Historical Theory

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Private citizens may never know the full extent of the weaponry and tools of war that the U.S. government has developed over the decades. One significant leap in technology was thought by some to have occurred in July 1943, when officials at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard took the USS Eldridge and successfully rendered it invisible using electrical field manipulation—or so some believed, anyway. Later, the Eldridge was allegedly teleported to Norfolk, Virginia, with the ship arriving a few seconds before it left. Thus, time travel had also been invented.

The text is a powerful and attractive example of Renaissance historical writing and at the same time an introduction to the Florentine genre of critical political analysis. Classical stories are set to work by Machiavelli to teach his fellow-Florentines how to rescue their city from the disasters which beset it in his day and how to capture for themselves by emulation something of the glory of Republican Rome.

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Idealistic interpretations of history were promulgated and promoted by numerous theorists from Leibnitz to Fichte. Their work was consummated by Hegel. In the early decades of the 19th century Hegel revolutionised the understanding of world history, placing it at the widest vantage point of the bourgeois era. His contributions may be summed up in thirteen points. Just as the royal despots dominated the city states and their empires, so the will, passions, plans and needs of the gods were the ultimate causes of events. The king is the agent who maintains the world in being by means of an annual contest with the powers of chaos. This theological theory was elaborated by the Sumerians, Babylonians and Egyptians before it came down to the Greeks and Romans. It was expounded in the Israelite scriptures whence it was taken over and reshaped by the Christian and Mohammedan religions and their states. Fetishistic worship of the Great Man has come down through the ages from the god-kings of Mesopotamia to the adoration of a Hitler. It has had numerous incarnations according to the values attached at different times by different people to the various domains of social activity. In antiquity these ranged from the divine monarch, the tyrant, the lawgiver (Solon), the military conqueror (Alexander), the dictator (Caesar), the hero-emancipator (David), and the religious leader (Christ, Buddha, Mohammed). All these were put in the place of the Almighty as the prime mover and shaper of human history.

Marxism builds on this insight that history is the result of the collective actions of multitudes, of mass effort extending over prolonged periods within the framework of the powers of production they have received and extended and the modes of production they have created, built up and revolutionised.

Literary and Critical Theory

New Historicism can be quite a broad and encompassing field of study. Read on for characteristics that will help you recognise and understand the theory when you see it. History is full of irony. It has an overall objective logic which confounds its most powerful participants and organisations. Although the heads of states apply definite policies, and peoples and individuals consciously pursue their own aims, historical actuality does not fall into line or accord with their plans. The course and outcome of history is determined by overriding internal necessities which are independent of the will and consciousness of any of its institutional or personal agencies. Man proposes—the historical necessity of the Idea disposes. Thus some 18th century rationalists who believed that “opinion governs mankind” looked toward an enlightened monarch to introduce the necessary progressive reconstruction of the state and society. A more widespread manifestation of this approach contrasts to the unthinking mob some upper stratum of the population as the exemplar of reason which alone can be entrusted with political leadership and power. Historians commonly approach the study of historical writing in two quite distinct ways: either by study of the techniques which we hold to be immediately relevant today, or by looking at the “history of history”, as for example by focussing on classic texts in Western historical writing. This paper takes the second road. Its principal agenda are as follows:

as if the whole web of human history were woven out of folly and childish vanity and the frenzy of destruction, so that one hardly knows in the end what idea to form of our race, for all that it is so proud of its prerogatives. But it will also be found at the bottom of the social and political philosophy of the most diverse schools. Thus the empiricist David Hume flatly asserts in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding : “Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature.” This topic examines ways in which sociologists have conceptualized the state and political institutions and at how they have analysed political obedience in terms of power (coercion) and authority (the recognition of legitimacy). It explores different notions of power developed by theorists such as Foucault, and ideas of bureaucracy, social discipline, revolt and revolution. Ways in which historians have used or developed these ideas are discussed. The truth about history is concrete. As the Russian thinker Chernyshevsky wrote: “Every object, every phenomenon has its own significance, and it must be judged according to the circumstances, the environment, in which it exists—A definite judgment can be pronounced only about a definite fact, after examining all the circumstances on which it depends.”This topic introduces students to another central interest of anthropologists – to the way authority is constructed and maintained in small face-to-face societies and to the role of rituals in legitimizing power or authority. Areas of particular study might include the strengths and limitations of the functionalist approach to feuds and rebellions, or the way in which historians have learnt from anthropologists’ attempts to analyse how rituals work. Today, New Historicism has become influential in literary studies worldwide. Read on for the principles of New Historicism, some of its key theorists, and an example of how to use the theory to analyse texts.