They Weren't Doing History
At the Oakeshott conference, Ken McIntyre just said, "It is wrong to say that pre-modern thinkers were making historical mistakes, because before 200 years ago, no one was doing history."
Just so.
Just so.
In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
Contemporaries certainly thought their peers were guilty of historical mistakes.
ReplyDeleteYes, but not yet understanding what critical history is, how would they know?
ReplyDeleteDid my comment get lost? That seems to happen every time I use my smartphone. It was something like this:
ReplyDeleteDiscriminating between sources requires the skills of the court room and not much more. But whatever the source of their judgments, the fact that they made them tells us that they saw accuracy as a goal of their genre.
I'm at a conference connecting via phone as well, but my answer will point to the different *types* of past, and note that one can be accurate about the practical past, but that doesn't mean one is doing history! More anon.
ReplyDeleteThe distinction here, PSH, is that if I say, "I had a roast beef sandwich for lunch," I am being accurate about the past, but the past I am dealing with is not the historical past, but the practical past. The historical past only differentiated out of other possible pasts in the 19th century.
ReplyDeleteNotice, PSH, what Ken did *not* say: "Two hundred years ago, no one made mistakes about the past."
ReplyDeleteThat, however, is what you have responded to.
In what sense does a work like Ammianus Marcellinus's Res Gestae (4th cent.) or Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (18th cent.) not touch on the historical past?
ReplyDeleteI haven't read those works, but I think you expressed it well yourself: earlier writers on the past sought to be edifying, and the past seen as a source of edification is the practical, not the historical past.
ReplyDelete