Historiska orsaksförklaringar (eller: Historikers förklaringar)

Konversationen i AHR utgår från ”an assumption of a “problem”—that many of today’s historians have eschewed the rigorous explanation of historical change, once a hallmark of historical analysis in recent times” — inte för att säga att andra approacher till historia brister i legitimitet, men… Konversationen initierades av redaktören Robert Schneider, som tillfrågade Emmanuel Akyeampong, historiker om moderna Afrika vid Harvard; Caroline Arni från universitetet i Basel som forskar om vetenskapshistoria och genushistoria; Pamela Kyle Crossley, forskare i kinesisk historia vid Dartmouth; Mark Hewison, modern-Europa-historiker vid UCL; och William Sewell, statsvetare och historiker vid University of Chicago.

Redaktören, Schneider, börjar sin intervention så här, med en väldigt intressant iakttagelse:

”In recent years, it has been observed by many who are interested in the nature of historical scholarship that a range of questions that once were central to our profession have lost their prominence. One way to characterize these questions is to recall that not long ago it was common for historians to think about “cause” as an element of historical analysis. Thus, books, articles, and well-known debates on the causes of the French Revolution or World War I, or on the decline of feudalism or the rise of capitalism, or on the factors contributing to the Protestant Reformation or the “New” Imperialism—all implied a confidence that focused analysis could yield answers that would explain large-scale historical transformations. It has been a long time since mainstream historians have thought in terms of “causes” or causality—perhaps for good reasons—but along with this there has been a move away from a more general attempt to analyze change, and to specify those factors and conditions responsible for significant transformations and developments. There are a whole host of explanations for this historiographical shift: the decline of Marxism and the discrediting of modernization theory or developmental models; the rise of cultural history and the so-called linguistic turn; the waning of treatments of the longue durée; a suspicion of master narratives, especially as originating in Western visions of history; a turn toward “thick” description and microhistory as fruitful modes of historical scholarship; and the emergence of transnational and global history, whose scope and scale seem to render a certain kind of analysis quite difficult. And there are surely others reasons as well.” (s. 1371)
Att bara lista olika faktorer räcker inte, och Schneider ställer två frågor till deltagarna: (1) håller du med om att ambitionerna att förklara har gått ned bland historiker? (1b) I så fall, ser du det som ett problem? Och (2) I så fall, varför? — ”I would like each of you to indulge in something on the order of a mini historiographical survey with this question in mind, and from the perspective of your own position and field.” (s. 1371)

Mark Hewitson är först ut bland deltagarna och håller med om att i böcker i historisk teori har frågan om kausalitet fått stå tillbaka. Hewitson publicerade 2004 boken History and Causality och han är alltså väl inläst när han säger att:

”The combination of criticism of the very notion of causality on the part of some poststructuralist scholars and indifference on the part of many others has arguably left practicing historians with relatively little guidance in their quest for and their ordering, linkage, and delimitation of individuals’ reasons, motives, assumptions and interests, communicative and other forms of interaction, discursive frameworks and aporias, institutional constraints and empowerments, and wider economic and environmental conditions. Even historians who discuss causes openly or seek to provide causal explanations of events often do so with little reference to a theoretical literature.” (s. 1372)Han nämner Simon Schama som ett exempel på ”self-proclaimed narrative historians”, som kritiserat resonemang om orsak och effekt och istället förespråkat en återgång till 1800-talets narrativa historia. Jo Guldi och David Armitage med deras History Manifesto (2014) tar han upp som talat för ”big questions”, men han menar att också Guldi och Armitage vacklar mellan  “mak[ing] sense of causal questions” och “tell[ing] persuasive stories over time.” Han verkar inte heller helt övertygad om att historiker har de förmågor som Guldi och Armitage hävdar och som krävs för den ”big history” som de förespråkar.

Caroline Arni börjar sitt första inlägg på mesta möjliga historiker-sätt: ”I would indeed like to begin by critically interrogating the premises of the question, that is, the diagnosis that “large-scale historical transformations” and the quest for “causality” have “lost prominence” in the discipline.” (s. 1374) Och: ”If I try to come into the discussion at this point, it is in an attempt to get a more nuanced historiographical picture and to question the disciplinary bookkeeping that goes with it: I am not convinced that said “turns” have lost sight of change and explanation tout court.” När EP Thompson, säger hon, introducerade ”kulturalistisk” socialhistoria med The Making of the English Working Class så hade han ingen avsikt att överge förklaringsambitioner — tvärtom så ville han förklara klassens utveckling över tid. Och:

”When Joan Scott in “Women in The Making of the English Working Class,” setting an example for what was taking shape as the linguistic turn, criticized Thompson for not going far enough when he replaced determined class consciousness with determined experience, she was abandoning neither the emergence of “class” as a topic of historical inquiry nor the attempt to explain what went on in societies of the nineteenth century. Rather, she explained not only the continuing problem of women in socialism, which was to haunt the New Left a hundred years later, but also why this problem could not have been historiographically apparent. She did so by excavating a mechanism of exclusion that would be repeated whenever universalist definitions (of the rights-holding subject, of the worker, etc.) were conceived in gendered terms or whenever the abstract was conceived by concretization—as in the paradoxical constitution of modern republicanism.19 To be sure, while Thompson remained dedicated to reconstructing a continuous historical process driven by a social logic, Scott delved into historical moments that produced discursive logics, which then were repeated in different settings. This approach owes much to Michel Foucault’s project of history as genealogy. While such history-writing went against any teleological drift, it can hardly be accused of neglecting large-scale transformation (just think of Foucault’s history of sexuality or his work on governmentality). Hence, I would like to argue that the rejection of models and determination should not be equated with abandoning change as an explanandum, and that a turn to social or linguistic logics is not the same as abandoning explanation.” (s. 1375)
Hon menar alltså att: ”It is not change, but a specific way of conceiving change, namely as a continuous movement through time. And it is not explanation, but a specific way of explaining, namely by abstraction.”

Pamela Kyle Crossley börjar med att konstatera att Kina-historiker inte har någon egen teori, utan plägar att använda samma (västerländska) teoretiker som övriga historiker. Hon har en intressant utläggning om Braudel:

”On the question of the longue durée, Braudel’s early concept was that longue durée studies would reveal causations that had previously not been appreciated, whether it was the role of Kondratiev waves in Europe’s modern political history or the interplay of patterns of trade with demographic trends. Right away one sees an implied reference to Bergson, who had suggested that the durée was the moment of free-play consciousness, in which causality had no particular meaning. The longue durée is the durée that is long enough to recapture a sense of sequence and causation—long enough to transcend the individual and mark the experience of communities, regions, continents. This was accompanied by a hope that the rapid aggregation of both data and computational techniques in the later twentieth century would reveal patterns that were not only long but also massive; indeed, the axiom that more data necessarily led to more accurate discernment of relationships (including causal) was everywhere in twentieth-century thinking. Yet for Braudel, “social reality” remained the scale of everything. The cumulative effect of material forces on social interactions was and would remain for him the engine of change, and the measure of “reality.” In that sense, Braudel seems to me to be the consummate modernist.” (s. 1377)Idag tror intellektuella, säger Crossley, mindre på en verklighet utanför observatören. Men viktiga europeiska forskare i kinesisk historia har ofta fostrats i Pirennska eller Braudelska miljöer: ”They fostered a search for the longue durée and were grandfathers to later searches—led by scholars such as Pierre-Etienne Will and R. Bin Wong, editors of the seminal Nourish the People—for wide-ranging archival research that could transform the unstructured particular into the structured general, including big-data demographic studies led by James Lee.” Efter Edward Said har dock den europeiska blicken på Kina problematiserats.

Bill Sewell (han introduceras så) börjar sitt svar på ett intressant sätt.

”I do think that this first question has signaled a significant problem in contemporary historical scholarship. However, the problem as I see it is not that historians have lost interest in “explaining historical change.” It is true that the terms “cause” and “causation” have fallen out of style over the past three decades, largely, I think, because of the “billiard ball” model of causality that these terms tend to evoke. During the vogue for quantitative social history in the late 1960s and 1970s, some historians adopted the positivist language that dominated sociology, political science, and economics in those years, a language in which “causation” was a kind of sacred touchstone. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, when many historians turned from social to cultural history and from positivistic to interpretive modes of thought, uttering the words “cause” or “causation” tended to mark one as hopelessly backward. But “explanation,” unlike “causation,” has not become a tabooed term, largely because of its rather vaguer implications. (When, in ordinary conversation, we ask, “How do you explain that?” we might get a billiard-ball causal account, but we would be at least as likely to get a narrative or an explication.) When historians gave up “cause,” they did not necessarily give up explanation, or even explanation of large-scale historical transformations. In my own field of French history, explaining the French Revolution continued to be the holy grail—but the explanations changed from class struggle or economic fluctuations to changes in political culture. The key question became not what social forces constrained or empowered actors, but how actors understood what they were doing—and how their construal of affairs guided their actions.
What certainly has shifted is the form of explanations favored by leading historical scholars. Here the crucial development, as I see it, is the cultural or linguistic turn—a complex movement with many different theoretical strands (e.g., structuralist, hermeneutic, anthropological, Foucauldian, and Derridean). Derridean post-structuralism or deconstruction, which was the most epistemologically radical form of the linguistic turn, has inveighed against the very concept of cause, which according to it erroneously claims to arrest the free play of the signifier. Poststructuralists’ aggressive denunciations of what they regard as naïve notions of cause or explanation in historical texts, let alone grand narratives, have had an intimidating effect on the general run of historians, whose grasp of philosophical and theoretical issues of any kind tends to be weak, and who understandably wish to avoid being denounced. Foucault, whom many categorize as a poststructuralist, seems to me an utterly different case. Far from abandoning “grand narratives,” Foucault proposes grand narratives of his own, such as the historical shift of epistemes or the rise of the disciplines or the rise of biopower—but grand narratives established by searching out patterns of thought that have structured the conduct of historical actors in different eras. Historians, by wrapping themselves in the cloak of Foucauldianism, often embrace what are in fact sweeping causal narratives while claiming (falsely, in my opinion) a post-structuralist epistemological high ground.” (s. 1381)Han har också en för mig hjälpsam uppdelning mellan olika kulturalismer inom historieforskningen. ”The hermeneutic or anthropological forms of the cultural turn lack the supposed epistemological radicalism of poststructuralism, but they share the poststructuralists’ focus on the sphere of signs as the key to understanding social life.” I denna tradition använder man sig av teoretiker som Geertz, Goffman, Sahlins, Elias, Ricoeur och Bourdieu, och Sewell menar att ”This tradition, I would say, has become dominant in the historical profession.” (Ett påstående som rimmar sant för oss som jobbar i Lund!) Inom forskning om fransk historia ser han följande forskare som framstående exempel på denna inriktning: Natalie Zemon Davis, Roger Chartier, Fran¸cois Furet, Bonnie Smith, Keith Baker, William Reddy, Mona Ozouf, Lynn Hunt, Robert Darnton, och, ibland, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Också det mesta av Sewells egen forskning sorterar han in i denna tradition. Och det är väldigt kul när han diskuterar denna skolas aversion mot historiska förklaringar som kan låta gammeldags:

”Historians who work in this style (or cluster of styles) generally embrace historical explanation as a goal, either explicitly or implicitly. But the emphasis on the sphere of signs, however conceptualized, makes most of them leery of invoking the sorts of causal arguments that were common during the high point of social history in the late 1960s or the 1970s—all the more so because they prefer to steer clear of denunciation by post-structuralists or would-be poststructuralists. References to, for example, social structures, class, market dynamics, demographic patterns, exploitation, or business cycles all have an odor of mechanical causation that nearly all cultural historians eschew.” (s. 1382)Som ekonomisk-historiker känner jag igen en av rötterna till min egen frustration med historiker här… Sewell säger att:

”There has, in short, been a “loss” as a consequence of the cultural turn, but a loss that most historians would probably regard as a gain—a gain in subtlety and sophistication that has preserved them from the crude errors of economic and social determinism.”

Och då vill jag gentemot den tänkta historikern (inte mot Sewell per se) förstås invända att grundandet av förklaringar i ekonomiska och sociala förhållanden inte är samma sak som determinism! Utan det är väl just den förväxlingen av ekonomiska och sociala förklaringar med determinism som frustrerar mig.

Referens
EMMANUEL AKYEAMPONG, CAROLINE ARNI, PAMELA KYLE CROSSLEY, MARK HEWITSON, AND WILLIAM H. SEWELL, JR. (2015) ”AHR Conversation: Explaining Historical Change; or, The Lost History of Causes”, American Historical Review