Historians: is there a de-emphasis on revolutions and schism with the past?

(this is not going to be as popular a thread as "women: how many bras do you have?" is it)

xpost. that does link to what i'm reading - but i don't know the wider context. is this a dominant school or..?

thanks too!

exceptionally tricky field. according to foucault (not an real historian lol) the breaks are SO HUGE that there can be NO CONTINUITY AT ALL between them. but at the same time he sees VERY LITTLE CHANGE AT ALL within the periods um bifurcated (?) by the breaks, ie the epistemes. nothing fundamental changes during the episteme. but he was a wally innit.

it would be hard to call the annales school dominant now, but i don't really understand "the field" -- academic history is so vast it's probably hard to say there's anything dominating it. it's also hard to pick out slam-dunk you-have-to-read-this-to-keep up stuff. specialization. professionalization. no fun anymore. but the annales school were gods to the last generation of great british historians -- the communists and ex-communists, christopher hill, lawrence stone, etc.

international academia being econominally skewed towards american, it would be interesting to know how big it was there.

what i'm re-reading was to be read alongside Foucault, but it comes out immensely critical of the privileging of discourse. which is nice.

there are i guess inevitably weird disconnects between national traditions, only partial points of contact, etc. i read a good book-length critique of foucault by this one guy j. g. merquior (it was in the old fontana series of modern thinkers i think) which was like: here are some actual histories of prisons, they aren't so bad.

i studied history, quite badly, but am getting back into it in a practical way because i'm basically writing a long historical account of a thing or seires of things that happened based on primary sources and so on. so for the first time i have to think about this non-abstractly. so much of it is about sheer technique, the ability to construct -- if not a narrative, then something that isn't simply an accumulation of facts.

annales history says it's about the absence of breaks but it sort of depends what you're looking at. the famous is example is: french peasant life changed shit-all in half a millennium. things like the counter-reformation or even the revolution weren't that big a deal. whereas histories of france about kings and cardinals is packed with excitement and costumery. but as with stelfox's real people/real music, there is room for a history of kings/orpington-based indie fans too. the annales thing was partly a corrective against old style great-men history.

i was a history major in college (though the requirements were looser than at some other places) and pretty much took any course with 'revolution' or 'radical' or 'gnarly' in the title.

my favorite class was Big Air, 1976-present

what about the history of science? i found kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions interesting.

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is there a de-emphasis on revolutions and schism

I mean, it seems like there's an emphasis on being contrary to whatever the last guy said. So if someone says "that was a revolution" then you say "wait no in many ways it wasn't" and the next person can say "no there totally was dude" voila! History, as a profession, as a field of debate, continues. So I think it depends on whether the last guy said there was a revolution or wasn't.

yes that's kind of otm. the study of history is not exactly walled off from broader political debates going on at the time either. but obviously historians themselves are conscious of this and, while taking down the last big name will get you a name, not everyone involved is totally cynical!

but that's dialectics for you. a key essay wrt this discussion (haha who am i kidding -- who *knows* what a key essay is? have you seen how many history journals and books are published a year? no-one can absorb it all); but a key essay for my tutors written by a major historian is lawrence stone's 'the revival of narrative' from about 1979 in 'past and present' (house journal of britishes fans of the annales school) which says, well, okay, that was great but revolutions and schisms and whatnot are important too.

I came off as more cynical about it than I intended. It's more like this: There is a situation which is open to interpretation (like most!). Someone posits an interpretation. You can either (a) agree with it and move on or (b) find something shaky in it and respond. And since it's open to interpretation, it's easy to be to do (b). It's a "yeah but". "Yeah but look at the peasants!" "Yeah but you forgot the Jews!" "Yeah but there was also disease!" "Yeah but they were basically praying to their old gods even if they said it was the new ones!" And since both sides are kinda right, having someone posit that one side is right will naturally make someone else say wait, no, the other side is right! Until finally both sides are understood and you can say "they're both kinda right, it's really complicated after all" or else say "no no there's this third side!"

So much history starts out with neat theories that are actually quite ludicrous but do give you someplace to start and end up with totally bafflingly complex "wait they seem to be this and that at the same time, hrm!" And it's all a matter of whether you enjoy (a) that sort of uncertainty (b) grand theories that approximate in interesting ways (c) knowing that nothing you say is really "true" but it sure might be "interesting".

casuistry -- yeah, i think that's probably about right. academia is a more disciplined place now and less open to single overarching narratives (ie marxism or its twin, the whig interpretation of history). i think if you're actually practising it, though, it is hard to just stick on 'interesting'. you have to believe in truth to get it done.

"what about the history of science? i found kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions interesting.

-- lfam, Thursday, April 19, 2007 9:06 PM (Yesterday)"

history of science is probably the most thorny of all sub-sets of history because it really is about moving toward a greater or more accurate 'truth' which other types of history are not. within the history of art, developments in technique or approach don't render older art 'wrong', but a paradigm shift in science -- or medicine mttp -- kind of does rewrite all the books.

and i think foucault (and althusser) took a lot of their stuff from two french historians of science... whose names possibly start with 'b'? i'm pretty sure the idea of the 'episteme' comes from the history of science, and it makes sense there. but arguably it's not so easy to apply more generally.

charting historiographic trends is k-hard becuz there's so many modes of history that don't really talk to one another these days but yeah there was that trend and generally i think there's been an ur-shift in a lot of ways occasioned by scads of historians (especially the europeans) moving away from classic marxist-influenced history that was v. much about seismic shifts and classes and so you get discourse theory and cultural history of a particular sort and the annales stuff but there's also the question of scope here -- i mean if you choose 500 years of the Mediterranean as what yr. writing about either you write something very disjoint or you focus on long-term trends over vast areas. the topic begs the answer often and grand history is always gonna be sexy enticing weighty all that + its handy to assign it since it lets ppl slot lots of knowledge into a nice big framework but also lots of the discourse guys go real small scale except the changes they try to nail down are sort of arbitrary or unimportant or even just artifacts of how they pose the question again, confusing a word getting used a different way with a shift in mentality or whatever. simultaneous with this you still have a huge and conflicted schism over incommensurability w/r/t civilization and culture becuz even as you get a timelessness of cultural forms you also get a notion of their absolute difference which is pretty widespread. so the notion of modernity and the modern mind being somehow utterly distinct from what came before is also pretty widespread, but then you look at accounts of the rise of "modernity" as such and find them sort of wanting (at least i do) in terms of demonstrating this.

ok this is all rambling but again i guess there's a give-and-take between how you want to see history, what you choose to study, and then what that topic will draw out of you. its pretty impossible to talk about, for example, the development of most parts of the world from say 1500 on without seeing colonial contact and development as bringing a gigantic wrenching change, but equally its pretty impossible to talk about the scandinavian monarchy without recognizing that, for the most part, from one king to the next, the succession didn't shatter the earth. the reformation, on the other hand... except are you talking about the uprooting of people (big changes), the theological development of the catholic church (debatable), the structural development of the catholic church (big), or grain milling technology (as far as i know, fairly independent process, at least in the direct sense)?

there's this, too -

http://music.guardian.co.uk/pop/story/0,,2060953,00.html

which says a lot of the same things simon reynolds does in that recent interview that's bein discussed here -

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=41&threadid=4340

The biggest change from when I studied history at university in the early 90s to now is that for the last ten years you've actually had history books that sell well, sometimes very well. This surely has concentrated some minds wonderfully.

history of science is probably the most thorny of all sub-sets of history because it really is about moving toward a greater or more accurate 'truth' which other types of history are not

I think post-modernism and all that Foucaulty stuff has crept into the history of science, with people queston whether science is really about progressing towards a more accurate truth at all. There was some fellow in the LRB recently who was really having a go at the idea of medicine as being defined by progress, for instance.

But I wouldn't know about that.

And on the Groke's comment above - there is a chicken and egg thing here, of course, or a feedback mechanism. I reckon historians started to realise by trial and error were books about how people in society X at time Y were really just like us.

"I think post-modernism and all that Foucaulty stuff has crept into the history of science, with people queston whether science is really about progressing towards a more accurate truth at all. There was some fellow in the LRB recently who was really having a go at the idea of medicine as being defined by progress, for instance."

blimey.

i've been mulling over the history of art thing -- i guess i can't help thinking things are superseded in that i'm not interested in bands that sound too much like older bands. just that you can listen to older bands and like them, whereas you wouldn't take old-timey medicine when newer stuff was available.

a "good" hist-of-sci book by some defs is immune, so to speak, from a shift in science that follows -- i.e. a hist of what ppl thought of phlogiston can be contested on the basis that it doesn't get what ppl thought right, or why they thought it right, or why it changed right, but not on the basis that phlogiston doesn't exist thanks to understanding X about chemicals as opposed to understanding Y about chemicals which also held that phlogiston doesn't exist.

i mean in a sense tho, if say some big shift occurs like all cancer turns out to be caused by a virus, then there's work to be done to talk about the history of how this came to be known that means all prior books on understanding of cancer, that didn't view the development of this theory as key to their story are dated becuz it IS now key to the story of science of cancer if not the story of what ppl thought was science of cancer. but that's no different then if sweden elects a marmoset to be president then all history books of sweden that don't deal with the developments that could possibly lead to such a thing are retrospectively lacking becuz the idea of even looking for such developments only is spawned after the thing itself raises the question.

i didn't say, but history of science is what i am concentrating on, though i was asking about more general practice/theory in history in general. it was sort of a naive question, i was just trying to triangulate the approach - especially as the stuff I'm re-reading is now over a decade old.

hist of sci is such an outlier -- dunno how much of any of the general historiographic trends translate! i mean there's the foucauldian stuff in spades but also the soc of science influence which is on a way difft trip and the objectivity debate is such a huge part of that (latour, etc) and then in hist sci historians of social science don't talk much to historians of physics don't talk to etc. the whole thing is mainly under the long shadow of the (mis)use of kuhn's "paradigm" tho, i guess, especially for the hard sciences, so what you tend to get are institution based histories? (+ the documentation is just waaay easier if you focus on some specific journals/sets of records)

then of course there's history of applied sciences vs. basic ones in the hard category.

what's your specific angle yr. exploring?

(spot on). when i was studying it at college, it was indeed Foucault and Latour, and I'm just re-reading Latour properly (i sort of skimped it as history was not my major area of study). I reread some Foucault some time back, but it's just not that interesting to me, but the Latour is great fun.

istr that institution-based study was the mode of science history when i was at college (late 80s) but that the sociology approach was looking to a more personal interaction level. (which as you say is harder to study in time because records are institutionally based)

you may want to try pickering's "mangle of practice" on the soc of sci tip if you haven't.

i guess i can't help thinking things are superseded in that i'm not interested in bands that sound too much like older bands.

I hear you, but this is a very modernist approach to music - not that there is anything (necessarily) wrong about this, but a postmodernist cultural approach would be all about picking random elements from the past from which to make music, eschewing the idea of musical progress.

Not that this has anything to do with Alan's original question.

cheers, that mangle of practice does sounds Latour-y

NO ROOM FOR SELF DOUBT!

we *know better* but how do we *know* that we know better aghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Has anyone read Ernest Gellner?