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Chapter 4: “The Past Everything” Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History
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..................................................................... When we consider the vast range of human interests, our histories furnish us with a sadly inadequate and misleading review of the past, and it might almost seem as if historians had joined in a conspiracy to foster a narrow and relatively unedifying conception of the true scope and intent of historical study. —James Harvey Robinson, The New History 4“The Past Everything” Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History 180 } “The Past Everything” Partial, Contingent and Incremental Truths Challenges to universal laws by professionals raised some unsettling questions about the enterprise of history and the function of historians. In Ridpath’s Newtonian intellectual universe, historians were governed by what David Shi described as “immutable laws rather than divine commands, laws which the scientific method could ultimately uncover and manipulate.” This “deterministic, orderly cosmos, ticking away with the predictability of a great clock, and looking the same to every observer,” suggested that scholars had access to a “real and single past” whose historical meaning was implicit in the explicit facts unearthed by historians.1 “Postulating the past as a complex but ultimately combined or unified flow of events organized narratively,” Robert Berkhofer Jr.has noted,allowed popular historians to presume that they could narrate the story of history as a continuum of events organized according to the structure inherent in the events themselves.2 By this logic, the best historians were those who reconstructed the past with the greatest fidelity to the facts as reflected in the pervasive principles operating through them. The comforting thing about this system was that it gave historians an honored place in the intellectual community, conferring special significance on students of “precedent .” George Santayana’s mantra that those failing to learn from the mistakes of the past were doomed to repeat them implied a uniformity of condition that heightened the relevance of those who treated historical experience. Emphasizing continuity and developmental sequence,Ridpath’s scheme posed teleological challenges for historians, to be sure, but it also provided a convenient and consistent literary framework for understanding and recounting the past. Confidence in such an orderly system, however, began to break down in the late nineteenth century in the face of modernist doubts about the possibility of an ordered universe or the likelihood of a uniform human experience. When the Viennese physicist Ernst Mach declared that “space,time,and mass had no objective existence,” he “ruptured conventional notions of a stable and uniform reality.” According to Mach, “the world consists only of sensations”; there is “no common ‘reality’ independent of human acts of perception.”3 Universalizing “cover” laws such as those posed by Ridpath were derided by Mach as “useless abstractions” and “mere rationalizations” for a world that seemed to be neat and systematic but was not.4 As one contemporary historian put it, “conditions, at least in our own time, are so rapidly altering that for the most part it would be dangerous indeed to attempt to apply past experience to the solution of current problems.” Frustrated by the vain attempts of Ridpath and others “to squeeze the story of the universe and man into their puny philosophic categories,” such modernist scholars argued that there were [52.207.218.95] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:18 GMT) Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History { 181 no stable truths, no deterministic schemes for organizing the past that made sense.5 History, they asserted, “did not unfold in linear fashion, revealing truth in the process of development over time, but rather moved through an arbitrary set of crises, disjunctures, and disruptions.”6 Ironically, part of this modernist skepticism was born of the scientific method in which the young Ridpath and others had put such faith. “[T]he contemporary scientific model of inquiry, with its demands for ceaseless and radical doubt and for verification of a special kind, challenged all areas of historiography,” Ernst Breisach has noted, including “the concept of truth, how to arrive at it, and how valid it was; the perception of the forces that moved human affairs; the aim and purpose of history; the shape of historical accounts; and history’s subject matter.”7 Philosophies of history such as Ridpath’s were simply too systematic and convenient to be useful in a chaotic world dominated by complex, unstructured, and anonymous forces. In one sense these revelations presaged the “epistemological crisis” that threatened historical studies throughout the remainder of the century...