Putting History in Its Place

...And it is particularly hard for them to grant, at the present juncture of affairs, that "The West is probably going to lose" is compatible with "The West is in the right...

...Once this dependence of historical "fact" upon "theory" is recognized, one is tempted to follow the historicist in concluding that since we are all condemned to subjectivity, we should take care that our subjectivity is going to be the one which will, historically, win out...

...The heart of Aron's argument is that once we realize that "there is nothing either below or beyond the development" of history, we will realize that historicism is itself simply the dying gasp of a phony "objectivism...

...No anti-historicist tract is going to be of much help unless it gets down to basic issues in the theory of knowledge, and Berlin stays on the surface...

...Although the devotion to human liberty which his book exhibits has made Popper the hero of a generation of philosophers, the dubious scholarship with which he supports his historical accounts makes The Open Society useless as a polemical weapon...

...The method of presentation consists, roughly, of the exposition and discussion of every imaginable antinomy which is relevant to problems of historical explanation...

...dissertations can be just as diffuse and exasperating as American ones...

...But, Aron shows, it is this very dependence which makes it impossible to formulate an "objective" theory about who's going to win...

...Many of the difficulties of historical interpretation which Aron attributes to the specifically human character of the data would seem to be merely extensions of the difficulties encountered in any empirical discipline, and to differ only in degree from those of, say, physics...

...But these critiques have not been very useful...

...Aron grants, and indeed insists at great length, that there is no such thing as an untrammeled "objective" grasp of the historical object-in-itself...

...He replied that he had not wished to sacrifice rigor to elegance...

...Originally submitted in 1938 as Aron's thèse principale for the doctorate, it shows that French Ph.D...

...The sense in which the natural sciences are exempt from the relativity characteristic of historical interpretation is never made clear, and many of Aron's arguments depend upon a rather naive and simplistic conception of the methodology of these sciences...

...Aron's book indicates that if the job of putting history in its place is going to be done, it will be done only within the context of a truly radical rethinking of the philosophic presuppositions underlying all areas of thought, not just those underlying historical thinking itself...

...Reviewed by RICHARD RORTY Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Wellesley College The intellectual history of the last hundred years has been marked by a willingness to let "history" play the role which "nature" played for the 18th century and "God" for the 13th...

...Historicism"—a generic name for philosophies which argue from the premise that criteria of value and truth are relative to historical epochs to the conclusion that we must submit to the judgment of history—combines the attractions of one-upmanship with those of either activism or quietism, depending upon one's taste...

...Because the historicist philosopher is himself a historical being, who makes himself what he is by choosing what subjectivity to have, and thus what theory of historical interpretation to employ, he cannot arrange to have history do his judging for him...

...Thus it was with considerable hope that I opened his Introduction to the Philosophy of History: An Essay on the Limits of Historical Objectivity, which has now been translated—though not very well—into English...

...At his oral doctoral examination, Aron was asked whether he did not think his "scholastic" style masked the development of his argument (which it certainly does...

...Only in this way does the individual overcome the relativity of history by the absolute of decision, and make the history he bears within, and which becomes his history, truly a part of himself...

...Raymond Aron's distinguished political analyses are a good example of the empiricism which antihistoricist philosophers commend...

...The trouble is that the aphorisms seem, as often as not, merely to restate the antinomies in a different tone of voice...

...But one essential requirement of rigor is discipline in the use of terminology, and the crucial terms in this book— "objectivity," "philosophy," "logic," "positive science," "cause"—are either left undefined or are defined too often in too many different senses...

...Unfortunately, this too is not the book we need...

...Karl Popper, in his The Open Society, attempted to write an antihistoricist history of historicism, and thereby to turn the tables...

...each such discussion is rounded off by a more or less aphoristic summary...

...By now it is difficult for intellectuals to recognize that the statement, "X is a good cause," is compatible with "X is doomed to perish without a trace...

...As a result of disenchantment with Marxism, however, liberal intellectuals have been looking around for a way of putting history in its place...

...He shows, in exhaustive detail (although without the precision which would be required to answer positivistic critics) that "Only a theory, legitimately anterior to the historical inquiry, makes it possible to fix the value of each interpretation, the possibilities of objective explanations, and the nature of intrinsic understanding...

...One does not have to be addicted to the fashions of AngloSaxon "analytic philosophy," with its strong insistence on linguistic clarity, to feel that some firm distinctions between various meanings of key words would have let Aron say what he wants to say more clearly and in less space...

...His own commitment is a factor in the historical process: "So, without yielding to a pathetic mode of philosophy, and without taking the anguish of a disordered era as an eternal datum, nor yet allowing oneself to sink into nihilism, one can recall that man détermines both himself, and his mission, by measuring himself against nothingness...

...It is that the inference from the relativity of historical judgment to the need for submission to the judgment of history is self-refuting...

...To get around Hegel, we need the kind of drastic critique of our philosophical heritage which is offered by a Heidegger, a Whitehead, a Sartre, or a Michael Polanyi...

...His supporting arguments turn on the assumption that there is a clear-cut contrast between the natural and the historical disciplines, and that "objectivity" is possible in the former...

...Various champions have come forward, publishing books which expose the fallacies of historicism and demand a return to a pluralist, pragmatic and empirical approach to political thinking and social philosophy...

...Further, there is little cumulation of results: After a while, all the antinomies begin to sound alike, and the reader fails to see how the one currently being resolved differs from the one that was resolved 50 pages back...

...This point is so important that one wishes that Aron had made it more effectively...

...One central argument, which is both sound and vitally important, does come through despite the scholastic static...

...Isaiah Berlin's Historical Inevitability, for example, was a bluff and hearty defense of what Marxists sometimes call "vulgar empiricism," but the defense amounts to little more than the argument that since empiricism is the instinctive philosophy of the vulgar, and since all philosophic reflection must start from the position of the vulgar, therefore the empiricist distinction between "fact" and "theory" is beyond the reach of philosophical dispute...