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THE WHAT AND THE WHY OF HISTORY: PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS. By Leon J.Goldstein. Leiden, New York, Cologne: E. J. Brill 1996. Pp. xiii, 351.

Leon Goldstein, a professor of philosophy, not a historian, has brought togethernineteen essaysas he prefers to call themon the philosophy of history, dat-ing back to 1958. They were originally published in a variety of journals andanthologies, four in History and Theory. He could at no time presume that thereaders of a particular essay were acquainted with his other so-scattered articles.Repetitions in the published collection are therefore inevitable. More seriously,since the essays were published over so long a period of time, one can find it hardto tell if one comes across sentences in different essays that seem to be inconsis-tent whether this represents a change of mind or is a real inconsistency. But suchoccasions are very rare; one can generally rely upon Goldstein to stick to his ini-tial assertions.

If I mention philosophy of history to my history colleagues I do not find itgreeted with enthusiasm. Ask them what history is and they will reply whatwe do although that is notably different from what they did twenty years ago,cultural history largely having replaced political history. (I shall write his-tory for the subject, history for what happened, although Goldstein sometimeswrites as if these are identical.)

There is at least one respect, however, in which my colleagues would agreewith Goldstein. His book, in a manner partly reflected in his title, is divided intothree segments Why, What, and Collingwood. Like many of us from thepast, he at first thought of explanationhe was a pupil of Hempelas the mainproblem for philosophers of history. But now his emphasis is on what ratherthan why, description rather than explanation. Hempel had been anxious tosave history as an intellectual activity by showing that in spite of appearancesto the contrary it explained by appealing to covering laws and so wasrespectably scientific. In these postmodernist days, being like science is nolonger a recommendation; some rejoice in treating history as a form of litera-ture. But even those historians who despise postmodernism describe whatrather than why.

There may be other reasons than the rejection of scientism for the switch fromwhy. A recent reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement of a book on the his-tory of Glasgow congratulates the author for not attempting to offer explanationsof its ups and downs. It is hard enough, the reviewer says, for historians to findout what happened; finding out why is an impossibly difficult task. Certainlywhen I listen to papers read in history seminars I listen in vain, in my old-fash-

ioned way, for a why but can find the what interesting enough. In general, ofcourse, there is growing skepticism about social laws except, and then only toa degree, in the case of the simpler economic laws. Sociology is content with sta-tistics, describing what is happening or happened at a particular time.

Few historians would approve, however, of either of two leading theses devel-oped by Goldstein, which begin his book in an essay entitled Historical Past andReal Past. The first sentence in this essay refers to Collingwood, as does the lastsentence in the book. What lies between, indeed, entitles Goldstein to be regard-ed as a member of the Collingwood Revival Society, even if, not uniquely, byno means all his fellow members accept his interpretations. The Collingwoodthesis is that all history is present history; the secondGoldsteinthesis is thatthe starting point of historical inquiry is a body of evidence. The first statementalways puzzles me. To be sure, some of the things it could mean are obviouslytrue. One is that history is always written at a particular time, at what is, for it,the present. The historian Kenneth Clark advised history students to look verycarefully at the date of any history book they are reading, this being a date asimportant as any in the book. A history book, he was saying, can only reporthistorical knowledge as it was when the book was writtenits present. He is notadvising against reading such books. Indeed no alternative may lie open. He wasonly saying that they cannot report our, as distinct from their, present state ofknowledge.

Another interpretation is that a history written at a particular time is boundin some measure to reflect some of the attitudes of that, their present, time. Sowe can choose to read it as exhibiting what was happening at its present, eventhough what it is officially writing about is the past. So we can read Gibbon notto read about the Roman Empire but as an example of what I call the pessimisticEnlightenment, made explicit in his description of history as little more thana register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.

Yet another possible interpretation is that history always fulfills demands ofthe present, demands which are not stable. So when considerable changes occurin a society, there is always a demand that history be rewritten. Not long agoin Australia the general view was that the indigenous peoples would soon die outand in any case they had never really inhabited Australia, that Australia, beforethe British arrived, was terra nullius, an empty land. So early histories ofAustralia left them out of the picture, except in the case of occasional individu-als who helped the explorers. Now the situation has changed and Australians, ormany of them, have developed a conscience in respect to the treatment of theindigenous peoples and have become much more conscious of their beliefs andtheir artistic gifts. In consequence there is a demand that history be rewritten.Similarly, though to a lesser degree, historians ignored women, but today thereis a demand that history be rewritten to pay more attention to their contribu-tions. There are demands elsewhere for the rewriting of historyin France,Germany, Japan, and Russiato satisfy the present-day conscience about thepast as described in their histories. The Australian Prime Minister, John

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Howard, has protested against the new historical work, describing it as blackarmband history. He obviously believes that histories should help to makepresent-day citizens proud of their past. There have been similar protests inJapan, in some cases reaching the point of arguing that nothing exists except thepresent. The world was created yesterday.

There are obviously many ways then of arguing that all history is presenthistory. But I do not think that any of them represents Goldsteins position; Ido not find that my considering alternative interpretations has led me any nearerto understanding him. He is not, I feel sure, following the Australian PrimeMinister in arguing that history is simply the past as the present would like itto have been. But such negations still leave me baffled about what Goldstein doesmean unless it is simply that history can only represent the past as seen by thepresent, the historical past, in consequence, inevitably being different from thereal past. The constant rewriting of history might be taken to support that view;Goldstein appeals to changes over time in scientific theory to argue that just asthe world does not change when a theory changesthis showing, he says, thatscientific theories are always present pictures of the world, there being no wayof comparing them with the actual worldsimilarly there can be no way of com-paring present-day histories of England, let us say, with what really happened.

Some of these interpretations Goldstein rejects in passing, but I confess to stillnot being at all confident about what he means. Perhaps it is nothing more thanthat since history is of a past which is gone foreverhis examples are all fromrelatively remote past timeshistorians cannot do anything of the sort suggest-ed in such statements as history reveals the past or gives us access to it. Hedoes not go so far as the Japanese statement suggesting that there is no such thingas the past, which I take to be a piece of adviceforget the past. The pres-ent of course is a tricky notion. Does it mean the passing moment, so that I shallhave to think that I have already passed through innumerable presents thismorning and that to describe what I ate at breakfast would be to describe the past,or is it a longer period, as it is certainly employed in such phrases as present-day morals. Much of the past, too, is still with us, in the form, for example, ofthe principal religions, the American Constitution, and so on. To take a very triv-ial example, I recently wrote a criticism of the view that Sydney, Australia, wasin the 1930s a cultural desert. I appealed first of all to my own, and my wifes,memory. My remembering was something that occurred in what was then thepresent. But am I to say that my memory must be of the present? That woulddestroy the distinction between memory and perception. I also, to check mymemorywhich I knew from past experience was by no means wholly reli-ablelooked at programs, newspaper reviews, the clothes of the then-visitingRussian ballet, which were held in the art gallery. Was I not, in looking at them,looking at things that were both past and present?

Goldstein quotes more than once a passage from the sociologist George H.Meade that the estimate and import of all histories lies in the interpretation andcontrol of the present and that as ideational structures they always arise from

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change (5, note 1). I have myself granted that as attitudes to our indigenous peo-ples change so does in some respects the history of Australia change, not with-out political opposition. But much of earlier histories remains in essenceuntouched. The rise of popularism can lead to historians discussing topics theypreviously left untouched but, listening to papers from this area, I cannot say thatthe content of the papers, as distinct from the choice of topics, is politically deter-mined. Nor my own little piece, which arose in the course of writing a memoir.

To turn now to the secondpurely Goldsteinclaim about evidence.Ordinary people, he is willing to admit, think of history as offering them a nar-rative account about the past, more accurate, if usually less exciting, than whatthe historical novelist presents us with. But, Goldstein tells us, the historianstask, far from being storytelling, is to make sense out of evidence. His examplesof such evidence are things which do not seem to fit into the present texture ofculture and life, writings that most of us cannot read, coins that will buy nothingat the grocery, ruins of buildings and entire cities and so on (4). When histori-ans succeed this is not by way of putting us in touch with the past, which is nolonger there to be put in touch with, but simply by explaining the evidence.

His examples suggest the archaeologist rather than the historian, just as hislater references to Ezekiel would normally be taken to belong to the world of bib-lical criticism rather than history, although it can be admitted that the two areoften intertwined, and particularly were so in the nineteenth century when F. H.Bradley wrote his The Presuppositions of Critical History (1874). But let us lookat Goldsteins examples in the light of what historians for the most part do.

Suppose a historian discovers on the streets of New York a coin which is notlegal currency in the USA. Suppose further that the only other obvious featureabout it is that it is a low value coin. Then the historian might throw it back onthe street, tidily into the gutter, or take it home for children to look at, or try tosell it at a collectors shop. Of itself it is not being treated as evidence. But sup-pose the historian is in Antarctica and has a belief that the Russians made a secretjourney there in 1935, and finds there a Russian coin of the appropriate date, orhears of its being found, then at once it is transformed into being evidence.

Consider Goldsteins writings that most of us cannot read. Most of us canread only a few languages. In fact the vast majority of people can read only onelanguage. It does not automatically set the historians mind to work to discoverthe meaning of something written in a language that the historian is unable toread. Of course, if no one knows the language it sets a task for excellent codereaders, although it can also be helpful if they have historical knowledge. As forruined buildings and cities, these naturally arouse our curiosity: is this the effectof an earthquake, or an invasion, or of a climatic change? Then we go in searchof evidence to enable us to choose among these hypotheses, perhaps to rule themall out so that we have to begin speculating again. The strange thing is thatGoldstein, without indicating disagreement, cites the Collingwood of The Idea ofHistory where he says that nothing is evidence except in relation to some defi-nite question (137). But Goldstein still stands by the view that the logical func-

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tion of the constituted event is to explain the evidence, even though he admitsto being unable to say precisely what this logical relationship is (204). Thisadmission comes at the end of a lengthy paper entitled Towards a Logic ofHistorical Constitution (171-206) which contains the most extensive develop-ment of these views through the study of a particular case.

That case is the discovery in the town of Kensington, Minnesota, of a stonefound in the foot of a tree. It appeared to be a stone marked with runes. Goldsteincalls this the evidence. I would describe it as creating problems. Are thesemarks actually runes or just accidental marks? Suppose it is discovered, as actu-ally happened in this case, that if the marks are read as runes they offer a descrip-tion of nearby lakes. That makes it more likely that they are runes rather thanaccidental marks, as could be produced, for example, by childish play.

But then a new problem is set. Who could possibly have produced them inKensington, given that the Norse only made their way to the Eastern coast? Anew factor enters the case with the publication (1969) of Hjalmar F. HolandsNorse Discoveries in America 9821362. For it now appears that the Norse pen-etrated much further into America than had previously been supposed. At longlast the runes become evidence, evidence that at least one Norseman had gottenas far as Kensington. One no longer has to invent unbelievable stories to accountfor the existence of the runed stone; its author was leaving useful information forhis fellow Norsemen. Goldstein gets into logical agonies trying to explain themovement from what he sees as in itself evidence and the history of which itnow forms partunsuccessfully trying out induction, deduction, and finally thesomewhat obscure Peircian abduction. But with the analysis I have offered nosuch problem arises. There is a series of speculations; the logic involved is thatof hypothetical arguments.*

Goldstein likes to think of himself as following the same kind of line as Kuhn,writing about what historians actually do as distinct from what philosophers havesupposed them to do. But I cannot see that he succeeds in this particular reform.In practice, evidence enters into the historians work in a variety of ways.Historians, for one reason or another, become skeptical of a received account, sayof the historical importance of the Magna Carta, or the conduct of Richard III orof the time at which its native peoples entered Australia, or of the motives lyingbehind the American War of Independence, or of the papal attitude to the Nazimovement, or of the reputation of Florence Nightingale as a secular saint or . . .Evidence, as often as not, is a weapon in the very common battles between his-torians. Goldstein is, of course, familiar with such battles, citing the opposing

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* By an extraordinary coincidencehistory cannot deny their existence, troublesome as theymay bejust as I finally prepared this review for submission, my breakfast reading of the local paperrevealed a review of The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings. The review told me that the the-ory that Vikings had penetrated into the North American mainland, based on the notorious runic stonediscovered at Kensington in Minnesota, has been authoritatively rejected as a misguided attemptto predate the discovery of America centuries before Columbus. So it looks as if the historians evi-dence can turn out to be planted. Whether it was or not in this case, the hypothetical nature of his-torical speculation remains the case.

interpretations of the 1670s dispute between the new governor of Virginia, SirWilliam Berkeley, and the settler Nathaniel Bacon (240).

Some view Berkeley as an oppressor and Bacon as protecting the rights of thesettlers; on the opposing view, Bacon was greedy and the governor was trying torestrain the workings of that greed. Goldstein uses this example against the viewthat writing history is just a matter of retailing established facts, and one can haveno objection to his doing so. But the more interesting question is how such con-troversiesor the other controversies mentioned aboveare conducted.Historians are certain to have political leaningsin favor, say, of establishedauthorities, revolutionaries, American settlers, or British governance. One can, Ithink, safely say that historians would not have become historians or be fasci-nated by history if they had no such interests, at least when they are the sort ofpeople who write what we call history simpliciter, as distinct from historiansof. (I am inclined to think that contemporary style cultural history should beregarded as a species of history of, as is the case of most of my own work.)

To see historians at work, as to see philosophers at work, is to see themengaged in actual or potential controversies and to see more clearly the role ofevidence. I do not want to suggest that, as some suppose, history and philosophysimply are permanent controversies. Historians and philosophers can learn fromeach other, can cooperate in a publication. But it is in their controversies that onemost clearly sees what their subjects demand from them. Goldstein briefly refersto contemporary German historians who are a splendid example of historicalcontroversialists with special motives (sometimes to preserve the traditional pic-ture of the German people, as other historians are trying to preserve the reputa-tion of the Vatican or of Stalin). In some such cases evidence is concealed,archives kept closed, and the refusal to allow access to them ensures that somecontroversies can never be settled. Cases where the historians nevertheless goahead with bold assertions rather than confess to limitations in their evidence dothe reputation of history no good. Of course, for those who argue that histo-ry is a form of literature, simply, there is no problem involved.

A term of abuse that regularly recurs in the essays is realist. One finds this,too, in Collingwood where its antithesis is idealist. Collingwood was teachingin Oxford University, which had been for a considerable time the center of aGerman-style idealism. He hated to see Oxford taken over by philosophers wholaid some claim to being realists, although one might question whether theirclaim could be fully sustained. For Collingwood, whose idealism was distinctlyItalian, realism was identified with what Russell was to call logical atomism,while idealism was holisticfor it, everything could be understood only as partof a total whole. Goldstein, however, seems to identify realism with the corre-spondence theory of truth, so that a realist referring to a sentence in someoneshistory as true would mean that it presents an accurate picture of what hap-pened. And since what happened no longer exists there is no way of determiningwhether it is in fact true.

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As a realist, I would say that there is no single way, but rather many differentways, of determining whether a historical statement is true, granting that in a par-ticular case none of them may be available. Wanting to know whether a particu-lar statement is true, I may sometimes refer to a photograph or filmalthoughtaking it for granted that photographs can be faked and film material may betotally unreliable. Who would count the Richard the Third film as evidence thathe was a villain? Documentaries may or may not be reliable. One can consultdocuments, read other books, listen to witnesses and so on. As I said earlier, dis-puting the view that Sydney in the 1930s was a total cultural desert I began frommy own and my wifes memories but went in search of programs, newspaperreports, and, of course, relevant statements in memoirs. I should pay no attention,however, to someone who told me that it must have been a desert because thiswas a stage it had to go through as a post-colonial country, any more than I paidattention to the distinguished Russian physicist who told me not many years agoin Moscow that this is bound to become a perfect country; it is just a matter oflogic. Such views are products of idealism.

This remark leads up to the final group of Goldsteins essaysonCollingwood. His interpretation of Collingwood, like everybody elses interpre-tation of Collingwood, has been subject to criticism but at least it is thoroughgo-ing in its range. We meet not only Collingwood the philosopher but also the his-torian, we meet his views as they change over time. Goldstein sees RomanBritain as exceptional in its attempt to tell us how and why the Roman walls werebuilt and why they differ so considerably in structure. At least one undergradu-ate, myself, found Collingwoods book not only illuminating but exciting, in con-trast with other writings on Roman Britain. Goldstein recreates this excitementand helps to explain it. To follow him critically through his full account ofCollingwoods often puzzling shifts of mind is impossible in the course of a briefreview. One prevailing weakness, however, runs throughout GoldsteinsCollingwood essays. He quotes from Collingwoods autobiography a passage inwhich he complains that he is supposed to be a resurrected T. H. Green. Thatprotest is fully justified; he was not. But Collingwood in his Autobiography issilent on the very different Italian idealists, for all that his essay on Croce mightwell be supposed to be a description of his own work. One of his teachers, nowforgotten, was J. A. Smith, very different in his teaching from Green or Bradley,an idealist of the Italian kind, in contrast with what one might call the static ide-alism of that time at both Oxford and Cambridge. Collingwoods interests areillustrated in the fact that he translated two books by Croce as well as Ruggierosaccount of what was then contemporary philosophy.

The importance of all this is that Collingwoods concept of thinking is verydifferent from the concept of it in traditional empiricism for which thinking goeson within the head, thus raising, as Collingwood pointed out, all sorts of impos-sible problems about how we can possibly know what goes on in the minds ofother people. It does not follow, of course, that such phrases as I dont knowwhat he is thinking are never correct. Collingwood argues that if a person fails

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in an endeavor, it can be impossible to know what is being, or had been, thought.Goldsteins discussion of Collingwood is in many ways thorough but his failureto relate him to Italian idealism creates a gap.

The difficulty of reviewing this wide-ranging book is increased by the absenceof a subject index, making it very difficult to find again passages the centrality ofwhich is not, at a first reading, at once evident. I have had no option but to takeup just a few topics. These topics, however, are of great importance to the phi-losophy of history. It is a very serious book that deserves to be reviewed withequal seriousness. I strongly recommend the reading of the essays just becausethey are so deeply concerned with fundamental issues that are often overlookedor simplified. If I criticize it is not out of contemptfar from it. Goldstein hasled me into areas that I have never previously penetrated. In my earlier writingson objectivity and explanation my main concern, like Hempels, was to bring outthe seriousness of history as a form of inquiry. Goldstein leads us into morefundamental issues.

JOHN PASSMOREThe Australian National University

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