What is History? – How it really was

History & Morality – some guiding ethical principles

22 June 2017

As suggested by the name of this blog, I take the view that the role of history is not to judge, but to try to understand the past ‘how it really was’. What right have we to judge the actions of people who lived in times that we, with the privilege of hindsight, in the relative prosperity of early twenty-first century Western Europe, are fortunate never to have directly experienced ourselves?

But I also take the view (as discussed in an earlier post on History & Policy) that history can help us understand, and so help resolve, some of the problems that we face in the present. Although it is not for us to judge if people were right or wrong in the past, we need a sense of morality, together with an accurate understanding of what happened in the past, to help determine what we should do in the present and future.

This, of course, is to enter the domain of ethics, rather than history, so I have outlined below some ethical principles for assessing the relevance of the past to the present. These principles are expressed in my own words, as a form of personal morality, on the basis that as rational human beings, we can work out what is right for ourselves without having to resort to external authority, religious belief, custom or tradition. But at the same time the principles assume that everyone is different, and we can all work out our own personal morality, in our own way, for ourselves.

The principles owe a great deal to the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative, according to which we should always act in accordance with what we, as individuals, should logically and rationally desire to be a universal law that applies equally to everyone.

The first four fundamental principles, in the spirit of the US Declaration of Independence, I take to be self-evident:

1) Liberty of the individual – to strive for personal fulfilment and the pursuit of happiness

As human beings we have instincts, wishes and desires, to seek pleasure and avoid pain, but we can also learn from experience. Everyone should be free to fulfil their desires, whatever they may be, and obtain the means to do so by their own efforts, subject to the three points below.

2) Empathy and respect for others (equality)

We are not all the same. Other people’s desires may be different from mine and are not necessarily better or worse than mine, just because they are different.

3) Cooperation for mutual advantage (fraternity or fellowship)

As social beings, we cannot live alone and we cannot fulfil our wishes and desires without help from others. Everyone should be free to receive help from and offer help to others, provided they do not exploit other people, or abuse any power they may have, to compel them to do so.

4) Freedom to resist exploitation and the abuse of power

If anyone attempts to exploit or abuse any power they may have, to prevent me from fulfilling my desires, or to force me to help them fulfil their desires, I should be free to choose whether to submit, or to resist any force they may apply. The same applies to everyone else. We should be free to decide for ourselves whether to submit or to resist, in any given set of circumstances.

These four fundamental (and in my view self-evident) principles have four further consequences, based on our individual and collective knowledge and experience:

Rule of law

The ethical principles outlined in the first four paragraphs above can best be preserved, so that we can collectively fulfil our desires without exploitation or the abuse of power, and resolve conflicts without the use of force, through (as Kant and many other ethical philosophers have proposed) creating universal rules (i.e. laws and customs), which apply to everyone equally.

Mutual agreements, creating duties and obligations

Although not everyone is able to think and act rationally, in my experience the great majority of people do, so it is possible to create an environment in which we can achieve many (if not all) of our desires and resolve conflicts through mutual agreements, which create duties and obligations. Such agreements may be explicit and enforceable by law, or informal customs and social conventions, such as being polite and considerate to others. These duties and obligations limit our ability to fulfil our own desires, and oblige us to help others fulfil their desires. Cooperation is better than conflict.

The inevitability of conflict and the use of force

My desires may conflict with other people’s desires. There will always be someone, or some group of people, who are stronger and more powerful than I am, so I may not succeed in forcing, or even persuading, other people to do what I want. Similarly, if I use force to resist exploitation or the abuse of power by others, this will make it more difficult both for them and for me to achieve our desires, regardless of which of us is stronger. If everyone acted rationally, it should be possible to resolve conflicts without the use of force. But the use of force may be necessary, in certain circumstances, to prevent the abuse of power, the exploitation of the weak by the strong, and to enforce universal rules, that apply to everyone equally.

Ethical realism and the creation of institutions to enforce the rule of law

I also know from my experience that people (including myself) do not always act rationally and agreements may be broken. Universal rules are not absolute. As the conditions in which we live change, rules may need to be modified so they continue to preserve the four fundamental principles and help to resolve conflict. Institutions and social structures may need to be created to make, modify and enforce the rules, but no set of institutions is ideal. There is no ideal state or society. Universal rules and institutions established to enforce them need to change as circumstances and conditions change over time.

There is therefore no absolute morality, which brings me back to the point that the role of the historian is not to judge, but to understand what people did in the past, in very different circumstances, and draw appropriate conclusions and learn what we can from this. History, in other words, is a dialogue between the past and present, for the benefit of the future. You could say that we need history to understand the past, and a sound sense of morality to understand the relevance of the past to the present, and help us all decide what needs to be done in the future.

Winning the prize of the German Historical Institute, London

26 November 2014

This blog is the story of my research for my PhD thesis on ‘Winning the Peace: The British in occupied Germany, 1945-1948.’

My first post was nearly ten years ago, on 1 October 2005, when I enrolled, as a part-time student, on the MA in Contemporary British History at the University of London. Two years later I started on my PhD. I finished my thesis and was awarded the degree in February this year (2014).

I heard recently that my thesis has been awarded the annual prize of the German Historical Institute, London, given for an outstanding thesis on German history (submitted to a British university), on British history (submitted to a German university), or some aspect of Anglo-German relations.

Receiving the prize is a great honour, above all for the recognition it gives to the subject of my work – the post-war occupation of Germany by Britain. This area has been neglected by historians in recent years, but I hope this will change, as scholars discover new and innovative approaches to the subject.

In January 2011 I tried to explain why I wrote the blog. I said that, at first, I wrote it for myself. I didn’t know if anyone would read the blog and I didn’t care. Even if no-one else looked at it, I thought it would be useful as a way of helping me get my thoughts in order.

Researching a history PhD is about writing as much as it is about reading, working in the archives, and learning more about your subject. Writing a blog helped me express my ideas, and select which aspects of my work were most important.

But I was also amazed at how many people discovered the blog, read it, added their comments, and sent me emails: students and other academics working on projects or researching similar subjects, people exploring their family history, a few individuals who were there in person and could tell me about their own experiences, and children of British fathers and German mothers, who met each other and married in occupied Germany after the war.

The earliest posts on the blog were on a variety of subjects: including post-modernism, bread rationing in Britain, and allowing historical sources to ‘speak for themselves’. I then discovered Humphrey Jennings’ documentary film on post-war Germany ‘A Defeated People’.

As I became absorbed in my PhD research, the posts became more focussed on post-war Germany under occupation and the twelve British individuals I researched, who all worked for Military Government or the Control Commission.

More recently, as I came to the end of my research, I wrote about one or two topics that I found interesting, but had not included in my thesis, for one reason or another: such as the Craft of Research, the process of researching an writing a PhD thesis, and the extraordinary story of Sergeant Harry Furness, the first serving British solider in occupied Germany to marry a German.

I hope to continue my research over the next few years, working with other academics interested in developing new and innovative approaches to the study of the occupation of one country by another.

But this will be the start of a new story. The award of the prize of the German Historical Institute for my thesis seems a good time to bring this blog, which tells the story of my PhD, to a close.

This blog will remain open to anyone to read and add comments, if they wish. I hope it will provide a resource for anyone researching the occupation. But I do not propose to write any new posts. Please feel free to contact me by email, or ask any questions, which I will always try to answer.

List of previous posts: July 2011 – March 2014

Harold Ingrams and the ‘Aden Emergency’ 17 March 2014

The four stages of competence, or how history can help stop us forgetting the fundamentals and throwing the baby out with the bath water 20 February 2014

History and Policy 6 February 2014

‘Infantilisation’ and ‘Echoes of Empire’ 21 January 2014

‘Operation Butcher’ 1 July 2013

Marriage with ‘ex-enemy nationals’ (continued) 24 May 2013

‘Hunting for Democracy’ (continued) 2 April 2013

Collective biography 8 March 2013

The Craft of Research 12 February 2013

Colonel E H D (Eric) Grimley: ‘Hunting for democracy’ 7 August 2012

‘Winning the peace’: attempting to explain some of the contradictions in British policy in occupied Germany, 1945-1948 1 March 2012

International Socialists 5 January 2012

“We pour petrol on them” 21 June 2011

List of earlier posts: June 2011 – September 2009

List of earlier posts: June 2009 – May 2007

List of earlier posts: March 2007 – October 2005

The four stages of competence, or how history can help stop us forgetting the fundamentals and throwing the baby out with the bath water

20 February 2014

In my last post, on History & Policy, I suggested there were two reasons why studying history can help us resolve some of the problems we face in the present. It provides background and context, to help us understand why people acted the way they did in the past, and it can help us think of options we may not have considered before, remove the blinkers of the present and open our eyes to other possibilities.

There is a third reason: history can remind us of fundamental principles which may have been forgotten. It can explain why institutions, laws, values and principles were first established, and help us judge if they need to be preserved, or if they no longer fulfil their original purpose and should be abolished or simply forgotten.

In my business career I came across the popular concept of the four stages of competence. Very briefly the idea is that, as individuals, we learn a new skill in four stages:

– unconscious incompetence: we don’t know we are doing something wrong
– conscious incompetence: we realise we are doing something wrong and could do it better
– conscious competence: we learn to do it right
– unconscious competence: we become so good at it, that we do it right automatically, without thinking

If you search for the 'four stages of competence’ on the web, most sites claim that people perform best during the fourth stage, unconscious competence, when they do something automatically, without thinking; like driving a car, or riding a bicycle.

But there is another side to unconscious competence. It can lead, all too easily, right round the circle and back again to the beginning, to unconscious incompetence. We can become so good at doing something without thinking about it, that we fail to realise that the world around us has changed, or that we have changed and are no longer as good as we thought we were.

It seems to me that a tendency to forget fundamental political, social or moral principles – why certain institutions were first created; the United Nations or the European Court of Human Rights for example, or why we elect MPs, or why we have elected local authorities – is very similar. We continue to do something because ‘it has always been done that way’, like going to the polling station to vote in elections perhaps? This may not matter, but sometimes we may be surprised when things start to go wrong, and we don’t know why – the law of ‘unintended consequences’.

For my PhD, I studied the years immediately after the Second World War, researching twelve important and influential British people living and working in occupied Germany between 1945 and 1948: what they aimed to achieve, and why, and how this changed over time. Many fundamental aspects of the world we live in now were created at this time, in response to our parents’ or grandparents’ experience of the death and destruction of war. My parents, and many others of their generation, believed that they had to do everything they could to prevent another war and another Hitler coming to power; that everyone, regardless of which country they lived in, should be able to lead a decent life free from fear of hunger, poverty, disease, or expulsion from their homes; that governments should be freely elected and should act in the interests of all those they represent; that minorities should have certain basic rights enforced by law, such as the freedom to speak their language and practice their religious beliefs.

These principles were embodied in many of the institutions created during or soon after the war in Western Europe and internationally, such as, among many others, the United Nations, the European Union, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the European Convention on Human Rights and, in Britain, Oxfam and the National Health Service.

Fundamental issues such as these were especially important for the British people I researched for my PhD, working in occupied Germany. Their task, as they saw it, was to try to prevent another war, by disarming the German armed forces and dismantling weapons factories, but also by helping to create a set of political structures, after twelve years of fascist dictatorship, which would prevent another Hitler coming to power. They realised they could not do this on their own; it had to be done in co-operation with Germans, their former enemies. The structure of the Nazi state had to be destroyed, but what should take its place? Should the structure and institutions of the Weimar Republic be restored? Or was this too risky? In many ways the constitution of Weimar Republic, established in 1918 after the First World War, was a model of good democratic practice, but it had not prevented Hitler seizing power in 1933.

After a not very successful early attempt to introduce British democratic practices in Germany, such as the first past the post electoral system, the people I studied realised that democracy can only be introduced in another country through a process of dialogue, not by force or by totalitarian means. As I wrote in my policy paper published on the History and Policy web site, Germany: a case study in post-conflict reconstruction, they agreed with leading post-war German politicians on many basic principles, even if they disagreed on the details of how the principles should be implemented in practice. For example, they agreed on the decentralisation of power, the need to protect basic rights and safeguard the individual against excessive demands from an authoritarian government. They agreed that the electoral system should promote stable government with an effective but loyal opposition, that it should discourage extreme or ‘fractional parties’, and that electors should vote for a person to represent them, as well as voting for the political party that best matched their views and interests.

In Britain today, many of these principles appear to be forgotten. Central government has taken more power from local government. The government and right-wing press are arguing that decisions of the European Court of Human Rights should not apply in Britain. Extreme political parties, such the BNP and UKIP have not (yet) succeeded in gaining significant representation in Parliament, but there is no guarantee that the British electoral system will discourage this in future. As the number of people who vote in elections declines, (the turn out in the recent Wythenshawe by-election was as low as 28%), it is easier for a small number of activists to secure a majority in some constituencies. New technologies could enable electors to vote in direct referenda on a number of issues, which may have the advantage of increasing participation, but runs counter to the principle of representative democracy, in which voters elect an individual, who can, or should, study and consider the issues and act accordingly. In a referendum, decisions on complex issues are made by a simple majority of electors, voting to express an opinion which may be carefully considered, but may also be based on hearsay, prejudice, or influenced by emotionally charged campaigns in the press.

History does not provide all the answers, but it can help us ask the right questions.

Collective biography

8 March 2013

In January 2008, I wrote on this blog that the approach I intended to adopt for my PhD research was to ‘Follow the People’. This, I believed, would be the best way of understanding what the British aimed to achieve in occupied Germany after the war, and why, at a time when official policy was unclear or seemed inappropriate for the conditions they found on the ground.

In September 2009 I wrote another post, on History and Biography, in which I outlined some of the advantages of a biographical approach, after reading the excellent collection of articles edited by Volker Berghahn and Simone Lässig, Biography between Structure and Agency.

I’ve now read an interesting article by Krista Cowman, on Collective Biography as a research method for historians, which provides further support for anyone considering this type of approach to their research. Collective biography, she wrote, has a long tradition, from classical and medieval collections of ‘lives’, to more recent social historians researching those ‘marginal to the historical mainstream.’ Despite still being seen by some historians as a ‘lightweight’ method, suitable for studies of politicians and pop stars but not for serious academic history, many historians were now, she added, ‘rediscovering an interest in individuals and their subjective experiences’. Collective biography was, she concluded, an ‘invaluable way of attempting to recover past experiences as well as of suggesting ways in which this was shaped by the broader structures in which it was situated.’

The distinguished historian and Professor at University College London, Mary Fulbrook, has also used a biographical approach, which she called ‘history from within’, in her latest book Dissonant Lives. In what appeared to me to be an excellent description of a biographical approach to writing history, she described her book as ‘concerned with the ways in which Germans of different ages and life stages variously lived through and across the major historical ruptures [of the twentieth] century … It attempts to combine an exploration of the subjective perceptions and lived experiences of succeeding generations with an analysis of changing historical structures and developments.’

In my case, studying the British in Occupied Germany between 1945 and 1948, I originally decided to adopt a biographical approach for practical reasons, as this seemed the only way I could make sense of a mass of data in the archives. I thought I could ‘follow the people’ in the same way as Theseus used Ariadne’s ball of thread to trace a path and escape from the labyrinth after killing the Minotaur. This has worked well as I tracked the twelve people I research through the archives, learning about what each of them did in Germany and why, and relating their actions to their family background and previous experience. Sometimes I was able to discover previously unknown connections between them and what they thought of each other.

I found a biographical approach helped me to understand some of the apparent contradictions in British policy. As well as explaining diversity, it also revealed what I considered to be the fundamental aims of the occupation. Once the differences between individuals were stripped away, it was possible to identify the key principles they all agreed on.

There are, of course, disadvantages as well as advantages to a biographical approach. It is good at explaining motivation, aims and intentions, and how these changed within a short period of time, but less able to explain how policies were played out in practice. As my supervisor said about one of my draft chapters, on Harold Ingrams and British attempts to reform local government in Germany, ‘Well, it is not really about local government, it is about what the British person in charge thought he was doing at the time, sometimes with hindsight.’ That was a fair comment. A focus on personal lives can make it difficult to examine any one theme or subject comprehensively over an extended period of time.

Because much of the source material was subjective, and some created with hindsight, evidence I obtained from the archives, and from reading personal papers, memoirs and autobiographies, had to be carefully validated, cross referenced, checked for consistency with other sources, and placed within its historical context. Nevertheless I would still claim that a biographical approach can offer distinct advantages for studying a relatively short period when policies and attitudes changed rapidly. It can be preferable to a structural, thematic or chronological approach, when dealing with a subject, like the British Military Government of Germany, that was essentially temporary in nature, with no consistent organisation or structure, even over the short three years of my study.

On a few occasions I could claim that specific outcomes were due to the deliberate decisions of individuals. For example, the decision by one young British officer, John Chaloner, to create the German news magazine, Der Spiegel, probably had more influence on the future of the West German media than anything else the British did during the occupation.

More generally, a biographical approach does not necessarily imply a belief in human agency, as opposed to a more deterministic view of history governed by long term social, economic or cultural structures and processes. Studying the subjective experiences of individuals often reveals the limitations and constraints which prevented them from achieving what they intended. A collective biography can be a good method for examining the aims, intentions and actions of individuals, but it can also help us understand the outcomes of their actions, and the deeper structures which characterised the society in which they lived.

References:

Krista Cowman, ‘Collective Biography’, in Simon Gunn and Lucy Faire (eds), Research Methods for History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp83-100

Mary Fulbrook, Dissonant Lives: Generations and violence through the German dictatorships (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)

Volker R. Berghahn and Simone Lässig (eds), Biography between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography (New York, Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2008)

The Craft of Research

12 February 2013

I am coming to the end of my research and have been working on writing up my thesis, which explains why I have not posted very much here over the past few months. I hope to remedy this once the thesis is complete.

This means I have been thinking about the process of studying for a PhD. I have benefitted greatly from meeting with other students in a small ‘Reading Group’. At one of our meetings we discussed how to structure the thesis and how to turn a vague and general topic, which is what most of us start with, into a more specific set of questions, which together form a research ‘problem’, to which we propose a solution in our theses.

There are some useful books around which provide guidance on how to do this. One book I have found helpful is The Craft of Research. This provides advice on turning a broad topic into a focussed topic, a focussed topic into a set of research questions and a set of research questions into a research problem.

Wayne C. Booth, Gregry G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams, The Craft of Research (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2008) Third edition

Some French theorists call this problematizing your topic, which is not the sort of thing we British normally do, but the authors of this book make it all seem quite simple. If you are working on a history, humanities or social science PhD, I would recommend you buy a copy, or borrow it from your library, and read it. The following is taken from my notes on the relevant chapters. (Any errors, omissions and misunderstandings are therefore mine, and not the fault of the book or the authors).

1) From a broad topic to a focused topic

A topic is probably too broad if you can state it in four or five words. Topics can be narrowed by adding words – nouns derived from verbs expressing actions or relationships – in particular conflict, description, contribution, development. This makes the topic dynamic rather than static.

2) From a focused topic to research questions

The key point here is to think about:

– What you are writing about – I am working on the topic of …
– What you don’t know about it – because I want to find out …
– Why you want your reader to know and care about it – in order to help my reader understand …

This can be simplified to:
Topic: I am studying …
Question: because I want to find out what / why / how …
Significance: to help my reader understand …

3) From research questions to a research problem

A conceptual problem simply means not knowing or not understanding something.

The significance or importance of a conceptual problem lies in its consequence. Because we don’t understand one thing, this means that we don’t fully understand something else of greater significance.

This aims to answer the ‘So what’ problem.

Topic: I am studying …
    Question: because I want to find out what / why / how …
        Significance: to help my readers understand …
            Consequence: so that …

I have found this very helpful in my own research, trying to make sense of the mass of data I have accumulated and thinking about how to structure it all in the final thesis.

Here is my own version:

I am studying:
– The contribution made by twelve important and influential individuals to the development and implementation of British policy in occupied Germany, in the first three years after the end of the Second World War.

Because I want to find out:
– What these twelve individuals aimed to achieve, and why and how this changed over time.
– Why British policy apparently changed from unconditional surrender, strict controls enforced by a long occupation and non-fraternisation with the German people, to physical and economic reconstruction, political renewal and personal reconciliation.

To help my readers understand:
– The reasons for some of the apparent contradictions in British policy.
– How and why British policy in occupied Germany changed very soon after the end of the war.
– How and why British attitudes towards their former enemy changed in the transition from war to peace.
– How individuals implemented, modified and interpreted official policies.
– The successes and failures of the British in occupied Germany. How can you judge success or failure without understanding the original intention(s)?

So that my readers understand better:
– The British contribution to the development of post-war Germany.
– The origins of the Cold War, in particular how former enemies became allies and vice versa.
– Some of the ways in which British people engaged with the rest of the world, through the British Empire and as a great power in Europe, what motivated them and what they were trying to achieve.
– What happens in the aftermath of war, some of the problems faced by victors when they occupy the country of their defeated enemy, and how to plan better for occupation of a defeated country, after winning the war.

Thick Description: History and Anthropology

27 June 2011

I’ve written a few posts on this blog which could be described as theoretical (see What is History?). As historians, we collect a mass of data from our own research and from reading what other historians have written. When we come to write up the results, we have to make sense of it all. What do we include, and what do we leave out? How do we make it interesting and relevant? How do we organise what we’ve discovered so it all logically fits together?

I’ve always liked the idea that (in the opening words of L.P. Hartley’s novel, The Go-Between) "the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." We can explore the past in the same way we travel to a new and unfamiliar country or city. We may have a map or a guide-book, or we may prefer to wander around and discover things for ourselves. You could say a historian is like a tour guide, trying to explain to a group of travellers what makes it interesting and relevant; or like a travel writer, describing their own experiences and discoveries to those unable to visit the places themselves.

Taking the analogy a step further, the study of History is similar to Anthropology. Anthropologists observe customs and practices in strange and unfamiliar places and try to describe and interpret them so they make sense to those back home. One noted cultural historian, Peter Burke, has written that he and his colleagues "would confess to having learned much from anthropologists," though he stressed that they now treat all cultures as of equal value, rejecting the old anthropological notion that some were ‘primitive’ or ‘backward’.

‘Thick Description’ is a term used by the distinguished anthropologist Clifford Geertz. In an essay on: ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, he explained that his understanding of the culture of a people was not their "total way of life" or "a storehouse of learning", let alone their art, music or literature, but ‘webs of significance’, writing that:

"Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning."

Geertz described how he had taken the term ‘Thick Description’ from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, who distinguished between a ‘thin description’ of, for example, a physical action, and a ‘thick description’ which includes the context: when and where the action took place, who performed it and their intentions in doing so. For example, the same physical act of someone "rapidly raising and lowering their right eyelid" could be a nervous twitch, a deliberate wink to attract attention or communicate with someone, or an imitation or mockery of someone else with a nervous twitch or winking. It all depends on the context, the aims of person the performing the action, and how these were understood by others.

This implies there is no clear distinction between description, explanation and communication. All descriptions of human actions and behaviour, except the most trivial, do more than simply relate what happened. They include judgements, assumptions, and explanations of why people behaved as they did, what they were trying to express or achieve in doing so, and for whom. All historians know that the sources they use, typically written documents but also artefacts, images, customs and practices, need to be evaluated not only in terms of what they say, but why they were created, with what intentions, and for whom.

I have long believed that historical sources ‘speak for themselves’ and that a sensitive and intelligent reader or listener can work out for themselves from the text what assumptions or judgements the authors were making. Or if this is not clear, they can at least ask the question and realise that without additional information, the source could be read and understood in different ways. This is one of the things that makes history interesting: there is no one right answer and what happened in the past can be understood and interpreted in different ways.

Most anthropologists seem to believe that despite differences between societies, the human mind is essentially the same and deep unchanging structures of meaning can be discovered if specific behaviour is examined in sufficient depth. Geertz wrote that the aim of the anthropologist was not so much to "capture primitive facts in faraway places and carry them home" like a ‘primitive’ mask or carving to be placed in some ethnographical museum of mankind, but to "draw large conclusions from small" and attempt to explain "what manner of men are these".

As a historian, not an anthropologist, I’m not sure I would go so far. As the name of this blog suggests, I subscribe to the view that the role of history is to discover and reveal the past ‘how it really was’. There is a danger in over-interpreting our data, and the end result can then reveal more of our own prejudices and assumptions, than how people thought and acted at the time. But I do think we can go beyond a simple narrative of the facts (whatever they are) and describe human behaviour – what people thought and did – in context, together with an attempt to understand and explain their motivation, their aims and intentions, and how these changed over time, in response to the circumstances in which they found themselves.

Perhaps this means that writing history can be thought of as ‘thick description’, that places events in context and explains human behaviour through reference to aims and intentions, (what it signifies as some anthropologists would say). If so, what are the implications for how we research and write about our subject? I don’t know the answer to this, but as a start, here are my thoughts on some issues I’ve had to consider, when researching and writing about people’s aims and intentions:

– Whose aims and intentions are worth studying? Some people were more influential than others, but it is not always obvious who the really important and influential people were in any situation. Some may have influenced events through providing information to those who made the decisions. Others simply did what they were told.

– Some exceptional people did not do what they were told. We may have studied the aims and intentions of the policy makers, only to find that the policy was ignored by those responsible for carrying it out.

– Their stated aims and intentions, especially in accounts written or told many years after the events they relate to (such as personal memoirs or oral history interviews), may not have been the real reasons people acted as they did at the time. It is easy to be wise after the event and claim the intention matched the outcome.

– Reasons given at the time for acting in a particular way, (for example in personal correspondence, speeches, official papers or articles in newspapers), can also be misleading and may not reflect the authors’ own views, as they may have said or written what they thought their readers or listeners wanted to hear.

– People may have acted in accordance with unspoken assumptions, which even they were not fully aware of. For example, on several occasions I have come across references to people saying they did ‘what they believed was right’ without elaborating further.

– People may have acted in accordance with the values they held, which in turn were based on their personal and family background, social status, education, moral or religious beliefs.

– People may have acted in their own interest. As the saying goes, you can always find many more good reasons for doing what you want to do, than doing what you don’t want to do.

– People may have acted the way others expected them to act, in accordance with social conventions and expectations, which may vary from one group to another.

– People did not always act rationally. We cannot assume people acted for a particular reason because that now appears, to us, to be the logical thing for them to have done.

– Every individual is unique and it is impossible to understand and describe everyone’s individual motivation. To what extent can we generalise and assume all those in a group shared the same aims, for the same reasons, or explain behaviour through reference to social rather than personal factors?

References

Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997)

Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick description: toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in The Interpretations of Cultures (London: Hutchinson, 1975)

Max Weber and the “Ideal Type”

4th November 2009

As the name of this blog “How it really was” suggests, I start from the assumption that the aim of the historian is not to judge the past, but to discover and reveal what really happened, following the German historian Leopold von Ranke, who famously said:

“Man hat der Historie das Amt, die Vergangenheit zu richten, die Mitwelt zum Nutzen zukünftiger Jahre zu belehren, beigemessen: so hoher Ämter unterwindet sich gegenwärtiger Versuch nicht: er will blos zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen”

which I translate as:

The role, commonly attributed to History, is to judge the Past, to instruct the Present, for the benefit of the Future: such a high (noble) role is not claimed for this essay: it aims simply to show how it really was

I am therefore very suspicious of any theoretical approach to history, especially those which attempt to judge the past, (who are we to criticise what other people may or may not have done, in circumstances and times we can barely understand), preferring to stay firmly grounded on what we know, drawing on the evidence of what people said, wrote, or were reported to have done. It seems to me that all too often the historian’s interpretation tells us more about their own personal views and the commonly held prejudices of their time, than anything new about what actually happened.

But this empirical approach to history means I very quickly come across the issue of whether the people and events I describe and find interesting are typical of what other people thought and did at the time, or whether they are just unrepresentative, isolated instances.

The problem we face as historians is how to make sense of the mass of facts and circumstances we discover and how to communicate this to our listeners or readers.

One way of addressing this issue is through some form of statistical analysis. It seems to me, though, that the problem with this approach is that we have to reduce everything to the lowest common denominator and generalise to the point where too much data is lost. The most influential and interesting people and events were often those that were exceptional in some way.

Some time ago, another research student at the Institute for Historical Research (at the University of London) introduced me to Max Weber’s concept of the “Ideal Type” and this seemed attractive, as a way of generalising from specific examples without losing their individuality. I had already classified the various people I intend to study for my thesis, on the British in occupied Germany after the war, as “senior army officers”, “diplomats and administrators”, “educators”, “young men” and “returning exiles.” Perhaps I should construct an “Ideal Type” for each of these groups?

I had never read anything by Max Weber before and was very sceptical as to what he could offer a historian. After all, he is best known as one of the founders of modern sociology (a theoretical discipline I have done my best to avoid, as it seemed too full of complex jargon, abstruse logic, and highly questionable assumptions).

But after reading what Max Weber himself wrote about the “Ideal Type”, (rather than what other people have written about it), it seemed to make a lot of sense.

So here is my understanding of Max Weber’s concept of the “Ideal Type” and how it could be used by historians.

1) It is not possible to describe historical events without using concepts of some sort. If historians are not explicit about the concepts they use, the result is that they either do this implicitly, using some kind of logical or verbal construction, (and so possibly mislead their readers), or else they stay lost in a world of undefined “feelings”.

2) To be useful as an aid to historical description, concepts must have certain characteristics and be used in particular ways.

They should be based on, or constructed from, a selection of historical events and form a logically consistent thought picture (Gedankenbild). In other words, they must be firmly grounded on the evidence and be internally consistent, without obvious logical contradictions.
Though based on real events, they should remain purely theoretical constructs and not represent anything that can be found, in its entirety, in the real world.
They should be used as the means to the end, not as the end in itself.

3) Weber called a concept which meets these criteria an “Ideal Type”:

logical constructions, not what actually happened
an aid to description, not in themselves a description of historical reality
not hypotheses to be proved or disproved
not schemas to be used for the purposes of classification
“ideal” only in the logical sense and not implying in any way that an “Ideal Type” forms the “essential core” (das Wesen) of historical reality, or can predict the future course of history, or act as a model or recommendation for future action

4) Different historians will construct different "Ideal Types" as our understanding of historical events changes over time.

5) To be useful, concepts used as "Ideal Types" should be precise and specific, not vague or general. It doesn’t matter if this means some historical events do not always fit with the "Ideal Type" as the historian has defined it, because our understanding of what happened works by highlighting differences between the concepts we hold in our minds and historical reality, as well as similarities.

In summary, Max Weber seems to be saying that history is a dialogue between the present and the past (very similar in many ways to the English historian EH Carr in his book What is History). The present is represented by the concepts – the “Ideal Types” – created by historians and held in the minds of listeners and readers. The past is represented by the historical evidence, as discovered and revealed in the historians’ sources.

References:

Max Weber, “Die ‘Objektivität’ sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntis” in Johannes Winckelmann (ed) Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen, 1988)

Happy New Year

7th January 2008

Happy New Year to all my readers. If you’ve stumbled upon this blog for the first time, I am a part-time PhD student at the (CCBH) Centre for Contemporary British History, part of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London.

In this blog I try to record and make sense of my thoughts, and the books, the papers and archives I read, as I gradually work through my research. As a part-time student it will take around 6 years to complete the thesis, so I don’t expect to finish until 2013.

My area of research is the British Occupation of Germany after the Second World War, 1945-1951. A few weeks ago I described this in a little more detail and posted my Research Proposal.

I aim to post on this blog around once a week, and generally manage to do so, more or less, with a few breaks over Christmas and New Year, and during the Summer.

In my view history is a process of discovery and in this blog I aim to share my discoveries and, I hope, the occasional insight, with anyone who is interested. I also find writing a weekly post very useful to help organise my own thoughts.

Over the past two years I’ve posted most of what later became my MA dissertation, (after suitable re-writing, amendments, references and so on), and will do the same with the PhD. If you find anything of interest to you, please browse further through the postings, ‘search this blog’, quote what I say (with suitable acknowledgement, reference, link or trackback) and if you wish, post or email me your comments.

Dancing with Strangers

18 February 2006

‘Dancing with Strangers’ by Inga Clendinnen,
(Cambridge University Press, 2005), describes an encounter between two
different worlds, the first contacts between Europeans and native (aboriginal)
Australians.

Inga Clendinnen starts the book in South
America and retells the story of Charles Darwin meeting the native inhabitants
of Tierra del Fuego. She quotes Darwin saying, in contrast with modern
assumptions of a universal shared humanity: “I could not have believed how
wide was the difference between savage and civilised man; it is greater than
between a wild and domesticated animal.” Only after going ashore and
meeting the Fuegans face to face, did Darwin and his party establish some kind
of rapport, by dancing with the natives.

She then describes a similar event,
recorded by Lieutenant William Bradley, when the British fleet, of soldiers, sailors, settlers and convicts, landed at Sydney Cove in Australia on
29th January 1788 and met the local inhabitants: “these people
mixed with ours and all hands danced together.” Bradley later painted a
picture of Broken Bay, with the British sailors and native Australians dancing
hand in hand, reminiscent of children playing Ring a Ring of Roses, and his
picture is reproduced on the cover of the book.

The theme of ‘Dancing with Strangers’ is
the experience of a common shared humanity and how two very different societies
tried, unsuccessfully, to come to terms with each other.

I was interested in this book, not only for
the subject, which is fascinating in its own right, but as an example of
historical sources speaking for themselves. Inga Clendinnen is no advocate of
‘scissors and paste’ history; writing, as she describes others in her field
have done, by: “piecing together snippets derived from a range of
narratives, perspectives and sensibilities in chronological order, and calling
the resulting ribbon patchwork ‘objective history.” Much of the fascination of her book is her
interpretation of the actions and motivation of the native Australians, who,
unlike the British, left no written records of their own. But she does tell a
story, she introduces the reader to the characters who have written the
accounts which have survived and she helps us see the events through their
eyes. Her reference to Darwin, her retelling of the two stories of Dancing with
Strangers, the contemporary illustration on the cover and the title of the book
itself, all help convey the vividness and reality of the past. As she relates
in the introduction, her own personal experience of a visit to a derelict
settlement at the northern tip of Australia first showed her “that the past
… had once been as real as the present, which is always an electrifying
realisation.”

As Graham Swift’s fictional history teacher
says in his novel ‘Waterland’:“what history teaches us is to avoid illusion
and make believe, to lay aside dreams, moonshine, cure-alls, wonder workings,
pie-in-the-sky – to be realistic.”

Postmodernism

12 November 2005

Returning to the study of history after a gap of 30 years, I am delighted to find that the Postmodern movement passed me by.

Asked to read and comment on Keith Jenkins, Rethinking History, (Routledge 1991) and Refiguring History (Routledge 2003), I was amazed that his re-hashes of ideas from the 1960s and 1970s have been taken seriously and are apparently so influential.

If anyone reading this blog likes or agrees with what Keith Jenkins has written, please add a comment or email me. I’d be delighted to hear from you.

I remember discovering works such as Borges’ Labyrinths, Albert Camus’ The Rebel and George Steiner’s Language and Silence. These are all good or great writers, who said it all much better many years ago.

You can’t translate ideas taken from literature, let alone literary criticism, and use these as criticisms of historical writing, or the study of history itself.

History is different from literature. History is not the same thing as an historical novel, any more than science fiction is same thing as science.

It’s fine to say that a work of literature can be interpreted in many different ways, and that all interpretations are equally valid. This is true, for literature, as a work that draws its strength from the author’s imagination and the reader’s response to the author’s ideas and how these are expressed in the work.

It’s also fine to say that there is no certainty in history and we can never know, for sure, what really happened.

Life is just the same, as Bishop Berkeley and the idealist philosophers showed centuries ago. How can I know that the table in front of me is real? I can see it and touch it, but as the only way I can experience it is through my own senses, how can I know that it really exists and is not just a figment of my imagination. But so what?

This does not mean that all historical interpretations are equally valid, or that students of history should spend their time studying texts comprising what people have written about the past, rather than attempting to discover for themselves "how it really was."

When we study history, it does matter if the events we describe really happened, even though we can never know for certain if they did, or not.

The power of history lies in the shared belief between the writer and reader that the events described really happened.

The novelist Graham Smith expressed this better than anyone when he said (in Waterland, quoted by David Cannadine in British History, Past Present and Future, 1987):

"… what history teaches us is to avoid illusion and make believe, to lay aside dreams, moonshine, cure-alls, wonder workings, pie-in-the-sky – to be realistic."