Siegfried Kracauer and the Practicing Historian
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Thursday 08 February 2024 is the 135th anniversary of the birth of Siegfried Kracauer (08 February 1889–26 November 1966), who was born in Frankfurt am Main on this date in 1889.
Siegfried Kracauer is not particularly well known. Some will have heard of him as a film critic, but he also left a manuscript on philosophy of history that was posthumously published as History, the Last Things Before the Last, edited by noted renaissance scholar Paul Oskar Kristeller, who wrote in the Introduction:
“…the present book does not attempt to provide a philosophy or methodology of history in the form of a systematic exposition. We may rather consider it as a series of meditations on some of the basic problems involved in the writing and understanding of history. He tends to criticize the general theories of history formulated by Hegel and Nietzsche, Spengler and Toynbee, Croce and Collingwood, and to disregard the theories of Heidegger and of the analytical philosophers. Kracauer is more inclined, and I tend to agree with him, to listen to the practicing historians, to Ranke and Huizinga and especially to Burckhardt, to Droysen and Marrou, Pirenne and Bloch, to Butterfield, Kaegi, Hexter, and Kubler. Kracauer is a keen critic and a good quoter, but in both criticism and approval he is guided by his own insight. His masterly critique of Croce’s ‘present interest theory’ of history has become once more timely, as is his critique of Nietzsche, or of ‘the current infatuation with social history’.”
Kristeller also added, “I profoundly agree with the spirit out of which all of his work was written.” Note the use of “practicing historians” in the previous quote. One often reads appeals to the “practicing historian” or the “working historian.” Kracauer himself writes:
“Somewhat vague as Ranke’s theoretical observations usually are, they have the advantage of resulting not from a pottering about with a set of abstractions but from his undiluted experience as a practicing historian.”
Clearly, abstractions are the problem and the experience of the practicing historian is the gold standard. How does Kracauer pull off the trick of writing a philosophy of history that prefers the practicing historian at the expense of the philosopher of history? We can get some of the flavor of his approach from a quote of and about Jacob Burckhardt near the end of the book. Burckhardt — a friend of Nietzsche and himself a practicing historian — like Kracauer, has an ambiguous relationship to the philosophy of history:
“Burckhardt’s dealings with philosophy and theology testify to the same ambiguity or ‘fear of the fixed’ (in which he resembles Erasmus). Of philosophy of history, he remarks: ‘It is a centaur, a contradiction in terms; for history is co-ordinating and hence non-philosophy, philosophy subordinating and hence non-history.’ And of Hegel in particular he says that ‘This brisk anticipation of a world plan leads to errors because it starts out from incorrect premises — as we are not privy to and do not know the purposes of eternal wisdom.’ Yet, in spite of these misgivings, he cannot help philosophizing a la Hegel on occasion and recognizes a relationship to Hegel, as in a passage noted by Wind: ‘All the same, we are deeply indebted to the centaur, and it is a pleasure to come across him now and then on the fringe of the forest of historical study’.”
Kracauer never explains exactly what he means by “fear of the fixed,” and I will return to this presently. It seems that Kracauer, like Burckhardt, wants to have it both ways. Burckhardt wanted to dispose of Hegel, but keep him too; Kracauer wanted to dispose of philosophy of history, but keep it too. Abstractions are the enemy, but we might need them, so we hold them in reserve (or, if you’re a Heideggerian, you maintain a standing reserve of abstractions, of course putting “Bestand” in parentheses to remind everyone that you know the German original).
One way to pull off this precarious balancing act is to appeal to the figure of the working historian or the practicing historian, whose happy eclecticism allows him to keep his concepts while simultaneously disavowing them. There are a number of philosophers of history who have urged us to consider this practicing historian rather than risk losing ourselves in specifically philosophical quarrels with little apparent relation to history. We find this in a 1985 paper, “Philosophy and its Historiography,” by Kristeller:
“Philosophers who claim to explore the status of historical knowledge have written about general laws of history and about causal explanation. These topics may concern the philosopher of history and also the sociologist or anthropologist, but they are speculative and derivative, and at best marginal for the practicing historian or philologist.”
Here Kristeller is throwing analytical and substantive philosophers of history into the same basket, which shouldn’t surprise us; the work of the philosopher of history of any stripe is set aside as marginal compared to the work of the historian, who is presumably concerned with “real” history and not whatever it is that the philosopher of history is doing. I can easily imagine a “no true historian” argument being made such that no true historian employs philosophical ideas in his work.
It is a perennial criticism of philosophy that it is not only an obstacle to whatever real work needs to be done, but also that philosophical inquiry is itself somehow illegitimate. We have all heard that philosophy bakes no bread and that fine words butter no parsnips. This perennial criticism appears in other specialized areas of philosophical inquiry. In the philosophy of mathematics there is an entire school of thought that focuses on mathematical practices — presumably the practices of the working mathematician. This development was made explicit in the 1998 collection of papers New Directions in the Philosophy of Mathematics: An Anthology, edited by Thomas Tymoczko (who died tragically young). In the Introduction Tymoczko wrote:
“…the philosophy of mathematics can be begun anew by reexamining the actual practices of mathematicians and those who use mathematics.”
We could reformulate this in a precisely analogous way for philosophy of history, so that the philosophy of history can be begun anew by reexamining the actual practices of historians and those who use history (or, if you prefer, those who read or write history). We can posit that a school of historical practices analogous to the school of mathematical practices, which tacitly exists as a school of thought in philosophy of history, and that is why I am belaboring this point.
Henri Berr, a precursor to the Annales school in France, and who himself formulated a research program in history, also elevated the working historian at the expense excessively general speculations:
“Studies in theory will perhaps abound to begin with: but unless we repeat ourselves, this is a vein that will not be slow to exhaust itself. Furthermore the word ‘theory’ should not give alarm: it does not presuppose, it absolutely does not presuppose, vague, excessively general speculations put forth by thinkers who have never been working historians.”
The fifth annual New York University Institute of Philosophy symposium in 1962 actually included both historians and philosophers of history among its speakers, and several of the contributions to the resulting volume of proceedings, Philosophy and History: A Symposium, edited by Sidney Hook, explicitly addressed the working historian. Part II of the volume was “The Problems of the Working Historian,” with three papers under this heading, “Some Problems of a Working Historian” by Leo Gershoy, “Relativism and Some Problems of Working Historians” by Ernest Nagel, and “The Problems of the Working Historian: A Comment” by Bernard Bailyn.
The appeal to the working historian is attractive, promising the hard-won fruits of honest labor, and distracting us from the philosophical problems that seem distant from the work of the practicing historian — though getting us little closer to resolving these philosophical problems. Earnest Nagel’s contribution to the Hook volume points to an aspect of the problem:
“When historians do express themselves on [philosophical] issues (usually on ceremonial occasions), they are… likely to voice philosophical ideas imbibed by chance during their school days or in their desultory reading, but which they have seldom subjected to rigorous criticism in the light of their own professional experience.”
I personally think that specifically philosophical problems are great fun, and I’m not about to abandon them. Nevertheless, I find the approach to any given discipline based on the actual practices of those working in the discipline to be an equally valid point of entry for philosophical inquiry, as much as any other philosophical point of entry. Indeed, I welcome a philosophy of practices in history, in mathematics, in logic, in archaeology, or any other body of scientific knowledge. We aren’t forced to choose between philosophy of history and historical practices; ideally, complementary approaches will supplement each other.
In Hill and Sorokin: An Addendum on Theoretical History I took examples from an historian, Christopher Hill, and a sociologist, Pitirim Sorokin, to make a point about theoretical concepts, historical taxonomies, and the need for a scientific approach to historical knowledge, so I am myself responsive to what practicing historians (and sociologists) say and do, but I also have a philosophical perspective that is not entirely satisfied with a purely historical approach to historical problems.
After posting Hill and Sorokin: An Addendum on Theoretical History, I realized that in a counterfactual history in which a robust conceptual framework for history had been constructed by the time of Hill and Sorokin, their formulations could have looked rather different. For example, I quoted from the Introduction to Hill’s The Century of Revolution 1603–1714:
“The transformation that took place in the seventeenth century is then far more than merely a constitutional or political revolution, or a revolution in economics, religion, or taste. It embraces the whole of life. Two conceptions of civilisation were in conflict. One took French absolutism for its model, the other the Dutch Republic. The object of this book is to try to understand the changes which set England on the path of Parliamentary government, economic advance and imperialist foreign policy, of religious toleration and scientific progress.”
Consider this passage rewritten in the tradition of a (missing) theoretical history, like this:
The French model, better known as a civilization of type x, and the Dutch model, better known as civilization of type y, were both attractive for different reasons during the seventeenth century’s social unrest and political agitation (unrest of the established type U1), but England was transitioning from a z1 to a z2 society, so that the French x model and the Dutch y model could be only of limited utility as social models, since it has been demonstrated these civilizational templates must be modified in their implementation on non-native societies with an indigenous civilizational tradition. Moreoever, x and y fell outside the well known parameters of templatization for z1-z2 societies, which would have resulted in a submerged indigenous English civilization, with continued unrest of type U2 following.
Obviously, that’s not what Christopher Hill wrote, and some historians and their readers would find history formulated in this way off-putting, if not grotesque. Those of us, however, who would like to see a theoretical history are not put off. If a truly scientific school of history ever appears birthed out of the womb of philosophy of history, I suspect that traditional narrative history will continue to be written even while a new school of theoretical history, perhaps readable only by specialists in the discipline, appears in parallel with traditional history. And then we will continue to have a philosophy of history of traditional history (including the denial of the possibility of philosophy of history, which I call non-philosophy of history, as well as a philosophy of theoretical history specifically addressing the problems of theoretical history. There may even be a substantive philosophy of theoretical history and an analytical philosophy of theoretical history. It is obvious, then, that philosophy of history is so far from being exhausted that forms of philosophy of history we can clearly formulate haven’t yet even appeared.
In all of this there is an important philosophical problem. When we have a concept like the concept of history or the concept of mathematics, and a truly novel permutation of the concept appears, do we expand the meaning of the original concept so that both the traditional conception and the novel conception fall under the umbrella of the newly expanded concept, or do we create a new disciple, so that traditional history is H1, while we posit a new form of history, theoretical history, H2? But then we also need to posit a new more comprehensive concept, distinct from traditional history, say, meta-history (if that term wasn’t already taken by Hayden White), under which fall both H1 and H2.
Philosophy of mathematics has faced this problem with the appearance of constructive mathematics in the twentieth century. There is as yet no consensus on the status of constructivist mathematics vis-à-vis classical mathematics. Earlier I mentioned the eclecticism of the traditional historian who keeps his abstractions while disavowing them too — this can be a useful position. The late Torkel Franzen (who, like Thomas Tymoczko, died tragically young, and with whom I briefly corresponded) coined the useful term “classical eclecticism” to cover the attitude to the classical mathematician to the methodological tools at his command. Similarly, the classical historian can maintain a similar eclecticism in regard to historical methodology — or, rather, the future classical historian can do so, when faced with the methodological tools of traditional history and of theoretical history. The purist theoretical historian, on the other hand (like the purist constructivist mathematician who employs only constructivist methods), will use only the methodology of theoretical history. History hasn’t yet developed to this extent, and theoretical history remains a mere twinkle in the eyes of its expectant practitioners.
I have gotten rather far afield from Siegfried Kracauer’s philosophy of history, or non-philosophy of history as may be the case. Let us conclude with Kracauer. A couple of pages on from what I quoted above in regard to the “fear of the fixed,” Kracauer wrote the following, which I take to be a further elucidation of this fear:
“Because of their generality and concomitant abstractness, philosophical truths tend to assume a radical character. They favor either-or decisions, develop a penchant for exclusiveness, and have a way of freezing into dogmas.”
I don’t entirely agree with this, but I don’t entirely disagree either. Part of the radical character of philosophy is the making explicit of assumptions and presupposition hidden in ordinary thought. Sometimes it is a disturbing experience to make presuppositions explicit, and we would rather leave them buried so we aren’t bothered by the implications of what we are suggesting. A radical philosophy of history, which shows how traditional history can go off the rails by making the presuppositions of traditional history fully explicit, strikes me as a valuable contribution to historical thought. So count me a radical philosopher of history even as I wish a happy birthday to Seigfried Kracauer!
