SOCIOLOGY AND HISTORY The Evolving Relationship of History and Sociology John Lukacs

Allow me, a historian, to say that the notion of social science is relatively recent. The reason for this is the relatively late appearance of the notion, indeed, of the word "scientist," which appears in English only around 1850. Of course a philosophical and analytical interest in human society existed from the beginning of history. Aristotle wrote that human society was, by its nature, different from all other groupings, wherefore its analysis and study called for a different kind of realism. Nearly two thousand years later the renaissance humanists rediscovered and restated the uniqueness of human relationships. Montaigne had the ancient Latin phrase, h o m o sum: nihil h u m a n u m a me alienum puto, carved on the beam above the door of his study in his little tower. Another one hundred and forty years later, Vico, in Naples, suggested that the study of human society required an approach, method, and philosophy different from the study of nature. Yet the 18th century turned out to be marked not by the influence of Vico but of Voltaire. The philosophers of the Enlightenment bel i e v e d - a n d their legacy is predominant even now--that due to the tremendous advances of Reason and Science, the time had come to apply their positive techniques to the study and improvement of human society. Man is A Machine, wrote De La Mettrie in 1749, a "radical" and "new" statement at the time, but one whose antiquated, corroded and incomplete character should be more than evident two hundred years later. Yet, m u t a t i s mutandis, most people (especially including our biologists and technicians) believe this even now. On that belief hangs the tremendous and somber tale of the decay of independent thinking and the decline of the entire Modern Age. In any event, in the 20th century, unlike in the 18th, the notion of "social science" kept a few humanists irritated. In 1912, for example, Agnes Repplier, a fine American essayist, wrote in a letter to Harrison Morris: "You know everything and everybody. Please tell me what is the American Social Science Association, of which I have been asked to become a member. It has dues and gives medals. Shall I accept?" She added a postscript: "I see by looking again at the card, the name of

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II This is not written by a snobbish historian. As an historian, I will admit that "history," like the "social sciences," is relatively new. In the schools and universities of the Middle Ages the study of history did not exist. It figured neither in the trivium nor in the quadrivium. Even our historical consciousness is fairly recent. The very notion of progress in time is less t h a n four centuries old. Before 1600 "progress" simply meant an advance in space, not in time. Logan Pearsall Smith wrote that the beginning of a new consciousness appeared with the emergence of the word "primitive" around 1550. To the Greeks and their successors "barbarain" simply meant outsiders, people who were outside of Greece in space, whereas "primitive" suggests that some people are behind, removed from us in time. Three hundred years ago no one would have understood a phrase such as "17th-century European history," since the words "century" and "European" did not yet exist. The very words and notions of " m o d e m " and "medieval" were only then beginning to appear. The first chair of "modern" history was not established until 1720 in Oxford. The first Ph.D. in history was not established until 1775 at the University of Gottingen. It was only then that the notion of scientific history, the study of history as a "science," began. Ul

During the 19th century the conception of history as a science spread across Europe, Russia, and America. Before that, history had been regarded as a branch of literature. The consequent accomplishments of "scientific" history were immense and, in more t h a n one way, enduring. 1Yet in one important sense this notion was illusory. It rested on the unquestioned belief t h a t there is but one scientific method, fundamental and overarching and dependent upon the canon of objectivity. We are--or should be--aware that this view of reality, especially of h u m a n reality, is insufficient. At the same time we should recognize not only the monumental achievements but also the broad perspectives of the great 19th century "scientific" historians. "Science" for them had a broader meaning t h a n it does today. The German word, Wissenschaft m e a n t (and still means) "knowledge" as well as "science." In the English language, too, the notion of "science" at that time was broader t h a n it is today, when even in its more narrow meaning, "scientist" tends to evoke the image of a m a n or woman in a white laboratory coat and is no longer synonymous with "scholar." People have too readily criticized Ranke's famous phrase that the

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serious historian's task is to reconstruct the past wie es eigentlich gewesen, i.e., as it actually happened. There is a touch of naivete in Ranke's statement, but that hardly reduces the probity and seriousness of his desideratum. Still, there were serious historians--including such contemporaries of Ranke as Tocqueville and Burckhardt--who saw the historian's task differently. Neither the aristocrat Tocqueville nor the patrician Burckhardt expected that professional scientists or scholar-historians could be the inventors, discoverers, creators and sacred guardians of historical truth. Tocqueville and Burckhardt understood (as had Kierkegaard) that what is given to men is not the possession of truth but its pursuit. It is not accidental that these great men also extended historical study and historical reconstruction into realms well beyond the range of Ranke and most German professional historians. Tocqueville-whom most people wrongly consider a political thinker or sociologist rather than a historian--wrote not only political but also social, intellectual and institutional history. The profoundly conservative Burckhardt was at the same time the innovative founder of cultural history and art history. In 1882 the English historian J. R. Seeley wrote that "history was past politics and politics current history." But this was no longer true. His French contemporary Taine, a generation after Tocqueville, was no longer interested primarily in political history; and whether we categorize Taine as a historian or a sociologist, historical sociographer or social historian, is beside the point. Around the same time, or more precisely, around 1875, the first postscientific (and not merely antiscientific) thinkers appeared in the German world. Nietzsche proclaimed that the study of history, as then conceived and accepted, was insufficient. The philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey made, perhaps for the first time since Vico, a categorical distinction between the "natural sciences" and the "mental-spiritual sciences," Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften. By the close of the century, numerous thinkers, including Bergson, Unamuno, Ortega, and William James, had arrived at postscientific conclusions. While they worked toward these conclusions from different directions, they all recognized the inadequacy of the scientific method, especially when it was thoughtlessly or automatically or categorically applied to h u m a n nature and to its personal and social problems. IV By that time--around 1900--sociology was already in existence. It is not my intention here to retrace its pedigree, which would perhaps lead us back to Comte. What we must recognize is that its emergence in

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the 19th century was not very different from that of professional history. Its purpose was the application of the scientific method to a subject t h a t had previously been recognized and thought about, but hardly scientifically. The psyche existed before psychology, life before biology, and society before sociology; but the nineteenth century was the century of "ologies." It was merely a linguistic accident that the word "historiology" did not also catch on, even though m a n y professional historians would have welcomed a term that would confer special status and recognition on their person and their work. The other thing sociology was t h a t it emerged not as the result of new methods but great new numbers. It was the result of the development of democratic nations and states, indeed, of the democratization of history. It was no longer sufficient to study or describe the lives of the leading classes, of the governors independently of the governed, or of minorities and not majorities. That this was a perspective particularly apposite and appealing to American intellectuals, including some historians, was obvious and I shall return to this in a moment. But I must first suggest a broader and perhaps also deeper theme. The emergence of sociology a n d of modern history (i.e., of professional history as well as of the contemporary interest in history) were part and parcel of the same development, which is the development of modern historical consciousness. One--but only one--example of this development is the appearance of the novel, a literary form that had few if a n y precedents either in the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, or Antiquity. For the novel is not, as so often described, a prose form of the epic that was written in verse. The novel and the epic, as Ortega y Gasset wrote in 1914: 9 are precisely poles apart9 The theme of the epic is the past as such: it speaks to us about a world which was and which is no longer, of a mythical age whose antiquity is not a past in the same sense as any remote historical time . . . . No matter how many real yesterdays we interpolate, the sphere inhabited by the Achilleses and the Agamemnons has no relationship with our existence, and we cannot reach it, step by step, by retracing the path opened up by the march of time. The epic past is not our past. Our past is thinkable as having been the present once, but the epic past eludes identification with any possible present, and when we try to get back to it by means of recollection it gallops away from us like Diomedes' horses, forever at the same distance from us. No, it is not a remembered past but an ideal past. After 1750 every novelist was a walking sociologist and also a walking historian. The emergence of the historical novel, in the 19th century, was only one aspect of this development. For it is arguable that the prose of J a n e Austen is even more historical t h a n that of Tolstoy, who was the captive of his own, often fairly insane and false

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ideas about history. In any event, Northanger Abbey 2 or Madame Bovary are at least as sociological, and perhaps even more appositely historical, than Anna Karenina or War and Peace. In other words, the great novelists of the last 200 years have been literary practitioners of sociography, and moreover, of a sociography that was solidly planted in history.

V

By 1914 a sociological tradition had become established in Europe. Its best professional practitioners were sociographers as well as sociologists: Troeltsch, Sombart, Durkheim, Weber. Scores of excellent practitioners appeared elsewhere, too, in the smaller nations of the continent. At the same time, professional history and professional sociography continued to converge. Some of the best historians recognized that they must deal with the reconstruction, description and analysis of entire societies, or at least of large portions of these. The appearance of the Annales school in France, around 1911, was only one--and, in retrospect, a sometimes unduly exaggerated3--manifestation of this recognition. Another example was the brilliant vision and achievement of Johan Huizinga, perhaps the greatest historian of this century. By 1920 Huizinga had written his The Waning of the Middle Ages, a profound and yet startling new kind of reconstruction of societies and their ways of thinking 50 years before certain French historians were to proclaim the importance of the study of "mentalities." Around 1918, in other ways and on other levels, Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, a brilliant but occasionally corrupt compound of concrete illustrations and an abstract historiological system, was yet another example of the sociographical inclinations of an important 20th century historical thinker. Between Europe and America stood England where, after World War I, the professional study of history was recognized, while sociology--except for its manifold manifestations in novels about manners--was not. But the United States was a different story. I suggested earlier that a sociological mentality has appealed especially to Americans because of the democratic character of their nation, their institutions, and their intellectual inclinations. This was recognized as early as the 1830s by Tocqueville, i n one of the most profound (but seldom read) chapters in the second volume of Democracy in America ("Some Characteristics of Historians in Democratic Times"). There he observed--without mentioning the still nonexistent term "sociology"--the tendency of democratic scholars--without

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mentioning the then nonexistent term "intellectuals"--to generalize and categorize in their description and definition of large numbers of people. It may be significant that the important work by George Fitzhugh, the leading antiabolitionist thinker in the South, bore the title Sociology for the South, and that it was published as early as 1854, even before Auguste Comte died and before the term "sociology" had become current in France and in Europe. It is perhaps also significant too that, a generation later, the establishment of the American Social Science Association preceded that of the American Historical Association. In sum, Americans took to sociology like ducks to water. The entire thrust of the Progressive Era, or of the Age of Reform, was sociological, not historical. 4This inevitably affected American historians, no matter how much their professional training depended on the German school of the 19th century. The "New History," proposed and written by Robinson and Beard, was a quintessential application of Progressive thinking. They proposed not only that the scope of historical study be enlarged to deal with the history of entire societies, they also proposed that the purpose of historical study should include the improvement of citizenship. There is too little space--and perhaps no need--to detail the development of professional sociology and professional history in the United States after 1914, except to say that the convergenceof their researches and of their styles continued, even as the specialization and the fragmentation of intellectual disciplines went on. Alas, the emergence of a class of professional intellectuals brought about results that were not always salutary. Two examples may illustrate this point. During World War I, at the behest of Woodrow Wilson and his administration, social scientists and historians worked together in the Creel Committee on Public Information, the first American institution of government propaganda. This gathering of national intellectual talent by the government should have been a propitious and welcome occasion, and for the sake of the self-esteem and well-being of some of its members, it was. Regrettably, much of the "work" and "research" of the Creel Committee was not only shoddy and shortsighted, but its members often failed to state their disapproval of the publication of false reports and fraudulent documents. The other example concerns the monumental effort, funded by the Social Science Research Council during and after World War II, to "solve" the "problem" of history by constructing foolproof and leakproof Historical Definitions that would, once and for all, establish the essential place of history within the social sciences. Under the leadership of the ideological philosopher Sidney Hook this mountain of a project produced a mouse. Published eventually as Bulletin 54 of the Social Science Research

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Council, the project was one of the most ridiculous excrescences of the history of American social scientism. I mention these examples not merely to illustrate the degeneration of intellectual probity: I mention them because, largely forgotten though they are, they were forerunners if not harbingers of the present disarray of professional intellectual life manifest in the crisis of sociology and of history.

Vl Allow me, then, the attempt to sum up as an outsider--an outsider not only from sociology but from many circles of professional historiunship as well--the principal characteristic of this crisis. What I see in professional sociology is the predominant tendency to prefer sociology over sociography--in other words, to prefer definition over description, and abstract and quantitative categorization over qualitative and narrative analysis. This is not the Olympian lament of a reactionary historian. Sociology and history suffer the same crisis, although in varying degrees and manifestations. Both are too important to be tef~ to their own, often self-serving, professionals. Professional history is not in much better shape than professional sociology. The first unreadable--by which I mean, jargon-ridden--articles in the American Sociological Review preceded those in the American Historical Review by about 20 years. Yet one of the things that history and sociology have in common is that they have--or, rather, that they should have--no language of their own. Surely in this country their language must be everyday English, for the simple reason that our expressions and thoughts about history and society occur in everyday language, whereby history and sociology must be taught, spoken and written in everyday language. The belief that the social sciences possess, or should possess, a vocabulary m-~dsuperior methodology5of their own--superior, that is, to history--is nonsense. At the beginning of this article I stated that both the scientific concept of society and the professional study of history are more recent developments than people have been accustomed to think. During the 18th century history was a branch of literature. During the 19th century history was seen as a science. For the 20th century we cannot make such a general statement. There has been a divergence among historians--even though few have paid attention to this divergence. Because interest in history has been rising and widening during the last 300 years--a development of which the rise and expansion

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of professional history has been a part--some of us see history as a form of thought. The majority of historians, however, continue with the notion that history is a science--if perhaps not quite a natural science, then a social science. Even historians who will not state this belief in such terms--after all, affirming that one's discipline is unique and different from the rest is a source of self-satisfaction--teach and write and speak as if history w e r e a social science of sorts. A good example is Fernand Braudel, perhaps the most celebrated historian of our decade, but whose work--valuable in some of its details but flawed in its general concept--is hardly more than retrospective sociology. I do believe that the Braudel-like concept of historical reconstruction leads to a dead end: but not becuse of a narrow, or snobbish, fear that my "discipline" might be swallowed up by sociology, after all.

YI!

This statement has nothing to do with the comparative merits of history and sociology. It has everything to do with the outdated nature of our concept of "science," about which I have written much elsewhere ~ and which, at the risk of superficiality and perhaps even of presumptuousness, I am compelled to sum up at the end of this article as briefly as I can. The realization that history is a form of thought issues from the recognition that history is both less and more than a science. History is more t h a n a science because of the self-evident sequence of events. First came nature; then came man; and then came the science of nature. The science of nature, including the e n t i r e scientific method, was the invention of m a n at a certain time of his history, whereby itis science that is part of history and not the other way around. At the same time history and the study of h u m a n nature are less t h a n a natural science, because the knowledge that man has of man is less accurate and different from the knowledge that m a n has of animals, vegetables, minerals. Here we come to the essential and chastened nature of h u m a n knowledge--chastened because of the now inevitable recognition of the very limitations that give it special validity and meaning. These limitations have now been recognized--and experimentally proven-in physics, in the study of matter itself; but it will be a long time before the meaning of this is accepted, even by physicists. Only then and thereafter will a new and unitary conception of man's relationship to the universe crystallize, superseding the Cartesian division of object and subject and the increasingly corroded ideal of "objectivity."

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Until then we must realize that the knowledge men have of men is of a different order than the knowledge men have of things. The former involves participation, not separation, involvement rather than objec. tivity. Therefore in the study of history and human societies description must have priority over definition, narrative over abstraction, words over numbers (and descriptive sociography over abstract sociology). The method, purpose and practicality of our knowledge of things depend on accuracy. The purpose of the knowledge we have of other human beings is understanding, the kind of human understanding which, again, is both more and less than certainty. Historians, scholars, students of society, and indeed, all professional intellectuals should recognize this, unless they are content with their status as mandarins in obsequious dependence upon governments, foundations, and tax-fi-ee institutions at the end of the Modern Age. At the beginning of the Modern Age thinkers drew enormous energy and sustenance from the recognition that they were men thinking about men. Toward the end of the Modern Age it is, in plain English, their task to show that even during the passing of this historical epoch man is not tired of being man.

1. One example: All research now follows the canons and practices of historical research, including the "scholarly equipment" of bibliography and of referential footnotes, even in the natural sciences. 2. Consider Jane Austen' s definitively historical concern in her preface to Northanger Abbey, in 1816: "This little work was finished in the year 1803, and intended for immediate publication. It was disposed of to a bookseller, it was even advertised, and why the business proceeded no further, the author has never been able to learn. That any bookseller should think it worthwhile to purchase what he did not think it worthwhile to publish seems extraordinary. But with this, neither the author nor the public have any other concern than as some observation is necessary upon those parts of the work which thirteen years have made comparatively obsolete. The public are entreated to bear in mind that 13 years have passed since it was finished, m a n y more since it was begtm~ and that during that period, places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes." 3. Exaggerated: because, with all due respect to the superb contributions of this "school"--Ln the teachings and books of Marc Btoch, Lucien Febvre, for example-its positi'~sm was still narrowly "scientL~c," harkening back to the Cartesian categories, in spite of the forward~Iooking and ever broadening perspectives of some of its practitioners. 4. The American tragedy was, and ~ill is, the belief in the perfecs of society rather than in the improvability of m a n - - b u t that is another story. 5. An example of this kind of nonsense may be viewed in an article by the sociologist Herbert J. Gans in The International Migration Review, Summer, 1967, pp. 8-9. Guns wrote: "To put it more bluntly, in the period like the present, in which psychology, sociology and anthropology, economic, political sciences, and other sciences are flourishing as never before [my italics!] descriptive history is not enough; it cannot compete with the other sciences. . . . For a while descriptive history can survive, but when the social sciences apply their superior methodology

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[my italics, again] to questions of change, development or process, then I suspect descriptive history will lose out. Consequently, history must become as analytic and as sophisticated in its methods and concepts as the other social sciences, or else it m a y disappear from the scene altogether. [But] If historical researchers play it right, history could become the dynamic social science par excellence, synthesizing the methods and concepts of all the individual disciplines. At that point, I might be one of the first to migrate from sociology into history." God protect the immigrant. 6. Mostly in my Historical Consciousness (New York, 1968), now reprinted in a considerably enlarged edition by Schocken Books, New York, 1985.