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The Critical Tradition

This page follows the subject’s second question, what historians do when they explain and what a narrative adds to or takes from the record. It is the tradition Walsh called critical, and it runs from the German human sciences through the analytic debate on explanation to the narrativism of the 1970s and 1980s.

It began by asking what history is for before asking what it knows. Nietzsche’s “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (1874), the second of the Untimely Meditations, put that question first: history serves life in three modes, monumental, antiquarian and critical, and an age that consumes history as knowledge for its own sake is sickened by it, unable to act because it knows too much of what has been. Wilhelm Dilthey argued from the 1880s that the human sciences rest on understanding (Verstehen) of meaningful expression rather than on causal explanation, and that the historical world is understood from within because we are ourselves historical beings; historicity, in his sense, is the condition of a being whose life is lived as a connected course and interpreted as it goes. Heidegger and Gadamer took the term further: for Heidegger historicity is a structure of existence, the having-been that shapes what one can become, and for Gadamer effective history is the ground of every understanding, not a bias to be removed. R. G. Collingwood’s The Idea of History (1946) gave the tradition its best-known method: all history is the history of thought, and the historian knows a past action by re-enacting in their own mind the thought that lay behind it.

The opposite answer came from the philosophy of science. Carl Hempel’s “The Function of General Laws in History” (1942) argued that historical explanation, where it is explanation at all, has the same form as any other: an event is explained by subsuming it under general laws together with initial conditions, the covering-law model, and what historians usually offer is an “explanation sketch” that would be completed by the laws they leave unstated. William Dray’s Laws and Explanation in History (1957) replied that historians explain actions by making them intelligible, showing what the agent had reason to do, and that there are almost no genuine universal laws in history for a covering-law explanation to use. The exchange defined analytic philosophy of history for two decades, and Arthur Danto’s Analytical Philosophy of History (1965) moved it towards narrative by observing that historians describe events under descriptions unavailable to those who lived them.

Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973) turned the question from explanation to writing. A history, on his account, is a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse, and the historian’s choices of plot, argument and ideology, and beneath them of trope, shape what the past is made to mean before any fact is set down. Louis Mink argued in the same years that narrative is a cognitive instrument, a form of comprehension that configures events into a whole, and that stories are not lived but told. Frank Ankersmit’s Narrative Logic (1983) treated the historical text as a proposal about how to see the past, a “narrative substance” that is not true or false in the way its individual statements are. Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative (1983–85) gave the movement its most systematic account and held it back from its own conclusion: narrative is the form in which time becomes human time, and history remains bound by a debt to the past that fiction does not owe. The dispute narrativism opened, between the narrative as a construction of the historian and the narrative as a structure of the events, is still open.