Peter Novick, That Noble Dream
Novick breaks up the book into four periods: the 1880s through 1910s,
WWI and the interwar period, the mid-40s through the mid-60s, and
finally, the 60s into the 80s. The “narrative” is that of, in the
corresponding time periods, the rise of “scientific” objectivist
history, followed by the ascendancy of challengers to these claims of
objectivity, most famously with the speeches of Becker and Beard at the
AHA, the incorporation of some of this group’s criticisms during WWII
and the early years of the Cold War to remodel and reconfigure what
“objectivity” meant, while at the same time putting it back at the fore,
and finally, with the social unrest of the 60s, the loss of the goal of
objectivity to specialization. The sometimes rather passionate critical
responses to this book that I have found make me ask if the objectivity
question is as settled as he makes it out to be.
Novick’s periodization is rather essentializing, and I have to question
to what extent it creates a sort of “cherry picking” effect, not
allowing for the voices of historians who may have been out of step with
their historiographical period.
Likewise, his fourth section was somewhat difficult for me to grasp. I’m
not sure I agree with or even understand how historians no longer trying
to produce work that is catholic, all-inclusive, generalized actually
means that there is a breakdown of the myth of objectivity. Couldn’t one
be objective and still specialized? Are ichthyologists not being
objective by studying fish, instead of all of biology? Also, using the
brick metaphor from the first section, couldn’t the compartmentalism of
post-60s historians be looked at as just “making smaller bricks?”
In his introduction, Novick explains his view of history, and espouses
the view that historic events tend to be the effects of
“overdetermination.” The only time I’ve encountered this term used with
reference to historical events is usually in work drawing on the Marxist
theory of Louis Althusser. This leads me to believe that in certain
respects, Novick is essentially a structuralist. His quoting Emile
Durkheim in the same introduction would reinforce such a view.
Which makes me ask, where’s the Poststructuralist History? Shouldn’t
there be, couldn’t there be, a real movement challenging the myth of
objectivity by using Derridian techniques of deconstruction on the
truth-claims of history? The closest I’ve heard of to this is the late
Jean Baudrillard’s work on the Gulf War, but I haven’t read it yet. Did
the book come out too early for Novick to witness Poststructuralist
History’s moment, or has it not materialized? It seems to me that it
would be a worthwhile project, if only because it might be a useful
technique to put aside the objectivity question once and for all.
Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre
I personally found Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre
quite informative and enjoyable. I seem to be in the minority within my class, however, as many people seem to feel the book is quite simply not
history. I disagree.
Personally, I feel that Davis did an amazing job of making an historical
work out of scant details. Moreover, by taking on the story of Martin
Guerre, she has done something that few historians I’ve read have
actually pulled off—she created a work that relies on the methods and
works of social history that nevertheless has a story.
The book is a
model of how much can be done with so little. And I find that rather
inspiring, as I always seem to think the meatiest, most fascinating bits
of history are the ones that you find in that single, throw-away mention
in a book about another topic completely.
Davis indicates that this story still has cultural capital, is still
being told and reiterated, almost five hundred years later. No story
stays part of the culture for that long unless it inherently hits on
some raw nerve of the culture, some theme that seems almost
inexhaustible to the people who keep telling the tale. When something
possesses this sort of cultural relevance, it is natural for an
historian to try to come in and attempt to see what light historical
knowledge can shed on it.
Guerre’s case is a natural for such
treatment, as well, as it’s a “true story.”
Such work is difficult, however, there’s really only one primary source,
and another cotemporary source that may or may not be written by someone
with any firsthand knowledge of the events that transpired. Looking
through the footnotes, Davis definitely leans on Coras, but she then
went the extra step of incorporating a lot of nineteenth and twentieth
century works that applied to the case—and in this way, she was able to
flesh out things that may have been unclear in Coras’ text. She
elucidates peasant economies and family structures of the time. She
brings in the Guerre family’s Basque heritage, and how it helps to
explain why Martin may have left—something that likely was inexplicable
to his French neighbors.
This incorporation of knowledge of peasant life
at this time and place enriches the story, and gives a reader a far
fuller understanding of the events of the tale.
Where Davis speculates as to people’s mindsets or attitudes, she tends
to very reliably use those famous phrases that historians to indicate
such a shift. “It may be” and “it is possible” and “perhaps” are all
over this book. The book contains an entire chapter on Coras and his
strengths and weaknesses as a source. There’s even a selected annotated
bibliography at the end.
To me, these all indicate an historian who is
struggling to remain in the realm of “real history,” using the tools of
the trade and being quite transparent about her sources.
It all comes back to that persistent “objectivity question.” I think
that Davis saw the potential for a good book, and one that contributed
to an ongoing discussion of over four hundred years. When confronted
with the dearth of sources, Davis faced a dilemma—she could be
objective, or attempt to tell the truth. She chose the latter, and I
personally think it was the right decision.
“Objectivity” would have
left the book unwritten, a single paragraph, as one of my classmates pointed out.
The use of reasonable inference and honesty about uncertainties and
ambiguities, however, brought about a book that I felt was a worthwhile
read.
Besides, I still feel that the truth is seldom “objective.”
William Cronon, Changes in the Land
Changes in the Land deals with the impact on the ecosystems of New England by Native Americans and colonial British settlers.
Cronon’s basic premise is that Native and English populations viewed the land and its use in fundamentally different ways, and that the decreasing population of the former and the increasing population of the latter led to a fundamental change in land use among both.
This in turn influenced the very environment itself, as the reordering of economies and land-use changed the landscape, the flora, the fauna, water quality… New England would have been almost unrecognizable in 1800 to someone who had seen it two hundred years prior.
The way man interacts with his environment fundamentally alters that environment. If Braudel was writing about how mountains and bodies of water influence human history, Cronon is writing about how human history influences mountains and bodies of water.
Cronon’s basic thesis—and the implications of adding the environment to how we view history—are unassailable and invaluable. This is definitely one of those books that’s a classic for good reason.
However, there were two small, niggling inaccuracies I noticed—things I only knew about due to later scholarship—that nevertheless I think point to some of the work's biases. I don’t feel that either of these damage the worth of the book, by any means, but they are telling or at least interesting.
First—on page 14, and again on pages 92-93, Cronon explicitly argues that part of the difference between Indian and English economies is one of scale. While this is true, the scale of the pre-Columbian North American economy is somewhat underestimated by Cronon, who argues that it was exclusively limited to inter-village and occasionally regional trade.
While it is true that there weren’t Native wholesalers shipping stuff out to the Pacific in the able hands of Indian Teamsters, Daniel Richter’s Facing East From Indian Country has demonstrated that the pre-Columbian Native American trade network was definitely a continental one, while still supporting Cronon’s assertion that it wasn’t a centralized one. Cronon, researching this book in the late seventies and early eighties, makes the common (and often but not always accurate) conflation of “low-impact” or “sustainable” with “small.”
Second—when comparing English and Indian views of land use, husbandry, and property, Cronon dismisses the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s understanding of land ownership as the product of land improvement as “little more than an ideology of conquest…” (57) While this is true in terms of how it was applied to Native Americans, it only tells half the story. In a working paper for the Rappaport Institute of Greater Boston, Harvard’s James Levitt has pointed out that this was actually a policy borne of quite progressive ideals.
The Massachusetts Bay Corporation, being allowed by its charter to govern itself from America without a direct overseer in London, brought many more of its shareholders to the new world than other of these colonial corporations. Once there, they quickly established this rule of land improvement as grounds for ownership—and then went the further step of making all land-holders members of the corporation. The result by 1631 was near-universal manhood suffrage in a direct democratic system via elections and town meetings—a level of franchise unmatched in the southern English colonies, and even in England after the English Civil War.
In focusing the book so exclusively on environmental concerns, Cronon’s history can at time lose sight of important things like civil rights and just governance.
Overall, though, I loved the book. It was a great read. I’ve been meaning to get around to it for a long time, and I’m glad that my Historiography class has finally forced me to do so.
Foucault, Discipline and Punish
I’d like discuss the issue of agency in Discipline and Punish.
The reaction of my Historiography class, which I gladly re-read this book for, was somewhat mixed. One student argued that “Foucault dismisses personal responsibility and the willful choice of an individual to commit a crime.” Meanwhile, another argued that Foucault’s departure from Marxism “is evidenced by assigning a sense of free will to the individuals discussed…”
This isn’t a new debate. Since his rise to academic prominence in the US, at least, people have been debating whether Foucault presents a view of people trapped in multivalent matrices of power that leave them with little or no agency or choice, or if his work represents a radical imbuing of power to all, even those traditionally considered to be powerless in society.
Is this a view of a world where we are constantly being disciplined, punished, and robbed of choices, or is it one where the subaltern can not only speak, but act? Personally, I fall into the latter camp. I’m going to try to explain why here.
The key to this view, to me, is Foucault’s construction of power. He describes power as a “perpetual battle,” as a thing “…exercised rather than possessed, , it is not the ‘privilege’, acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions- an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the positions of those who are dominated.” (26-27)
The traditional concept of power coming from the top down, embodied physically in the figure of the king, with what Foucault repeatedly describes as his “super-power,”* (e.g., 57) is out the window. Where popular notions of power had been forces like Newtonian gravity, Foucault’s power is like quantum physics—unpredictable, unstable, constantly shifting, everywhere, and appearing in quantities too small to see. Foucault discusses “infra-penalty” and “infra-politics,” (pgs 214 & 222) concepts that, along with his concept of power, likely are the main source for Robin Kelley’s concept of infra-politics—political acts on a small scale taken up by the supposedly powerless.
It may be easier to take an optimistic view of power when looking at the “bad old days” of torture, when you’re looking at this book. Foucault almost puts the criminal and the king on equal footing (47-48) in his argument that the criminal’s power to break the law is a direct affront to the power of the king, whose will is law. It’s harder to see this sort of power at work later in the book, with the advent of modern penal reform. Part of this is probably a result of having to spend a lot more time inside prisons, after punishment ceased being a public spectacle and became a cloistered, private affair between the state and the body—or the soul—of the individual subject.
Yet even under the régime of panopticism, there is hope in Foucault’s construction of power. Think of it this way: the utility of the panopticon is based on its efficiency—the uncertainty of whether one is being watched leads to an internalization of discipline, and thus to the disciplining of one’s self. As this technology increased, it spread out, became more generalized, and became a prevalent method of social control.
But the beauty part of this is, most of the time, we are policing ourselves. We discipline ourselves. This means that within the modern world of discipline and biopower, if one feels denied the opportunity to exercise ones agency, all one really needs—most of the time—is the strength and the courage to stop doing the work of the warden for him, and go out and do what you want.
Because Foucault is essentially a Neitzchian. That’s why he writes genealogies rather than histories or metaphysics.
Of course, it’s also why Chomsky dismissed him as “amoral” after their televised debate, but I’ve just opened a couple cans of worms I don’t have the time or space to close right now.
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*I don’t have the book in French, but I have a suspicion that this term is a translation of puissance supérieure—a phrase that gives a sense, again, of top-down-ness. Just a thought, really.
Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
Braudel’s first volume of “The Mediterranean” is a great work of
scholarship. It certainly displays a great mastery of a variety of
topics, a knowledge that is notable in both its depth and breadth. It’s
also a logical inclusion in the syllabus of an historiography class, as
Braudel is fundamentally attempting to shift the focus of what had been
previously considered historical thought—a trend that would only proliferate in the next
half-century, ending in the current state of affairs, where the
sub-disciplines of History are so numerous and compartmentalized that
sometimes it seems they can hardly recognize one another.
Braudel attempts to refocus the discipline, which he seems to see as
overly focused on the political, military, and biographical. His
response is to produce a work that moves from the socio-geographic to
the socio-economic and demographic. It’s definitely well-written,
well-researched, and full of those curious tidbits that keep a reader
interested when reading a rather dry history text.
While my attention
wandered at times, I found the book intensely interesting at others.
One thing that particularly grabbed my interest was the section on mail
and couriers on pages 355-371, as it seemed to give a much deeper
background to something I found interesting in Habermas’s “Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere,” but which Habermas unfortunately
glossed over in a matter of a few paragraphs.
Another was his repeated
use, in his socio-geographic description of the mountain ranges of the
Mediterranean, of the word “civilization.” Unlike Prescott a hundred
years earlier, Braudel seems to use the word in a very value-neutral
sense, as a complex that includes both positive features like improved
quality of life, refinements, etc., but also features negative
qualities, such as greater and more widespread despotism, heightened
class disparity, corruption of the clergy, etc. It seemed a very modern,
progressive view.
All of this aside, however, I had an overall negative response to the
book. It seemed to me that Braudel was over-reaching with this work—he
created a book with an impossible scope, and thus inevitably, the result
is mixed at best. To attempt a history of such a large area is a very
difficult task, and to do so through multiple lenses, without a single
unifying grand narrative or theoretical structure, seems downright
foolhardy. The result is a book that is meandering, at time confusing,
and desultory in its organization and evidence.
While it may or may not
have been the author’s decision, not indexing the first volume within
the first volume seems to me to be a horrible decision, one that reduces
the use of the book as a reference, while the complaints I’ve listed
above make it highly unlikely I’ll ever decide to re-read the book at
leisure.
That said, as someone who is very interested in historical cultural
geography, the book fascinated me, as it seems to represent just that,
in its nascent state, before the birth of cultural theory and cultural
history.