Can History Be a Science?

[Marat]

Obviously history can never be a science in the sense in which natural sciences can claim that title. Even Kant at the end of the 18th century recognized that since the description of natural phenomena can be based on universal framework concepts of space and time, nature is much more readily characterized by general, 'scientific' laws than any social phenomena can be.

 

But still, history claims to be more than just a jumble of anecdotes of past events, and instead seeks to explain phenomena in terms of general themes which have more explanatory value and general significance than mere stories about what happened in bygone days would have. Thus academic history operates with terms like 'the rise of the city state,' 'the agrarian revolution of the 14th century,' 'the contraction of population, the rise of wages for labor, and the decline of the power of the nobility following the Black Death,' etc., rather than just talking about individual wars, heroic individuals, singular events, or particular objects. It denigrates the attempt to explain things by single coincidences as 'Cleopatra's Nose' theorizing, referring to the supposed influence of Cleopatra's beautiful nose in seducing Mark Anthony and thus shaping all of Roman history at that time.

 

But the problem with this approach is that it cannot be denied that individual, isolated, absolutely contingent events seem to play an extraordinarily important role in accounting for what happens in history, which puts the reality of what academic historians seek to describe at odds with their preferred 'scientific' methodology, which only wants to admit as explanatory causes the most general themes. Thus while there would no doubt have been some effort by Germany in the decades following its defeat in the First World War to regain its lost position of prominence in Europe, and there certainly were fascist movements throughout the world contemporaneous with that, it is also clearly true that if Hitler's mother had had a miscarriage and he had never been born the history of the 20th century would have been radically different. So if minor contingencies are so powerfully explanatory of what happens in history, can it ever claim to achieve even a low order of rationality as a discipline?

[SMF]

I an guessing that when historical facts are treated rigorously a resulting study might be published as anthropology, psychology, sociology, or even phenology. SM

[michel123456]

You mean History as an exact science ?

 

The english wiki article does not include History as an exact science. The french Wiki does.

Une science narrative des temps du passé, l'histoire, s'est constitué à partir des héritages oraux consignés et de toutes sortes d'archives.

transl. "A narrative science of the times of the past, history, has constituted itself from the oral recorded inheritances and of all sorts of archives."

 

What you understand as History is not only a chronological narrative description of the recorded events, but the "scientific" explanation of the events. I know the one is too often incorporated to the other, but they are distinct features.

The first part is definitely an exact science, the second, I don't think so. But it is still a science. IMHO.

Edited April 2, 2011 by michel123456

[Kikis]

History can be a science as long there were some approach with mathematic and statistic that explain about past event. That was mean the situation in past could be calculated in future but not in predicted

[lemur]

History is by definition an accounting of events. Thus, even when scientific-type analysis of the mechanics of the stories are included in the narrative, they are still part of its historiography. If you want to do science with history, I would recommend extracting specific questions and formulating those as social-scientific questions. E.g. you example about Hitler's mother having a miscarriage could be honed into a number of specific research questions such as, 1) would/could the effects popularly attributed to Hitler's existence as an individual have been expressed through some other individual(s) and if so, why and how? 2) What post-birth factors affected aspects of Hitler's personality, actions, and the conditions of his popularity and authority? 3) is it methodologically sound to conduct social research about variability within one parameter while treating other parameters as deterministic, or should you then revise your model to include variability and agency for all individuals at all levels, and is there a way to do this analytically without losing any sense of historical continuity? There are probably other examples, but these are three I could come up with off hand.

[michel123456]

(...) questions such as, 1) would/could the effects popularly attributed to Hitler's existence as an individual have been expressed through some other individual(s) (...)

 

An example I recall in History is the famous pirate Barbarossa, when Oruç Barbarossa died, his young brother Hızır Hayreddin became "Barbarossa" in name and place, just as if the conditions were waiting for him.

Edited April 3, 2011 by michel123456

[Marat]

With respect to the French article I think the problem is that most Continental European languages use 'science' to mean 'any rationally structured discipline,' while English tends to confinte the term 'science' to mean only 'exact natural science.' The difference is also clear in German, where anything rationally organized is described as a 'Wissenschaft,' while only disciplines having a formal, mathematical structure would be termed 'Naturwissenschaften.'

 

History can only be 'scientific' in the sense of being a rational discipline if it can hope to explicate its explanandum, the record of social and political events, in a way that is at least somewhat lawlike. But what the example of all of the second half of the 20th century being entirely different if one tiny, totally irrational, profoundly insignificant event like Hitler's mother having a miscarriage had happened indicates is that the explanation of how social and political events cohere and lead one into the other is so driven by arational contingencies that there can be no possibility of any 'laws' of history.

 

True, we can say that the general trends in Europe in the 20th century were such that Germany would probably make a second bid for power after the defeat in World War I. General explanatory factors of some rational sophistication can account for this in part: Economically Germany had the capacity to rebuild; it had a nationalistic, militaristic tradition; the other nations of Europe which had opposed it in World War I were tired of war and were inclined to let Germany reassert itself; the fear of Soviet Communism among the capitalist nations made Stalin seem like more of a problem than Hitler, and an empowered Hitler could counterbalance Stalin. But without Hitler's mother not having had a miscarriage, a totally ridiculous contingency of no intellectual dignity, could we really explain why Austria, Hitler's birth country, had so little objection to being united with Germany, which was the essential first step to Germany's re-empowerment? Without Hitler's particular brand of stubbornness, can we explain why the German offensive in the Caucasus in the Spring of 1942 bogged down in the fight for Stalingrad which led to the failure of that offensive with the encirclement and surrender of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad in early 1943, with its decisive impact on the eventual German defeat? Without Hitler's overweaning ambition and recklessness can we account for his decision to declare war on the U.S. in December, 1941, which he was not bound by the treaty with Japan to do, and which guaranteed Germany's ultimate defeat?

 

If the difference then between Germany winning and losing World War II factually depended on a certain utterly unimportant Austrian woman named Clara Hitler not having a miscarriage with a particular fetus in the late 19th century, then history is a totally contingent discipline and cannot be made rational while still being true to what it purports to explain.

[lemur]

With respect to the French article I think the problem is that most Continental European languages use 'science' to mean 'any rationally structured discipline,' while English tends to confinte the term 'science' to mean only 'exact natural science.' The difference is also clear in German, where anything rationally organized is described as a 'Wissenschaft,' while only disciplines having a formal, mathematical structure would be termed 'Naturwissenschaften.'

 

History can only be 'scientific' in the sense of being a rational discipline if it can hope to explicate its explanandum, the record of social and political events, in a way that is at least somewhat lawlike. But what the example of all of the second half of the 20th century being entirely different if one tiny, totally irrational, profoundly insignificant event like Hitler's mother having a miscarriage had happened indicates is that the explanation of how social and political events cohere and lead one into the other is so driven by arational contingencies that there can be no possibility of any 'laws' of history.

 

True, we can say that the general trends in Europe in the 20th century were such that Germany would probably make a second bid for power after the defeat in World War I. General explanatory factors of some rational sophistication can account for this in part: Economically Germany had the capacity to rebuild; it had a nationalistic, militaristic tradition; the other nations of Europe which had opposed it in World War I were tired of war and were inclined to let Germany reassert itself; the fear of Soviet Communism among the capitalist nations made Stalin seem like more of a problem than Hitler, and an empowered Hitler could counterbalance Stalin. But without Hitler's mother not having had a miscarriage, a totally ridiculous contingency of no intellectual dignity, could we really explain why Austria, Hitler's birth country, had so little objection to being united with Germany, which was the essential first step to Germany's re-empowerment? Without Hitler's particular brand of stubbornness, can we explain why the German offensive in the Caucasus in the Spring of 1942 bogged down in the fight for Stalingrad which led to the failure of that offensive with the encirclement and surrender of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad in early 1943, with its decisive impact on the eventual German defeat? Without Hitler's overweaning ambition and recklessness can we account for his decision to declare war on the U.S. in December, 1941, which he was not bound by the treaty with Japan to do, and which guaranteed Germany's ultimate defeat?

 

If the difference then between Germany winning and losing World War II factually depended on a certain utterly unimportant Austrian woman named Clara Hitler not having a miscarriage with a particular fetus in the late 19th century, then history is a totally contingent discipline and cannot be made rational while still being true to what it purports to explain.

It's not just the contingencies, as you frame them, that detracts from the objectivity of history. It is the very fact of how the framing determines the whole logic of the narrative and therefore the way in which the events and parameters are understood. It would be as if physics was subject to answering questions biased by insistent assumptions about the Earth being flat or the sun going around the Earth. One thing that makes physics more objective is that it has the ability to reframe its objects in different ways to see if that changes the results and compare apparently diverse forms of motion for regularities.

 

History doesn't have this ability because the basic concepts, like power, are skewed to draw attention to some actors and obscure those of others. I mention power because it's the first example I think of and I think Foucault came the closest to making a more scientific approach to power possible by calling for a "microphysics" of power relations. He is famous for criticizing political science for limiting its focus to sovereigns/heads-of-state "long after the king had been beheaded" in government. Yet, it's so analytically tedious to do "microphysical" analyses of social power, that I have not seen many historians incorporate this approach into their work. Instead, they have the tradition of painting events in relatively broad brushstrokes by focussing on high-profile public individuals and large-scale long-term events like wars, cultural epochs/trends, etc. When they focus in on the "microphysics" of individual relations, it usually has to be in the form of historical fiction because there's simply not that much data available as to what went on minute by minute in, say, the interactions between Hitler and other individuals and how those interactions became linked with so many individual thoughts and actions globally.

 

Ultimately, I think that if history would emerge as an objective science with the ability to compare events in terms of general social/individual mechanics and express these according to general law-like behaviors, it would be sociology or psychology instead of history. On the other hand, sociology and psychology (and maybe other sciences) have become so heavy under the weight of institutionalized traditions, that they don't offer much promise of a general physics-like approach to history either - so what else is left?

 

 

[michel123456]

You're mistaking History with How-To-Teach-History-Methodology.

 

Almos all historians have their way to explain the past as a logical succession of totally explainable events, based on one or another methodology. Everything has an explanation. IMHO it is completely wrong.

 

It is totally different from the definition of History by a man who made it:

 

History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided. Konrad Adenauer

Edited April 3, 2011 by michel123456

[Marat]

I agree with Lemur's first point. We gain some objectivity in natural science and escape our anthropocentric prejudices by building explanations from the micro-level on up, so that the explanatory elements we begin with are so different from the laws which might be found eventually to explain their behavior that those laws cannot be seen as skewed by our initial explanatory prejudices. But for humans, a micro-level account of history starting with stimulus-response studies of individual humans to individual influences and building up from there would be impossible. We start already with highly prejudicial perspectives, like the growth of the nation-state, the rise of wages after the Black Death, the enhancement of royal authority by successful wars, not from behavioristic psychology.

 

Any discipline has to explain its object of study in a way that shows it as it really is, but it also has to explain that object in some lawlike, rational, structured way for it to make claim to being an academic discipline beyond just anecdote collecting. The problem with framing a 'science' of history is that if it is true to the empirical object it has to account for -- the incoherent tangle of events, some of which are of decisive importance even though they are utterly contingent -- it has to surrender its claims to present rational, lawlike structures of explanation, which cannot concede such massive importance to ridiculous contingencies like the size of Clara Hitler's uterine canal in relation to the head of the future Adolf Hitler. This could never be a chapter in a history text on European history in the twentieth century, but it is nevertheless decisive for how things developed. Similarly, the decision of the Vienna and Munich Art Academies not to accept Hitler as a student, thus channelling his interests towards politics, is also purely contingent and without merit as a scientific account of the development of world history in the twentieth century. Yet it has decisive causal significance.

[lemur]

I agree with Lemur's first point. We gain some objectivity in natural science and escape our anthropocentric prejudices by building explanations from the micro-level on up, so that the explanatory elements we begin with are so different from the laws which might be found eventually to explain their behavior that those laws cannot be seen as skewed by our initial explanatory prejudices. But for humans, a micro-level account of history starting with stimulus-response studies of individual humans to individual influences and building up from there would be impossible. We start already with highly prejudicial perspectives, like the growth of the nation-state, the rise of wages after the Black Death, the enhancement of royal authority by successful wars, not from behavioristic psychology.

The other approach is to start with historiographical assumptions and critically analyze them to subject them to rigor. E.g. so when people talk about "the growth of the nation-state," "rise of wages," "enhancement of royal authority," "war," etc., you can critically interrogate what kind of microphysics at the individual level would constitute such general forms. You do this by asking questions like, "in what sense(s) was the nation-state growing and what does that mean in an extra-institutional sense, i.e. was nation-state construction and growth really something new or just a continuation of older patterns of cultural activities?" or "whose wages were rising and how, and how did the plague influence the cause(s)" or "what is royal authority exactly and for whom was it being enhanced and how?" or "when is interhuman conflict defined as war and when not and what are the material causes and consequences of various forms of conflict regardless of whether they are ascribed 'war' as a label or some other container-concept?" By asking these kinds of questions, you begin to dissect sweeping historical summary-concepts to the level of actual material interactions.

 

Any discipline has to explain its object of study in a way that shows it as it really is, but it also has to explain that object in some lawlike, rational, structured way for it to make claim to being an academic discipline beyond just anecdote collecting. The problem with framing a 'science' of history is that if it is true to the empirical object it has to account for -- the incoherent tangle of events, some of which are of decisive importance even though they are utterly contingent -- it has to surrender its claims to present rational, lawlike structures of explanation, which cannot concede such massive importance to ridiculous contingencies like the size of Clara Hitler's uterine canal in relation to the head of the future Adolf Hitler. This could never be a chapter in a history text on European history in the twentieth century, but it is nevertheless decisive for how things developed. Similarly, the decision of the Vienna and Munich Art Academies not to accept Hitler as a student, thus channelling his interests towards politics, is also purely contingent and without merit as a scientific account of the development of world history in the twentieth century. Yet it has decisive causal significance.

Good points, and btw ones that have been made by critical historians. The problem with history is that the scale of its scope includes so many micro-events that it seeks ways to summarize these to render them into a narrative with balance and flow. Historiography is an art of seamlessly integrating radically different types of characters from institutions, to macro-social bodies, to individuals, and as you put it, uteruses. So to go from saying in one sentence that the German economy was failing to recover from WWI and in the next that Clara Hitler's uterus was healthy and her family supportive (or insistent) of her having children works as a coherent narrative because we're used to reading and thinking in such terms, but really this is shifting from radically different levels like saying that a warm front and a cold front are meeting and then a single free electron jumped from one molecule to another setting of a chain reaction that resulted in a lightning bolt that zapped some birds in a tree providing easy-meat for a disabled cat who, because of the meat, managed to survive and kill a mouse that carried a disease that would have killed a woman as a child who grew up to enthrall Napoleon only to turn down his advances sparking the inferiority complex that drove him to manipulate others into elevating him to Emperor status, which made it possible for a number of other lower-level bureaucrats to organize their activities in a way that institutionalized a certain approach to regulatory activities in European culture.

 

History writing is ultimately an art because it comes down to selecting which events to include in the story, how to describe those events and ascribe interconnectedness among them, and what assumptions to make about scaling and (the mechanics of) human psychology/sociology/culture.

 

 

 

Edited April 4, 2011 by lemur

[Marat]

I guess this is what Dilthey means when he distinguishes history as a discipline of 'Verstehen' (understanding) rather than science. The subject is adequately intellectually addressed by being structured by theory in such a way that it appeals to our sense that we can understand the story being told. We achieve this in history by leaving Clara Hitler out of the story and focusing on the German inflation problem of the 1920s.