Historicism and the Human Sciences in Victorian Britain ed. by Mark Bevir, and: The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences by Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm (review)

The two intriguing books under review address teleological accounts of Western modernity. Mark Bevir's edited volume, Historicism and the Human Sciences in Victorian Britain, comprises interdisciplinary essays by specialists examining the rise and (alleged) fall of "developmental historicism" in nineteenth-century Britain (2); Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm's The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences provides a genealogy and critique of the discourse of modernity as "disenchanted" via rationality and science. The two authors are also interested in the explanatory models advanced by the social sciences during the fin de siècle and after. Bevir presents his own metanarrative of the development of the social sciences, perceiving them as replacing diachronic, evolutionary accounts with more synchronic and formal approaches, whereas Josephson-Storm prefers to deconstruct metanarratives: "By challenging this narrative [of disenchantment], I have been aiming to take up modernity and postmodernity together and exit both" (316). Each volume combines stimulating considerations of epistemological practices with carefully researched case studies.

Bevir advances a tightly-knit model of epistemic change in his introduction. He discusses the rise of historicism—the use of historical facts and processes as causal explanations—beginning in the eighteenth century, and the ways in which an optimistic, teleological version attained prominence for most of the nineteenth century. The fin de siècle then witnessed a shift from "developmental historicism" to "modernist" approaches within the emerging social sciences, which were more skeptical, empiricist, and synchronic in orientation: modernism sought "correlations, classifications, and formal models" (2). He argues that developmental historicism was fatally challenged both by this "modernist tide" in the social sciences and by World War I, which "shattered the Victorians' confidence in progress and reason, the romantic belief in the role of the spirit within organic life, and the purposive nature of social evolution" (18). The modernist outlook thus represented a shift "from wholes and their evolution to atomistic and analytical studies of discrete and discontinuous elements and the assemblages these created" (17).

Such sweeping generalizations, however, seem hard to sustain in the light of scholarship by Jay Winter, Samuel Hynes, and others, who have demonstrated the prevalent continuities between the Victorian and modern periods. Bevir does briefly acknowledge that historicist accounts continued to appear after World War I. Yet he disqualifies them as instances of developmental historicism because they were now understood in contingent terms, rather than being guaranteed by evolution or a Whiggish faith in continued progress. Given that an implicit faith in ongoing progress characterized influential ideologies like modernization theory and non-structuralist versions of Marxism well into the 1960s, it is doubtful that developmental historicism was decisively eclipsed in favor of more synchronic approaches after World War I.

The synchronic tendencies that Bevir highlights existed, but developmental historicist accounts continued alongside them, along with other configurations, such as the cyclical theories of history proposed by Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. Rather than perceiving stark paradigm changes or epistemological shifts, some scholars maintain that the late nineteenth century began to eschew binary oppositions in favor of complementarities. Walter Benjamin's metaphors of constellations and force fields, in which oppositions are retained within a tense yet productive equilibrium, are emblematic of this notable cultural trend. Indeed, several of the contributors to Bevir's volume query his model of epistemic rupture. In his chapter on "Language," Marcus Tomalin notes, "In assessing this topic, one might be tempted to frame the discussion in strongly theoretical terms, seeking to identify a Kuhnian paradigm shift or a succession of Foucaldian épistemès"; however, "any attempt to identify a small set of fundamental common principles, conventions or...