Introduction: Causality after the Linguistic Turn

Abstract

The question ‘What is history?’ has elicited many different answers. For Herodotus, one of the first historians, it was a form of ‘inquiry’ such –that neither the deeds of men may be forgotten by lapse of time, nor the works great and marvellous, which have been produced some by Hellenes and some by Barbarians, may lose their renown; and especially that the causes may be remembered for which these waged war with one another’.² Historians continue to debate which part of Herodotus’s definition is the principal one: a story of ‘deeds’ (human actions), a record of ‘works’ (artefacts and other traces) or an evaluation of ‘causes’ (reasons why actions or events occurred or ‘causes’ were taken up). Many now contend that history is ‘an authored narrative’, which tells a story by recounting a sequence of events in a particular manner, as an act of narration.³ More empirically minded scholars emphasize facts and evidence, which are held to constitute the record and structure the narrative. Post-structuralists, appealing to hermeneutics and literary criticism, concentrate on the techniques, lapses, tropes, genres, epistemology and ideology of representation and narration by historians-as-authors within historical texts and discourses. Neither pay much, if any, attention to causes. Few recent works on historical methods and theory have devoted chapters to the examination of causality and to the identification, framing, analysis and justification of questions.⁴

Before the effect, one believes in different causes than one does afterwards.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1887)¹