Methods – Page 4 – Ether Wave Propaganda

Historiographical Balance

Last week, I posted on the possibility that there might be such a thing as definable historiographical responsibility, and that defining this responsibility might aid us in developing new kinds of inward-directed critiques (critiques of historical work rather than critiques of those outside the history of science profession proper). Specifically, defining historiographical responsibility would allow our critiques of each other to become more vigorous, but will also allow us to define new standards of critical fairness thereby bounding whatever dangers to professional civility might be presented by experimenting with a new critical sensibility.

The key to defining historiographical responsibility is the necessity of establishing a notion of historiographical balance, which must be defined around the ability of a historiography and the contributions of individual historical works to address key needs or problems. These needs or problems are potentially limitless. This limitlessness creates the need for a vigorous and continuous historiographical conversation to articulate (and rearticulate) what needs and problems the historiography seems to be addressing currently and in what proportion and how well, and what needs and problems ought to be addressed in the future. Then, it falls to criticism to determine which styles of research and writing best serve historiographical needs.

We return to the relationship of the historical work to the historiography. It seems to me that the notion of the “corrective” is nearly useless, particularly

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History and Historiography

When writing a historical work, it’s important to think about what one needs to accomplish with it, which is a two-level issue. On one level, one simply needs to check an item off a to-do list: write something publishable, get a line on the CV, secure your professional credentials, move on. So, let’s say there’s a set of “publication requirements”. But (ideally) we also hope to contribute in some way to a historiographical literature and enhance historical understanding in some way. And here is a question that needs to be seriously addressed: what is the relationship between historical work and historiography? It raises a subsidiary question: does the individual historian have a responsibility to the historiography, and, if so, what defines that responsibility?

Insofar as authors are expected to address the historiography, it seems obvious that they do have a responsibility. But is this a trivial responsibility? I ask the question this way, because the topic and argument of the individual historical work is usually left to the historian’s own “interests”. We all know the phrase, “I am interested in X, Y, and Z”. Now we get into a touchy subject: are these interests sacrosanct? Are we allowed to say: “Well, that sounds fine, but I’m quite familiar with the literature on X and

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The Hierarchy of Needs

In the following paragraphs, I argue that historians or philosophers must necessarily write about a thing according to a series of rules or a ‘hierarchy of needs’ so that their account (consisting of a narrative, a series of propositions, a taxonomy, etc.) may be considered as both valid (internally coherent) and as useful (generally applicable) by and for the work’s perceived public. That a specific study of Galileo or Descartes assumes a specific form in response to the needs of the wider scholarly community and emerges as a mediated product of the individual scholar’s realization that he or she must satisfy a series of ‘needs’ in order for that argument to be accepted by the wider community has a specific intellectual genealogy. The idea of the meditated and individual but nonetheless universally valid judgment can be traced back to the later days of the enlightenment with the fleeting supremacy of the romantic absolute subject that bridged the gap between individual intuition and understanding. This allowed the individual judgment to have the same force of assent as those judgments accorded to the work of reason alone (Kant’s ‘inter-subjective validity’).

The shared understanding that a particular narrative exists within a specific discipline attains visibility in every work of history or philosophy that situates itself in the ‘literature.’ In this way, every work of scholarship is by its very nature a work of intellectual atavism, a rehearsal of intellectual formulations to be defensively considered and offensively discarded. Scholars appeal to literature to formulate a series of propositions from which they will depart. It is the habit of scholars to say, “historians of (subject) have noted x, while, in the following work, I will note y and z.” The degree to which such a statement represents the body of work in question is less important in comparison to how the author uses the previous literature

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Definitions, Professions, and Theodicy

One of the most spectacular debates that has emerged since the late 1970s has been those concerning the taxonomy and ontology of two interrelated historical periodizations, that of the “enlightenment” and that of “modernity.” In the history of ideas in both Europe and America, the duel question of “What is enlightenment?” and “What is modernity?” has been the subject of innumerable books, articles, dissertations, and conferences. The conjoining of both these questions and the interrogation of the reality of the intellectual movements they contend to signify has been the focus of recent work by James Schmidt and Graeme Garrard. Garrard, like Isaiah Berlin a generation before him, has linked the end of enlightenment and the arrival of modernity with the failure of rationality, cosmopolitanism, representative government, and the consequent rise of the totalitarian state. Thus, in this context, to define is to also narrate, explain, and defend oneself against the explanations of others.

For Garrard, political theorist Eric Vogelin, Richard Wolin, Ira Katznelson in his Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust, as well as Zygmunt Bauman in his Modernity and the Holocaust, all of whom in some ways follow Hannah Arendt, the failure of the enlightenment and the advent of modernity can help, in no small measure, to explain the ensuing failure of reason and democracy in the twentieth century. The cataclysms of the First World War, the advent of

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