Wesleyan University
The Essential Difference between History and Science
Author(s): Raymond Martin
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Feb., 1997), pp. 1-14
Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505422
Accessed: 27-07-2016 19:24 UTC
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THE ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE
BETWEEN HISTORY AND SCIENCE
RAYMOND MARTIN
ABSTRACT
My thesis is that there is a deep, intractable difference, not between history and science
per se, but between paradigmatically central kinds of historical interpretations -call
them humanistic historical interpretations-and theories of any sort that are characteristic of the physical sciences. The difference is that unlike theories in the physical sciences
good humanistic historical interpretations (purport to) reveal subjectivity, agency, and
meaning. I use the controversy provoked by Gordon Wood's recent reinterpretation of
the American Revolution to illustrate and substantiate this thesis. I also use it to support
the claim that unless one attends to the ways in which humanistic historical interpretations reveal subjectivity, agency, and meaning one has no hope whatsoever of getting
the epistemology of historical studies right.
I. INTRODUCTION
The difference isn't really essential. And it's not between history and science.
Even so, Idealist philosophers of history who argued that there is an essential
difference between history and science and made various proposals about what
it is were more right than their positivist antagonists who argued that history
is merely proto or applied science. There is a deep, intractable difference, not
between history and science per se, but between paradigmatically central kinds
of historical interpretations - I shall call them humanistic historical interpretations -and theories of any sort that are characteristic of the physical sciences.
Simply put, the difference is this: Good theories in the physical sciences
(purport to) reveal the nature of things, as well as how kinds of things are
related to each other and why. Sometimes they reveal which particular things
happened and why. Usually they don't reveal what it is (or was) like to be those
things (or kinds of things) since usually - we assume - there is nothing it is (or
was) like. And usually they don't include an account of what events mean.
Good humanistic historical interpretations do. That is, usually they (purport
to) reveal not only what happened and why but also what it was like to be the
people who did and/or suffered whatever happened and what it means (to us
now) that these people did and/or suffered whatever happened.
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2
RAYMOND
MARTIN
Successfully revealing what it was like to be the people whose history is under
consideration involves portraying their points of view and agencies accurately
and in a way that is balanced and that facilitates empathic identification with
them. By their points of view I mean how they understood and experienced
their lives. By their agencies I mean the narratively important roles they played
in the story that's being told.
Historians give a balanced portrayal of point of view and agency when their
interpretations are appropriately inclusive, that is, when they give due representation to all of the points of view and agencies that are importantly relevant
to whatever is being interpreted. They portray subjectivity and agency in a way
that facilitates empathic identification when their interpretations help us - their
audiences - to imagine ourselves experiencing, understanding, and acting as the
people whose history is being interpreted experienced, understood, and acted.
Conveying meaning typically involves portraying the events under discussion
so that we can grasp them whole, that is, so that we can get an accurate overview
of what happened in a way that facilitates our appreciating its human significance. Since there is no limit to the ways in which something can be humanly
significant there is no such thing as the meaning of events. Even so, since for
most historical interpretations there are better and worse ways of relating the
events under discussion to the shared concerns and values of those who want to
understand them, there are better and worse accounts of meaning. In historical
interpretations one conveys meaning successfully to the extent that one conveys
it in one of these better ways.
In saying that good humanistic historical interpretations reveal subjectivity,
agency, and meaning I'm not making a conceptual point, say, about the notion
of "historical interpretation." I'm not even saying that all humanistic historical
interpretations reveal subjectivity, agency, and meaning. What I'm saying,
rather, is that humanistic historical interpretations are central to historical
studies proper, and that given the norms that currently exist both among professional historians and also among sophisticated consumers of historical studies,
humanistic historical interpretations tend to be regarded as more adequate, all
else being equal, as they more successfully reveal subjectivity, agency, and
meaning. Nothing of the sort can be said of theories in the physical sciences.
That is why it is a mistake to regard historical interpretations generally or even
typically as if they were theories - proto, applied, or whatever - of any sort
that are characteristic of the physical sciences.
Most historians, I think, would not regard what I am claiming as controversial. With respect to the issue of revealing subjectivity, J. H. Hexter, for in-
stance, has said that a chief value of historical studies is that they enhance
ones "ability to know and understand what it is like to be another."'1 E. P.
Thompson has stressed the importance of focusing on what he called the "lived
1. J. H. Hexter, The History Primer (New York, 1971), 207, 215.
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THE ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HISTORY AND SCIENCE 3
experience" and agency of those at the bottom of society.2 And David Cannadine
recently remarked that A. J. P. Taylor's inability "to get beneath the skins of
other people, to project himself imaginatively and empathically into their hearts
or mninds" was "a great limitation" in his work as a historian.'
With respect to the issue of portraying subjectivity inclusively and in a bal-
anced way, Isaiah Berlin has said that in historical studies "we wish, ideally at
least, to be presented, if not with a total experience--which is a logical as well
as practical impossibility - at least with something . . . seen from as many
points of view" as possible.4 Bernard Bailyn has said that even though recent
interpretations of the American Revolution "have allowed us to see with some
clarity the pattern of fears, beliefs, attitudes and perceptions that became the
ideology of the Revolution" they have "not yet made clear why any sensible,
well-informed, right-minded American with a modicum of imagination and
common sense could possibly have opposed the Revolution. . . . [And] until
that is done, until we look deliberately at the development from the other side
around, we have not understood what the issues really were, what the struggle
was all about."5 Howard Zinn has reminded historians of the importance of
their reporting "accurately all of the subjectivities in a situation," in particular,
that they balance their accounts of slavery in America by conveying what it
was like not only from the slaveowner's point of view but also from the slave's
point of view.6 And so on.
If we turn from the things historians say about historical interpretations
to the interpretations themselves, the same preoccupation with subjectivity,
agency, and meaning shows up. Consider, for instance, the following representative sample of remarks about subjectivity scattered throughout Gordon
Wood's recent and highly acclaimed The Radicalism of the American Revolution:
We will never comprehend the distinctiveness of that premodern world until we appreciate the extent to which many ordinary people still accepted their own lowliness.
Only then can we begin to understand the radical changes in their consciousness . .
that the American Revolution brought about.7
[Tihe colonists were much more acutely conscious of legal dependence -and perhaps
of the value of independence - than Englishmen across the Atlantic. Under such circumstances it was often difficult for the colonists to perceive the distinctive peculiarity of
black slavery!8
2. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical
Profession (Cambridge, Eng., 1988), 441.
3. David Cannadine, Review, TLS (February 4, 1994), 4.
4. Isaiah Berlin, "The Concept of Scientific History," History and Theoty 1 (1960), 1-31. Re-
printed in Philosophical Analysis and History, ed. William Dray (New York, 1966), 5-53.
5. Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), x.
6. Howard Zinn, The Politics of History (Boston, 1970), 41.
7. Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992), 30.
8. Ibid., 54.
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4
RAYMOND
MARTIN
Since people in this society noticed everything, personal reputations counted a great
deal.... We today may be astonished by the "triviality" of these defamation cases, but
slander was anything but a frivolous matter for the people of that very different society.'
In this face-to-face society, particular individuals -- specific gentlemen or great men -
loomed large, and people naturally explained human events as caused by the motives
and wills of those who seemed to be in charge. . . . No one as yet could conceive of
the massive and impersonal social processes -industrialization, urbanization, modern-
ization-that we invoke so blithely to describe large-scale social developments. Such
complicated processes were simply not part of people's consciousness. 1
We shall never understand the unique character of the revolutionary leaders until we
appreciate the seriousness with which they took these new republican ideas of what it
was to be a gentleman. No generation in American history has ever been so self-conscious
about the moral and social values necessary for public leadership.11
In modern eyes Washington's concern for his reputation is embarrassing; it seems
obsessive and egotistical. But his contemporaries understood. All gentlemen tried scrupulously to guard their reputations, which is what they meant by their honor. To have
honor across space and time was to have fame, and fame . . . was what most of the
founding fathers were after, Washington above all."2
So, Wood has been preoccupied with subjectivity. Whether his account of it
is balanced is a separate question. As we shall see, some of his critics feel that
it is not.
What I'm claiming about the importance in humanistic historical studies of
portraying point of view and agency accurately and in a way that is balanced
and that facilitates empathy has been ignored or denied in almost all positivis-
tically-inspired philosophy of history, which includes almost all analytic philos-
ophy of history. The tendency among positivists and their philosophical descendants has been to regard historical interpretations as if they were proto or
applied theories of a sort that issue from the physical sciences. Typical, for
instance, has been Ernest Nagel's view that "the distinction between history
and theoretical science" is "fairly analogous to the difference between geology
and physics, or between medical diagnosis and physiology" 13 and Murray Murphey's view that since historical interpretations "explain facts in just the way
physical theories explain the behavior of subatomic particles" 14 they should be
evaluated in just the same ways. I claim that such views overlook the obvious:
that it is a desideratum of humanistic historical interpretations but not of theories in the physical sciences that they reveal subjectivity, agency, and meaning.
II. HUMANISTIC VERSUS PHYSICALISTIC UNDERSTANDING
Even though positivists and their philosophical descendants have tended to
reject what I am suggesting, it still may seem as if what I am suggesting is old
9. Ibid., 59-60.
10. Ibid., 60.
11. Ibid., 197.
12. Ibid., 207.
13. Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation
(London, 1961), 550.
14. Murray G. Murphey, Our Knowledge of the Historical Past (Indianapolis, 1973), 112.
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THE ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HISTORY AND SCIENCE 5
hat. After all, ever since Vico it has seemed to many philosophers of history,
but particularly to Idealists, that properly understanding and/or interpreting
the human past centrally involves putting oneself imaginatively into the places
of the people whose behavior one is trying to interpret. The point of doing
this, these Idealists claimed, is to reexperience or rethink how the people one
is trying to understand experienced or thought. In other words, it has seemed
to these Idealists, first, that properly understanding and/or interpreting the
human past centrally involves appreciating what it was like to be the people
under consideration, second, that there neither is nor could be any such role
for this sort of empathy in the sciences, and, third, that the role of this sort of
empathy in historical studies is therefore a defining difference between historical
studies and the sciences.
Instead of these claims, I want to suggest that what these philosophers thought
was true of historical studies, in contradistinction to the sciences, is actually
true of humanistic studies in contradistinction to physicalistic studies, including
physicalistic historical studies. In other words, for the point that these philosophers were trying to make the proper cut is not between science and history,
not even between a scientific and a historical way of understanding (since history
too may be regarded appropriately as including a scientific way of under-
standing), but, rather, between a physicalistic and a humanistic way of understanding.
Idealists assumed, plausibly at the time, that it is because historical studies
are about humans and science is about mere physical objects and events that
empathic attempts to understand what it was like to be someone figure impor-
tantly only in historical studies. However, there are scientific studies, such as
human physiology and kinesiology, that are about people and their activities
and yet that have little, if any, role for the sort of empathy the Idealists had
in mind. Others have suggested that historical studies differ from the physical
sciences in that only historical studies attend to point of view. However, theories
in the physical sciences do not ignore point of view. In optics, for instance,
scientists have attempted to account for how changes in an individual's point
of observation produce systematic "flow" patterns in his or her visual field.15
Of course, there is a deep difference in the way in which humanistic historical
interpretations and theories in the physical sciences portray point of view. The
difference is that only humanistic historical interpretations include in their ac-
counts of point of view the role of ideology, beliefs, and values. The more
fully a historical interpretation does this and in particular the more fully it
portrays the ways in which humans now and at the time under consideration
explain (or, explained) their own behavior in such terms the more humanistic it
is. By comparison, the ways in which theories in the physical sciences sometimes
attempt to account for "point of view" are "external" (or, physicalistic).
15. Ulric Neisser, "Five Kinds of Self-Knowledge," Philosophical Psychology 1 (1988), 37-59.
Reprinted in Self and Identity, ed. Daniel Kolak and Raymond Martin (New York, 1991), 386406, at 387-388.
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6
RAYMOND
MARTIN
This way of understanding the differences between humanistic historical
studies and physicalistic scientific studies sheds light not only on the differences
between theories in the physical sciences and interpretations in historical studies
proper but also on differences within the discipline of history among more and
less humanistically oriented studies. Among historians of colonial America,
for instance, there has been throughout most of this century a split between
the more humanistically oriented Whig and neo-Whig historians, on the one
hand, and the more social-science oriented Progressives, on the other. The crux
of their disagreement has been and still is over how much explanatory weight
to give in explaining peoples' behavior to the rich array of thoughts and feelings
that the people themselves appealed to in explaining their own behavior. Charles
Beard, for instance, the quintessential Progressive, argued that the delegates
to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 designed the Constitution as they
did not for the reasons they gave but, rather, to advance their own economic
interests.16 The neo-Whig Edmund Morgan, on the other hand, in responding
to a question that he said "everyone who examines the American Revolution
must sooner or later face" - the question, "Were the colonists sincere in their
declarations of principle or were they merely trying to avoid the unpleasant
task of paying taxes that they ought to have paid?" -answered that his "book
has proceeded on the conviction that the colonists' attachment to principle was
genuine." 17 For present purposes the important point is not who, if either, of
these historians is right, but that Beard's suggestion that "economics explain
the mostest" does not circumvent appeals to human motives and values, as in
theories in the physical sciences, since self-interest is a motive as well as a value;
rather, it reduces radically the complexity of this appeal.
It is primarily this reduction in the complexity of the appeal to human motives
and values that provokes the ire of more humanistic historians. Perry Miller,
for instance - who gained his considerable fame primarily by showing that the
members of one major segment of colonial American society, the Puritans,
experienced the New World and particularly the progression of events that led
to democracy in America not as a triumphal march toward freedom, but rather,
with initially high hopes followed by bitter disappointment - wrote recently
that he is vulnerable to the charge of "being so very naive as to believe that
the way men think has some influence upon their actions." In a recent review,
Miller wrote of a younger group of historians whose work he likes that they
"write from a depth and with a fluency unknown to [the Progressives] Beard
and Curti because they understand what ideas mean ... because they have taken
the life of ideas into their own consciousness."'8 In expressing such sentiments,
Miller, in my terms, has opted for humanism. More recently, it should be noted,
many historians, including some neo-Progressives, have integrated socialscience and humanistic orientations.
16. Charles Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States [1913]
(New York, 1935), 7-8.
17. Edmund Morgan, The Birth of the Republic 1763-89 [1956], 3d ed. (Chicago, 1992), 50.
18. Both of Miller's remarks are quoted in Novick, 380-381.
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THE ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HISTORY AND SCIENCE 7
III. THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
I want now to use the controversy provoked by Gordon Wood's recent reinterpretation of the American Revolution to illustrate and substantiate my claim
that revealing subjectivity, agency, and meaning is central to humanistic historical studies and in particular to the ways historians evaluate the merits of com-
peting interpretations; indeed, it is so central that unless one attends to it one
has no hope whatsoever of getting the epistemology of historical studies right.
I also want to use this controversy to illustrate a way in which philosophy of
history can be done that is both responsive to traditional analytic epistemological concerns yet closely tied to data derived from actual interpretational contro-
versy among historians.19
Wood's study is regarded by many as one of the most important contributions
to early American history in thirty or so years. During most of those decades
historians bemoaned the absence of new interpretive frameworks for under-
standing the American Revolution. Wood has now provided one. Moreover
in striking contrast to the trend among historians to characterize the Revolution
as conservative -in the opinion of some hardly a revolution at all -Wood has
argued that it was "as radical and as revolutionary as any in history" - not
primarily because of how it changed political arrangements, but rather, because
of how it changed social relationships. Wood portrays these changes by de
scribing a transformation that occurred in America not just at the time of the
revolutionary hostilities but throughout the eighteenth and into the nineteenth
century. The transformation was from a monarchically to a much more demo-
cratically organized society. He says that to the Revolutionary leaders suddenly
"all the fine calibrations of rank and degrees of unfreedom of the traditional
monarchical society became absurd and degrading" and that, whatever may
have provoked the Revolution initially, it soon "became a full-scale assault on
dependency." Howeveir, in his view, instead of creating a new order of enlightened Republicanism, that is, of benevolence and selflessness, the Revolution,
to the dismay of its leaders, instead bred "social competitiveness and individualism." Wood concludes that by the time the Revolution had run its course,
American society had been radically transformed. "One class did not overthrow
another; the poor did not supplant the rich. But social relationships --the way
people were connected one to another-were changed, and decisively so. By
the early years of the nineteenth century the Revolution had created a society
fundamentally different from the colonial society of the eighteenth century. It
was in fact a new society unlike any that had ever existed anywhere in the
world."21
19. For more on this approach see Raymond Martin, The Past Within Us (Princeton, 1989);
Martin, "Objectivity and Meaning in Historical Studies: Toward a Post-Analytic View," History
and Theory 32 (1993), 25-50; Martin, Review essay of Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret
Jacob, Telling the Truth about History, in History and Theory 34 (1995), 320-329.
20. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 5.
21. Ibid., 6.
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8
RAYMOND
MARTIN
Joyce Appleby, whose interpretation of the Revolution is in many ways quite
close to Wood's, objects to what she sees as Wood's suggestion that the transformation from Republican ideals to democratic reality was brought about merely
by ordinary people pursuing their economic selfinterests. In Wood's account,
she says, the failure of Americans to live up to the standards of disinterestedness
that define enlightened republicanism betrays the Revolution: "republicanism
represents the pinnacle of civilized social order"; the transformation to democracy-ideologically as well as socially-is all down hill. Wood's interpretation,
she points out, is like Perry Miller's account of Puritan declension -a story of
initially high hopes that get dashed.22 In Appleby's view, that is the wrong
story-line:
Only democracy comes into being without a singular will. Wood's depiction of democracy
as indifferent to virtue permits him to elide the question of agency in the radical transformation he describes. Rather than detail how the opponents [led by Jefferson] of the
Federalist gentry carried the day, Wood depicts radicalization devoid of intentionality
except the assumed common impulse to strive for more. It [democracy] just happened
when the elite made critical concessions, giving ordinary men an opening for expressing
their ordinary desires.... [Tihere is no examination of the new intellectual commitments
and political organization that it took to usher in democracy.23
In other words, the problem with Wood's view, according to Appleby, is that
while "monarchy and republicanism are the products of intention" democracy
is merely a by-product of self-serving attempts by people to better themselves
materially. If Appleby is right about this, then the topography of Wood's interpretation is wrong because his account of subjectivity and agency is deficient.
In Appleby's alternative interpretation, three things primarily explain the
"new ideological imperatives" that underlay the transition to democracy: first,
the abolition movement, which she says "brought northern slavery to an end"
and turned the Mason-Dixon line "into the most conspicuous ideological divide
in the world;" second, sympathetic interest among Americans in the ideals of
the French Revolution, which she says gave the movement toward democracy
in the United States "its epoch-making momentum"; and, third, philosophy,
in particular a view of the world and of social relationships that was inspired
by Europeans and articulated in America by Jefferson.24 Wood barely discusses
any of these three. In Appleby's view, had Wood taken them into account
properly it would have forced him to change his view of what was radical about
the Revolution and, hence, his view about its meaning; specifically, she thinks,
it "would have pushed to the fore the role of conflict in the radicalization of
the United States, and with the spotlight trained on conflict, issues of power,
in particular of the connection of ideas to assumptions and both to the exercise
of power, would have become more conspicuous." This, she thinks, would have
22. Joyce Appleby, "The Radical Recreation of the American Republic," William and Mary
Quarterly, 3d series, 51 (1994), 681.
23. Ibid., 682.
24. Ibid.
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THE ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HISTORY AND SCIENCE 9
"thrown up obstacles" to Wood's "reducing democratic values to crass material
striving and competitive individualism."25 In sum, Appleby says that to leave out
of one's account, as Wood does, the philosophical underpinning of democracy
leaves us "with a basket of consumables and an empty library shelf-a lot of
elbowing competitors in a capitalist economy and no participants in a public
debate over what is natural, what is just, and what is true"; in her alternative
account, she says, eighteenth-century American radicalism emerges as more
liberating, more intellectual, and even more revolutionary than it does in
Wood's account.26
Barbara Clark Smith is decidedly less sympathetic than is Appleby to Wood's
account. Smith has two main criticisms, one theoretical and the other ideological. Her theoretical criticism is that Wood "keeps 'the Revolution' in the hands
of an elite, thus encouraging a 'narrow' understanding of eighteenth-century
experience."27 She thinks he does this, first, by seeing the experiences and agencies of ordinary people not as they saw themselves but as they were seen by
elites. For instance, she says that
what interests Wood most about African-American slavery is whether that institution
was conspicuous to eighteenth-century Euro-Americans. (His preoccupation with that
issue underscores how greatly the book is about what only some Americans saw.) Other
historians have taken the denial of slavery as a historical fact of extraordinary significance; Wood takes elite subjectivity as unproblematic. Most slaveholders and others
saw no evil, Wood tells us, as if that were all we need to know about them or as if
theirs were the only subjectivities that mattered. Surely African-American slavery was
conspicuous to some Americans; it depends on who was looking. Yet a host of people
remain throughout Wood's account merely the object of others' acknowledgement or
denial.28
And, second, Smith criticizes Wood for leaving out of his account those parts
of the resistance movement that had to do mainly with ordinary people. He
does this, she thinks, by providing almost no information about the political
resistance itself- little to nothing, say, about the Boston Tea Party, the Boston
Massacre, the Sons of Liberty, the women mobilizing to disuse tea and take
up the spinning wheel, the merchants and artisans negotiating over terms of
non-importation, the committees of correspondence feverishly linking inland
villages and seaports, and so on.29
In leaving these episodes out of his account, Smith says, "readers receive no
picture of the unfolding of resistance, the moves and countermoves of different
actors, the reluctance of merchants and the energy of artisans; the fears of
indebted slaveholders as they faced fervent evangelicals and unruly AfricanAmerican workers. " 30
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 683.
27. Barbara Clark Smith, "The Adequate Revolution," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series,
51 (1994), 684.
28. Ibid., 688.
29. Ibid., 686-687.
30. Ibid., 687.
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1o
RAYMOND
MARTIN
Wood does not consider whether the relatively humble patriots who joined the Revolution actively shaped the coalition and contributed their own understandings of events.
If there was something radical about the era, it seems, it could not be the plebeian
capacity for interracial alliance, for running away, rising up, contesting the law, and
otherwise presuming their own competence to occupy a public terrain. If there was
something radical about patriot leaders, it could not be their capacity to ally themselves
and hence negotiate with those beneath them on the social scale.31
So, Smith concludes, "the long sweep of Wood's Revolution, from colonial
society to Jacksonian America, takes place at the surface, absent a careful
account of revolutionary events, absent the agency of artisans, sailors, and
foot soldiers, absent the full daring of elite patriots, who staked their all on
their inferiors' competence to resist constituted authority and to commit them-
selves to liberty."32 As a consequence, she says, Wood "sets sail leaving Jack
Tar on shore" and, so, his revolution "takes too much credit. It slights the agency
of those who did struggle to end slavery and makes it difficult to comprehend or
even credit those who opposed abolition."33 It "elides the actual experience,
the small gains and setbacks, the lived struggle for freedom and for dignity
and meaning when freedom could not be reached."34 "One is left with the
impression," she says, "that Wood's purpose is less to discover American radicalism than to avoid acknowledging radicalisms of the wrong kind."35
In this theoretical part of her criticism Smith, like Appleby, is worried about
Wood's sins of omission. But the omissions that worry the two of them are
different. In Appleby's view, Wood's sins of omission occur primarily in the
second part of his story; in Smith's view, they occur throughout. For Appleby,
the problem is not so much that Wood's account is elitist -after all, the main
person she wants him to take into account more fully is Jefferson - but that
only the views of Republican elites are mentioned. For Smith, on the other
hand, the problem is not that Wood ignores the ideological underpinnings of
democracy but that he doesn't adequately portray the experiences and actions
of ordinary people. Both Appleby and Smith accept Wood's view that the
Revolution was radical but disagree with him as to why it was radical and,
hence, disagree with him about its meaning. For Appleby what was radical
about the Revolution included the development of a democratic ideology; for
Smith it included the radicalizing of ordinary people.
Smith has another main criticism of Wood in which she faults him on ideolog-
ical grounds. She thinks his interpretation sends the wrong political message.
She is worried about its legitimizing impact. In Wood's view, she says, "for
Revolutionaries we look to the Founders and for radicalism we ultimately look
to impersonal demographic and commercial forces" 36; as a consequence by
3 1. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., 688-689.
34. Ibid., 690.
35. Ibid., 688.
36. Ibid., 689.
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THE ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HISTORY AND SCIENCE 11
"harnessing our approval of the Revolution to nineteenth-century capitalism,
[Wood makes] mobile, competitive, and individualistic elements of the Jacksonian era not just revolutionary but American Revolutionary, hence worthy of
celebration and deference."37
Smith endorses Nathan Huggins' view, according to which "the master narra-
tive" of American history is one "within which slavery and racial caste can be
held apart as sad 'exceptions' to the true American story" of "the inevitable if
sometimes slow expansion of liberty under the auspices of the American state."
According to her "what is left out and unexplained thereby" is not only the
agencies of ordinary people but also "the society's central and persisting is-
sues."38 For instance, she says that in Wood's account "women of any circumstance figure largely as an absence. The Revolution failed to liberate women
in this period, he notes, although it would do so later."39 But Smith insists that
it was people, not the Revolution, that would ultimately liberate women. "The
Revolution was not a transhistorical agent that could go marching through the
ages to bestow economic, social, or political rights on waiting womankind.
Women's inequality was a presence in the nineteenth century, and present with
it were ideological visions of women's nature that have profoundly affected
female Americans for over a century."40
Thus, in Smith's view, Wood got the meaning of the Revolution wrong. She
thinks that contrary to what he says "this Revolution did not bring about a
full scale assault on dependency" so much as "a reformulation of dependence
that banished it from the consciousness of the public world, set apart African
Americans, children, women, tenants, and other poor people, remade the American state, recast forms of participation, and constructed a narrative of the
Revolution and of American-ness without their aspirations, experiences and
agency."S41 She concedes that to Wood her objection may "appear to be quibbling, stressing the things the Revolution did not do, when in fact it accom-
plished so much" since, in his view, "the Revolution made possible later movements for abolition and women's rights" and, indeed, "all our current egalitarian
thinking." However, according to her, those movements and that thinking have
also taken place "against the weight of the American past," for the Revolution
not only extended but also contained liberty, offering a particular heritage of
participation, particular possibilities for public life, but not others.
In sum, according to Smith "there are few losses in the successful Revolution
painted by Wood and hence few possibilities for imagining American freedom
in terms not well within its compass." In Wood's account, she says, "material
abundance and mobility" pose "as substitutes for participation in a public
realm." What is worse, "these developments are not just described but universal-
37. Ibid., 689-690.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., 691.
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12
RAYMOND
MARTIN
ized and celebrated."42 "Given the power of the narrative of the American
Revolution to frame our sense of identity, the nation, and the politically possible," she says, "we are in danger of concluding," with Wood, that "nothing
could be more radical than" these aspects of the American case. It would be
a pity, she thinks, for us to leave out of account the many Americans and
Revolutionaries who dissented from that view, thus getting the meaning of the
Revolution wrong, and by getting it wrong sending the wrong message.43 If we
have to legitimize something, Smith seems to think, let's legitimize not capitalism
but the continuing struggles for freedom of ordinary Americans.
Perhaps the harshest of any published criticism of Wood's account is that
of Michael Zuckerman, who says that it is "not integrative, or integrated, or
for that matter even very interesting" but, rather, an account that is "utterly
and authentically in what Santayana called the genteel tradition":
It is a book of rhetoric uncontaminated by any significant sociology, a book that confines
the American Revolution and America itself to what the better and often the best sort
wrote. It allows other Americans to appear primarily through the accounts of those in
positions to pronounce upon them and it presents them as an undifferentiated mass not
because they were but because their betters saw them that way and because Wood
identifies profoundly with their betters.
Zuckerman, then, like Smith, is bothered that Wood's account is elitist and by
being elitist doesn't give an accurate and balanced portrayal of subjectivity and
agency. But Zuckerman's worries are not simply that Wood's account is elitist,
but also that he
excludes from any consequential place in his account the vision and the violence, the
soaring and sometimes outlandish ideals, the seething and sometimes appalling passions
of ordinary Americans. Or rather he transmutes them all into simple ambitions of
economic success. And in the exact tradition that Santayana scorned he sets those trans-
mutations forth in a bland parable of irresistible individualism, a comfortably conserva-
tive tale of a people finding its destiny and fixing it forevermore. ...44
The reality, Zuckerman thinks, is much messier.
One way in which he thinks it's messier is that Wood exaggerates the differ-
ences between the three stages of American society that form the backbone of
Wood's interpretation. Zuckerman concedes that by the nineteenth century
America may have been, as Wood maintains, the most egalitarian, most materi-
alistic, most individualistic society in Western history, but he claims that before
the Revolution it was already all of that, even on Wood's own evidence.45 That
is, "just as Wood exaggerates aristocratic and discounts egalitarian elements
in his idealization of pre-Revolutionary monarchy, he equally but oppositely
trumpets leveling innovations and mutes hierarchical persistences in his exalta-
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 692.
44. Michael Zuckerman, "Rhetoric, Reality, and the Revolution: The Genteel Radicalism of
Gordon Wood," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 51 (1994), 694-695.
45. Ibid., 696.
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THE ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HISTORY AND SCIENCE 13
tion of post-Revolutionary democracy."46 Zuckerman says that Wood "cannot
countenance the obvious implication of continuing tension between aristocracy
and democracy because it would attenuate the ineluctable linearity of his interpretation and vitiate the only sort of significance he can attach to the Revolution."47
So, like Appleby and Smith, Zuckerman is worried about what Wood leaves
out. But whereas what mattered to Appleby was Wood's omission of the ide-
ology of democracy, and to Smith his omission of the experience and agency
of ordinary people, what matters to Zuckerman is Wood's way with everyone's
experience and agency, especially those he ignores but even those he doesn't.
For instance, according to Zuckerman, Wood's "inexplicable elision of slavery
from the story of advancing equality misses the effect of the institution on
masters as well as slaves, misses Jefferson's anxiety that black servitude 'nursed,
educated, and daily exercised' whites in 'the most boisterous passions' and 'the
most unremitting despotism,' misses, in other words, the ways in which slavery
precluded inculcation of the kind of character Wood claims republicanism
and democracy alike required."48 Zuckerman concludes that aside from a few
"delectable details" Wood's account is "essentially untouched by life."
For present purposes what is interesting about these three critiques is not
whether they are right or wrong - Wood, it should be noted, responds forcefully
to all three - but what they show about the ways in which historians debate
the merits of competing interpretations. What they show, rather dramatically
I think, is that humanistic historical interpretations are expected to reveal what
happened and why, and what it means that it happened; they are also expected
to convey the meaning of what happened against the backdrop of a balanced
and empathy-facilitating portrayal of the experiences and agencies of the people
whose history is being interpreted. The critiques also show that how a historian
decides to portray subjectivity, agency, and meaning not only importantly influences the meaning he or she finds in events, but even which whats and whys
get mentioned in an interpretation. Wood, for instance, passes over almost
without mention the actual revolutionary activity that occupies the bulk of
most historians' accounts of the Revolution.
What is of concern in this debate among Wood and his critics is typical of
humanistic historical studies. As this debate clearly shows one cannot understand how historians assess the merits of competing humanistic historical interpretations unless one attends centrally to the ways in which such interpretations
portray subjectivity, agency, and meaning. These are among the very features of
humanistic historical interpretations that most visibly and decisively distinguish
them from theories in the physical sciences. The question of how properly to
portray such features is irrelevant to any debate over the adequacy of competing
theories in the physical sciences; moreover, it is alien to the kinds of questions
46. Ibid., 697.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., 698.
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14
RAYMOND
MARTIN
that are central to such debates. The conclusion is inescapable, I think, that
humanistic historical interpretations are quite unlike theories in the physical
sciences and not primarily because they are proto or applied versions of such
theories, but because they are animated at their core by radically different
concerns. In sum, humanistic historical interpretations, unlike theories of any
sort in the physical sciences, are fundamentally an attempt to interpret experience on the level of experience. Quibbles and qualifications aside one might
say that in the physical sciences the goal is to transcend subjectivity whereas
in humanistic historical studies the goal is to embrace it.49
University of Maryland
49. Thanks to John Barresi, Kevin Levin, and Sara Vollmer for many useful criticisms and
suggestions, and also to those who commented so helpfully when I read an earlier version of this
paper at Dalhousie University in the summer of 1995.
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