Maurice Mandelbaum
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 113th anniversary of the birth of Maurice Mandelbaum (09 December 1908–01 January 1987), who was born on this date in 1908.
Mandelbaum wrote many books and papers on philosophy of history, but neither the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy nor the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy have an article on him.
The familiar idea that “history” has two importantly different senses — on the one hand, past actuality, and, on the other, the study or record or knowledge or narrative of past actuality — is in Mandelbaum formulated as the distinction between formal and material philosophies of history, implicitly taking Aristotelian hylomorphism as the basis of his distinction:
“Just as the term ‘history’ has come to have two fundamentally different meanings, the one referring to occurrences in the past and the other referring to the knowledge, or supposed knowledge, of these occurrences, so the term ‘the philosophy of history’ has come to refer to two different types of philosophic inquiry. These two types of inquiry are usually, and most conveniently, designated as ‘formal’ and ‘material’ philosophies of history. Briefly stated, a formal philosophy of history represents a philosophic concern with the problem of historical knowledge, while a material philosophy of history represents an attempt to interpret the historical process itself.” (from “Some Neglected Philosophic Problems Regarding History”)
We usually associate what Mandelbaum calls formal philosophy of history with analytical or critical philosophy of history, which asks questions about how we come to formulate historical knowledge and know it to be knowledge (a classic epistemic question), while we associate what Mandelbaum called material philosophy of history with what others have called speculative philosophy of history, the most famous, or most notorious, representative of which was Hegel.
Later in the same paper Mandelbaum notes the metaphysical dimensions of a material philosophy of history:
“In constructing a material philosophy of history one must espouse some theory concerning the ways in which entities within the historical process are related to one another. Here the general metaphysical position of the philosopher of history plays an important, or even decisive, role. His views on the nature of causation, on teleology, and on kindred questions, are inescapably involved. However, such metaphysical assumptions do not operate in vacuo: the actual interpretation that he gives concerning the relations between historical entities is also in part determined by his conception of the nature of these entities and the ontological status that may be ascribed to them. Thus, in this perhaps most important of all aspects of a material philosophy of history, the type of assumption we have noted plays an important role.”
Mandelbaum became known for his defense of historical objectivity, i.e., that historical knowledge could approximate, to within a reasonable degree, the standard of objective knowledge. In his defense of historical objectivity, he criticized historians known as historical relativists, notably, Charles Beard among them.
Eminent American historian Charles Beard responded directly to Mandelbaum in a review of Mandelbaum’s The Problem of Historical Knowledge: An Answer to Relativism. Beard criticized Mandelbaum’s characterization of his historical relativism, and then supplied his own formulation:
“…no historian can describe the past as it actually was and that 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.”
One of the points of contention between Mandelbaum and Beard is the work and historical legacy of Leopold von Ranke, who is widely regarded as among the greatest of historians, but whose legacy has divided subsequent historians. Ranke’s unlikely slogan — “simply to show how it really was” (in German, “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist”) — became a rallying cry for some and a point to be explicitly rejected by others. When Beard writes “no historian can describe the past as it actually was” he is implicitly invoking Ranke and signaling that he was among those who rejected Ranke’s conception of the task of history.
Beard’s review was of Mandelbaum’s The Problem of Historical Knowledge: An Answer to Relativism. Mandelbaum also criticized Beard and defended historical objectivity in his The Anatomy of Historical Knowledge, from which the following paragraph is taken:
“…I shall attempt to show that when one clears away the preceding misunderstandings, the interlocking connections among the data with which historians are concerned permit us to hold that the cumulative results achieved through their individual inquiries can, in most cases, be regarded as establishing knowledge that is objective in this third sense of that term. To be sure, there are innumerable individual cases in which this contention appears open to challenge, but in many such cases, as we shall see, conflicts arise because the referents of the two sets of judgments have not been spelled out with sufficient care. In such cases, the two conflicting judgments may not in fact be contradictory, and as soon as the defect has been remedied both judgments can be accepted without violating the principle of objectivity. Nevertheless, as we shall also see, there are cases in which the opposing judgments do contradict each other, and a decision concerning the truth or falsity of one or the other cannot be reached unless one can appeal to some well-authenticated general theory that lends its support to one rather than to the other.” (pp. 150–151)
Further Resources
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Mandelbaum
https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL1195759A/Maurice_Mandelbaum
https://archive.org/details/inlibrary?query=maurice+mandelbaum
https://www.academia.edu/7652186/Mandelbaums_Noble_Dream
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