History is in the making

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From Works in Progress:

Most of us recognize the following dates and years: 4th July 1776, 14th July 1789, 1914, 1933, 1917, 1215, 1815, and 1066.

But I imagine most readers will fail to identify what’s special about this second list of dates: 5th July 1687, 9th March 1776, and 24th November 1859. Or indeed this third list of dates and years: 22nd January 1970, 26th April 1956, 1st October 1908, and 1960.

Why are these first dates so recognizable and memorable? It is because the events in question (the adopting of the US Declaration of Independence, the fall of the Bastille, the start of World War I, Hitler’s coming to power, the Russian Revolution, the drafting of the Magna Carta, the Battle of Waterloo, and the Battle of Hastings) are seen as critical events or markers in a particular story. They are supposedly events that had a profound subsequent impact on the shape and destiny of society and so shaped the way that later generations lived. 

Undoubtedly there is truth in this but what was the nature of the impact that these events had? What, if anything, did they have in common? The clear answer is that these are all political events. As such they are also thought of as being connected, as being key points or landmarks in a particular story that structures the past into a meaningful pattern and makes sense of it. It thus tells us what was important in bringing about both past worlds and the contemporary world and so, by extension, what we should see as important here and now.

This story is of the growth and development of government, the forms it has taken, and in particular the historical evolution of particular states or political entities, such as France, England/Britain, and the USA. Making these dates important and central to our understanding of the past implies that the driving force in history, the thing that shapes and determines the world we are in and that is crucial for our future, is politics and political power. The dates given are all about political power: Who has it, who contests it, and who wins it.

In this political story the important, memorable events are wars, revolutions, elections, the rise of certain kinds of governance and political institutions, and the doings of rulers – kings, emperors, popes, prime ministers, and revolutionaries. The fact that these kinds of dates are memorable and widely known shows us that this is the dominant way of thinking about history and of understanding the past. We can see this in the Wikipedia pages that cover the significant events of specific years, where the main list is always dominated by events of this kind, while the ‘born’ and ‘died’ lists for the year are at least half composed of political, military, and religious figures.

. . . .

This predominant understanding of history is incorrect for three reasons: 

  1. It places emphasis on the wrong events.
  2. It judges the relative importance of events incorrectly.
  3. It ultimately misunderstands which events had the most transformative effects on human life.

The political understanding of history leads us to view our situation in a distorted and inaccurate way. It implies that if you want to address social problems or challenges, then politics (whether electoral or revolutionary) is the only way to do it. It implies that the news and events we should pay attention to are political ones, because those are what will have the greatest impact.

But there may be other, better ways of looking at the past. 

. . . .

Let us return to our second list of dates: 5th July 1687, 9th March 1776, and 24th November 1859. These dates are associated with the publication of major works of intellectual inquiry that changed the human understanding of how the natural world works.

The first of these, 5th July 1687,  has been rated as the second most significant date of the last millennium, as it saw the publication of the first edition of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. The text brought about a revolution in the understanding of the nature and mechanics of the physical world.

The second date, 9th March 1776, was the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, creating not just modern economic thought but also several other intellectual disciplines. It also saw the first systematic exposition of a spontaneous-order analysis of the workings of human society.

The third date, 24th November 1859, saw the publication of Charles Darwin’s great work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. This not only wrought a revolution in biology and social thought; it also built on the earlier work of people like Smith to introduce a truly dangerous and revolutionary idea: that complex and elaborate orders in the human and natural world could be the product of blind processes and chance rather than any design or intent. 

Link to the rest at Works in Progress

8 thoughts on “History is in the making”

    • K – I’m sure you know that history professors must always find new and different ways of analyzing and writing about old events.

    • I’d say the OP’s approach is just as lacking, believing in the myth of the singular scientific genius who changes the world, whereas Newton realized he stood on the shoulders of giants. Yes, Newton deserves his credit, but so do those who came before him, his contemporaries (let’s not forget Leibnitz, who also developed calculus independently from Newton), and successors who further developed his ideas.

      Same thing for Darwin – and the time mattered, too. If Darwin had lived a 100 years earlier, his ideas would’ve been ignored, instead of being used and abused.

      • Your point reminds me of my astronomy class in college, where the professor drew a “chain of succession” from Copernicus to Newton. Tycho Brahe was included, and the prof explained to one skeptical student that Brahe counts because though he didn’t make discoveries, he did keep accurate data that Kepler (his assistant) and Galileo could draw upon. These are the giants Newton springboarded off of. Dissemination of knowledge for the win!

        The OP has not made a convincing case that we’re “doing history wrong.” Political events have a more immediate effect on the lives of the every day person. I had a coworker once who joked that she didn’t know if her ancestors were French or German, because they came from Alsace-Lorraine during the time when France and Germany were fighting over it. Some people are born in places that no longer exist on the map, or places newly created. I bought world atlas in the early 2000s, thinking that with the end of the Bosnian conflict it was safe to do so. Then Montenegro became a country again, and later Belgium and Catalan were talking about splitting. I decided never mind on buying updated atlases, and was vindicated when South Sudan sprang into existence. That stuff is all political.

      • If he lived 100 years later, he’d have access to computers, cheap/fast world travel, and Watson/Crick. Or he’d be a pop singer. 😉

        Everybody is a product of their times.

  1. To make a point that is so obvious that it is not normally considered to be worthy of comment: as history encompasses the totality of all knowable past events no-one can know about, study or write on more than a very small subset of happenings, and any historical narrative must involve a radical selection process, most likely by subject.

    When given a free choice historians will select subjects that interest them and the most that we can expect is that they will honestly search out and evaluate all available evidence and avoid the temptation to arrive at a predetermined result. Stephen Davies however, is convinced that he knows which of the innumerable past events are the “wrong” ones to study, that he is apparently specially qualified to evaluate the relative importance of events and that he ultimately understands which events had the most transformative effects on human life. I suspect that his judgement here is ideologically based – though it is quite likely an ideologically informed historical philosophy rather than a more direct question of a political viewpoint – but in any case, he is wrong. Not so much in his choice of, for example, scientific over political history, but in his belief that a hierarchy of the importance of historical events even exists.

    If he is going to be concerned about political history he should be much more worried about the way in which it has often been driven by ideology, whether as often the case in the last 100+ years by the fantasy of Marxist scientific historical theory or the now all too common government driven nationalist/religious historical foundation myths.

    • What historians choose and how they choose to present it says more about them than the subject of their presentation. The future will judge accordingly.

  2. Here’s a test we can all safely do at home.

    Without glancing at the OP, write down the publication date of any book.

    Truth in posting: I know none,

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