The story about the story

A pamphlet about a man who was still alive

In 1819 a small pamphlet went on sale in London, printed for J. Hatchard of Piccadilly and signed by nobody. It was called Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte. Its argument was that the Emperor of the French probably never existed. The newspapers contradicted each other, the pamphlet said; the witnesses only repeated what they had been told; the whole story was far too marvelous. “Supposing there be a state-prisoner at St. Helena ... how do we know who he is?” it asks. People had seen only “a man in a cocked hat, who, they were told, was Buonaparte.” At that moment the man in the cocked hat was alive and well, at Longwood on the island of St Helena, where he had arrived in October 1815. He died there on 5 May 1821.

The author was Richard Whately (1787–1863), then a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and later Archbishop of Dublin. The pamphlet was a joke with a target. It took the rules that the Scottish philosopher David Hume had laid down in his essay “Of Miracles,” which Hume used to cast doubt on reports of miracles, and applied them to the best-attested man of the age. If those rules proved Napoleon a myth, Whately wanted readers to ask, what was wrong with the rules? The pamphlet went through many editions, and the joke is still taught, because it asks a real question in a funny way: what makes us trust that something happened?

Napoleon had his own view of the matter. In the St Helena conversations recorded by Las Cases in 1816 he is quoted as asking what the truth of history is, generally speaking, and answering: a fable agreed upon. He said he was repeating a saying, and it is indeed older than he is. It is traced to Fontenelle in 1724. But it states, in four words, the question of this lesson. That question is called metahistory: not what happened, but how anyone knows, and who decides what counts.

How a fact is made

After the First World War, the confident nineteenth-century picture wobbled. Lesson 2 met the German tradition called Historismus, the view that every age must be understood on its own terms. If every age has its own standards, is there any standpoint from which one can judge? Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923) gathered his worries in Der Historismus und seine Probleme (1922); he died the next year with it unfinished. Others worried that the past is rewritten by every present. In Italy, Benedetto Croce wrote in 1917 that every true history is contemporary history. He did not mean recent history. He meant that a document comes alive only when a present concern needs it. In England, R. G. Collingwood, whose The Idea of History appeared after his death in 1946, wrote that all history is the history of thought: the historian’s task is to re-enact in his own mind the thought behind an action, and not to paste together sources.

In the United States, Carl Becker told the American Historical Association in 1931, in his address “Everyman His Own Historian,” that every person is a historian, as everyone sorts through a coal bill and a memory of what was ordered. In an essay of 1910 he had written that the facts of history do not exist for any historian until he creates them. Charles Beard’s 1935 article, “That Noble Dream,” attacked the dream of telling the past as it actually was.

The lecture series gives a sharp form to this idea: an event is not a fact. It credits Hayden White with it. The point is right, but it is not White’s. It comes from Becker, who wrote in a lecture of 1926 (printed only in 1955) that as an actual event it has vanished and there is no fact until someone affirms it; then from E. H. Carr, in What Is History? (1961), who separates the “facts of the past” from “historical facts.” Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon is a fact of history; the crossings by countless other people, Carr says, interest nobody. “The facts speak only when the historian calls on them,” says Carr. He also describes history as a continuous process of interaction between the historian and the facts, an unending dialogue between present and past. Later the anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot (Silencing the Past, 1995) distinguished what happened from what is said to have happened.

In this course’s reading, a fact is an event that has passed through two filters. The first is significance: someone has to ask a question that makes the event matter, which is the historian’s choice. The second is verification, and this one is not a matter of taste. Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos set out the rules in 1898: history is made with documents, and a document must be tested from the outside (is it genuine? when and where was it made?) and from the inside (could the author know, and had the author reason to lie?). Lorenzo Valla’s demolition of the Donation of Constantine, in Lesson 2, is the model case. Marc Bloch’s The Historian’s Craft is the best short book on the method.

A plot for the past

Hayden White (1928–2018) was an American historian, born in Martin, Tennessee, who taught for many years in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His book Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973) made the field’s question famous. White took the word “metahistory” from the critic Northrop Frye, who used it for the old speculative philosophies of history, and turned it around: the metahistorical element is the set of choices, poetic and philosophical, hidden inside every history. A historical work, he wrote in the preface, is a “verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse.”

The book examines eight great nineteenth-century writers, four historians (Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, Burckhardt) and four philosophers of history (Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Croce). White finds in each a combination of choices. A historian emplots the events, giving them the shape of a story, one of four (here in simplified form): romance (a hero overcomes), tragedy (the hero falls, and something is learned), comedy (a conflict is reconciled), or satire (a disillusion: things are not as they seemed). The historian also argues in a certain way and carries a certain ideology. And the language itself leans on one of four tropes, or figures of speech: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, or irony. White treated these as tendencies, not as a table into which each author fits. In a 1974 essay he went further, regretting the reluctance to treat historical narratives as “verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found.”

The lecture series puts the point in one line: history may refuse to be philosophy or science, but it cannot refuse to be literature. That sentence is not White’s own. It is a paraphrase, and it sounds more radical than he was. His own lines are that history is a verbal artifact, and that it is at once poetic, scientific, and philosophical in its concerns. His later essays allow that historians can explain things scientifically, and say that what interested him was how they constitute a past as something that can be told. See for yourself what changes when only the plot changes.

A trial about footnotes

The argument was not only academic. At a conference at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1990, historians met to ask how far the stories we tell can represent the Nazi murder of the Jews. The papers, edited by Saul Friedländer as Probing the Limits of Representation (Harvard University Press, 1992), included White’s “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth” and Carlo Ginzburg’s “Just One Witness.” Critics argued that a theory in which plots are chosen cannot say why a denier’s plot is wrong. White did not defend denial. His position was that the evidence constrains the account, but does not by itself pick its plot. Ginzburg replied that the judge and the historian both work from proof, and that rhetoric is a tool of proof, not its opposite. The Italian historian Arnaldo Momigliano had earlier (1981) objected to sorting historians by their figures of speech: history should be built around facts and problems. Richard J. Evans, in In Defence of History (1997), argued that the postmodern view of history could give comfort to deniers. Defenders of White, such as Hans Kellner and Frank Ankersmit, answered that he never denied that evidence matters and only insisted that evidence does not write itself into a story.

Then a court tested the question. David Irving, an English writer of books about the Second World War, sued the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, for libel because her book Denying the Holocaust had called him a denier. The trial in the High Court in London opened on 11 January 2000 and ran for 32 court days, until 15 March. Irving argued his own case. Richard Evans was one of the expert witnesses for the defense, and his report followed Irving’s footnotes back to the sources they cited. On 11 April 2000 Mr Justice Gray gave judgment for the defendants. He found that Irving “for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence.” He found, too, that Irving had presented Hitler in an unwarrantedly favorable light and was an active Holocaust denier. The judge said at the outset that it was not for him to rule on what happened under the Nazis; that was for historians. But he could ask what a conscientious historian would have done with the evidence, and it was on that question that Irving’s case failed. Evans told the story in Lying About Hitler (2001).

The case did not decide any question about narrative theory, and Gray did not rule on White’s ideas. It does show something. A historian can be checked, line by line, against the sources, and some plots fail that check. In this course’s reading, that is the answer to the strongest form of the “fable agreed upon.” The agreement is not arbitrary, because documents, witnesses, and measurements can contradict a story. And the storytelling is not avoidable either, because the evidence never arranges itself.

Seeing the whole

Some thinkers have tried to see the whole of history at once. Cicero, in On the Orator (55 BC), called history the witness of the times, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity. In Naples in the early 1700s, Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) argued that we can know history in a way we cannot know nature, because people made it: “the true and the made are convertible,” as he put it as early as 1710. In his New Science (1725, with a final edition in 1744) he saw each nation pass through an age of gods, an age of heroes, and an age of men, and then, after decay, a return, a ricorso, that is not mere repetition. In 1784 Immanuel Kant offered an “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” not as a proven fact but as a guiding thread: history as the slow working out, through human conflict, of a world order; and from “the crooked timber of humanity,” he wrote, nothing quite straight can be made.

The grandest scheme was Hegel’s. On 13 October 1806 he wrote from Jena, the day before the battle, that he had seen the Emperor, “this world-soul,” riding out of the town. In Berlin, between 1822 and 1831, Hegel lectured on the philosophy of history, and his students published the lectures in 1837. The key sentence in the English of John Sibree reads: “The History of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom.” History, he said, works through “the cunning of reason,” which sets the passions of individuals to work for itself. Chinese readers will notice that his scheme begins with China as the childhood of the world, in which only one person is free: a Eurocentric picture that has long since been challenged.

Others followed. Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918, 1922) saw cultures growing and dying like organisms. Arnold Toynbee’s twelve-volume A Study of History (1934–1961) saw civilizations rising by answering challenges with a creative minority; the number of civilizations he counted varies from volume to volume, between about 19 and 26, depending on how one counts. Critics such as Hugh Trevor-Roper and Pieter Geyl said Toynbee imposed his pattern on the evidence, and his reputation fell after about 1960. Karl Popper attacked the whole enterprise in The Poverty of Historicism, which appeared as articles in 1944–45 and as a book in 1957. His argument was that the growth of human knowledge cannot itself be predicted, so the course of history cannot be, and no scientific law of historical development exists. The book is dedicated to the victims of the belief in inexorable laws of historical destiny. Course 4, Newton’s clockwork universe, met Laplace’s demon, a mind that could predict everything; Popper’s argument is its answer for history.

In the summer of 1989 the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama published an essay, “The End of History?,” in the magazine The National Interest, months before the Berlin Wall opened on 9 November. Note the question mark. Reading Hegel through the French thinker Alexandre Kojève, Fukuyama argued that the end point of the contest between ideologies was liberal democracy, with no serious rival left. He did not say that events would stop; he said that rival ideological systems had run out. His book The End of History and the Last Man followed in 1992. Samuel Huntington answered in 1993 with “The Clash of Civilizations?” and Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx, also 1993. Fukuyama himself has since qualified parts of his view, in later books such as Political Order and Political Decay (2014).

The historical gaze

What do these attempts have in common? Each chooses a distance from the past. Sima Qian wanted to “examine the border between Heaven and humans” and “master the changes from ancient to modern”: the whole of Chinese time, through five hundred thousand characters. Braudel taught that history runs at three speeds, the slow time of geography, the middle time of societies and economies, and the fast time of events and people. David Christian arranges 13.8 billion years into eight thresholds. In this course’s reading, a gaze is a chosen distance from the past. A person’s life, a civilization’s centuries, and the universe’s billions of years each show something the others hide, and none of them is the only true view. Braudel’s clocks and Christian’s thresholds are not rivals; they are two zoom settings.

And a gaze comes with a discipline. From Lesson 1: the past that history gives us is a selection, built from evidence. From Lesson 2: there are many ways to arrange it, by person or by year, as a mirror for rulers, as a conversation with the dead, as context, as long duration. From Lesson 3: the frame can be stretched to the whole cosmos, but the stretch has costs (people shrink, and a progress story creeps in). From this lesson: a fact is an event that has passed tests, a plot is a choice, and the two must be kept apart. In this series the cosmic, living, and earthly parts of the big story are told by the sciences themselves: Course 7, We are stardust, Course 8, The journey of life, and Course 20, Thinking about the Earth. What this course adds is the view from the other end: how people have known any of it, and how to hold such a story honestly.