Philosophy of History Books

History and Historians: A Historiographical Introduction (6th Edition)

Mark T. Gilderhus

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Great overview 4 out of 5 stars.
19 of 19 people found this review helpful.

This short book does a good job of providing an overview of Western historical thinking from Herodotus and Thucydides to the modern period. The first chapter is a brief discussion of why we study history to begin with: curiosity, a need to bring order to the world, identify cause and effect, study the identity of a people, calculate the consequences of our actions, and to provide society's memory.

Chapters two and three review the evolution of historical writings and their approach. Gilderhus begins with the ancient historians with a discussion of history in Greece and Rome and then reviews the influence of Christian thought; a paradigm against which history revealed the workings of God's plan. This perspective began to disappear as Western Christianity divided and historians of various religious persuasions wrote histories supporting their perspectives of the past. Enlightenment historians went on to reject a religious approach or even a factual approach wishing to rely on reason for their proofs while at the same time denigrating the past. This gave way to the influence of romanticism and nationalism in the 19th century which led to a more scientific approach to research and analysis. (p. 36) (In some ways this was a reaction to the emphasis on religion and God on man but it could also be a reaction to the renaissance emphasis on the greatness of classical civilizations.)

Chapter 4 then reviews the philosophical aspects (speculative approaches) of history; Gilderhus says there are three schema: cyclical, providential, and progressive (p. 49) and discusses each in turn. Chapter 5 reviews the analytical philosophical approaches to history reflected in the positivist approach (general laws exist that govern the outcomes of human affairs, and idealist thought (which believed that because history was about man, who had free will, history was not repeatable). Chapter six is a simple overview of types of historical papers and research. The last chapter summarizes the state of historiography as it has evolved in the last century.

Entire books have been written about each of the areas addressed in Gilderhus' book; the strength of this book is that it provides a simple easy-to-read overview of the whole field and the thinking behind history.

Editorial Review:

For undergraduate and graduate courses in Historiography and Historical Method. Also an ideal supplemental text for Western Civilization and Intellectual History courses. This text is a concise, brief, and accessible introductory text presenting a thorough, balanced, and comprehensive overview of Western historical thinking from ancient times through the present. Reaching to readers of all levels, it covers major areas such as historiography, philosophy of history, and historical methodology, as well as material on contemporary "culture wars" and current debates on post modernism.

History: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

John H. Arnold

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A Short History of History 4 out of 5 stars.
15 of 17 people found this review helpful.

Arnold takes 'historiography' to be the process of writing history, and 'history' to be the result of that process, i.e. to be a set of true stories about the past. If you enjoy reading history, then you should read at least something about historiography, to help you evaluate and interpret what you read. This short introduction to the subject is probably as good a place as any to start and for many readers will be as much historiography as they think they need.

Major figures such as Thucydides and von Ranke are discussed and central issues in the philosophy of history, such as the extent to which people of other times were essentially different from us, are introduced. Arnold presents a wide range of opinions on these various topics, but has a bias toward the politically correct.

His style is readable, if sometimes clumsy. The British spellings and usages may annoy some American readers. But overall this little book succeeds admirably in its task and contains a wealth of information and opinion. It is recommended for anyone wanting to get beyond the 'true stories' to what history really is.

Editorial Review:

Series Copy

Oxford's celebrated Very Short Introductions series offers concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects--from Islam to Sociology, Politics to Classics, Literary Theory to History, and Archaeology to the Bible. Each volume provides trenchant and provocative--yet always balanced and complete--discussions of the central issues in a given discipline or field. Every Very Short Introduction gives a readable evolution of the subject in question, demonstrating how the subject developed in its own right and how it influenced society. Whatever the area of study one deems important or appealing, whatever topic fascinates the general reader, the Very Short Introduction series has a handy and affordable guide that will likely prove indispensable.

The Revolt of the Masses

Jose Ortega y Gasset

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 26 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Shipwrecked 4 out of 5 stars.
12 of 15 people found this review helpful.

What a muddle (most) reviewers have made of this book. I am reminded of De Tocqueville, whom all factions regard as "prescient" and appropriate him to their own positions. Let's get some facts straight, Gasset is a reactionary and an elitist, just as De Tocqueville was an aristocrat attempting to make sense of an alien American democracy. The difference is that De Tocqueville was only a reactionary in sentiment. He felt that democracy was inevitable. Not so Gasset, who believes that we MUST in some way turn back the clock. The ways he proposes that this might be done are, as another reviewer has noted, somewhat at odds with each other. So, perhaps, it's no great wonder that the reviews are muddled.

Gasset is an intellectual descendant of Nietzsche, believing in the noble man above the masses. And, truly, this book at its heart, is more about the aristocratic man, than the aristocratic society, which is merely a means to this end. And, Gasset asserts, a true "society" is aristocratic by definition. Otherwise, it's not a society. But, to return to Gasset's aristocratic or noble man, who is a spin-off of Nietzsche's notion of the artist hero. If we keep our eyes on this notion, the book is a harrowing and effective plea for his existence.

Unfortunately, Nietzsche came to America in the form of the distinctly middlebrow Ayn Rand, whose terrible writing and weighted, tendentious novels found a home in middlebrow America and started a harebrained literary tradition that continues this day. One of the longer-winded reviewers mentioned some of the most recently published books of this sort. Neither her character Howard Roark nor her vision of society: "A coal mine is more beautiful than Niagara Falls." - What twaddle - are at all what Nietzsche or Gasset has in mind. Oh well, one can't expect much from an author who can't spell her own name.

Look, here is the type of soul Gasset adores and admires and is terribly worried is becoming extinct:

"The man with the clear head is the man who frees himself from those fantastic "ideas" and looks life in the face, realizes that everything in it is problematic, and feels himself lost. As this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost - he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked." P.157

I have quoted at length because I believe this passage is at the root of what Gasset is all about here: The soul with a sense of the tragic inherent in life seeking from this existential shipwreck to wring his own foundered chaos of notions he calls himself is the essence of the noble, aristocratic artist-hero, to whom this book should have been dedicated. And, finally, perhaps Gasset was (sadly) right. The revolt of the masses and the engendering of their proclivities in what we would call a society leave no room for the preeminence of such a spirit.

Finally, if one wishes to read these ideas in the original, close thy Gasset and open Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Editorial Review:

Social upheaval in early 20th-century Europe is the historical setting for this seminal study by the Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset. Continuously in print since 1932, Ortega's vision of Western culture as sinking to its lowest common denominator and drifting toward chaos brought its author international fame and has remained one of the influential books of the 20th century.

Introduction to the Philosophy of History

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Probably Only for True Hegel Enthusiasts 2 out of 5 stars.
11 of 17 people found this review helpful.

Introduction to the Philosophy of History is a short posthumous publication of Hegel's lecture notes pertaining to the nature of history (There are several similar publications of Hegel notes, e.g. The History of Philosophy, The Philosophy of Art. Georg Hegel was one of the most popular and influential German idealists of the ninetieth century. This short book (approximately 100 pages also includes an excerpt from the The Philosophy of the Right. I offer the following thoughts to potential readers.

Rauch's translation is readable and makes Hegel about as accessible as he gets. Generally, my view is that readers should interact with historic thinkers through their own work - with Hegel this can be frustrating given his style. His use of ambiguous metaphysical terminology such as "the World Spirit" and his teleological or progressive view of history may be difficult for the contemporary reader. As a result, an overview German idealism may be helpful before approaching Hegel directly.

Personally, German idealism has always struck me as a somewhat tedious and uninteresting aspect of modern philosophy. Reading this short work was an attempt on my part to re-examine this period and challenge my assumptions - unfortunately it has only reinforced my earlier impressions. Depending on one's perspective Hegel either represents the zenith or nadir of German idealism. While there is no doubt that Hegel was an able thinker much of his written work comes across as empty and highly speculative. Although I am not a positivist Hegel's type of sophistry likely contributed to the appeal of analytical philosophy in the early twentieth century. To be fair to Hegel, however, his work did influence some significant later thinkers such as Marx and may be worth a look for that reason alone.

Overall, probably only for readers well versed with Hegel. For those interested in a survey of German Idealism, Pinkard's German Philosophy 1760-1860 is a solid book.

Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" and Other Essays

Frederick Jackson Turner

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Turner's "Frontier Thesis" Unfiltered 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 9 people found this review helpful.

This is a very useful collection of ten essays by University of Wisconsin/Harvard University historian Frederick Jackson Turner written through out his career. Edited and introduced by John Mack Faragher, this book is a very fine entrée point to the thought of Turner. The first of the essays published here is Turner's seminal work, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," an essay that defined a whole field of research. Read at the 1893 annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, this paper has exerted an enormously powerful force on the historiography of the United States, in no small measure because of its powerful statement of American exceptionalism. Turner took as his cue an observation in the 1890 U.S. census that the American frontier had for the first time closed. He noted, "Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development."

Turner insisted that the frontier made Americans American, gave the nation its democratic character, and ensured the virtues of self-reliance, community, egalitarianism, and the promise of justice. He noted that cheap or even free land provided a "safety valve" that protected the nation against uprisings of the poverty-stricken and malcontented. The frontier also produced a people with "coarseness and strength...acuteness and inquisitiveness, that practical and inventive turn of mind...[full of] restless and nervous energy...that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom." It gave the people of the United States, in essence, virtually every positive quality they have ever possessed.

Despite criticisms, through at least the 1950s vision of the frontier reigned supreme as an underlying definer of American character. It conjured up an image of self-reliant Americans moving westward in sweeping waves of discovery, exploration, conquest, and settlement of an "untamed wilderness." And in the process of movement, the Europeans who settled North America became an indigenous American people. In Turner's characterization, the frontier concept has always carried with it the ideals of optimism, democracy, and meritocracy. It also summoned in the popular mind a wide range of vivid and memorable tales of heroism, each a morally justified step toward the modern democratic state. The popular conception of "westering" and the settlement of the American continent by Europeans has been a powerful metaphor for the uniqueness of America in the twentieth century.

As explained in Faragher's introduction, in the latter half of the twentieth century historians increasingly questioned Turner's frontier ideal, arguing that it reduced the complexity of events to a relatively static morality play, avoided matters that challenged or contradicted the myth, viewed Americans moving westward as inherently good and their opponents as evil, and ignored the cultural context of westward migration. They determined that Turner's "Frontier Thesis" was excessively ethnocentric, nationalistic, and somewhat jingoistic. His rhetoric excluded more than it covered, moreover, failing to do justice to diverse western people and events.

In addition to the title essay, this excellent collection of the essays of Frederick Jackson Turner includes such articles as "Social Forces in American History," "The Western and American Ideals," and "The Significance of Sections in American History."

This is an indispensable source for the thinking of Frederick Jackson Turner and his influence on thinking about the history of the American West.

Editorial Review:

Frederick Jackson Turner is often considered to be the most influential American historian of the century, and his views continue to shape the controversial field of Western American history. In this book, John Mack Faragher introduces and comments on ten of Turner`s most significant essays, concluding with a comment on the recent debate over Turner`s legacy and his effect on Americans` understanding of their national character.

Revolt Against the Modern World

Julius Evola

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Fantasy History 1 out of 5 stars.
25 of 64 people found this review helpful.

First of all, very little of this book is about the "modern world" of the title. Most of the book is a description and history of what the author calls Traditional society. Its characteristics are: an all-powerful sacred leader, a caste system, holy war, and the subservience of women.

According to Evola, Traditional societies existed in ancient times, first in an advanced Arctic culture, then through Arctic influence, in the Aryan nations of the Northern hemisphere. These superior and virile cultures were constantly threatened by decadent and feminine cultures originating in the Southern hemisphere.

After the Golden Age in the ancient world, only weakened versions of Tradition are found through history. Most of the book recounts (and laments) its gradual disappearance. The last 3 chapters critique the modern era.

My problems with the book:
1--No Traditional Arctic culture ever existed, much less ever influenced anyone.
2--While aspects of Tradition probably existed in various ancient societies, I doubt that most people, except those at the top, felt they were living in a Golden Age.
3--Evola hates women. A woman's only purpose is sex and reproduction. He defends harems and the Hindu custom of suttee. It is the feminine influence that causes the decline of Tradition.
4--Evola hates the lowest caste, the workers--also called slaves, serfs, plebians, "the caste of the beasts of burden and the standardized individuals."

I agree with many of Evola's criticisms of modern society, where spirituality has been replaced by meaningless activity, materialism, and greed. But most of his outrage is directed at the modern world's empowerment of workers and women. Although Evola's Tradition no doubt appealed to the "thinking" fascist of the 1930s, I can't imagine why his theories would interest anyone today.

Editorial Review:

In what many consider to be his masterwork, Evola contrasts the characteristics of the modern world with those of traditional societies, from politics and institutions to views on life and death.

The Historians’ Paradox: The Study of History in Our Time

Peter Hoffer

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Editorial Review:

How do we know what happened in the past? We cannot go back, and no amount of historical data can enable us to understand with absolute certainty what life was like “then.” It is easy to demolish the very idea of historical knowing, but it is impossible to demolish the importance of historical knowing. In an age of cable television pundits and anonymous bloggers dueling over history, the value of owning history increases at the same time as our confidence in history as a way of knowing crumbles. Historical knowledge thus presents a paradox — the more it is required, the less reliable it has become. To reconcile this paradox — that history is impossible but necessary — Peter Charles Hoffer proposes a practical, workable philosophy of history for our times, one that is robust and realistic, and that speaks to anyone who reads, writes and teaches history.

The philosophy of history that Hoffer supports in The Historians’ Paradox is driven by a continual and careful search for the authentic, but without confining the real to a finite or closed set of facts. Hoffer urges us to think and live with a keen awareness that history is everywhere, to accept the impossibility of measuring its reliability, but to never approach it unquestioningly. Covering a sweeping range of philosophies (from ancient history to game theory), methodological approaches to writing history, and the advantages and disadvantages of different strategies of argument, Hoffer constructs a philosophy of history that is reasonable, free of fallacy, and supported by appropriate evidence that is itself tenable.

The Historians’ Paradox brings together accounts of actual historical events, anecdotes about historians, insights from philosophers of history, and the personal experience of a long time scholar and teacher. Throughout, Hoffer liberally spices the mixture with humor to create a philosophy of history for our times.

Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, and Fraud in the Writing of American History

Peter Charles Hoffer

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Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Woodrow Wilson, a practicing academic historian before he took to politics, defined the importance of why: "A nation which does not know what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today." He, like many men of his generation, wanted to impose a version of America's founding identity: it was a land of the free and a home of the brave. But not the braves. Or the slaves. Or the disenfranchised women. So the history of Wilson's generation omitted a significant proportion of the population in favor of a perspective that was predominantly white, male and Protestant.

That flaw would become a fissure and eventually a schism. A new history arose which, written in part by radicals and liberals, had little use for the noble and the heroic, and that rankled many who wanted a celebratory rather than a critical history. To this combustible mixture of elements was added the flame of public debate. History in the 1990s was a minefield of competing passions, political views, and prejudices. It was dangerous ground, and, at the end of the decade, four of the nation's most respected and popular historians were almost destroyed by it: Michael Bellesiles, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose and Joseph Ellis. This is their story, set against the wider narrative of the writing of America's history. It may be, as Flaubert put it, that "Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times." To which he could have added: falsify, plagiarize, and politicize, because that's the other story of America's history.

War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires

Peter Turchin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Vague 3 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

There has been a trend of late of publishing multi-disciplinary books with an ambition of rediscovering history, economics, sociology, whatever, or even of creating a new science, which have met commercial success. In particular, it seems that as soon as you talk about "evolution" you double the sales of your book. "The evolution of wealth" and "Guns, Germs and Steel", both excellent books, come to mind. This book seems to be surfing that wave and explicitly aims at being the next Jared Diamond (says the publisher). Unofrtunately it doesn't quite get there.

It's difficult to find a thesis in this book. It claims to be a scientific model of history but it's mostly descriptive verbiage. Most of it is pedestrian historical narrative (which admittedly could be interesting to someone who knows little about world history), with a few analytical points (sometimes just summarizing someone else's book) thrown in from time to time. The part exposing the author's belief in free will is particularly naive and reads like an undergraduate philosophy dissertation. I suppose that the author's main thesis is the fact that empires tend to be built from areas located on meta-ethnic frontiers - which makes sense, if only because that's where the good armies are, but promoting it to a Universal Law of History is excessively pompous. Likewise, the asabiya concept, while not totally useless, is purely descriptive ex-post. Besides, the expression of those ideas is vague and lacks rigour.

There are some interesting points. The best chapter in my view is the one on the 14th Century (largely inspired by Barbara Tuchman's Distant Mirror), explaining how Europe resolved its overpopulation problem by murderous warfare, and its inequality problem ("top-heavy" society) by the elimination of the elites either through the legal assassination of the richest nobles (England) or by purging the nobility in military defeats (France). The parallel with the end of the Roman senatorial class at the beginning of the Principate is interesting and makes me think the of the way Mr. Putin has been recovering the People's economic assets from the Oligarchs in Russia. The observation that inequalities have been increasing in the US since the 1960s could perhaps help us determine the time of the next revolution...The part on social capital in chapter 13, essentially a summary of various theories on the subject (Putnam), is very interesting as well.

Finally, contrary to what seems implied by the publisher, the book makes no use of quantitative models. The author only briefly mentions a simplistic wealth distribution model with inheritance in a population which has little in common with the main discourse.

Editorial Review:

Like Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Peter Turchin in War and Peace and War uses his expertise in evolutionary biology to make a highly original argument about the rise and fall of empires.

Turchin argues that the key to the formation of an empire is a society’s capacity for collective action. He demonstrates that high levels of cooperation are found where people have to band together to fight off a common enemy, and that this kind of cooperation led to the formation of the Roman and Russian empires, and the United States. But as empires grow, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, conflict replaces cooperation, and dissolution inevitably follows. Eloquently argued and rich with historical examples, War and Peace and War offers a bold new theory about the course of world history.

The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History

David Lowenthal

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 2.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Heritage, while it often constitutes and defines the most positive aspects of culture, is a malleable body of historical text subject to interpretation and easily twisted into myth. When it is appealed to on a national or ethnic level in reactions against racial, religious, or economic oppression, the result is often highly-charged political contention or conflict. The extraordinary theme of this unique book is how the rise of a manifold, crusade-like obsession with tradition and inheritance--both physical and cultural--can lead to either good or evil. In a balanced account of the pros and cons of the rhetoric and spoils of heritage--on the one hand cultural identity and unity, on the other, potential holy war--David Lowenthal discusses the myriad uses and abuses of historical appropriation and offers a rare and accessible account of a concept at once familiar and fraught with complexity. David Lowenthal is Emeritus Professor of Geography at University College London, and the author of the bestselling The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985)