Is history little more than a fallback for those who find literary classics too demanding and science too serious? English historian E. H. Carr did not think so. He insisted instead, in his seminal work What is history?, that history was far too difficult than classics and every bit as serious as science (Carr 2008, 85).

Historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, grappling with this persistent question of whether history was a science or an art, often prefered to occupy a middle ground. History, they argued, had never claimed the status of pure science, since it depended on both intuitive and analytical methods. Historical judgements, therefore, could not be evaluated by the standards of mathematics or experimental disciplines.

But can we then conclude that history is a kind of art? When pressed on this, historians tended to retreat to the idea that history was at best a semi-science. Unlike art, historical data did not lend themselves to complete imaginative freedom, or “free” artistic manipulation, and the form of the narrative was not a matter of choice alone but was shaped by the nature of the surviving evidence (White 1986, 27).

According to the American historical theorist and literary critic Hayden White, while this middle ground helped to disarm the critics of history and allowed historians to claim that it was only in their discipline that art and science meet in a harmonious synthesis, it also burdened them with a particular task: mediation between the past and the present through the fusion of two modes of comprehension—art and science (Ibid, 27–29).

Historical background

How and why did the question of history being a science or fiction become important? What emerges through the writing of White is that prior to the French Revolution (1789–99), historiography was conventionally regarded as a literary art or a branch of rhetoric, and its “fictive” nature was generally recognised. There existed a rigid distinction between fact and fancy but history wasn’t seen to be the representative of facts separated from elements of fancy. In the representation of real events, the recourse to fictive techniques like rhetorical devices, tropes, figures, and schema of words and thoughts, was considered inevitable. Truth, thus, wasn’t considered equal to fact but it was a combination of fact and the conceptual matrix. Truth was, thus, the product of historical narrativisation.

But this changed during the course of the nineteenth century. It was a moment when art, science, philosophy, and history were united in a shared effort to comprehend the upheavals of the French Revolution. Intellectuals across these fields showed a remarkable willingness to cross disciplinary boundaries in search of understanding. By the mid-century, however, another shift occurred. This was not because artists, scientists, and philosophers abandoned historical questions, but because historians themselves adopted stagnant conceptions of what art, science, and philosophy ought to be. They cast themselves as custodians of antiquated ideas, clinging to the notion that history was a synthesis of “romantic” art and “positivist” science—or, as White put it, “bad” art and “bad” science. The “badness” lay in their insistence on objectivity: the belief that facts were simply “given”, waiting to be collected and arranged.

This faith in the “givenness” of facts produced an uncritical reliance on chronological frameworks for historical narratives. Fact started to be considered opposite of truth and history came to be set over against fiction (especially the novel), as the representation of the “actual” to the representation of the “possible” or only “imaginable” (Ibid, 42–43, 123).

Placed within this context, the question of history’s status—as science or as fiction—inevitably made its way into the intellectual discourse.

Is history a science?

According to Carr, the initial distinction often drawn between the two rested on the claim that history dealt exclusively with the unique, whereas science dealt with the general. However, Carr pointed out, even in the physical sciences no two geological formations, no two species, and no two atoms were truly identical. Similarly, in history no two events were identical; but to overemphasise their uniqueness was equally misleading, since the very use of language inevitably involved a degree of generalisation.

For instance, the Peloponnesian War (431–04 BCE; fought between Athens and Sparta and their respective allies for the hegemony of the ancient Greek world) and the Second World War (1939–45) were vastly different and each unique in its own right, yet both were described as “wars”. British essayist and historian, Edward Gibbon did something similar when he grouped together the establishment of Christianity and the rise of Islam under the general category of “revolutions”. Modern historians continue this practice when they write of the English Revolution, the French Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, and others.

Therefore, Carr’s point was that “the historian is not really interested in the unique but in what is general in the unique” (Carr 2008, 62–63). Both the reader and the writer of history were, in his view, habitual generalisers, constantly applying insights from one context to another. This did not mean, however, that historians should construct some vast overarching scheme into which all events must be forced. On the contrary, each event must first be studied in its own terms and only then compared with others; it was through this interplay between singularity and generalisation that a richer historical understanding could be achieved (Ibid, 64–65).

The second ground of distinction lied in the claim that history taught no lessons. In the decade preceding the First World War (1914–18) hostility towards historical consciousness—and towards the historian—had grown so widespread that James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (and later a central figure in Ulysses), described history as a “nightmare” from which Western man must awaken if humanity was to be served and saved.

By then, the accusation against history had acquired a moral dimension: scientists accused historians of methodological or intellectual failure, while artists charged them with a failure of sensibility or will.

The catastrophe of the First World War further discredited the profession. History, long expected to provide training for life by offering instructive examples, seemed to have done little to prepare humanity for the devastation of global conflict. The past, in the popular imagination, came to be seen as a burden, worse even than religion (White 1986, 31–38).

But is it true that the past is incapable of teaching lessons? Carr argued otherwise. For him, the very act of generalisation was itself an attempt to learn from history, to apply insights drawn from one set of events to another. A striking example was the case of the makers of the Russian Revolution of 1917, who were profoundly influenced and indeed obsessed by the lessons they drew from the French Revolution, the revolutions of 1848, and the Paris Commune of 1871. The effort to read meaning across different events, Carr suggested, was precisely what makes history a source of instruction (Carr 2008, 66–68).

Thirdly, closely related to the question of lessons, was the claim that history, unlike science, could not predict the future. Yet even science, since the twentieth century, had grown less confident about universal “laws of nature” that supposedly enabled prediction. Carr illustrated this with the law of gravity: it no longer proved with certainty that an apple will fall to the ground, since one could always imagine the possibility of someone catching it in a basket.

Modern physics, accordingly, had shifted its focus from absolute laws to probabilities. In much the same way, when historians generalised, they did not make specific predictions but provided a general guide for future action.

The fourth distinction concerned the charge that history was subjective. Carr noted that the dichotomy between the subjective and the objective arose during the age of the birth and development of modern science, when “man” as subject was set sharply against the external world as object in order to grapple with and master it. But even in science this distinction did not remain tenable for long. The so-called external world and its forces came to be seen less as hostile objects than as phenomena to be harnessed and worked with for human purposes. For Carr, therefore, the argument that history was not a science because it was subjective was no longer convincing. In science itself, there was no longer a rigid divorce between subject and object, nor should there be in history (Ibid 68–73).

Lastly, it was often argued that history, unlike science, necessarily involved questions of religion and morality. Carr acknowledged that history inevitably engaged with religious issues, yet this did not imply that divinity intervened directly in any specific events. No serious historian could invoke divine agency as an explanation for the occurrence of historical events. Carr put it succinctly that God could not be the joker in the pack, and history was a game that must be played without this joker (Ibid, 74–75).

Regarding morality, the historian’s task was equally distinct from that of the moralist. Historians did not need to pass judgment on the private lives or public actions of historical figures. Their standpoint, Carr insisted, was fundamentally different from that of the moralist; historical analysis required detachment and explanation, not ethical evaluation (Ibid, 75).

Carr conclusively argued that history should be counted among the sciences, since the supposed dispute between them reflected little more than an old, time-honoured prejudice. He did not, at the same time, advocate calling history a science in the straightforward sense, precisely because doing so would risk perpetuating the rift between the so-called “two cultures”(Ibid 84–86).

Is history fiction?

On the other hand, for White, facts were never simply out there; the construction of a narrative always depended on the kinds of questions historians posed, the choices they made about what to include, and what they left out. Truth, in his view, was not discovered but produced through historical narrativisation; a feature history shared with fiction.

If one considers why the shift occurred—from historiography conventionally regarded as a literary art, with its “fictive” nature, to a discipline increasingly treated as a realist science—it could be traced to the persistent blaming of mythical or ideologically shaped interpretations for the excesses and failures of revolutions, by both the political left and right. The prevailing notion became that historians must rise above any impulse to interpret the historical record through the lens of party prejudice, utopian expectation, or sentimental attachment to traditional institutions. The intellectual demand of the time was for a standpoint of social perception that could be considered truly “objective” and “realist”, enabling observers to navigate the conflicting claims of political factions emerging during and after revolutionary upheavals.

In short, demythification came to be equated with defictionalization: history was increasingly defined as a realist science, set against fiction, which was treated as the study of what is merely imaginable. This perspective was shared by many, including German historian Leopold von Ranke, who believed that remaining faithful to the facts would produce knowledge as authentic as that generated by science. What was overlooked, however, was that facts do not speak for themselves; it is the historian who speaks for them, fashioning fragments of the past into a coherent whole (White 1986, 123–25).

This concept of the “whole” was elaborated in the writings of Louis O. Mink, a philosopher of history, who emphasised the use of the terms “historical understanding” or “historical comprehension” rather than “historical knowledge”. For Mink, comprehension was a mental act of seeing things together. Distancing himself from three orthodoxies—realism, idealism, and pragmatism—he identified three modes of comprehension that are irreducibly different and autonomous, each equally valid: the theoretical mode, the categorical mode, and the configurational mode. Historical understanding belongs to the configurational mode, in which a number of instances are comprehended as elements of a single sequence or complex whole.

According to Mink, the task of the historian was first to make a “synoptic judgment”, in which chronologically separate events are recognised as part of a complex whole, and then to create a narrative that expresses this judgment. This aligns closely with White’s view that truth is produced through historical narrativisation. The particular challenge for the historian, therefore, was not merely selecting what to communicate, but organising it so that the narrative itself became a cognitive instrument for conveying understanding (Mink 1987, 11–15).

The techniques and strategies employed by historians and novelists in composing their narratives were, White further argued, substantially similar. While the novelist may present a notion of reality indirectly, through figurative or literary techniques, the historian presented it directly, by recording a series of propositions intended to correspond, point by point, to events in the extra-textual world. The resulting image of reality often bore a striking resemblance.

White emphasised that readers of both histories and novels cannot fail to notice these similarities; indeed, many historical narratives could pass for novels, and many novels could pass for histories. Hence, in White’s view, both the historian and the imaginative writer must meet the standards of coherence and correspondence to produce an account that is acceptable as a representation of human experience in the world (White 1986, 121–22).

Where does it leave us?

A plausible reflection is that the function of history, as distinct from both art and science, is to provide a specific temporal dimension to humanity’s awareness of itself. Both science and art, being dynamic in nature, offer history the opportunity to adopt new perspectives on the world (Ibid, 49–50). However, as long as history refuses to engage with the insights that modern art and modern science can provide, it remains a blind citizen of a world where, as the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel warned, “the pallid shades of memory struggle in vain with the life and freedom of the present” (Hegel 1956, 6).

References

Carr, E. H. 2008. What is History. Penguin Books.

Hegel, G. W. F. 1956, The Philosophy of History. Dover Publications.

Mink, Louis O. 1987. Historical Understanding. Cornell University Press.

White, H. 1986. Tropics of Discourse. Johns Hopkins University Press.