THUCYDIDES USED HISTORY TO MEET NEEDS PRESENTED TO HIM BY GREEK CULTURE AND HIS EMINENTLY, GREEK MIND. HE PRESENTS A WAR, ITS ORIGINSAND COURSE, EXPLAINED WITH INTELLECTUAL POWER AND ARTISTIC PROPRIETY. HE IS A POLITICAL SCIENTIST CONCERNED WITH POLICY, POWER, WAR AND CIVIC DEGENERATION, HIS IMPORTANT ASSERTON IS THAT KNOWLEDGE COULD LEAD TO A HIGHER FORM OF BEHAVIOR.
The founding editors of The Review were at one in proclaiming that their journal was devoted to the philosophical and historical approach to political realities. The labors and fads of half a century have made the motto suspect for the arrogant simplicity of its common sense. One may, nevertheless, ask: what do you call that which is there? Or is reality like Gertrude Stein's Oakland, with no "there" there? And are our words the conveyances of nothing but emotional sounds?
Notoriously history has two principal meanings: the past itself and the historian's presentation of the results of his inquiry into it. When the latter meaning is examined, it is evident that, for all of his stance of common sense and matter-of-factness, the historian encounters his profession's form of the problem of knowledge. How and why does he select his sources? What is the validity or truth of his account? What is the relationship between fact and generalization? Does his avowed or unconscious motivation affect the historian's search, selection and presentation? Does his form of presentation affect his use of facts and his judgment?Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), modern founding father of critical history and patron saint of devourers of archives, raised these questions and responded to them. His masterly histories of Reformation Germany, Prussia, England, France and the papacy were esteemed as the fruit and vindication of his method. In England and the United States, however, the method was identified with a few slogans and injunctions: history is primarily a study of politics and foreign policy; return to or search out the sources; evaluate them and prize, above all, the sources that present the testimony of participants and eyewitnesses; strive simply to tell things as they actually happened. So to reduce Ranke's position is intellectual primitivism, a primitivism that persisted because attempts to discuss the problem of historical knowledge were ignored or derided as futile.
The victims of the wars of religion and persecution had their revenge in the growth of a temper indifferent to the claims of particular churches. There were others too who, adopting ancient materialisms, rationalism or the outlook of physical science, rejected theology and abandoned religion altogether. For both, the Enlightenment meant a polemic against the Christian churches, as well as Judaism, and the articulation of new beliefs. Since religions touched in different degrees all spheres of life, the battleground included philosophy, morality and history. Superstition and persecution were the themes of Enlightened church history. God's hand, if there was a God, might direct history in some ultimate way, but not by direct intervention. As there was no "sacred history," the meaning of history or, at any rate, a way of looking at history, had to be sought anew. After the first quarter of the eighteenth century, this task attracted a remarkable and numerous response, to which the Romantic period added the dense and challenging Idealist philosophies of history. The philosophes, the gurus of Enlightenment, presented history's meaning as not in the past but to come, as salvation from the irrational and the brutal, presented it with a clarity as misleading as it was persuasive.
No Roman historian except the scholar propagandist Livy would have described his own age as the best of times and the worst of times. Imperial pagan Romans were too morally pessimistic about history to be able to say more than what Tacitus in effect said of the age of Trajan: it was the best of the worst times. His patriotism in no way encouraged him to say yes to his age, as Vergil and Livy had done to theirs. Instead it strengthened the moral severity with which he passed judgment on men of an iron age.
Greek historical writing began at much the same time as Greek philosophic-scientific speculation. It experienced an even more rapid growth than philosophy, which it resembled in culminating its development in two men of genius. Contemporary events, the principal subject matter of early history, became the subject of inquiry, when some among the literate could not look at or understand events in the epic or mythic terms that had served the past and had to serve as a past.
Serious historical inquiry is inevitably at odds with the idea of providence in history. To such inquiry providence is an unnecessary and frustrating hypothesis. For somewhat different reasons, including embarrassment about triumphalism and presumption in the past, modem theologians rarely speak of providence. Nevertheless, what men have made of providence has had a considerable role in making and viewing history. Here then my concern is with the ways of men to God.
