Truth and Ritual Judgment: On Narrative Sense in China's Earliest Historiography

32Historically Speaking · March 2004 happened to modernization had Europe had state structures like those ofChina in the early modern period. Still, here too, the onus lies on the historian to showhowEuropean state structures helped modernization and Chinese hindered it, and in this process speculating on what might have happened had things been the other way round does not reallyseem to help much. Finally, in much of what he writes, like Lebow, Black considers counterfactual speculation more as a factor influencingpolicydecisions than as a factorin enabling historical understanding, which is all well and good, but does not have a lot to do with the questions under discussion here. Finally, since I don't know Robert Cowleyat all, I obviouslyowe him an apologyfor lumping him with the New Right ofhistory, ifhe does notwant to be lumped in this way. However, his repeated complaints about "the currently fashionable tyranny ofrace, gender , and ethnicity" would seem to place him somewhere on the Right ifI know anything at all about the American political scene. As far as I'm concerned, the more about race, gender, and ethnicity in history, the better. Where I can agree with him is when he declares that"a rigorous counterfactual examination has a way ofmaking the stakes of a confrontation or a decision stand out in relief." The keyword here is "rigorous," and once more we're back to "the principle of minimal rewrite," as Philip Tetlock puts it, a principle in which we can surely all concur. But its uses remain in my view strictly limited . So what ifPickett had not charged at the Battle ofGettysburg, or Chamberlain lost the Little Round Top? Surely there were larger determining factors thatweighed decisivelyin the scales ofvictory and defeatin the Civil War? It's fun to thinkwhat might have happened had Hitler not attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, but the real challenge lies in explaining why he did. Cowley graciously concedes my charges that as currentlypracticed, counterfactual history works best with military and political history and focuses too heavily on individuals , and agrees that we can do withoutwishful thinking. Mypoint, however, is that counterfactual history encourages these things— a narrowly traditional view ofhistory, and a degree ofwishful thinking that is distorting, to say the least. As the numerous examples cited in the present discussion show, it need notbe thatway. Counterfactual historyisjust a tool ofhistorical analysis, as Cowley says, and has to be used with caution. It has to be applied in very specific, carefully delimited contexts ifit is applied at all, and we have to be aware of its limitations, which are extremelysevere. It's hard enough finding out whatwas, let alone reaching anykind oftenable conclusions on what wasn't. But ifcounterfactual history didn't exist, then the world ofhistorical debate would surelybe a poorer place. In his concluding contribution, Robert Cowley lets slip the fact that he has edited three volumes of What If? In my ignorance, I thought there were onlytwo. I'm offto buy the third one right away. Truth and Ritual Judgment: On Narrative Sense in China's Earliest Historiography David Schaberg For historians ofearly China, a coincidental agreement between traditional Chinese and modern Western taxonomies ofknowledge supported, through most ofthe 20th century, a rather blinkered view of the oldest source texts. Under late imperial China's predominant fourfold classification system, these texts had beenpegged as Histories or, in some cases, as Classics, and were thereby separated from Literature and Philosophy. Scholars could and did admire their literary characteristics, but the latter were ultimatelyto be considered superfluous in comparison with the historical truths the texts conveyed. Meanwhile, scientific history as practiced by Western and Westerninspired scholars tended to bracket observations on form and style in source texts, focusing instead on content and the value ofthese texts for discerninghistorical facts. The situation is a familiar one: it is the state ofaffairs that Hayden White addressed in his early books and that he and other scholars have worked to change. For a number ofreasons, the older view—that literary analysis of source texts mayyield appreciations butwill not contribute significantly to a better and more critical understanding ofthe past—has been especially tenacious in the early China field. The source...