Who Were the Sea Peoples?

In The Invention of Science , David Wootton takes a whack at strawman Herbert Butterfield, as follows: "In 1931 he had published  The Whig Interpretation of History...  Butterfield argued... it was not the historian's job to praise those people in the past whose values and opinions they agreed with and criticize those with whom they disagreed; only God had the right to sit in judgment" (p. 21) "It should be obvious that he was not right about this: no one, I trust, would want to read an account of slavery written by someone incapable of passing judgment" (p. 21n). This is a silly caricature of what Butterfield thought. Consider the following quotes from The Whig Interpretation of History : "There can be no complaint against the historian who personally and privately has his preferences and antipathies..." "If he deals in moral judgements at all he is trying to take upon himself a new dimension, and he is leaving that realm of histori...

One-book-itis is a malady that strikes amateurs in an academic field (e..g. history) when their reading in that field, on a particular topic, is largely restricted to one strong defense of a controversial position about that topic. The amateur simply doesn't know the field (e.g. history) well enough to realize that: 1) Of course any competent professional historian can marshall a strong case for any position he puts forward: he wouldn't put a case forward unless he could marshall strong evidence for it, and his entire professional life has been spent learning how to make the historical case for proposition X strong. In particular, what the amateur overlooks here is that their champion for this controversial position is in a dialogue with other professional historians . And whatever view he is disputing, those others themselves put forward good cases for the view he is disputing: if they hadn't, he wouldn't even bother disputing it ! 2) The professional discussion...

"The experience of transcendence, as previously defined, is a movement of the soul that may culminate in an act of transcendence. In the optimal case, as it brings to acute consciousness the relation between God and man, it will reveal the presence under God as the truth of human existence. An experience of this type would in any case be of importance to the person suffering it; but if the description were exhaustive, if the experience did not contain an additional factor, it would not be a constituent of history. The historian would have no occasion, for instance, to attach relevance to such an experience unless he were writing the biography of a person to whom it occurred--and quite probably he would never write the biography because persons plagued by such oddities would be devoid of historical interest... This additional factor that makes the experience historically relevant is the truth of order that it reveals with a obligatory force for every man. The obligatory force the ...

"For lies, Mademoiselle, tell a listener just as much as truth can. Sometimes they tell more." -- Agatha Christie, Sad Cypress What a great historical thinker!

Collingwood likened the historian to a detective in The Idea of History : both regard narratives from the past not as "the facts," but as evidence to be analyzed to get at the facts. Agatha Christie seemed to understand the resemblance as well: "You are at least right in this -- not to take what has been written down as necessarily a true narrative. What has been written may have been written deliberately to mislead." -- Murder in Retrospect , p. 183

Social scientists usually think we can't possibly understand individual historical episodes unless we can place them in some general category and under some general law. But the exact opposite is true: there is no way we could place historical events in general categories and draw them together under some law unless we already understood them individually! Not to pick on Mises, but in Theory and History he made this mistake in a very explicit manner: he claimed that, without theoretical categories, we could never understand historical events. This is logically absurd: what he is claiming is that there are agglomerations of historical events about which we understand nothing individually, but then we come and slap upon them a theoretical framework, and only then can we begin to do history. But without already having an understanding of these events as historical episodes, how would we possibly know what theoretical principles might apply to them or what agglomerations are sane a...

"'Historical concept-formation' does not seek to embody historical reality in abstract generic concepts but endeavors to integrate them in concrete configurations, which are always and inevitably individual in character." -- Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Many people have claimed that Hayek's The Road to Serfdom states that a single step towards the welfare state will initiate a near-inevitable slide into full-blown socialism. Others have argued that Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions makes the case for total relativism amongst scientific theories. (These are just two examples that happened to pop into my mind this morning; I'm sure you can come up with others.) In response, people -- and I confess I have been one of those people! -- often trot out what they feel to be a crushing reply: but later, Hayek / Kuhn himself very explicitly declares that that is not what he meant! After all, who should know better than the author himself what a book means? But this is not the decisive blow people who use it think it is. Why? Well, the text is an historical act, and determining its meaning is an act of historical understanding. In such work, we do not simply take an actor's word for what he/she did or ...