too much work in history is neither art nor science. It is sometimes defended as “pure research” like that of the mathematician, whose formulas have no knowable immediate use. But the pure scientist is working on data which open toward infinity in their possible future uses. This is not true of the historian working on a dead battle or an obscure figure. Also, the proportion of scientists working on “pure research” is quite small. The historian’s situation is the reverse; the proportion working on applicable data is tiny. Only when the pendulum swings the other way will the historian be able justly to complain that pure research is being crowded out.
Enlarging the social sector of historiography requires, as a start, removing the shame from “subjectivity.” Benedetto Croce undertook this, as far back as 1920, reacting against the strict claims of “scientific history”: what von Ranke called history “as it actually was,” and what Bury called “simply a science, no less and no more.” Croce openly avowed that what he chose to investigate in the past was determined by “an interest in the life of the present” and that past facts must answer “to a present interest.” 3 In America, James Harvey Robinson said: “The present has hitherto been the willing victim of the past; the time has now come when it should turn on the past and exploit it in the interest of advance.” 4
But this confession of concern for current problems made other scholars uneasy. Philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy, for instance, said the aims of the historian must not be confused with those of the “social reformer,” and that the more a historian based his research on problems of “the period in which he writes” then “the worse historian he is likely to be.” The job of the historian, he declared (this was in the era of the Memorial Day Massacre, Guernica, and the Nuremberg Laws) is “to know whether … certain events, or sequences of events, happened at certain past times, and what … the characters of those events were.” When philosophers suggest this is not the first business of a historian, Lovejoy said, “they merely tend to undermine his morals as a historian.”
At the bottom of the fear of engagement, it seems to me, is a confusion between ultimate values and instrumental ones. To start historical enquiry with frank adherence to a small set of ultimate values—that war, poverty, race hatred, prisons, should be abolished; that mankind constitutes a single species; that affection and cooperation should replace violence and hostility—such a set of commitments places no pressure on its advocates to tamper with the truth. The claim of Hume and his successors among the logical positivists, that no should can be proved by what is, has its useful side, for neither can the moral absolute be disproved by any factual discovery.*
Confusion on this point is shown by Irwin Unger, in his article “The ‘New Left’ and American History,” 5 where he says:
If there has been no true dissent in America; if a general consensus over capitalism, race relations, and expansionism has prevailed in the United States; if such dissent as has existed has been crankish and sour, the product not of a maladjusted society but of maladjusted men—then American history may well be monumentally irrelevant for contemporary radicalism.
Unger seems to believe that a radical historian who is opposed to capitalism must find such opposition to capitalism in the American past in order to make the study of history worthwhile for him; the implication is that if he does not find such opposition he may invent it, or exaggerate what he finds. But the factual data need not contain any premonition of the future for the historian to advocate such a future. The world has been continually at war for as long as we can remember; yet the historian who seeks peace, and indeed who would like his research to have an effect on society in behalf of peace, need not distort the martial realities of the past. Indeed, his recording of that past and its effects may itself be a very effective way of reminding the reader that the future needs kinds of human relationships which have not been very evident in the past.
(Unger continues to make the same mistake in this essay when, discussing William A. Williams’ The Contours of American History, he notes that it shows general American acceptance of private property and says “The Contours proves a constant embarrassment to the younger radical scholars.”)
For an American historian with an ultimate commitment to racial equality there is no compulsion to ignore the facts that many slaveholders did not use whips on their slaves, that most slaves did not revolt, that some Negro officeholders in the Reconstruction period were corrupt, or that the homicide rate has been higher among Negroes than whites. But with such a commitment, and more concerned to shape the future than to recount the past for its own sake, the historian would be driven to point out what slavery meant for the “well-treated” slave; to explain how corruption was biracial in the 1870’s as in all periods; to discuss Uncle Tomism along with the passivity of Jews in the concentration camps and the inertia of thirty million poor in an affluent America; to discuss the relationship between poverty and certain sorts of crime.*
Unyielding dedication to certain instrumental values, on the other hand—to specific nations, organizations, leaders, social systems, religions, or techniques, all of which claim their own efficacy in advancing the ultimate values—creates powerful pressures for hiding or distorting historical events. A relentless commitment to his own country may cause an American to glide over the elements of brutality in American “diplomatic history” (the term itself manufactures a certain aura of gentility). Compare, for instance, James Reston’s pious column for Easter Sunday, 1965, on the loftiness of American behavior toward other countries, with Edmund Wilson’s harsh, accurate summary of American expansionism in his introduction to Patriotic Gore.
It was rigid devotion to Stalin, rather than to the ultimate concerns of a humane Marxism, that led to fabrication of history in the Soviet Union about the purges and other things. After 1956, a shift in instrumental gods led to counter-fabrication. With the advent of the cold war, the United States began to outdo the Soviet Union in the large-scale development of government-supported social science research which assumed that an instrumental value—the nation’s foreign policy—was identical with peace and freedom.
Thus, teams of social scientists under contract to the armed forces took without question the United States government’s premise that the Soviet Union planned to invade Western Europe, and from this worked out all sorts of deductions for policy. Now it turns out (and we are told this by the same analysts) that premise was incorrect. This is replaced not by the overthrow of dogma itself, but by substituting a new assumption—that Communist China intends to take over all of Asia and eventually the world—and so the computers have begun to click out policy again. The absolutization of an instrumental value—in this case, current U. S. foreign policy (in other cases, Soviet policy or Ghanaian policy or whatever) distorts the results of research from the beginning.*
Knowing that commitments to instrumental values distort the facts often leads scholars to avoid commitment of any kind. Boyd Schafer, reporting for the American Historical Association on the international congress of historians held in Vienna in the summer of 1965, notes an attempt at one session to introduce the question of Vietnam. The executive body of the Congress “firmly opposed the introduction of any current political question,” saying the organization “had been and could only be devoted to scientific historical studies.” Here were twenty-four hundred historians from forty nations, presumably an enormous assembly of data and insights from all branches of history; if this body could not throw any light on the problem of Vietnam, what claim can anyone make that history is studied to help us understand the present?
It testifies to the professionalization, and therefore the dehumanization of the scholar, that while tens of thousands of them gather annually in the United States alone, to hear hundreds of papers on scattered topics of varying significance, there has been no move to select a problem—poverty, race prejudice, the war in Vietnam, alternative methods of social change—for concentrated attention by some one conference.
But
