The Future of History by Lukacs John

Author:Lukacs, John [Lukacs, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2011-04-25T16:00:00+00:00

Alas! These titles need no further comment. Alas! They are not untypical. They prove how low much of professional historianship, searching for subjects, has now sunk.

But what must shock us involves more than the selection of such subjects. What are the sources for these kinds of topics? What are their evidences? The latter are, practically without exceptions, insufficient and inconsequential. Jacques Barzun said in the 1970s that the current practices of social history are hardly anything more than retrospective sociology. Now let me add that they are, often, not even that. Sociology, with all of its limitations, can be serious and valuable: an exhaustive (and sometimes comprehensive) study of a society or of a definite portion of it. But the above-listed examples are not that. They are attempts at a scientific sociography (which is almost a contradiction in itself). The aim of sociology is definition. The aim of sociography is description—whence it is, inevitably, literary and historical.

Literary, rather than “scientific.” There is an—at least partial—concordance here between history and the novel (a relationship which the next chapter of this book shall address). Just about every novel is sociographical; it tells us things about people and their society in a certain place at a certain time. Not every history is sociographical: not every historical subject does necessarily include the description of a society of a certain time. But description is what they have in common. (“Description,” even more than mere “narrative.”) A choice of words, phrases, sentences, nouns as well as adjectives or adverbs, of significances and sequences, of meanings: choices that are more than stylistic—they are moral. There may be a moral purpose behind a scientific statement, but there is nothing that is moral or immoral in its mathematic accuracy. But the purpose of history is understanding even more than accuracy (though not without a creditable respect for the latter).

And this is at least one reason why historians ought to read literature, and even more than statistics: to truly widen and deepen their acquaintance with their chosen subject, but also to recognize that their main task is a kind of literature, rather than a kind of science. The converse of this desideratum has been stated recently by the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski:

I am not a historian, but I’d like literature to assume, consciously and in all seriousness, the function of a historical chronicle. I don’t want it to follow the example set by modern historians, cold fish by and large, who spend their lives in vanquished archives and write in an inhuman, ugly, wooden, bureaucratic language from which all poetry’s been driven, a language flat as a wood louse and petty as the daily paper. I’d like it to return to earlier examples, maybe even Greek, to the ideal of the historian-poet, a person who either has seen and experienced what he describes for himself, or has drawn upon a living oral tradition, his family’s or his tribe’s, who doesn’t fear engagement and emotion, but who cares nonetheless about his story’s truthfulness .

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