History Is One of the Humanities

Abstract

ONE OF THE FIRST BOOKS I bought when I entered Columbia Graduate School in 1946 was the then recently published Bulletin No. 54 of the Social Science Research Council entitled Theory and Practice in Historical Study: A Report of the Committee on Historiography. A member of that Committee was our chairman today, Merle Curti. The slim volume was my introduction to a philosophical understanding of history. The skepticism, the analytical thrust, and the relativism of the Report for a long time held me in thrall. It convinced me that the purpose of history was to explain the present and to explain why human beings in society in the past behaved as they did. There was no doubt in my mind that history was a social science. Today, thirty-five years later, I am more inclined to say that history is one of the humanities, rather than a social science. Let me try to say why I made that shift in emphasis-for that is the character of the change--a shift in emphasis, not a denial of one in favor of the other. Undoubtedly the most influential reason for that shift in emphasis was the recognition that all the social sciences are essentially unhistorical. Their data are almost invariably drawn from the present, if only