I had intended still to be writing about Charles W. Mills’s body of scholarship as I worked my way through it, a bit at a time. I still intend to do that, but I realized that I may need to do a bit reading before I begin blogging if I want to be able to have even marginally intelligent things to say about it.
In the meantime, I want to do something else that may not completely cohere for a while (and thus—caveat lector—may be a bit cryptic or cursory at times) but which I want to work out piece by piece. I have been thinking a lot about how an older generation of scholars has bequeathed to us a certain historiographical legacy or paradigm, one which is not quite so ideologically overt or well-defined as “consensus history” or “progressive history,” but which is no less intellectually hegemonic than those paradigms were. Indeed, both “paradigm” and “hegemony” are essential keywords of this school of historiography, this mindset or worldview.
For what this framework has tended above all to emphasize is internalization and endogeneity. The dynamics it foregrounds are either a) the “internal contradictions” story—dominant political or economic or cultural orders collapse or implode because of unresolved, even unresolvable paradoxes or impasses that grew more ungovernable or irrepressible over time; or b) the “co-optation” narrative—even those who oppose or reject the dominant order almost always find that they have internalized or been co-opted by certain aspects of it, at times even compromising their attempts at protest and resistance to such a degree that those protests become woven into that dominant order as necessary supports, as a sort of complementary (rather than truly oppositional) alternative.
What I want to do, then, is to look closely at certain books or articles by some of the most widely read and influential historians whose work has contributed to the creation and perpetuation of this historiographic paradigm. I started this project—without entirely intending to—in my last post, which discussed an essay by Daryl Michael Scott attacking what he calls “thirteentherism”.[1] I connected this intervention to his broader criticism of the 1619 Project and what he sees as its instrumentalist or activist approach to history. Scott is convinced that the historians who support the 1619 Project (a nebulous group) are indifferent to the question of whether they are telling true histories, subordinating fact to political utility.
The severity and even desperation of that charge—and Scott’s blanket rejection of scholars generally aligned with a commitment to writing history that is explicitly antiracist or decolonizing—indicated to me that his dissent occurred at a philosophical level rather than an interpretive one. I posited that Scott adheres to a prioritizes what I called the “problem paradigm,” after David Brion Davis’s monumental trilogy of The Problem of Slavery in… books. What strikes me as distinctive about this approach is its elevation of moral complexity into both the most significant object of analysis and the test of a good work of history. The best works of history not only locate and lucidly unpack the entangled and ambiguous attempts of historical actors to wrestle with circumstances that they perceived as moral paradoxes or aporias, but they also exemplify a particular moral posture characterized by a tragic appreciation for the irony of history’s cunning—the way that individuals often subvert their own best intentions, fail to recognize better paths of action, or end up complicit in the evils they wish to extinguish. The historian does not merely find ambiguity and paradox in their historical materials but illuminates and validates these complex patterns of human behavior. The best history affirms one of the most haunting speeches in Jean Renoir’s masterpiece La règle du jeu (1939): “Tu comprends, sur cette Terre, il y a quelque chose d’effroyable, c’est que tout le monde a ses raisons.” You must understand that on this earth there is an appalling fact: everyone has their reasons.
This way of thinking about history and this directive for how to write good history displays itself as more psychologically realistic as well as more rigorous because it makes more room for—in fact centers—complexity. In contrast to the simplifications of earlier paradigms—the bilateral conflicts of progressive history, the lumpy universalisms of consensus history and the “myth and symbol” school of mid-twentieth-century American Studies—the problem paradigm never lets the historian forget that the historian is a partisan only of complexity. The somber looming shadow of unintended consequences lurks everywhere across our vision of the past, preventing the historian from ever acting as if doing the right thing—morally or practically—was entirely self-evident. The historian should avoid passing a final judgment on persons, though (in a kind of historical adaptation of the “love the sinner, hate the sin” doctrine) it is entirely permissible—indeed, even mandatory—to condemn deeds. The effect is not meant to be relativism: the point is not to say that there was moral ambiguity to the institution of slavery but it is to say that, as Davis did in fact say, “Recognition that slavery in American involved a genuine moral problem does not require us to believe that… in the contest between slaveholders and abolitionists all virtue and reasonableness were on one side.” Like Ashley Wilkes, perhaps, one could be right in a wrong cause.
You may get the sense—I hope you do—that I am not in sympathy with this paradigm. I hope to explain why in the forthcoming posts, and to do so in close readings of passages in historical works like The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. For now, I want to make one general point. I think that the problem paradigm blurs two kinds of complexity together in a way that permits it to arrogate to itself both moral authority and analytical rigor. By moving between what I’d call conjunctural or circumstantial complexity and moral complexity, historians working within this paradigm encourage the reader to associate the undeniable messiness of empirical data with what is actually a quite structured and orderly set of moral ideas, such as unintended consequences, irony, paradox, and internal contradictions.
To give an example—which I’ll be getting to later—we can certainly all agree that any evaluation of the New Deal and its long-term impact on the United States will have to contend with multiple intertwining factors, tricky and overlapping chronologies, as well as the generic difficulty of separating causation and correlation. But to argue that it collapsed of its “internal contradictions” is actually not a way of working with that empirical complexity but of sidestepping it and pivoting to an orderly moral analysis from which we learn a relatively simple object lesson: by yielding to the political necessity of forming coalitions with a morally compromised group, you sow the seeds of your own eventual destruction. As we’ll see, some historians would argue that this moral truth should not negate the moral necessity of making that coalition, but that’s a story for another day.
Notes
[1] The idea that the thirteenth amendment’s exception clause—“except as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”—created the legal space for chattel slavery to mutate into a new system of forced labor and total restrictions of mobility, contract rights, etc.
2 Thoughts on this Post
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Andrew,
I really appreciate this post for a number of reasons. More particularly, I think you pinpoint something fundamental about the “problem” paradigm, as you deem it, with this conjecture. “The problem paradigm blurs two kinds of complexity together in a way that permits it to arrogate to itself both moral authority and analytical rigor. By moving between what I’d call conjunctural or circumstantial complexity and moral complexity, historians working within this paradigm encourage the reader to associate the undeniable messiness of empirical data with what is actually a quite structured and orderly set of moral ideas, such as unintended consequences, irony, paradox, and internal contradictions.”
What I take you to be saying is this: The problem paradigm makes two implicit claims. The first is that (a) “good” history points to factors like internal contradictions, irony, paradox, unintended consequences, etc. in order to show the empirical messiness (or complexity) of historical phenomena. Second (b), such a mode of historical writing is morally superior to any other form of historical analysis, but particularly those that are explicitly ideological or political in their motivation because the latter necessarily evades a more complete picture of such phenomena. I think you’re on to something in suggesting that there is a blurring of these two claims, in that there is a supposed virtue in (b) that follows from the implied “analytical rigor” suggested in (a). To my mind, however, both (a) and (b) follow from the larger claim (c) that the historian has a certain responsibility to present as rich a historical mosaic as possible in order to present the closest approximation to historical truth.
Of course, most historians work under the assumption that all histories are always approximations, must always leave certain things out, and even perhaps subscribe to the view that historical reality is in fact ontologically synonymous with the narratives and analyses that historians produce. The question, then, seems to be how far the responsibility of the historian to a modest, if incomplete, empiricism, should extend in light of these working assumptions. Those historians who subscribe to the “problem paradigm”, it seems to me, would argue that their work goes further than those of their colleagues who shirk that responsibility in the name of a different end–in the case of the 1619 project, anti-racism or historical injustice. But at this point, it seems, we are evaluating the ends themselves, rather than the content or method of particular historical works per se. In privileging the end of historical responsibility, “problem paradigm” historians make the complexity that they see as “endogenous” to their narratives into what some philosophers would call an “epistemic virtue.”
On this admittedly speculative reading, I think the force is taken out of the claim that the “problem paradigm” is more analytically rigorous if what we’re comparing is ends-in-view, rather than content or method. To that end, too, I do think the PP historian does implicitly “arrogate” moral authority to him or herself in privileging a certain mode of history. However, I would argue that such a claim (implicit or otherwise) is, rather than a moral case, a more modest, normative defense of a historically situated sensibility that has come to define a certain intellectual type associated with postwar liberalism.
I’m thinking here of the arguments of mid-century intellectuals like Daniel Bell, Lionel Trilling, Reinhold Niebuhr, and others, who very explicitly privileged complexity, irony, and “difficulty” as virtues that were anathema to dogmatic thinking following the horrors of World War II. And as Jamie Cohen Cole has shown, a related sensibility of “open-mindedness” was fundamental to delineating the boundaries of cognitive science and other disciplines in the human sciences during this period. I wonder if the PP is, in some ways at least, a legacy of this particular, liberal sensibility. If this is in fact the case, I think there might be good reasons for assuming that such a sensibility has permeated the historiographical legacy of the last 40 or so years.
Personally, I find parts of the PP compelling. (I think Davis’s more empirically minded analysis of slavery in his debate with Thomas Bender was the better argument). But I see no philosophically compelling way of privileging that paradigm over others. Its “end” is a certain goal of intellectual responsibility whose normative force may in fact be rooted in an aversion to certain political orientations. Perhaps, as you suggest, now is an opportune moment to question the assumptions of that position.
Erik,
You’ve stated my argument so much better than I did in the post that I hardly know what to say!
I think you’re right that there is a higher-level assumption at work in the problem paradigm, but I’m not sure that it is so broadly shared. I would phrase it a little bit differently. You say that this underlying claim is that “the historian has a certain responsibility to present as rich a historical mosaic as possible in order to present the closest approximation to historical truth,” but I think we need to be a little more precise on two counts.
First, we need to spell out where this responsibility rests—to whom or to what is the historian responsible? To the reader? To the dead? To the profession of history? To the historian’s internal code or standard? I don’t think that this is a problem with your articulation of the underlying claim; I think the fuzziness actually exists in the problem paradigm itself. If the historian is on one end of the relationship of responsibility, the entity at the other end tends to slide around.
That intersects with the second issue: I’m not so convinced that what distinguishes problem paradigm historians from others is just a question of different ends; I think that there are real (but buried) methodological differences as well. One measure of these differences is perhaps the pejorative meaning that “reductive” has for many historians. But in castigating reductiveness in other historians, what is truly the value being upheld? Generally, I think it’s the idea of history as a mimetic function: what do historians do? They describe or represent something. That *something* may be both epistemologically and ontologically questionable (am I representing some real sliver of historical “truth” or just the order that I see in a random mess of data points?) but the historian’s actions are representational in nature, not analytical. The action of describing or representing is by nature additive: one doesn’t describe something by removing details. But analysis often is “reductive”—it tosses away details deemed extraneous.
I’m not sure how many historians actually think of their work as non-mimetic, as doing something other than describing or representing. But the difference wouldn’t be that the mimeticists try to remain neutral (just the facts, ma’am) and the non-mimeticists embrace polemic. One can be both mimetic and polemical—if you think that the “picture” that you see contains an obvious message or conclusion, you can make an argument simply by telling what you see. It’s that non-mimeticists aren’t trying to describe what they see; generally they’re trying to pare back what they see into some kind of model, something that is no longer a representation of what they saw but its own thing that retains the important elements and their relationships. I think this split over whether or not history is mimetic is not always articulated clearly or even maybe noticed at all, but I do think it exists, and it is a difference in method, and not in ends.