Howard Burton - Eating Ones Own: Examining Civil War - A Conversation with David Armitage

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Ideas Roadshow conversations present a wealth of candid insights from some of the worlds leading experts, generated through a focused yet informal setting. They are explicitly designed to give non-specialists a uniquely accessible window into frontline research and scholarship that wouldnt otherwise be encountered through standard lectures and textbooks.

Over 100 Ideas Roadshow conversations have been held since our debut in 2012, covering a wide array of topics across the arts and sciences.

See www.ideas-on-film.com/ideasroadshow for a full listing.

Copyright 2020 Open Agenda Publishing. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-77170-026-9

Edited with an introduction by Howard Burton.

All Ideas Roadshow Conversations use Canadian spelling.

Contents

A Note on the Text

Introduction

The Conversation

I. Historical Origins

II. The Semantic Archaeologist

III. In Search of a Definition

IV. Bellum Civile

V. What Is To Be Done?

VI. Historical Relevance

VII. Oceans of Possibilities

Continuing the Conversation

A Note on the Text

The contents of this book are based upon a filmed conversation between Howard Burton and David Armitage in Boston, Massachusetts, on August 29, 2015.

David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University.

Howard Burton is the creator and host of Ideas Roadshow and was Founding Executive Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Introduction

Imagining the Possibilities

There are few disciplines that have a greater mismatch between the professional outlook and high-school stereotype than history.

While for many the very word history conjures up dry as dust images of memorizing long lists of dates and facts, most historians will tell you that their day job is all about interpretation: constructing meaningful narratives thatwhile necessarily a far cry from some canonical ultimate explanation of past eventsnonetheless enable the sensitive and thoughtful reader to attain a deeper level of understanding.

One of my favourite tricks of the historical trade is the counterfactual what if argument: What if Caesar never crossed the Rubicon? What if the Americans hadnt won the Revolutionary War? What if Newton hadnt been paying attention to falling apples?

By speculating on what didnt happen, goes the thinking, some progress can be made on trying to get a better handle on what actually did: Was a certain historical event to a certain extent inevitable, or was it merely one of several possible, plausible outcomes?

A counterfactual is hardly like a scientific hypothesisyou cant run to a laboratory somewhere and test itbut its typically a highly valuable tool in the historians intellectual arsenal to try to rigorously distinguish between the necessary and the contingentor even, sometimes, the downright serendipitous. Most, therefore, are happy to embrace it. But few do so with quite the fervour of David Armitage.

For David, the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University and a prolific author of a wide range of works of political and intellectual history, counterfactual approaches represent nothing less than the very definition of what it means to engage in the historical enterprise.

I always argue that all history is counterfactual history, but most of the time we dont acknowledge that. As were trying to make sense of historical evidence, were always forming plausible and implausible explanations, or scenarios, or narratives, around that material, and abandoning those that are implausible in favour of those that seem plausible as an explanation for all the available evidence.

Thats counterfactual thinkingwere imagining ways in which the evidence could fit together in such a way that it has explanatory power or that it coheres as a narrative.

Another prime way that such counterfactual thinking relates to the words we use to describe our everyday behaviour. While most of us unthinkingly go about our business invoking whatever terms seem appropriate to the task at hand, the astute historian often examines the background of those terms to see what lies beneath, asking questions like, Whythatword, exactly? What would happen if we used another? Is it a coincidence thatthisis the expression we use today for that particular idea or concept rather than something else?

Im interested in the way in which language is functional: how it can be used, especially in political terms. Those of us who are in that tradition are interested in etymologies, not in the sense that etymology is destinythat the original meaning of a term will therefore, ever after, inflect the way in which a term is used or what its implications can bebut as a way of recognizing the mobile and contextual nature of words and expressionsthat the history of the different uses of a term is always, to some extent, embedded or sedimented into its uses ever after, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Given his focus on language, its perhaps not surprising that David has developed his own expression to describe his historical approach geared towards analyzing the significance of these accumulated layers of meaning: a history in ideas.

The method of a history in ideas to recover that sedimentation of meanings is basically Nietzschean. I remember my early encounter with Nietzsches On the Genealogy of Morals was one of those Ah-ha! moments for me, because Id been groping towards something like that without realizing how well someone else had previously expressed itin this particular case someone writing in the 1880s.

One of the most pointed utterances in that particular text is where Nietzsche says, Only an idea which has no history can be defined, that the most complex ideas are those for which no single definition is possible.

And the exercise of a history in ideas is to uncover the various genealogical layers that history has sedimented into the meaning of the term and to look at the ways in which, often conflict had driven meaning.

Well, you might be forgiven for thinking to yourself, this is all very well and good, but isnt it all a little too... abstract and academic? After all, what does all this stuff about counterfactuals and etymology and Nietzsche have to do with the real world?

Quite a lot, as it happens.

Take Davids book, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas. You probably wont be surprised to learn by now that David carefully charts the development of the phrase civil war, tracing it back to the late Roman Republic before duly following its progression through the Roman Empire and early-European societies right through to the travails of an 18th-century legal scholar struggling to provide a suitable definition for his superiors in the Union Army in 1863.

But you might be surprised to know that a major impetus for the book was Davids struggle to make sense of what, exactly, was happening in Iraq in late 2006 and early 2007. After having come to the regrettable conclusion that his current project had reached a dead end, he decided to take an afternoon off and go through some papers that were available at the Huntington Library, where he was working.

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