Ask Ecthy - about history

[Ecthy]

But not merely events, eras and regional histories. Ask about philosophy of history, historiography, philosophy of historiography, scientific potential etc.

[Saras]

What would you consider the most usual mistake laymen make about the study and science of history?

[lord of the mark]

Is progress ineluctable? Can it be defined in a culturally neutral way? Is there a cunning of reason in history? Is history directional?

[lord of the mark]

Could Stresemann have saved Weimar if he had lived? Could he have avoided a great power war?

Alternatively, if Walter Rathenau had not been assasinated, would that have mattered?


Could any German state OTHER THAN Prussia have accomplished German unification?

[lord of the mark]

Has the new history from Marc Bloc on contributed to historical understanding, or detracted from it? Has recent emphasis on "multicultural" approaches to history, gender approaches, etc been a fulfillment of the approach of the new historians, or a departure from their path?

[lord of the mark]

What does it mean to be a historian in Germany today? What is the responsibility of the historian to the larger culture, and to the political future? Is there one (a responsibility, that is, not a future)

[Ecthy]

Originally posted by Saras
What would you consider the most usual mistake laymen make about the study and science of history?

The main conflict between the study of history on one hand and the layman's approach on the other is the different ideas they have about what history is, and what it is for. The layman cares mostly for the history of his own group, because subconsciously one's own group's history forms an important part of one's identity. Therefore, the layman will filter all historical input along his own interest, and he will judge. The judgement will therefore be egocentrist, ethnocentrist, class-centrist, depending on the central values of his identity. It will not be a considerate judgement along certain consciously picked values, as some historians would prefer. So there's the identity bias for one, though it's more of a very profound bias than a real 'mistake'. This and the realization that a group's ability to perform depends on its internal coherence raises the question of what historical education has to be like.

A big mistake that is made is to judge past events, decisions and processes from today's perspective without considering the timely conditions. This, in addition to #1 leads to the popularity of What Ifs. German revanchists will never cease to discuss WWII from a perspective that carries these two notions, ethnocentrist interest and judging everything with hindsight.

Oh, and the overrating of inidividual beings in history, but then there's Great Man Theory, so it's more of a philosophical or even methodological issue than a layman's mistake.

[Barnabas]

Could Austria unify the german states?

[Ecthy]

In addition to the last post: I'm not just adressing the infamous judgement with hindsight. I'm adressing the entire structure in a description of a historical process made in such a way that it leads to the point at which the history was written. More to come in the answer to LOTM's first post.

[BeBMan]

What's the more important "drive" of history: hard, material conditions or political thought, theory, ideas etc?

Simple answers like "both" or "they're interdependent" are not allowed


*runs*

[Ecthy]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
Could any German state OTHER THAN Prussia have accomplished German unification?

Originally posted by Barnabas
Could Austria unify the German states?

This depends much on the timeframe of which we're talking. In the post-Vienna order 19th century, a grand German solution was almost impossible to achieve with the dominant monarchical principle and two German great powers as potential leaders, so it could only end as one German "nation state" (though you might argue against the use of this term) and the other great power on the sidelines. None of the big two was willing to subordinate to the other in the 19th century, not in 1848 and not in 1866 either. So the questions left are:

1. Could Austria have unified with south Germany rather than Prussia?
2. Could Austria have unified Germany before the 19th century?
3. Could post-Vienna Germany have unified in a liberal, federal, peaceful way?
4. Could Prussia have forced the split of the Habsburg realms post-1871?

To 1, history answered that question for us. With a slower economic development in the Habsburg realms than in Prussia, and with the former being overly busy keeping its ethnicities together, Prussia turned out more powerful and decided the race in its own favour. This raises question #4.

2. There's been a point in modern Europe when the Habsburgs were close to achieve hegemony within Germany, during the 30 Years war. In the late 1620, when the emperor had control over all of north Germany, he had designs on annexing large parts of the north. General Wallenstein was appointed Duke of Mecklenburg and General of the oceanic and baltic seas. Sween and France disturbed this attempt, but if you look closer, you will see that Sweden was pretty worn out. France, being a catholic country, was applying Raison d'Etat as an early version of Realpolitik. Had the emperor had similar farsightedness in his political designs, he could have responded with a proper alliance policy, but he didn't. Chances are that the result would have been stable and durable, though European history would have taken a different course. Think anticipation of the world wars.

3. History has provided an example for this, the 1848 revolution followed by the national convention in Frankfurt. With the major players having no interest in too liberal a solution, they came up with a small German solution headed by Prussia, which was rejected. I don't see a chance for any further liberal attempt to unify Germany, save another Germany-wide revolution. Hard to imagine under what circumstances it might have occured, and it implies continueing small states. Maybe a bolshevik all-German revolution, but it's really futile to discuss this in further detail. The liberal attempt of 1848 failed.

4. This is the maddest scenario of all. One of the moot points of a potential grand German solution was the fate of the Habsburg territories that were not part of the German federation of 1816, namely Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Transsilvania. The reduction of Habsburg power to these territories was within the means of the newly founded German state of 1871, but need of allies and regional stability made the status quo preferable.

LOTM, I'm going to answer all of those, but it'll take time. Patience.

[Ecthy]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
Could Stresemann have saved Weimar if he had lived? Could he have avoided a great power war?

Alternatively, if Walter Rathenau had not been assasinated, would that have mattered?

Both are WIs that are hard to deal with. Both were members of parties that declined during the economic crisis, but then both might have added extra popularity. I don't know much about Rathenau, but I guess he was one of those liberals who didn't have apropriate concepts to deal with the republic's issues post-Versailles. Had he lived, I doubt his influence would have mattered much. He was killed for representing fulfillment and being somewhat Jewish and lefty, and for the same reasons his position was to decline either way. In the end, he was an idealist when the situation demanded realism.

Stresemann is a different case. His fulfillment was not unconditional, he traded and bartered all the time. He was sufficiently realistic to know what mattered, and his policy paved the way for later development. And I mean this the way I say it. His foreign policy was not aggressive, but it was revisionist. His line aimed at recovery of the country on the international stage. And there's already a huge difference to Rathenau, who opposed the 1922 deal with Soviet Russia although it was a smart thing to do. Stresemann took more opportunities and set the course for peaceful revision. He wasn't anti-democratic and while I suppose that he supplied many successful concepts, it is hard to tell how he and his party would have fared in wake of the economic crisis of 1929-32.

Definitely would have strengthened the republic's position opposed to the Nazis, but saved it? Either way, the confrontation with the powers of Europe was to continue. The course of the 30s shows that there was room for peaceful revision and even more, but the eventuality of war cannot be ruled out even without national socialism.

[Ecthy]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
Is progress ineluctable? Can it be defined in a culturally neutral way? Is there a cunning of reason in history? Is history directional?

Human history considers human societies over the time, and human societies change. With the possiblity of technical improvement, and the constant competition between groups and sub-groups of human society, technical advance, and economic expansion, are almost inevitable. What is judged as "progress" is however defined by humans, culturally mostly, but also in different ways. Do you consider an ideologically motivated definition of progress as cultural or as scientific? Our western way of thinking (call it culturally or ideologically directed) embraces economic and technical advance, so we tend to say there's always progress in history. This doesn't exclude the possibility of isolated societies in hierarchical order that do deny certain developments; think hunter-gatherers in New Guinea that repulse certain developments, or Imperial China when it banned certain ideas or technical concepts.

Directional? History as you see it depends on the prism through which you watch it. Since, as I explained in an earlier post, humans tend to see history in a biased manner, they also focus on certain processes more than on others. Therefore, history appears as "directional" to many, because A) they focus on certain phenomena more than on others, for reasons cultural, ideological, class-wise etc. and B) because they pretend their own temporal POV to be the end of history. Whig history is a good example for this. If you live in late 19th century Britain and look at the past of your country, it might appear that history always leads to the increase of freedom and representative government. If however you look at 20th century Europe from 1920 until 1980, isolatedly because you live in 1980 and are talking to your grandpa, you might find the opposite to be true.

Beyond that, there are certain features of the human being that make certain developments inevitable. The social drive of humans make them relate to others and interconect, and as, due to the mutually-enforced (game theory: prisoner's dilemma, perpetuated) necessity of technical development, social interaction will expand in space as well as in the numerical dimension (probably coupled with abstraction), the internet and places such as this being a good example. So the connection of human individuals might be a phenomenon where history is indeed directional, also individual mobility and accessability of information. Freedom and representation in government, I'm not so sure about, nor about socio-economic well-being.

[Ecthy]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
Is there a cunning of reason in history?

Not sure what you mean by "cunning of reason", but I think it comes sort of close to what BeBro is asking.

Originally posted by BeBro
What's the more important "drive" of history: hard, material conditions or political thought, theory, ideas etc?

Simple answers like "both" or "they're interdependent" are not allowed

Materialist interpreations of history impress me much more than idealist constructions, since they try, and usually manage, to base it all on a factual ground. The claim that ideas themselves originate from the natural environment is convincing to 80%. So I can write a nice theory on history with all this materialist and neo-marxist stuff as a basis, but it will never suffice to explain it down to every individual. Artists don't fit into it, creativity and imagination don't. But speaking on a social scale, I'm definitely pro-materialist.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Ecthy


Not sure what you mean by "cunning of reason", but I think it comes sort of close to what BeBro is asking.

Its a translation, I believe of a term from Hegel, that you may know in German. The notion that competition among states forces reason to the fore, via dialectic, IIUC