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On the Limits cf " Presentism" and "Historicism" in the Historiography of the Behavioral Sciences

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. This cssay appeared originally as an editorial in the third number of , the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences. Although the Journal was founded in 1¢5 primarily by a group of psychol· ogists asd psychiatrists, and its contents still reBect its origin, it may be regarded as a manifestation of a more widespread interest ill recent years in the historical background of the modern behavioral and social sciences.! This interest has been evident both among historians and. to a greater degree, among scholars in the various disciplines involved. Such a dualism of personnel, along with the nature of the subject matter, creates special historio-

graphical problems for the history of the behavioral sciences, which are widely manifest in its literature. In part because my own training and experience have been such as to give me an abnonnaI sensitivity to certain issues of historical method, I have devoted a fair amount of my scho&rly energies to their discussion -perhaps more than was tactful for someone who stin feels a bit of an "outsider" in relation to the anthropological "tribe." 2 Although several of the essays reprinted here reBect this rnethodological interest, they have been chosen primarily for their tela-

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. On tbe Limits of "Presentism" tmd "Historicism"

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RACE, CULTURE, AND EVOLUTION

tion to a substantive historical theme. I have nevertheless decided to include the present essay, since it states an underlying ographical poiut of view which_ I hope will be generally evident in the essays which folIow. In the present less polemical context, I inclined to qualify further my suggestion that the historian proaches history simply because "it is there."Much practice suggests otherwise. Furthermore, I am at this point elined to be just a bit doubtful of the utilitarian benefits of his-, torical study tor ongoing anthropological research. Neither

• these second thoughts, however, affects the basic message, which is a plea tor an ideal of historical understanding which may be easily obtainable in practice, and for the legitimacy of an torical enterprise whose utility is rarely easily definable in imme-diate terms. I have therefore reprinted the essay as it originally appeared, with only minor modi6cations oi language.

.'. If we can neither prescribe nor proscribe historic-

'''Iphical of view, we can at least define them and argue

", their relative merits .

• , , With due regard for the oversimplification which ideal-

, typical analysis involves, let us proceed by setting up a. seri~ of dkhutomies which may be subsumed under two alternative onentlrions toward historiography. If subtler analysis sbould destroy me neat dualism of the model, well and good. It may nevertheless

" .,rve as a polemical starting point. Consider then the following '.' .Iternatives: "context" and "analogue"; "process" and "sequence";

I'd " " "hi ki " d " h ht" "reason

'ell1ergence" an agency; t n ng an t oug; -

....• bleness" and "rationality"; "understanding" and "judgment";

. tt.trcctive" and "utilitarian"; "historicism" and "presentism." Their explication will, I hope, flow from the ensuinv~--: .AI this point, however, let us leap direc~Y1Q_the--alttrnatlve onen-

,'tltinns under wh~-aiem: in each case, the first ~ '*-rnt seems--t'6fD"e to characterize the attempt "eo understand the

. for the sake of the past"; the second, to characterize the. of "the past for the sake of the present."

e last two phrases are of course Herbert Butterfiel~'s. He them a generation ago in a critique entitled The W~g lnter-,

.... '.,"U'71 of History, which he defined as "the tendency III many :",III,lit'fI,r'ans to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise , elutions provided they have been successful, to emphasize cer•...... principles of progress in the past and to produce a story __ which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present."

. to Butterfield, the whig interpretation introduces itself .

historical as a principle of Faced with

rnlnnl~'ltv of historical the general

ALTHOUGH the April editorial on "Policy anditslmple-' mentation" outlined the basic objectives of the Journal of the History of the BehlWioral Sciences, its frankly limited scope and purpose did not allow extended consideration of certain broader questions of motive and method in the historiography of the behavioral sciences. Perhaps this was as it should have been. The "grass roots" impulses which produced the Journal were numerous. and express themselves in a variety of historiographical ap-. proaches. Furthermore, history itself is in many respects the most undisciplined of disciplines. There have been many attempts to codify historical method and to define the philosophical presup- .' positions.of historical inquiry. But Clio, putative mother of many of the behavioral sciences, still drapes herself in skirts as varied as the progeny who once abandoned and now return to them.' For all this, however, history remains a discipline of sorts, and one to which all the makers of this journal are at least avocationally committed. While we cannot assume and do not seek a consensus of motive and method, it is still appropriate to discuss these problems ..

whig processes by which the

t.,t"'ity of an historical past produces totality of its eonse-

qucm future to a search for the origins of certain rresent phe. "ulUcna. He seeks out in the past phenomena which seem to .. ruemble those of concern in the present, and then moves forward

. In time by tracing lineages up to the present in simple sequential

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..... CE, CULTURE, AND EVOLUTION

On the Limits of "Presentism" and "Historicism"

movement. When this abridging procedure is charged normative commitment to the phenomena whose origins sought, the linear movement is "progress" and those who seem abet it are "progressive." The result is whiggish history. Beea it is informed by a normative commitment, its characteristic j terpretive mode is judgment rather than understanding, and history becomes the field for a dramatic struggle between of light and children of darkness. Because it wrenches the vidual historical phenomenon from the complex network of contemporary context in order to see it in abstracted relatio to analogues in the present, it is prone to anachronistic I"I"U';~W pretation. Because it assumes in advance the progressive of historical change, it is less interested -in -urc,........,UJ.J.j ....... , .... by which change emerges than in agencies which direct i whether they be great men, specific deterministic forces, or the "logic" of historical development itself.

Whiggish history is a variety of what I would call "presentism" in historical study. To characterize its auernarrve.. I would suggest the term "historicism," although this word been used with a variety of meanings, which often have an lying or explicit ~istemological charie.1l By deliberately using rather loosely, without epistemological commitment. I am

"clasts" te traditional ideas to the ast" and traditional-

· -Jill "transform traditional ideas in the present"-an "apparent y ·.,.rlldoxical transformation-with-preservation" which depends on .11, (hange in the thinker's alternatives." F~r, as Pr?f~ssor Leve~son .Iggcsts, "a thought includes what its thinker eh~lnates; an Idea h.H irs particular quality from the fact that other Ideas, expressed In ! It her quarters, are demonstrably _ ~_lt~_rn!it_ives_':_LeV:~~_§()-l! _g~~ _ .·on 10 quote the British 'p_hilosopher of history, R. G. Collingwood,

".1ft ~uggest aJ_pg:ieatpnnciple by w~ich such c~ange ~ar be,~nder'. "nod: "a body of knowledge consists not of propos~tlons, state-

· ments' or 'judgments' ... but of these together With the questluns they are meant to answer." Levenson concludes that an .. ' "Idea then is a denial of alternatives and an answer to a question,"

'.n<l r' j~tellectual histo is the histor of men thinking rather •

." than the hist (I

". In a general consideration of the problem of history and value,

I . f " bl "

•. Levenson later comments on the a rernanves 0 reasons eness

· "rationality": "Absolutism is parochialism of the present, the IOl1f\lsioo of one's own time with the timeless, a confusion of the

· "tcgories of reasonable and rational." The historian, however,

· Ilks "not whether something is true or good, but why and where .. ' to what end it came to be enacted or expressed." He goes

nd "assessment of his subject's thought as rationally (time'. and abstractly) perhaps erratic. He proceeds to analyze Why, nevertheless, that thought ~as not ridic~lo~ . ;, . but..rea-

.... hie-in spite of or because of Imperfect rationality. For rea-

: JOnRbleness relates to the questions put by the subject's time . . . ,hn which] his ideas are answers." 7' It is in some context such as

· ""_, ruther than in any explicitly epistemological framework, that ,t would like to pose the dichotomy between judgment and under-

· -"nding: understanding is the attempt, by whatever means, to get

.... at the "reasonableness" of what might otherwise be judged as fal1-

d f"· I' "8'

.. Ina short of some present or absolute stan ards 0 ranon.a Ity.

At this point, the reader may well ask "what has all this to do

' .... lrh the work of our journal?" In the first place I would suggest ........ In 11 frankly provocative, but open-minded spirit-that each of

· tllt.e orientations will tend to find its natural adherents among the

.-. hilluriographers of the behavioral sciences, and that each orienta-

_. dun carries with it a characteristic motivational posture. The

convenience. N some term is necessary.

~ism" conveys rather well the essential quality of the commirmenr to the understanding of the past for its own sake. This ~"",",,-: should already be generally evident, but we can make it explicit-and at the same time relate this whole discussion . directly to the problems of the historiography of the behavioral sciences-by briefly explicating several of the dichotomies mentioned above: "thinking" and "thought"; "reasonableness" and "rationality"; "understanding" and "judgment."

What I have to suggest in regard to the first two pairs of alternatives has been admirably stated in Joseph Levenson's Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, an extended essay on the historicization of a world view: the process by which a traditional and absolutistic weltansthauung becomes historical and relativistic under the impact of Western culture. In discussing this process, Levenson treats with a subtle and delicate hand the ways in which

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.ACK, CULTURB, AND eVOLUTION

~ orientation .of the bistorian approaching the history of the havioral sciences will tend to be .. historicist" and his ml1,riV'!2"lr'llW posture "affective." Presentism is by no means a dead issue in historical fraternity, and historians are undeniably conditioned

a thousand subtle ways by the present in which they write. But general, the historian approaches the past rather in the spirit of mountain climber attacking Everest-"because it is there." demands no more of it than the emotional satisfaction which from understanding a manifestation of the changing human,

-. time. The approach of the professional behavioral ..... · ..... ""V"1 other hand, is more likely to be whiggish or, more sentist," and his motivational posture "utilitarian."

the historian's emotional satisfaction, to demand

the past something more: that it t.eieiated to and even useful furthering his professional activities in the ongoing present. the April editorial emphasizes the utility of historical study as way to implement interdisciplinary cooperation."

Leaving aside for now the relative merits of the postures these frankly ideal-typical practitioners, it is important to that there is a sort of implicit whiggish presentism virtually into the history of science, and by extension into the history the behavioral sciences. However disillusioned we may have come with the idea of progress in other areas, however cleated in the newer philosophy of science, most of us take it

, granted that the development of science is a cumulative ward progress in rationality. Indeed, George Sarton, doyen of historians of science, described his study as "the history which can illustrate the progress of mankind" because

.j acquisition and systematization of positive knowledge are the human activities which are truly cumulative and nr4,ar'_:ltI For Sanon, the history of mathematics was a whiggish

. unmarred by tory backsJidings, "an endless series of victories the human mind, victories without counterbalancing failures,

is, without dishonorable and humiliating Ones, and without cities."· In vie'" of the occasionally strident scientism and also the residual reformism of the behavioral sciences. it is hardly prising that their historiography should manifest various signs whiggish presentism. The careful reader will find a number in first issues of our journal. In a general and impersonal way,

one may note how the search for analogues, for precursors

modernity, can produce its a11 too revealing shocks of recognidisappointed-as, for instance, when scientist X, who otheranticipated so much of our current thinking, is found to .. e an "insufficient appreciation" of some point which is today

Fortunately, however, the history of science provides us with models than the "chroniclers of an incremental process." In t years there has been, in the words of Thomas Kuhn, a _Ullrln. ... r!2nn·ll' revolution in the study of science." Rather than ing out "the permanent contributions of an older science to

present vantage," historians have begun to attempt "to display. historical integrity of that science in its own time." Although revolution is still "in its early stages," Kuhn's own brilliantly. roversial Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a clear indica-

.. that historicism, though it may have come late to the history

. li:ience, is by no means irrelevant to it. True, Kuhn's book i¥._ historicist in its focus on the inner development of to the deliberate neglect of the role of "technological ador of external social, economic and intellectual conditions,"

, one might add, the variety of national cultural traditions which scitntific development takes place. But however certain traditional historians may have balked at its nomolanguage and its attempt to generalize the course of scien-

development, Kuhn's approach to the internal development of . ,"-iII'l nee is informed by a spirit which is clearly historicist, in the

in which [ have used the tenn.1• ' .

: Kuhn's central conc;ept is that of the "paradigm"-an articu- ~

. ... . set of assumptions about "the fundamental entities of which , universe is composed," the nature of their interaction "with '''~h other and with the senses," the types of questions "which legitimately be asked about such entities," and the techniques employed in seeking answers to these questions. In shon, the igm functions as a disciplinary world vie-w-which, as Kuhn

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.' On the LimitJ of "Presentimi' emd "Historicism"

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RACE, CULTURE, AND EVOLUTION

, But does this mean that the history of the behavioral sciences

> be written purely and simply "to understand the past for

. •. ·lhc sake of the past?" I think not. It may well be that such under.• ' exists only as a kind of historical Holy Grail-never to 1M found by sinful man, but enlightening the scholar who dedi; flttli himself to the search. Or one may argue, as indeed Professor

;· .. I..evcnson does, that the historian must "articulate his own [pres-:

. J standards in order to find the rationale of his subjects'. in

er=by -raising the question he could never recognize if he cd his own convictions-to find what made it reasonable for earlier generation to violate the later historian's criteria of

, .. _~ ... mality." 18 But beyond such limitations which historicism impose upon itself, there are compelling reasons for a . rc active presentism in the historioeraphr of the behavioral because most of us are practicing behavioral isrs, we are, and indeed must be, interested in thought as well - thinking, in rationality as well as reasonableness-not in absoin the context of

ro~ts ~ut, is c~turaUy transmitted and sustained by a set of institunons, Pnor to the establishment of its first consensual di~, a science tends ~o be a chaos of competing sc ' .... ",./r' ... which feels "forced too-build [its] field anew •• ~,_/.,-

tio~." Once accepted, the pan:di.gta_j~_Jhe _ the 1JIu.c.u.;-·

solvmg mop-up work of "normal science," which serves ... ~ ......... ,~ to complete the articulation of the paradigm. Scientific occur when anomalies "produced inadvertently by a game under one set of rules" require for their assimilation the ".."",coonr<l_ ti~n of another set"-the creation of a new paradigm based ~erent assumptions, asking different questions, and dlffer~t answers . ."'ithout further elaborating, or a~eptmg, the specifics of Kuhn's analysis, I would suggest

this approach. ~oes ~?courage us. to see a body of knowledge as set of propositions together wah the questions they are to answer," to understand the "reasonableness" of points of now superseded, to see historical change as a complex process emergence rather than a simple linear sequence-in short, to derstandehe science of a given period in its own terms.ll

Quit~ ~ide from the question of its general utility, ~hc:m.anz;abon suggests further reason for the presentism of histo~ograph~rs of the behavioral sciences; Perhaps because behavioral SCIences are for the most part in Kuhn's terms

,paradi!_l!lati~," their historiography is more open to certain Of presentism than that of science generally. When there is single framework which unites all the workers in a field,

rather points of view or competing schools,

raphy extends the arena oftbeii At its"

.: There exists, indeed, not only a subject matter for a history of Istic anthropology, but also a definite need. To my mind, there

general need in the current study of Itnguage for codification. larion as well as exploration. From a humanistic viewpoint., such might be seen as the reconstitution of a general ,philology. In y anthropological terms, such work might be seen as the framing

• provisioruil geiieral theory of laDfUage add culture. In either case, work of criticism and interpretanon would have to draw for pt!,_U'r,,~1' equally !IS much on the history, or development, of, the study as on a survey of current knowledge and research, Histo:r.

... ~~an~ .. "; would be .

stucents of intellectual history, and combination seems often to have occurred .... I mention the here out of a strong sense of its timeliness :and importance for pology. To the degree that we have lacked an active know 1- of the history of our field, we have been limited by lack of some perspectives that have not been transmitted to us. and by the of some of those that have. A critical history can help us

courses in many

science departments. As of partisan

ment and ~~ographical effort increases, the author may

tempt to legitimize a present point of view by claiming for it putative "founder" of the discipline. Or he may sweep across the history of a discipline. brushing out whigs and tories ~e~nooks~d c:;anmes of every century. Ill, Inevitably the sins

history wntten for the sake of the present" insinuate .

anachronism, distortion, misinterpretation, misleading .neglect of context, oversimplification of process.

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~:;;:;': •. t:.fto'"ih ...... _

.. _s. PQO

...... .,..: ..

._ .. q"

. ..,. u_ .R !I. zeal{ _ _;';_ .. l .~ . .J ; "' , __ C~=44 ti4Q:;l_ ....... i"":O:;;;J;yo; './ CZG ....... P::c._t .............. ,~ " ... J. N llG ;::

~r a case can be made for an intellectual discontinuity ~can linguistic anthropology during this century, such that Jmpo~nt \\r~rk of preceding generations has become unintelligible, mearung h.avlIlJ to be recaptured by special study. I say this not

of overestlIb.atlon of the worth of earlier work. Much of its ~as .been pennanently superseded, and its neglect thus to some Justified. But historical mterpretation IlI1d critique of .. _grhel~!rl('KlI

hasthe~~~~~~L£~~~~~~.w~ \11"'"U'~l~

above), say not as an

field in q?ettion. I would identify the IillUllKl()R recent,. still continuing, period has been tf'n."";"' ......

an earlier ptrspective considered too

too weak in data and method. In caricature the

» fr~ generalizations of bold scope been first to d;op

zatlon;s. and then the scope. V narrow definitions of lin~rni!:nc<::

:tt£ecttng anthro_POiogy, have to the fore. By enabling to

in full ~ecove many of problems and assumprions, mstorica

study will help change the situation in two respects. In some ways conseque~ct will be to depart in a much more thoroughgoing f~om earlier:- work, since the departure will be not simp'!y a r.;Ul ......... ." tlO~ hut a fresh start. In other ways the consequence will be to earlier penbd$ by renewing attention to problems posed in Ideally. the fresh start will harness the technical and empirical vances of the latest period to the broad sense of scope and of its predecessors. If

Perhaps one might generalize this argument in terms of "pre-paradigmatic" state, the a-historical orientation, and the to~lIy C4nditioned discipliriary fragmentation of the SCle_nCes. Because they are pre-paradigmatic, the various petmg sch()Q1s of the present and of the past exist in a sense t~poranC()usly. But because they have on the whole such nously short historical memories, the behavioral sciences of presen~ .b.lI"~_Y~ry:.!i.~_!~~~ that _their predecessors- wert

;;r ;hi~~~v:~ii~u= b~·o~::~ And ~eca~ ..

disciplinary fragmentation of approaches which were in the often much more integrated, there may be fruits of ary cooperation which are as easily picked in the past as in present. In short, in a pre-paradigmatic situation there are tremendous problems of defining what the positive increments in

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.ACE, CULTU.E, AND i!:VOLUT.ION

On tbe Limits of "Presemism" and "Iftstoricism" I [

wledge of human behavior actu~; been. There is also a

,"-. "n" .. n field in which_j.he--SCeker of serendipity may indulge

. himself. ~ . ..

Rut preci~ecause in the history of the behavioral sciences re are legitimate and compelling reasons for studying "the past , the sake of the present," it is all the more important to keep in " the pitfalls of a presentist approach. And beyond this [.

Id argue that the utilities we are seeking in the present are in best realized by an approach which is in practice if not in ""I""U"'" "affective" and "historicist." E. B. Tylor may speak to nt anthropologists, but they will be better able to understand

if they are able to distinguish ~. ~~I.I..l![!£_;~~~~i.JI5~1..

have been

, Tyler's central anthro-

ical problem, in its terms, was to "fill the gap

ween Brixham Cave and European Civilization without introng the hand of God"-that is, to show that human culture or might have been, the result of a natural evolutionary deNo anthropologist today would question the fact that

re was, in a broad sense, the product of such an q\rolunonary pment. That question has been answered. On the other the question of filling in gaps is still very much open, and our methods of approaching this problem are perhaps erent, Tylor may still have something to say to us. How-

the question of the hand of God, which greatly exercised a_( of TyIor's contemporaries, and therefore Tylor, we

Id not even regard as a question. As Professor Levenson sug-

to approach Tylor in these terms requires a standpoint in the

t. But it also.requires pat we know what the qu~ons w~e

. which Tylor's Ideas were answers, and the alternatives which. answers were designed to exclude.

What is involved here. if [ may turn to my own uses a distincwhich Professor Levenson made in a somewhat different con, is the difference in intonation between the "historically '("dlly) significant" and the "(merely) historically significant"•. "between an empirical judgment of fruitfulness in time and a nor, ve judgment of aridity in the here and now." "By ab~uring

ment," the "with an even-hailded. oca-

:X::~.".J "._, ... ' .v ...• i ._ .. ill·. I .......... -~· .. ,~3 .'·~'h,~j::;;S:re:::.:s C,hn.(Q'" s .... _;z, Zh ~i w. i) ;suo. ax j.

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French Anthropology in 1800

fUllY reRects the limitations of its genesis and its method. It gre '''lAt of a chance encounter with a late nineteenth-century reptit: .': q of .a French document dating from 1800, and subsequently t ""ted documents reprinted over the next several decades. A .lhclIlgl, my primary interests lay in other areas and 1 had 'itt, ·· ... dground in French history, the incidents sunolUlding the do; .,ncmts were of sufficient intrinsic interest to impel theu e;rpiiCl •. tfofJ, Essentially, my approach was an attempt to explicate th ('''Yliles going on in a microcosm in the context of an impliCl

to patterns at thought which I had uncovered b: ~> • .vlUUS researches into late nmetecnth-centuty racial thinm,

in France but in the United States. Based on comparison 0;

lorical phenomena separated both in time and space, writt.1: t access to certain French manuscript and printed $OUtt'eI, treating problems that in principle involve a tremendous mnp lOurce materials that in practice have been the subject of spotty

, often inadequate historical investigation, the essay is inevJ-

· ... /)' somewhat speculative and sketchy in its discussion 01 IU .. f(,,--I!IHIC,I' cOntexts and ot the filiations and processes ot change .. , through time. There were a lot at gaps to lill, and my attempt to .···'U them raised many more questions than were answered . .Quire .. from such broad and perhaps inherently speculative is!ue. t',,~ CRUseS of nineteenth-century racism, there are any number .... " ttllltively specific problemS' in the early nineteenth-century bi ..

' foI)' of the behavioral sciences that need to be investigated.

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!ion of historical significanc~' the historian may be able to OUt of "the nothing of the historically significant" something value and utility in the present, something "historically . cant." In Bur to ~.Q this requires-an-approachj.!!_!erms of process, emergence, thinking, and reasonableness. rnaeeo, burden of~his essay that this goal requires an affective, hi orientat!on which attempts "to understand the past for the of the/past." By suspending judgment as to present utility, 7 that judgment ultimately possible.