Forgetting History?

History as a Source of Normative Disagreement

Yesterday, I went to see Ridley Scott’s movie Napoléon at the cinema. I didn’t like it. As a French who has some knowledge about Napoléon, I found Scott’s choices of emphasis on some aspects of Napoléon’s life and personality dubious. Obviously, for a movie of two hours and a half, choices must be made.[1] You can’t tell and show the whole story, and that doesn’t mean anything anyway. Many French people have complained about the obvious historical inaccuracies (the firings on the pyramids, really?!). But really the problem is not that for me. It rather lies in Scott’s judgment about what is important or interesting in the history around Napoléon, not in the way he gets the historical details right or wrong. To use a Weberian notion, my issue is with Scott’s judgment of the value-relevance of Napoléon.

Well, I don’t intend to do a post on Scott’s view of Napoléon. It’s rather that reflecting on the movie reminded me of Weber’s account of “cultural sciences,” an account that he largely borrowed from the writings of the German neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert. Following a long tradition in German philosophy and social sciences, Weber distinguishes between two general kinds of sciences. Natural sciences are essentially “nomothetic”, they are turned toward the discovery of universal laws and principles. Their goal is therefore to produce nomological knowledge that is not tied to specific historical events. Cultural sciences, quite the contrary, are “idiographic.” They are turned toward the production of knowledge about historical events. Historical events are interesting and meaningful because they are singular. The search for universal laws is relevant only in so far as it permits highlighting the singularity of historical events. That poses however an immediate problem. How do you attach meaning to history and historical events, acknowledging that there is an infinity of such events and that it is impossible to have a “comprehensive” view of history through a nomological reduction? This is to answer this issue that Weber introduces the notion of value-relevance.

Value-relevance refers to the way an individual singles out and gives meaning to historical events by ascribing them a particular value. The value one ascribes to historical events is tied to the values that one is endorsing and based on which one forms a view about what matters. According to Weber, there are three main kinds of meaning that can be attributed to historical events and based on which value-relevance can be established:[2]       

1.      The event can be an exemplar of a type and therefore contribute to enhancing our understanding of this type.

2.      The event can be part of a set of events and therefore contribute to enhancing our understanding of this set.

3.      The event can be causally related to other meaningful events.

In all three instances, there is no fully objective basis to establish the meaning of the event. You need one way or another, to take an “axiological stance” on what matters. According to Weber, this stance is not fully subjective, it is determined by the cultural context that frames the historical inquiry. That explains why there is no “objective history” and why the way it is conceived is tied to forms of life.[3]

This conception of history and historical knowledge is relevant I think beyond its scientific study. History is not only an object of inquiry. It is also obviously a source of artistic inspiration and, even more importantly, a source of normative reasons to publicly justify principles, institutions, and actions. And that leads to the main reason why I wanted to write this post initially. Over the last couple of weeks, I have heard and read in the media and the press several diplomats and experts making the same point with respect to the conflict between Israel and Hamas and more generally the geopolitical situation in this region of the world: parties have to put history aside and start to negotiate peace based on a clean slate.

In many respects, this is a sensible point of view. History has been constantly used by different parties to justify claims and actions, including the most violent ones. This is clearly one of the reasons why the conflict is never-ending. The first question is where should we start to “count the points”? How far in the past should we return to determine who has a legitimate claim on such and such pieces of land? But more fundamentally, the Weberian conception of history indicates that there is no chance that an agreement on what history can justify will ever emerge. There is no objective history, only history as perceived through axiological lens. If you don’t share the same lens, you will not “see” the same facts. The appeal to history will only make matters worse by reinforcing the initial disagreement.

In this sense, history is a source of normative, not only factual, disagreement. The normative reasons that you can extract from it are tainted by overarching value commitments, and if two people do not share the same value commitments, they will hardly accept the historical reasons that they each submit. History can therefore be a major impediment to public reason and more generally to the justificatory endeavor. This is an aspect that contractarian moral and political philosophers have emphasized in their ways. For contractarians, history is irrelevant in so far as the status quo must necessarily serve as the basis for the establishment of the social contract. This point is well made by James Buchanan:[4]   

“The uniqueness of the status quo lies in the simple fact of its existence. The rules and institutions of sociolegal order that are in being have an existential reality. No alternative set exists. This elementary distinction between the status quo and its realized alternatives are often overlooked. Independent of existence, there may be many institutional-legal structures that might be preferred, by some or many persons. But the choice is never carte blanche. The choice among alternative structures, insofar as one is presented at all, is between what is and what might be. Any proposal for change involves that status quo as the necessary starting point. ‘We start from here,’ and not from some place else.”

Buchanan is clear that this view is not a normative defense of the status quo. It is a factual claim that the status quo is what will be left if no agreement is found. In light of the fact that history can hardly be a source of public justification, there is a strong reason to endorse the contractarian view that history is ultimately nothing more than “sunk costs” that are normatively irrelevant.

The problem however with this view is that it is oblivious to a psychological and social fact: history, more exactly a particular view of history, is constitutive of individuals’ personal and social identities. This contributes to a more general point about the unavoidable normative relevance of nationalism. In what I take to be one of his most lucid and contemporary relevant essays, Isaiah Berlin observes that liberal authors of the 19^th and early 20^th century, as well as Marxists, have considerably underestimated the ideological significance of nationalism.[5] Berlin locates the roots of 20^th-century nationalism in the “wounds” inflicted on peoples and the destruction of traditional hierarchies and orders by the rationalization process leading to the emergence of modern bureaucracy and market relationships – a phenomenon of course well diagnosed by Weber. The underestimation of the significance of nationalism and history are two sides of the same coin. Today, far-right populism is largely playing on the national sentiment, with great success. On the left, progressive “post-liberals” (as Cass Sunstein calls them in a recent NYT op-ed) are appealing to history to justify their claims about past injustices. Insofar as the national sentiment cannot be separated from a certain shared view of the history of a people, you cannot expect that the appeal to history as a source of justification will disappear. Whether (classical) liberals like it or not, nationalism and historical considerations will remain relevant normative factors. From an “ideal theory” perspective, it may be true that nationalities and history are irrelevant. But we are living in a non-ideal world.  

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[1] Apparently, there is also a director’s cut version that is almost twice as long. It will be interesting to see how significantly it changes the movie.

[2] Max Weber, Roscher and Knies: The Logical Problems of Historical Economics (New York: Free Press, 1906 [1976]).

[3] One of Weber’s key epistemological claims is however that the impossibility of objective history is not in contradiction with the possibility for cultural sciences to be value-free. Weber argues that once the value-relevance of historical events is set, their objective analysis through a causal explanation, itself based on the identification of actors’ motivations, is feasible.

[4] James M. Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan (University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 78.

[5] Isaiah Berlin, “Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power,” in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. IsaiahHG Berlin (Princeton University Press, 2013), 420–48.