What is the Objective of “Theory of History”?

Abstract

The article argues that the “theory of history” has gradually changed from being an analysis of what historians actually do or what historians ought to do into a discipline or art of its own. Historical theorists communicate with each other but rarely with historians. The making of “theory of history” into a discipline of its own is recent, even if the roots are perceptible in the philosophy of Kant and his successors, especially Fichte and Hegel. The community of theorists of history rarely accepts practicing historians as discussants. In the present analysis of six articles written by six different well-known historical theorists, (Hayden White, A.R. Louch, Gabrielle Spiegel, Herman Paul, Marek Tamm, and Chris Lorenz), the author points out the unanimity among them in considering “history” to be texts on the past and nothing else. When these historical theorists exemplify historical texts, they often use surveys and overviews of history instead of historical knowledge as an outcome of original research. The article asks for a closer relation to the professional writing of history as a search for new historical knowledge. Hayden White and A.R. Louch, in other respects advancing quite different ideas, want to identify “history” with texts written about (parts of) the past. For them “history” is a narrative (Louch) or a representation (White) but not the past itself. The struggle with concepts of this kind is also typical of Herman Paul’s thinking (performing or producing history) as well as Marek Tamm’s (performative speech acts), and the latter drives this to the extreme of making truth (of historical statements) into a “truth pact” between historians and their readers.