Part II. The Developing Structureof Historical Knowledge

How has modern historiography emerged? There were two preceding stages of development: Graeco-Roman historiography and the European protoscientific historiography of the 15th-18th centuries.

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human past. The remainder of this book deals chiefly with the writings of the first set.

Is the empirical-theoretical distinction applicable to historiography? Past happenings are unobservable, but for different reasons as compared with the unobservability of microbes and molecules. So the first stage of producing and formulating historical knowledge is to reconstruct the human past as it would have appeared to a historian directly observing the past. Empirical knowledge proceeds to find regularities after the primary descriptions are reconstructed and to re - describe individual events and entities as parts of the regularities. Historical theories are possible only on condition of having some empirical knowledge for the construction of models to which the theories refer. The development of historiography leads first to reconstructive knowledge, and only later to empirical and theoretical knowledge. This provides part of the explanation why empirical and theoretical studies are much less frequent among historical works than reconstructive ones.

What are the changes in the field of research? Traditional historiography was the study of politics and motives for politics (i.

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The widening field of study led to a change of the reference classes of some histroical knowledge: interest turned from the study of personalized referents (individual human beings, individual nations) to non-personalized referents (institutions, social systems), and from the study of governing elites towards the study of all sections of the population. As a result of these developments there has been a change adding the study of «invariant» objects (e. g., socio-economic formations by marxist historians) to the study of «applied» objects («England», «Caesar»).

What are the changes in the build-up of the image of history? Historical knowledge is that of sequences. Traditional historiography dealt with the sequences of events. The trend has been towards establishing the sequences of systems (institutional systems, societal types, etc.). Traditional sequences were also chronological. The trend has been to switch to generative sequences: to find out how events or systems develop out of previous events or systems, how they are generated by preceding events or systems. The sequences themselves can be classified into elementary and non-elementary ones (the elementary sequences can be formalized by means of elementary graphs, whereas the non-elementary ones are those represented by non-elementary graphs).

The traditional reconstructive image of history was built out of descriptions of examples or instances (some examples were intuitively accepted as typical and some were not).

What are the premises of historical writing in social theory? The use of any language introduces an implicit understanding of the world (consider, for example, the meanings of the terms «nation», «state»). Historians

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draw some concepts from other social sciences (economics, sociology). Marxist historiography seems to be the only influential case of historical writings explicitly based on systematic social theories.

Whenever historians write of" non-chronological interconnections of events, institutions or systems, they have to refer (implicitly or explicitly) to some theory of society about the influence of the different factors (economics, politics, etc. ) upon the subject of the study. Vulgar theories accept only one influencing factor, sophisticated theories allow for more than on factor. In the latter case, weighting of the factors and acceptance or non-acceptance of feed - backs become important considerations. A sophisticated theory may still allow for a dominant factor (the one having the highest weight or setting out a hierarchy of limiting conditions).

M. Postan has pointed out yet another basic premise of historical knowledge. Let us call it the presumption of qualitative difference. Historical knowledge is built up assuming that certain ways of behaviour, sets of values, economic or governmental institutions have been basically different in the past (e. g. , the differences between the British Parliament of the 20th century and that of the 14th century). Historical knowledge is formulated relationally to a certain reference system. This reference system is usually a social reality that is contemporary to the historian, or it is a system immediately preceding (or following up) the system under study.

Are values part of historical knowledge? To consider values as part of any knowledge involves abandoning the distinction between knowledge and values. To consider values as a necessary and integral part of historical writing implies the concept of intrinsic values. I cannot

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accept intrinsic values, therefore I cannot accept values (evaluations) as a necessary and integral part of all historical writing. This does not exclude the permissibility of making explicit evaluations by historians as human beings in their historical works. And this does not preclude the permissibility of evaluating actions or systems which involve a standard of values different from mine or from that of a historian: re-enacting the thought of an Inquisitor does not mean accepting his thoughts as valuable for myself.