Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"in order to understand the October [1929] crash, one needed to explain why it would have been sensible for investors to be highly optimistic in September 1929, and somewhat pessimistic in November 1929." -- Scott Sumner, The Midas Paradox , pp. 60-61 Again, Sumner is introducing his conclusions as a criterion for what facts will be acceptable. Of course, no one embarks on an attempt to explain some historical episode with a "blank slate": every effort at understanding is an effort to understand better what is to some extent already understood. There is nothing wrong with Sumner starting with the hypothesis that investors were "sensible" in September 1929, and seeing if it holds up. But here Sumner posits their being sensible, not as a conjecture to be explored, but as a given which any explanation must incorporate. And given that is a pre-condition he has placed on any acceptable explanation of what occurred, it is inevitable that the end result of hi...

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...

Reader Ken B. is puzzled : "I don't see how you can deny that without denying the use of historical counterfactuals in toto." First of all, to be very clear, no one is "denying the use" of anything in what follows, or in what went before. When I noted Fukuyama's remarks about "hijacking" the course of events, I was not trying to say he can't write like that: I was saying he is not writing as an historian when writing like that. And in what follows, I draw heavily on Michael Oakeshott. He was once asked, by my PhD advisor, David Boucher, if his ideas meant it was illegitimate for historians to write certain things. Oakeshott responded that he had no interest in telling historians what to put in their books. What he was (and I am) interested in is conceptually identifying a certain attitude to the past we can term "historical." And this is a very important point: Oakeshott made clear that there are pasts besides the historical p...

From a historical perspective, there is no "course of events," other than what actually occurred, to be "interfered with" or "hijacked" by some "intervention." As Oakeshott noted, the actions of some monarch or pope were not "interferences" with the course of events: they were the course of events. Generally when you see phrases like this, you are in the presence of partisanship. So, when Fukuyama says that democratic movements were "hijacked" by nationalists, what he means is that the actions of the nationalists are unfortunate from his point of view. When a modern libertarian claims that Progressives "hijacked" liberalism, all it really means is that he wishes liberalism had developed differently.

"It is not the human conduct must in principle be taken to occlude regularities (other than self-imposed circumstantial practices), or even that there may not be some brooding providential Intelligence that accounts for them; The point is that these considerations do not mix with and cannot take the place of an historical understanding concerned with what was actually the case, there and then, in terms of situations composed entirely of mutually related occurrences inferred from record." -- Michael Oakeshott, On History , p. 65 I make note this for the reason that it demonstrates that for Oakeshott, as for Collingwood, history is intelligible in and of itself, without the application of further laws or theories.

I have noted before how Collingwood compared the work of the historian to that of a detective. And I have noted how Agatha Christie, whether she had read any philosophy of history or not, seemed to grasp this as well. Here is one more piece of evidence: "To be sure means that when the right solution is reached, everything falls into place. You perceive that in no other way could things have happened." -- The Clocks , p. 236 That is just how an historian knows that she has solved an historical problem: The right solution makes all of the evidence fall into place. (Of course, new evidence may come to light, and the historian will have to go back to the drawing board.)