Abstract
The epistemology of history has been ridden by one-property-essentialism. Many philosophers and some historians have tried to reduce historical writing to one and only one trait that has been treated both as the signifier of the fundamental difference between history and all other forms of inquiry, and as the essential mechanism generating all epistemologically interesting properties and structures of historical writing (or historical knowledge). Historical inquiry has been essentially reduced by past philosophers to Verstehen, or to ideographic treatment of valued individuals (persons or states-of-affairs), or to re-enactment. The numbers of writers who have been opposed to simplistic reductionism, either explicitly or implicitly, have been few.1
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Notes
A. Megill, “Recounting the Past: ‘Description,’ Explanation, and Narrative in Historiography,” The American Historical Review 94 3 (1989): 629–53
Louis O. Mink, The American Historical Review 94.4 (1989): 1057
E. Loone, Sovremennaia filosofia istorii [A Contemporary Philosophy of History] (Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 1989)
M. M. Postan, “History and the Social Sciences,” in Fact and Relevance: Essays on Historical Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 15–21.
See B. A. Holderness, Pre-Industrial England: Economy and Society 1500–1750 (London: Dent, 1976), 2–4.
C. F. Richmond, “English Naval Power in the Fifteenth Century,” History 52.174 (1967): 1.
G. R. Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969)
Brendan O’Leary, The Asiatic Mode of Production: Oriental Despotism, Historical Materialism, and Indian History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
J. Hurstfield, “Political Corruption in Modern England: The Historian’s Problem,” History 52:174 (1967): 16–34.
Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (London: Tavistock, 1974).
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© 1993 Henry Kozicki
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Loone, E. (1993). “They Were Not Quite Like Us”: The Presumption of Qualitative Difference in Historical Writing”. In: Kozicki, H. (eds) Developments in Modern Historiography. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14970-4_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14970-4_9
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