Thinking Historically
On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life
Historians have a heavy responsibility not merely to teach people substantive historical truths but also to teach them how to think historically. ~ David Hackett Fischer
Over the last few months I've read three books by my favorite historian, David Hackett Fischer: Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (1970), Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (my third reading of this book, published in 1989), and African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals (2022).
Focusing here only on his methodology and not on the "substantive historical truths" he has revealed, Fischer sees himself as an empiricist, who strives to avoid the many misuses of history by asking open-ended questions that can be answered through well-reasoned explanations of judiciously selected facts about the human past.
Although an empirical approach to history sounds straightforwardly scientific, Fischer's copious catalogue of fallacies indicates that it's quite difficult to achieve: all too many historians twist the facts, ask inherently unanswerable questions, tell just-so stories, entertain without edifying, glorify or rebuke those who lived before our time, grind ideological or activist axes, etc.
Yet the longer I live and reflect, the more I appreciate the importance of historical knowledge in understanding "present trends and future tendencies" (Fischer 1970, p. 136). Every society has problems, and history can help us see them for what they are; it can also help us see the range of potential solutions (or, as Bertrand de Jouvenel said, the range of provisional "settlements" - for no societal problem is ever truly solved, since settlements necessarily involve what Thomas Sowell called "tradeoffs" and those can change over time in various ways). Specifically, historical insights can help us see which settlements and tradeoffs might be most workable in our present context - by asking questions such as this one from Fischer: "what, for example, are the historical conditions in which social stability, social freedom, and social equality have tended to be maximally coexistent?" (Fischer 1970, p. 315).
The foregoing uses of history are quite substantial, but it is another use that I find most meaningful: "historical scholarship can usefully serve to help us find out who we are" (ibid.). This use of history has its roots in ancient Greek historians like Herodotus, Thucydides, and Dionysius of Halicarnasus - who said that "history is philosophy teaching by examples". Fischer takes this to mean that historians should sit in judgment over people in the past, but he misunderstands what the Greeks meant by philosophy as the love of wisdom and the pursuit of self-knowledge (the famous γνῶθι σαυτόν from the temple of Apollo at Delphi). Indeed, this is just the kind of historical insight that Fischer excels at, especially in Albion's Seed and African Founders, which have helped me and no doubt thousands of others to understand America in its complexity, its high ideals, its repeated failings, and its ever-present potential for renewal and reform.
Ironically, Fischer is quite critical of anything like a philosophical approach to history, but I'm out of words for today so I'll have to write about that some other time.
Good essay. History straddles science and literature but can’t quite satisfy either, since the past, while it endures, is also gone, resulting in both facts and feeling being essentially irretrievable. The present is the result of a naturalism or natural history that cannot actually replicate since the naturalism is continuous - always some new factor confounding the seeming trajectory of the present. Although there seems to be known tropes of facism and chauvinism and resentment in our time, there also seems to be the relatively rare tropes of mobster culture and ideological gangsterism. Strangely, mobsterism would be better than facism. We need a natural history thinker that can tease out these threads.