THE LANDSCAPE OF HISTORY Origin ofthe Cold e Past ‘we-1967 i How Historians Map ssa, the Soviet Union, ad the United States An: Interpretive History Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American [National Secusity P aces inquires into the History of the Cold Wer the End of the Cold Wo: Inplicaions, ier The La ‘The United States , Provoca JOHN LEWIS GADDIS OXFORDChapter Six CAUSATION, GONTINGENGY, AND COUNTERFAGTUALS UE TRIED To Make the case, in the last wo chapters, that the search for independent variables in the social sc t depends are based on an out. rd sciences. Social scientists during in vision of linear and ona even as the natural scie because the procedure moded view ofthe so-called" the twentieth century therefore predictable phe abandoning The h rast, have remained happily on their methodalogie going ab - by these trends, for the most part hardly even aware of them. Those h and E. H., Carr who bothered to scan the paradox: that the ship sailing toward the historians was the “hard” sciences, which don't deal with hu the one fading from view was the one that cl building a science of society. But Bloch died~at the hands of the Gestapo, in France, in 1944~-before he c mbraced a News he methodological passing of ships in the might. y unaffected 1ed, at least, to be Car had hoped to pursue it in a revised vei= THE LANOSCAPE OF HISTORY but left only fragmentary notes for such a project at the time of death in 1982? ences, ent views of what seience is fe J RR. Tolkien's i remain where they are, and a around them, Or so Ive tried to argue so fat ‘The time has come now, though, to try to answer the question scientists have every right to ask and no doubt will if there really are only dependent variables in history, then how do historians establish and confirm causal relations every- the answer, we rarely pro- Cask, we won't tell," we too often reply when our stu sation. “Just finish your thesis. We’ right.” attitude in the preface as an anti-Pompidou Cen. ter aesthetic: the fact that historians dont like to display ductwork. Without some attention to such matters, however, we're apt to con. fuse not only our students but also social scientists tell us we aren't really doing science. We grumble at the postmodemists who claim that what we've wri than our own awareness of has put it, our ‘practice has heen USATION, CONTINGENGY, COUNTERFACTUALS 93 AA good place to begin any discussion of causation and verification is where Carr and Bloch ended theirs: w Carr described has become famous to st cay: is that of the unfortunate Robi road to purchase cigarettes by a drunken Jones, driving a cae with defective brakes around a blind comer on a dark night. Carr used this case to distinguish between what he called "rat wd “accidental ‘causation: 1g the number of trafic fatal to suppose that the number of traffic Fata preventing people fi | causes, Carr went on to explain, “Lead to fruitful general st category; the seco) past or the present managed to confuse not only his readers but himself 1 two senses in which he uses the word “accident”: as, both a general set of causes and as a particular consequence, A more serious problem is the murkiness of his distinction between the ‘ational” and the “accidental.” It’s certainly rational to claim that on’s nicotine addiction led him on this par this particular road in front of this part ossing to his alcohol addietion, was dr a scries of rational causes combined to produce an accidental conse- ticularly badly. But here4 THE LANDSCAPE OF HISTORY quence: Carr's categories therefore blur, even within the case he chose to illustrate their distinctiveness. The claim that accidents have no “meat se af Soviet history* can't prediet ye attempting to make su. Carr seemed to think they s rational” causes, predictions in the ist plac. ld: the whole point of specifying 1 argued, was to provide “fruitful generalizations 8." He ducked the issue, though, of who's to teach such lessons, and how w when they've got them right. It's an unsettling omission, given t quency with which Care himself got such lessons wrong.* For all of these reasons, 1 prefer Marc causes with corpses: h lessons” at wood, turn, lead to “cons fie: och’s connection of fo his death igs had to have happened, Bloch pointed di been built along the edge in had to have shi the law of gravity had to have been in effect; and, Bloch might have added, the Big Bang had to have occurred. Still, anyone asked the cause of the accident would probably reply: “a misstep. ‘The reason, Bloch explained, is that this particular antecedent dif- “it occurred last; it was fered from all the others in several ways the most exceptional in the general virtue of this greater particulari ld have been most easily avoided. death prevented him from discuss Bloch’s actus tion is less well known than Carr's. Even ever, it goes well beyond Ca usefulness. For if [ read Bloch correctly, ng three sets ENCY, COUNTERFACTUALS 95 of dist quences: ecting causes w 1e between the immediate, the intermediate, and the dis tant; a second between the exceptional and the general; and a thi between the factual and the counterfactual. Let me expand on each of these, attempting 2s I do sa to show how they might relate, at least metaphorical to the “new” sciences of chaos and complexity n. distant. Although historical narratives normal ans in preparing them move backward." particular phenomenon —large or sm: cedents. Or, to put it in the terms | used! earlier acknowledgment of Bloch’s moun the greatest importance to the most pr they don't stop there, It would make no sense, for exampl Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor with the launching of the planes i cartiers: you'd want to know how the carriers came to be 1g why the govern- nited States. But you can't they assign mate of these processes to begin an account of the range of Hawaii, which requires explain do that without discussing the American oil embargo against Japan, rench Which in tum was a response to the Japanese takeover of Indochina, Which of course resulted from the opportunity provided by Brance’s defeat at the hands of Nazi frustrations Japan had encountered in trying to conquer China Accounting for all of th the rise of authoritarianism and militarism during the 19996, w tum had something to do with the Great Depression as well as the perceived inequities of the post-World War I settlement, and so on. many, together with the however, would re96 THE LANDSCAPE OF HISTORY ‘You could conti w this process all the way back co the moment, h dreds of millions of years earlier, when the fist Japanese up, in great billowing clouds of steam and smoke, from what was to become the Pacific Ocean. However, we don't that far There's no precise sule d the causes of any historical event. But there is what we might principle of di ater the ti separates a cause from a consequence, the less relevant we presume ng relevance re that is that che gt Jat cause t0 term “irrelevant,” Carrat one py in dismissing what he called es." The Japanese government could hardly have decided to ick fed States if the Japanese islands had never surlaced any more than Bloch’s mountain climber ‘mountain had never arisen. The relevance oft ficiently re alt tal ‘aceiden- that they don't tell us very ke explaining the success of the Japanes the fact that prehumans evolved thumbs. We expect the causes we cite to to consequences. Wh What about causes # but iple of diminishing relevance works hete t00, ier immediate nor dist ermediate? The pi zone of “intermediacy” is sufficiently great that we need some nal standard for differentiating between low levels of relevance at one end of it and high levels at the other. In the Pearl Harbor case, for example, we might place the emergence of Shintoism, the Toku- gawa ascendane} and the Great Depression, the ri ‘China and Indochina within the second. But what's we make these ids of judgments? CAUSATION, CONTINGENCY, COUNTERFACTUALS 97 1 Ws here, Lthink, that Bloch’s second distinetion, between exceptional and general causes, comes into play. Bloch’ point was thot although tain climber could not have fallen from his precipice without the path along it having been built, without the mountain having been uplifted, and without not everyone who skitts precipices plummets from them. The placement of the path, the existence of the mountain, the effects of gravity were all general causes of the accident: they were necessary for the death to law of grav ing been in effe: have occurred, but they werent in themselves sufficient to exp| it For that, we have to come back to the misstep. id ise xe one between dependent and independent variables it social scientists like to make. his disti he same as between necessary ficient c: For a sufficient cause is sti dependent upon necessary causes: that's why a misstep on a mor path is more dangerous than one that takes place in the middle of a meadow. It would make no more sense to discuss either of these mis steps without specifying where they occurred th: Id to place the Japanese carriers off Hawaii without explaining how they got there. Causes always have contexts, and to know 1e former we must understand the latter. deed { would go so far as to det the word “context” as the necessary causes; of, in Bloch's nal upon the general. For while context does not happens, t can certainly determine consequences case of the missteps I've just mentioned, it makes the differ ence between (at worst, in the meadow) a broken ankle and (at best, from the precipice) a broken neck Blach’s understanding of exceptional causes, | think, anticipates ‘what the chaos theorists have called “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” and Care may have had s nd whe hing similar in n98 THE LANDSCAPE OF HISTORY he spoke so confusingly about “accidental” causes. Neither historian lived long enough to hear about “butterfly effects’ butterfly over Beijing that wreaks such havoc elsewhere’ the now famous about such pheno: way to characterize their workings Hou, though, do we know a moment of sensitive ‘of exceptional causation—when we come across one? Neither Bloch nor Carr has an answer for this, but physies may, For in that field it’s done by looking for phase transitions, those points of criti which stability becomes unstable: where water begins to b freeze, for example, or sand piles be Fracture, ing happens in evolutionary biology wher yr when new predators are introduced, or nos Much the same ‘Are there phase transitions in history? The historian Clayton Roberts, without actually using the term, seems to believe that there are. “Historians,” he writes, “instinctively stop the backward search for the ultimate cause at the point where the state of affairs, whose alter- ation they seek to explain, flourished." This isa rather clumsy way of stating, for history, a principle paleontologists have more e called punctuated equilibrium. Ut has to do with the fact that periods of stability are nges. These tend to doesn't proceed at a steady rate “punctuated” by abrupt and destat rise to new species, whose origins paleontologists would trace back to CAUSATION, CONTINGENCY, COUNTERFACTUALS 99 the point of punctuation, but not to the beginnings of life itself, or to the Big Bang.* Roberts is suggesting something sway histo the tant Reformation — opposable thumbs—then w exceptional from by seeking a “point of no return”: the moment at which an & that once existed ceased to do so as a result of whatever J causation. Roberts suggests that we do this ibeium is we're try Givi! War, Roberts argues, Church in argo of August oat as the equivalent been a Protestant Refor Japanese aggression have oc consequence of the Mefji Restoration. So the dependency of the ‘What we're looking fr, then, #s we trace processes that le lar structures, is the point at which these processes t ive, oF abnormal, or unforeseen course, We're searching for phase punctuations in some ex103 THE LANDSCAPE OF HISTORY have been predicted from them. Or, as Aristotle put it in che Poetics, | for those moments "when things come about contrary to expectation but because of one another How, though, do we know wl ‘expectations prior to the event may have been? Wv cedure for establishing causation comes into hs the role of counterfactuals. Bloch argued that we should he antecedent which could have been most easily avoided.” We do that, he explained, by a "bold exercise of the mind” in which histo rians transport themselves “to the time before the event to gang ts chances, as they appeared upon the eve oF its te ‘We move the present back into the past so that it becomes, as he p ' future of bygone times." What Bloch was suggesting here, I believe, wa less than the historical equivalent of laboratory experi physical lans were to perform proc hysicists do with their test tubes, centtifuges, and cloud chambers, They would revisit the past, varying as they did soto try to see which would produce different do this by means of co tried to be careful, in a previous chapter, to distinguish between laboratory and non: ice. Tmade the point that ns can rerun history, any more than ts, paleontologists, and evo factual, Ferguson, ‘experimentati CAUSATION, CONTINGENCY, COUNTERFAGTUALS 101 history, he pat of those ~ that point of view iecelevant, se ned, was just wishful this ce the opponents of the Bo ss had come out differently.” historical causation, For if the “mean. ing coherent sequences of cause and Wve to proceed, to be sure, by cer to identify 4 critical compound by throwing everything av nes say, or toe of frog—into a giant bub! pens, You'd instead clTHE LANDSCAPE OF HISTORY were all initiatives the United States government could have attempted at the time; but to speculate on their combined effect is to ical witches’ brow wher anything goes ani produce a historiograj particular outcome is any more probable than any other Nor is it appropriate to change a variable if the aetion jolved could not have taken place at the time. Its useless to specu: what difference an atomic bomb or a reconnais late, for instance, sance satellite might have made in 1941, because these technologies were as yet undeveloped.” Irs equally useless to wonder what would have happened if the iad suddenly palians, or if top officials coped an abrupt affinity for karaoke bad, and less often good, science fiction” bi it fails the test of pl xy. These weren't options that would scemed feasible to decision-makers at the time.” ‘What this suggests, th 3t the use of counterfactuals in his tory has got to be hig factuals into the pot, because this makes it impossible to pinpoint the can't experiment with single variables argue that have attacked Pearl Harbor if the Americ the Ameri imposed or to claim off the these ave perfectly legitimate positions f the Japanese hadn't mov Historians use counterfactual reasoning ‘causation, therefore, just as they distinguish between immediate, saves the question, though, of how his- the causes of from general causes. This st torians know when they've established, once and for any past event. CAUSATION, CONTINGENCY, COUNTERFAGTUALS 103 and because even if they were reliable no participant w nessed all of an event from al ossible angles, we can never expect to happened. Maybe Napoleon's under- ‘wear was itchy on the day of Waterloo, and the great man’s discomfort distracted him from the proper management of the battle. We'te not likely to knove this, though, because it’s not the sort of thing that would have made its way into the written records. Napoleon might have found it too embarrassing to mention, even to his batinan. But let's say, counterfactu id wrote it down, There's always the possibility that new ev the past will cause historians to reassess familiar and agreed-upon historical events. There's even the po that new perspectives in the present—the possibility, say, of s ing some surviving fragment of the offending garment to microscopic get the full story of what actual iat the batman fidence from analysis to find the remains of the offending fleas-—will bring about ‘changes in what we thought we knew." And even in the absence of new answers from the past, the shifting perspectives of the present can cause us to ask new questions about it that will make it look quite different, as Leo Tolstoy complained toward the end of War and Peace: “every year, with each new what constitutes the ity changes; so that what once seemed good, ten years later seems bad, and vice versa. ... {We even find i ‘one and the same ti 2ws as to what was good and what was bad." None of this means, though, that we lack a basis for detetm! ter, opinion as welfare of story, at 1, quite contradictory causes in history: it only means that our basis is a provisional one. R, G, Collingwood has argued that104 THE LANDSCAPE © own way; every nswers to old ques- orian, working at 8 fs when he ties 1 re0p 1: it's “the heir organic forms, stretching back to for a one-to-one correspondence wap that Jorge Luis cless, a voracious velociraptor that only Steven tailor, a naked body* Its nrposes of representation vary: a world map adel sity museum for a ‘oveen the two could produce, respectively, the one-tor in the case of | nd town, indergarten classroom. f'l leave any further tailoring metaphors to your imagination: my point, quite simply, is that there are boundaries causar | CONTINGENCY, COUNTERFACTUALS 195 between representation at 1's always a goo idea to respect ive is the form of representation that most historians ve already suggested, is to n the past. They're reconstructions, assembled wit nds, of the processes that produced what: tot in their methods. For How could this have happened?” We uch a way as ical prowess combined United States in the in tum most of the time ot least: le to ty to do, Second, the subordination of generalicatify each detail with yer lapoleon's fleas, This isn’t infinite numberof links in any causal cha did each flea come from, for example, and how did he or himself or herself to the emperor's underwear, and then to the emperor? How did cach of the Japanese pilots lear to fly? How did the engines in each of their planes work? What kind of underwear were they wearing o} know, there are some ced to know, and fortun o-gen ge such gaps in the evidence and to move the narra a considerable degree. We use 1 ard: they make possible to represent reality, We resist the macro-generalizations that, by overs tive, and therefore detach represent: ems Lused 1 previous chapter, we practice pa sion, not general particularization. id time-bound logic. Some storical findings require no research, just common s have to be a professional historian to understand that causes must se. You don't hat correlations are not necessarily causes. precede consequences, 0 id propositions, at least throughout this u verse." What does require research is common sense uncommonly Jd because of dista c re, H CAUSATION, CONTINGENCY, COUNTERFACTUALS changing a tense. It's an important part of whats involved in achieving that Assen representation and reality with the purposes of our narrative in relevant: that's a deductive calculation. Composing the narrative will then produce places where more research is needed, back to ind withi that new evidence tion again. B until, as 1 earlier quoted Wil ship it off to on and deduction is largely meaningless for the n. The verb “to fi,” which Lwiite stine tion between in storian seeking to establish causat implies both procedures, is much at what they have to cover, and then at what they t, and then back and fo good as its going to get Fin: tion—must command a consensus among those jon—or narrative, or simula iy, repli The represent ho use it that its correspondence with reality is a close one. This need not extend to .ce is ambiguous there's always room For st as there is among paleontologists every det disagreement amon achieved." There reaching ac history or science, or even law Bur there are standards th the absolute, nonetheless. They derive from the precedents estab.108 THE LANDSCAPE OF HISTORY ied through repeated efforts to apply representations to realities, agreements these generate on where a close fit is and vi T want to cons ude with one more point about causation, cont and the difficulties of dealing with them: it a plea For methodological rational igm plural have one tolerance. I once had an article turned down by a major in n the grounds that I'd indulged in pa red,” the reader's report read. “You can on ago that a situation of “rules springing from rer onnected quarters [but leap- 1 being the point uth resides."*” Well, perhaps not only, and perhaps not even the nineteenth century than they you understand Whewell’s argument to mean that a he same paint” was possible onl things looked more cert do now. Bu plurality of paradigms can converge to bring us a closer fit between representation and reality ~if you accept his “leaping to the same point" as analogous to my “fitting together” —then I think me, is yet another area in which hi wide range of methodological app ve we can be Rankesns, or Marxists, or Freudians, or Weberians, or CAUSATION, CONTINGENCY, COUNTERPACTUALS 199 postmodernists, to the extent that these modes of representation ies for which weite trying to account. We're free to describe, evoke, quantify, qualify, and even reify if dl iques serve to improve the “fic” we're trying to achieve. W works, in short, we s Of course se tech more promi hods by which we learn.8 THE LANDSCAPE OF MisTORY ‘hat the historian can or should st way around ment with the mo engagement ej from the morality of. has staggered, even more th he metaphors T've under the weig! jeted on its John h, the New Jersey Turnpike, Cleopatra's nose, St ish coastline, the good sh the usual assortment of dinosaurs. If Td told you at d ( have antict Jocques Denida, the I requires them, If we'r at I've argued en us think—if, to use yet a final one, they can open windows and let in fresh air—then we have every reason to rely con them, and to do so unashamedly. We need all the help we can get. [BEGAN AND ENDED ‘created 180 years apart, of backs tured toward us: Caspar David young man stand knows is there but ca 1998 film, Shakespeare in Love, the beginning of Twelfth Nig beach, which, as the uncharted continent, I suggested that if you of landscape, then the historian is in something like the position the two figures portrayed here: the simultaneous sense of signifi Chapter Bight SEEING LIKE A HISTORIAN book with tw we First chapter in images, 1g The Wanderer above a S intemplates a landsea scene from John Madden's Gwyneth Paltrow, as Viole at wades ashore alone on a deserted of i's 1818 pai to be an amera pulls back, is reve: hink stas a kind f detachment and engagement, of mastery and y. of adventure but also of danger. Being suspended between, argued, is what histori consciousness is all about chapters have focused on how historians achieve ime, space, and scale; the derwvation particularization ofSEEING LIKE A HISTORIAN 31 fed States government of the American Mid tem of six-square-mile grids which the Ui just on North Dakota but on veyed that territory during the nineteenth century. lines of longitude converge thing other than ninety-degree angles in mal cuts allowed Now contrast this with one of the most elegant publte sp: Europe, No govemnment designed the great curve of the High as it sweeps from Carfax down to st did either. Rather it was created by happens co lie in the middle of Ox These state simplifications,” he writes, are “ike abridged maps." They Je what's actually there, but “when allied with state ble much of the realty they (depict) to be remade Not all of it, though, for there remain plenty of places like Oxford where governments had no choice but to retrofit their authority to what was already there The evidence of state-sought Roman roads that remain straighter334 THE LANDSCAPE OF HISTORY jopes soon) cell phones; in the artic ‘of great cites like Paris, Washington, and St. Petersburg, oF the s of unmonumental small owns in middle America where design is nonetheless present in the relentless monotony of their in the straight-line boundaries that the ninety-degree intersection: rowers projected across huge unexplored stretches of te nineteenth-century Africa; but also, as Scott points out, in @ remarkable range of twentieth-century phenemena extending from the agi re that has increased both the productivity and the vulnerability of crops and animals to the political end eco: nomic monomania of a Stalin or a Mao Zedong that did much the reat imper lewral monoct and with disastrous results, for people. aren't all bad, Withot transportat welfare, and communication services upon whi ety as we know the medieval E ebrated by the bean a price: depends.’ We'd not have progressed much beyon ing birds and plague-ridden people so cel me-travel novels. But there has definitely is thatthe state's search for lel shes local diversity, Universal standards tend to dge of how things work. One reader of an + version of this book has described seeing a fifteenth-century eral uniform submerge particular know! nny railway and 2 group of twen Oxfordshire floods of the year 22co: “What combination of memory, experience, expectation and chance.” he writes, “had brought {the cottage builder) to the right decision wh hhad been missed by the builders not the bungalows but also the railway?”® to a Heisenberg like di instance, a perpetual others: a quick smooth train ride to London, for example, or teasonably affordable houses with central the same calcul sma of having to sacri- dry building si fice certain values —in jn order to achieve cert SEEING LIKE A HISTORIAN 135 heating, We make trade-offs every day between the old and the new: the particular and the general, the distinctive and the democratic. We benefit from the grid modernity imposes on our lives, event as the aguiet logic of antiquity continues to surprise and impress us th the landscape of history? y that historians may s the position states do And what does al ofthis have to do les simply this: the poss tionship to the pa relationship to territory and society. For in “mapping! the past, the his torian too is laying down a grid, stifling particularity, privileging leg e for the presei in something i all with a view to making the past acc ing and liberating: we oppress the past even as we free it valve no sin » once again historical cons tle quality but rather a tension between raises questi are the themes T want to explore in this final chapter. and with one part 1 oppressor. It Let me begin with oppress vas myself as a young historian of the Cold ing while many of I alive, They ‘were, for the most part, proud of what they'd done and eager to know how history would regard them, They found my work, on the whole ng were si the participants in the events { was deseri derstood the crises disappointing: few of them felt that Fd fully they'd confronted, or that I'd given adequate attention ~and, let it be added, sulficient applause —to the solutions they'd devised. 1 fre quently found myself explaining to one or another of these elder states men that, while I respected their recollections, I'd had ro balance these against those of others, and all ofthis against what the archives had shown, They, in turn, acknowledged the necessity of such e proce:136 duce, but still Found THE LANDSCA € OF HISTORY vays, at once plaintive and condescend ate themsel ind memories peop! ‘person, ora place, or 2 ingly that it quickly becomes38 THE LANDSCAPE OF HISTORY But the great man hated this portrayal of himself as a querulous old ormidable bulldog who'd faced down Hitler. No to have done what Clementine Ch ‘man, not as the doubt he would li fact soon do: burn the portrait ren about them —or pethaps even Ask yourself how many of Picasso's ams who wrote th models would have recognized themselves in his portraits "Then put a historian in Picasso's place and, say, King Henry VII, or Theodore rust yield tothe po was, afterall, Emst Neiavestny as “dog shit,” who wound up designing his tombstone : “Reality is not only experience, itis immediate experience,” R. G. wood pointed out. ‘But thought divides, distinguishes, medi 1 reality, we deform it by rerefore just so far as we Wits immediacy, and thus thought can never grasp reality ; to put it another way, thought can grasp reality only in the same ‘way that artists grasp images, states grasp Jandscapes, and historians grasp history: by destroying ang it, mediating past isto const e past, to consti That's the darkside, but fortunately its not the only side. For the his- torian ho oppresses the past i also at the same time liberating the past, in much the same way that states, however mich they may npose themselves on landscapes, still make it possible for most of us SEEING LIKE A HISTORIAN 89 to live comfortably within them most of the time. Only the most ‘extreme anarchist would want to eliminate the state and its infrastruc ture altogether: It’s much the same with the wi promised no benefits ata ing of history. Uf se who make history be as interested as they are in what those who c they're grizaled dons or peach-fuzzed undergraduates —are going to say about them? From the earliest there's always been « il poet reciting verses a connected, ancient Greek campfire or the most contemporary, fe was right about that in at Feast one sense, which st ans do liberate their subjects fro pect of being forg Most of us understand hysical remains we'll eave behind wi the of ashes, for example, oF m: ly notorious a shrunken head like that of Oliver Cromwell, which is said to have bounced around Cambridge for sev- eral centuries before being quietly interred, supposedly in garden at Sydney Sussex."! We hope for more dignified f memoration: a tombstone, a memorial professorship if we can afford it, or pei lege dining hall gazing down on stud bbe more interested in the food (and in ea ing on the wall. Historians perform that co the great but dead: for however much we ma particular representati master's of com laque, a named bui we do at least f149 THE LANDSCAPE OF HiSTORY To the extent that we place our subjects in c the world that surrounded them. As 1 tried to po! chapter, historians surpass even science fiction writers in their through the manipulation of time, space, and scale, to recover lost worlds."* We portray societies that may like the Romans—or may not like so many peasant cultures—have left their own monuments behind. We liberate the ones that have from their self-proclaimed grandiosity: we try not to confuse how they wanted to be seen with who they actually were. And we try to free those who left no mona mn them by Id also free the p write about from tyrannies of judgment imported from other times. and places. If i to cross a thinks there might be d is folly for the historian, preaching at him across a gulf of cen: ingwood once wrote, turies, to say “This is sheer superst Face the facts.”"* Historians must not confuse the passage of time with the accumulation of intelligence by assuming, that we're smarter they were then. We may have more info ology or easier methods of c mean that we're any more skil 1 forebears in the to them. This, in turn, means freeing not j in history from determinism: from the c things could only have happened in the way that they did. Gould, who understood history better than most historians, is emphatic on this point: “the SEEING LIKE A HISTORIAN essence of history... is continge ching unto itself, not the ttrat History is determined o sage of eemed at the time. Our responsibility 2s ow that there were paths wot take snd that to0 I think is an act of when historians contest can be only a single valid explanation of what hap: cof oppression or worse when debating alternative perspectives Ing room. We're showing that the me: corians as well as ev these liberations of the past aren't performed: it’s our own haunted spirits, locked up wi prison that’s @ future in which na ane respects remembers us. That would be at least as painful an the one living historians impose uj ‘we should allow that su Jit welcome be But pattems af oppress eration in history don’ from what historians do to those who made it. For the past weighs s heavily upon the present and the future time hardly have meaning apart from it. Whether they tge THE LANDSCAPE OF HISTORY SEEING LIKE A HISTORIAN 43 who confuse the indisputable fact onstructions do exist with the highly disputable proposi language in which we think and speak, the institutions wi ch we function, the culture within which we exist, or even the thin which we move, the constraints history has physical imposed perfuse our lives, just as oxygen does our bodi nt in a place like Oxford, where accte mpede straightforward progress from pub In each of these instances history is enlisted in some act of oppres sfon: the past is reconstructed — which is to say that it’s made legible in some particular way —with a view to constraining someone else's freedom in the future. Historians too often have participated in this process, but it's hardly confined to them. The search for a past with which to attempt to control the future is inseparable from humat They'ee parti tions from the past to pub, or from book to reader in to updated curricula, “So why did y ‘who was complaining about these inefl charming,” he instantly replied. It is indeed, and think, is that the burden of history rests relatively Like the High and the many forms of traffic that have flow cover the centuries, Oxford's people and its past have evolved ‘Theyve not always done so harmoniously, to be sure; but things never at which the people felt it necessary totally to were thus spared the consequence that so often ts, which is that the past then turns upon ibrary system, or from outdated asked one student nature: it's what we mean n we say we learn from experience Whats frightening about this process is excuses for marginalizai fon and then to the next go so far as to define that nstricted past produces the belief, in the mind of some leader in the present, that the future requires recon. structed people ‘The subtitle of Jim Scotts book is How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. He begins it, innocuously enough, with forestry: how “scientific” methods of « tobe applied in late eighteenth-century Europe, w only certain kinds of trees in stra «clearing out of underbrush, and the eventual harvesting of logs that were supposed to be of much the same size, shape, eral decades the yield course, was that their ecosystem had been. reached the uproot the past follows from s and uproots the By uprooting the pa: to marginalize or even eliminate something he or she doesn't {mean what happens when someone secks fake document that led to so much real misery fc weight. They were for a while, but over sev- xeenth and twentieth centuries. It can result from imag) ine. The reason, of rupted: the bees, birds, sects that distributed pollen had fewer places in which to nest, verse vegetation that had limited the damage from diseases and pests was n these forests began to d nger present, and the effects of windstorms and fires ‘were now more devastating than before. Efforts to make the Forest leg ‘ble an as Marx did, there 1 for suppressing all classes other than “proletarians.” It ean mm, whether on the basis of gender, vy or simply appearance, all of which istorical sense that certain people are can even take the form of deconstruction as surely show up as d race, ethnicity, sex herefore manipulable had come close to wi thigh mod emnism," which he defines as “a strong, one might even say muscle: bound, version of the self-confidence about . . . the expansion of Scott es this example as a parable for what he c requite cons superior to othersTHE LANDSCAPE OF HISTORY production, the growing satis cumstances; one seeks one prefers straight lines interse and asymmetries of the natu high modernism can involve the attempted lees purely A lin's forced proletarianization of the Russian peas- single atrocity of the twentieth century oduced—some thirty ‘what he has in mind when he stressé igh modernism: the attempt vo make not just a landscape and people legible, but their future as well. I's @ pattern thar persi across vast differences i and what's most stetking about SEEING LIKE 4 HISTORIAN 145 that such acts of oppression are almost always justified as ects of liber ation. Slavery, in this Orwellian sense, eally is supposed to produce freedom. wv But of course it doesn't. If, chen, the burde! heavily upon the present and the future, then surely part of the histo- rian’s task is 10 try to lift that burden: to show that, because most forms of oppression have been constructed, they can be decon: structed; to demonstrate that what is was not always so in the past and therefore need not be so in the future. The historian must be, in this sense, a social ertie; For it’s by means of such criticism that the past liberates even as it oppresses the present and future—very much ian, however paradoxically, simultaneously performs both acts upon the past itself. ‘To see what I mean by the past liberating the present, hepin with ld be racial or ethnic social standing—you name it. The constant would be a feeling of iso- orientation, economic or lation, af being alone in a crowd, 0 ing one of “them.” And the fact that kids ean be so eruel to one another—~to say nothing of what adults can do to kids—doesn't make bearing this loneliness any easier. ‘Then imagine the sense of relief that comes from learning that you're not in fact alone: that othe ent” may not in fact always have be: reading, say, Michel Foucault or146 TUE LANDSCAPE OF HISTORY within the American civil rights movement when the work of W. E. B. Du Bois on slavery and Reconstruction was resurtected, or when C Woodward showed that segregation in the South had aot always resent. Then expand the view still more widely to take in the toftos demonstrating that the sources of their oppression were t rather than timeless each of these insta learner from oppressi imposed pon them. “Nothing co sarning about the past liberates the x constructions of the past have d be less true than the old bromide that what you don't know doesn’t hurt you," Joyce Appleby, Lynn “The very opposite seems K mose the case.” Of course there ate risks in this kind of hh you make the case ca patience needed to establish the cas at be achieved. criticized for “advocacy”: for letting the c affect their con findings; somet other historians have don basi —that the sources of oppression are lodged ia time and are not scholarly scrutiny, which makes iss and Margaret Jacob have ai ave revised t that for them. message, independent of time —has sun liberating effects all the more powerful ‘The past, therefore, can free imething of an asymmetey her 1g these constraints, they could accomplished that without the far more powerlul assist salar and society in general, Historians are 1 in the coercive process, When the role of hi constrains us. But there's le historians have often col edly have far fr past liberaci minor: they are U have advocacy —the SEEING LIKE 4 HISTORIAN ay rian should make moral judgmet good, | think, for if there's to be an acceptable bi teaching of history, let ir tile coward hberation. v. les here, at last, that we can beg get some sense of what the study of history is actually for. Borrowing from Geoffrey Elton, I suggested book that historical consciousness helps to establish human identity: that its part of what it means to grow up. But I've postponed until now a discussion of that proposition, because at the beginning oft it seemed necessary first to estab] how historians think before we approach the purpose of their thinking. That purpose argue, to achieve the optimal balance, fst within our selves but shen within society, herween the polarities of oppression and ibe Go could us is, How wat is, in one sense, to ‘world totally dependent. But it’s also totally liberated, in the sense of her than itself, We start life, thus, at the extremes, and we gradually nar row the gap between them. As we grow physically we're better al take care of ourselves, so thet we gradually become more independ- ent, As that happens, though, we're increasingly enmeshed within a web of experience, lessons, obl ies. By the nost of us have learned at least to balance having no preconceptions, no inhibitions, no cancem for anyone ations, and responsibi , though, to reach adulthood without having achieved that balance? At the oppressed end of the sj148 THE LANDSCAPE OF HISTORY +s around him. At the liberated end might be the severely afflicted amnesiac Dr. Oliver Sacks describes wse memory extends back only ahout two minutes, s; but because his environment is constantly unfanil to himn it’ also terifying, "What sort of a life (if any), what sort of a ‘world, what sort of a self,” Sacks writes, “can be preserved " and his moorings in time?” The irony here is that total oppression and total can take these examples as symbolizing them—both lead back to slavery. Freedom comes only from the tension between personality is like Jim Seatt’s healthy forest. There are plenty of big, productive, and harvestable trees, but there's also lots of underbrush lying around, inhabited by ants, bees, bitds, and even parasites. There’ a balance between uni versal knowledge and patticular experience, between dependency and autonomy, between legibility and privacy: There’ little room here for « belief in independent variables, or in the superiority of as a mode of inquiry, Rather, everything is interdependent: person becomes ecology. W's what we mean by being wellzounded. Ie’ w takes to heep us sane There's nothing automatic about that process, though, because we've had both parents and teachers to help us slong the way: And ‘mentors com- eration —if we surely { don't have to stress the extent to which these bine oppression and liberation as they instruct us, They lay out the grids within which we become free to lead our lives, They requite some sense of the past in order to do this need not extend back very far. Plenty of people who've known history have excelled in preparing theie young for adulthood. Plenty of iterates have been impressively literate in other ways. But what about society, and the role of the individual constructs iden istorical nce between oppression and libera Just as ab so the same may be true of a social system, Here you y for pet SEEING LIKE A MIsToRIAN 4 49 rdly do without history as a disci which a culture sces beyond the limits of its own senses, across time, space, and scale, for a wider view: A col ine, because it's the means by consciousness, therefore, may be as much a prerequisite well-rounded society as is the proper ecolog) forest and a healthy planet. This is, moreover, s take for granted jetween oppression and eth ‘intaining that eq And lea izing that we cantt co monographs or even asa te What you hope for, as a resul future upon which the pa lety prepared to respect the past while holding it accoun 8 society less given to uprooting . @ society that values a moral sense over moral ray not be the only way « a, within the realm of ne reflexive ent 4 has shown itself more cpabl than other iy im commanding the widest possible consenss, 0 ical method may occupy a similarly advanta when it comes to human affairs "ene peTHE LANDSCAPE OF HISTORY 150 toward us, cent who at , the landscape of h they'te actually Facing the as the simultaneous oppression and liberat 1, but also of the old by the young. If that s which activity the yo 1u wondering who's really facing Tittle turned around— then that’s my profession. confusing—if i Intent, for these ambiguities ¢ We teachers are certainly oppr them to show up fo or pu ir papers, o try to get them to see—this isa particularly difficult ng our students when we expect erating our students by laying out grids, by lity, and by setting them ashore—as we ull int of the mind which it w hough, is the fact that our students are \d liberating us. It can be frustrating to Almost as impo simultaneously oppressing 1 prose of students w conspiratorially relish the passive voice ‘amet paragraph. Tt ean be dreary to wait for them not to appear ters of recom n, oF to respond to th sense of oppression least so e ravages ol young is not a bad way to try to stay that way yourself good students and we're good teachers, They also release us, if they SEEING LIKE 4 HISTORIAN fr t being talked back to think, not to reach at all. They certainly inform and eventually instruct tos: the most gratifying single moment in teaching comes, for me at 1 particu tberate us from oblivion: they may secre have Professor X's head to kick around, like Oliv they won't soon forget Professor X. So are my symbolic figures facing backward or Forward? Is it the ndscape of t that issue and say te that they see? I'm going to fudge we need not dex de—for if we n between oppression end liberation in our n surely we can live with the possibilty thatthe backsides we ala frontside facing either a past ofa Fut direction they, and we, think wisdom, f love, may whichever fe and a4 NOTES TO PAGES 87-92 143, Waldrop, Complevty, pp. 292-04 itary and the Selentific World View” p. 10, emphases in the 4 45 Waldrop, Complexity, p49. 448 Berry, "On the Problem of Laws in Nature and History” p. 126 em: Essays om Pr 1k Coss, 1000), p. 243 is already taking place in the Seven Weber, s. Relations 6 (2009 ions of World Politics (New York: Re ” 49° MeNaill, "Passing Strange ledge, 201 Six: Causation, Contingency, and Counterfactuals tary {New Vorke Cambridge Uni “Terence J. McDonald, “Introduction,” in The NOTES TO PAGES 92-98 175 Historic Turn othe Social Seiences, ed". MeDonsl (Ann Arbor: Uni versity of Michigan Press, 1996). pp. 14 shout History (New York Granta, 1997), say nothing a all about the connection between history and the “new” sciences of chaos and com William H. MeN 1986), 8 Is History? pp. 104-8, Davies, “From E. H, Car's Files,” pp. 189-70. The pattern is documented in Jonathan E.H, Cary, 1892-1982 (N. 78-79, 94-95, 128-29, 235, 2484 ork: Verso, 1999) Appleby, H Defence of History, pp. 129-38. Mare Bloch, The Historians Cri trans. Peter ‘Manchester University Press, 199 ist Clayton Roberts, The Logic of Historical Ex 998). 9108 utnam (Manchester, ished in 1953), pp. 257-98 (University Pack Laws in Notre and parison,” History and Theory 38 (December 1999), 122, makes a s argument “This point i also made ina slightly different way ia King, Keohane, and Verba, Designing Social inguin. p. 870, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking. 17), Bp. 8-34 5p. 126-38, 160-64, M. Mitch ing Science atthe Edge of Order aed C Waldzop, Complexity: The Emerg to (New York: Simon & SchuisNOTES TO PAGES 98-102 Nicolson, 200°), pp. 5-76, 80-81 Waldrop, Complexity, pp. 198-240, Steph “The Burgess Shale lick, Chaos, pp. 16-18 Roberts, The Loge of The best intra Roberts, The Lopic See, fi Perspect Dp. 131-33. Ace these the Greeks to the Renaissance se, indebted to Toni Dorfman for this reference ston? pp. 96-9. sho, Designing S USS. Eldridge. For Genters debunking, see htp:/évww historyinavyanilfag/faqas-hom, One of the better examples is Hary Turtledove, The Guns ofthe South (New Yorke Bal can Ch ses the outcome of the At NOTES TO PAGES 102-107 7 Ferguson, “Viewal History” p85; King, Keohane, and Verba, Designing Social Inguiry, pp, 82-83, provide a femal explanation of why: ‘The most dramatic recent example is lefferson The Idea of Histor, p. 248. nan, Heal Science, p. 7, Zimanis point here echoes Carts on history as the inheritance of acquired chatacteristies. See What Is Histor? pp 50-31 Appleby, Hune, and Jacob, Telling the Tru about History, p. 7 See Chapter Three, Postmodernist objections to nara Defence of History. pp. 1a8-s2, See al 2yor46;and Appleby, Hi Pp 195, 48-50, 259, 268. For a extique ofthis kind of thinking, ee King, Keohane, and Verba, Historian’ Craft, p. 67 See Chapter Three Fora diccussion of d The Historian’ Aeseribes one Holocaust and theNOTES TO PAGES 108~ 2967), pp jc Method, ed. Robert E. Butts (Ind ‘See Chapter Thee Seven: Molecules with Minds of Their Own 1 RG. Collingsood, The dea of Histon (New Yorks: Oxford Universit Press, 1956), p. 216, makes much the same point, as dows Mart jonary Theory of History." History and Theory 38 (December 2M, Mitchell Waldeep, Coosplesty: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Onder and Chaos (New York: Simon & Sel el Taylor, "Wh ed Jelfrey Friedman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 199 cntique, see Donald P. Green and “hice Controversy, provides 2 useful and supporters of the Creen and Shapiro a Less formal criticisms of rational choice appear in Paul Omerod, Butterfly Economics: New General Theory of Social and Feonomic 8}; also Jonathan Cohn, “Ia icience Forget about Polities October 25, 1999; Louis Uchitelle, “Some Economists (Call Behavior a Key,” New York Times, ebruary «1,200; and Roger Naw York Times Magazine, Febru I Alison Alter, Jeremni Suri and James sing to explain rational choice theory pit, Pathologes of Rational Choice Theory p. 24 . Callingwood, The Idea of History, pp. 212-13 NOTES TO PAGES 114-122 Barry Unsworth’s novel Losing Nelson (New York: Doubleday, 1993] sround the dilemma any biographer faces: that you can never really jyatt, The Biographer’ Tale (Landon: Natalie Zemon Davis, Carlo Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Worms: The ury Miller (Baltimore: Johne Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Hisorical hought (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p49, ns. Robin Waterfield (New York: Oxford Uni versity Press, 98), p. 312. My thanks to Michael Gaddis for this refer This paragrap War Histon” Dil © ography, n from Above, 1928-1941 (New York: Na 312, See alo, for» portrayal of Stalin's eyes of would have approved, George F. Kennan, Men 1925-1950 (Boston: Attantic- oe n, see Joyce Appleby; Lynn Hunt, and Margaret made clear in ln Kershaw’: recent bioge London: Peng Phoeni, 1999) rog2-45 (London: Phoenix, 2080) Phoenix, 1997). low of opp ‘one jumped through it, se the report of the U180 NOTES To PAGES 122-128 ‘on National Securty/2ist Century, which appeared in three installments between September 1999 and March 2001, and is available at butpi/orwwenssg gow More widely known For its cochais, former senstors Gary Hart and Warten Buelman, as the Hart-Rudman Report this study Waldsop, Complesy, pp. 233-34 Hitler, 936-4, pp 487, 52. See also Isiah Berlin, The umanity: Chapters i the History of Ideas, ed. Heney Hardy (New Yorke Random House, 19), pp. 265-6; aso James Q son, The Moral Sense (New York: Free Press, 1993), especialy p15. among certain historians a if he gates. See or examy Essential: Some Reflections on the Present Stat of Historical Study (Car Inidge: Cambridge University Press, 990} Keith Windshutle, The ng of History: How Literary Cries and Social Theorists Are Murder anta, 1997) P30, also pp. 87 and 199, See, as well Bloch, The Historian’ Cri, pp. 118-19, For recent attempt to deal with these difficulties, see Roger Shattuck, Candor and Perversion: Literatare, Education, and the Arts (New York: Collingwood, The Idea of Hi or Norton, 1999) 1 Keay, The Great Are: The Dramatic Tale of How India Was Mapped verest Was Named (New York: HarperCellins, 2900), ‘The Historian’ Craft, p Cart, What Is Histon? pp. 75-70. Bid. p79. Carr to Betty Behrends, February 19,1966, quoted in Jonathan Haslam, Vices of Integrity: B. H. Car, 82-2982 (New York: Vers, 1999), 235 See, for example, Bloch, The Historian’ Craft p. 66; Cate, What Is His tony p28 NOTES TO PAGES 130-140 Eight: Seeing Like a Historian 1 See Chapter One ced. J. Prest (Oxfo Scott, Seeing Like a State, pp. 2-3 Ibid, pp. 4,340. 358 Le of His Winston $, Churchill, 1945-1965 (Lon they become, presumably the grateful ded. Discussed further in Chapter Tw.NOTES TO PAGES 141-148 also Gould's Time's Arron, Time Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Dis covery of Geologie Time (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 1987), p27 Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New Yorks Norton, 198g), p.51- See also Scott, See Stave, p. 390, . 37, The term comes from Benedict And sons on the Origins INDEX gramme, Myth, Reality (New York: Cambridge U Scott, Seeing Like a State, pp. "22, Bid, p. 4 Scott provides a good discussion of most of these cases, For China’ Great Leap Forward, see Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao’ Secret Famine (New York: Free Press, 1997). ‘Nose: Page numbers in italics indicate photographs or illasta itor. p-307 This 1983, ; 1e0 appearance by my Yale ea: casting Arcadia (Stoppard), 38, 83 Aristatle, 70, r00 league Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Cli cal Tales (New York: Surmmit Books, 1985), p. 23, Azevedo, Jane, 46 Ballard, Maetha, 42 behaviorist, 62, Boing Jobe Malkovich anges, 83-84. 85 Bennett, Andrew, 65-66 Adams, John, 26 biography Adams, John Quincy, 20 adaptation, 85,87 advocacy, 46-47 1s commemoration, 139, Alvarez, Luis, 77 Orlando (Wolf), antecedents, 160 postmodernism and, 13-14 ‘Antony, Mare, 79 representation in, 14-16, 124 Appleby, Joyce, 104, 148 surviving structures and, 119-24,