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Summary European History
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Summary of European History for BA1 Business Economics at the VUB.
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European History for Business Economics II. Chapter I: Intro to European History
• Why study history?
o To escape the present, nostalgia, a longing for “what is forever lost”.
§ The “pastness of the past” and overstating rupture/discontinuity
o To learn lessons from the past – moral understanding.
§ Biases in what counts as the “great men and women of history”
o To identify structural laws .
§ Linear progressive history: Marx, Fukuyama
§ Teleology, causality and the risk of overdetermination
o For political or ideological purposes.
§ Selection mechanism; helping distinguish the (un)educated
§ Nationalism and the “natural” character of nation-states
§ Post-colonialism and reclaiming the past
o Put the present day into perspective, to dismantle its “for granted” (natural)
character.
§ To question uniformity, to “provincialize” Europe, to account for
multiple paths/meanings of “modernity”
§ To question the idea that “to understand anything it has to be seen
both as a unity and in its historical development” – Dipesh Chakrabarty
(2008)
o To understand change and how society came to be.
§ Understand continuity and change; revolution and institutionalization.
“For every institution or value that disappears or is changed, another
remains the same” – T.C.W. Blanning (2001).
• So, there are many pitfalls, .... why bother studying history?
• “Fake news” (then and now):
o John Adams (1735-1826), 2nd US President:
§ “There has been more new error propagated by the press in the last
ten years than in a hundred years before 1798.”
• The objectivity of history?
o “History is the subject of a construction whose site is not homogeneous,
empty time, but time filled full by now-time. Thus, to Robespierre ancient
Rome was a past charged with now-time, a past which he blasted out of the
continuum of history”
- Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
,• What does Benjamin mean?
o Interpretation: the world is not objectively given, readily accessible to the
human mind; no experience can be grasped without theory.
o Political narratives: by giving a particular representation of what the past was
and underlining the political salience of some historical events for current
times, the past becomes part of the present.
o History is story-telling, a man-made product.
• The objectivity of history?
o Objectivists: evidence-based history
§ Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886)
• Emphasis on systematic data collection, source verification.
• Personal detachment: differentiation between “statement” and
“judgment”.
§ Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406)
• History should not limit itself to recording events but should
examine environments, social mores and political bases.
• Method: criticism, observation, examination, falsification of
sources, and comparison.
• No divine end of history: suggestion that history has no end:
the “past is like the future, water from water.”
o Relativists: the subjectivity of history
§ Giambattista Vico (1668-1744)
• Recognition that people have fundamentally different schema
of thought in different historical eras
• Criticizes René Descartes (1596-1650) and his notion that
“truth” can be attained via observation. Truth can only be
verified through creation and invention.
• Subjectivity: truth is what we make of it, but it does not make it
less “truthful” (in an intersubjective sense).
• “The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it”. Accordingly, our clear and
distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other
truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself”.
§ Carl Becker (1926): “What are historical facts?”
• No history shall be the same for two historians.
• A historian chooses what (s)he considers
important/relevant/significant based on his/her knowledge,
experiences, and the needs of his/her time
, • Subjectivity is a richness: subaltern histories. For instance, the
perspectives of the colonized-on imperialism.
• Objectivity redefined:
• Not measured based on the degree of detachment between the historian and
the society (s)he studies.
• But measured based on the relationship between available facts and the
interpretation arrived by the historian.
• Does one’s interpretation makes sense? Is it reasonable?
• Mark Bevir: ”fact-making” through critical comparison
o We cannot grasp historical facts as immediately present truths...
Yet, it is possible to have knowledge of the past that is neither relativistic nor
irrational.
o Facts = pieces of evidence which nearly everyone in a given community would
accept as true.
§ Facts are accepted as true as a result of their demonstrable
relationship to other facts which provide it with a definite context.
Nonetheless, disagreement on historical interpretation can persist:
“For instance, even if Peter's view entails theoretical presuppositions with which Mary
disagrees, and even if Mary's view entails theoretical presuppositions with which Peter
disagrees, Peter and Mary still might agree on enough facts to make debate worthwhile, and
perhaps to enable them to reach a decision as to the merits of their respective views.
Because they agree on numerous facts, the facts constitute an authority they can refer to in
their attempts to justify their views and compare their alternative interpretations.”
o Debating rival interpretations rest upon a standard of reasonableness (against
the backdrop of agreed facts that constitute a form of authority)
o Objectivity = a product of our intellectual honesty in dealing with criticism.
• Comparison of historical theories exposes mutual limitations
• Acceptance of limitations cannot be enforced, relies on normative
standards of reasonableness
• Acceptance of flaws/biases/limitations creates new “agreed facts”
(dialectic)
• Historical objectivity = always in the making; always contestable
• The long 19th Century (Eric Hobsbawn)
o The collapse of French absolutist monarch (1789) to the eruption of the First
World War in 1914.
, § From a society of orders (the “three estates) to a society of classes
§ Popular sovereignty and new modes of political legitimation
o Economic and social transformation
o Demographic explosion and mass migration
o Dramatic changes in the political landscape
• Birth of new European powers: unification of Italy and Germany
• The consolidation of nation-states and imperialism
• The incorporation of the masses in politics
• A focus on modern Europe
• 19th Century and the transformation of the European continent
• Imperialism and the dissemination of European ideas
• The normative pulse of Europe’s narrative of modernity
• 19th century modernity:
o The 19th century is often conceived as the era that put the “Enlightenment
ideals” into practice.
o But... “What is the Enlightenment? There is no official answer, because the era
named by Kant’s essay was never demarcated by opening and closing
ceremonies like the Olympics, nor are its tenets stipulated in an oath or
creed.”
- Steven Pinker (2018)
o Steven Pinker (2018)
§ 18th century Enlightenment as a bridge-head between
• 17th century: scientific revolutions and the age of Reason
• 19th century political, socio-economic and cultural changes
(industrialization, urbanization, secularization, democratization, ...)
§ Associated with core values; linked to the “modern condition”:
• Reason: as opposed to divine conditions and imperatives
• Science: evidence-based judgments
• Humanism: universal ideal, equality, liberty
• Progress: human-made systems (government, market,
international institutions) for the betterment of the human
condition
• Peace
o Henry Martyn Lloyd (2018)
“On either side of the Atlantic, groups of public intellectuals have issued a call
to arms. The besieged citadel in need of defending, they say, is the one that
safeguards science, facts and evidence-based policy. The white knights of
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