Historiography and civilization
Keith Windschuttle
Washington Times
May 9 1999

While refugees from Kosovo stream across borders and talking heads in television studios debate the merits of the Serbian and NATO cases, one name unlikely to be mentioned as responsible for the current debacle is that of the German philosopher of history, Johann Gottfried von Herder. Apart from those who have studied the history of ideas in the late eighteenth century, Herder is largely unknown. Yet he deserves to be recognized as much as his later compatriot Karl Marx as an architect of many of the disasters that have befallen Europe in the twentieth century.

Herder was the man who originated two of the most influential concepts of the modern era: cultural relativism and self-determination. He said that people who constitute a language group, no matter how small and undistinguished, have their own culture which cannot be judged by outside standards and which are authentic in their own terms - all cultures are equal but different. He also argued that all unique cultures deserve to determine their own destiny -- every culture should form a nation.

Though Herder was a conservative, his ideas let loose on Europe the then radical concept of nationalism. Within a century, the wars of German unification were waged to enforce the idea that all German volkes must be affiliated to the German state. In the twentieth century the extension of this idea produced the First and Second World Wars. Under Hitler, its logic led to the extirpation of those who did not qualify as part of volk culture.

One of Herder's disciples was the great nineteenth century German historian, Leopold von Ranke, who, after reading a collection of medieval folk ballads, wrote a history of the people among whom they had originated, the Serbs, thereby inspiring the awakening of their national identity from its centuries-long domination by the Ottoman Empire. Though Serbian aspirations were subsequently curbed by the rise of the new empire of the Soviets, the collapse of Communism has seen their revival in the 1990s. Herder's romantic nationalism is today represented in the Balkans by the sinister euphemism of ethnic cleansing.

In North America and Western Europe, however, the historic track record of these ideas in fostering the most primitive kind of tribal hubris is blithely ignored. In our own societies, cultural relativism and self-determination remain inviolable, self-validating concepts from which the aura of innocence still shines. The past twelve months alone have seen them gain some remarkable endorsements. Canada, for instance, has just given one fifth of its lands to the Eskimos and the English Parliament seems determined to see Scotland become an independent nation.

Perhaps this is why, in his discussion of Herder's role as a philosopher of history in the book reviewed here, Donald Kelley in Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder [1] feels no obligation to discuss his ideas critically nor to mention their disastrous consequences in central and eastern Europe. Indeed, Kelley toes the line of the prevailing Western intellectual establishment by defending Herder on these very grounds.

In Herder's time, the philosophes of the French Enlightenment made a clear distinction between those societies that had attained the higher plane of civilization and those who languished as barbarians. Herder's cultural relativism, however, would have none of this. There could be no barbarians since all cultures were authentic. As Kelley explains: "Herder's point was that in contrast to the civilization of scholars and philosophers, culture could involve the whole people (Kultur des Volkes) and so represented the best road to an understanding not only of history but also of human nature."

Today, there are very few Western historians who dare to use the word "civilization" because of the politically incorrect value judgement embedded within it. Almost none, however, would shy from the term "culture". Indeed, the field of "cultural studies", a combination of literary theory, criticism and ethnography, which owes its central ideas to the principles founded by Herder, has been the fastest growing area of the humanities in America in the 1990s.

Herder is the last author discussed at any length in Kelley's survey of the history of history writing, which starts in ancient Greece and finishes at the end of the eighteenth century. The idea of the book was actually a good one. One of the best ways to grasp the sweep of Western culture and the shifts in its thinking over the past two millennia is to look at how it has reflected on its own past. Moreover, there have been few good short surveys of the subject since R. G. Collingwood's The Idea of History appeared in 1946, so there was clearly a gap in the market. However, Kelley's execution leaves a great deal to be desired.

He starts with Herodotus, who, although he entitled his work The Histories, is not regarded by some observers, including the present reviewer, as a proper historian at all. Those, like Kelley, who see Herodotus as the founder of the discipline do so because they have no problem with the fact that his writing conforms to earlier poetic and dramatic conventions. In Greek tragedy, for instance, Aristotle said the job of the poet was to describe events as they might have been or ought to have been "from probability or necessity", that is, to make the events fit the drama. Accordingly, Herodotus embellishes his work with legends and rumours. In fact, some modern scholars argue that several of the travel tales in The Histories, especially of the author's purported visit to Egypt, are pure invention.

Those of us who see his compatriot, Thucydides, as the first genuine historian, emphasise the latter's pains to get his facts right by using "only the plainest evidence", but especially by his efforts to distance himself from his own political system and religion. By attempting to report objectively on the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides took a profoundly revolutionary step for both himself and for the legacy his work has bequeathed. To look down, as it were, upon your society and become a critic of your own practice, is a characteristically Western notion and, indeed, one of the great strengths of Western culture-possibly even its greatest strength. We now take this notion-the attempt to be objective and self-critical, rather than subjective and self-defensive-so much for granted that we assume it is a perfectly natural thing to do, whereas to many other cultures it has long been something shocking.

Kelley, however, will have none of this. He adopts the position of the German hermeneutic theorist Hans-Georg Gadamer who claims that our use of language makes such self-awareness impossible. Kelley doesn't argue for this position, he simply asserts it, as if Gadamer's authority is sufficient to make it so.

Another problem with Kelley's book is that, unless you are as familiar with the subject matter as he is, you will find it almost impossible in places to follow what he is saying. There are passages where his writing is so condensed, and where he drops so many names and concepts without backgrounding their significance, that one finds oneself totally bemused, and can only wonder whether the author might not be in the same boat. The worst offender is the final chapter, which reads more like bibliographical notes than finished prose. This not only makes the book inaccessible for the average undergraduate history student but puts it way out of reach of the non-specialist reader as well.

The main fault of this book, however, is its deferral to current academic fashions. It is yet another example of the influence of the so-called "linguistic turn" in the humanities over the past decade, also known as postmodernism or poststructuralism. Although Kelley does offer a brief criticism of one poststructuralist writer, Michel Foucault, the overall evidence of his book is that he is captive of many of these concepts himself. This has left him unable to see any problem with the prevailing deference to cultural relativism.

This is a pity because a proper account of the Western historical tradition might have been used to show how this tradition contributed to the development of a genuinely civilised world view -- how it developed a distaste for ethnocentrism and racism and came to regard all human beings (though not all human cultures) as fundamentally equal, albeit equally flawed. Such an account might also have been critical of those theorists like Herder and his successors who rejected the Enlightenment in favour of the narrow-minded, tribal concepts of cultural demarcation, ethnic destiny and rule of the volk.

1. Donald R. Kelley, Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder, Yale University Press, New Haven