Marks - Ground Under our Feet Beard's Relativism.pdf

7/28/2019 Marks - Ground Under our Feet Beard's Relativism.pdf

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Ground Under our Feet: Beard's RelativismAuthor(s): Harry J. MarksReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Oct., 1953), pp. 628-633Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2707707 .

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GROUND UNDER OUR FEET: BEARD'S RELATIVISMBY HARRY . MARKS

If the school of Scientific History appeared to threaten the historian withthe occupational hazard of archival silicosis, the school of the relativistsseemed for a while to offer to Clio herself the prognosis of ultimate completedissociation into an incurable psychosis, wherein fevered phantasmagoriawere to obliterate all hopes for wholesome living in a real world. Uponcloser examination, however, it would appear that this gloomy outlook wasbased upon faulty diagnosis, and that there are hopes for a rational andvalid historiography. As a matter of fact, some of the opponents of rela-tivism appear to have been alarmed to excess. Thus the warning blasts inthe American Historical Review for April 1950.1 To change the figure:while the arch American relativist, the late Charles A. Beard, seems to havecommitted history irrevocably to a slippery subjective quicksand, it turnsout that implied in his own statements of relativism there is a substratumof solid ground.In December, 1933, Beard issued his declaration of war against conven-tional absolutist historiography in his presidential address to the AmericanHistorical Association, " Written History as an Act of Faith," 2 but his mostsuccinct statement appeared in his review of Maurice Mandelbaum's "answerto relativism ": 3Has the author correctly stated the relativist position? He defines rela-tivism as the view that " no historical work grasps the nature of the past(or present) immediately." Had he added: "and tells the whole truth aboutit or describes it in miniature as it actually was," and stopped there, Mr.Mandelbaum would have correctly stated the relativist position which hethinks he has destroyed.The first group of italicized words sets forth a notion about the indirectgrasp which history has of its subject matter. Since this point is just asvalid for work in the physical sciences, and since Beard elsewhere impliedhis acceptance of the notion that the physical sciences can arrive at reliableknowledge, this assertion may be dismissed. The second point, the italicizedwords which Beard wanted included to round out the definition, he expandedwith some asperity:What I have tried to say so that it can be understood is that no historiancan describe the past as it actually was and that every historian's work-that is, his selection of facts, his emphasis, his omissions, his organization,

1 Chester McArthurDestler, "Some Observationson ContemporaryHistoricalTheory,"AmericanHistoricalReview55 (April,1950), 503-29.2 AmericanHistoricalReview 39 (Jan., 1934), 219-29. 3MauriceMandelbaum,The Problemof HistoricalKnowledge. An Answerto Relativism (N. Y., 1938),reviewedby Beard in AmericanHistoricalReview 44 (April, 1939), 571-2. Italicsin all the quotationsaremine. 628


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BEARD S RELATIVISM 629and his methods of presentation-bears a relation to his own personality andthe age and circumstances in which he lives. This is relativism as I under-stand it .... I do not hold that historical " truth " is relative but that thefacts chosen, the spirit, and the arrangement of every historical work arerelative .... How many living historians would be willing to stand up inpublic and say that they can describe the American Revolution or the CivilWar or Reconstruction as it actually was, in personalities, events, and cir-cumstances, that is, tell the whole truth about it?

There is some obscurity in the first quotation which is only intensifiedin the second. The notion of " the whole truth " is not clear without eluci-dation, but if it means, as it seems to here, the reporting, complete in everydetail, regardless of significance, of every aspect of the past, it would hardlyrepresent the same product as a description of the past "in miniature,"which implies a scaling down with much of the detail dwindling to thevanishing point, while the addition of the words " as it actually was " seemsto contradict the very notion of "in miniature." And what is meant by"the nature of the past "? Perhaps the only indisputable characteristic ofthe nature of the past is that it is past. Otherwise we must interpret " thenature of the past " in some idealist sense of " the essence " (das Wesen)of the past, a procedure which has uniformly condemned research in anyfield whatever to a fruitless chase of a non-existent will o' the wisp. On theother hand, the apparent vagueness of Beard's statement that every his-torian's work " bears a relation " to factors outside the past as actuality,is far from constituting the same stumbling block. This charge that thehistorian's labors are subjectively conditioned does not mean that the his-torian's work cannot contain any truths. Beard is explicit:Ranke's works do contain statements of objective truth, many truths. WhenRanke says that some person was born on a certain day of a certain yearhe states a truth about an objective fact. I have never meant to say thatwhatever " truth " Ranke's works contain is " limited " by psychological,sociological, or other processes under which Ranke wrote.

If a historian's work, then, is forever debarred from offering " the wholetruth," it may nevertheless contain many objective truths. These are truthsabout the past, and since they are truths, they must " describe the past as itactually was." When Beard denied that historians could do this, he musthave meant " the whole past," an inference resting upon his use of the term," the whole truth." We may then restate Beard's thesis as follows: No his-torian can tell the whole truth about the whole past. Admittedly, bothmodified terms are ambiguous.Is it possible to tell partial truths about parts of the past? This seemsto have been conceded. Is it possible to tell partial truths about the wholepast? This would seem to be limited by a point not ignored by Beard butnot treated in the polemics as comparable to subjectivism in frustratingreliable historiography. This is the point made clearly by the first greatmodern student of historical method, Johann Gustav Droysen, in his lec-tures delivered in 1858:


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630 HARRY J. MARKSAll empiricalscholarshipgovernsitself according o the data to which it isapplied. Andit canapply itself only to such data which are directlypresentfor sensual,tangibleperception. The data for historicalscholarshipare notthe past, for that had vanished,but that extant part of it in the here andnow,it may be in recollectionsor in remainsof whatwas andwhathappened.4Thus the limit to the possibilityof presentingpartialtruthsaboutthe wholepast would lie in the extent to which an unbrokensequenceof data, evenpartial data, may be found covering"the whole past." This limitation isboth objectiveand subjective:archeological emainswhichtoday constitutedata for Romanhistorywere extant in the eighteenthcenturybut were notdata because the techniquesfor exploitingthem were not yet available toGibbon.Beard grantedthat a historianmay state many objective truths aboutthe past. Is it possibleto tell the wholetruth aboutpart of the past? Sup-pose that many objective truths were concentratedupon one part of thepast, which is not contradictedby anythingin Beard'sstatements,would itthen be possibleto state "the whole truth" about a limited segmentof thepast? Concretely,Beardchallenged his in reference o the AmericanRevo-lution, the Civil War, and Reconstruction,which are obviously offerednotas exceptionsbut as demonstrations f his point. Hence we can reasonablyinfer that he woulddenythe possibilityof tellingthe whole truth aboutevena part of the past, beyondthe discrete facts of the type illustrated in hisreference o Ranke'sobjectivetruths.Once it has been granted,however,that a part of the objective truth,albeit a small fraction,can be stated abouta part of the past, a quantitativeelement has been introduced,and, staying within the frameworkof Beard'slimiting conditions,there is nothing inherent in his logic to prevent newstudies from evolving additionalobjective truths about this given segmentof the past. And furtherstudiesadd further ruths,and so on, accumulatingmoreand moretruths, subjectto three limiting conditions:first,the condi-tion specifiedby Droysen, viz., the limits of extant evidence; second, thetechnicalequipmentof the historian;and third,the impossibilityof achiev-ing all the truths. Whilerecognizing he first and secondlimitations,Beardplacedhis majoremphasisuponthe third,and if we acceptthis as valid, wemust still admit that it is conceivably possible to accumulatelarger andlargerproportionsof the unattainable"wholetruths" about this given sec-tor of the past until one would have collected so overwhelminga bulk oftruths that each newincrementwouldmodifythe composite ncomplete-butincreasinglycomplete-picture of this fragmentof the past that a hypo-thetical "whole truth" could not seriously alter the fundamentalfeaturesof the picture.It is thus possiblewithin the Beardian limitations to secure an objec-tively truthful account approachinga limit ("the whole truth") closelyenough,eventually, so that "the whole truth" would not be substantiallydifferent. In otherwords,the validity of Beard'sdenial of the possibilityof statingthe wholetruthstill permitsthe establishmentof somethingalmost4GrundrissderHistorik (3rd edition,Leipzig,1882), 8.


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BEARD S RELATIVISM 631as good, namely a practical approximation of the whole truth. Hence it isevident that the acquisition of truths about the past is exactly the same sortof process toward an unattainable limit as is found in every other growingfield of research. There is, in fact, a contradiction in Beard's thought whichit may here be suggested derives from his intellectual affiliation with neo-Kantian thought rather than with some Hegelian concept of process.5 It isthe refusal to grant that a progression of small increments may eventuallyjell into a structure. Thus, in his presidential address of 1933 he proclaimedthat the historical scholarship of the past fifty years had " wrought achieve-ments of value beyond calculation. Particular phases of history once darkand confused have been illuminated by research, authentication, scrutiny,and the ordering of particular relevancies." But what he gave with onehand he snatched away with the other: " So the historian is bound by hiscraft to recognize the nature and limitations of the scientific method and todispel the illusion that it can produce a science of history embracing the full-ness of history, or of any large phase, as past actuality." 6 " Particularphases " evidently had to be phases small enough to be smaller than somecritical size, nowhere defined but illustrated: the American Revolution, theCivil War, Reconstruction.

The inference of the possibility of accumulating more and more validtruths about a single segment of the past is ironically corroborated withrespect to the causes of the Civil War, close to one of Beard's "phases "above the critical limit, in Howard K. Beale's account of the relevant his-toriography: 7This study indicates that the acquisition of " scientific tools," the more sys-tematic sifting and evaluating of evidence, and the constant striving towardnever-fully-obtainable objectivity or fairmindedness have brought us closerthan we were to a clear and true picture of the causes of the Civil War.Hence, the intrinsic limitation to the recapture of " the whole past " is ratherDropsen's point, the partial character of the extant evidence available to thehistorian. And this, as has been noted, is a fluctuating corpus, varying withrefinements of historical method and, more significantly, with the queriesput to the data. And this leads us to the vital core of Beard's relativism.

5 It is striking to read Beard's statement in a letter to H. M. Kallen (printed inKallen's article, "In Remembranceof CharlesA. Beard, Philosopher-Historian,"SocialResearch18 [June, 1951], 243) under date of November22, 1947: "I havefound Vaihingermost useful in trying to master aggregationsof tough historical'data' and to keep within the limits of the documents . .. ." Walton E. Bean("Revolt AmongHistorians,"Sewanee Review 47 [1939], 339) observed: "Beardmaintained for historical knowledge . ..what Kant had maintained in the Critiqueof Pure Reasonaboutknowledgeas such ...."6"WrittenHistoryas an Act of Faith,"226-7.7 " What Historianshave said about the causes of the Civil War,"TheoryandPractice n HistoricalStudy. A Report of the Committeeon Historiography N. Y.,n.d. [1946]), 91. That Beardwas one of the contributorso this symposiumntensi-fies the irony.


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632 HARRY J. MARKSIn Beard's statement that " every historian's work . . bears a relationto his ownpersonalityand the age and circumstancesn which he lives,"thewords"bearsa relation" requireexplication. To shorten the examinationof this relationship, et us take a blunt example,the naval history of RearAdmiral Samuel Eliot Morison. In a benign disputationwith Beard, inwhoseeye he remarkeda beam,Morisonwrote:8

The ordinary, dumb, as-it-really-happenedhistorian admits that he hassome frameof reference;but he does not consciouslygo aboutpolishingoneup before he starts writing, or reject facts that do not fit the frame. Hebelieves that he has an obligation o keep himself on the alert for facts thatwill alter any tentative conclusionswith which he starts.This is probably a true descriptionof how most historians in Americaoperate,and the last six wordswill requiresome attention shortly. Afterrejectingthe chargethat the historianought to study the past in order toilluminatethe future,the Admiral wrote:He may wish to influence he future,but that shouldnot be his main pre-occupation. I naturally hope through my naval history, to persuadetheAmericanpeoplenot to scrap their navy; but that is incidental. My realtask is to tell what the navy did in WorldWarII, mistakesand all.Fromthis it would seem that the navy had appointedProfessorMorison alieutenant commandero serve as historianof naval operationsbecause thenavy merely wanted a souvenir of its activities, a pretty trinket lackingcrassutility. Are we really to think that all the Admiralhas done was tofacilitate the otherworldlycontemplationof our naval operations? Thisappears o be the mote in Morison'seye, and it servesto signalizewhat therelativistshave validly claimed,namelythat the themeswhichthe historianinvestigates may be very largely determinedby present rather than pastevents. The naval and military historiesnow in productionexhibitthis ina form that is almost too blunt. What about other histories? We mustreturnto the implicationof the last few words in the first quotationfromMorison. It is containedin the propositionthat the historianbegins hisstudy with "tentative conclusions."To state that a historianstarts his work with tentative conclusions nmind merely sets forth the propositionthat the historian operates withhypotheses. This, however,presupposeshat the historianconfrontsa prob-lem. It is both in the sensitivity to problemsand the appraisalof theirimportanceas felt by the historian,as well as in the hypotheseshe developsfor heuristic purposes,that the impact of the contemporaryworld maysometimesbe discerned.9 But even here, it is the impact of the contempo-

8" Did Roosevelt Start the War? History Through a Beard," The AtlanticMonthly 182 (August, 1948), 92-3.9 It would be useful in order to clarify this relationship to have many and de-tailed case studies on individual historians, one recent example of which is given byWalther Hofer: Geschichtschreibung und Weltanschauung. Betrachtungen zum


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BEARD S RELATIVISM 633rary world upon the historian's valid knowledge of an actual past thatcounts. That more American students of history devote themselves to thestudy of the American past than to any other major theme is evidence thatthe social and geographic and intellectual environment of historians havetheir influence in determining what segments of the past shall be extensivelyinvestigated in a given society. That a significant number of Americanscholars devote their attention to the early history of the Eastern Mediter-ranean area, however, suggests that the "past in actuality " through itsextant remains possesses a compelling allure, remote as it may be from theimmediate environment of the historian. On the other hand, that the stu-dents of antiquity, regardless of nationality, in the past two generationshave devoted more attention to economic aspects of their field of study thandid the investigators of ancient history two centuries ago, suggests at thevery least the pervasiveness of current economic preoccupations.All this leaves little remaining of the conviction that search for historicalobjectivity is no more than a futile chase after a will-o'-the-wisp that isn'tthere. No more than the natural sciences can history tell " the whole truth "about the whole of its subject matter, but likewise this must not be regardedas utterly nullifying the prospect of the procurement of reliable knowledge.It is rather a limiting condition. The historian selects, as Beard charged,but within the segment of the past which he chooses to investigate, the in-trinsic bounds to his establishing a reliable picture are set in principle ratherby the substantive limitations of his data than by the inherent subjectivequalities of his mind. Individual historians are duller or brighter than theircolleagues, and the former find less in the data than the latter; this is self-evident and only mentioned in order to indicate its irrelevance. The samepersonal attributes circumscribe every scholar's achievements, regardless ofhis field of specialization. We are speaking instead of what in principlerestricts understanding, and, to repeat, it is the limitation which Droysenstressed and the level of technique of historical study, rather than the con-geries of subjective factors which Beard thought so decisive. If this appearsto restore the historian to respectable scholarly status, it also makes clearthat the defects as well as the merits of his work reveal more of his personalqualities than the intrinsic characteristics of his profession.

University of Connecticut.

Werk Friedrich Meineckes (Munich, 1950). Henry Nash Smith, too, in smallercompass, relates Turner to the ideology of the West in Virgin Land. The AmericanWest as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Mass., 1950).

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Marks - Ground Under our Feet Beard's Relativism.pdf