What is History

1
What is History?
2
The historical sausage

• It can be sliced in two ways
• Horizontally
• Vertical

3
Structure/Context 1
Actors Who?
Space Where?
Time When?
Event What?
Structure/Context 2
Change and Continuity How?
Causality Why?
4
Two statements First E.H. Carr

• The facts of history cannot be purely objective,
  since they become facts of history only in virtue
  of the significance attached to them by the
  historian. Quoted in Tosh, John The Pursuit of
  History, p.181 (fourth edition)

5
Second L.B. Namier

• The function of the historian is akin to that of
  the painter and not of the photographic camera
  to discover and set forth, to single out and
  stress that which is of the nature of the thing,
  and not to reproduce indiscriminately all that
  meets the eye. Quoted in Tosh, John The
  Pursuit of History, p.181 (fourth edition)

6
Three important components

• Difference (past-present), values, fears, hopes,
  Gorbachev
• Context lateral thinking Historians can claim
  with some justice to be specialist in lateral
  thinkingto train graduates for management and
  the civil servicethe ability to think beyond the
  boundaries of particular problems.

7

• Process growth/decay/change (how we go from then
  to now).
• Used for predictions, the future. We might call
  these sequential predictions in order to
  distinguish them from the discredited repetitive
  or recurrent variety. The game of future
  scenarios etc

8
What can we then suggest

• Scientific method, then is a dialogue between
  hypothesis and attempted refutation, or between
  creative and critical thought.
• The essence of historical enquiry is selection-
  of relevant sources, of historical facts and of
  significant interpretations.

9
Three types of theory

• The difficulty of grasping the inter-relatedness
  of every dimension of human experience at a given
  time. Total history, political history, economic
  history.
• Application of theory on change. Is history
  driven by a motor? How do we explain change or
  the absence of change?
• The direction in which all change take place. The
  Meaning of History, God or Marxism?

10
European tensions and divisions making fission
(creativity) rather than fusion

• The separation of religious and political
  authority
• The division between Byzantine and Catholic
  Christianity
• The separation of knowledge and power
• States versus empires
• Civil society versus the state
• The guild versus economic society
• Class struggles versus liberalism
• Revolutionary versus evolutionary socialism
• Foreign influences and domestic development
• Finally the relation between extra- and
  intra-European developments

11
Why European Studies?

• OWO
• NWO

12
Why humanistically based ES

• What is Europe?
• What does a European identity mean?
• Critical attitude, critical stance.
• Deep historical perspective on the present.
• Europe Different things to different people in
  the different parts and at different times in its
  history.

13
Systematic Internal comparison

• Search for inner similarities and inner diversity
• Units as regions, ethnic groups, religions
• Conceptual pairs as south-north, east-west
• States versus states, political culture of
  states.
• Deepening the conceptual pairs as
  individual-collective, town-country,
  immigrant-native, centre-periphery, male-female,
  tradition-modernity etc

14
Systematic External Comparison

• Europe and the rest of the world as
• Europe-China, Europe-Russia, Europe-the Orient,
  Europe-USA
• Europe and the Others

15
Expected Results of this approach

• Europe will look different from different
  viewpoints.
• Further a decentring of the national,
  ethnocentric experience.
• Blurs and breaks up the national categories which
  rules many of the traditional scholarly
  disciplines.
• Comparison contributes to the critical potential
  of European Studies.