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A review by sense_of_history
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past by John Lewis Gaddis
Two things I appreciate about this book: Gaddis' pragmatism and his attempt to put the writing of history back on the scientific map.
His pragmatism builds on a very post-modern vision of history: the past is a foreign country, we can only represent it, by giving meaning to the remnants of the past in terms of what they explain. It's like making a map of a landscape: also a selection, but a quite useful one. Just as there can be different maps of the same landscape, there are also different descriptions (Gaddis chooses the word 'narratives') of the past possible; all of which are "true", as far as they lean as close to reality as possible. No relativism with Gaddis ("there is truth"): the past is not irremediable gone, it is definitely out there, open to questioning by us in the present, and even sometimes actively adjusting our look on it: "the history these representations represent has not changed. It’s back there in the past, just as solidly as that still imprecisely measured coastline. It’s this reality that keeps our representations from flying into fantasy"(p.125).
Precisely because there are different ways of mapping the landscape of the past, we must be open to methodological tolerance, that too is pragmatism: "Within a single narrative we can be Rankeans, or Marxists, or Freudians, or Weberians, or even postmodernists, to the extent that these modes of representation bring us closer to the realities for which we're trying to account. We're free to describe, evoke, quantify, qualify, and even reify if these techniques serve to improve the 'fit' we're trying to achieve. Whatever works, in short we should use."(108). And finally, it is the continuing debate among historians (and non-historians) on the outcome of these different approaches, which may lead to a consensus about the past, albeit a provisional one.
Second merit: history indeed is a science! Historians according to Gaddis are scientific experimentalists par excellence, they constantly test their conclusions on what sources say. Thus they do exactly what the "hard" scientists more and more do, in an ongoing revision of intuitive, practical and theoretical approaches, "fitting things together". He even offers a bold reversal of thought: Gaddis refers to the chaos and complexity theory to suggest that the hard sciences gradually move in the direction of what historians have long been doing: approaching reality as a complex system, a web-like thing where everything is connected to everything. Obviously he doesn't focus on the scientists in their laboratory, but rather on geologists, paleontologists, astronomers, evolutionary biologists etc.
I'm not so pleased, though, with Gaddis' quite crude attack on social sciences, and their supposed reductionism: "The methods of historians are closer to those of certain natural scientists than to those of most social scientists- because too many social scientists in their efforts to specify independent variables have lost sight of a basic requirement of theory, which is to account for reality. They reduce complexity to simplicity in order to anticipate the future, but in doing so they oversimplify the past "(p.71). That tempts him into outright derogatory statements: "Historians are in much less demand than social scientists when it comes to making recommandations for future policy. We have the consolation in contrast to them, though, of more often getting things right"(p.58). Perhaps that is true for certain trends in the social sciences, but I think Gaddis here is generalizing too much and perhaps more expresses a personal inferiority complex as a historian.
Anyway, Gaddis is right that when historians adhere to their pragmatic methodology, they are building a sound scientific view of reality, different perhaps, but as meritorious as that of other sciences. And that is no small achievement. I really loved this little book.
His pragmatism builds on a very post-modern vision of history: the past is a foreign country, we can only represent it, by giving meaning to the remnants of the past in terms of what they explain. It's like making a map of a landscape: also a selection, but a quite useful one. Just as there can be different maps of the same landscape, there are also different descriptions (Gaddis chooses the word 'narratives') of the past possible; all of which are "true", as far as they lean as close to reality as possible. No relativism with Gaddis ("there is truth"): the past is not irremediable gone, it is definitely out there, open to questioning by us in the present, and even sometimes actively adjusting our look on it: "the history these representations represent has not changed. It’s back there in the past, just as solidly as that still imprecisely measured coastline. It’s this reality that keeps our representations from flying into fantasy"(p.125).
Precisely because there are different ways of mapping the landscape of the past, we must be open to methodological tolerance, that too is pragmatism: "Within a single narrative we can be Rankeans, or Marxists, or Freudians, or Weberians, or even postmodernists, to the extent that these modes of representation bring us closer to the realities for which we're trying to account. We're free to describe, evoke, quantify, qualify, and even reify if these techniques serve to improve the 'fit' we're trying to achieve. Whatever works, in short we should use."(108). And finally, it is the continuing debate among historians (and non-historians) on the outcome of these different approaches, which may lead to a consensus about the past, albeit a provisional one.
Second merit: history indeed is a science! Historians according to Gaddis are scientific experimentalists par excellence, they constantly test their conclusions on what sources say. Thus they do exactly what the "hard" scientists more and more do, in an ongoing revision of intuitive, practical and theoretical approaches, "fitting things together". He even offers a bold reversal of thought: Gaddis refers to the chaos and complexity theory to suggest that the hard sciences gradually move in the direction of what historians have long been doing: approaching reality as a complex system, a web-like thing where everything is connected to everything. Obviously he doesn't focus on the scientists in their laboratory, but rather on geologists, paleontologists, astronomers, evolutionary biologists etc.
I'm not so pleased, though, with Gaddis' quite crude attack on social sciences, and their supposed reductionism: "The methods of historians are closer to those of certain natural scientists than to those of most social scientists- because too many social scientists in their efforts to specify independent variables have lost sight of a basic requirement of theory, which is to account for reality. They reduce complexity to simplicity in order to anticipate the future, but in doing so they oversimplify the past "(p.71). That tempts him into outright derogatory statements: "Historians are in much less demand than social scientists when it comes to making recommandations for future policy. We have the consolation in contrast to them, though, of more often getting things right"(p.58). Perhaps that is true for certain trends in the social sciences, but I think Gaddis here is generalizing too much and perhaps more expresses a personal inferiority complex as a historian.
Anyway, Gaddis is right that when historians adhere to their pragmatic methodology, they are building a sound scientific view of reality, different perhaps, but as meritorious as that of other sciences. And that is no small achievement. I really loved this little book.