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World History and Its Critics Author(s): Philip Pomper Reviewed work(s): Source: History and Theory, Vol. 34, No. 2, Theme Issue 34: World Historians and Their Critics (May, 1995), pp. 1-7 Published by: Wiley-Blackwell for Wesleyan University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505431 . Accessed: 16/09/2012 15:30
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WORLD

HISTORY

AND ITS CRITICS

PHILIP POMPER

World history occupies a special niche within the profession. Most historians, certainly most modern historians, would agree that it makes good sense for students to study history from a global perspective, but the dearth of upper-level courses suggests that not very many historians teach world history or global history as such. The profession also recognizes that history should be written from the broadest possible perspective, but few historians have the temerity to write world history. More generally, it seems that while historians increasingly recognize the importance of world history, they remain relatively ignorant about it as a developing field. It therefore seems fitting at this moment to take stock of a lively and creative, but still small subdiscipline of history. The articles in this issue are based upon papers discussed at the World History Conference sponsored by History and Theory and held at Wesleyan University on March 25-26, 1994. The conference received support from The Pew Charitable Trusts as part of the University's International Program at the John E. Andrus Public Affairs Center. We invited representatives of quite different schools of thought to exchange views and to inform us about the state of play in world history. William H. McNeill examines the changing shape of world history and ways to explore its patterns, whereas Lewis Wurgaft offers postmodern approaches to the problem of individual and group identity and adds an ordinarily missing psychological dimension to the project of world history. Francis Fukuyama represents a version of universal history whose perspectives and assumptions are challenged by Ashis Nandy. Several of the contributors explore issues that vex all historians, but especially concern world historians: problems connected with the comprehension, integration, and synthesis of diverse materials. William A. Green discusses the special problems of periodization facing world historians, and Janet Abu-Lughod the self-critical and creative process on the way to a major synthesis as well as the epistemological grounds for venturing one. Before examining these themes, it might be useful to advance some of the possible reasons for world history's relative marginality as a field, something that seems especially odd at a time of ever greater and more intense global connections. Perhaps the paradox can be partially explained by comparing the cognitive styles of world historians with those of "normal"historians. The task of grand synthesis requires hedgehogs, Isaiah Berlin's great system-builders or holists,

PHILIP POMPER

whereas the history profession attracts foxes, Berlin's thinkers who relish detail and particularity. A less generous typology would place standard historians at the lower end of a scale of intellectual creativity. Although historians do attempt syntheses, they rarely aspire to a master narrative of the sort produced by philosophers of history or the grand syntheses of a Spengler or Toynbee. Historians ordinarily leave the grand syntheses and master narratives to sociologists, anthropologists,and philosophers, and eitherapplaudor heckle from the sidelines. The leaders of the profession generally make their impact and reap their rewards by opening up for investigation a trove of archival material, by developing new methods of research, and by making what had been marginal the center of attention. They sometimes offer new visions (or revisions) of things that others have investigated but comprehended differently. A variety of this type of creativity- finding new ways of comprehending the world by seeing connections among things that have been studied in relative isolation - has been the forte of world historians. However, unlike colleagues who focus more narrowly and use all relevant primary as well as secondary sources, practitioners of world history rely heavily upon secondary sources. Such reliance evokes disapproval among guild members, for whom only direct scrutiny of documents validates the status of historian. Moreover, the world historian's ability to "see" patterns and connections among secondary and primary sources is not so much a skill as a gift and cannot be taught to apprentice historians. In short, the values and practices of "normal" historians tend to relegate world history to the margins of the profession; and leading world historians find it difficult to reproduce themselves. Critics of world history have other, less guild-centered grounds for being wary of it. Even though world historians are a varied lot and even though fewer and fewer subscribe to the master narratives about progress of, for example, Hegel or Marx, they are victims of guilt by association. In The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism Karl Popper, an early critic, assailed the holistic tradition, which he believed was based largely on a false analogy of societies with organisms. To be sure, during the 1950s and 1960s the proponents of modernization theory produced variations on the theme of progressive historical change and prospered, but as competitors with rather than continuators of earlier organicist philosophies of history or world histories. The modernization theorists' sociologically inspired visions of systematic change proved to be no less vulnerable to criticism than the theories Popper had criticized as holistic. The critics tended to be those who still found value in the tradition assailed by Popper and believed that modernization theory carried relatively conservative and Eurocentric implications. Roughly a half-century after Popper's opening round, others now join the attack on holism and systemic theory in the social sciences. Some critics associate theories of progress with the historical behavior of imperial Western democracies, others with the catastrophic costs and utter failure of communism. The putative agents of progress in world history have failed to play their role prop-

WORLD HISTORIANS AND THEIR CRITICS

erly; "late capitalism" refuses to leave the stage; the gap between the affluent and the poor widens; tribalisms flourish; "modal personalities" suited to modern conditions fail to appear; warnings of ecological catastrophe abound; and one might easily extend the list. Small wonder that hopeful dialectical visions of the progressive direction of world history or "scientific"predictions of universal modernization console fewer and fewer. People who identified themselves as "progressive"twenty-five years ago might prefer another label today, even if they retain their original commitments. Current critiques of holistic and systemic traditions thus come from many different points on a cultural-political spectrum. Both conservative Western critics and radical non-Western ones find in the great dialectical utopias less hope and promise than pathology. A prominent non-Western critic of the modern Western utopian tradition and contributor to this theme issue, Ashis Nandy, approvingly cites Richard Pipes, with whom he otherwise has little in common. The philosophers and historians who changed our image of science and criticized aspects of the Western intellectual tradition, however, played a small role in depreciating holistic theories compared to the advocates of the "linguistic turn." This movement-generally anti-scientistic, anti-holistic, and constructivist in style-required major shifts in intellectual allegiance. By the 1970s influential groups within the French intelligentsia and its outliers had abandoned their existential commitment to Marxism. Combining dissident psychoanalytic, linguistic, and philosophical currents, leaders of the postmodern generation found paranoia and power motives everywhere in Western thought. Prominent critics in the new generation followed Barthes and Foucault and dissolved into "discourse"the substantial world described "scientifically"by the vast majority of their fellow social scientists. By the 1980s the postmodern style of thought had won over significant constituencies, most notably among Western feminists, non-Western postcolonial intelligentsias, and other groups that felt "marginalized," insulted, and injured by the norms of "scientific" Western doctrines. Thus, although for very different reasons, leading lights of the postmodern intelligentsia joined humble guild historians in rejecting holistic or "totalistic" projects. The events of the late 1980s, however, seemed to many to signal a revival of the progressive global trends predicted by modernization theory. The recent collapse of Communist regimes brought renewed hope to those still invested in one or another species of the theory. Francis Fukuyama returns to the well of Western master narrative and finds that the overall direction of history confirms the predicted global ascendancy of liberal democracy and the market. He also finds theoretical grounds for a human nature that will be satisfied with nothing less than liberal democracy and the market. These views distance him from a postmodern intelligentsia vehemently opposed to any discourse about human nature. Fukuyama finds a prominent place in his version of modernization theory for Hegel's notion of recognition, which, through Alexandre Kojeve's reading

PHILIP POMPER

of The Phenomenology of Spirit, had inspired the French intelligentsia in the 1930s, and by way of them, Frantz Fanon. The latter combined Hegel with Marx and psychoanalysis, and in The Wretched of the Earth recommended violent revolution as therapy for the victims of Western power. Fanon, of course, prescribed what a great many political leaders had already practiced and continue to practice without the inspiration of Hegel's master-slave dialectic or any psychoanalytic notion of therapy. The appalling results of therapeutic violence have contributed to the postmodern effort to remove targets of aggression of any sort by subverting the scientific and philosophical discourses responsible for their "construction." It is rather difficult to justify killing in behalf of mere constructions, and pointless to train one's sights on a transitory cloud of signifiers. Unlike Fanon and earlier generations of colonial or postcolonial thinkers who decided to fight the West on its own terms, contemporary non-Western intelligentsias sometimes combine their critique of world history with a general critiqueof scientifichistory. Sustainingthe therapeuticoutlook, but in a different voice, Nandy proclaims both the ethical and therapeutic benefits of a rejection of history, a discipline tainted with Western scientism. In this respect he echoes colleagues in the West who have unmasked Western science as an instrument for the labelling and domination of the many by the few, of women by men, of people of color by white people, of "backward" peoples by "developed" ones, of "abnormals" by "normals." Rather than extolling the emergence of a global scientific-technological culture and the liberal democratic order envisioned by Fukuyama, Nandy calls for cultural pluralism grounded in prescientific traditions. In place of Western-style history, he proposes ahistorical myth as an appropriate cultural-political therapy. Although he does not count himself one of them, Nandy shares the postmodernists' rejection of the Enlightenment, of Western "scientific" norms, and of binary definitions leading to rigid and destructive behavior in the name of masculinity, the nation, or the scientifically defined cause of the moment. His approach is designed to counteract harmful forms of Western holism and scientism, but not universalism as such. Nandy offers as an antidote the sort of fluidity and androgyny that he finds in traditional Indian culture. Lewis Wurgaft's contribution, like Nandy's, addresses the relationship of history writing to therapy. Wurgaft clarifies the evolution and multiple meanings of "identity," a psychoanalytic term first given wide currency by Erik Erikson in the 1950s, and now used as often in a cultural-political sense. Like psychoanalytic clinicians who help their patients create a coherent narrative supporting a positive identity, historians play a therapeutic role in shaping group identity by providing narratives promoting, for the most part, strong national identities. In presenting postmodern approaches to both individual and national identity, Wurgaft probes the limits beyond which the dissolution of "identity" yields harmful rather than therapeutically positive results. The desire for continuity, cohesion, and a strong identity still activates not only

WORLD HISTORIANS AND THEIR CRITICS

existing nations, but groups that feel victimized and deprived of nationhood. The latter no doubt find discussions of the discursive origins of nations somewhat curious. In any case, whatever their merits, postmodern notions about the construction of the nation, gender, or identity, simply float above the heads of ordinary people at the "groundfloor" of culture and politics, to use Theodore von Laue's term. Wurgaft and Nandy point up the need for world historians to incorporate psychological analysis in their projects. For example, world historians frequently study the consequences of encounters among different peoples and cultures under conditions of unequal power. Psychoanalysis has important things to say about the sources of the human tendency to form distorted images of outsiders in such conditions. Yet historians generally steer clear of psychoanalysis for a host of reasons. One may say of psychoanalysis what Pareto said of Marxism when comparing it to a bat: it looks like a mouse to some and a bird to others. No less than Marxism, psychoanalysis has taken a great variety of forms, from Freud's grimly deterministic views to the postmodern ones represented here. Wurgaft criticizes varieties of psychoanalysis that set rigid gender boundaries and fail to recognize the human potential for a healthy multiplicity of selves.* Postmodern psychoanalysis prescribes more fluid and capacious selves, and psychoanalytically-minded historians generally hope for a time when group identities cease to depend upon paranoid projections. Nandy confronts the dangers of orienting oneself in the world by means of established absolutes while Fukuyama discusses the consequences "scientifically" of living without them. However, the practitioners of world history contributing to this issue - William H. McNeill, Janet Abu-Lughod, and William A. Green deal not so much with the ethics, politics, and therapeutic consequences of holistic and scientistic visions as with the practical problems of shaping a world history. They are all aware of the transcendent, consolatory visions, the earlier "heavenly cities" that partially shaped "materialist" utopias; like most historians, they are conscious as well of the politics of group identity affecting history writing past and present. They remain, however, dedicated to systemic approaches and to the integration of parts into wholes. Although distancing themselves from historians who still practice the earnest positivism of the nineteenth century, the world historians represented here belong somewhere on the realist side of the realist-constructivist spectrum. To be sure, McNeill, Abu-Lughod, and Green do not agree about a method for arriving at the structure of world history, much less for deciding upon a historical moment when one can speak of "world history" proper. They are sensitive

* Like the term "progressive,"the term "healthy"seems problematic from a postmodern perspective. It is derived from "heal," meaning "to make whole." Postmodern therapy suggests "unbinding" rather than "healing."

PHILIP POMPER

to the interpretive aspects of their discipline and its growing heterogeneity. Janet Abu-Lughod finds hermeneutic approaches congenial, although in practicing her hermeneutic art she remains faithful to her systemic project. Green presents an array of reasons for abandoning an "integrationist"approach and any hope for a consensus about periodizing world history, but resists disintegrative critiques. McNeill has used the word "mythography"to describe what historians do, but "myth" for him connotes not so much group therapy as worthy but inevitably obsolescing efforts at cognitive mastery. In short, historians committed to the pursuit of a global vision take into account the politics of history writing; they are not threatened by relativizing and hermeneutic perspectives. They continue to look for the nourishing cognitive grain amid the chaff of culture-laden motives and emotions. Knowing in advance the limitations of their vision, they continue to act as if they can advance knowledge, and as if there is a unitary world for them to comprehend. In this respect, they do not differ significantly from scientists who expect their hypotheses to be falsified. The hedgehog spirit of system animates the work of the most prominent world historians. Their systemic visions, however, sometimes depart radically from that of their predecessors. There are, of course, a great many species of systemic thinker. For example, the systemic architectonics of ecologically informed world historians differ radically from those of earlier philosophers of history or world historians relying upon optimistic dialectical approaches or metaphors of growth and decay. McNeill's work contains a sober sense of a human community expanding or contracting within limits set by fluctuating systemic equilibria. One would be hard put to find in this type of system either the optimistic sense of an ending in the dialectically driven systems or a Spenglerian sense of inevitable decay. McNeill's and Abu-Lughod's quest for cognitive mastery and their relative optimism about finding connections, patterns, and system in the data of history do not imply utopian projects or consolatory accounts of the human condition. A robust spirit of self-criticism in world historians leads to dramatic revisions within the field. McNeill, for example, finds problematic his and others' earlier definitions of civilization and notes the considerable diversity subsumed under that spacious but imprecise notion. "Civilization"to him now denotes a variety of groups with quite different sociocultural characteristics flourishing within boundaries set by agreements about the legitimacy of rulers and the terms of trade. Even the discovery of new groups -new sociocultural elements functioning within a civilization -and of shifting relationships among them would not, in this view of things, endanger the basic project of a unitary world history. World historians should investigate on a global level the ways in which diverse groups rearranged boundaries by expanding contacts, tolerating outsiders, and engaging in mutually beneficial arrangments of various sorts. McNeill is willing and to negotiate macrostructural terms such as "interactive zone," "ecumrene," "world system," so long as historians continue the project of identifying the

WORLD HISTORIANS AND THEIR CRITICS

structures that prefigured our present globalism. In this respect, he and other world historiansreaffirmthe traditionalcommitmentsof social scientiststo defining real macrostructures, past and present. Although generally agreeing about the basic project, world historians disagree about the kinds of things that should be emphasized in establishing boundaries, periods, and macrostructures, and the disagreementsreflectquite differentways of thinking about the human condition. Of the practitioners of world history represented here, Abu-Lughod most clearly reflects the impact of the linguistic turn. The new emphasis upon language makes perfect sense to many scholars who define themselves as social scientists. For some historians the linguistic turn simply licenses chronic heterodoxy and elevates to a more prominent position the readily acknowledged interpretive aspect of history; for others it sanctions an instrumental approach to knowledge long held by philosophical pragmatists; and for still others it serves the moral and political purpose of exposing relationships of power contained in systems of knowledge. Abu-Lughod confronts the "metatheoretical dilemmas" of world history. While conceding much to constructivist approaches, she draws a ratherfirm line between the narratives of historians and those of fiction writers. The "synthetic imagination" involved in doing world history is fully compatible with the practice of social science. Like McNeill, Abu-Lughod acknowledgesperspectival limits without surrenderingto cognitive pessimism. She, too, affirms systemic projects and investigates how historians "catch" (or are caught by) the shape of the whole. As a sociologist doing history and examining her own process of creativity, she both attests to and exemplifies the creative role of scholars on the margins of disciplines. It might be argued that it would be a disservice to world historians to tamper with their marginality. One hopes, however, that this issue of History and Theory will clarify some of the likely misconceptions of critics, most notably the tendency to find the same sins in all hedgehog theoretical styles. The views represented in the issue make clear that several traditions flourish in world history. The progressive one, descending from the quest for heavenly cities, still seeks to establish the directionality of history. The philosophical underpinning of Fukuyama's position distinguishes it from those of McNeill, Abu-Lughod, and Green, who devote their effortsto findingthe shape of history and to reflecting self-criticallyabout their own creativity. They search for patterns and integrative periodizations, and for new ways to comprehend the relationships of the parts making up systemicwholes. They aim at cognitive masterywith a less than utopian hope that superior historical knowledge about global connections may prove to be useful. The psychoanalytic perspective, on the other hand, illuminates the sometimes unconscious factors at work when we create boundaries, establish continuities, make connections, and shape unities or wholes. Nandy and Wurgaft expose the rigid and static identities that have been responsible for great human pain and for destructive conflicts, small and large. Perhaps this sort of criticism will be useful for distinguishing the defensive distortions of destructive forms of holism from the benign system-building of world historians. Wesleyan University