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9. Nation, History, and Ethics: The Choices of Post-imperial Historiography in China
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Chapter 9 Nation, History, and Ethics: The Choices of Post-imperial Historiography in China* Axel Schneider The history of modern Chinese historical thought and writing is characterized by a close interaction between indigenous traditions and the modern Western post-Enlightenment views of history and historiography. In this process of interaction, a progressive, often also teleological view of history was dominant, in combination with modern, professional institutions and approaches to the writing of history aiming at understanding “what actually had happened.” Although modern Chinese historiography is divided into many different academic and political camps, and is influenced in varying ways by premodern traditions, there were few attempts to resist these dominant trends. Liu Yizheng 柳詒徵 (1880–1956) in his later years was one of those historians, who, after initially wholeheartedly adopting modern views of history, began to voice doubts about progress, causality in history, and the objectivity of historical research. Situated within a dual horizon of modern Western theories of history and Chinese historiographical traditions, Liu struggled to find a consistent position. His attempts to overcome the contradiction between modern claims to objectivity and his profound ethical concerns and how he first doubts and then discards notions of progress and causality help us to understand the complicated process of interaction. * I would like to thank Hon Tze-ki, Kuo Ya-pei, Luo Zhitian, Brian Moloughney, Viren Murthy, Wang Fansen, Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, and Daniel Woolf for their stimulating comments on earlier versions of this article. 272 · Axel Schneider A Dual Horizon Modern Western theories of history are closely connected to the project of nation building.1 Nation-states needed a past supporting their claims to legitimacy and loyalty. In order to foster national consciousness, newly forming nation-states invested heavily in the establishment of a national educational system, including the development of the modern academic discipline of history. In Germany the Historical School of Law around Friedrich Karl von Savigny and the historiography of Leopold von Ranke and of Heinrich von Treitschke are situated within this new approach to history focusing on the nation-state and with a concomitant concept of world history.2 In this process of nation building and the related development of modern historical research the concept of history underwent a fundamental shift.3 The premodern notion of history as one story among others—history hence always understood in the plural as histories—told by a writer in order to exemplify moral lessons taken from somewhere else, mostly from moral philosophy or cosmological speculations, was replaced during the Enlightenment by a notion of history as denoting singular facts. Time was quantified and transformed into a quasi-mechanical, abstract time of experience as opposed to the qualitative time of a normative order. In the West coherence and hence the meaning of history were conceptualized as being ascribed to historical facts by the historian from a position outside of history. Before long this mechanical and rational notion of time and history underwent further change, leading to a concept of history in the singular. History became the sum of all individual (hi)stories encompassing all that ever happened; and what once was divine history (providence) now was desacralized and became universal history. History thus acquired the status of an actor, of a process external to human beings influencing if not determining their fate. Meaning, previously ascribed to history in a rational, constructive act (as typical for the Enlightenment), was now thought to be immanent in history. Although in this speculative version of history reason manifested itself in history,4 it was not yet historicized and particularized. Toward the middle of the nineteenth century this speculative concept of history was severely criticized by a burgeoning academic discipline of history. Be it the positivism and naturalism of a Comte or Henry Thomas Buckle,5 or be it the idealistic, religious historicism (Historismus) of a [54.81.185.66] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:42 GMT) Nation, History, and Ethics · 273 Ranke,6 both attacked the philosophy of history for its speculative violation of facts. Whereas positivists modeled history after the natural sciences, historicists stipulated that history is man-made and has to be understood as the expression of ideas. Positivistic history was explicitly universalistic in its approach to and understanding of history, that is, positivists saw universal laws of nature at work in history, a view that later was combined with notions of linear time and concepts of biological evolution. Historicists, however, saw history as the unique expression of ideas and conceptualized every...