Jan Romein and the Logical Geography of Theoretical History
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Wednesday 30 October 2024 is the 131st anniversary of the birth of Jan Marius Romein (30 October 1893–16 July 1962), who was born in Rotterdam on this date in 1893.
Romein was a Dutch historian and a student of Johan Huizinga, whom I have mentioned in several episodes. Like many of the figures I’ve discussed, Romein was a Marxist, but he wasn’t a doctrinaire Marxist, so he exhibited some independence of mind. I suspect that Romein’s Marxism made him more sympathetic than most historians to cultural evolutionism, and to the idea that there could be regularities in human history — call them laws if you like, but laws of history are even more unwelcome among most historians than cultural evolutionism.
In a 1937 essay titled “The Dialectics of Progress” Romein himself formulated a law, the law of the handicap of a head start, also called the first mover disadvantage. That the first mover should have a disadvantage rather than an advantage sounds counter-intuitive from an economic point of view, but the historian takes a broader view than economics, and so sees cases in which apparent early advantage turn out to be a later disadvantage. If you’re first to market with a revolutionary new horse collar, and you therefore dominate the market, but you do this as horse drawn carriages are being replaced by automobiles, then your first mover advantage isn’t going to help you much in the longer term. Worse, you’ve sunk your capital into a declining infrastructure, and you may never get in back again, which can prevent you from effectively competing in whatever new markets appear.
Romein would go on to develop a more theoretical conception of history, which he in fact called theoretical history. He gave an exposition of this in his 1946 paper “Theoretical History,” translated into English in 1948. There are at least a couple more papers by Romein that have been translated into English that are relevant to his conception of theoretical history, but I haven’t yet managed to get copies of these. What I have to say today is based only on this one paper, “Theoretical History,” and on what other scholars have said of Romein’s theoretical history, so when I eventually get copies of the other papers I may do this episode over, or record an addendum or otherwise re-visit Romein on the basis of additional sources. This episode may be a little thin given my lack of materials, but I wanted to at least acknowledge Romein’s contribution to historical thought, since it strikes me as being distinctive.
In several earlier episodes I’ve talked about the need to map the conceptual space of history. This can be framed in terms of what Donald Davidson called “logical geography”:
“…much of the interest in logical form comes from an interest in logical geography: to give the logical form of a sentence is to give its logical location in the totality of sentences, to describe it in a way that explicitly determines what sentences it entails and what sentences it is entailed by. The location must be given relative to a specific deductive theory; so logical form itself is relative to a theory.” (Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events, p. 119)
Before Davidson, Wittgenstein had written about logical space, in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus section 3.4: “The proposition determines a place in logical space.” Whether we frame the problem in terms of logical geography or logical space, this hasn’t been done in any kind of thorough way for history, which reflects the impoverished conceptual framework of history. For example, J. G. A. Pocock made a careful tripartite distinction among three different activities that are all called historiography, but it’s difficult even to convey the distinction because of the lack of sharply defined concepts in history. But historians are always grasping after some better expression of what they’re trying to do, even if many or most of these attempts are unsuccessful. Romain in proposing what he called theoretical history, must be counted among those who was grasping at a distinct kind of history that even today remains elusive.
Theoretical history occupies a distinct place on the conceptual map of history, related to but not the same as historiography, philosophy of history, or history properly speaking. Romein himself gives us the location of theoretical history in the conceptual geography of history
“…let us briefly imagine theoretical history as a central square surrounded on its four sides (a) by what in the eighteenth century was sometimes called theoretical history; (b) by what nowadays is known as the philosophy of history; © by the technique of historical research, which is often mis-called historical method; (d) and finally by what might be named practical, as distinct from theoretical, history.”
So we’ve got theoretical history in the middle, bordered by an Enlightenment era conception of the same, by philosophy of history, by historical technique, which is what I would call historiography, and lastly by practical history, which is what Romein calls historiography. Romein notes that Dugald Stewart had used the term “theoretical history” in 1793, and Stewart did indeed use “theoretical history” several times in his work, as when he wrote:
“To trace the theoretical history of geometry, in which we know for certain, that all the transitions have depended on reasoning alone, is a problem which has not yet been completely solved.”
Recall that during the same period many called the work of Gibbon and Hume and even Friedrich von Schlegel “philosophical history,” and Stewart uses this as well, though I couldn’t find a place where he clearly distinguished between theoretical history and philosophical history. Stewart implies that theoretical history eschews all metaphysics, so if it is allowed that philosophical history can abide metaphysics, then that is our differentia between the two.
I’d have to put in a lot more effort to clarify Romein’s logical geography of history, since each of the boundaries he cites for theoretical history themselves admit of a logical geography, as I mentioned earlier in relation to Pocock’s identification of several different tasks that could be called historiography. And Romein characterizes theoretical history in a variety of ways. He says that:
“…theoretical history aims at bridging the gap that divides the cautiously objective technique employed to ascertain the isolated facts of history, and the arbitrarily subjective method by which these facts are assembled into a picture of the past.”
But Romein also says that:
“…theoretical history deals with developments and concepts, and establishes its case by comparing historical phenomena and developments in different periods and places.”
Theoretical history itself has a logical geography, as these two characterizations of Romein are not necessarily distinct, but each could be practiced in isolation from the other, yielding two distinct theoretical histories. Another sense of the logical geography of history is that of the many ideas that a given historian weaves into his histories. In a review of Romein’s posthumously published The Watershed of Two Eras: Europe in 1900, Maarten C. Brands attributed five themes to Romein’s historical work:
- dialectical progress and the “law of the disadvantageous lead”;
- “common human pattern” and European deviations from it since the Middle Ages;
- the theory that the great changes in history are achieved by upheaval, or transformation from quantitative growth into qualitative change;
- integrated historical writing; and
- the synthetic concept of history which should follow historical research.
I’ve already mentioned the law of the disadvantageous lead. Brands connects this idea with what Elman Service called the Law of Evolutionary Potential. Elman service is best known for his taxonomy of early societies that develop from bands to tribes, chiefdoms, and states. This is a form of cultural evolutionism, but unlike Marx’s cultural evolutionism, it is concerned with the evolution of society and governance, rather than economic and technical evolution. Service also wrote a book with Marshall Sahlins, Evolution and Culture, in which they formulated what they called the Law of Evolutionary Potential, stated thus:
“The more specialized and adapted a form in a given evolutionary stage, the smaller is its potential for passing to the next stage. Another way of putting it which is more succinct and more in conformity with preceding chapters is: Specific evolutionary progress is inversely related to general evolutionary potential.” (Service and Sahlins, Evolution and Culture, p. 97)
This isn’t exactly the same as what Romein propounded as the law of the handicap of a head start, but we can see the formulation of Service and Sahlins as a more general and comprehensive version of the same core idea.
The common human pattern is the topic of one of Romein’s papers that I haven’t yet obtained, but Brands seems to point to a perennial way of life that would give rise to modern capitalism, indicating that Romein found this common human pattern exemplified in pre-modern Europe. We can think of this as the maturation of the perennial institutions of an agricultural civilization, bringing that civilization up to the transition to capitalism. Once again, this is a form of cultural evolutionism.
The idea that the great changes in history are the result of the transformation from quantitative growth into qualitative change we can understand as emergentism, that is to say, that when a system becomes sufficiently complex, emergent properties appear, so that quantitative change beyond a certain threshold results in qualitative change. I’ve previously discussed emergentism in the episode on my paper “A Complexity Ladder for Big History,” since big history particularly focuses on emergentism.
Of integrated historical writing Brands says of Romein:
“Romein was never able to accept the independence of historical specialisms — economic, social, political, cultural, or any other sort. Because of the division of historical knowledge, history has not fulfilled the social function which he thought it should.”
Romein himself wrote that his conception of theoretical history grew out of his critique of specialization in history:
“The progressive specialization of historical research constitutes a real threat to modern historiography and itself deserves to be made the object of special investigation. It was to the study of this and allied problems that I first gave the name theoretical history. Further thought has convinced me, however, that this new disci- pline involves a much wider territory.”
From the integrated historical effort of theoretical history would follow the elusive synthesis that so many historians have sought. Of this synthesis Brands writes:
“With his concept of the totality of history Romein thought he could demonstrate the nature of the synthesis by choosing a limited period in which change manifested itself in all fields.”
From these five themes that Brands finds in Romein we can remark that all but the first have come to be widely adopted, and the first was independently formulated by others, at least in some schools of historical thought. Romein also turned to non-Western history, writing The Asian Century: a History of Modern Nationalism in Asia. Given Romein’s law of the handicap of a head start, and given Europe being where the scientific revolution and then the industrial revolution originated, it is easy to see why Romein’s attention turned to Asia. With industrialization beginning in Europe, Asia and the rest of the world stands to benefit from the converse of the law of the handicap of the head start, which is sometimes called the law of the stimulative arrears. This argument has now made its way to the other side of the Atlantic, where the 20th century is sometimes referred to as the American Century, serving as a proxy for Europe, and it’s up for grabs who the 21st century belongs to.
Romein’s interest in identifying patterns in historical developments made him somewhat sympathetic to Toynbee, and being sympathetic to Toynbee made Romein the exception among historians and a target for criticism. The Dutch historian Pieter Geyl is known for his criticisms of Romein across several of his works, often focusing on Romein’s alleged Toynbeeism:
“Romein begins by admitting the difficulty: our comprehension of history is subject to limitations. But in his craving for certainty he has in his neo-Marxian philosophy found that useful ally, the Zeitgeist. Curiously enough, Romein has been unable to resist the fascination of Toynbee, the prophet of Christianity; he has fallen for that glorious conception of the unity of mankind; ‘universalist solidarity,’ as the philosopher of that Amsterdam School, Romein’s friend Pos, has dubbed it, easily divesting it of its Christian garb and retaining the stark reality of one way of life enforced by one authority.”
While Geyl’s treatment of Romein verges on being abusive, he has made some valid points. Although Romein doesn’t call his efforts universal history, there are admittedly many universalist elements in it, including the universalist solidarity that Geyl mentions. Perhaps we could say that the Enlightenment ideal of universal history would, in its maturity, becomes what Romein believed what theoretical history can be.
