History as Process

Abstract

This is an inquiry into the possible applications of Alfred North Whitehead's ideas of process to historical method. The inquiry proceeds from attempts to explain historians' rhetoric to students, and from my disappointment with Whitehead's own interpretation of history. I believe that Whitehead's doctrines, as developed in Science in the Modern World (1925), Process and Reality (1929), and to some extent in Adventures of Ideas (1934), can lead to a coherent theory of historical explanation. Also they offer a broader and deeper context for historical inquiry than previously conceived, a context that transcends social science to restore history's link with the humanistic tradition. It is not easy to identify the styles of causal explanation used by historians so that their books can be made comprehensible. If there were a coherent theory of historical causation, the main principles might be sorted out and students taught to distinguish their application in different contexts. But by and large, the reputable monographs and well-known surveys that I have used do not indicate any such theory. Rather, the causal explanations embedded in our histories are a hodge-podge of inferences gathered from personal experience and a variety of other disciplines. Moreover, though historians describe multitudes of conditions in which a given event occurred, they are unable to describe how that event occurred just the way it did, and not otherwise. Imaginative students sometimes question the accuracy of historical accounts on the ground that the stated conditions admit of other, more intelligible outcomes. And they are right. Historians tend to use many euphemisms for cause and effect more than needed for elegant variation. Event A is said to promote, undermine, underscore the need for, or discourage event B. Or event A meant that event B would occur -whatever that means. If such terms were used consistently in any given work we might conclude that they indicate particular types of causation. But they are not used consistently at all. What, then, are historians trying to do? Analytical philosophers of history have been arguing over the proper