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Historical Objectivity
Historical Objectivity
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access to The Journal of Philosophy
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VOLUME XLVII, No. 2 JANUARY 19, 1950
1 This paper was read at the meeting of the Eastern Division of the
American Philosophical Association at the University of Virginia, Charlottes-
ville, December, 1948.
2 Prehistoric Cave Paintings, Pantheon Books, 1945. Prehistoric Pottery
and Civilization in Egypt, Pantheon Books, 1947.
3 Theory of History, Yale University Press, 1925, p. 32. Italics mine.
4 This JOURNAL, Vol. XLV (1948), p. 633.
29
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30 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
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THE NATURE OF HISTORICAL OBJECTIVITY 31
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32 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
II
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THE NATURE OF HISTORICAL OBJECTIVITY 33
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34 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
III
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THE NITATURE OF HISTORICAL OBJECTIVITY 35
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36 THE JOURNAL OP PHILOSOPHY
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THE NATURE OF HISTORICAL OBJECTIVITY 37
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38 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
into the statistical probability over time, which forms the basis of
scientific law. If we concentrate our investigation on a single
specific, certain things about it will remain indeterminable; e.g.,
position and velocity of the smallest units of physics can not be
determined simultaneously.
It follows that certain phenomena in the physical world can best
be understood, not by breaking them down into smaller and smaller
isolated parts for separate study, but only by perceiving them in
relation to each other.
Nevertheless, as Irving Langmuir has shown in his study of
convergent and divergent phenomena,21 certain particular events
under certain circumstances-mutations, for example-start a new
train of events and have a different kind of importance than can
be encompassed by statistical probability.
The necessity for the historian to develop a more adequate
theory of causation-and at the same time the difficulty he faces-
will appear more clearly if we look at the way competent historians
have dealt with a familiar period: the history of England since the
beginning of the nineteenth century. We may take five who are
not open to charges of the cruder sort of parochialism or bias: 22
J. H. Clapham, A. V. Dicey, hlie Halevy, Arnold Toynbee, Karl
Marx.
Clapham's three great volumes which carry the economic history
of England from 1820, the beginning of the "Early Railway Age,"
through the period of "Free Trade and Steel" to 1929, where he
ends his study of "Machines and National Rivalries," 23 place all
students of the period in his debt. What facts about population,
industry, agriculture, trade unions, finance can be assembled he has
assembled. Clapham's study is a model of comprehensive and care-
fully documented data. He avoids judgments and hypotheses.
And yet assumptions are implicit in his work. The whole structure
of his work presupposes that it is possible to isolate what he calls
economic facts in society and study them significantly as such. He
says (end of Vol. IlI) that present times are better than earlier
times, and undoubtedly this view though unelaborated has colored
his selection and treatment of material. He says (end of Vol. I
and end of Vol. III) that the cooperative movement is the best of
the social institutions which developed during the nineteenth cen-
tury to meet the workers' needs. He does not attempt to trace
causal connections in the past, still less does he attempt hypotheses
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THE NATURE OF HISTORICAL OBJECTIVITY 39
about the extension of past trends into the future. This means
that, with all the importance of his accumulated data, he does not
take the responsibility for the judgments thrown in almost casually
at the close of his volumes which are nevertheless implicit in his
selection and structuring of material, and he does not state his
hypotheses in a form which leads to clarification and testing.
A. V. Dicey 24 finds the most significant feature of the last cen-
tury and a half in England the change from "Benthamism or In-
dividualism" to "Collectivism." Following Leslie Stephen, he
over-stresses this contrast, not recognizing the extent to which even
during the "Benthamite" period the state began to "interfere"
in industry at the same time it was relaxing its "restraints" on
commerce. He attempts to discover the causes of this major
change, and finds them to be five: Tory Philanthropy and the
factory movement; the changed attitude of the working class; the
modification in economic and social beliefs; the character of modern
commerce; the introduction of household suffrage. These causes
are verbally explicit but not sufficiently precise to form bases for
hypotheses which can be extended into the future and either con-
firmed or modified. None of these so-called "causes" does more
than to repeat in different terms Dicey's central assumption that
as various sections of public opinion change, these changes will,
if sufficiently powerful and wide-spread, become reflected in law.
Including a wider institutional range than Clapham and with
more precision than Dicey, Elie Halevy has attempted in his series
of volumes-unhappily incomplete at his death-to place different
institutional changes in relation to each other and to frame hypoth-
eses regarding them. England, he says, would seem at the outset
of the nineteenth century to be of all countries most destined for
revolution if a materialistic interpretation of history is to be
trusted,25 but instead it follows a course of gradual modification.
He finds the source of what he regards as an anomaly, not in eco-
nomic institutions or in political institutions, but in religion-par-
ticularly in Methodism. The questions arise as to the criteria by
which we distinguish small and continuous changes from profound
and abrupt changes, and the criteria by which we distinguish the
birth and the disintegration of civilization. In his later volumes
his strong bias in favor of nineteenth-century liberalism and
against any form of state control leads Halevy to an over-simplified
interpretation of the influence of German state socialism and of
Fabian socialism on English thought and political action.
24 Lectures on the Relation Between Law and Public Opinion in England,
London, MacMillan, 1930.
25 England in 1815, New York, Harcourt, 1924, pp. 334-335 and 339 ff.
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40 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
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THE NATURE OF HISTORICAL OBJECTIVITY 41
IV
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42 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
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BOOK REVIEW 43
position to know where we went astray and take at least one small
step toward objectivity.
Herman Melville's definition of philosophy might well be ap-
plied to history: a series of irregularly spaced stepping-stones
through a morass. In a morass we do not reject stepping stones
because they are not a causeway or a cantilever bridge.
It may be that our failure to make much progress in historical
objectivity, or in the effort to have social science make use of the
world which natural science has made possible, is not that our
scientific efforts are clouded with too much emotion, but that we
have too little emotion-too little passion for the truth in human
affairs. Objectivity might be described as the discovery and recog-
nition of necessity. This recognition is not freedom, but it is an
indispensable condition for freedom. Without some dependability
there can be no freedom, no choice that has meaning. It is only
by distinguishing in the historical process between what is neces-
sary and what is not yet determined that we can have any intelli-
gible basis for exercising what options we have and making of
history in the present a creative activity.
HELEN M. LY-ND
SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE
BOOK REVIEW
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