J. B. Bury
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 162nd anniversary of the birth of John Bagnell Bury, probably more widely known as J. B. Bury (16 October 1861–01 June 1927), who was born in Ireland on this date in 1861.
As with most historians, Bury was suspicious of philosophies of history, primarily because they are the work of philosophers and not of historians. In “The Place of Modern History in the Perspective of Knowledge” (included in Selected essays of J. B. Bury), Bury implied that philosophers had brought philosophy of history into disrepute:
“…a large number of interpretations or ‘philosophies’ of history were launched upon the world, from Germany, France, England, and elsewhere. They were nearly all constructed by philosophers, not by historians; they were consequently conditioned by the nature of the various philosophical systems from which they were generated; and they did a great deal to bring the general idea of a philosophy of history into discredit and create the suspicion that such an idea is illusory.”
We can take it as a thesis in the philosophy of history that every historian has a philosophy of history, whether implicit or explicit. Bury would not necessarily have disagreed with this, and his own implicit philosophy of history informs his writings, perhaps conditioned by the nature of history and historical research rather than being conditioned by various philosophical systems. An historian might well argue that this is right and proper, and I will not say that they are wrong.
Bury is famous for stating that “History is a science, no more and no less.” Bury further elaborated on the scientific status of history when he followed Lord Acton as the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, and for his inaugural address, presented “The Science of History” (1902), echoing themes that would be given a more comprehensive exposition in his book on progress:
“The principle of continuity and the higher principle of development lead to the practical consequence that it is of vital importance for citizens to have a true knowledge of the past and to see it in a dry light, in order that their influence on the present and future may be exerted in right directions. For, as a matter of fact, the attitude of men to the past has at all times been a factor in forming their political opinions and determining the course of events. It would be an instructive task to isolate this influence and trace it from its most rudimentary form in primitive times, when the actions of tribes were stimulated by historical memories, through later ages in which policies were dictated or confirmed by historical judgments and conceptions. But the clear realisation of the fact that our conception of the past is itself a distinct factor in guiding and moulding our evolution, and must become a factor of greater and increasing potency, marks a new stage in the growth of the human mind. And it supplies us with the true theory of the practical importance of history.”
In The Idea of Progress Bury, more than a hundred years ago, is already developing a theme that is familiar to us today: the moral consequences of the Copernican demotion of Earth from the center of the universe:
“We may perhaps best conceive all that this change meant by supposing what a difference it would make to us if it were suddenly discovered that the old system which Copernicus upset was true after all, and that we had to think ourselves back into a strictly limited universe of which the earth is the centre. The loss of its privileged position by our own planet; its degradation, from a cosmic point of view, to insignificance; the necessity of admitting the probability that there may be many other inhabited worlds — all this had consequences ranging beyond the field of astronomy. It was as if a man who dreamed that he was living in Paris or London should awake to discover that he was really in an obscure island in the Pacific Ocean, and that the Pacific Ocean was immeasurably vaster than he had imagined.”
Here Bury sounds like he is channeling Carl Sagan three generations before the fact. This is because Bury’s belief in science and progress was what made the world of Carl Sagan possible; clearly, for both Bury and Sagan, the epistemic changes wrought by the scientific revolution were wrenching but worthwhile: Carl Sagan is entirely comfortable with a worldview that is still, for Bury, dreamlike and capable for reversal.
But the blandishments of progress do not come without a cost; ever for positivisitic historians and scientists there is a metaphysical cost to be paid, though clever accounting can conceal the cost in otherwise unexceptional expenses. American philosopher W. M. Urban formulated Bury’s project in a nearly metaphysical vein:
“It is obvious, as Professor Bury tells us, that progress would be valueless if there were cogent reasons for supposing that the time at the disposal of humanity is likely to reach a limit in the near future, but he thinks that there is no incompatibility between the law of progress and the law of degradation, because the possibility of progress is guaranteed, pragmatically a t least, by the high probability, based on mathematical calculations, of a virtually infinite time to progress in.”
I assume that Urban was commenting on this from The Idea of Progress:
“As time is the very condition of the possibility of Progress, it is obvious that the idea would be valueless if there were any cogent reasons for supposing that the time at the disposal of humanity is likely to reach a limit in the near future. If there were good cause for believing that the earth would be uninhabitable in A.D. 2000 or 2100 the doctrine of Progress would lose its meaning and would automatically disappear. It would be a delicate question to decide what is the minimum period of time which must be assured to man for his future development, in order that Progress should possess value and appeal to the emotions. The recorded history of civilisation covers 6000 years or so, and if we take this as a measure of our conceptions of time-distances, we might assume that if we were sure of a period ten times as long ahead of us the idea of Progress would not lose its power of appeal. Sixty thousand years of historical time, when we survey the changes which have come to pass in six thousand, opens to the imagination a range vast enough to seem almost endless.”
Bury may be right is his speculation that, for human beings, 60,000 years is endless for all practical purposes, but it is at this point that Bury and Sagan part ways, and in a twofold sense. Firstly, contemporary science presents to us a vision of the universe billions of years old, and with trillions of years yet to elapse before its heat death. And the Earth itself is billions of years old, and may be habitable for another billion or more years. This is such an uniminaginable quantity of time that 60,000 years is annihilated as if nothing, as the ancients would say that the finite is annihilate by the infinite. All the better for progress, you say. But wait. Secondly, there was Carl Sagan’s apocalypticism, which would have been utterly alien to Bury’s belief in progress seemingly inhering in the nature of things. Sagan’s works are riddled with apocalyptic warnings of technology that threaten humanity with an uninhabitable world by A.D. 2000 or 2100, if not sooner. Science a century after bury has inflated the scope of the cosmos, deflated the hopes of human beings, and has failed to make history scientific into the bargain. Maybe belief in progress wasn’t such a bad thing if it helped us to believe in ourselves.
Indeed, the idea of the future appears throughout Bury’s The Idea of Progress, as in this seemingly complacent passage:
“As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Silurian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of equally inappreciable length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental environments will tend to progress towards perfection.”
One could argue that this is a providential naturalism, or a naturalistic providential philosophy of history (if indeed this is not incoherent or self-contradictory), which brings us to the final paragraph of the book:
“In other words, does not Progress itself suggest that its value as a doctrine is only relative, corresponding to a certain not very advanced stage of civilisation; just as Providence, in its day, was an idea of relative value, corresponding to a stage somewhat less advanced? Or will it be said that this argument is merely a disconcerting trick of dialectic played under cover of the darkness in which the issue of the future is safely hidden by Horace’s prudent god?”
There is much to unpack in this final observation. Here Bury is comparing the modern belief in progress to pre-modern belief in providence: this is a pregnant comparison, suggesting that pre-modern providential philosophies of history served a function not unlike modern progressive philosophies of history: in other words, Condorcet is to Enlightenment thought as Augustine is to medieval thought. This apparently superficial analogy is not necessarily misleading. The future is hidden from us, to be sure, but it was equally hidden from all who lived and died in the comforting bounds of a providential philosophy of history.
Further Resources
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Goldstein, Doris S. J. B. Bury’s Philosophy of History: A Reappraisal. The American Historical Review, Volume 82, Issue 4, October 1977, Pages 896–919, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/82.4.896
Alison Pogrebin Brown (1980) Methodology and Philosophy of History:, Trends in History, 1:1, 23–36, DOI: 10.1300/J265V01N01_02
