Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder

To those interested in the history of history, Donald R. Kelley’s is a familiar name. Over the years Professor Kelley has made several significant contributions to the field of historiography, including his authorship or editorship of Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law and History in the French Renaissance (1970), Historians and the Law in Postrevolutionary France (1984), Versions of History from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (1991), The Writing of History and the Study of Law (1997), History and the Disciplines: the Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (1997), and The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500-1800 (1997). Much of that scholarship is in the background of the volume under review here. Kelley writes that the “essential purpose” of his book “is to present a critical survey and interpretation of the Western tradition of historical inquiry and writing from Herodotus and Thucydides down to the masterworks of the eighteenth century and the beginnings of ‘scientific history’ in the nineteenth” (xi). A striking feature of this survey is the perspective from which Kelley intends to make his observations, something he emphasizes clearly from the beginning:

What Herodotus was in the pristine condition of his own experiences is a matter of antiquarian debate, but the reception and interpretation of his work, which was ‘published’ and so separated from its creator more than twenty-four centuries ago, is something for readers, critics, and historians to discover and rediscover. The aim here is to observe Herodotus in hindsight—in a rear-view mirror, as it were, which may distort the features of the ‘father of history’ but which is the best we can do from our latter-day and fast-changing perspective. (19)

Given the spirit of that approach—in a book published some ten years ago now—it may not be inappropriate to look back at Kelley’s book from the perspective of 2008.

This is a volume which, in part, aims to discuss the limits of historical understanding. An underlying theme related to those limits is Kelley’s argument that “history” and “culture” are intimately connected and difficult to untangle. For instance, in his “Preface” he writes that “Culture is an ocean in which we swim, and despite the efforts of study and the wonders of technology, we remain—at least we historians remain—fish and not oceanographers” (x-xi). Surveying those waters, Kelley writes that “there are three general questions which must be asked about the art of history, indeed have been asked over the entire career of Western historiography, and those concern its scope, its method, and its purpose” (7). Kelley traces the process of defining answers to those questions and of setting the limits to historical understanding back to the two founding figures in the Western tradition of historiography—Herodotus and Thucydides.

“Herodotus’s work was, from a modern standpoint, primum in genere” (28), and he gave us history as “interstitial background investigations” (28). Thucydides, on the other hand and especially in his History of the Peloponnesian Wars, showed the power of history to concentrate on “the immediate experience” and political developments of one’s own times (29). Historians in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds—Polybius, Diodorus of Sicily, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Lucian of Samosata, Marus Porcius (Cato the Elder), Julius Caesar, Sallust, Livy, Tacitus, Ammianus Marcellinus—, those from Jewish and Christian antiquity, the Renaissance and the Reformation, built on those foundations establishing and entrenching the “noble dream” that the “historian’s sole task is to tell the tale as it happened” (47). However, readers of Eighteenth-Century Book Reviews Online are likely to have a specific interest in eighteenth-century historiography. What does Kelley find when he turns his historical eye to historical inquiry in the eighteenth century?

“The Enlightenment conception of history, in its classic form,” he writes, “is based on one of the oldest historical conceits. Humanity is like individual members of the species, and the experience of the human race over time is much like the life of a person, from generation and growth to, presumably if not predictably, corruption and death” (215). In his survey of the historical writings of Giambattista Vico, Edward Gibbon—whose “own popular historiographical success had been opened a generation earlier by the Scottish historians, especially Hume and Robertson” (233)—Voltaire, and others, Kelley builds on the work of well-known scholars such as Ernest Cassirer, R.G. Collingwood, Paul Hazzard, Arthur Lovejoy, and James Westfall Thompson. His interpretation of eighteenth-century historiography is not always glowing, and, indeed, at times is downright ambivalent about the degree to which it struck new notes. For instance, he defends Carl Becker’s “ironic and paradoxical” thesis that sees Enlightenment history “constructed within the framework of an old, crypto-Christian vision of universal world order,” writing that “attempts to discredit Becker’s argument” are “naive” (244). After all, Voltaire and Condorcet “saw history as a sort of pilgrimage from error to truth, whose higher meaning might be deciphered by men of wisdom and good will. A proud and expansive, if flawed and culpable, humanity remained the center of concern; and while the words of praise, blame, and commemoration may have changed in many respects, much of the old music could still be heard by those who would listen” (244). That reading (and other sections of this survey), hints at a direction for historical inquiry that has become much more pronounced in the years since 1998—namely, giving more sustained attention to the contemporary reception of seminal works as a way to better appreciate and understand their nuanced contexts and meanings. Such an approach explains, in part, Johann Gottfried von Herder’s privileged place in Kelley’s pages.

“Herder’s contributions … were richer and fa[r]ther reaching than those of any academic. Herder’s path to historical studies was philosophical, literary, encyclopedic;” for Herder “ ‘each language has its distinct national character,’ which was in turn an expression of local conditions and experiences” (246). Kelley’s Herder strove to “understand the human spirit and its history” in its “unique” manifestations “and this led him to the new discipline that emerged in precisely those years in which he was formulating his philosophy of history—namely, cultural history” (247). For Kelley we ought not to forget that “the Enlightenment project included history as well as philosophy” (261).

So, in the end, what does this critical historiographical survey suggest to Kelley about the purpose of history? Or, to put that question another way, how does history look when seen through the rear-view mirror?

History is indeed a way of asking questions; its answers, however, must be local and provisional; and while they may be improved on or replaced as geographic and temporal horizons are extended or techniques are improved, they can never be complete until history becomes truly universal and is capable of prediction as well as retrodiction—and this is indeed a millennialist hope. History is a matter not of ‘endings’ but of ‘beginnings,’ not of doctrinal closure but (as philosophy started out to be) of exploratory pursuit and disclosure; and historicism, too, should be understood in such historicizing terms. (269)

That perspective is one which Kelley perceptively saw Enlightenment historians finding their way to when he suggested that the topic of eighteenth-century historiography remained ripe for further historical inquiry—a note that rings as true today as it did in 1998 when Faces of History was first published.