Jonathan Rée on the vanity of historicism

Jonathan Rée

I should have known that it would be a tall order to get married and maintain a bilingual blog over the same summer. But I'm pleased to say that after a few months of inactivity posting will now resume on this blog. I regret to add that it will no longer be bilingual. The reasons for this are the obvious one that translation is time-consuming, and the less-obvious one that the bilingualism so far practiced on this blog has already done its job of improving my French. At least a bit.

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I have some things to say on the much-discussed topic of Whiggism, but as a warm-up here are some remarks on an intriguing paper from two decades ago: Jonathan Rée, "The Vanity of Historicism," New Literary History, 1991, 22(4), 961-983 (paywall).

The paper is intriguing for three reasons. Firstly, it presents an outsider's perspective of the history of science--Rée was a professor in philosophy when he wrote the article, and is now better known as a freelance writer and historian. Secondly, Rée endorses a thesis that is part of Will's picture, namely that recent historians of science tend to suffer delusions of novelty. Thirdly, Rée gives a general and plausible explanation of why those delusions exist. I'll say what Rée's views are and then say what I think of them, in general and with respect to the discipline of the history of science.

Rée diagnoses three problems with intellectuals who have taken what he calls "historical turns." These intellectuals include postmodernists, deconstructivists, and Foucauldians, as well as plain old historians of science. Here are the problems:

[F]irst, they have substituted relativism for skepticism; next, they have mistaken historicism for historicity; and finally, they have vastly exaggerated the scale of what they were trying (rightly, no doubt) to turn against (976-7).

These claims require some explanation. By relativism Rée means the view that values--whether moral, intellectual or aesthetic--cannot be justified absolutely but only relative to a given historical situation. Rée makes short shrift of relativism, noting that it is self-defeating and that--despite the good intentions of its advocates--it is not a "true friend of the marginalized and the oppressed" (965).

These are stock arguments against relativism, but the distinction between "historicism" and "historicity" is Rée's own invention. Historicity is an appreciation for the strangeness and particularity of the past, for "the sheer singularity of places and times" (961). Rée urges us to "respect the historicity of things, the fact that they take place without benefit of an enveloping historical plot" (976).

By contrast, historicism is the insistence on a plot, or at least a particular kind of plot. For Rée, the prototypical historicist is the historican of philosophy who believes that all past philosophers were addressing the same set of "perennial questions," and that his job is to assess their answers. Such a historian ignores or misreads all statements that do not seem like answers to a pre-fabricated schedule of questions. As a result such historians "offer you the comforting assurance that nothing you encounter in history will be really unfamiliar or alien to you."

The third and related problem on Rée's list is the delusion of novelty I mentioned in the introduction to this post. The relativists "believe in the originality of their theme, its audacity, its scurrilousness, and even its radicalism." Rée thinks that in fact it has been around for centuries, in the work of Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, Simone de Beauvoir, and 1940s existentialists, as well as in the "languorous, snobbish cosmopolitanism which likes to smile at the intuitive enthusiasms of simple folk." Rée concludes that relativism "is more like a recurrent ideal of high cuture than its belated comeuppance" (965).

The history of science is a special case of this amnesia. "The new historians of science have supposed that everyone before Kuhn believed in a single scientific method, which was somehow supposed to control the whole of the history of science" (977). This judgement of "the new historians of science" is similar to claims made over at Ether Wave Propaganda, such as that "historians of science have themselves become appallingly poor historians of their own profession so as to amplify the significance of recent insights" (see the end of this post for a summary of this line of thought on EWP). But whereas EWP writes about the history of science, Rée levels the accusation against everyone who has taken the "historical turn," including political and literary theorists.

How does Rée explain such widespread hubris among late-twentieth-century intellectuals? By appeal to their early-twentieth-century counterparts, the modernists. The relativists think they are subverting the entire history of Western thought (the argument runs) but really they are simply reacting to the excesses of modernism circa. 1910-40. That period witnessed the rise of professionalized disciplines, the members of whom...

...saw themselves as the inheritors of a set of comforting pieties about God and human dignity which, in the stark and unillusioned world in which they now found themselves, could be seen to be empty, anthropocentric, self-indulgent, and prescientific: in short, no longer possible. They developed a kind of higher sentimentality about their own stern refusal to be sentimental. They were, that is to say, modernists, and they sought to construct hardedged, antitraditional, professional research communities which would put an end to the timewasting of the past to produce solid, context-free, cumulative, scientific knowledge. This is what the historical turns have been turning against.

There is much I disagree with in this set of claims. It is very strange to accuse relativists of engaging in historicism, as Rée defines the latter term. Consider two of the people he calls relativist, Quentin Skinner and Thomas Kuhn. Both of these men were opposed to that brand of historicism that treats all past texts as so many answers to present-day questions. Indeed, this is one of the reasons they get called relativists.

Rée seems to recognise this at the end of the article, when he quotes Skinner as arguing for "a non-anachronistic reconstruction of the alien mentalities of the past" (978). So is Rée on Skinner's side after all? Apparently not, because Rée then goes on to accuse Skinner and his ilk of being too sensitive to the strangeness of the past; Rée then urges historians to embrace anachronism. The upshot is that Rée gives a set of cogent arguments for opposite conclusions, without much attempt to reconcile those conclusions.

The same can be said of Rée's discussion of relativism. On the one hand he says that relativism is a long-standing feature of intellectual life that has nothing subversive about it; on the other hand he argues that relativism may be "foundationalist, transcendental, and even totalitarian" (966). So is Rée rejecting relativism or not? Perhaps he would say that the question is too crude. Very well, but if there is a more nuanced question that he is answering I'm not sure what that question is.

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Despite such oddities, Rée is surely right that those involved in the "historical turns" in the late 20th-century often claimed to be doing something very novel. If such claims were systematically overblown then we need to explain why they were so, and Rée offers an interesting explanation. The question I want to finish with is: does the explanation apply to the discipline of the history of science? I think it does, but not in the way Rée suggests.

It is not hard to find people who flourished in the period 1910-1940 (Rée's dates for modernism), who were keen on building a professional research community in the history of science, and who act as a foil to present-day historians of science. The outstanding example is the Belgian chemist George Sarton (1884-1956) who founded the field's flagship in 1912 and worked in many other ways to build the field. He also had ties to Paul Otlet, another Belgian now known as the father of the information age for his promotion of "rational bibliography"--an archetypal modernist project.

But Sarton did not see past history of science as Rée says a modernists saw their predecessors. That is, Sarton did not see past historians of science as "empty, anthropocentric, self-indulgent, and prescientific." How could they have been prescientific when almost all of them were scientists? Certainly Sarton thought that his field was fragmented, under-resourced, and in need of unification. But he did not think it was excessively sentimental.

Moreover, historians nowadays are not delusional when they assimilate writers like Sarton with all historians of science before him. Sarton is not just a modernist anomaly--in many respects it is reasonable to group him with his predecessors and contrast that group with present-day history of science. Take a look at the last ten winners of the book prize for the History of Science Society, a society that Sarton co-founded. Most of them are the sorts of books that could not have been written prior to about 1970.

Another "but" is that it is easy to identify pioneers of the field in the period 1910-1940 who had a rather non-modernist view of science, if modernism means thinking of knowledge as an empirical, cumulative affair. Neo-Kantians such as Hélène Metzger and Alexander Koyré thought of science as a mental, epochal affair in which whole systems of thought rose up then fell away. The American philosopher Edwin Burtt not only lamented the de-humanised world that he inherited from seventeenth-century science, but tried to work out an alternative. These and other writers forged a discipline around the idea of the Scientific Revolution, ie. the idea of a dramatic change in ways of understanding the natural world that occured between about 1550 and 1700.

If Rée's account is applied to the history of science, it should be applied to the historians who rejected the neo-Kantians. Burtt, Metzger, Koyré and their followers were genuinely novel in their treatment of the history of science as a sequence of coherent world systems. There were precursors, as there always are. But Burtt et. al. were as novel with respect to their predecessors as recent winners of the HSS book prize are with respect to their predecessors.

The backlash against these authors consisted in rejecting their idealism, ie. their emphasis on abstract ideas as opposed to what we now call "scientific practice" or "material culture." This backlash goes wrong when it takes the neo-Kantians as representative of all past history of science. One can say of this backlash, as Rée says of relativism, that "the orthodoxies against which [it is] in revolt have a quite short and particular history."

To sum up, Rée's idea of an over-reaction to modernist excesses may help to explain some forms of relativism, but it does not apply to the history of science. It fails to apply because the really new historians of science in the early 20th century were not the ones with modernist sympathies (like Sarton) but the ones who scrutinised those sympathies (like Burtt). There have been over-reactions to short-lived past excesses in the field of the history of science. But the over-reaction has not been to the excesses of modernism, but to those of Burtt, Koyré and their followers.

The next post will provide some badly-needed evidence for my claims in this post. Expand post.

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