John Lukacs - History and the Human Condition: A Historians Pursuit of Knowledge

HISTORYIS IT ART OR science? History is an art, like the other sciences: a felicitous paradoxical epigram crafted by Veronica Wedgwood, a very erudite and charmingly modest English historian, not inclined to produce epigrams. Here my question is somewhat different. Is the writing of history literary or scientific? Is history literature or science? Wellit is literature rather than science. And so it should be. For us.

In the eighteenth century Veronica Wedgwood's epigram would have been a truism, since in that century people did not regard the difference between art and science that is customary to us. We have seen that during that time they saw history as a branch of literature. But we do not and cannot return to the eighteenth century. Our consideration of history is not a return to history as literature but asomewhatnew recognition.

The emphasis is on letters and words. Let us imagine that at some future time the printed word may cease to exist (except in remnant books or microfilms or other reprintable devices). Will then a film, or any other series of pictures, reconstructingor, rather, confectinga then recent or past historical episode amount to authentic history? No, because it will be a necessarily complicated technical construction. History writing (and teaching) are reconstructions too, but their sources are authentic, from men and women who really lived, their acts and words being retold but not reenacted. And described and told in a common and everyday language, comprehensible to their writers and teachers as well as to their readers. History writing does not depict; it describes.

In the beginning was the word; and then the letter; and then literature. Does history consist of Facts? Yes, there are facts. The house was burning. The dog did not bark. Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Napoleon lost the war at Waterloo. But facts have four limitations at least. One: for us the meaning of every fact exists because of our instant association and comparison of it with other facts. Two: for us the meaning of every fact depends on its statement, on the words with which it is expressed. Three: these words depend on their purposes. There are statements in which the fact may be true, but the meaning, the tendency, the purpose of its statement may be false. Fourth: fact has its history too. Five or more centuries ago the word fact (as also such words as objective and subjective) meant not what they now mean or are assumed or pretend to mean. Fact meant feat, something done.

Words are not finite categories but meanings: what they mean to us, for us. They have their own histories and lives and deaths, their powers and their limits. Let us imagine (it is not easy, but imaginable) that at some future time human beings may communicate with each other mostly by pictures, images, numbers, codes. When words will hardly exist, people will not: but their consciousness of history, including their own history, will.

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At this late date the recognition that history is literature, rather than science, runs against the determinable inclination to render history more scientificall-encompassing, useful, concrete. The realization (which is not a re-cognition) that the historian must deal with subjects wider and deeper than the records of states and of governments and powers, with more and more people, had led to all kinds of erudite explorations, including social history at its best, but also at its worst. A move in former direction was the French Annales school, with superb historians such as Marc Bloch (killed during World War II in 1944) and some of his colleagues and successors producing valuable representations of small as well as large subjects ever since. But now read what the highly reputed French historian Lucien Febvre, once a colleague and then a successor to Bloch, write at the acme of his career, in 1949:

Like all the sciences history is now evolving rapidly. Certain men are increasingly endeavoring, hesitating and stumbling as they do so, to move in the direction of team work. The day will come when people will talk about history laboratories as real things. One or two generations ago the history was an old gentleman sitting in his armchair in front of his index cards which were strictly reserved for his own personal use and as jealously protected against envious rivals as a portfolio in a strongbox; but Anatole

Wellthis was (and is) not what happened. During the past sixty years much excellent history has been written and is still being written not by teams but by individual men and women (and by professionals as well as amateurs), some of them using a computer and yes, many of them their index cards. So much for Lucien Febvre and his new kind of historyas, too, for Fernand Braudel and his total history. Learned historians they, and not devoid of imagination; but, as the French bon mot puts it: