THE UNI VE R S I T Y L E C T UR E S 1968

AttemptingHistory

W. K. HANCOCK

THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

This book was published by ANU Press between 1965–1991.

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First published in 1969

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SBN 7081 0275 lLibrary of Congress Catalog no. 69-15857 National Library of Australia reg. no. AUS 68-3203

forP. H. PARTRIDGE

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the word history has various meanings. To most people nowadays it means the human past, or fragments of it; in this sense we speak, for example, of the history of Australia or Germany, of Medicine, or of the Fine Arts. But history can also mean the historian’s attempt to explore past happenings and to tell a story about them. That was the meaning of the Greek word, loropla, and that will be my meaning in these lectures.

I shall speak a good deal in the first personal pronoun. Please, don’t damn my Is. The guild of historians is so large and various that it would be presumptuous for any member of it to speak on anybody’s behalf except his own. I spy fellow-historians in this audience and I anticipate hot criticism from some of them; but I shall be speaking neither for them nor to them; instead I shall be trying to tell the members of other guilds what it means to be an historian.

It is my hope to repay a little of the large debt which I owe to those men of science who have taken the trouble in their books or broadcasts to tell laymen like myself what their work is and how they set about it. Let me cite two brilliant examples of recent years. The first is Agnes Arber’s short book, The Mind and the Eye. A reviewer in the British Medical Journal called it ‘a testament of biology’. He went on to say that it would delight all research workers, and not merely biologists. Certainly, it has delighted my young historians. They have found in the early chapters not only inspiration, but sound practical advice about how to discover their fields of research and how to till them and in the fulness of time harvest them. Later on, if not now, they will find inspiration in the concluding chapters, which examine the broad perspectives and

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the deep foundations of a life dedicated to research and scholar­ship. 1

My second example is the collection of addresses and papers which P. E. Medewar published recently under the title, The Art of the Soluble. Medewar makes me feel how much nonsense people have been talking about ‘the two cultures’ which—it is said— contain and imprison those two separate tribes: theimaginative but undisciplined humanists; the disciplined but un­imaginative scientists. According to Medewar, imagination is a chief glory of science. A man’s imagination generates ideas; his disciplined intelligence tries them out. Conjecture and refutation, the recognition of an hypothesis and the attempt to prove it wrong —that is the rhythm of scientific endeavour. My endeavour as an historian follows the same rhythm. When my brain grows stiff a person whom I call Edgar sets himself to work for me. Edgar lives deep down in the recesses of my unconscious mind. It pleases him to wake me in the morning with the gift of some bright idea. I receive the gift with dark suspicion. ‘This idea’, I tell Edgar, ‘is too good to be true.’ I start picking holes in it. Before long, the engine of my brain is running smoothly again. A physiologist friend has told me that he also has a fellow working for him down below. His fellow, he says, answers to the name Ethelred.2

Since natural scientists and historians both belong to the species homo sapiens, it would, indeed, be surprising if their minds were to work in totally dissimilar ways. Nevertheless, conspicuous dis­similarities are normally observable in their purposes and, conse­quently, in their methods. Medewar illuminates the contrast. In confutation of those people who say that the burden of scientific facts is becoming more than university students can cope with inside the time limits now imposed upon them, he declares:

The ballast of factual information, so far from being just about1 The Mind and the Eye was first published by the Cambridge University Press in 1954 and is purchasable in a paperback edition. Agnes Arber (1879-1960) was a plant morphologist of high distinction. I am indebted to Dr Denis Garrett, Reader in Botany at Cambridge, for sending me photo­stats of many reviews of her superb book.2 The mathematician Henri Poincare in Science et Methode (Paris 1908) emphasised the imaginative element of scientific discovery. The philosopher Karl Popper in Logik der Forschung (Vienna 1934, Eng. trans. 1959) expounded the hypothetic-deductive method of science. P. E. Medewar’s reflections on these matters are to be found in the last two papers o f his The A rt of the Soluble (London 1966).

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to sink us, is growing daily less. The factual burden of a science varies inversely with its maturity. As a science advances, par- tbular facts are comprehended within, and therefore in a sense annihilated by, general statements of steadily increasing explan­atory power and compass—whereupon the facts need no longer bi known explicitly, i.e. spelled out and kept in mind. In all sciences we are being progressively relieved of the burden of singular instances, the tyranny of the particular.

But I must remain submissive to that tyranny. As an historian, I reccgnise the particular as my business.

Some people consider it a low kind of business, if not down­right ridiculous. A story is told of Ferdinand Gregorovius, the learned German who produced in fourteen volumes his Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter. Year by year he looked forward to two months of fossicking in Italian archives and to learned talk with his friend Gino Capponi, the historian of Florence. His visits normally were in the spring; but one year he made a second visit in the autumn. A surprised Capponi spied him at work in the Vatcan Library and the following conversation took place:

Capponi: Whatever has brought you back again this year? Gregorovius: I’ve just got married. This is a honeymoon trip. Capponi: My dear fellow, I do congratulate you. Come round this evening to my place and bring Frau Gregorovius with you. Gregorovius: I should love to bring her; but there wasn’t enough money for both of us to come to Rome for the honeymoon.

The flavour of that merry tale (which I perhaps have embroidered a little) is affectionately contemptuous.

The contempt has deep roots in two millennia of non-stop phibsophical argument about particulars and universals. For Plato, particulars possessed no intrinsic reality; at best, they achieved derivative reality from the universal ‘forms’ to which they approximated. Knowledge of ‘forms’, of the universal, was the only true knowledge; mathematical statement was the supremely rational statement. On these crucial issues Descartes—as I in­expertly interpret his teaching—followed Plato. Descartes despised histmans and all the other pedlars of particularity. Galileo was his exemplar of intellectual endeavour; in his great structures of mathematical reasoning, Descartes saw revealed the universal laws whi:h governed particular events. If a man knew laws, he could not only explain but also predict events; if he merely knew particulars, he vas in a dead end. Astronomers could predict eclipses of the

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sun and moon; but no historian, so far, had predicted a war or a revolution. Historians, with their ridiculous rummaging in the ragbag of the particular, were just like children. Surely it was time for them to grow up?

Descartes did not, of course, use those very words; in words of my own I have been trying to make you see that history had no place in his essentially mathematical model of rational inquiry. When physics became the preferred model, the prestige of history sank still lower, if that was possible. The science of physics, as it became increasingly experimental, was revealing the ‘uniformity of nature’ as a system of causal and mechanical laws. Why could not an historian be just like a physicist? Notice was served upon historians that their business henceforward must be to formulate the universal law of historical phenomena.

Let me cite some examples. In 1784 Immanuel Kant published his Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitical Point of View. While admitting the apparent disorder of history, Kant still believed it possible to ‘discover a universal purpose of nature in this paradoxical movement of human things’. Nature, he declared, had brought forth a Kepler to reduce the eccentric paths of the planets to definite laws and had then brought forth a Newton to explain those laws by a universal natural cause. In her own good time, Nature would surely bring forth a second Newton to formulate the universal law of human development. Pending this great event, Kant submitted his own interim report on Nature’s ‘hidden plan’ for the perfection of mankind. Many of Kant’s contemporaries shared his assurance. The Marquis de Condorcet, for example, grew up with mathematics and physics, blossomed into philosophy, and demonstrated the infinite perfectibility of human society at the very time when his Jacobin enemies were hunting him to his death.3

Kant and Condorcet were heralds of an idea which Plato and Descartes had not entertained—the idea of development, of pro­gress. Their successors in the nineteenth century tried to inject scien­tific rigour into that idea. They said in effect— ‘Very well: things move forward through time, they develop: what, then, are the causal laws of development?’ In 1830, Auguste Comte published the first

3 In 1794 the Jacobins caught Condorcet before he had time to finish his Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progres de I’esprit humain. The day after they caught him he was found dead in his cell.

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volume of his monumental Cours de Philosophie Positive. Comte asserted that the progress of human knowledge in all its branches was governed by a law of evolutionary stages: first, the theological or fictitious stage; secondly, the metaphysical or abstract stage; thirdly, the scientific or positive stage. The investigators of natural phenomena, he declared, had long since arrived at stage 3; it was time for the investigators of social phenomena to join them there. Inductive reasoning must be their common method; the formulation of laws their common aim. Positivism, as Comte proclaimed it and as majority opinion in his time acclaimed it, was a manifesto of the methodological identity of natural and social science. Although its prestige was beginning to wane by the end of the nineteenth cen­tury, its spirit is mighty still and may be seen at work among historians—or lapsed historians. Arnold Toynbee, despite his latter-day hesitations, surely set out in a positivist mood on his voyage through world history, with intent to discover by empirical study and inductive reasoning the causes of the birth, growth, and death of human civilisations.

Toynbee has arraigned workaday historians for their obsessive pursuit of piddling particularity within their ‘unintelligible’ fields of study. A century before Toynbee, the English positivist Buckle reproached them for their failure to formulate laws; that failure, Buckle said, could only be the fault of their ‘indolent and inferior minds. My fellow-guildsmen have been enduring for a long time the contempt of superior intelligences. Madox, the illuminator of the records of the English Exchequer, wrote early in the eighteenth century: ‘The Lovers of Antiquities are commonly looked upon to be men of a low impolite genius fit only for the Rough and Barbarick part of learning’. Nevertheless, Madox did not permit himself to be intimidated. He belonged to that heroic band of English scholars whose labours in three successive generations built the foundations upon which our knowledge of the Saxon, Norman and medieval past o: England still stands.4

I cannot but admire the fortitude— or, if you will have it so, the obstinicy—of my fellow-guildsmen. In nineteenth-century Germany they took no more heed of positivist contempt than their English predecessors had taken of Cartesian disdain. Early in the century a

4 See Eavid C. Douglas, The English Scholars (London 1939) and (for an acount of the myths which these scholars destroyed) J. A. Pocock, The Aicient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge 1957).

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band of historians at Göttingen was already engaged in an ardent search for new historical evidence and in the rigorous sifting and critical evaluation of that evidence. The Göttingen tradition flowered in the mid-century achievement of Leopold von Ranke. He wrote long and learned historical works on Germany, England, France, and the Papacy, and in his old age he launched himself upon the immense task of producing a ‘World History’ in many volumes. 5 I shall not discuss his writings; but I shall quote two of his sayings. The historian’s task, he said, was to tell the story of past events ‘just as they happened’. That saying, surely, demanded more of the historian than he could achieve; yet the demand had its grandeur. Every period of the human past, Ranke said again, was ‘immediate to God’. In that saying he repudiated the positivist doctrine. He believed that historical endeavour need not stand or fall by its success or failure in discovering causal laws purporting to contain and to explain all the past ages of human experience. Each age, he declared, possessed value in its own right; each in its own right was a proper object of historical investigation.

When Ranke died, and for a considerable time thereafter, the prestige of historians stood high. For this happy situation they had to thank not only their own successful search for particulars, but also the failure of their critics to produce those much-heralded laws. The philosophes of the eighteenth century had produced, not laws, but exclamations in the optative mood. The positivists of the nine­teenth century had produced, not laws, but assertions which—to say the most for them—fell a long way short of Newtonian pre­cision. Some people say that the situation today remains substan­tially the same.

Be this as it may, the positivist conception of scientific law seems nowadays too unsubtle for serious scientific use. Let me return again to The Art of the Soluble. Medewar lives in a stochastic universe. Probabilities and problems are his concern. He launches a frontal assault against ‘the myth of induction’. After reporting the turns of speech which one would hear in a biological laboratory if one listened through the keyhole, he comments:

Scientific thought has already reached a pretty sophisticated level before it finds expression in language such as this. This is not the language of induction. It does not suggest that scientists are

B Ranke died without completing his vast project. ‘World History’ as he conceived it, did not perhaps deserve that name; it was European-centric.

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hunting for facts, still less that they are busy formulating ‘laws’. Scientists are building explanatory structures, telling stories which are scrupulously tested to see if they are stories about real life. 6

That last sentence comes pretty close to the sentence that I should write if I were challenged to produce a terse summary of my endeavour as an historian.

Nevertheless, I must once again take pains not to smudge the irreducible contrasts. In the sentence just quoted, my emphasis would fall upon telling the scrupulously tested story; whereas Medewar’s emphasis falls upon building the explanatory structure. To be sure, I too spend some time and energy upon re-examining and sharpening my conceptual tools;7 but my purposes are different from Medewar’s purposes. When he pursues the particular it is for the sake of the general; when I pursue the general it is for the sake of the particular. On the other hand, he and I are in accord on one important issue. Just as I insist that historians are, and ought to be, a mixed bag, so does he insist that ‘there is no one kind of scientist’. 8 He goes on to say that there is no such thing as the scientific mind or the scientific method. He goes on still further to denounce the snobbish and damaging distinction that is too often drawn between pure and applied science. I do not doubt that he extends his charity to the field-workers of geology and botany. I have a botanist friend, a man most competent in theory, who has given ten years or more of his life to tracking down take-all in wheat. This man, surely, has been almost as much concerned with the particular as historians are when they track the processes of monetary inflation in revolutionary France or a twentieth-century nation at war.

Philosophers, nowadays, are more appreciative than they used to be of historical particularity. I have taken some pleasure in charting the main current of their discussions on this issue. In the early eighteenth century, when historians were most despised, the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico stood up to defend them. I have made no serious study of Vico’s Scienza Nuova, but nobody can miss his reiterated vindication of the mind’s imaginative

6P. 152.71 have, for example, examined in books or articles concepts of the frontier, the metropolitan market, nationalism, and raison d’etat.8Medewar, p. 110.

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element. He did not believe it possible that men who stood chained upon their own narrow shelf of time could find a few formulae which would explain all human experience in all the historical ages. Other ages, he declared, had had other needs, aspirations, thoughts, images, and idioms. The illuminati of modem Europe, if they pro­posed seriously to think about the human past, would have to learn how not to think in the terms of their own fashionable concepts. They would have to explore the thought contained in legends, myths, metaphors, and parables. In short, they would have to nourish and to exercise their historical imaginations.

I am well aware how dangerous it can be to glorify imagination; the enemies of reason play that trick. For all that, or perhaps because of that, I wish to go a little further than Medewar has gone in considering the interplay between the imaginative and critical faculties. Verstehen—the German equivalent of understanding— was a key word in the writings of those nineteenth-century philoso­phers who were trying to understand and explain what a man like Ranke was doing. He was making himself a participator, the philosophers said, in the experience of people who had lived in other times and places. He was getting to know these people by empathy, by direct acquaintance. He was understanding them. How was he managing to do it? By steeping himself in the records which they had left of their activities, thoughts, and feelings. Naturally, he was all the time employing his critical faculties upon those records; but that exercise was instrumental for him; it was his road to Verstehen.

The doctrine of Verstehen, as expounded by Rickert, Dilthey, and other philosophers, spread from Germany to Italy and from Italy to England. Forty years ago I was the ardent and dutiful disciple of Benedetto Croce, Italy’s resurrected Vico; but today I shall skip Croce and introduce you briefly to a like-minded Englishman, R. G. Collingwood. Like Croce, Collingwood waged war against the positivists. He did not dispute their naive exposi­tions of scientific method; on the contrary, he made those expo­sitions the starting point of his argument for historical method. Scientists and historians, he said, both studied events, but these events were of different kinds. Events of the physical world could be described in terms of bodies and their movements; they could be studied from the outside, grouped into classes, and linked together in relations of cause and effect. But events of the human-historical

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world could not be studied in that way because they possessed not only an outside but an inside; their outside was matter, their inside was mind; they could not be understood except by getting to know the agent inside the act, the thought inside the deed. History thus became a re-thinking, or, as Collingwood put it, a re-enact­ment of past human experience.

In the game of top-doggery between champions of the universal and champions of the particular, Collingwood awards the prize to my side. But I have never played that game with any zest, nor do I enjoy winning the prize by a verdict which seems to me partisan. My feelings about Collingwood are mixed. He has brilliant insights, but he has also blind spots. Sometimes he demands too little from historians; he tells them, for example, that they need not explore the passionate and irrational drives of human behaviour because thought alone, conscious thought, constitutes the ‘inside’ of an historical event. At other times he demands too much from historians: he exhorts them, for example, to re-think Caesar’s thoughts the night before he crossed the Rubicon; a feat which they cannot perform, because no sufficient record survives of what Caesar was thinking that night. Empathy cannot take me into Caesar's tent.

R. G. Collingwood was a Prince Rupert of philosophers; he could lead a brilliant charge but he could not win the battle. Karl Popper, by contrast, is a Cromwell, a man of wrath who scatters his enemies and puts them to the sword. It is perverse of me, I know, :o parade the Roundhead with the Cavalier under the same colours; but Popper wages implacable war against Collingwood’s sworn enemies—those doctrinaires of all times and places who try to turn historians into law-mongers. In his polemical writings, Popper at times uses crude weapons—by which I mean, crude words. His favourite word historicism generates heat, but not light. Any ordinary person would assume, as I myself assumed until I read Popper’s books, that historicism signifies what real historians do; but, on the contrary, it signifies law-mongering, a thing which real historians do not do. We might have been spared this con­fusion.- Still, when all is said and done, Popper is a great fighter9 The ccnfusion is made worse because Popper from time to time gives historicum new twists of meaning. At the same time he distinguishes it from Troeltsch’s favourite word historism. If I wished thoroughly to bamboode an examination candidate I should ask him to enumerate and expound the various meanings of historism and historicism. But I suppose

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in a good cause. Thanks in large measure to him, historians can feel free at long last to pursue the particular, without having to endure the boring and silly reproaches of self-styled superior persons.

Even so, historians possess no licence to despise and disregard the general. In my imaginary conversation just now with Medewar I admitted, indeed I emphasised, their need to use the general for the illumination of the particular. Historians are not jackdaws; they do not collect particulars at random; they collect such particulars as they need for the stories they propose to tell. Their stories, if anybody is ever going to read them, must have a theme; they must hang together. This means that they must be not only descriptive but also explanatory.

In that last sentence I have reported an agreed opinion of the many pertinacious philosophers who have been arguing with each other throughout the past three decades about the nature and logical foundations of historical explanation.10 Last year I read about two dozen books and ten dozen articles on this theme. I must confess that they intimidated me at first. They reminded me of a period in my life as a tennis player when I felt fairly satisfied with my forehand drive, until an expert told me one day that I was playing it from the wrong foot. I made up my mind to get my foot­work right and after some months I did get it right, only to find that I had ruined my forehand drive. ‘Are the philosophers doing to me now’, I asked myself last year, ‘what the tennis expert did to me then?’ Today I can answer that question reassuringly. My bout with the philosophers has proved a muscle-building exercise. When next I play a hard historical game I shall expect to find more power in my drive.that we have to learn to live with the latter word, at least. Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism first appeared during the war as a series of articles in Economica and can now be read as a paperback (Routledge). The author pursues his theme further in The Open Society and its Enemies (Routledge 1945 and the three subsequent revised editions).10 In the following brief report on this protracted and pertinacious philo­sophical argument I shall cite only an occasional reference. Theories of History, edited by Patrick Gardiner (The Free Press, Illinois 1959) is a useful collection of articles and excerpts from books. The progress of the argument since 1959 can easily be followed in Journal of Philosophy, Mind, History and Theory, and other well-known periodicals. I have paid particular attention to the books and/or articles of Karl Popper, Carl G. Hempel, M. S. Scriven, Alan Donegan, William M. Dray, J. B. Gallie, and J. A. Passmore.

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I have only a minute or two to spare for reporting the long argument about historical explanation. My starting point is a quotation from the English translation of Karl Popper’s Logik der Forschung (1934).

To give a causal explanation of an event means to deduce a statement which describes it, using as premises of the deduction one or more universal laws, together with certain single state­ments, the initial conditions.That sentence does not refer to all explanations, but only to

causal explanations of events. Popper, when he wrote the sentence, was not thinking specifically of historical events. They became the subject matter of Carl G. Hempel’s much debated article, ‘The Function of General Laws in History’.11 Hempel maintained in effect that the logical structure of a causal explanation was the same in history as it was in natural science or in any other branch of rational inquiry; historians, whether they knew it or not, had to start from general laws, if they were hingeing their stories upon causal sequences. And this, he said, they were all the time doing, as anybody could see by listing the words which held their stories together—words like ‘since’, ‘because’, ‘therefore’, ‘consequently’, ‘naturally’.

Hempel, I have to confess, frightened me at first. After taking so much trouble to get rid of laws as the object of my endeavour, I hated the prospect of having to bring them back as my instruments of thought. However, I soon discovered that the laws that Hempel was talking about were a very different thing from the dreary laws of Auguste Comte. Some philosophers even told me that I had no need to trouble myself with laws of any kind; truisms, they said, were good enough for historical explanation, provided the truisms had tough roots in common experience and common sense. These philosophers, it seemed to me, were rather too tolerant of my naivety. However, they made one conspicuously helpful observa­tion. The whole argument, they said, had got off on the wrong foot by taking it for granted that historical explanation is concerned all the time with causal connections between events. That is not true. The historian, like the man in the street, or, for that matter, the man in the laboratory, has to ask not only Why? but also Who? What? Where? When? How?u Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 39 (1942). Hempel defined a general law as a statement of ‘universal conditional form . . . capable of being confirmed or disconfirmed by suitable empirical findings’.

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Let me put the issue to the test by examining two books which I once had good cause to know well, British War Economy and the Survey of British Commonwealth Aßairs, Volume I. I was co­author of the first book with Margaret Gowing, whose recently published volume, Britain and Atomic Energy, has won the acclaim both of historians and physicists. In producing the second book 1 had the support of an Australian academic lawyer, Richard Latham, whose death in an air sortie over Norway on 11 April 1943 cut short an endeavour of the intellect and the will which had already achieved greatness.12 It gives me pleasure to remember these friends, one still living, the other dead, and to tell you for a change what we did.

The two books serve my present purpose for a second reason, namely, that they seem at first sight to be as different from each other as any two works of history could possibly be. By editorial decision and by the free choice of the co-authors,13 British War Economy excludes personalities, politics, and everything else that could distract the attention of readers from its single and severe theme: the economic effort of a modern nation at war. That effort is measured in figures. The entire book is built upon quantitative estimation. By contrast, the Survey of British Commonwealth Aßairs, Volume I contains no statistical matter but is brim full of persons, politics, races, nations, with their interests, passions, aspirations, and their arguments with each other about how— if at all—they propose to keep on living together as a community.

Now for the denouement. In each of these strikingly dissimilar books the language of causality is conspicuous by its absence. This news cannot surprise you more than it surprised me when I re­examined the books. Admittedly, I had never expected to find in them any formal statements of general law, but I had expected to find those betraying words which Hempel declared to be the stock- in-trade of historians—the words ‘since’, ‘because’, ‘therefore’, ‘naturally’ and all the others of that family. These words do not

12 R. T. E. Latham’s contribution to the Survey, a long chapter on The Law and the Commonwealth, has been republished in its own covers (Lon­don 1949). In an introduction to this edition I have briefly described his achievement as a scholar and as a participator in the common human experience of his time.13 N o conflict could arise, because I, as one of the authors, was obeying my own instructions as the editor of the Civil Series of United Kingdom War Histories.

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occur in either book. If the books tell coherent stories, as I believe they do, it is not because they are answering why questions. Their coherence has its root in the answers which they are all the time seeking, and sometimes finding, to questions which belong to the families of what and how.

These questions, some of my scientific friends tell me, are sufficient for their purposes as investigators of natural phenomena; but they do not satisfy E. H. Carr, the historian of political action in Soviet Russia. The study of history’, Carr asserts, ‘is the study of causes’.14 In reply to that pronouncement, let me say once again that there is no one kind of historian, just as there is no one kind of scientist; I give Carr leave to ask as many why questions as he likes, provided he will give me leave to plug along with my how questions.

To be sure, a why question sometimes sparks off a how question and sometimes re-emerges from it. To cite a simple example from British War Economy, in mid-1941 there were queues outside the food and clothing shops; but a year later it was quite a rare event for anybody to see that kind of queue. In our story of points rationing my colleague and I explained how this change of scene happened. Our account of the process contained by implication an explanation of the cause and was an invitation to economists to carry the causal analysis further; during the early 1950s scores of American economists were using British War Economy as a spring­board for their causal and conditionally-predictive studies of the economics of war. I know some political scientists who have used the Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs in much the same way. Its stories of how constitutional rule broke down in Newfoundland and Malta, or of how communal conflict flared up in Kenya, Ceylon, and Palestine, can quite easily spark off inquiries into why such things happened and why, given comparable conditions, they will happen again. Having got so far, the political scientist will soon find himself at grips with the phenomena of civil war, military dictator­ship, territorial partition, and some similar troubles of our time.

These economic and political investigations are necessary and useful. There is no bar against historians joining them. Some historians do join them; sometimes I have done so myself. How­ever, most historians stick most of the time to their home territory. The main reason, I think, is temperamental; some people are born

11 E. H. Carr, What is History? (London 1961), p. 81.13

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with an addiction towards abstraction, towards the complexities of experience. I come into the latter category. To be sure, I recognise abstraction as a glorious achievement of the human intellect. The Greeks abstracted number from numerical objects with such success that every experience of number within the mind corresponds exactly with similar experiences in the outer world. They tried to do the same thing with space and nearly brought it off; for two thousand years, men of science believed that they had brought it off. They tried to do the same with politics; but there they fell immeasurably short of their success with number; the activities of the political animal contain too many variables. Conse­quently, students of the political animal, as he behaved in ancient Greece, need to read not only Plato and Aristotle but also Hero­dotus and Thucydides. In modern studies, we still need these two approaches. Let economists and political scientists continue to abstract from the complexities of human experience the things that belong to their disciplines. Let historians continue to steep them­selves in the complexities.

There remains just one more piece of evidence that I wish to give. Historians, no matter how difficult their subject matter may be, must try to make it interesting. As practitioners of the art of story-telling they have many ways open to them. Let me mention one way that I have stumbled upon. It is the way of dramatic confrontation. British War Economy may have no persons in it; but it is brim full of argument. 15 Should the reserves of overseas purchasing power be guarded thriftily or should they be spent recklessly? Should the women be called up now or later? Should the queues be tackled by points rationing or by group rationing? Debates such as these never stop until the war stops. All of them, admittedly, are debates about the means of winning the war; that single purpose was not debated. By contrast, the Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs reports a never-ending debate not merely about means but about ends. The book opens with the confronta­tion of two ideas, imperium et libertas. The Commonwealth emerges. Irishmen confront the Commonwealth. Irishmen confront each other. In South Africa, Asians confront Europeans; Europeans confront each other. In Kenya, Africans confront Europeans and

15 British war historians received an editorial instruction from me not to play down interdepartmental conflicts but to give them their due weight in the policy-making process.

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Asians. In Ceylon, Tamils confront Sinhalese. In Palestine, Arabs confront Jews. When the book ends, all these confrontations remain unresolved. The destiny of the Commonwealth remains unresolved.

Some natural scientists may find it hard to tolerate or even to understand such inconclusiveness; but let me end this lecture, as I began it, by calling a biologist to witness. In the ninth chapter of The Mind and the Eye Agnes Arber reminds us that biologists also conduct inconclusive debates. This can happen, she says, because they are working at different levels of thought, congruent with the different levels of biological reality. The eye sees and the mind seeks to penetrate a multifaceted world. In such a world, polemics and ex cathedra pronouncements do not aid understanding. Agnes Arber pleads for ‘the full dramatic mode—that mode in which Shakespeare formulated the innumerable aspects of his wisdom’.1®

In no other way [she continues] can incompatibilities and har­monies find so effectual a medium. Every speech, written or spoken by one person, suffers under the disadvantage of being a simple sequence of words, linear in time or space; the dramatic form, on the other hand, gives opportunity for a number of sequences instead of one . . .. . . In science today, an author is expected to adopt, and to outline firmly, a single definite view, expressible in as few words as possible, and to conclude his treatise with a neat summary, readily comprehensible, and easy to remember. All this undoubt­edly means a gain in clarity, but it generally involves a corre­sponding sacrifice of truth. For Renan’s query—Qui sait si la finesse d’esprit ne consiste pas ä s’abstenir de conclure?—is as relevant to biology as to any other branch of the intellectual life. The very nature of scientific conclusions is to be inconclusive, and it is impossible for any biologist to hope, for one moment, that his own pronouncements will remain the last word.

Whether or not that last sentence is true for biology, it is true for history.

lflPp. 111-13.

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Persons

'geography is about maps; history is about chaps.’ That jingle tells us what the common reader expects to find, but not, necessarily, what he does find, in the history books. Some historians have put out the placard: ‘Chaps not admitted’. Chaps, they protest, are peculiar, idiosyncratic, variable, unpredictable, untidy, unmanage­able. ‘Impersonal forces’ lend themselves more readily to manage­ment and manipulation.

But how shall we define these impersonal forces? The English Utilitarians defined them as ‘springs of action’ or psychological ‘pro­pensities’ which were, they said, the primum mobile of all human behaviour. To be sure, John Stuart Mill found himself afflicted by doubts. His friend Thomas Carlyle proclaimed the historical glory of heroic individuals. Mill could not go so far as that; he fought shy of heroes; but he did make a little room in history for ‘eminent persons’—on the strict understanding that their admission must never disturb the statistical average. Psychological regularity—or, as Popper calls it, psychollogism— seemed to Mill a far more manageable instrument than the human person. Mill’s psychological theories are outmoded today; but psychollogism still survives in social science, although— as we might expect—other impersonal forces challenge its pre-eminence. Karl Marx nominated class conflict as the primum mobile; Emile Dürkheim nominated the entire structure of social fact and logic. Both these nominations continue to command support among academic students of human behaviour; both of them start from the assumption— even if they do not invariably stick to it—that individual persons are expendable in historical and social studies. Let me cite by way of example Durkheim’s study of suicide: it disregards the motives of the individual persons who commit or attempt suicide; instead, it

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groups these persons statistically into social categories. Dürkheim, if he were alive today, would be getting good value from the computer. My former comrades, the economic historians, are getting good value from it; for example, computer programming is enabling them to make sense of the hundreds of thousands of entries which express the pattern of international payments during the early nineteenth century. I suppose that there is nothing to prevent some other friends of mine from using the computer to throw new light on the legal reasoning of Sir Owen Dixon or the prose style of Jane Austen; but I do not see many signs of such things happening. Up to the present the computer has brought its grist chiefly to the mills of the impersonal forces. Today, we acclaim the advent of a new science, Cliometrics. 1 The man who coined that word was saved at the last moment—so I have been told—from spelling the Muse of History C-l-e-o.

Notwithstanding all this, most historians still put persons into their books. A formidable champion, Karl Popper, applauds their obstinacy. Historians, unlike their foolish neighbours in the depart­ments of Sociology, have stuck—so Popper says—to the rules of ‘methodological individualism’, which he equates with ‘the quite unassailable doctrine that we must try to understand all collective phenomena as due to the actions, interactions, aims, hopes and thoughts of individual men, and as due to traditions created and preserved by individual men’ . 2 Sociologists reject that doctrine. If it were to prevail, they say, sociology would become nothing more than an agglomeration of individual biographies; consequently, it would soon peter out. 3 History, it seems to me, would peter out also. Let me state the reasons which debar me as an historian from going all the way with Popper.

I have enjoyed the privilege of admission to the Royal Archives in Windsor Castle. My researches there have convinced me that a

1 See e.g. Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer, Studies in Econometric History (London 1965). Part I of this book is a methodological essay; Part II contains three interesting case studies.2 K. R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (paperback edition, London 1961), pp. 157-8.3 In Theories of History (Illinois 1959) pp. 476-503, Patrick Gardiner reprints two representative articles in defence of sociology: Maurice Mandelbaum’s Societal Facts and Ernest Gellner’s Holism versus Indivi­dualism in History. For Popper’s idiosyncratic use of the words holism and holistic see my Smuts, Vol. I (1962), pp. 305-66; Vol. II (1968), p. 193.

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monarch, even in this century, sometimes exercises a significant personal influence: to cite one example, the British and Irish peoples owed a great deal in 1921 to the personal intervention of King George V. Even so, the most vivid impression I have carried away from Windsor is the procedural and institutional significance of the Monarchy. Its story could not possibly be told according to the rules of methodological individualism. The same thing is true, I believe, of Parliament; Namier’s Who was Who method is useful so far as it goes—indeed, here in Canberra we have put it to good use4—but it cannot be stretched to the full dimensions of parlia­mentary history. No more can the ‘actions, interactions, aims, hopes and thoughts’ of individual judges, jurymen, barristers, plaintiffs, and defendants be stretched to the full dimensions of legal history; we shall get nowhere unless we understand procedures such as the writ. We shall get nowhere, I am arguing, if we fail to keep in good repair the work of Stubbs and Maitland, those mighty builders of English constitutional history. If I had time, I should submit a similar argument in defence of Clapham’s work on the institutional foundations of English economic history. I once sat on the Houblon- Norman Committee of the Bank of England; but Clapham’s History of the Bank of England would not make sense if it were merely a Who was Who of the Bank’s Governors—not to mention its clerks and clients—from the time of Houblon to the time of Norman.

Methodological individualism, I conclude, is a dubiously appro­priate tool for historical research; but I do not further conclude that historians have no concern with individuals. The methodologi­cal controversy irritates me; one party tells me to have no truck with chaps; the other party tells me to have truck with chaps but with nothing else. I reject that dilemma. Aristotle said that a man without a State must be either a beast or a god; he might just as well have said that a State without men must be a chimera. Persons live in societies; societies contain persons; historians are at liberty to study both. Some historians will put their main emphasis on the societies; others will put it on the persons; others will change it from time to time. And why not?

In recent decades, a marked change of emphasis has become observable in the practice of Marxist historians. Lenin’s tomb in

* We have published Who was Who monographs on the legislatures of New South Wales and Western Australia.

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Moscow visibly contradicts the dogma of impersonal forces. Soviet historiography, after some creaking and groaning, has absorbed the contradiction. E. H. Carr, the English historian of Soviet Russia, lets us into the secret of this tour de force. ‘The great man’, Carr writes, ‘is an individual, and being an outstanding individual, is also a social phenomenon of outstanding importance’ . 5 That expla­nation seems rather ponderous, but let us not chip at it; let us rather welcome the return of persons to the Soviet history books, even if they are made to walk about like sandwichmen with their placards —WE ARE SOCIAL PHENOMENA. I only hope that the phenomena will not be too narrowly defined; in real life we recog­nise them not only at the high political level but at all levels. Samuel Smiles commemorated the engineers of Great Britain. T. S. Ashton, an economic historian well supplied with theoretical and statistical sophistication, discovered the springs of innovation in the lives of struggling business men. To parentage such as this we may trace the entrepreneurial studies which are in fashion today at Harvard. But are we to conclude that no person who is not an innovator —whether in politics or in industry or in some other sphere— can qualify for admission into the history books? Surely not: one of the best books I read last year was about Joseph Ashby, a poor man who lived nearly the whole of his life in the small Warwickshire village of Tysoe.0 This book has taught me a good deal more than I had found in the agricultural statistics about the condition of rural England three-quarters of a century ago. And in this country, whenever I want to remind myself of what pioneering once meant, I read again the tragic and glorious story of Mrs Molloy at Augusta.7

Live and let live ought to be our motto. It is beginning to happen. I wish good luck to the Cliometricians. They are not aiming at a general take-over of the historical business; on the contrary, they wave an encouraging hand to old-fashioned historians like me. On both sides, the fanaticisms are dying down. Nobody nowadays is fighting very hard to keep individual persons out of history.

B E. H. Carr, What is History? (London 1961), p. 47.* M.K. Ashby, Joseph Ashby of Tysoe (Cambridge 1961). The book possesses unusual beauty.7 Marnie Basset, The Hentys: An Australian Colonial Tapestry (London 1954), Part VI, Ch. 2; Alexandra Hasluck, Portrait with Background: a life of Georgiana Molloy (Melbourne 1955).

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All the same, historians who want to write about persons have some tricky problems to cope with. They have to ask themselves, to begin with, how much space they have to spare. Dorn David Knowles, in his three-volume history of The Monastic Orders in England, spared all too little space for the monks. To be sure, he painted some lovely miniatures of the first Franciscans to arrive in England and he made a few bold drawings of memorable abbots; but most of the time he kept himself on the main highway of his essentially institutional history. Thereby he forced himself, I think to work against his natural bent. That is my interpretation of his inaugural lecture at Cambridge. An historian at work on a large task, he told his audience, cannot allow himself the luxury of dealing in any depth with persons. These persons will have to wait for their biographers. 8

Who will the biographers be? Some people say that they must not be historians. To write a biography, R. S. Collingwood has asserted, is not merely a non-historical but an anti-historical act. I shall not recapitulate the argument which led Collingwood to that fanatical conclusion, but shall say simply that it does not intimidate me.9 I pay rather more deference to the admonitions of L. B. Namier, G. R. Elton, and some other practitioners of modern European history. Biography, even at its best, is—so they say—a poor way of writing history. Except by very rare exception, the self- respecting historian should let it alone.10

8 See Dom David Knowles, The Historian and Character and other essays (Cambridge 1963).9 Collingwood’s argument is, in brief, as follows:1. History is Thought.2. An individual man is a natural organism.3. His biographer must deal with him as such.4. Consequently, biography belongs to the world of nature, not to the world of history.

This argument, it seems to me, bans prehistory along with biography, seeing that prehistory is inextricably entangled with the origin of species. But why should we try to disentangle prehistory from natural processes and history from prehistory? I prefer the approach of Gordon Childe as stated on page 1 of What Happened in History (Pelican Books, 1942).10 See L. B. Namier, ‘History: its subject matter and tasks’, in History Today, Vol. II, No. 3 (March 1952), pp. 157-62. See also G. R. Elton, The Practice of History (Sydney University Press, 1968), pp. 134-5. Con­trariwise, G. Kitson Clark, in The Critical Historian (London 1967), p. 135, makes a strong case for biography. He thinks that it should hold a larger place than it does at present in the teaching of undergraduates.

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But why? I fancy that these people have in mind the dubious company they would be keeping should they turn their hands to biography. If history, as Henry Ford once said,11 is bunk, biog­raphy— as we too often have known it in this century—is bunk, debunk, rebunk. The century opened with Plutarch’s edifying models holding the stage in decorous Victorian dress; but edifi­cation and decorum fell out of fashion soon after World War I. Intelligent people suddenly discovered the intolerable boredom of Victorian biography. In his preface to Eminent Victorians (1918) Lytton Strachey staged a mock funeral for it.

Those two fat volumes with which it is our custom to commem­orate the dead—who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the cortege of the undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism.

Lytton Strachey’s stories of the eminent dead had the sharp, delicious tang of a Noel Coward comedy. They brought biography into the entertainment industry. And there, I suppose, the rebunkers will want to keep it. Later on, I shall discuss seriously the problems of substance and style which underlie these swings of biographical fashion. Meanwhile, you will be feeling some sympathy with the historians who say that the demi-monde of biography is no place for them. They have queasy stomachs.

They also have hard heads. They see the very real difficulties of running history and biography in double harness. Every biographer who has had any training as an historian knows that he has to fight a never-ending battle against over-simplification and bias; as biographer, he has to see situations through the eyes of one man; as historian, he has to see them through the eyes of many men. I have it in mind later on to propose some ways and means of coping with this difficulty; but first I want to take up the question which I raised just now and to tag on to it a supplementary question. If historians fight shy of biography, who will the biographers be? Will they be any better at the job than the historians have been?

Let me take a quick look at the biographical ventures of sociolo­gists and psycho-analysts. They are professionally concerned from their different points of view with ‘cases’ or ‘life histories’. Consider first the sociologists: in many of their investigations case work is

n Did Henry Ford really say it? I have never tracked down the reference.

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fundamental. Individual attitudes and experiences, as elicited by questionnaires and interviews, are the bricks with which they build their structures of caste, class, kindred, age group, immigrant group—groups of all kinds, with their variegated patterns of behaviour in matters economic, religious, sexual, educational, political—there seems no end to the possible combinations and, consequently, to the lists of doctoral theses. This work is worth doing and this country needs more of it. Nevertheless, it is no substitute for biography. A case is not a person, but merely the abstracted fragment of a person. Charlemagne, St Francis, Newton, Keats, Lenin, Joseph Ashby of Tysoe and Mrs Molloy of Augusta were persons; to catalogue and manipulate them merely as cases would be silly. Sociologists are at liberty to ignore them, and to ignore anybody else in any time, place, and society who stands out from the ordinary run of humanity. Such prudence, no doubt, makes generalisation easier. Many historians practise it. As A. D. Hope explains—

And since historical research Has lost the name of noble action,Proved most ideas in state and church Mere subterfuge of greed and faction,That great men do not lead: they lurch Between rebellion and reaction,By documented texts it can Abolish the Uncommon Man.

And as for the Uncommon Woman Who blessed the Hero’s hearth and bed Divine Calypso or the human Penelope he chose instead,Your psychological acumen Thrusts in where angels fear to tread And proves her something in between A mirage and a love-machine.12

I receive these stanzas as a poet’s blessing on me and my work if I continue to concern myself with persons. What may surprise you more, a political sociologist has given me the same blessing. In an address last year to historians, Professor A. F. Davies of

12 From ‘Conversation with Calliope’ in A. D. Hope, Collected Poems (Angus and Robertson 1966). Reproduced with the kind permission of the author and the publishers.

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the University of Melbourne made a powerful plea for more and better biographies. 13

Yet it still remains an open question whether historians are proper people to write the biographies. To be sure, they are skilful explorers and elucidators of documentary evidence; but this evidence most commonly reveals a person at the level of conscious thought and action, not at the deep levels below consciousness. To sociologists sometimes, and to psycho-analysts always, these are the levels that matter. Freud invented a new technique for exploring them and for dredging up the thoughts and desires buried in them. His experience over a long period with neurotic patients convinced him step by step that these thoughts and desires were sexual; that their roots were in early infancy; and finally—this was his ‘great illumination’—that they were common to all mankind. No hard and fast line could be drawn, he believed, between the neurotic person and the ‘normal’ person. If this belief was true, psycho-analysis was something far greater than therapy; not only could it cure sick minds, it could penetrate and illuminate the abysses of all minds, including the most exceptional ones. The springs of individual genius at its highest, and of individual ineptitude at its lowest, fascinated Freud. He found himself irresistibly propelled towards biography.

No historian whom I have met claims comparable power to plumb the depths of a man’s unconscious mind. 14 Nevertheless, historians should take careful thought before they decide to cede to psycho-analysts the territory of biography. Psycho-analysts, when they take up biography, are likely to encounter difficulties that they had not anticipated. They will discover that it takes much time and trouble to acquire the requisite documentary skills. Worse still, they will find themselves frustrated in the effective use of their own13 Criteria for the Political Life History, by A. F. Davies, Historical Studies of Australia and New Zealand, Vol. 13. pp. 76-85. Professor Davies cited and supplemented John Dollard’s Criteria for the Life History (Yale University Press, 1935). Dollard, who is best remembered for his study Class and Caste in a Southern Town (1937), crossed subsequently to the psychoanalytical side of the sociological fence. Davies now holds a chair of political science. I should like to think that my biography of Smuts meets some at least of his requirements, although it might have met them better if I had had advance notice of them.“ But see W. L. Langer, ‘The Next Assignment’, in the American Historical Review, Vol. 53 (1958), pp. 283-304. In this presidential address to the A.H.A., Langer served notice on historians that they would have to re-equip themselves as psycho-analysts. He omitted to tell them that the professional training of a psycho-analyst takes six years or more.

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skills. If Freud could have got Leonardo da Vinci on to the couch in his consulting room, he might in fifty sessions or so have dredged up all the buried impulses that he was looking for; but Leonardo had been dead for four hundred years when Freud conceived the idea of writing a book about him.

The book had a modest title, Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci.15 It appeared in 1910 and still provokes passionate controversy. I have read it once in German and many times in English. I have, besides, a fair familiarity—although not by any means a scholarly acquaintance— with Leonardo’s notebooks and with the Leonardian literature. For these and other reasons the controversy about Freud’s book interests me. I have no time now to report it at any length, but I shall try to identify its origins, and — at the risk of appearing dogmatic— I shall state my personal reactions to it.16

Although Freud could not have Leonardo as a patient in his consulting room, he had what seemed to him a stroke of luck. He found in a learned German’s book the citation of a childhood memory which Leonardo himself had recorded in one of his note­books. The German author quoted him as remembering a vulture coming to him as he lay in his cradle and opening his mouth with its tail and beating with its tail against his lips. Freud’s experiences with neurotic patients made it easy for him to recognise the vulture story as a phantasy from a later period of Leonardo’s life, trans­posed into a recollection of childhood. The phantasy symbolised Leonardo’s suppressed desire to perform the homosexual act named fellatio. Freud accepted the phantasy as his master key to Leon­ardo’s life-history. He used the key to open every mysterious door. He believed that he was reading the entire riddle of Leonardo’s sublime performances— and his failures of performance—both as an artist and a man of science. He told his story in fascinating

15 As translated into English by Alan Tyson and published in Vol. xi of the standard edition of Freud’s works, it has a rather more ambitious title, Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood. It can be procured in a Pelican Books edition.14 The points at issue in this controversy can be sufficiently identified in Meyer Shapiro, ‘Leonardo and Freud’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. xvii (1956), No. 2, pp. 147-76; and K. R. Eissler, Leonardo da Vinci: Psycho-analytic notes on the Enigma (Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1962).

These protagonists give sufficient references to other participators in the controversy.

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detail and with flawless coherence. Unfortunately, the story got off on the wrong foot. Trusting to the German translator of Leonardo’s sentence, Freud mistook Leonardo’s bird. It was not a vulture but a kite— a bird with very different associations in legend and myth. 17

Freud’s mistake, it has been argued, did not matter: the vulture will serve as well as the kite for psycho-analytical purposes. 18

Should this be true, it would seem in logic to follow either that psycho-analysts are more slapdash than other professional people in their handling of evidence or else that Freud enjoyed exceptional good luck. I am most anxious to avoid even the appearance of aligning myself with Freud’s mockers; yet it does seem strange to me that a man setting out to build so large an edifice of interpreta­tion upon so short a sentence should not have taken the trouble to read that sentence as it was written, or, at the very least, as it was subsequently printed, in the language of the man who wrote it. I shall pass by the other methodological criticisms which come naturally to me as an historian, but I cannot help noticing— as Freud’s own followers sometimes noticed—that he was uncritical of himself. 10 In his study of Leonardo he conceived and hotly pursued a bright idea, brushed aside all objections to it, and ended by persuading himself that the possibilities were probabilities and the probabilities certainties. This does not mean that he wrote a worth­less book; that most discerning historian of art, Sir Kenneth Clark, has praised its flashes of insight.20 To me it seems, in its Alice-in- Wonderland way, an endearing book.

Freud gave it first place among all the books that he ever wrote. 21

For the rest of his life he cherished the hope of writing more histori­cal biography. The last book that he saw through the press was a biographical study of Moses, the hero of monotheism and of his own people. Unfortunately, he wanted to write not only about

17 For example, the delightful stories which Freud told at length about two vulture-headed and sexually peculiar goddesses of ancient Egypt become totally irrelevant when Leonardo’s word nibio (in modern spelling, nibbio) is correctly translated.1S Dr K. R. Eissler argues thus.19 See Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, Vol. II, pp. 477-8. Jones tells various stories to illustrate Freud’s streak of credulity, but also quotes the comment of Strachey, who was, like Jones himself, a Freudian: ‘It was lucky for us he had it’.20Leonardo da Vinci (Cambridge 1940), p. 153.21 Ernest Jones, Vol. II, p. 447.

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heroic artists and prophets, but also about fraudulent politicians. More unfortunately still, he accepted William C. Bullitt as his collaborator in a work on Woodrow Wilson. A quarter of a century after his death, the work appeared with the names of Freud and Bullitt on its title page. So far as I can see, it adds nothing to the sum of historical knowledge. Nor does it add a new interpretation of character; it merely says repetitively things that other people had said before; for example, by my counting, it says sixty-seven times that Wilson thought that he was Jesus Christ. I have made some other counts of similar vulgarities; but I shall not repeat them. To me at least they are a stylistic demonstration of Freud’s capital error—his omission to psycho-analyse William C. Bullitt before accepting him as a co-author. 22

For my present purposes, this deplorable book performs a useful function. It demonstrates by a reductio ad absurdum the risks that a biographer will run should he attempt to use the sparsely recorded experiences of a person’s infancy to explain in full the well-recorded thoughts and actions of his maturity. To historians, that must seem a strange handling of evidence. To some psycho-analysts at least, it seems just as strange. The most devastating review of the book on Wilson that I have read came from the pen of Erik Erikson, an American follower of Freud who holds a chair at Harvard and is widely known both for his psycho-analytical and for his biographi­cal writings. 23

Erikson invariably lays a strong stress upon the experiences of early infancy, but he does not expect to find in them all the clues to a man’s life: on the contrary, he invites us to see the life as Shakespeare saw it—to see it unfolding in successive ‘ages’, or, in

22 Thomas Woodrow Wilson . . . A Psychological Study by Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt (New York 1966; London 1967). Six pages only of this book are indisputably from Freud’s pen. The reviewers have declared almost unanimously that Bullitt bears almost entire responsibility for all the rest. Neverthless, the question of responsibility should be systematically cleared up. The operation would necessarily start with Sir Ernest Jones’s account of the book (Vol. Ill, p. 160). It might well proceed to a computer-aided comparative analysis of the styles of Freud and Bullitt.23Erikson’s review was in The New York Review of Books, 9 February 1967. Of Erikson’s published writings, I have read with great interest the following: Childhood and Society (first published 1950: later editions in Penguin books); Young Man Luther (Faber 1958); Insight and Respon­sibility (Faber 1964); ‘In Search of Gandhi’, a preview in Daedalus, Summer 1968, of what may prove to be an important book.

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the language of contemporary psycho-analysis, in successive ‘identity crises’. If a man is to surmount each crisis as he meets it, he needs a corresponding ‘virtue’, in the old English sense of virtue as an active quality of strength and competence. To cite one example: the virtue of youth is fidelity, the young man’s capacity to take a stand and to maintain it when he faces a challenge. In his book Young Man Luther, Erikson shows us this virtue in action. He expounds both the dynamics of Luther’s personality and the conditions of church, state, and society in Luther’s time. In Luther’s Lectures on the Psalms we see these elements at explosion point. To understand the explosion, Erikson maintains, we must under­stand Luther’s psychic distress as it surges upwards from the depths of his personality; equally, we must understand Luther’s theological battles at the level of conscious thought.

On terms such as these, Erikson and I could strike a partnership. I should expect him to tell me a good deal more than I have been able to find out about what made J. C. Smuts tick. He in turn would expect me to tell him a good deal more than he knows about the thoughts and actions of J. C. Smuts. Might we, perhaps, further agree that Smuts— along with Lenin, Keynes, and Mrs Molloy— would not repay biographical study if his thoughts and actions possessed no historical significance? There comes to my mind Sir Ernest Jones’s superb three-volume biography of Freud. It records the heroic endeavour of a modern man to follow and fulfill the injunction of the Delphic oracle: ‘Know Thyself.’ Its strength is rooted in fidelity to the documentary record. Basically, its method is historical. 24

After all the argument, it now seems clear enough that any historian is free to attempt biography if he wants to. Yet he will find the attempt hazardous. As a much-enduring biographer, let me identify a few of the hazards.

To begin with, there is the hazard of myth. Since this word means different things to different people, I shall stick close to Malinow-

24 Psycho-analytical explanations of Freud’s life and work occur only occasionally in Jones’s book. One such explanation is offered of his reluc­tance for some years to visit Rome; but an alternative explanation, which stresses Freud’s self-conscious Jewishness, is also offered. See Jones, Vol. II, p. 17-21.

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ski’s definition of it.25 Myths, he says in effect, have at best only a tangential connection with historical fact. Their function is not to tell truths about past events but to validate ways of life and belief which tribes, or social groups of any other kind, have maintained and wish still to maintain. For historians, myths are like minefields along their lines of march. I have had to thread my way through dozens of them to give myself the chance of getting close to the historical J. C. Smuts.

As an example, the myth of Slim Jannie will serve as well as any other. ‘Slim’ is a tricky word to translate, because it means different things in different contexts to different people. Like the Greek word rjoXvfxrjTLs which Homer applied to Odysseus, it connotes a man who is crafty, astute, full of stratagems and wiles; but whether such a man is judged worthy of praise or of blame will depend upon who does the judging. We may well suppose that the comrades of Odysseus admired and acclaimed him for bringing them so craftily through so many dangers; but that the Sirens and Cyclops cursed him. Similarly, we may suppose that the men of Smuts’s commando, after he had led them through yet another of the traps which half- a-dozen British columns were trying to spring on them, congratu­lated each on their good luck in having such a ‘slim’ general; but that the British took a different view of him. Smuts, the young colonial spoilt by too much education, the Cambridge man gone wrong, was a particular object of British distrust and dislike. Whenever his name appears in papers of the Colonial Office the implication is that he is the dangerous, crafty, implacable enemy of everything British. 26 Let me quote an Intelligence Note on him and his wife which went into circulation soon after the Anglo-Boer War:

Smuts—the clever man of the whole Dutch combination and, as is well known, fought us hard in the Western province during the war. Pleasant, plausible, and cunning. Educated at Cam­bridge. His wife a dreamy, untidy woman with a large knowledge of Greek. Lost some children during the war and it preys upon her mind. Hates the English and everything connected with them.

Those sentences spelt Slim Jannie with a sneer.25 See B. Malinowski, Myth and Primitive Psychology (London 1926). My impression is that Malinowski’s theories of legend and myth, unlike his theories of religion and magic, have won wide acceptance among social anthropologists.20 In the above paragraph I have repeated with slight modifications some sentences from Smuts: the Sanguine Years.

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During the first two decades of this century in South Africa the political parties of English-speaking conservatism, of English- speaking labour, and of Afrikaner nationalism, each in its turn, appropriated the myth. Meanwhile there was growing up alongside it a rival myth which pilloried not the craft but the cruelty of Smuts. In 1922, when violence exploded on the Rand, Labour made common cause with the Nationalists and the two myths fused. The lurid light of a famous political debate illuminates their fusion. On 31 March 1922 Smuts told parliament that his government had ‘let the situation develop’. Hertzog tore those words from their context of patient and reasonable exposition. The Prime Minister, he asserted, had let the situation develop because he had arranged beforehand how it would develop.

The Prime Minister had sat still, incited the men; he had shot them down with one object— that he might sit behind the tor­toise to stick his fork into its head when it should put its head out . . . .The Prime Minister’s footsteps dripped with blood—his foot­steps would go down to history in that manner.

Those two sentences painted the composite portrait of Slim Jannie and of Shoot-them-down Smuts.27

The myths were self-perpetuating and their life-histories were unpredictable. After 1922, the words ‘Let the situation develop’ achieved independent mythological status; but nobody ever knew what meaning they would convey from one year to the next. In 1922 they had meant that Smuts was a plotter; in 1929 they meant that he was a drifter; in 1939 they meant once again that he was a plotter. At one time he was the man who let situations develop so that he could stick his fork in the tortoise’s head; at another time he was the man who let them develop because he could not or would not see the peril of White South Africa; at another time he was the man who let them develop in far-sighted anticipation of the day when he would once again drag South Africa into a British war. Under the rules of this game, Slim Jannie could never win.

Nevertheless, the game fell out of fashion in South Africa before Smuts died. This happened because his political enemies discovered a more profitable game— by which I mean a myth more serviceable

37 Hertzog’s words, platskiet politiek, mean the policy of shooting people down.

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to their cause.28 Consequently, the mythology of Slim Jannie flourishes today chiefly in England, where it originated. Its prolifer­ation there has given me some entertainment. One historian-journa­list, with a Johnsonian rotundity of diction, calls Smuts ‘the great equivocator’; another calls him ‘a sophisticated Kruger’. The latter label was made, most appropriately, in Birmingham, Joseph Chamberlain’s city. We are back again in 1899, when all Boers were bad, but a clever Boer was the worst of the lot.29

Please do not imagine that I set out deliberately to track down the proliferating myths and to confront them with the facts. On the contrary, I found the myths a most annoying impediment to my search for Smuts, until quite suddenly the idea came to me of bring­ing them into my story. This, I now feel sure, is the proper treat­ment for any myth—at each particular stage of its development, to put it into its particular historical context. Easier said than done: for example, to put Shoot-them-down Smuts into historical context I had not only to write two chapters on some tragic events in South Africa, but had also to report what the New Statesman was saying contemporaneously in London—it said some things that would surprise you—and what British administrators and soldiers were doing in Kenya. These labours were in conformity with a rule—let me call it the rule of contextual congruity—which every member of the historical profession acknowledges and does his best to follow. We think it wrong to measure the thoughts and actions of people in the past by a measuring-rod of experience, knowledge, and common assumption which did not come into use until after those people were dead; we think it right to examine their thoughts

26 Nationalist propaganda in the election of 1948 made Hofmeyr its chief target; it depicted Smuts not as crafty and cruel, but as a silly old man fussing about every country except his own. In Nationalist mythology today, Smuts has become once again a formidable figure in virtue of his Holism, which is equated both with Darwinism and with British Imperialism; the little Afrikaner nation, by contrast, is the David which defies and destroys this Goliath. This myth was foreshadowed by Professor A. C. Cilliers in his pamphlet South African Nationalism or British Holism (Stellenbosch 1938). Recently, Dr R. G. D. Scholtz has elaborated the myth system­atically in five articles ostensibly reviewing my book in Die Transvaler (March-April 1968).

20 See the Observer, 28 October 1962 and the Birmingham Post, 10 February 1968. Yet we still sometimes see the old original Slim Jannie — for example, as the heading of a review in the Times Literary Supplement, 15 February 1968.

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and actions in the context of their own time, place, and circum­stance. Contextual congruity, as thus illustrated, is our sovereign rule. Unfortunately for us, it is a hard rule.

Let me briefly describe the hardest thing that I had to do in order to discover Smuts in the context of his own time. I had to find my way across a language barrier. By this I do not mean merely that I had to teach myself Dutch and Afrikaans—that was a routine exercise. My really difficult task was to master and manage my own language in a period of linguistic revolution. To cite an example of this revolution: if you read almost any parliamentary debate of last century—even a humdrum debate about the factory laws—you can hardly fail to notice the pious phraseology of almost every speaker; but if you read a comparable debate of this century, you will find the phraseology invariably laconic. The language of piety has fallen so fast and so far out of fashion that even to see it in quotation marks makes some people feel sick. Yet I grew up with it in Gippsland. Thirty years before that, Smuts grew up with it in Cape Colony; what is more, he grew up with its idiom in three separate languages—Afrikaans, Dutch, and English. For the rest of his life, the idiom retained its hold on him. Consider these two sentences that he wrote to a like-minded friend when he was 73 years old:

I shall not be surprised to see angels unawares and to hear their footfalls where now only bombs or war propaganda is heard. The Voices will once more speak to us like long ago and we shall once more feel at rest.

I have chosen these particular sentences from scores of comparable ones because a reviewer of my book quoted them the other day and went on to ask what on earth they meant? In their own context, their meaning is crystal clear to anybody who recognises their Biblical reference; but not many people live nowadays, as Smuts lived, in daily companionship with the Bible.30

Do you see the dilemma that confronted me? On the one hand, if I quoted Smuts in his own style I should mystify many intelligent people; on the other hand, I had to quote him, because the style was the man and I was that man’s biographer. The only thing to do that I could see was to quote him faithfully in context—both as he revealed himself in his letters to sympathetic friends and as he

30 The reviewer was David Lytton in the New Statesman, 15 March 1968. For ‘angels unawares’ see the Epistle to the Hebrews, XIII, i.

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revealed himself in his public utterances to unsympathetic critics. One such critic was the poet Anthony Delius:

Oh words, those words

‘mighty’ and ‘infinite’ and ‘God’ that grow too tall for right and wrong do with the vanished isopards lie along that grooved old tongue.31

After quoting those lines, I had to put them into context with the speech which Delius had heard Smuts make. That task was trifling in comparison with the task which another poet foisted on to me. Philosopher J. C. Smuts had published a book; poet Roy Campbell hailed the event with four lines on Butcher Smuts.

The love of Nature burning in his heart Our new St Francis offers us his book

The Saint who fed the birds at Bondelswaart And fattened up the vultures at Bull Hoek.

To put that brilliant and slanderous quatrain into context cost me roughly four months’ research and 12,000 words of narrative prose.

In the few minutes that remain I want to raise a related question of craftsmanship. Every chapter of the second volume of Smuts takes shape as a non-stop argument of Smuts with his enemies, with his friends, and with himself. This arrangement enabled me to achieve contextual congruity on each issue as it arose and to show Smuts not only as he saw himself, but also as others saw him. Nevertheless, the arrangement does not please everybody. In a vigorous and thought-provoking review, Professor Max Beloff has chided me for keeping my own opinions too much in the back­ground; he says that I ‘narrate, expound, elucidate—but never explain’.32 To cite one of his examples: he says that I do not explain Smuts’s failure to insist on proper treatment for South Africa’s Indian community. Yet my volume contains analyses of eight South African elections. It devotes two chapters specifically to the Indian question. These chapters contain rather more sociological, econ­omic, and political analysis than would normally be permissible in

31 From ‘The General at Ottawa’ in An Unknown Border, poems by Anthony Delius (Cape Town 1954). Smuts, when Delius listened to him over the air, was closer than he ever came before his last illness to total physical collapse.32 Jewish Chronicle, 22 February 1968.

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a biography. They tell a closely-knit story of the action of pressure groups and demagogic agitators. They tell the story of how Smuts met the Indian leader A. I. Kagee at Pretoria on 18 April 1944, and of how he accepted in toto Kagee’s proposals for a settlement. They tell the story of how English-speaking, flag-wagging, Indian- hating rebels within Smuts’s own party torpedoed the Pretoria Agreement. What more need a biographer tell, what more explain? The explanation is in the story.33

Professor Beloff, in company with a good many other people, expects biographers to take the stage in person as commentators on the stories they tell. There is something to be said for his point of view.34 It was my own point of view when I was writing the first volume of my biography of Smuts. ‘Let me explain to the gentle reader’, I said in effect, ‘the things that we shall know for certain when Professor Snooks has published his next monograph and I have published mine. Meanwhile, let me explain the present state of our knowledge. Let me explain, so far as I can, what my story is adding up to’. Many reviewers blessed me for offering such con­venient explanations; but Professor Keith Sinclair of New Zealand

33 By this I mean that the story contains as much explanation as the present state of research justifies. Fuller explanation would require, among other things: (1) an analysis, which nobody as yet has made, of the structure and behaviour of the United Party, particularly in Natal; (2) more rigorous studies than those made hitherto of the Indian community and its relationships with the white community; (3) a systematic ethico-political examination of the general conditions under which resignation may become the moral duty of a Prime Minister; (4) a re-statement of the circumstances (including the state of the war) in mid-1944, when Smuts’s followers torpedoed the Pretoria Agreement. If I were to do this work — but perhaps it can be left to an up-and-coming historian — I should be willing to declare my opinion on whether or not Smuts ought to have resigned in 1944. Meanwhile, I have given pointers to some other occasions (in 1929, 1938, 1943, 1948) on which he had to ask himself whether or not it was his duty to carry on with politics as ‘the art of the possible’ or to resign the leadership of his party and perhaps quit politics altogether. (See Smuts: The Fields of Force, pp. 259-60, 292, 297, 298, 460, 488, 507.) Such a question, I believe, cannot be answered glibly. It raises the deepest prob­lems of political ethics.

34 Peter Brown, in his recently published book Augustine of Hippo (London 1968), quite rightly reflects upon not only the actions and thoughts of St Augustine but also upon fifteen centuries of Augustinian interpretations, and upon various brilliant studies in this century of late-Roman history. Brown, as he says in his preface, stands upon the shoulders of giants. This is not the situation of any historian or biographer whose tasks of research lie in the twentieth century.

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cursed me. ‘My criticism’, he wrote to me later, ‘was that . . . the biographer intrudes unnecessarily into the biography. It rests on the Flaubertian assumption that the author should keep out.’

I accepted that minority opinion and in writing my second volume took pains to act upon it. The pains at times were severe. Here is an example. I drafted a chapter which showed Smuts at the summit of his fame. I wanted the chapter to close with a premonition of his fall. So I told the story of the plans that he made as an ecologically sensitive Prime Minister to clear the pine trees from Table Mountain. And then I wrote my concluding sentence—

On Table Mountain the pine trees still stand in their serried rows, a symbol of all his lost causes.

I loved that sentence; but on the Flaubert-Sinclair principle it was an intrusion. So I scrapped it.

Many people, I know, applaud the writer who ends his book with a summary of findings. Even so, story-telling is an art and my story of Smuts has a tragic theme. Can anybody imagine the Book of Job ending with a summary of findings?

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3

Bias

people sometimes say that they like history books to have a bias; but all they mean, I think, is that they like historians to have a point of view. Between these two things there is a big difference; we can be open-minded in our points of view, but bias closes our minds. Bias signifies the built-in propensity of bowls to follow an oblique course and of historians to follow their prejudices. Would anyone say that he likes his doctor or his dentist to have a bias? Twenty years ago, I consulted a dentist who had a strong bias towards pulling out his patients’ teeth. I still curse him.

Every decent historian detests bias. David Knowles deals severely with the historical work of his fellow-Catholic, Cardinal Gasquet:

He lacked that passion for absolute intellectual chastity, which is desirable in any man, but in an historian is as much an occu­pational requirement as is absolute integrity in a judge. 1

Herbert Butterfield, an historian with tough roots in English Methodism, is of one mind with Knowles on this issue.

I should not regard a thing as ‘historically’ established unless the proof were valid for the Catholic as well as the Protestant, for the Liberal as well as the Marxist. 2

Even if we fail to achieve this high standard, we have to aim at it. History, as an activity of the mind, stands or falls with the fidelity of historians to their own well-tested rules of good conduct. As I shall show later, the guild of historians possesses some sanc­tions which it can bring to bear upon the unfaithful. Alas, the sanctions do not always work. Too often, the unfaithful flourish.

1 Dorn David Knowles, The Historian and Character and other essays (Cambridge 1963), p. 261.

2 Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (Cambridge 1955), p. 139.

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Butterfield, in his well-known studies of historiography, helps us to recognise bias as a giant who takes a lot of killing. Flagrant bias sometimes flourishes amongst historians who believe them­selves to be free of it. To cite an example: it flourished in England precisely at the time when English historians were preening them­selves upon their rapidly increasing mastery of the scientific method. Erskine May’s Constitutional History of England (1861) systematised and propagated the Whig myth of King George the Third’s unprovoked aggression against English constitutional lib­erty. Erskine May was a man of great learning, the author of a classic work on parliamentary procedure; but he fell into the error of back-dating by a hundred years the constitutional assumptions of his own time.s His bias remained dominant in historical teaching and research for a full half-century, if not longer. Not until the 1920s did L. B. Namier, that formidable giant-killer, give it the coup de grace.

More often than not, bias survives among the teachers of history long after the research workers have got the better of it. I recall a conversation I had about forty years ago with an American historian who had just written a textbook for schools. He told me that his story of the battle of Bunker’s Hill had got him into trouble with the Daughters of the American Revolution. In his first version of the story he had said that the British charged bravely up the hill; but to call the British brave was deemed to be un-American. Anxious to appease his critics, he re-wrote the sentence: ‘The British, cowards that they were, charged up the hill’. That amend­ment gave no satisfaction, because, if the British were cowards, the Americans could hardly claim credit for bravery. However, my friend got his sentence right at the third try. ‘The British’, he wrote, ‘charged fiercely up the hill’.

This story, if not true, is ben trovato. Forty years ago things like that did happen, and not only in America. Today we are not so crude; the bias of our history lessons is harder to track down. Three or four years ago a representative panel of British and American historians conducted an investigation into the school history books of Britain and America. The investigators took three sample topics: the American Revolution, the British-American

3 Herbert Butterfield, George III and the Historians (revised edition, New York 1959), p. 153.

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war of 1812, and World War I. In considering each topic, they classified as follows the manifestations of bias:

1. deliberate falsification;2. inert bias; for example, the repetition of discredited myths;3. unconscious falsification;4. bias by the omission of relevant detail;5. bias revealed in the use of language;6. bias by cumulative implication.

They concluded that all these manifestations of bias, except the first, were widely prevalent, even in the textbooks which reputable scholars put on to the market. It follows from this conclusion that some historians adopt a double standard of truth: they see no harm in writing a biased textbook, so long as they exclude bias from their articles and monographs.4

In my lecture on teaching I shall look closely at this double standard. Today, I shall confine myself to some reflections upon the temptations which beset the research historian. Some of them come to him from without; others come to him from deep places within his own mind and temperament.

Consider first the temptations which come from without. They rise in an ascending scale until they reach their climax in the stern commands of totalitarian states. In a democratic society, by con­trast, they tend to be not so much terrifying, as insidious. Let me cite once again an American example, not because Americans are more prone to sin than other people, but because they are honest enough to drag their sins into the light of day. I remember Gunnar Myrdal once telling me of an experience he had when the Carnegie Corporation commissioned him to investigate the condition of the American Negro community; he collected scores if not hundreds of graduate theses, but found nearly all of them quite useless for his purpose because their authors had chosen subjects which could not possibly make any American citizen feel uncomfortable. In a democracy, biased historians run unobtrusively with the large,

* See Ray Allen Billington and others, The Historians Contribution to Anglo-American Misunderstanding (London 1966). The investigation was sponsored conjointly by the American Historical Association, the Historical Association of England and Wales, and the British Association for American Studies. The investigators considered the textbooks in use in American Junior High Schools and High Schools, and in British Grammar Schools and Secondary Modern Schools. The children who used these textbooks were in the age group 12 to 16.

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conformist herd; alternatively, they run defiantly with one or other of the small, non-conformist herds. Either way, their bias has its roots in their politics. The historical past had no intrinsic interest for them; what they want is a ‘usable past’— usable, that is to say, in their political struggles as conservatives or radicals to fashion the future of their society. 5

The saving grace of this situation is its dialectical character. The debate is continuous; it is public; it is productive in long term of ‘increments of knowledge’. Bias reveals itself as an ever- dangerous but also as a never-invincible enemy. Myrdal, after all, got his superb book into print. To be sure, in his determination to follow the evidence without fear or favour he could count on the resolute support of a great Foundation. Historians and sociologists do not always find themselves in so fortunate a situation as that. Consider, for example, the situation of an historian who had been granted access to a collection of family papers; he may find the family breathing down his neck. Consider, again, the historian’s situation when he accepts a commission to write the history of a business firm or of a government at war; if he possesses the smallest spark of realism, he will reckon with the possibility of conflict arising between the claims of commercial or national interest and the claims of his professional conscience. I commend to your careful attention the articles in which S. J. Butlin has recorded his experience both as a war historian and as the historian of a bank. My own experience ranges even wider than Butlin’s, for I have worked in close association not only with a large com­mercial firm and with a government, but also with two quite for­midable families. My head, like Butlin’s, has emerged unbowed from these encounters; but once or twice it has been bloodier than his head seems ever to have been . 6

My report, so far, seems reasonably encouraging; but I have

6 See Irwin Unger, The “New Left” and American History: Some Recent Trends in United States Historiography’, in American Historical Review, Vol. LXXII, No. 4 (July 1967), pp. 1237-63.* See S. J. Butlin, ‘Sources for the Story of the Australian War Economy’ in Historical Studies of Australia and New Zealand, Vol. 7, No. 25 (1955), pp. 44-45; and ‘The A.N.Z. Bank History’, in Business Archives and History, Vol. II, No. 1 (1962), pp. 1-17. The second article contains some excep­tionally shrewd reflections on the problems discussed above. For some comment of my own on these problems, see the publications cited in notes 8, 9.

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been discussing the experience of historians in countries where constitutional government survives. The rule of law, free discus­sion, and honest history hang together. So do their opposites hang together. I do not see how I could practise my craft if I were sur­rounded by hordes of students brandishing in my face The Thoughts of Chairman Mao. No more do I see how I could have practised it in Hitler’s Germany or in Stalin’s Russia. The dismal thought steals into my mind that the historical animal has survival value only within a shrinking area of this small planet. Yet I recall the fable about the mouse that fell into a bucket of milk but kept on kicking until he churned the milk into butter and so gave him­self a firm base for jumping out. Friederich Meinecke outlived Hitler, and in his old age led German historians along the road of their return to the values of European civilisation. Last year, I enjoyed the friendship of three or four historians who had come to Oxford from countries behind the so-called iron curtain. No curtain existed that I could see between their minds and mine. In 1957, perhaps, it might still have existed; but in 1967 we found ourselves talking the same shop and taking the same pleasure in it. This may sound smug, as if I were telling my colleagues in eastern Europe that they were coming along nicely and would soon possess the same freedoms as we of ‘the western world’ possess. That, however, is not my notion: on the one hand, the forms of our freedom will not always fit their needs; on the other hand, the substance of our freedom is showing some dangerous cracks. From the foundations of morality upon which freedom stands, these cracks creep upwards into the fabric of our social, political, and academic life. If we are to repair them, we must first identify them and take their measure— a task which is occupying some good brains in this university. But I must return to my Russians. The strongest bond between us that I discovered last year was our common zest for historical exploration and our common interest in its technique.

It is time for me to talk for a few minutes about technique. Any historians who may be listening had better take their chance of a short nap, because my remarks will be stale stuff for them; I shall be talking to the practitioners of non-historical techniques. Let me imagine a microbiologist taking the trouble to look at a few sample articles in the American Historical Review. At the bottom of almost every page he will observe with some surprise

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big stacks of detailed references. In the microbiological journals there are no similar stacks. Admittedly, contributors to these journals cite the published work of other microbiologists, but their citations— so it seems to an onlooker— are in some degree at least expendable. If the contributors were told to cut them out, they would feel resentful, but their articles would suffer no irreparable damage; they stand or fall, not by their bibliographical references, but by the observations and experiments which they report. We historians, by contrast, have no closely comparable observations and no experiments at all to report. Our work stands or falls with the accuracy of our references. If we were commanded to cut them out, we should suffer an irreparable disaster.7

Our references point to historical evidence of various kinds— the evidence of words written on paper, of words or symbols carved on stone, of ridges in fields photographed from the air, of bones and implements dug out of the ground. All these things are tracks which mark man’s pilgrimage through time. If you think of the historian as a tracker, you won’t go far wrong. Some of you, no doubt, are on terms of close acquaintance with Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, known to his friends as Bony, the half- Aboriginal sleuth in Arthur Upfield’s Australian stories. All the stories start in the same way; Bony is called to investigate a death or a disappearance or some similar problem which hitherto has baffled the police. All the stories end in the same way: Bony solves the problem. Invariably, he starts his investigations by casting about for tracks. The first he finds may seem to make no sense; but as he finds more, he begins to see patterns in their relationship to each other. Sometimes he sees three or four plausible patterns. He com­pares these patterns with each other and with the accumulating evidence of the tracks. His work ends with the demonstration that one of the patterns he has in his head corresponds with the pattern of events as they actually happened.

Historical investigations seldom if ever have simple begin­nings and endings; but their processes and procedure bear a strong resemblance to those of Bony. The tracks that Bony picks up and follows are sometimes too few for his convenience as a pattern- seeker and sometimes too many; sometimes they are scattered

7 In writing this paragraph I have been in debt to J. A. Hexter’s article, The Rhetoric of History’, in History and Theory, Vol. VI, No. 1 (1967), pp. 2-13.

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here and there over the wide, empty desert; at other times they are concentrated within a small area of too-much-trampled ground. Historians face similar difficulties in their attempts to make sense of the tracks they discover. In Palestine, to cite a much-studied example, the tracks of human activity are sparse at the beginning of the story but become more plentiful as the story moves forward in time; in our own time, they have become multitudinous. More than half a million years ago homo jab er appeared in Palestine. Prehistorians do not know yet, and possibly may never know, what kind of hominid he was; the only surviving evidences of his pres­ence are some tools that he used and a few fragments of bone. Sixty thousand years ago men kindred to ourselves were living on the slopes of Mount Carmel and burying their dead with a cere­monial which still strikes a chord in our minds when we remember our own dead. Ten thousand years ago, men of the neolithic culture were living inside the walled city of Jericho. Less than three-and-a-half thousand years ago, the Hebrews conquered Pales­tine; with that conquest Palestine enters the age of recorded— even if sparsely recorded—history. Thirty years ago, I went to Palestine to study the conflict between the returning Hebrews and the resisting Arabs. The records of that conflict, I need hardly tell you, are by no means sparse.

In this century, pre-historical and archaeological studies have achieved a well-deserved prestige. Consequently, many people have gained some knowledge of what it means to follow the tracks made by men in the far distant past. Fewer people, I think, have comparable knowledge of what it means to follow the tracks made by men in the recent past. I doubt whether anybody in this audience has a clear picture in his head of the complexity and the immensity of our twentieth-century piles of historical evidence. You will hardly believe me when I tell you that I, as the editor of a series of British war histories, had to take into my reckoning approxi­mately eight hundred million documents. The elements of this calculation are as follows: first, the twenty government departments of my historical diocese; secondly, an estimated average of two million files per department; thirdly, an estimated average of twenty documents per file; finally, a multiplication sum: 20 x 2,000,000 x 20 = 800,000,000. Admittedly, my calculation has a large margin of error; but quite possibly the error is on the side of understatement. When I tell you that the wartime records of a single department,

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the Board of Trade, ran to twelve million files, you may consider my guess at the two-million departmental average reasonably conservative. My guess at the average of twenty documents per file will not surprise anybody who has ever handled a wartime file—that untidy, bulging bundle of exhausting official paper.s

I shall not bore you by repeating descriptions which I have given elsewhere of the techniques which my colleagues and I worked out in our attack upon this Himalayan mass of historical record. 8 9 They were rational techniques. They proved effective. Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte would, I feel sure, have given them his approval. Nevertheless, our experience differed in one respect from Bony’s. His investigations invariably began with a single problem, and ended with the solution of that problem. We, by contrast, had to select our problems from a fairly wide range of possibilities. Our selections were acts of deliberate decision and, as our work proceeded, we kept making similar acts of decision— to follow this road of investigation rather than that road. These acts of decision were—I believe—necessary, well considered, and free from any taint of bias. But not everybody will believe it.

I find myself puzzled by a strange phenomenon: namely, the bias of those people who smell bias whenever they look at a history book or talk with an historian. Actually, they fight shy of the word bias, perhaps because they think it rude; ‘subjectivity’ is the word they favour. In philosophical discourse this word has its uses. In the context which I am now considering it means in effect that Bony—I keep on returning to him—never tracked down the pat­tern of actual events; instead, he imposed upon the events patterns which he had woven in his own mind. That, I think, is a fair paraphrase of the argument which asserts the incorrigible sub­jectivity of history and the social sciences. The assertion could be countered in logic by quoting the Cretan who said that all Cretans were liars and thereby accused himself of making a lying

8 In my Webb Memorial Lecture, The History of our Times (Athlone Press 1951), I included a brief report on British wartime documentation. What the historian needed, I suggested, was a motor bike to speed his journeys along the miles of shelving which held the files. Fortunately, it was rare to find a file that had been tampered with by the subtraction or addition of a document. Unlike Bony, my colleagues and I had very few ‘false tracks’ to cope with.9 The History of our Times; and Country and Calling (London 1954), pp. 196-206.

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statement. But I do not want to score debating points. I want to understand what these people mean when they say that all history is subjective.

With this purpose in view, let me first make sure that they do not misunderstand me. I am far from denying that many history books are subjective or—as I prefer to call them—biased. At the beginning of this lecture I not only admitted the wide prevalence of bias; I emphasised it. To be sure, I said that the guild of his­torians possessed certain sanctions for disciplining its biased mem­bers; but I went on to say that these sanctions often failed to achieve their purpose. They are most effective when examiners impose them against graduate candidates who give unreliable refer­ences, or attempt in other ways to rig the evidence. They make themselves felt, up to a point, through the vigilance of scholars whose reviews in learned journals reprobate the faulty documenta­tion or logic of biased authors. Unfortunately these reviews seldom decide the commercial failure or success of a history book; if it gets good publicity in the popular dailies and the middle-brow weeklies it is likely to sell well, no matter how low its professional rating may be. Please don’t mistake me here; I know some good historians whose books sell well and I know others who write good reviews for the dailies and the weeklies. I am merely pointing to the fact that historians, unlike the majority of their academic colleagues, have two audiences to choose between, and that some of them choose the audience which shows the greater tolerance of bias. Nor must I forget the historians who write textbooks. I once wrote a textbook with the title, Two Centuries of Change. I could not bring myself to look at it again, but in my memory it stinks of bias.

You will agree that I have made some substantial admissions. What I will never admit is the inveterate and irredeemable sub­jectivity of historical investigation and explanation. I quoted earlier on the statements of Knowles and Butterfield on this issue. These statements set the standard for every historian who has any regard for his professional integrity. ‘But’, the cynics will object, ‘you yourself admitted just now that you and your colleagues selected your war-historical problems from a wide range of possibilities. Your decisions to select this problem, rather than that, demon­strate your subjectivity.’ This argument baffles me. Possibly it stems from the naive idea, widely prevalent in the nineteenth

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century, that facts have an existence of their own and that the historian’s task is simply to collect them and then—but only then— to start thinking about them. Nobody any longer believes this; but the notion lingers on that selection is somehow sinister. Yet I know no intelligent person in any walk of life who does not select his problems and, consequentially, the evidence which seems likely to have a bearing on them. The slippery slope to bias is not selection but indiscriminate collection. J. A. Passmore, a con­spicuously level-headed observer of what historians do, has pointed out that their writing is most prone to bias when it purports to be encyclopaedic. 10 That was the trouble with my textbook; for page after page I was laying down the law about problems that I had never seriously studied. No biologist wrould ever have com­mitted that crime against the young.

Historians, like natural scientists, are practitioners of ‘the art of the soluble’. Like natural scientists, they should admit frankly that nobody can tackle all of the problems all of the time. They should admit with equal frankness that they have greater difficulties to cope with than natural scientists have in their struggle to achieve objectivity. In the article which I have just cited, Passmore enum­erates seven criteria of objectivity and uses these criteria as measur­ing rods of the performance of historians.

What ought to surprise and gratify us is the extent to which the spirit of objectivity has won its triumphs. Roman Catholic and Protestant accounts of the Reformation, considered as a story about social institutions, come more and more into conformity. If the test of objectivity is that there are regular ways of settling issues, by the use of which men of whatever party can be brought to see what actually happened, then I do not see how one can doubt the objectivity of history. But if we are satisfied with nothing less than the production of histories which all men the least rational will accept as final, then that would be a greater victory for the scientific spirit than we have any reason to expect. Such unanimity, however, is not to be found in any branch of human inquiry. Once again, if we press the criterion of objec­tivity too hard, it applies to no form of inquiry; slacken it slightly and history edges its way in with the rest. 11

In these sentences, a philosopher encourages historians to stand fast in their struggle against bias; but other voices, even from their

10‘The Objectivity of History’, in Philosophy, Vol. XXXIII, No. 128 (1958), pp. 97-111.11 ‘The Objectivity of History’, p. 109.

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own ranks, tell them that the struggle naught availeth. Weapons originally forged for their defence are now turned against them. Vico said that man could understand history because he made it; Collingwood said that he could understand it because history was thought and the historian, as a thinking creature, could put him­self inside it. Yet we all know how easy it is for makers and insiders to become emotionally involved in the things that belong to them, or to which they belong. Whereas the physicist feels no emotional involvement when he is studying the behaviour of par­ticles, the historian can hardly help feeling it when he is studying the behaviour of persons. The historian is a man; consequently, he is both the subject and the object of his own study. The historian belongs to a society; consequently, he carries the values of that society into his studies of past societies. So runs the argument. It reaches its climax in a fashionable body of doctrine known as ‘the sociology of knowledge’. Extremist expositors of that doctrine assert—I quote their jargon—the ‘situational determination’ of every historian. He is imprisoned, they declare, within the culture of his own time and place. No matter how hard he tries, he can never escape from it. Consequently, he can never achieve true knowledge of the culture of any other time and place.

Throughout the past half century, argument on these issues has been continuous and has engaged the energies of some unusually able men. 12 The only contribution to the argument that I can make is to submit evidence about what historians do. I shall cite the work of four men, starting with a simple English monk of the eleventh century named Eadmer, the author of an historical work about Canterbury and of a biography of St Anselm. 13 The interest of these two books from my present point of view lies in the contrast between them; the first was irredeemably biased; the second tran-12 Most notably, the German polymath Max Weber, who has exercised a powerful and beneficial influence on the generation of historians and sociologists which is now in, or approaching, its most creative period. Karl Mannheim, whose book Ideology and Utopia (Eng. trans., London 1936) became a manifesto of the sociology of knowledge, coined the phrase ‘situational determination’, but struggled to escape the consequences of that rigid formula. According to K. R. Popper ( The Open Society, ch. 23), he sought the wrong escape route.131 first encountered Eadmer nearly half a century ago in an excerpt printed by Stubbs in the Charters. Recently, I have met him again in the pages of R. W. Southern’s fine book, St Anselm and his Biographer (Cam­bridge 1963).

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cended bias. When he was writing about Canterbury, Eadmer saw only what his community saw and made no concession of any kind to the persons who challenged its claims—for example, its claim to possess the authentic bones of St Wilfred: ‘It is not permitted to us’, he wrote, ‘who have received these bones, to be troubled by doubts about them.’ In his biography of Anselm, on the other hand, Eadmer asserted nothing which he could not support by fair-minded citations of evidence. He adored Anselm and passionately desired his canonisation. No member of the Church could expect to be canonised unless the evidence of miracles could be adduced in his support; but Eadmer refused to invent miracles. On one occasion, he and two other monks crossed the English Channel with Anselm in a small boat; one of the monks, Baldwin, reported seeing a hole in the boat through which no water came; but Eadmer did not see that hole. He was a simple man with the gift of a direct, honest vision. Thus he created, although he never intended it, a new literary tradition. He became the first European author of an inti­mate biography.

My second witness is F. W. Maitland, in my judgment the greatest English historian of the past hundred years and more. Maitland was a man of modern mind who immersed himself in medieval studies. The story of how that happened is very apt to my purpose. As a young barrister, Maitland took a special in­terest in conveyancing. He found himself infuriated by the still surviving medievalism of the English land law. With the zeal of a young reformer, he started to hack at it; but, as he gained more knowledge of its intricacies, he began to ask him­self whether there might not once have been some sense in it. That question led him into the path of his vocation. His luminous volumes of legal and constitutional history record a series of crea­tive encounters not only with Bracton and the Common Law but also with the masters of Civil and Canon Law. He explored the institutional framework of law and the interpenetration in history of the legal, political, and social elements. His Doomsday Book and Beyond is a pioneering work not only of legal but also of sociologi­cal history. Of course, he had his own situation in his own sophisticated time; but his achievement as an historian makes the theory of ‘situational determination’ seem silly.

J. H. Hexter, my third witness, is a witty and shrewd American whose research interests lie in the ‘early modern period’ of British

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and European history. He has taken the trouble to tell us precisely how he fills in his day. 14 For by far the greater part of it, he is living imaginatively and thoughtfully outside his own time. He is in closer touch with the events of Elizabethan England than those of mid-twentieth century America; he is more closely acquainted with the members of the Long Parliament than with the members of Congress. Nevertheless his common sense saves him from pre­tending to know the Long Parliament precisely as Pym and Hamp­den knew it. They knew some important things that he cannot know; conversely, he knows some important things that they could not know. He knows, to begin with, what the Long Parliament led to. He also knows a good deal more than they knew about population trends and some similar phenomena of Stuart England. He would consider himself a fool if he brought twentieth-century prejudices, but just as much a fool if he failed to bring twentieth- century techniques, into his studies of the seventeenth century.

My fourth witness, E. R. Dodds, was until a few years back Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford. The Greek literature and history in which I soaked myself between the ages of fourteen and twenty have become faint in my memory, but not quite so faint as to prevent me from recognising Dodd’s book, The Greeks and the Irrational, 15 as an unusually exciting historical achievement. What most fascinates me in the book is its interplay between the thought and feeling of a modern man and the thought and feeling of Greeks from Homeric to Hellenistic times. These separate ‘con­glomerates’ of thought and feeling are never confused with each other. Unlike some of his predecessors, Dodds does not uncon­sciously project into the past the preoccupations of his own time. 10

He does something quite different: consciously and deliberately, he uses the knowledge of his own time— above all, its psychological and sociological knowledge— as a searchlight to illuminate dark areas of the Greek psyche. In his concluding pages he turns that searchlight upon himself and allows his readers to see the motives and the method which have shaped his book.

When authors are as frank as this, the imputation of bias withers.

14 J. H. Hexter, ‘The Historian and his Day’ in Reappraisals in History (Longmans 1961).“ University of California Press 1951; fifth printing (paperback) 1966.16 See, e.g., pp. 174 ff. and note 88 on p. 170 for his critical review of the discussions about Orphic religion.

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As I said at the beginning of this lecture, bias and a point of view are two different things. If we did not have historians, we should have no history; if historians did not have points of view, they could not even begin their historical explorations. Bias most easily creeps in when historians conceal their points of view from their readers and—what is worse—from themselves. The good historian starts with a point of view and as his work proceeds he modifies it, drastically if need be, in the light of new evidence and new insights. For the evidence he depends on what I have called ‘tracks’ and most people call sources. For the insights he depends not only upon these sources but also upon such capacity as he possesses for living to the full his own life of imagination, thought, and action. Historians who live stunted lives in their own times will write stunted books about the people of other times. I recall an apt story told twenty or more years ago about two superb medieval histor­ians, Marc Bloch and Henri Pirenne. They were visiting Stockholm together and decided to go first not to the old quarter of the city but to the recently completed Town Hall—because, as Pirenne put it— ‘we are historians and therefore we love life.’

This seems a convenient place for me to offer an explanation. I have all the time been distilling long and complicated arguments into a few sentences. Consequently, I have been running the risk of appearing not merely to distil but also to distort those arguments. You may have thought, for example, that I was attacking the sociology of knowledge, whereas my attack had a more limited objective. I rejected the formula, ‘situational determination’, be­cause it makes historical exploration impossible; but I do not reject an alternative formula proposed by the same writer. 17 He asserts ‘the inherently relational structure of human knowledge’. This second formula, it seems to me, helps us to understand what Mait­land was doing when he studied Doomsday Book and what Dodds is doing when he studies Homer.

Historians of the Maitland and Dodds stamp, it seems to me, approach societies of the past in the same spirit which informs the work of social anthropologists. Recently I have read and enjoyed Hortense Powdermaker’s book, Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist. 18 Her book is simple in the good sense of that word. In the first chapter she describes her early experiences17 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia.18 New York, 1966.

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in the American culture to which she belongs by birth and upbring­ing. In the second chapter she tells us how she discovered her vocation as a social anthropologist. In the twenty-four chapters that follow she tells us with concrete illustrations what a social anthro­pologist does and how he, or she, does it. She faithfully records her first experience of field work in Lesu, a village of 232 people on the east coast of New Ireland: the preparations that she made for her journey; her arrival; her settling into a house; her making a start at work; her struggle to learn the language; her interviewing and note-taking; the loneliness she felt at first and the joy she came later on to feel in her deepening companionship with the village people. ‘I had come to the end of the world’, she writes, ‘to study a Stone Age people and found people who, although they were quite different, yet reminded me in some ways of relatives and friends. I mused about whether there were universal personality types’.19 Those two sentences reveal the two interwoven move­ments—participation and observation—of her endeavour to under­stand and explain a strange culture. In later years, when she was investigating the conflict of cultures in the deep south of her own country and in Northern Rhodesia, she still remained, in spite of many hindrances, a dedicated participant-observer. Characteristic­ally, she reports a conversation that she had in Northern Rhodesia with a fellow-worker whose involvement as a participator destroyed his detachment as an observer: ‘One . . anthropologist boasted about getting into a physical fight in a bar with a European because of the man’s remarks about Africans. My answer was: “But you should have been taking notes”.’20

In her Epilogue, she cites some sentences in which I have described my experiences as an historian of the Risorgimento.21 She likes the account I give of my endeavours to get inside the minds of my Italians, yet still to keep on seeing them from the outside. When I say that I made myself a partisan in turn of each contending party and cause, yet that I managed in the end to achieve a non-partisan view of all their contentions, she feels that her work in Mississippi and mine in Tuscany are closely akin. It is true, I think, that our minds work in the same way; but her

19 P. 82.20 P. 250.21 W. K. Hancock, Country and Calling (Faber 1954), pp. 220-1.

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language is more felicitous than mine. She calls herself a participant-observer; I called myself a referee. I wonder now how I ever came to choose that inappropriate word. I should hate to think that I ever claimed the right to send any of the players off the field.

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this lecture will be a fumbling performance. Most of the time I shall be skirting vast and vague patches of my own ignorance.

I do not even know my own profession. ‘But is it not late in the day’, you may ask, ‘to tell us that? What about your guild of historians?’ I can understand your bewilderment and am beginning to be sorry that I ever used the word guild. I never intended it to signify anything so definite as an organised professional association. Please forget the word for a minute or two while I consider a few of the associations in various countries where you can count on meeting historians. Both in Britain and in Australia you will meet them in the Association of University Teachers; it can be called an organised interest-group, because it is concerned, if not exclusively concerned, with the claims of its members for status and good conditions of employment. The other associations are not nearly so earthly as that; they acknowledge no other interest than the advancement, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge. Which branches of knowledge? The associations differ from each other in the answers they give to that question. The American Academy of Arts and Science, as its name implies, spans the whole world of knowledge. The British Academy spans the adjacent territories of the humanities and social sciences. In Australia, by contrast, humanists and social scientists have opted for territorial segregation— an arrangement that does not suit historians, for some of them will find themselves in the one territory when they would feel more comfortable in the other, or feel equally comfortable in either territory.

In the associations that 1 have mentioned so far, historians are intermingled in one way or another with practitioners of other disci-

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plines. By contrast, the word guild—as I have been using it— con­notes the solidarity of fellow craftsmen. The Royal Historical Society in Britain comes close to the guild idea. It is a meeting place of master craftsmen, of the men and women who produce the monographs and review them in the learned periodicals, who manage those periodicals, who train the graduate students of history and examine their theses, who decide or powerfully influ­ence the historical curricula of universities and schools, who have banded themselves together on one principle and with one purpose —to maintain and fortify the standards of historical scholarship. I have called these people guildsmen; but let me now copy the fashionable jargon and call them ‘the establishment’.

Establishments, if they are to fulfil their function, have to be exclusive. You will not meet the journeymen of history in the Royal Historical Society. Yet these journeymen constitute the vast majority of the historical profession. Many of them teach history in the schools. When I said just now that I did not know my own profession, I was thinking particularly of the schoolteachers. I feel a professional solidarity with them and want to find a meeting ground with them. In England and Wales, the Historical Associ­ation provides that meeting ground. It brings together all those members of the profession, from the professoriate to the primary school, who love history and take a proper pride in their calling as students and teachers of it. The Association’s journal, History, keeps pace with the advancement both of knowledge and of teaching. Its conferences, excursions, and leaflets create the feeling that history is a living study where new and exciting things are all the time happening. Here in Australia we are not yet so lively as that; but we are growing livelier. From Sydney encouraging reports are coming in of an active partnership in the common cause between teachers of history in the universities and schools.

Our professional solidarity, whether or not we acknowledge it, is a fact of life. To illustrate: throughout the past twenty years I have been speeding the advent of that dismal day when no historian will have much chance of teaching in any university unless he has first secured the label, Ph.D. So far, almost all my Ph.D. pupils have sought and won appointments in the universities. 1 There they

1 Diversity of employments for successful Ph.D. students may soon become more common than it has been in Australia during the 1950s and— so far —the 1960s.

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teach history to students who in their turn will teach it to school children. Some of them set and mark school examination papers. Some of them write school textbooks. Meanwhile, all of them take their allotted share in the honours work of their departments. They encourage the better honours students to proceed to the degree of Ph.D. So the circle completes itself; so it runs round again. We may not admit it; but we all have our places on the circle. In our profession we are members one of another. Should we not therefore know each other and know our profession far better than we do?

To investigate the historical profession, in Australia or anywhere else, would be a rewarding task for a really first-class sociologist of knowledge. Here are a few broad headings which the investigator might be willing to consider:

1 Numbers: how many thousands of people spend how much of their time in teaching history at all levels from the graduate school to the primary school?

2 Recruitment: what inducements of status, pay, and the sense of vocation attract these people into the historical profession?

3 Training: what are the objectives, standards, and methods of training at the various levels?

4 Curricula: what kinds of history do we study and teach, and by what methods?

5 Organisation: what are the institutional ramifications from top to bottom of the historical profession?

6 Financial cost: how large is the expenditure on history within the total of national expenditure on education?

7 Returns: what gains accrue to school children, to university students, and to the community at large from the study of history, compared with the gains that accrue from the study—let us say—of mathematics or languages?

8 Purpose: do we believe that the study and teaching of history are worth while, and if we do, what grounds do we have for believing it?

It might be difficult to pursue some of these inquiries without stirring up controversy; but controversy could have a tonic effect upon our excessively inert and acquiescent profession. Anyway,

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most of the suggested inquiries concern matters of fact. The track­ing down and elucidation of fact under each head— and under the ramifying sub-heads which I have not listed—would be a daunting task. Pending the time, if ever it comes, when somebody tackles the task, I shall submit some scraps of evidence from my own half- century of experience.

It may be helpful if I focus this evidence upon an issue of current controversy: is history or is it not an autonomous discipline? In a recently published book, G. R. Elton of Cambridge asserts that it is; but one never knows for certain what meaning he is giving to the word autonomy. 2 I take my stand alongside him when he means merely that historians are the legitimate possessors of academic territory which has to be defended against the take-over bids of upstarts. In the primary schools of New South Wales, such a bid has already succeeded; history is out, ‘social studies’ are in. Even at the level of research and graduate teaching, one sometimes meets pedants who see no sense in historical study except as a humble slave to this or that body of theory; if their view were to prevail, we should have historical economics, historical politics, and other meritorious members of the same family; but we should no longer have history. Like G. R. Elton, I refuse even to contemplate so ignominous a surrender. He, however, gives to the autonomy of history an additional, and, in my view, an erroneous meaning. He means that history is a self-sufficient discipline. As the following quotation makes plain, he believes that the surviving records of past events contain within themselves all the clues which any historian will ever need for their interpretation.

In the first place he [the historian] knows his evidence. He knows the range of it, how it came into existence, what people or institutions produced it, what it can tell and what can never be got from it. In consequence, he knows the ‘right’ questions— those capable of being answered and that lead to further questions. 3

I have no quarrel with the first two sentences, but I dislike the last one; if what it says is true, economic historians need no econ­omics, ecclesiastical historians need no theology, legal and consti­tutional historians need no law. In Maitland’s university, so strange a proposition would surely win little acceptance, were it not for the

2 The Practice of History (Sydney University Press, 1967).SP. 19.

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comfortable corollary which it carries—that the Historical Tripos needs no reformation.

My argument so far has been twofold: first, that historians need not be subservient to any body of theory; secondly, that they will do well to master such theory as may suggest fruitful questions to them. To these two statements I shall add a third, namely that no endowment can be more profitable to historians than a rich and varied experience of life. With this in mind, I wish to make a report on a vocational seminar which I conducted for eight successive academic years in London. There once was a time when I thought ‘vocational’ a dirty word, but I do not think so now. From 1949 to 1956 it was my privilege to meet week by week about two dozen members of the British Colonial Service, who were seconded to London for twelve-month courses of post-graduate study. In the early years of the seminar most of the members were white in colour; in the latter years most of them were black or brown. All of them were intelligent men in the middle thirties or early forties and all of them had specialist interests in local government, education, agricul­ture, accountancy, community development, or some other practical activity. My seminar was the only meeting ground where the agricul­tural officer from Nigeria, the accountant from Jamaica, and the district officer from Uganda could exchange ideas with each other. If these exchanges were to rise above the level of desultory chit-chat, the seminar had to have a coherent program of work for each successive meeting throughout the entire academic year. History, with a continual reshuffling of its qualifying adjective—economic, political, cultural, sociological history—provided the program. History transmuted the diverse regional and professional experi­ences of these two dozen people into a shared experience. In this most rewarding seminar, history earned its keep. Some members of the seminar could have made themselves master-craftsmen of history, but they all returned to their own countries and to their own work in the world. That, I felt sure, was as it should be.

I wish that I could report some further experiences of vocational training at the post-graduate level; but all my other seminars, in Australia as in Britain, have borne a severely academic stamp. They have been tailored to the requirements of people seeking to equip themselves for careers of research and teaching. Some of these people have had behind them a good deal of practical experience in the armed forces or in civilian employment; but most of them have

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known books, not men. For historians, such lopsidedness is an impediment; but time, circumstance, and individual gusto are its natural remedies. Lopsidedness of intellectual training is a different matter; it can be and should be remedied by changes of the curricu­lum. As things now are, too many students of history have a lop­sided equipment and outlook when the time comes for them to move from the honours school into the graduate school. They have read big piles of history books and have had some practice in the handling of historical documents; but too often they are ill supplied with the other essential instruments of historical thinking. Here are some illustrations:

1 Languages. The historian who has mastered no other language than his own can study no other people than his own. Even in that study, he will more likely than not show himself to be provincially-minded.

2 Statistics. For economic and social history, and increasingly for political history, elementary statistical competence is essential.

3 System. It should be part of the historian’s training to exercise his mental muscles upon some systematic body of thought. Mathematics, philosophy, economics, theology, law—the choice will vary with the young man’s aptitudes and the fields of re­search where these aptitudes seem likely to lead him.

In my discussion of these instruments of thought, you will have observed me once again in conflict with the doctrine of the self- sufficiency of history as a discipline. To the exponents of this doctrine I address the question, ‘What do they know of history who only history know?’

As my own sufferings have taught me, it is dangerous to post­pone too long the acquisition of these instruments. I still bless the great schoolmaster who taught me Latin and Greek and thereby gave me the confidence and competence to acquire other languages as I needed them; but I shall always make heavy statistical weather, because I never had any worth-while mathematical education. I should like to save my pupils from these pains that have afflicted me; but by the time they enter the research school it may be too late to save them. Naturally, they will have to acquire—if they do not already possess it—the bare minimum of linguistic or statistical competence which their thesis requires; but the thesis itself will

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inevitably absorb the larger part of their energies throughout their three years of doctoral research.

From this it follows that the intellectual foundations upon which the research historian must build ought to be firmly established during his years of undergraduate education. Let me now report briefly upon my quarter of a century of experience as a teacher of undergraduates in Oxford, Adelaide, and Birmingham. My evidence, no doubt, will be in many respects out of date; I am not at all well briefed on the new experiments now being tried out in— let us say—the University of Sussex or Latrobe University. Even so, historians in Oxford, Adelaide, Birmingham, and possibly some other places are likely to find continuing relevance in some parts at least of the evidence.

I shall skip Oxford and start with Birmingham. There I had very few pass students; I spent most of my teaching time in an honours school of the Oxford stamp. The students spent barely one-tenth of their time on the studies that I have called instrumental; they spent nine-tenths of it on straight history. This was the more remarkable because not more than one in fifty of them had any expectation of proceeding to post-graduate research. Perhaps one in ten of them went into the civil service or industry; but all the rest— 80 per cent or more—went back to the schools and taught history there. I knew most of them intimately and still remember them with affection and respect. They felt pride in their vocation as historians and teachers. They joined the History Students’ Fellow­ship at Birmingham and kept returning to the university year by year to meet their juniors, contemporaries, and seniors. They kept themselves abreast of new work in history and explored the records and antiquities of their own neighbourhoods. I should have con­sidered myself lucky during my schooldays if I had had such competent and zealous teachers of history. Nevertheless, I consider myself still luckier in having had an inspired teacher of the classical languages and civilisations; he gave me a better preparation for work on modern history than I could have gained even in the best history class. My complaint against the English system, as I then knew it, was not its specialisation—in history, as in every other discipline, we need specialists— but the narrow and faulty basis of that specialisation, and its quite remarkable monotony. The university professor, the schoolteachers, and the school children seemed shackled to each other on a chain moving round and round

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in a repetitive circle. Year by year my old pupils coached their cleverest boys and girls for the scholarship examinations; year by year I met university freshmen already half-made in my own image. I used often to long for freshmen less learned in history but with a good grounding in languages or mathematics or one of the sciences. On the rare occasions when a student came to me by one of these paths, he seldom if ever found much trouble in catching up with the students who had been reading history obsessively during their last years at school. They, too often, were stale; while he, almost always, was fresh.

I have been arguing that specialist work in history ought to have broad and firm educational foundations. The following table, which is of course no more than a cockshy, will bring this argument to a point.

Education of Historical Specialists Suggestions for an allocation of educational time

Straight history Non-historical studies1. During the last two years at

school: 25 per cent 75 per cent2. During the three or four years

of the undergraduate honours course: 66 per cent 33 per cent

3. During the three years of doctoral research: 100 per cent nil

To avoid misunderstanding of the last line of this table, I had better explain that ‘straight history’ includes at the graduate level the acquisition of such techniques as each student may require for his task of research. I had better explain further that a fanatical concentration upon that task, to the exclusion of all the pleasures and responsibilities of civilised living in an adult community, is not, in my experience, a royal road to the degree of Ph.D.4 Given these explanations, my proposal for proper use of the graduate student’s time is likely— so I hope—to win fairly wide approval. Contrari­wise, the two preceding proposals will almost certainly displease my friends in Oxford and Birmingham. I can imagine them taking

4 In Ordeal by Thesis (Occasional Paper No 11, Australian Humanities Research Council) I have emphasised the damage which graduate students too often inflict upon themselves by obsessive concentration upon their research for the Ph.D.

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fright at the spectre of under-employment in their profession. Admittedly, the proposals embody a sizeable curtailment of ‘straight history’ in the honours classes at English universities and in the scholarship classes at school; but they need not involve offence to the historian’s pride, or any quenching of his zeal. His zeal may well find exciting new outlets. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and—in lesser degree— at the University of New South Wales, history has a place in the curriculum of engin­eering students. I have it on first-hand authority that specialist historians enjoy this variation from their ordinary teaching, and that many of the engineers develop a strong enthusiasm for histori­cal study. English professors of history and English schoolmasters, surely, could make similar experiments in education, without any sacrifice of their professional standards and self-esteem.

In Australia my tabulated proposals seem less likely to create alarm and despondency. Although the history honours curriculum at Australian universities contains a good many leaves taken from the Oxford book, total concentration on ‘straight history’ is not normally the practice until the fourth year. At school the candidates for matriculation honours in history have an allocation of their working time which corresponds fairly closely with the recommen­dation of my table. Consequently, it would appear at first sight that I ought to be feeling satisfied with our Australian arrange­ments. Yet I feel gloomy. To begin with, the combinations of sub­jects in the undergraduate course are too often insipid; honours historians need tougher exercise than they get in the English literature classes. This, however, is not the main point. To explain my deep gloom, let me draw upon my recollections as a professor of history at Adelaide. My honours students there were just as good as their opposite numbers at Birmingham; but they were no more than a handful of raisins in the large suet pudding of pass students. The comparative ratios were roughly as follows: at Birmingham, nine honours students to one pass student; at Adelaide, thirty pass students to one honours student. Although I have severely criticised the honours curriculum at Birmingham, I could at least feel sure that my students, almost without exception, would prove zealous and competent teachers of history in the schools. At Adelaide, I could not very often feel similar confidence in my pass students. Many of them seemed not to care for history. They seldom if ever asked questions, but looked to their professor to feed them with

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information for regurgitation on examination day. Such submis­siveness of mind and spirit shocked me.

This evidence, no doubt, requires considerable discounting. For one thing, it has been fished up from thirty-odd years ago; many changes for the better must surely have happened since then. For another thing, it is non-comparative within the Australian setting; had I been teaching chemistry or economics, I might well have encountered in my classes the same submissive spirit. This thought, however, is not consolatory. The fear nags at me that our Australian school system has been, and may still remain, at odds with our Australian character—with that alertness and independence which belong, at any rate, to our self-portrait as a people.

I propose to raise some questions about the teaching of history in our schools. To clear the ground, let me first define, as I see it, the purpose of teaching—not only history teaching, but the teaching of all subjects, in all places, to pupils of all ages. My definition is contained in the following quotation from a recent book by Sir George Pickering, the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford. ‘The function of education’, he writes, ‘can be simply stated; it is to organise, accelerate and direct the processes of learning in order to produce individuals who will contribute to the limits of their ability to the fitness of their society.’ For many people nowadays, ‘fitness’ has the nasty stink of neo-Darwinian tripe; but the word as Picker­ing uses it smells good to me. Fitness signifies for him the capacity of a people to take and hold its place in the van of scientific and technological progress; equally, it signifies for him good citizenship, a rich culture, and individual creativity in work and leisure. I accept the Pickering definition of educational purpose. 5

How and in what measure does the historical profession in this country serve this purpose? The question has to be asked; but finding well-considered answers to it would take many years of hard work. All the work that I have done so far is to examine a sample of the examination papers and the textbooks intended for boys and girls who have aspirations towards a university education. Let me give you my impressions of the sample—the examination papers first, and afterwards the textbooks.

Examination papers always terrify me. I imagine myself having to answer the questions, but can never imagine myself answering them

E Sir George Pickering, The Challenge to Education (London 1967), p. 21 and passim.

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successfully. The questions that start with the word why frighten me most. They require simple explanations of complicated affairs. Why, for example, did cities grow so much faster in the nineteenth century than they had grown before? That is a favourite question of Australian examiners; but I could give no answer to it unless I had first found answers to a dozen or more questions starting with the words what, who, where, whence, how—and some combinations of those words. Consider the growth of Birmingham: what, to begin with, was its population in 1800, and what were the popula­tion increments and rates of growth from census to census up to the end of the century? How much of the population growth came from natural increase and how much from immigration? What were the mechanisms of natural increase? When did the immigrant flow start? What was its rate of acceleration? Where did the immigrants come from? What were their motives in coming to town? By now I am getting closer to the reason why; but before I can make my statement of it I shall have to answer some more what and how questions—for example, about industrial growth, the effective demand for labour and comparative earnings in various employ­ments. You will protest that school children cannot possibly under­stand these intricacies. That, precisely, is my point. Why should examiners pretend that the children can understand them? Porten­tous questions invite glib answers; glib children are mis-educated children. But perhaps I am being unreasonable. Let me now cheer­fully admit that the examination papers of today are better than those of my day. Above all, they are better at giving the boys and girls opportunities to put on paper the knowledge they have achieved in their class work and their reading.

What do they read? I have sampled the books especially designed in two Australian states for children at or near the matriculation level. I am told that they are not prescribed textbooks, but that for the majority of the children—as distinct from the select company of eager young readers—they are the staple fare. I suppose that this fare contains all the calories which the educational dietitians pre­scribe and I give credit to some of the cooks for making the fare appetising. Even so, it seems to me to contain ingredients injurious to the health of the young people who consume it. For example, in the accounts of modem African history, which has been an interest of mine throughout the past thirty years, I have found on almost every page of every book errors of fact, half-truths, or dogmatic

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and disputable generalisations. You may say that Australian writers can hardly be expected to know much modern African history. Fair enough—but is it fair for adult persons to teach children things which they themselves do not know?

From Africa I turned to the French Revolution. Here the sample was various. Some of the writers were keeping reasonably in step with the advancement of knowledge; but others were telling a story totally unrelated to historical research throughout the past half-century. This seems to me rough treatment of the boys and girls in Australian class rooms. Yet the boys and girls in French class rooms are suffering even rougher treatment. Some master craftsmen of French Revolutionary studies, when they turn their hands from research and analysis to the textbook industry, seem not to care whether or not they are telling the truth, even on issues illuminated by their own research. 6 I am reminded of the advice reputedly given to Madame Melba early in this century, when she was planning a return visit to the country of her birth and upbringing —‘Sing them muck. ’7

We are back again with the double standard. How does it happen that we encounter real history in the monographs but pseudo­history in the textbooks? The explanation, I think, is twofold: first, the temptations to crime which beset the writer of an historical text book; secondly, the intellectual difficulties that he has to cope with.

Mr E. H. Dance, an English schoolmaster, has published a book under the title, History the Betrayer: A Study in Bias.8 In this book he exposes the crime of using the history lesson for political indoc­trination. In my South African explorations I have encountered fanatical perpetrators of that crime. 9 In my own country, I myself61 have particularly in mind investigations which have shown that those two abstract entities, ‘feudalism’ and ‘the bourgeoisie', falsify the com­plicated realities of French society in town and country before and during the French Revolution. Yet these abstract entities are still the stock-in-trade of some eminent French historians when they write textbooks. On this conspicuous exemplification of what I call the double standard, Professor A. Cobban’s Wiles Lectures, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge 1964) sparked off a controversy which reached its high point in a memorable article by C. B. A. Behrens in the Historical Journal, Vol. IX (1966), No. 2, pp. 236-41.71 have never tracked down this story but somebody has told me that these memorable words were said not to Madame Melba but to Amy Castles. 8 London 1960.8 Cf. W. K. Hancock, Are there South Africans? (Hoernle Memorial Lec­ture [Johannesburg 1966]).

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have feebly perpetrated it. I wrote my horrid textbook, Two Centuries of Change, at the prompting of the League of Nations Union in South Australia. The book—and this perhaps is a small point in its favour—failed to meet the expectations of its pro­moters. It failed also to meet my expectations of profit. Let us be honest on this issue: people write textbooks in the hope, if not exclusively the hope, of making money. The sociologist of know­ledge, if and when he starts his investigation of the historical pro­fession, may find it worth his while to weigh the monetary element of the textbook industry.

But let us suppose that our motives when we write textbooks are as pure as the driven snow; even so, we shall be prone to perpetrate historical falsifications, not because we are criminals but because we are blunderers. Forty years ago I was the blundering disciple of a brilliant but viewy Italian, Benedetto Croce. Other historians have blundered through being too stick-in-the-mud. Professor Butterfield has shown how German historians of the Seven Years War failed for many decades to absorb new evidence about its origins, not because they had a Prussian bias but because their minds kept running in an old rut. 10 This, perhaps, is partly the explanation of our present troubles with the French Revolution; the old conceptual bottles will not hold the wine of new discovery; but to make new bottles takes time. At the best of times, it is a tricky task to make abridgments of complicated stories. In a spirited book of his youth, Butterfield proposed for teachers and writers of history the following rule: never to tell a story that would have to be altered in its shape and balance if it were told at greater length; but, instead, to make the abridgement itself ‘an exposition in some form of complexity. ’11 Hard though this rule is, I have struggled in my maturer years to respect it. But suppose that I had the responsibili­ties of a schoolmaster? Schoolmasters tell me that they simply must tell simple stories of what happened in history; if they do not, they say, they will fail to make themselves understood. I accept this state­ment; but I make a distinction between true simplicity and false simplification. There is no impediment that I can see to any teacher telling simple and true stories of the individual actors and actions which we tie into a bundle and label ‘French Revolution’. The10 Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past (Cambridge 1955), ch. V, passim.11 Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (2nd ed., Cam­bridge 1950), p. 102. This book was first published in 1931.

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teacher can make these stories exciting. He can bring his lessons to life with drama and the zest for more drama. His simple, separate stories will become before long a complex tangle of interweaving stories. But he will not be able to leave it at that. His pupils will start asking him how one story leads to the next. They will want his help in finding signposts and patterns to bring some order into the complexity. By now, he will be feeling fairly sure that his pupils are on the right track. From simplicity, through complexity, towards order—historians follow that track. Alas, textbook writers too often follow the opposite track. They start from abstract order, dodge complexity, and never come within sight of simplicity. As if any child, or for that matter any man, could swallow the French Revo­lution at one gulp, or borrow a single formula to explain its multi­faceted ideas, urges, and thrusts.

‘You have never taught history in schools’, somebody may interject, ‘yet you have the cheek to stand up there and day down the law for schoolteachers.’ I am not laying down the law. I am trying to start an argument. I affirm my solidarity with all teachers of history from the graduate institute to the primary school. We have a common concern with the ways and means of our profession— things like examinations and textbooks— and with its purposes. We need to argue these things out with each other. For example, I feel myself in debt to the schoolteachers who started an argument with me the other day about E. H. Carr’s book, What is History? 12

They blessed the book because it ironed out so many complexities of history; I cursed it for that same reason. We all applauded Carr when he insisted that historians ought to be forward-looking people; but I considered him an over-confident seer of the shape of things to come. They maintained that he was spotting winners; but I maintained that he would do better to spot problems. Let the argument continue. 13

12 Edward Hallett Carr, What is History? The George Macaulay Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge January-March 1961.13 Historians, in virtue of their training, are skilful discoverers of the ‘tracks’ of events; but events of future time have not as yet left any tracks. If historians are to study ‘futuribles’ realistically they will need rigorous training in other disciplines. On this, see Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Art of Conjecture (Eng. trans. London 1967).

Carr (p. 142) shows particular interest in the emergent re-distribution of political and military power. This interest is legitimate and has tough intel­lectual roots in the English tradition of political arithmetic. Present-day

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Meanwhile, I shall continue to insist upon the two primary mean­ings of the word history. Whatever else it has come to mean, it still means inquiry, it still means story-telling.

In primary schools, so it seems to me, story-telling ought to be the first concern of history teachers.

William the Conqueror, Ten Sixty SixLanded in England and fell over sticks.

Jingles like that still stick in my head and give me chronological compass-bearings. 1066 and All That reminds me of the ancestry that I have in the British Isles. The towering figures of Moses and David, of Theseus and Socrates, remind me of other ancestries that I have in the Mediterranean hearth lands of my civilisation. I first heard these stories more than half a century ago, yet they still remain vividly alive in my imagination. Let the children of today still hear the same stories, along with stories belonging to Asia and to their own country— stories of the Buddha, the Mahatma, and the Great Wall of China; stories of Captain Cook and Bennelong and William Farrer and the first A.I.F. As the children grow older and begin to discover the two worlds of poetry and science to which history, in one or another of its modes, belongs, they will begin to consider these stories critically. They will begin to ask the question — ‘How do we know?’ By this time, story-telling will have brought them a good distance along the road from the simple to the complex, from legend to history.

Nevertheless, they will never make the whole distance so long as they remain content merely to listen and to read. Growing into history means exploration; the boys and girls will begin to make their own voyages into the past and to return with stories of their own. Let nobody tell me that this is moonshine. Last year I read a short book, Projects in History, by Sheila Ferguson.14 She is a

historians, if they propose to set up shop as forecasters of the shifts of world power, will need to make themselves — among other things — rigor­ous political arithmeticians. Yet some historians, it is to be hoped, will prefer to interest themselves in other ‘futuribles’, such as the following: the prospects of staving off thermo-nuclear warfare; the problems of man’s action upon his environment that are now on the agenda of the International Biological Programme; the question ‘What rough beast?’ which W. B. Yeats asked in his poem, The Second Coming.

14 Batsford 1967

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friend and former colleague of mine, a successful research worker and author, a happy wife and mother and, more recently, the history teacher in an unusually difficult school in South London. In her down-graded classes she has a large proportion of children from poor and uneducated and coloured families. 15 Yet the classes come to life when drama and the spirit of exploration are brought into them. Her book tells us how the children pursue their explorations —into costume and fashion, arms and armour, castles and churches, farms and farming, schools, homes, the condition of the poor, medical care, trade unions— a large variety of topics which belong to the history curriculum. Each child chooses from the long list his own venture of exploration. The school library subscribes to Finding Out, Look and Learn, Knowledge, and similar periodicals, and it buys or borrows books that the young explorers need. Gov­ernment departments, museums, libraries, hospitals, trade unions, and business firms give generous help. In organising all these aids and activities, the teacher has a great deal of hard work to do outside the school. Inside her own classroom, as the following passage shows, she has to live strenuously.

A class at work on individual projects is noisier and more fluid than a class where all are working on the same subject. The teacher has to maintain ‘order in disorder’ and to allow move­ment, exchange of reference material and ideas, and yet at the same time to see that the talk is purposeful. An atmosphere of freedom and cheerful concentration is the ideal. The teacher must move around among the pupils offering help and advice on material, presentation, illustration, etc. The teacher must try to remember all the children’s topics and to keep eyes and ears open for useful information. He must look ahead, and train the children to do so too, at the television and radio programs which may be helpful, and he must recommend suitable films, plays, exhibitions, museums, galleries, and houses to visit. 16

The individual projects, in this school as in others, occupy about a quarter of the time spent on history and have the same rating in the examination. The Secretary of the Council of Education told me last year that he hoped to see this rating raised to one-third.

1S The children of this school are not allowed to enter for the ‘O Level’ examinations, but may be given an equivalent rating if they do well enough in their different examinations. Many of Mrs Ferguson’s pupils have achieved this rating.in Projects in History, p. 14.

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Strong winds of change are blowing through the schoolrooms of London. What winds do we need here?

This question is not rhetorical. I address it in the first instance to the small group of able men in this university who are making it their task systematically to re-examine the ends and means of education. In this country, and not only in this country, no task is more urgent.

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