Ancient History

...Much of what Finley finds to ob-ject to in the scientific history practiced in the nineteenth century—a romantic reliance on subjective intuition and a n unabashed political conservatism (Eduard Meyer is singled out for thes e sins among historians of antiquity) — is really a failure to live up to its ow n standards...

...As a result, Finley' s concrete prescriptions for improvement tend to be highly tentative and limited , lacking the confidence of his criticism of current practice...

...In a debunking chapter o n Leopold von Ranke, generally regarde d as the founder of scientific history, Finley contrasts von Ranke's claim "to allow only the things to speak" wit h the approach of J. G. Droysen, one of the few historians of antiquity to ad-dress methodological issues...

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...He goes quite far, for example, in de-nying that the speeches in Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War bea r any tolerable relation to speeches that may actually have been pronounced by the political actors in that conflict . Here again, Finley seems to find scien-tific history wanting through a failure to apply genuinely scientific principles...

...Such a view left little room for models o f political order other than those derived from the historical process . At the sam e time, it gave a powerful impulse to th e enterprise of scientific history, under-stood as the study of the history of par-ticular periods in opposition to the self-understanding of those periods, an d with the aim of discovering not lesson s for contemporary practice but simpl y (in von Ranke's famous phrase) "how it really was . " M. I. Finley, Professor Emeritus o f Ancient History at Cambridge Univer-sity and probably the most distin-guished contemporary student of th e economic and social history of classica l antiquity, is dissatisfied with the cur-rent state of scientific history as applied to the study of Greece and Rome...

...At the same time, Finley also admits that th e primary source material is extremely deficient...

...Thus to Martin Nilsson's standard works on Gree k religion he counterposes Jacob Burck-hardt's Griechische Kulturgeschichte, and he appears to prefer the "political pedagogy" of Theodor Mommsen's once immensely popular history o f Rome to the "positivism" of Herman n Bengtson...

...Fin-ley's indictment is roughly as follows . Contemporary historians delude themCarnes Lord is director of international studies at the National Institute for Public Policy in Fairfax Virginia...

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...When Finley thinks of the deficiencies of the ancient literary sources, he thinks first of thei r neglect of the economic and social GIANT HEAVY DUTY TRUCK & BOAT TARPAULINS 16x20...

...At times, Finley gives the impression of rejecting the entire enterprise of scientific history in favor of a return to traditional narrative history, with it s overt didacticism and concern for con -temporary problems...

...And Finley is by no mean s hostile to recent innovations in his-torical methodology such as "cliomet-rics," or to the contributions of arche-ology, insisting only that they be kep t in perspective and integrated fully wit h the more traditional approaches...

...Histor-ians, Droysen argued, "must kno w what they wish to seek ; only then wil l they find something . One must ques-tion things correctly, then they give a n answer...

...What happened in the first instance is that the ancient republics, and th e historians and political theorists who preserved, digested, and interpreted the lessons they offer, came to seem in-creasingly irrelevant in a modern era that rejected the political model s available in the classical past . But much of the answer also lies in the profoun d transformation in historical writing and the conception of history that oc-curred during the nineteenth century...

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...This impression, however, is mislead -ing...

...According to Finley, historians of an-tiquity have generally adopted an at-titude of faith in the literary sources o f the period that is unique among th e practitioners of scientific history, an d need to make a much greater effort t o distinguish between primary an d secondary source material...

...Finley is in the last analysis unwilling to sanction a return to traditional history because tradi-tional history is above all political history...

...What, then, is to be done...

...For educated • Americans an d Europeans of the late eighteenth cen-tury, classical antiquity was not only a living reality but a vital source for th e understanding of republican politica l orders...

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...Much of the reason for this seems to lie in his marked skep ticism concerning the value of the an-cient literary tradition, including even those ancient historians who have been most esteemed as precursors of modern historiography...

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...The paucity of the ancient evidence has caused his-torians to overrate the reliability of th e literary sources, while it has licensed assaults on more traditional histori-ography on the one hand by the new scientific archeology, and on the other by trendy approaches using quantita-tive analysis...

...In place of the mathematical models of the cliometricians, Finley proposes the use of "non-mathematical models" as a way to give greater focus to the stud y of essentially fragmentary and enig-matic data...

...the problem is merely the lack of reliable statistical data and documents from the classical period...

...ANCIENT HISTORY• EVIDENCE AND MODEL S M. I. Finley/Viking/$17.95 Carnes Lord When the authors of the Federalist Papers sought a collective identity for themselves, they turned to ancien t Rome...

...Indeed, he appears ready to concede a large role to cliometrics in principle...

...Some of the ambiguities and hesitations in Finley's argument can be understood by appreciating the "ideo -logical" agenda underlying his own theoretical project...

...As such, it is the history of par-ticular ruling groups or classes, of their contests for political power at hom e and their wars abroad...

...Under the impact of Hegel, history came to be seen as a series of discret e epochs in which the human spiri t marches dialectically toward self-consciousness and freedom...

...This slight volume sets forth the grounds for Finley's indictment, but needs to be supplemented by other re -cent collections of his essays . Never-theless, it conveys an accurate sens e of the seriousness of Finley's disaffec-tion with current historiographical practices, as well as the breadth o f learning and sharpness of judgmen t that are characteristic of his writing . Finley's polemical style is deliber-ate, an aspect of his refusal to ac-cept the claim of scientific history to be a cumulative body of knowledge o n the model of the modern natura l sciences...

...Historians of antiq-uity are particularly exposed to the twin temptations of antiquarianism and subjective or ideological recon-struction of the past...

...In common with much recent historiography, Fin -ley believes such history tends to be fundamentally flawed by its neglect o f private life and the life of the non-ruling strata of society...

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...selves in believing that scientifi c history, in the sense of the objective study of the past wholly divorced from ideological preconceptions, is possibl e at all...

...Today, Athens and Rome are foreign to our political discourse, and they are barely at home in the educa-tional curricula of our best universities . What happened...

...For Finley, the necessary prolegomenon to an adequate history of classical antiq-uity is, if not the sociology of Max Weber, at any rate a kind of historical sociology postulating Weberian "idea l types" that can serve as models fo r historical investigation . One of the in-teresting features of the present volum e is the evidence it provides of Finley's growing realization of the problemati c character of Weber's "ideal types . " Whether owing to his awareness o f Weber's inadequacy for his purposes or for other reasons, Finley has never suc -ceeded in working out the theoretical basis for the alternative approach to ancient history that he appears to regard as necessary...

...Finley's approach is reminiscent i n some ways of the fourteenth-century North African historian Ibn Khaldun , who prefaced his history of the worl d with a lengthy essay that can be con-sidered the earliest attempt at com-parative or historical sociology...

...Such a belief leads either to a merely antiquarian concern with th e brute facts of the past, or to a kind o f historiography in which the operationa l principles of historical explanation are unexamined, half-conscious reflection s of present realities...