Pirenne and the Development of Human Societies in Space and Time
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Monday 23 December 2024 is the 162nd anniversary of the birth of Henri Pirenne (23 December 1862–24 October 1935), who was born in Verviers, Belgium, on this date in 1862.
Pirenne was a Belgian historian who wrote a monumental seven volume history of Belgium and many other books, but Pirenne’s few comments on historiography represent only a small fraction of his work. Nevertheless, Genevieve Warland in her 2011 paper “Henri Pirenne and Karl Lamprecht’s Kulturgeschichte” attributed an implicit philosophy of history to Pirenne:
“…Pirenne’s philosophy of history is implicit and best illustrated in his determinism and essentialism. His History of Belgium draws upon a large body of evidence, from the ‘naturalness’ of the process which resulted in the creation of a Belgian state to the definition of a Belgian character.”
Not everyone thought that Pirenne had accurately captured the nature of the Belgian state in his history of Belgium. Dutch historian Pieter Geyl was highly critical of Pirenne in his essay “The National State and the Writers of Netherlands History,” which is included in his Debates with Historians:
“Professor Pirenne was a Walloon, teaching history, in French, to Flemish students at the only public university in the Dutch-speaking part of the country, at Ghent. In other words, he occupied an advanced post in the movement of penetration and conquest which French civilization, under the auspices of the centralized Belgian State, was carrying on in Flanders. He never understood the resentment, or the feelings of responsibility towards their own people, animating the Flemish intellectuals who were behind the counter-movement, the movement of resistance, the Flemish movement as it was called, which aimed at the re-nationalization or de-gallicization of public life in Flanders. On the contrary, Pirenne contributed to the struggle by offering this historical conception of the interdependence of Wallonia and Flanders — under French auspices!”
Geyl being Dutch may well have seen things differently from Pirenne. It’s easy to think of the low countries as a small area that’s not especially differentiated, particularly for Americans used to wide open spaces, but historians of the low countries make careful distinctions within the region. Belgium itself is a conspicuous example of differentiation, since it’s a single nation-state divided into Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north, and French-speaking Wallonia in the south.
In “Philosophy of history, from social criticism to philosophy of science and back again,” a 2010 paper by Berber Bevernage, Broos Delanote, Anton Froeyman & Kenan Van De Mieroop, the authors identify Pirenne as a practical historian, which implies that his work is very little philosophical:
“There has always been an important difference between Belgium and the Netherlands when it comes to the theory of history. This is most likely due to the diverging approaches of the founding fathers of history in the two countries. Belgian historians such as Henri Pirenne and François Louis Ganshof were always quite focused on the practical aspects of the profession, while famous Dutch historians such as Johan Huizinga and Jan Romein (who coined the term ‘theoretische geschiedenis’ (Theoretical history in Dutch) were more interested in its theoretical aspects.”
Still, there is value in Pirenne’s work for the philosopher of history. Pirenne is known for his work on medieval European urbanism in books such as Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade and Early Democracies in the Low Countries: Urban Society and Political Conflict in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Pirenne wrote one book that I especially admire, A History of Europe, which was written while Pirenne was interned by the Germans during the First World War, and without access to his library or indeed to any library. In isolation from scholarly resources, he book was written from memory. Nevertheless, it is, in my opinion, among the greatest of the histories of medieval Europe, if not the greatest single work on the period. Because of the unusual circumstances under which the book was written, it is a survey and an overview of Western history from the end of the Roman world to the renaissance and the Reformation. There are no footnotes because he had no sources available to cite.
On the one hand I could say that this is history in its purest narrative form, like having a knowledgeable friend sitting next to you and telling you in the clearest and most straight-forward terms the history of Europe. On the other hand, implicit throughout the book are the general principles of history that make history explicable and comprehensible to us. I could call Pirenne’s A History of Europe “one long historical explanation” in the same spirit that Darwin called The Origin of Species “one long argument.” If I were traveling in Europe and I could bring only one history book with me, it would be this book.
Pirenne is also known for the Pirenne Thesis, developed in his book Mohammed and Charlemagne, which was the idea that the Roman world and its orientation to the Mediterranean was transformed into the medieval European world, oriented toward the Atlantic, due to the rise of Islam, and not due to the collapse of Roman political and military institutions. The Pirenne Thesis belongs to the class of specific theses about history that Geoffrey Elton considered acceptable even to an empirical historian not concerned to frame a general theory. That is to say, Pirenne didn’t develop the Pirenne thesis as a general conception that could be applied to many historical instances, but rather as a highly specific explanation of the transition from ancient to medieval civilization in Western Europe.
As I said, even Geoffrey Elton would approve of an historical thesis framed in this way, but treating history in this way, the Elton might have called “empirical” and the paper I quoted earlier called “practical,” begs a question. And the question is this: What is the explanatory value of a mechanism that occurs only once in history? I don’t think we could call this an explanation at all. We could, instead, say that this was intended merely descriptively, but I think that Pirenne was making an historical explanation, and in much the same way as his A History of Europe is one long explanation of how Europe came to be. It seems like pure narrative, but it makes sense to us because it explains history for us. History is complex, so any historical explanation must cover many related events, telling us how they are related, and so an historical explanation will be complex in a way that mirrors the complexity of history. That is to say, an historical explanation is a whole that consists of many parts.
What makes an historical explanation makes sense to us is that we recognize within it parts confirmed by our own knowledge and experience. Perhaps we haven’t previously encountered all these parts of the explanation integrated together into a coherent whole, but they are familiar to us from a wide variety of circumstances. Lacking this recognition, the explanation will have little or no explanatory power for us, and we’ll be skeptical of it as an explanation until either the unfamiliar parts are explained to us separately, in terms that our knowledge and experience can confirm, or we figure it out for ourselves, again, through our own knowledge and experience. Knowing parts of an explanation before they come together into an integrated whole is to know these parts as they appeared in other explanations, but also to know them with a degree of generality such that it is plausible for us to conceive of them entering into relationships other than those in which we previously encountered these parts. The parts of a complex historical explanation aren’t necessarily bound by their historically conditioned circumstance in the way that the explanation taken as a whole is bound by and its historical conditions, being, in a sense, a unique product of particular historical circumstances.
Here’s a paragraph from Pirenne’s Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe that gives the flavor of the Pirenne Thesis:
“It was only the abrupt entry of Islam on the scene, in the course of the seventh century, and the conquest of the eastern, southern and western shores of the great European lake, which altered the position, with consequences which were to influence the whole course of subsequent history. Henceforth, instead of the age-old link which it had hitherto been between the East and the West, the Mediterranean became a barrier. Though the Byzantine Empire, thanks to its navy, succeeded in repulsing the Moslem offensive from the Aegean Sea, the Adriatic and the southern shores of Italy, the Tyrrhenian Sea fell completely under the domination of the Saracens.”
In this brief paragraph we have the rapid rise of a new agent in history, Islam, the idea that a new historical agent alters circumstances around it, the idea that an ancient connection constitutive of a civilization can be ruptured by historical changes, the idea that what was once a corridor can become a barrier, and that other historical agents positioned differently in respect to the new historical agent will respond differently as their circumstances allow. These are all familiar ideas that appear time and again in other circumstances, and so they appear as parts of other historical explanations for other historical states-of-affairs, but they come together into a distinctive explanation when they are intended to explain the reorientation of Western European civilization following the rise of Islam as a political and military power.
The Pirenne thesis can be and has been expounded dogmatically, and when this is done I think it loses some of its explanatory power, because so many other things are going on at the same time. In other words, the Pirenne thesis needs to find its place in an even larger explanation that explains the transition from the ancient world to the medieval world. Kenneth Clark suggests this larger picture, and also shows us how the Pirenne thesis can be used with some subtlety as an element in the larger picture. In his book Civilisation, after describing a kind of historical inertia in the West, Clark said,
“Civilisation might have drifted downstream for a long time, but in the middle of the seventh century there appeared a new force, with faith, energy, a will to conquer and an alternative culture: Islam. …Mahomet, the prophet of Islam, preached the simplest doctrine that has ever gained acceptance; and it gave to his followers the invincible solidarity that had once directed the Roman legions. In a miraculously short time — about fifty years — the classical world was overrun. Only its bleached bones stood out against the Mediterranean sky.”
Clark doesn’t say that the rise of Islam was the only force that redirected Western civilization, and so he doesn’t give us the Pirenne Thesis in its pure form, but here the rise of Islam is part of a larger historical explanation of a larger historical process, though this is implied rather than being made explicit. And Clark never identifies this idea as the Pirenne thesis
What exactly was Pirenne trying to accomplish with the Pirenne Thesis? Pirenne himself can help us out with this question. There is an essay by Pirenne, “What Are Historians Trying to Do?” which originally appeared in Methods in Social Science, edited by Stuart A. Rice, and which is included, in an edited form, in Hans Meyerhoff’s The Philosophy of History in Our Time: An Anthology. The opening paragraph of this essay consists of four sentences, each of which I will quote separately, and then I will comment on each sentence in turn.
1. “The subject of historians’ study is the development of human societies in space and time.”
This is an admirably sententious definition of history that embodies a high degree of generality — something absent in most definitions of history. though I should note hat Pirenne didn’t explicitly identify this as a definition of history; he says this only in passing. This is further interesting in that it is not confined to the past, being equally applicable to the future.
2. “This development is the result of billions of individual actions.”
History is constituted by countless small, incremental actions. This is a lot like Adam Smith’s conception of a market, in which each individual looks to his own good, but these transactions, when taken together, form an invisible hand that shapes the economy.
3. “But in so far as they are purely individual, these actions do not belong to the domain of history, which has to take account of them only as they are related to collective movements, or in the measure to which they have influenced the collectivity.”
Individual action and biography do not, strictly speaking, constitute history.The individual action is historical only when it is part of the collective movement of society. Taken together with the previous sentence, history is an emergent from “billions of individual actions” that is distinct from these individual actions. An individual action is historical insofar as it is taken under the aspect of collective action. So it’s not the action itself, but the context of an action that makes it historical.
4. “History is thus allied to sociology and psychology and at the same time it differs from them.”
In several episodes I’ve talked about the twentieth century interest in integrating sociology and psychology into history. Psychohistory, which I discussed in an episode on Bruce Mazlish, was part of this. These disciplines seemed to offer a way to make history more scientific, since sociology and psychology were closer to being scientific in an empirical and quantitative sense than history itself. Pirenne recognizes these motivations, but he also says that history is different from these disciplines.
After discussing the imperfection of documents and the historical record, Pirenne says, “To construct history is to narrate it.” In the following discussion of historical construction he makes the following interesting remark:
“All historical construction — which amounts to saying all historical narrative — rests upon a postulate: that of the eternal identity of human nature. One cannot comprehend men’s actions at all unless one assumes in the beginning that their physical and moral beings have been at all periods what they are today. Past societies would remain unintelligible to us if the natural needs which they experienced and the psychical forces which stimulated them were qualitatively different from ours. How are the innumerable differences that humanity presents in time and space to be explained if one does not consider them as changing nuances of a reality which is in its essence always and everywhere the same?”
It would make for an interesting exercise to develop this idea and to comment upon it in detail. I had planned to make this talk about Pirenne into a detailed examination of the role of human nature in history, but I’m not yet prepared to talk about that in detail, so for the moment I will only mention it as something worth further inquiry. I will say only this much: implicit here is the Collingwoodian idea of being able to reenact the thoughts of past human beings, but Pirenne goes to a deeper level and explicitly formulates the postulate upon which a Collingwoodian method implicitly relies.
This problem of human nature presents an implicit challenge to the prehistorian, who would reconstruct the history of human ancestors. These human ancestors, as distinct species, would not have been precisely the same as us, whether anatomically or cognitively, but rather would represent stages of approximation to human nature as we know it today, and which, according to Pirenne, constitutes a presupposition of history. And since Pirenne’s conception of history that I earlier quoted as being the, “development of human societies in space and time,” doesn’t limit the historian to the past, the same potential challenge arises symmetrical about far future human descendents, who may differ from us anatomically and cognitively. This may one day present a challenge to those who could compare human history as we have know it to date, to the coming history of post-human successor species and their societies. I doubt that Pirenne had anything like this in mind, but what makes a conception of history interesting is its ability to be extrapolated beyond its intended application to determine the scope of its validity.
