Refinements of Culture in Large-Scale History

Abstract

Doubts about the Concept of Culture. The mere curiosity men feel about large-scale changes in history, like changes in culture, may not justify professional historians' giving attention to such changes, except to demolish other people's attempts to describe them. Culture may be too grandiose and polymorphous a concept for an historian to handle responsibly. If the concept could be used for one age and region, it is true, it could (given comparably adequate evidence) be applied to the same region in another age, and hence in effect be used to describe a change in culture. But perhaps the concept cannot be used at all. I assume no one could successfully maintain that Burckhardt's description of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy or Young's portrait of Victorian England was meaningless. But such accounts, even were they to be embellished by self-conscious invocations of and social system in the anthropological and sociological senses, might be misguided. They might have no hope of being true. Some historians, I suspect, would cheerfully argue that the concept of culture cannot be successfully applied even to contemporary societies, at least when these have reached a stage of sophistication and complexity which Italy in the fifteenth century and England in the nineteenth had long since left behind. Burckhardt's account of the Renaissance, meaningful enough to invite piecemeal refutation, may be only a charming fiction; to superimpose sociological thinking on it might well destroy the charm without rectifying the fiction. I am, of course, conjuring up a specter with which perhaps no real historian would consent to be identified,1 the specter of a skeptic who may accept the validity of historical facts on a smaller scale, facts having to do with specific actions by specific people or with the day-to-day operations of f amiliar institutions described in plain terms who may even fiercely defend