Historical Theory

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The second theme includes, but extends beyond, the use of visual imagery as a form of propaganda. Images have been deployed for subversive, no less than authoritarian, purposes. Analysis often reveals a creative tension in the interpretation of an image, whose ‘true’ meaning is contested. These earliest sociologists taught that mankind had climbed from savagery to civilisation by imitating nature and improving upon her operations. The finest exponent of this materialist view in Graeco-Roman culture was Lucretius who gave a brilliant sketch of the steps in the development of society in his poem On The Nature of Things . What bourgeois nation has not proclaimed in time of war that “God is on our side”, guiding its destiny? The Great Man theory strutted about under the swastika in the homage paid to Hitler. Spengler in Germany and Toynbee in England offer their re-editions of the cyclical round of history. The school of geopolitics makes geographical conditions in the shape of the heartland and the outlying regions into the paramount determinant of modern history. Marxism has incorporated into its theory of social development not only the verified findings of modern scientific research but all the insights into history of its philosophical predecessors, whether materialist, idealist or eclectic, which have proved valid and viable. To do otherwise would flout the mandate of its own method which teaches that every school of thought, every stage of scientific knowledge, is an outgrowth of the past work of men modified and sometimes revolutionised by the prevailing conditions and concepts of their existence. Scientific inquiry into history and society, like the process of history itself, has given positive, permanent and progressive results.

The low level of their productive powers, the immaturity of their economic forms, the narrowness of their activities and the meagreness of their culture and connections are evidenced in their extremely restricted views of the course of events. Practising historians claim that their accounts of the past are something other than fiction, myth or propaganda. Yet there are significant challenges to this view, most notably from postmodernism. In Historical Theory, a prominent historian develops a highly original argument that evaluates the diversity of approaches to history and points to a constructive way forward. How do economists approach slavery? What is the significance of slavery for the broader economy? How viable is a slave-based economy? Slavery in antiquity provides one possible focus, as do the importance of slavery to the British economy, and the North American experience more generally. In describing his philosophy, the Italian thinker Croce wrote: “History is the record of the creations of the human spirit in every field, theoretical as well as practical. And these spiritual creations are always born in the hearts and minds of men of genius, artists, thinkers, men of action, moral and religious reformers.” This position combines idealism with elitism, the spirit using geniuses, or the creative minority, as the agency which redeems the masses. This Approach introduces students to the work of cultural and social anthropologists, and to the way it has influenced the thinking of historians in recent decades. As with the other Approaches, the aim is to offer students new broader perspectives on the ways in which the past can be studied and to think more carefully about the concepts they use. The four broad subthemes and supporting bibliographies allow students to read some of the classic works of anthropology and thereby appreciate the diversity of ways in which anthropologists have approached the study of humans in the present. Students can consider the extent to which functionalism and field studies at a micro level have influenced historical work, or the possibilities for historians of the cultural anthropology exemplified by the work of Clifford Geertz. Students will also be encouraged to take note of the extent to which there is a two-way interaction between anthropology and history and to consider the implications of the intense self-criticism of anthropology as an agent of colonialism.Thus some 18th century rationalists who believed that “opinion governs mankind” looked toward an enlightened monarch to introduce the necessary progressive reconstruction of the state and society. A more widespread manifestation of this approach contrasts to the unthinking mob some upper stratum of the population as the exemplar of reason which alone can be entrusted with political leadership and power.

This topic examines ways in which sociologists have conceptualized the state and political institutions and at how they have analysed political obedience in terms of power (coercion) and authority (the recognition of legitimacy). It explores different notions of power developed by theorists such as Foucault, and ideas of bureaucracy, social discipline, revolt and revolution. Ways in which historians have used or developed these ideas are discussed. This topic examines the way the language and practice of politics, colonialism, nationalism and citizenship have been gendered. It introduces students to work contesting narrow understandings of political participation to uncover the way women have exercised political power both formally and informally, and challenged their political exclusion. The intersections of race and gender in the establishment and evolution of political structures are explored. In the introduction to the English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific Engels defined historical materialism as “that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another”.The amount of historical knowledge possessed by extremely primitive minds may be gauged from the following observations made by the Jesuit father Jacob Baegert in his Account of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the California Peninsula written 200 years ago. “No Californian is acquainted with the events that occurred in the country prior to his birth, nor does he even know who his parents were if he should happen to have lost them during his infancy—The Californians—believed that California constituted the whole world, and they themselves its sole inhabitants; for they went to nobody, and nobody came to see them, each little people remaining within the limits of its small district.”

Handbooks of historical method at the end of the 19th century assured students that if they mastered the interpretation of written documents, they would have done everything required to be a historian. “No documents, no history,” one said. In this century the notion of a document has been enormously expanded so that any artifact surviving from the past can serve as the answer to some historian’s question. Aerial photography, for example, can reveal settlement patterns long since buried. Napoleon’s hair can be examined to see whether he died a natural death or was poisoned; analysis of Newton’s hair showed that he was an alchemist. The architecture along Vienna’s Ringstrasse can be construed as revealing the ambitions of the liberal bourgeoisie. The history of sexuality cannot be written without the history of clothing—even the nudes in classical paintings pose in postures influenced by the clothes they are not wearing. Indeed, the ordinary things of all kinds to be found in a folk museum are one of the best sources for the everyday life of people in the past. He conceived history as a universal process in which all social formations, nations and persons had their appropriate but subordinate place. No single state or people dominated world history; each was to be judged by its role in the development of the totality. summarizing historical facts: univariate descriptive statistics (frequency distributions, means, medians and modes, measures of dispersion, concepts of normality) History is central: New Historicism views history as having a direct and undeniable impact on any literary text produced. The most celebrated latter-day expounder of this viewpoint was Carlyle who wrote: “Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here.”Since the world about him, which he called “objective mind”, was the work of man, he, like Vico, was convinced that it was intelligible and could be explicated by the inquiring mind. Today, New Historicism has become influential in literary studies worldwide. Read on for the principles of New Historicism, some of its key theorists, and an example of how to use the theory to analyse texts.

The text is a powerful and attractive example of Renaissance historical writing and at the same time an introduction to the Florentine genre of critical political analysis. Classical stories are set to work by Machiavelli to teach his fellow-Florentines how to rescue their city from the disasters which beset it in his day and how to capture for themselves by emulation something of the glory of Republican Rome. exploring historical relationships: bivariate descriptive statistics (correlation, measures of association including correlation coefficients, linear regression) In this topic students are invited to consider the extent to which the dead, and what is buried with them, can provide evidence of belief and social differentiation. Hegel approached all historical phenomena from the standpoint of their evolution, seeing them as moments, elements, phases in a single creative, cumulative, progressive and ceaseless process of becoming. Idealistic interpretations of history were promulgated and promoted by numerous theorists from Leibnitz to Fichte. Their work was consummated by Hegel. In the early decades of the 19th century Hegel revolutionised the understanding of world history, placing it at the widest vantage point of the bourgeois era. His contributions may be summed up in thirteen points.Although they may have held different opinions of what the essential qualities of humanity were, idealist and materialist thinkers alike have appealed in the last resort to permanent principles of human nature to explain social and historical phenomena. Thus the materialist-minded Thucydides, as M.I Finley tells us in his introduction to The Greek Historians, believed that “human nature and human behaviour were—essentially fixed qualities, the same in one century as another”. This topic examines an area where the debt of many historians to the work of anthropologists has been extensive and has opened up a number of lively debates. The work of Evans-Pritchard or Clifford Geertz and its influence on historians such as Keith Thomas or Robert Darnton offers a classic example. At a general level the topic encourages students to examine why religion and magic make sense to their participants and to consider the limitations of concepts such as popular culture.