Mark Hewitson

History and causality

Introduction: Causality after the Linguistic Turn 1. Intellectual Historians and the Content of the Form 2. Social History, Cultural History, Other Histories 3. Causes, Events and Evidence 4. Time, Narrative and Causality 5. Explanation and Understanding 6. Theories of Action and the Archaeology of Knowledge Conclusion Select Bibliography

Princes’ Wars, Wars of the People, or Total War? Mass Armies and the Question of a Military Revolution in Germany, 1792–1815:

This article investigates whether a military revolution took place in the German lands during the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, with the potential to transform institutions and to alter contemporaries’ attitudes not merely to war, but to politics and diplomacy. The scholarly debate about a metamorphosis of warfare during the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods involves three connected controversies: the meaning and timing of any ‘revolution’ in the conduct of war, the existence of a ‘total war’ in or after 1792, and the continuation of ‘cabinet warfare’ by the majority of the German states. Recently, historians have argued that the geographical and political diversity of the German states, in conjunction with popular criticism of the burdens and sacrifices of conflict in southern and western Germany, militated against a broad military revolution. This study contends that such reactions were themselves indicative of the transformation wrought by the conscription of more mobile and destructive mass armies in a seemingly unending series of wars, which ensured that military conflicts impinged more fully on civilian life.

Black Humour: Caricature in Wartime

Abstract The article evaluates Sigmund Freud’s theory of the joke, Mary Douglas’s anthropological reading of Freud and Michael Billig’s Freudian analysis of the sociology of laughter and ridicule as a means of interpreting cartoons produced in Germany during wartime. Defining ‘black humour’ broadly, as humour deriving from the contemplation of suffering or death, the author argues that both sociological and anthropological accounts of satire have difficulty in comprehending the nihilism of some wartime caricature. Freud’s notion of the joke as the revelation of repressed instincts and unconscious desires seems better suited to such interpretation but pays little attention to the particular social roles and cultural meanings of humour.

Images of the Enemy: German Depictions of the French Military, 1890-1914

This article re-examines German assessments of the French military before the First World War. It challenges both the view of the followers of Fritz Fischer and that of subsequent revisionists that such assessments played only a peripheral role in the formulation of the Reich’s military strategy and foreign policy. By looking at the correspondence of the General Staff, attachés, diplomats, the Chancellor, Wilhelm II and his entourage, and the press, the study investigates images of Germany’s principal military enemy for most of the pre-war period in their own right. It contends that government, the army and the press - of different political leanings - shared a large number of assumptions about the eventual decline of the French army and navy, which had a decisive effect on the conduct of foreign policy in the decade before 1914. This perceived decline, however, occurred later than is commonly held, around the turn of the century, against a widely believed historical background of French military power. The tardiness of such a shift in Wilhelmine views of the neighbouring state helped to ensure that calculations of French strength remained a - perhaps the - central element in the development of Germany’s strategy and policy-making prior to the First World War.

Intellectual Historians and the Content of the Form

The reasons for the strange death — or decline — of causality in history are various, resting in part on reactions to the illegitimate importing of natural-scientific methods in the 1950s and 60s and in part on a longstanding ‘empirical’ attachment to evidence, chronology, facts, events, description, objectivity and narrative.1 Above all, the marginalization of causal explanation in theories of history has been connected to a series of oft-decried but rarely completed ‘turns’ — linguistic, semiotic, symbolic, cultural, post-colonial — in specific historical sub-disciplines during the last two decades or so.2 The concomitant disputes have been acrimonious, with Patrick Joyce accusing his antagonist Lawrence Stone of issuing ‘a war cry’ and ‘pre-emptive strike on “postmodernism”’ in 1991, after the latter had blamed three ‘threats’ from linguistics, cultural and symbolic anthropology, and ‘new historicism’ for provoking ‘a crisis of self-confidence’ within the discipline of history. Generally, the different positions have been cast as a defence of — or attack on — the ability of historians to describe the world beyond texts and to use evidence to prove or disprove a case, rather than implying a direct assault on causality.3 ‘Derrida has concentrated his fire upon the realist assumptions embedded in the Western conviction that words could repeat reality’, wrote the intellectual historian Joyce Appleby in 1998: ‘Despite the overt commitment to rationality, writings in the Western tradition, he has said, can always be found undermining these categories [of dichotomy] because they were not, in actuality, opposites that explained the world but elements within a hermeneutic system’.4

Introduction: Causality after the Linguistic Turn

The question ‘What is history?’ has elicited many different answers. For Herodotus, one of the first historians, it was a form of ‘inquiry’ such –that neither the deeds of men may be forgotten by lapse of time, nor the works great and marvellous, which have been produced some by Hellenes and some by Barbarians, may lose their renown; and especially that the causes may be remembered for which these waged war with one another’.2 Historians continue to debate which part of Herodotus’s definition is the principal one: a story of ‘deeds’ (human actions), a record of ‘works’ (artefacts and other traces) or an evaluation of ‘causes’ (reasons why actions or events occurred or ‘causes’ were taken up). Many now contend that history is ‘an authored narrative’, which tells a story by recounting a sequence of events in a particular manner, as an act of narration.3 More empirically minded scholars emphasize facts and evidence, which are held to constitute the record and structure the narrative. Post-structuralists, appealing to hermeneutics and literary criticism, concentrate on the techniques, lapses, tropes, genres, epistemology and ideology of representation and narration by historians-as-authors within historical texts and discourses. Neither pay much, if any, attention to causes. Few recent works on historical methods and theory have devoted chapters to the examination of causality and to the identification, framing, analysis and justification of questions.4

Social History, Cultural History, Other Histories

The label of ‘translator’, put forward by Appleby to describe the entire discipline of history could not be applied to social historians, many of whom took the train ‘through the terrain of textuality to the land of discourse and deconstruction’ but who were not sure whether they would stay ‘very long at the destination’, in Geoff Eley’s opinion in 1990.1 At the apogee of their sub-discipline in the 1970s, the majority of them had been influenced by Marxian analyses of social and collective actions and material and other causes, frequently in contrast to supposedly mistaken or dissembling avowals of individual motives. A significant number had sought to describe and explain Charles Tilly’s ‘big structures, large processes [and] huge comparisons’.2

Explanation and Understanding

The exploration of causes and causal explanation owes much to the traditions of pragmatics and neo-Wittgensteinian philosophy. The exponents of the two schools of thought (William Dray, G. H. von Wright, G. E. M. Anscombe, R. S. Peters, Peter Winch, A. I. Melden, Charles Taylor) separate different language games, with their own use of language, activities, concept formation and paradigms. One language game relates to natural science, with its observation of natural events and regularities, its identification of causes and its formulation of laws without exceptions. Another relates to social science, which accounts for human actions, together with the reasons and goals connected to them, and the rules and norms to which they refer.1

Theories of Action and the Archaeology of Knowledge

Repeated or patterned actions — that is, practices — are typically invested with meaning, but they need not be meaningful and they sometimes seem to have effects — as in the case of unintended or unexpected outcomes — which go beyond the ways in which they are understood by actors, onlookers or parties to an action.1 This contention contradicts the premises of historical ‘interpretivism’, casting doubt on Sewell’s definition of ‘structures’ as ‘sets of mutually sustaining schemas and resources that empower and constrain social action and that tend to be reproduced by that social action’, where ‘resources … embody cultural schemas’.2 Agency, in Sewell’s opinion, is ‘the capacity to transpose and extend schemas to new contexts’, rather than the ability — sometimes in defiance of expectations — to act.3 Historical transformation results from agents’ access to a multiplicity of intersecting structures and schemas, their transposition of schemas to new sets of circumstances, the unpredictability of the accumulation of resources as a consequence of the enactment of schemas and the polysemy — or multiplicity of meaning — of resources, in the American historian’s account, rather than from the unanticipated cooperation, competition and collision of individuals’ actions, frequently in institutions with ill-comprehended logics or dynamics and in conditions which are incompletely understood or are seen to be meaningless.4

Causes, Events and Evidence

In Michael Oakeshott’s view, which he expounds in a review of E. H. Carr’s What is History? (1961), causal explanation threatens to elide the two separate meanings of ‘history’, namely a form of enquiry and a series of events in the past.1 In his criticism of Carr’s Marxist ‘Whiggism’ — or the distortion of the past for the purposes, or through the lens, of the present — Oakeshott mocked the historian of the Soviet Union for claiming that ‘history is the study of causes’, in which ‘every historical argument revolves around the question of the priority of causes’ and where determinism simply implies that there are no ‘causeless events’.2 The British philosopher’s targets, which, he implied, invalidated the very notion of ‘causality’, were the unjustified use of natural-scientific ‘laws’ in history and the ‘evolutionism’ of Marxist historiography, which manipulated events to arrive at a predetermined outcome: ‘There can in fact be no “scientific” attitude towards the past, for the world as it appears in scientific theory is a timeless world, a world, not of actual events, but of hypothetical situations’.3 Oakeshott’s priority was to preserve the particularity and alterity of the past, despite conceding that historians were obliged to ‘create and construct’ historical accounts, by examining the ‘relations’ — which were frequently identified only by their contiguity — between individual events.4 To use the term ‘cause’ simply to mean a set of events which bring about another event or set of events — rather than to connote adherence to a ‘law’ or historical direction — was to exclude ‘all that properly (or even distantly) belongs to the notion of causality’.5