Beard on Historical Relativism and the Objectivity Question
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Wednesday 27 November 2024 is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Charles A. Beard (27 November 1874–01 September1948), who was born in Knightstown, Indiana, on this date in 1874.
Beard was among the most eminent American historians of his time. Though born in the US, he spent several years at Oxford University before returning to the US, receiving his doctorate from Columbia University, where he became a lecturer. He wrote prolifically, but he made arguments that were controversial at the time. The two early books that established his reputation were An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States of 1913 and Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy of 1915. Although these books were acclaimed by scholars, many people at the time objected to an economic interpretation of the origins of US political institutions.
Beard resigned from Columbia in 1917, at a time when there were many staff leaving Columbia on principle due to issues of academic freedom. After leaving Columbia, like Will Durant he managed to do something somewhat rare, which was to support himself as an independent scholar from the royalties of his books. With his wife Mary Beard in the 1920s he published the two volume The Rise of American Civilization, which was followed by another two books a decade later, seen as continuing the American story, America in Midpassage of 1939 and The American Spirit in 1942. His later works were highly critical of FDR’s foreign policy. Even though he had supported the First World War, his criticism of FDR got him labeled as an isolationist, and his reputation took a hit for bucking prevailing elite opinion.
We can see that Beard was primarily a historian, but he did reflect on the philosophical problems of history, especially in two essays, “Written History as an Act of Faith,” which was delivered as the Presidential Address to the American Historical Association in December 1933 and published in the American Historical Review in 1934, and “That Noble Dream,” which was published in the American Historical Review in October 1935. Since I’ve mentioned Beard’s presidential address to the American Historical Association, I want to note that you can pretty much take the temperature of American historiography over the years from 1884 to the present by skimming the presidential addresses of the American Historical Society, as these usually reflect the attitudes of the time and what was brewing among academic historians. Several of the figures I’ve profiled have delivered presidential addresses to the American Historical Association and many of these addresses were intellectual events that became the historical manifestoes of their time. Carl Becker gave the address in 1931 and Herbert Bolton gave the address in 1932, the two years immediately prior to Beard’s 1933 address.
In “That Noble Dream” Beard summarizes his argument in elevent propositions that constitute a kind of manifesto of Beard’s historiography, which has been called historical relativism and progressivism. It seems strange to me that anyone would identify one and the same doctrine as being both relativist and progressivist, since the historical relativist can’t well argue for progressivism, and the progressivist can’t very well argue for relativism. If historical periods are judged only in reference to each other, and not in terms of some standard that is independent of all historical periods, then we can’t arrange these historical periods in a sequence that exemplifies progress, and if we do judge all historical periods by a metric derived from the idea of progress, then we aren’t judging them relative to each other. Of course, relativism and progressivism are broad and vague labels that are associated with a wide variety of interpretations, so I give them here only as the labels that have been most frequently associated with Beard.
Beard is usually given a prominent place in progressivism. Richard Hofstadter, in his book The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Perrington, identified Beard as one of the three major progressive historians, that is to say, historians of what is often called the Progressive Era, along with Frederick Jackson Turner and V. L. Parrington. Different historians give different dates for the progressive era, but it roughly covers the earliest part of the 20th century in the US, and it roughly corresponds to the Edwardian Era in England. I won’t attempt to explain the ideology of progressivism since that would take me too far afield, but here’s a particularly telling quote from Hofstadter’s book:
“…the suspicious and somewhat conspiratorial approach to history that at times had shown itself in his work had now come full circle: a style of thought which gave heart to Progressivism when he was exposing the machinations of the Founding Fathers had become congenial to postwar ultraconservatives and Roosevelt-haters, now that he was exposing the machinations of F.D.R. His penchant for finding the rotten core in the fruits of history finally brought him to turn upon his earlier works, and his intense lifelong devotion to pursuit of the ‘reality’ that underlay appearances at last consumed itself.”
What Hofstadter is here calling a suspicious and conspiratorial approach to history is what has more recently been called the hermeneutics of suspicion, as exemplified by Marx on economics, Nietzsche on religion, and Freud on human motivations. It is a reading of history with a pretense to laying bare ugly truths from which we ordinary turn away. In other words, Beard was trying to red pill his readers.
Hofstadter is saying that Beard’s early work on economic interests at work in the US Constitution was driven by this spirit, and that it was this spirit that drove the Progressivism of the era. Hofstadter is also saying that Beard was engaged in distinguishing historical appearance from historical reality. This is particularly interesting for philosophy of history, since the distinction between appearance and reality is fundamental to the metaphysics of the Western tradition. In doing what is essentially historical metaphysics, Beard was revealing a deep affinity for the Western tradition, but it’s also something that easily gets out of hand. Recall that Freud, himself called one of the masters of suspicion, said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. When no cigar remains merely a cigar, then the hermeneutics of suspicion have gotten out of hand.
Hofstadter notes that Beard’s historical metaphysics served the interests of the Progressive Era during his earlier years, but ended up serving ultraconservatives in his later years. So it seems, that is to say, it gives the appearance, that Beard’s alliances have shifted over time, even though his work was continuing in the same vein. Hofstadter thinks that this ultimately consumed Beard, but he’s just saying that because it’s unpopular for a mainstream historian to criticize FDR, whereas a contemporary mainstream historian is entirely comfortable with Beard’s methodology as long as it’s seen as supporting the progressivist cause. For Beard’s part, he maintained that what he was doing was making his biases explicit so that the reader knew what to expect. In “That Noble Dream” he wrote:
“A book entitled An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, like every other book on history, is a selection and an organization of facts; but it serves advance notice on the reader, telling him what to expect. A book entitled The Formation of the Constitution or The Making of the Constitution is also a selection and organization of facts, hence an interpretation or conception of some kind, but it does not advise the reader at the outset concerning the upshot to be expected.”
This is an admirable motivation, and one we’d like to see carried out more thoroughly. But Beard isn’t particularly remembered for the kind of historical rigor represented by this interest in making his methods and assumptions explicit. Beard is remembered for his defense of historical relativism.
Two of the most eminent American historians of the early twentieth century, Beard and Carl Becker, are both identified as historical relativists. Relativism, like historicism, means many things to many men, so one should never appeal to relativism without making it clear exactly what kind of relativism one is talking about. In other words, we should serve advance notice to the reader regarding our methods and our biases, as Beard has argued. When Beard explicitly discusses historical relativism, he sounds more like a critic than an enthusiast. In “Written History as an Act of Faith” Beard said:
“Contemporary criticism shows that the apostle of relativity is destined to be destroyed by the child of his own brain. If all historical conceptions are merely relative to passing events, to transitory phases of ideas and interests, then the conception of relativity is itself relative… As the actuality of history moves forward into the future, the conception of relativity will also pass, as previous conceptions and interpretations of events have passed. Hence, according to the very doctrine of relativity, the skeptic of relativity will disappear in due course, beneath the ever-tossing waves of changing relativities. If he does not suffer this fate soon, the apostle of relativity will surely be executed by his own logic. Every conception of history, he says, is relative to time and circumstances. But by his own reasoning he is then compelled to ask: To what are these particular times and circumstances relative? And he must go on with receding sets of times and circumstances until he confronts an absolute: the totality of history as actuality which embraces all times and circumstances and all relativities.”
So if Beard isn’t onboard with this kind of relativism, what are his views that have earned him a place among historical relativists? This we find most systematically laid out in “That Nobel Dream.”
The title of Beard’s “That Noble Dream” was taken from the previous year’s presentation by Theodore Clark Smith, who characterized the ideals of the American Historical Association as what was for Smith a “noble dream.” Beard notes that this noble dream sets up a dichotomy between those who are themselves pursuing the dream and the opposition who must be “ignoble, unsound, discreditable, and weak.” Smith didn’t use those terms, but the implication is clear. The noble dream, as Beard presents it, is about historical absolutes and objective truths. Beard is skeptical of these, so he doesn’t count himself among those who share the noble dream. Beard, as I wrote earlier, lays out his own position in elevent explicitly formulated propositions. I’m not going to quote all of them in full, but I will summarize some and quote others, as follows:
- The mind independence of history as the common sense view. (A classic realist position that Beard presents as the common sense view.)
- The historian cannot observe the past, but is reliant on documentation.
- Documentation of the past is incomplete.
- The historian makes a partial selection of this incomplete record.
- “…the total actuality is not factually knowable to any historian,” so that history is therefore neither known nor knowable.
- “The idea that there was a complete and actual structurization of events in the past, to be discovered through a partial examination of the partial documentation, is pure hypothesis.”
- History does not consist of mere events that can be observed neutrally because they involve aesthetic and ethical considerations.
- Any overall interpretation that guides the historian in organizing his material is something transcendent. Here he quotes Benedetto Croce to make his point.
- Any historian is a product of his time and cannot bring pure neutrality to his work.
- The historian’s personal interests will always enter into this selection and arrangement of material.
- “The validity of the Ranke formula and its elaboration as Historicism is destroyed by internal contradictions and rejected by contemporary thought. The historian’s powers are limited. He may search for, but he cannot find, the ‘objective truth’ of history, or write it, ‘as it actually was’.”
With the eleventh item we finally come to the villain of the piece, who is Ranke. In several posts I’ve mentioned Leopold von Ranke because he’s been so influential in historiography since the 19th century. Ranke is famous for having said that the historian should try to give an account of things as they really were. What exactly Ranke meant by this is still disputed today, but it was taken over as a slogan by many historians. Beard presents himself as the arch anti-Rankean. This is strange, because Ranke is associated with a particular formulation of historicism, and many have argued that historicism is a form of relativism. Beard is called a relativist, but he unambiguously rejects a canonical formulation of historicism, which is at the same time a canonical form of historical relativism. This is why is need to be careful how we formulate things, and this is why I’ve summarized or quoted all of Beard’s elevent propositions, so we can see what exactly his position was, and whether or not we call it relativism is immaterial.
Beard’s propositions come down to two interlocking theses: historical evidence is incomplete, and the historian is selective. In other words, the already incomplete historical record is made the more incomplete by the historian’s selection, and the historian’s selection is made according to his human, all-too-human biases. For Beard, this rules out historical absolutes and objective truths. I’m not sure that this follows from Beard’s propositions. Of course, it will depend on how we define historical absolutes and objective truths. You don’t necessarily have to have an exhaustive record to state an objective truth, and insofar as any such objective truth does not change in relation to other propositions, i.e., it always is what it is, it’s not relative. So Beard may be guilty of a non-sequiter, but apparently the meaning he invested in historical absolutes and objective truths was inconsistent with the methods of the historian as he recounted them.
Beard’s own particular formulation of historical relativism comes in the form of a denial of historical objectivity. Sometimes this is called “the objectivity question,” and a great many books and papers have been written on the objectivity question. Maurice Mandelbaum explicitly criticized Beard’s relativistic formulation in terms of a rejection of the possibility of historical objectivity. Mandelbaum wrote:
“When we search out the meaning of what Beard, Becker and others of the relativists have written, and when we reduce this meaning to its least common denominator, we find historical relativism to be the view that no historical work grasps the nature of the past (or present) immediately, that whatever ‘truth’ a historical work contains is relative to the conditioning processes under which it arose and can only be understood with reference to those processes.”
We see that Mandelbaum doesn’t focus on what I call the two interlocking theses of the incompleteness of the historical record and the selection made the historian. Instead, what is definitive of the relativism not only of Beard but also of Becker is our mediated relationship to the past, the fact that we cannot observe the past directly, which Beard does mention, but he doesn’t place as much emphasis on this as on incompleteness and selection. We could argue, perhaps rightly, that incompleteness and selection are functions of non-immediacy, but this would be a distinct thesis to demonstrate, so I’m not sure that Mandelbaum’s criticism hits home as sharply as he intended.
Beard wrote a review of Mandelbaum’s 1938 paper The Problem of Historical Knowledge: An Answer to Relativism ,” from which the previous quote was taken. Beard wrote in his review of Mandelbaum that Mandelbaum missed the point:
“…no historian can describe the past as it actually was and… every historian’s work — that is, his selection of facts, his emphasis, his omissions, his organization, and his methods of presentation — bears a relation to his own personality and the age and circumstances in which he lives. This is relativism as I understand it, and it is not the conception put forth by Mr. Mandelbaum. I do not hold that historical ‘truth’ is relative but that the facts chosen, the spirit, and the arrangement of every historical work are relative. Mr. Mandelbaum has missed the whole point of the business.”
While Beard contended that Mandelbaum had entirely missed his point, Mandelbaum returned to Beard again many years later in his 1977 book The Anatomy of Historical Knowledge, in which he wrote:
“…the facts with which historians are concerned when they work on different scales are not ‘the same facts,’ even though they relate to the same actual occurrences. There is nothing odd about this. Take, for example, almost any important episode in a person’s life. One may view such an episode in either of two ways: One may describe it and analyze it, treating it as a particularly memorable, self-contained episode, or one can view that same episode in a larger context, as a turning point in that person’s life. When one views such an episode in these different ways, which features appear as most significant may be quite different, since the same episode is being viewed in different contexts. Relativists are apt to seize on this fact as establishing the contention that any historical account is dominated by the historian’s own interests, which lead him to view an event in one context rather than in another. The existence of the influence of one’s interests on the context in which one happens, or chooses, to view an occurrence is indisputable. What must not be overlooked, however, is the fact that these different approaches are not in the least contradictory, since the truth of each is compatible with the truth of the other.”
Here, I think Mandlebaum has connected more directly with this target than previously. Beard was not alive to refute Mandelbaum’s new charges against him, though I doubt that Beard would have accepted Mandelbaum’s formulation of the problem or its solution by either the historical relativist or the defender of objective truth in history. Both Beard and Mandelbaum in this exchange make reasonable and defensible points. That the two representing these different perspectives have not been brought together and resolved, or a high synthesis sought in which each party receives their due in full, is to be regretted.
