History and Theory: The Concept of Scientific History

Abstract

A. History, according to Aristotle, is an account of what individual human beings have done and suffered. More widely still, history is what historians do. Is history, in this sense, a science, as, let us say, physics or biology or psychology are sciences? And if not, should it seek to be one? And if it fails to be one, what prevents it? Is this due to human weakness, or to the nature of the subject, or does the very problem rest on a confusion between the concept of history and that of natural science? These have been questions that have occupied the minds of both philosophers and philosophically minded historians at least since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when men became self-conscious about the purpose and logic of their intellectual activities. But two centuries before that, Descartes had already denied to history any claim to be a serious study. Those who accepted the validity of the Cartesian criterion of what constitutes rational method could (and did) ask how they could find the clear and simple elements of which historical judgments were composed, and into which they could be analysed; where were the definitions, the logical transformation rules, the rules of inference, the rigorously deduced conclusions? While this confused amalgam of memories and travelers' tales, fables and chroniclers' stories, moral reflections and gossip, might be a harmless pastime, it was beneath the dignity of serious men seeking what alone is worth seeking the discovery of the truth in accordance with the principles and rules which alone guarantee scientific validity. Ever since this doctrine of what was and what was not a science was enunciated, those who have thought about the nature of historical studies have laboured under the stigma of the Cartesian condemnation. Some have tried to show that history could be made respectable by being assimilated to one of the natural sciences, whose overwhelming success and prestige in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries held out promise of rich fruit wherever their methods were applicable; others declared that history was indeed a science, but a science in some different sense, with its own methods and canons, no less exacting than those of the sciences of nature, but resting on foundations different from them; others defiantly declared that history was indeed subjective, impressionistic, incapable of being made rigorous, a branch of literature, or an expression