A New Philosophy of History.

If you find the work of D. N. McCloskey on rhetoric and economics interesting and challenging, and I confess that I do, then you will probably consider A New Philosophy of History a valuable contribution to the history of thought in the humanities. If, however, you find McCloskey's work somewhat less than interesting, then you might want to move on, because the essays in this volume, written by notable historians, literary critics, and philosophers, grapple with many of the same issues raised by McCloskey. Needless to say, these issues are not typically covered in graduate training in economics. For example, the essays are organized in four sections entitled "Rubrics of Style," "Voice," "Argument," and "Image" - not exactly the nouns found at the core of today's leading debates among economists.

Although all of the essays are provocative, economists will probably find the ones in the "Style" and "Argument" sections more interesting, at least from a professional perspective, than those in the "Voice" and "Images" sections. In the "Style" section, for example, Nancy Partner offers a refreshingly candid essay entitled "Historicity in an Age of Reality-Fictions". She provides a list of "basic literary" forms employed by traditional (Western) historians (and economists for that matter); these forms include but are not limited to the author as narrator, the substitution of information for inspiration, the use of prose for extended narrative, and attention to causal relations. She observes that these devices are not legacies of the Enlightenment or the nineteenth-century intellectuals who supposedly formalized scientific analysis, but rather come from Greek and Roman antiquity. Importantly, Professor Partner includes incorporated fictions (her emphasis) among these ancient bequests. She concludes that collectively these devices produce an "appropriate protocol" among historians, and in a democracy, violations of this protocol lead dangerously to cynicism among the polity. One might add that violations with ideological roots and political objectives are especially harmful in this sense.

The "Argument" section contains two essays. One, Robert Berkhofer's "A Point of View on Viewpoints in Historical Practice," illustrates how easily critics of the white-European-male history substitute their own color-continent-gender history. To make his point, Professor Berkhofer quotes a number of passages (some quite lengthy) from critiques of traditional historiography. In one of these passages a critic accuses unreconstructed traditionalists of "intellectual laziness." Strong words. In fact these passages reveal more about academic politics and turf wars than they do about history. Recognizing the flaws of substituting one world view for another, Professor Berkhofer concludes that multicultural history should embrace "polyvocality" which represents multiple viewpoints from the past and the present. Maybe, but this essay also reveals how difficult it is to reconstruct a text, course, or discipline once it has been deconstructed.

The futility of that reconstruction is illustrated in the other essay, "'Grand Narrative' and the Discipline of History," in the "Argument" section. In it Allan Megill makes a case for the application of "theory" in history, though this is not theory in the formalized sense that economists use the term. Theory here means a set of "levels of conceptualization" that yield postulates, one of which is: "Never assume that there is a single authorized historical method or subject matter." Obeying this postulate, he goes on to state that: "In a world that no longer believes in a single History, historians can awaken universal interest only insofar as their work addresses theoretical issues." One might conclude that a world with no single history, is one with many histories, which might help explain the proliferation in recent years of courses on racial, ethnic, and gender history.

Some readers will be troubled by the notion, often implicit in these essays, that the recognition that there is no single history, or historical perspective, logically leads to the conclusion that there must be arbitrarily many; however, given that the dean's resources are finite, the History Department must still decide which histories to include in the curriculum (and which faculty to hire). In the absence of intellectual arguments addressing this issue, campus and departmental politics will fill the vacuum. Unfortunately, nothing in the new philosophy of history helps determine which history should be taught. (On this point, it is worth noting that less than half of the authors of the essays in this volume list as their academic residence a department of history!)

For an economist, even one with formal training in history, perhaps the most striking feature of these essays is how much intellectual effort the authors put into exploring what it is exactly that they and their colleagues do or should be doing. With the notable exception of McCloskey, no major intellectual figures address similar issues in contemporary economics. Your relief or consternation about this observation will probably go a long way toward predicting your view of this volume.

Finally, many prominent individuals have offered succinct philosophies of history. These include Voltaire, whose characterization of history as "fables agreed upon" appeals to a late-twentieth century sense of cynicism (though after reading these essays, "fables disagreed upon" would be more like it). Emerson evoked a less skeptical notion when he wrote, "There is properly no history, only biography". Perhaps he was only thinking of history that we once referred to as "a good read" (character, after all, being the root of drama). Although Voltaire's glib cynicism would no doubt carry him far in today's academy, I am afraid the historian whom Emerson had in mind would be labeled a "naive realist" and have a tough go of it. Indeed, the message of this volume is: "There is no history, only discourse."

Lee A. Craig North Carolina State University