The tyranny of the definite article: Some thoughts on the art of intellectual history

History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 101–117

Discussion

The tyranny of the definite article: Some thoughts on the art of intellectual history$ Brian Young* School of English and American Studies, University of Sussex, Arts Building, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QN, UK Accepted 16 January 2002

Abstract This essay argues, following an insight of Burckhardt, that the philosophy of history is a ‘centaur’, and that it has a tendency to hinder rather than to encourage the practice of history. It challenges many of the presuppositions of Bevir’s study, demonstrating that The Logic of the History of Ideas is not, in any meaningful sense, an historically minded work. The ‘logic’ of the essay looks to the arts, especially literature and music, as providing genuinely illuminating parallels to the discipline involved in the practice of intellectual history. History cannot be understood as a process of philosophical abstraction; pertinent examples are of its essence, and plurality is therefore central to its richly textured nature. It still has much to learn from the reflexive procedures of anthropology. By examining the idea of ‘tradition’ the essay demonstrates that ‘the past’ is never dead, and that the relationship between texts is a living process: the intellectual historian is him/herself an artist, and his/her task is no less demanding than that of the creative artist, and it is always humblingly provisional. r 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: The historian as artist; ‘Tradition’; Performativity; Provisionality

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This is an extended (and annotated) version of a reply to Mark Bevir which I gave in response to a paper he delivered at the Theory and Research seminar at Sussex University in November, 2001. Bevir’s paper was derived from his book. I have tried to retain something of the oral nature of my paper; hence my liberal use of what Gibbon excoriated as ‘the most disgusting of pronouns’. I am grateful to Donald Winch for his Nestorian wisdom in his reading of the piece, and to Mishtooni Bose for suggesting some necessary fine tuning. *Tel.: +44-1273-877-105. E-mail address: [email protected] (B. Young). 0191-6599/02/$ - see front matter r 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 1 9 1 - 6 5 9 9 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 0 0 7 - 4

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I I would like to begin these remarks on what is true and what is possible in intellectual history with an image of the existence of the mythic and the impossible. In his Reflections on History Jakob Burckhardt wrote that, ‘The philosophy of history is a centaur, a contradiction in terms, for history co-ordinates, and hence is unphilosophical, while philosophy subordinates, and hence is unhistorical’.1 As a mythological source of wisdom, Burckhardt’s centaur embodies that which is simultaneously desirable and unattainable about a philosophy of history.2 Either philosophy holds the key to a genuine ‘logic of intellectual history’, as Bevir argues, or, as I will argue here, it is illusory to look for any such key. A notion of philosophical history has certainly been perpetually dominant in the German traditions of Geistesgeschichte and Begriffsgeschichte, and thence, through its German-derived traditions of graduate education, in America.3 With the significant exception of the traditions of sociological history pioneered by Montesquieu and continued, in different registers, by Guizot, Cousin, and, above all, Comte, this indebtedness was less obvious in France. Change, however, has been at work even there. While the Annales tradition enjoyed its largely uninterrupted years of lordly rule, a certain conception of sociological rather than directly philosophical history held sway, but the rise of structuralism, and then of poststructuralism, challenged this hegemony, and philosophy once again challenged sociology as the basis for historical generalisation. The fascinating work of such historians as Michel de Certeau and Roger Chartier has brought such questions directly into areas of enquiry where previously the Annales approach had been dominant. With his pioneering work on language and silence, and his post-Freudian meditations on religion and mysticism, de Certeau brought philosophical considerations centrally into historical reflection.4 By considering Freud both as an historian of the mind and as himself a historicised subject of such histories, de Certeau also took a pioneering Modern into the realms of the postmodern.5 Chartier, long engaged in a productive dialogue with the 1 Jakob Burckhardt, Reflections on History, trans. M.D.H. (London, 1943), p. 15. For the original, more trenchant, if less elegant German, edited from Burckhardt’s lecture notes by Jakob Oeri, see Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (Berlin, 1905), p. 2. 2 For a useful discussion, see Thomas Albert Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W.M.L. De Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 137–169. 3 On the recent experience of Begriffsgeschichte see the papers by Joan C. Tronto, Jerry Z. Muller, James Schmidt, David Armitage, Daniel Gordon, and Melvin Richter from a symposium on the subject published in History of European Ideas 25 (1999) 1–37, and Melvin Richter, ‘A German Version of the ‘Linguistic Turn’: Reinhart Koselleck and the History of Social and Political Concepts’, in Dario Castiglione and Iain Hampsher-Monk (Eds.), The History of Political Thought in National Context (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 58–79. 4 Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, I: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago, 1992). 5 Michel de Certeau, ‘What Freud Makes of History: ‘A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis’’ and ‘The Fiction of History: The Writing of Moses and Monotheism’ in The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York, 1988), pp. 287–307, 308–354.

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Annales school, has similarly charted the potentially disorientating peregrinations of recent historiography all the way to the edge of the cliff, to invoke the title of a recent collection of his writings on these matters.6 Above all, of course, there has been the richly provocative work of Michel Foucault, who, as he always carefully reminded us, was not an historian, but whose work has inspired that of a vast number of historians, some of a very theoretical, others of a firmly empirical cast of mind, but all firmly indebted to his pioneering example. Even when the Annales ruled the French academic roost, however, a philosopher was at work, probing their preconceptions about time and narrative. As a resident in both the French and the American academic worlds, Paul Ricoeur has been well placed in refining and analysing the philosophy lurking within the sociology.7 Perhaps, then, philosophy was more important in French historical enquiry than its practitioners thought; but what matters here, surely, is what they thought they were doing, rather more than what Ricoeur assumed them to be doing. Here, of course, I reject the burden of Bevir’s insistence that, ‘When we investigate the logic of the history of ideas, our concern must be with what historians of ideas ought to do, not what they do’.8 The is/ought problem is a philosopher’s problem, not a historian’s, and my argument rests with what historians do, rather than with what they supposedly ought to do. This is a historian’s perspective, and I shall continue to insist on its priority over philosophical ones in the remainder of this short essay. As Peter Ghosh recently demonstrated, there is an archaeology behind Foucault’s archaeology, and an ordering of things that can itself be successfully historicised.9 In Britain, philosophical history was pioneered by such ‘North British’ historians as David Hume, William Robertson, John Millar, and Adam Ferguson. Christened ‘conjectural history’ by Dugald Stewart, it was actually, like the style of thought initiated by Montesquieu, more sociological than strictly philosophical in orientation, content, and style. When a self-consciously philosophical historian took up his pen south of the border, it was to challenge this approach: Henry Thomas Buckle felt that the logic of history demanded stronger statistical enquiry and, subsequently, an even more generalisable method than that suggested by Scottish (and French) writers.10 Aside from James Mill’s tendentiously philistine The History of British India (1817) and Buckle’s own History of Civilization in England (1858–61), there was little philosophical history in 19th-century Britain. Philosophical issues were brought back to the fore by R.G. Collingwood, in whose work one can witness the closing 6 Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore, 1997). 7 Paul Ricoeur, The Contribution of French Historiography to the Theory of History (Oxford, 1980), where he refers (p. 33) to ‘the deliberately anti-epistemological attitude of French historians’; Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (3 vols., Chicago, 1984–1988), i. 99–111, 169–174, 208–225. 8 Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge, 1999), p. 9. 9 Peter Ghosh, ‘Citizen or Subject? Michel Foucault in the History of Ideas’, History of European Ideas 24 (1998) 113–159. 10 Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England (2 vols., London, 1858–1861), i. 20–31, 224–230, 730–756; ii. 410–420, 579–588.

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down of Oxford Idealism; some of his historicist claims have influenced Quentin Skinner, the most philosophically orientated of living British historians, as did the work of those Oxford ordinary language philosophers, such as J.L. Austin, who had reacted so strongly against the Idealism which Collingwood had represented.11 J.G.A. Pocock has also ventured into this territory, not least in his recent work on the philosophical histories current in the 18th century, but also in his ruminations on the implications for intellectual historians of Saussurean linguistics, and again in his as yet unpublished Isaiah Berlin Lectures, given at Oxford in 1997.12 Bevir thus promotes a very particular Germano-American division of labour. What is more, the division in his work is invariably in philosophy’s favour: it is extraordinary that a book which contains a long chapter on objectivity in historical enquiry contains no reference to Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream (1988), a magisterial study of objectivity in American historical writing, and arguably the major historical and historiographical contribution made in this contentious debate in recent years.13 A glance at Bevir’s bibliography reveals no Novick, but it does reveal Nozick; history is always subordinated to philosophy in Bevir’s argument, and a very particular sort of philosophy at that.14 Plainly, for Bevir, writing in full Davidsonian flow, neither Skinner nor Pocock is philosophical enough, and he is too brutally dismissive of postmodern developments in history to appreciate anything of the legacy of de Certeau or the significance of Chartier’s work. It has to be admitted that few historians have emerged from encounters with postmodernism particularly well.15 In his challenge to postmodernist accounts, In Defence of History (1997), Richard J. Evans simply attributed too much to the postmodernists as imputed wreckers of history, and his distorted presentation of such critiques led to an over-determined defence of empiricism. Consider, for instance, his dismissal of the cultural historian Philippe Arie! s’s contention that the early modern period lacked a notion of childhood, based on Arie! s’s observation that children always appeared dressed as adults in family portraits. By simply stating, on the authority of Geoffrey Elton, that this was just a convention, Evans chooses not to elaborate on the fact that it is precisely the nature of this convention that needs to 11

Quentin Skinner, ‘The Rise of, and Challenge to and Prospects for a Collingwoodian Approach to the History of Political Thought’ in Castiglione and Hampsher-Monk, The History of Political Thought, pp. 175–88. 12 J.G.A Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, ii: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge, 1999); ‘Introduction: The State of the Art’ in Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 1–34. 13 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988). 14 Do historians really need Bevir’s complex philosophical rationale in order to make such blandly unexceptionable claims as the following?: ‘Historians of ideas should justify their work by comparing it with its rivals, using the criteria of accuracy, comprehensiveness, consistency, progressiveness, fruitfulness, and openness’. (Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, p. 106). 15 For a usefully sceptical appraisal of such matters, see Scott Mandelbrote, ‘History, Narrative, and Time’, History of European Ideas 22 (1996) 337–350.

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be analysed if Arie! s’s suggestion is to be fully explored.16 Such notably incomplete, knock-down responses characterise far too much of the argument of In Defence of History, and this is especially marked in Evans’s encounters with postmodernity. Similarly, the blandly declamatory inclusivity displayed by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob in Telling the Truth About History (1995), manifestly failed to engage the postmodern critique they so plainly detest. Their, no doubt, wellintentioned book often reads rather more like a lesson in multicultural civicsFa laudable enterprise in its own termsFthan it does a work of serious historical reflection. If postmodernism is to be challenged, and I feel that it very much ought to be, historians have to be better informed about what they imagine they are taking on, and just what it is they consider themselves to be defending. A useful perspective for such a critique has recently been expressed by Blair Worden, who points to the importance of how the past is used by different generations, and how this usefully reflects on the relationship between pasts and presents as a means of understanding the manipulation of the past in historical and literary terms. Whilst rejecting the claim that historians are makers of fiction, he nonetheless importantly observes that ‘historians, like novelists, are makers of order’.17 In suggesting against Bevir that philosophical history is not the ideal path for intellectual (and non-intellectual) historians to follow, I would suggest an entirely different model which follows neatly from what Worden has written about the relationship between fiction and history. The model I will follow is that suggested in a posthumously published article by that most idiosyncratic of Cambridge intellectual historians, Duncan Forbes. The model is that of the historian as artist, the scholar actively and persistently engaged in cultivating the artist’s penetrating eye.18 Forbes makes much of this parallel; I will develop another aspect of it, the idea of history as literature, and literature as history. In arguing that history and literature provide a more fruitful union for historical practice than does the union of philosophy and history, I will emphasise that this approach is altogether more impressionistic, even messier perhaps, than Bevir’s ideal might prove to be, but also that it is infinitely more pluralistic. At the root of my suspicion of Bevir’s approach is his confident deployment of the definite article, since, whatever he might claim to the contrary, the very conception of The Logic of the History of Ideas resists the idea that there is, after all, necessarily more than one way into the past. Any claim to engage history with literature at the expense of philosophy is confronted by the problem of how to divide philosophy from literature, and whether one ought to seek to do so in a poststructuralist universe. This is not the place to 16 Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London, 1997), p. 63. Evans, it would seem, is, like his hero Elton, no admirer of intellectual history, claiming, absurdly, that ‘intellectual historians [are] engaged in a close reading of a small number of texts’ (p. 127). For a critique of such a quasi-Eltonian perspective, see Quentin Skinner, ‘Sir Geoffrey Elton and the Practice of History’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th Series, 7 (1997) 301–316. 17 Blair Worden, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity (Harmondsworth, 2001), p. 19. 18 Duncan Forbes, ‘Aesthetic Thoughts on Doing The History of Ideas’, History of European Ideas 27 (2001) 101–113.

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open up the fascinating debates so encountered, but I will instead explore here the recent turn in literary studies towards an active engagement with history. An important instance can be seen in the work on 16th- and 17th-century literature undertaken by David Norbrook, from the theoretically nuanced Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (1984), to his fiercely historical Writing the English Republic (1999), replete with Skinnerian attention to ‘republican speech acts’.19 Similarly, the work of Christine Gerrard on the ‘Patriot’ opposition to Walpole, and that of Howard Erskine-Hill on the relationship between literature and politics in 17th- and 18th-century Britain, is hugely indebted to historical research.20 Likewise, the 19th-century encounter between history, literature, and science has been notably illuminated in the writings of Gillian Beer, from Darwin’s Plots (1983) to Open Fields (1996). Norbrook, Gerrard, Erskine-Hill, Beer, and a host of other literary scholars, have had a lot to teach historians, as well as having learned from them in their turn. The encounter between history and literature has been a constructive one in Britain in recent years. The work of James Chandler has considered an analogous trajectory in literary study in the United States, and his seminal study, England in 1819 (1998), provides a fascinating history of this experience as well as making a substantial contribution to its further development.21 What is striking is just how uninterested in literature Bevir reveals himself to be; the one school of literary analysis to which he regularly appeals, and usually negatively, is the New Criticism of the 1950s, one of the most consciously antihistorical of all approaches ever adopted in the analysis of literary texts.22 This is a strange cul-de-sac to which to direct one’s readers, especially now that literary studies are becoming so historically minded, a trend largely initiated through what has become known as New Historicism in America and cultural materialism in Britain. In pursuing this movement (if such it is), one is faced by a further complication, or, rather, refinement, namely the union of history with anthropology, to which I will return later. An element of Geertzian ‘deep play’ was always inherent in New Historicism, especially as promoted by Stephen Greenblatt. Indeed, one might say that it was of the essence of the New Historicist technique to analyse the deep play constantly at work between texts and contexts. New Historicism is itself now on the wane, but its intellectual legacy has made many literary scholars much more historically minded than they hitherto were. New Historicism can itself now be historicised. For example, it has been described as a means of talking about politics in post-Vietnam America by a politically engaged but once alienated generation of 19

David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 1–22. 20 Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford, 1994); Howard Erskine-Hill, Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Wordsworth (Oxford, 1996), and Poetry of Opposition and Revolution: Dryden to Wordsworth (Oxford, 1996). 21 James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago, 1998). 22 Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, pp. 68–70, 80–82, 175. A few cursory references to reception theory (pp. 73–74, 121, 171) hardly make up for this woefully insufficient attention to the procedures of literary study, one of intellectual history’s major kindred disciplines.

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academics, and about how power has been re-constructed in the post-Watergate world (with Richard Nixon as America’s Richard III?).23 New Historicism was a product of the cultural politics of a particular generation, but it is a generation that was consciously productive of histories and the means of analysing history. Herein lies the foundation of my argument: everything is historicisable, including Bevir’s arguments, and therein lies the power of history over philosophy; everything may at one time look authentically modern and irreducible, but there are no Hegelian culminations, only different moments to be analysed and understood. It would be banal to cite the instant irrelevance of Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) to support this claim, but only because it is so obviously the case.24 This is not, however, to claim that history and historical writing is always reducible to literary analysis, but this is what is usually true of the great historians precisely because they were uniquely sensitive masters of rhetoric (and entrepreneurs of the rhetorical repertoire rather than philosophers). We do not read Tacitus because he was a philosopher, but because he was a literary stylist whose histories informed later philosophical reflection, and whose language still has a peculiar resonance. Anyone looking at world politics in recent months can appreciate the celebrated moment in the Agricola (Book 30:4) when Tacitus has a British chieftain declare: ‘Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant’. (‘They made a wilderness and called it peace’.) Herein, of course, lies a hint of those post-Tacitean tropologies of which Hayden White has, pardonably perhaps, made rather too much in his reading not just of historical writing, but also of ‘history’ as literature.25 One need not go anywhere near so far to appreciate the rhetorically purposeful nature of the work of the great historians: as Peter Gay and John Clive have reminded us, that is why we still read Gibbon and Macaulay.26 It is also why we no longer read such once stateof-the-art historians as Buckle or Comte, other than in our calling as intellectual historians, concerned to understand what they saw themselves as doing. If there is an image of history as a process over time, of historical literature informing what we 23 Louis A. Montrose, ‘Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture’ in H. Aram Veeser ed., The New Historicism (London, 1989), pp. 15–36. It is worth remembering that Geertz’s own career was made possible by war; he was a beneficiary of the G.I. Bill which provided the means for a college education for former second world war soldiers: on which see Clifford Geertz, ‘Passage and Accident: A Life of Learning’ in Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton, 2000), pp. 1–20. On Geertz’s deep awareness of the contexts of his own work of contextualisation, see After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist (Cambridge, MA, 1995). 24 It is worth asking whether Fukuyama’s work was not inherently compromised by taking the form of a philosophical history. In 1995, three years after the appearance of The End of History and the Last Man, Clifford Geertz offered a more convincing, because historically and anthropologically informed, account of the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall: ‘The World in Pieces: Culture and Politics at the End of the Century’ in Available Light, pp. 218–263. 25 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973); Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978). 26 Peter Gay, Style in History (New York, 1975); John Clive, Not By Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History (London, 1989). For the belief that historians have become more scientific and, hence, less literary, since the time of the great historians, see Evans, In Defence of History, pp. 70–71. What, then, of such stylists as Richard Cobb and Hugh Trevor-Roper?

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see, and how, accordingly, we change what we see ourselves, let me suggest that moment at the very end of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire when Gibbon is imagining the Renaissance historian Poggio contemplating the ruins of Rome.27 What is important here, surely, is the activity and the quality of the historical imagining taking place, and of the conception it yields of the past as simultaneously loss and gain, pleasure and pain. The exercise of just such an historical imagination is vital, as Hugh Trevor-Roper rightly (if controversially) reminded historians decades ago.28 The exercise of the historical imagination is, however, as Trevor-Roper also emphasised, a discipline, and it is a discipline acquired through constant training, and by immersion in the work of other historians and kindred writers. After all, Trevor-Roper’s prose is so rewardingly effective because it is shot through with a translucent Latinity, which is both that of the classics which he studied as a young man, and that of the Latinate vernacular of the ‘Golden Age’ of English prose, the 17th century on which he is such an authority.29 This brings me to the most troubling aspect of Bevir’s notably unimaginative book, its stunning lack of historical examples.30 He does give rather compressed illustrative examples of the usual sort that one gets in philosophy, as in Paul and Susan’s East End musings on the idea of a ‘hallelujah lass’ (about which Jane Garnett has pertinent things to say in her contribution to this issue), but, this example aside, there are remarkably few for an historian qua historian to consider.31 Let me, then, provide some, beginning with one from Skinner’s work that Bevir does try to develop, but which he effectively foreshortens. At the close of A Passage to India, E.M. Forster famously implied a somewhat pedestrian site for its composition: ‘Weybridge, 1924’. Skinner has argued that this is a parody of the altogether more glamorous destinations which occur in the signing-off of Joyce’s Ulysses, published 32 earlier in 1924: ‘Trieste-Zurich-Paris’. . Unlike Bevir, I think Skinner is on to something here, but I do so by thinking my way to it through a later literary example, and also by thinking of Forster’s historical links with an altogether different world from those thought of by Skinner. To begin with the later literary example. At the conclusion of his wonderfully scabrous novel The Roses of Picardie (1980), Simon Raven lists the following place names: Deal, Corfu, Venice, Cannes, Athens, Rome, Monte Carlo, Dieppe. These encompass many of the scenes in which 27

Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley (3 vols., Harmondsworth, 1994), iii. 1062–1064 (ch. lxxi). 28 See Trevor-Roper’s inaugural and valedictory lectures, given at Oxford in 1957 and 1980, respectively: ‘History Professional and Lay’, and ‘History and Imagination’ in History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H.R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl, Blair Worden (London, 1981), pp. 1–14, 356–369. 29 For suggestive remarks on Trevor-Roper’s prose style, see Hugh Lloyd-Jones, ‘Foreword’, in History and Imagination, pp. v–vi. 30 For Bevir’s philosophical (rather than historical) argument against the use of examples, see The Logic of the History of Ideas, pp. 24–25. 31 Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, pp. 38–46, 51–53, 58–60, 66, 119. In strict fairness, this is, at best, at least a quasi-historical example. 32 Quentin Skinner, ‘A Reply to My Critics’ in James Tully ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 231–288, at p. 285.

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the outrageous narrative works itself out, and also where the novel was conceived and composed; Deal, prosaically, was where Raven lived. So far, so good. Raven was also, however, like Forster, a self-conscious product of King’s College, Cambridge, and also like him a homosexual writer, and a soi-disant admirer and friend of the older man.33 Here, then, I suggest, we have an affectionately teasing homage, and an homage that provides a key to understanding the place names at the end of A Passage to India. Raven’s is a literary device saluting itself in deeply personal terms, terms of friendship and play; it is also, necessarily, a reading of the close of A Passage to India, and one which alerts us to the parody, but also to the seriousness in that device. I offer, then, not a resolution of the problem, but rather a suggestion as to how one might read it. Incidentally, I do not see how, contra Bevir’s alarmingly straightlaced reading of the matter, any evidence that the book had been written in India and Cambridge, rather than in Weybridge, would have undercut the fact that this is a joke.34 It is an aspect of a very English jokiness about place names, which can be seen, for example, at work in The Goons and in Monty Python (as in the conclusion to Blackmail, a superb game-show spoof: ‘This week we visited Thames Ditton’.) This pervasive sense of place brings me to another context for considering Forster’s deep sense of its significance. This was, I would argue, because of his peculiar standingFas a militant agnosticFin the legacy of English Evangelicalism. A sense of place meant a great deal to him, as any reader of Howards End will know, but Howards End has its origins in Battersea Rise, the house of his great-aunt, Marianne Thornton, a zealous memorialist of the Clapham Sect whose life he would write in the 1950s.35 The closure of A Passage to India is also, then, I would suggest, part of this deep nostalgia, in the true sense of the word. As this example shows, unpacking a literary device requires that its exegetes read, and read, and read again: there are no short cuts in intellectual history, any more than there are in literary history, and a contextual reading may draw on a longer chronological sequence than an historian such as Skinner might ideally want. This is in part because traditions evolve over long periods, and Raven’s place in such a tradition makes one think again about its origins and earlier evolutions. As Ecclesiastes reminds us: ‘Of the making of books there is no end’; and as we might remind ourselves, ‘Of the reading and the understanding of books there is equally no end’. Traditions offer a rich context in which to consider contextualisation, and they raise the deeper question of when contexts change sufficiently for one to feel one is studying something apart from the originary moments in the creation and evolution of a tradition. As J.G.A. Pocock has shown, The Machiavellian Moment was a moment of some duration.36 The examples I shall give will be drawn from literature and music, the latter chosen especially because it demonstrates, perhaps better than 33 Simon Raven Shadows on the Grass (London, 1982), pp. 205–209; Michael Barber, The Captain: The Life and Times of Simon Raven (London, 1996), pp. 94–95,132. 34 Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, p. 86. 35 On Forster’s post-Evangelical sense of place, see Christopher Tolley, Domestic Biography: The Legacy of Evangelicalism in Four Nineteenth-Century Families (Oxford, 1997), pp. 220–234. 36 J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975).

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any other art form, the fact that history is a living process and that, accordingly, it can never end.37

II In the 1930s, W.H. Auden put together some of his own newly written poems with some by other poets from earlier periods, all of which were set to music by his collaborator, Benjamin Britten, in a song cycle, Our Hunting Fathers (1936). The closing three lines of the title poem are particularly striking, and they appear to be authentically those of Auden. The poem needs, of course, to be read as a whole for these lines to make their full, forceful impact: Our hunting fathers told the story Of the sadness of the creatures, Pitied the limits and the lack Set in their finished features; Saw in the lion’s intolerant look, Behind the quarry’s dying glare, Love raging for the personal glory, That reason’s gift would add, The liberal appetite and power, The rightness of a god. Who nurtured in that fine tradition Predicted the result, Guessed love by nature suited to The intricate ways of guilt? That human ligaments could so His southern features modify, And make it his mature ambition To think no thoughts but ours, To hunger, work illegally, And be anonymous? Those powerful and moving closing lines are actually the work of another writer, not best known for his poetic inclination: they are, or so Auden thought, the words of Lenin (actually, in a further intensification of allusive power, they are a succinct statement of his position made by Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow).38 How does this affect the way one reads the poem? For Edward Mendelson, they are a translation into the emotional realm of political beliefs;39 but, surely, they are more 37 For interesting reflections on the history of art as a complex practice indebted to a whole variety of approaches, but ultimately itself an historical practice, see Thomas Crow, The Intelligence of Art (Chapel Hill, 1999). 38 On which see John Fuller, W.H. Auden: A Commentary (London, 1998), p. 151. 39 Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (London, 1981), p. 216.

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than that? When one takes account of the fact that the song cycle was a piece of socialist art, possibly even of agitation, written against Fascist forces in Europe, it is clear that there was something implicitly pro-Soviet in the work (this is the era of the Cambridge Spies, after all). To discover Lenin/Krupskaya as an intertextual presence therefore raises all sorts of interesting questions, not least when the ideal of the anonymity of the artist was so important to Auden and Britten. Allusive quotation in this context is filled with politics, and how one unpacks them says a great deal about notions of the artist in the age of mass politics, of the artist in a socialist society. It also raises the problem of how a charismatic leader seems, paradoxically, to call for anonymity in words that are disguised to all but those who know them as his words, or at least a statement of his position by one who ought to have known it. When those words are sung a whole series of related questions come to mind, about performance (particularly the context of the first performance of the work), and about the communication of ideas through music.40 Music and its history raise a whole series of further reflections, not least about performativity. If I were to nominate the most thought-provoking piece of intellectual history I have read recently, it would have to be a piece by Bernard Williams on the apparent impossibility of staging Siegfried’s funeral to his funeral music in Gotted ammerung. It raises an issue of cultural politics and basic ethics as . . well as the perennial problem as to how one stages Wagner’s Ring, a question in which history fundamentally informs practice, sometimes to a dangerously limiting extent, as anyone following the by-now-traditional wrangles in Bayreuth over the decades can testify.41 Music, like all other texts, changes according to context, and the parallel between contextual reading and the performance of early music on original instruments, for example, is one we are used to making when talking about the historicised reading of texts.42 Let me instance a parallel which raises further complex issues of how great texts interact with living contexts, creating a living dialogue between texts. At a Bach Festival concert organised by the GDR in Leipzig in 1950 to mark the tercentenary of the composer’s death, Dmitri Shostakovich replaced an indisposed pianist in a performance of the concerto in D minor for three keyboard instruments and orchestra, playing alongside Tatyana Nicolaeava (celebrated for her performances of Bach’s preludes and fugues on the pianoFnot, note, the harpsichord), and Pavel Sereboyakov. This experience, especially the presence of Nikolaeava, inspired Shostakovich to write his own 24 preludes and fugues for the piano, which 40

For thoughtful discussion of the song cycle’s context, see Donald Mitchell, Britten and Auden in the Thirties: The Year 1936 (London, 1979), pp. 20, 39, 47, 49, 53, note 28. Mitchell’s lectures can themselves be contextualised, given as they were in November 1979 in the wake of the Blunt affair, which informed his positive perspective on anti-Fascism in the 1930s: on which see Britten and Auden in the Thirties, p. 51, note 15. Auden visited Blunt at Cambridge in 1936, and Blunt returned the visit to Auden on Ischia in 1948: Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives (London, 2001), pp. 170–171, 332. 41 Bernard Williams, ‘Wagner and Politics’, New York Review of Books 47:17 (November 2, 2000), 36–43. 42 For problems with this view of ‘authentic reading’ in music, see Mishtooni Bose, ‘Humanism, English Music and the Rhetoric of Criticism’, Music and Letters 70 (1996) 1–22.

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Nikolaeava quickly made her own.43 Would this have happened if Nikolaeava had chosen to play the pieces on a harpsichord; and what sort of statement about the relationship between the past and the present is being made here? After all, we can choose to hear Bach played on modern instruments, and we can even choose to listen to the various 20th-century arrangements made of his music, some of which, notably Elgar’s arrangement of the C minor fantasia and fugue, sound more authentically Edwardian than Bachian, others of which, such as Webern’s celebrated arrangement of the ricercare from The Musical Offering, seem, somehow, to get us even closer to Bach’s conception of the music than any number of authentic performances. How is this so? Plainly it matters that Webern was a musicologist as well as a composer, and that Elgar the composer had reached a creative crisis from which Bach offered a positive escape for Elgar the arranger (in conversation with Elgar, Richard Strauss opined that his orchestration was overblown).44 How does the past inhabit the present in musical performance, and what does this have to teach the historian? In one case, at least, a historian proved the catalyst for just such a creative encounter. One of the most fascinating instances of the parodic and the allusive in music, Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969), was conceived just as the authentic performance movement was coming to dominate the way we listen to pre-Romantic music. The genesis of the piece also serves to demonstrate the importance of artefacts in stimulating a creative response to remnants of a living past. In August 1968, Maxwell Davies and his librettist, Randolph Stow, visited the house of the historian Sir Steven Runciman, who demonstrated to them his collection of mechanical instruments, including George III’s own mechanical handorgan. Stow and Maxwell Davies had their moment of inspiration, and Stow compiled a libretto comprising the king’s tormented words as transcribed by a spying Frances Burney.45 The result is quintessential ‘60 s performance theatre, but it is also a vivid reimagining of the tortured years of a mad monarch (and, remember this is also the era of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade),46 full of musical parody, including 43 The incidents which gave birth to Shostakovich’s 24 preludes and fugues are recounted in Dmitri and Ludmilla Sollertinsky, Pages from the Life of Dmitri Shostakovich, trans. Graham Hobbs and Charles Midgley (London and New York, 1980), p. 132. What is one to make of the allusions to Rossini and Wagner and his own earlier work in his 15th symphony, a darkly enthralling instance of music’s intensely personal, yet very public, relationship with its past? 44 For a fascinating discussion of Webern’s orchestration, seen as ‘the culmination of two centuries of contrapuntal development’, see Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern: A Chronicle of His Life and Work (London, 1978), pp. 442–445. Whereas Webern saw himself as somehow collaborating with and also extending into a whole new soundworld Bach’s supremely intellectual exercise, Elgar saw himself as offering him the services of modernity. As he wrote in a letter in 1921, his orchestration of the organ fugue was done ‘in a modern way – Largest orchestra y So many arrgts have been made of Bach on the ‘pretty’ scale & I wanted to shew how gorgeous & great & brilliant he would have made himself sound if he had our means.’ Quoted in Jerold Northrop Moore, Edward Elgar: A Creative Life (Oxford, 1984), p. 759. On Strauss’s call for restraint, see Moore, Elgar, p. 760. 45 Mike Seabrook, MAX: The Life and Music of Peter Maxwell Davies (London, 1994), pp. 108–109. The piece was dedicated to Runciman. 46 The analogy with the presentation of 18th-century madness in Weiss is striking: see Peter Weiss, The Persecution and Assasination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, trans. Geoffrey Skelton and Adrian Mitchell (London, 1965).

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moments of Handelian majesty as the king’s own rememberings of the Messiah (already old when he quoted it) echo through the piece. One could almost say that the piece is haunted by the king, by Handel, and by a panopoly of vivid musical references, including 1920s popular music and allusions to the style of Harrison Birtwistle, Davies’s contemporary at the Royal Northern College of Music. As the composer Jonathan Harvey observed of the piece in 1969: The power of quotation from the past in modern works lies partly in the fact that we are obsessed with the past (many composers would even feel pushed offstage by it), and to quote it adds an integral substratum of meaning to the work, a stratum that is very readily comprehensible, in certain terms at least; and partly in the fact that it invokes irrationality and dream-logic.47 Music thus provides much food for thought for historians, not least when it comes to what Eliot famously identified as the creative tension between ‘tradition and the individual talent’.48 Increasingly, the historical obsession with national identity is playing its role in the history of music, and much could be made, in this instance, of the revival of Purcell made by Britten, Tippett, and others. In Purcell’s tercentenary year, 1995, the BBC commissioned a large number of composers to write pieces around some of his themes in a supreme instance of what one might consider to be the national institutionalisation of music as a union of the past with the present. What the history of music also very obviously demonstrates is the need for the historian to listen, and to listen with contemporary ears sharp enough, through training, to catch the nuances of apparently dead tones and registers.49 Roger Scruton has argued that the logic of the authentic performance lobby is flawed because our ears are used to hearing pre-Romantic music played on modern instruments, and that the post-Romantic ear cannot, therefore, understand ‘authenticity’ as such.50 Surely, however, Scruton’s logic is flawed by the fact that, increasingly, our ears are growing unused to inauthentic performance practice, and that this will grow more true for the generations aheadFunless, of course, there is a reaction and we are once again subjected to Stokowski’s orchestrations of Bach’s music. Furthermore, music from later repertoires is now conforming to authentic music techniques: Elgar’s orchestration of the Bach C minor fantasia and fugue would have sounded rather different in 1921 from contemporary performances of it; inauthenticity may require authenticity if it is to be heard properly! The recent foundation of the Queen’s Hall Orchestra for the authentic performance of such music shows just how historically sensitive modern ears have become. What is more, such authentic period ensembles as the viol consort Fretwork are now 47

Jonathan Harvey, ‘Eight Songs for a Mad King’ (1969) in Stephen Pruslin ed., Tempo Booklet No. 2: Studies From Two Decades (London, 1979), pp. 57–61, at p. 58. 48 T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ in The Sacred Wood (London, 1920), pp. 39–49. 49 For an analogous argument about language, see J.W. Burrow, The Languages of the Past and the Languages of the Historian: The History of Ideas in Theory and Practice (London, 1987). 50 Roger Scruton, ‘The Myth of Authenticity’ in Untimely Tracts (London, 1987), pp. 25–27.

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commissioning composers to write for them, thereby uniting the idioms of contemporary music with the pre-modern sound world. Similarly, three American composers, Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, recently wrote a piece, Lost Objects, which combines the forces of Bang on a Can, a contemporary music . percussion group, with Concerto Koln, a specialist baroque orchestra. Parts of this were then remixed as a collage of sounds by one DJ Spooky: a postmodern me!lange, if ever there was one, but one that is historically aware, centrally concerned as their librettist, Deborah Artman, is with a post-Holocaust world in which the sense of loss is deeperFculturally, historically, spirituallyFthan ever before.51 In short, defamiliarisation is a necessary historical experience which needs constantly to be applied to the apparently familiar if we are to understand it in anything like its own, original terms. There is a moment in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) when giant statues begin to emit sounds, which his narrator later represents by a notation from a piece by Handel, ‘the greatest of musicians’Fa moment, incidentally, which inspired Tippett, a master of musical and extra-musical allusion in music, to write a wonderful Fantasia on the piece so identified (an example, like that of Gibbon’s image of Poggio viewing Rome, which shows how rewardingly complex diachrony can become).52 Such a moment, when the familiar is emitted by the unfamiliar, can stand as a symbol of the difficulty of translating the past into the present, but also, of how liberating, and open-ended such moments of cultural encounter can be. Here, of course, one might want to raise the anthropological questions about the past which Bevir does not do nearly enough to address.53 I will raise just one, which, I think, goes to the heart of the rationalistic technique which informs his book. Marshall Sahlins sought to explain the death of Captain Cook by reference to myth in a structuralist manner; another scholar, Gananath Obeyesekere, took umbrage at his account, claiming it to be Eurocentric, and chose to deploy Weberian notions of practical reasoning as a universal to undo it (something of an inherent

51 For the aural and written elements, listen to the recording of the work, and consult the enclosed booklet, on the Teldec New Line, August 2001. 52 Samuel Butler, Erewhon: Or, Over the Range (1872: Penguin edition, London, 1935), pp. 49–50. On its impact on Tippett’s later composition, see Meirion Bowen, Michael Tippett (London, 1981), p. 98. On Tippett’s fascination with Butler, see Those Twentieth-Century Blues: An Autobiography (London, 1991), pp. 16, 20. On his peculiar powers of allusion, see David Matthews ‘‘Mirror Upon Mirror Mirrored’: Some Notes on Tippett’s Allusions’ in Geraint Lewis ed., Michael Tippett, O.M.: A Celebration (Southborough, 1985), pp. 35–42. Not all musical allusion is anything like so self-conscious. When Herbert Howells set Walter de le Mare’s exquisite poem ‘King David’ as a song for solo soprano and piano accompaniment, he was surely paying tribute to the longstanding English choral tradition of settings of ‘When David Heard’, from Thomas Weelkes and John Taverner onward. Like so many art songs, Howells’s setting is a piece of music about music, and therefore full of its own echoing history. 53 For a rare exception, see Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, p. 112. Bevir’s imagined anthropologists are remarkably old-fashioned: very few would now be happy with his use of the word ‘tribe’, still less the idea of a ‘lost tribe’. As with his knowledge of and concern for literary study, one suspects that Bevir is insufficiently familiar with anthropology, the most fruitful kindred discipline in the study of cultural history.

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paradox, this).54 A famous debate ensued, in which, for my money, Sahlins easily had the better of the argument.55 Does making this claim make one a structuralist? No, but it does argue that such a model helps make sense of a tragic colonial encounter which otherwise makes little sense. Models, contra Obeyesekere and Weber, are themselves fluid: as Sahlins himself observed regarding the arbitrary character of the sign: ‘Don’t be Saussure’.56 To return, than, to literature as a mode of understanding. Consider the epigraph taken from the German poet Novalis by Penelope Fitzgerald in her novel The Blue Flower (1996): ‘Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history’. The Blue Flower is a vivid reimagining of the love affair with the statutory dying girl which gave a sort of coherence to the final years of the short life of Novalis. Like everything Fitzgerald did, her deployment of the epigraph says a great deal not only about what she is doing in this novelisation, but also about how art and life are indissolubly bound together. Historians can learn a lot from Novalis’s terse statement, and also from Fitzgerald’s use of it. My next image is a pervasive one, and it relates to what Duncan Forbes has to say about how the historian, perhaps especially the intellectual historian, has to acquire the skill of supremely concentrated seeing typical of the artist.57 It is itself an artistic representation taken from Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (incidentally, the one work I would set all research historians as required reading). In La Prisonni"ere, the narrator recounts how an art critic, Bergotte, dies whilst staring at the patch of yellow wall in Vermeer’s A View of Delft, a detail which ultimately became the whole to the dying critic’s eye.58 Valuable though that lesson is in itself, I want to extend it by referring to Harold Pinter’s Proust Screenplay, in which the direction is frequently given for the screen to give way to yellow; only at the conclusion of the film, when fragments became parts of a whole, incidents thickening into an embracing narrative, does the yellow become identifiable as what it is. The directions are: ‘Vermeer’s View of Delft. Camera moves in swiftly to the patch of yellow wall in the painting. Yellow screen. MARCEL’S VOICE OVER. It was time to begin’.59 I cannot think of a better image for the constant making and remaking that is the stuff 54 Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago, 1985); Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton, 1992). For a useful discussion of the debate, see Clifford Geertz, ‘The State of the Art’ in Available Light, pp. 89–142, at pp. 98–107. Geertz’s conclusions, at p. 106, favouring Sahlins’s interpretation of the evidence are music to an historian’s ears: ‘ y I find Sahlins, the structuralist glitter surrounding his analyses aside, markedly the more persuasive. His descriptions are more circumstantial, his portrayal of both the Hawaiians and the British more deeply penetrating, and his grasp of the moral and political issues involved surer, less prey to the confusing noises of the confused present’. 55 Marshall Sahlins, How ‘Natives’ Think About Captain Cook For Example (Chicago, 1995). 56 Sahlins, Waiting for Foucault, p. 8. 57 I am thinking particularly of Forbes’s citation of the remarks made by Elstir, Proust’s thoughtful artist: ‘Aesthetic Thoughts on Doing The History of Ideas’, p. 102. 58 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (3 vols., Harmondsworth, 1983), iii. 180–186. 59 Harold Pinter, The Proust Screenplay (London, 1978), p. 166. It is a nice paradox that this screenplay, made for Joseph Losey, was never translated into film, but it did work superbly as a radio play, in which Pinter himself acted as narrator and (virtually) as camera.

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of the historian’s craft, of the need to look, to concentrate, to dissolve, to assemble, to recognise contradiction and the necessarily fragmentary nature of the fluidity of the past and its objects. If that sounds vaguely postmodern, so be it. Like the medievalist Gabrielle Spiegel, I believe there are things to be learned from postmodern enquiry, but not when it paradoxically asserts itself monolithically against the conventions of historical enquiry.60 A plurality of voices is what one will always hear when listening attentively to the past. As for the necessary self-consciousness of the historian, that staple of postmodern insistence on the peculiarity of history, an image suggests itself which Burckhardt might have appreciated. It is one which would have been known to many German historians through the researches of the pioneering Orientalists of the early 19th century.61 Roberto Calasso has retold it with admirable clarity and concision: Only once was Yasoda alarmed. Some little boys had been spying for her: ‘Krsna is grubbing around and eating filth like a pig.’ Yasoda rushed out and found the boy on all fours. She yelled and scolded but then was shocked to see a terrifying flash light up his eyes. ‘Mother, it’s all lies. If you don’t believe me, look in my mouth.’ ‘Open up,’ said Yasoda. The mother watched those small lips whose every crack she knew so well, come apart. Yasoda bent down to study her son’s palate and found a vast, starry vault that sucked her in. Already Yasoda was traveling, flying. Where the back of his throat should have been rose Mount Meru, strewn with endless forests. To one side were islands, which perhaps were continents, and lakes, which perhaps were oceans. Yasoda breathed with a new calm, as if she had walked into the open air for the first time in her son’s mouth. The vision that most enchanted her was the wheel of the Zodiac: it girded the world obliquely, like a many-coloured sash. But Yasoda went further. She saw the mind’s back-and-forth, its lunar inconstancy, its monkey leaps from branch to branch of the universe. She saw the three threads all substances are made of twist together in balls, which produced other balls. And behind it all she saw the village of Gokula, recognized its narrow streets, the patterns of its stonework, the carts, the springs, the wilting flowers. Until finally she saw herself, in a street, looking into a little boy’s mouth.62

60

Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ‘History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text’, ‘Orations of the Dead/ Silences of the Living: The Sociology of the Linguistic Turn’, and ‘Towards a Theory of the Middle Ground’ in The Past As Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore, 1997), pp. 1–28, 29–43, 44–56. 61 On whom, treated sympathetically, see Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880 trans.Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (New York, 1984), and, unsympathetically, Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London, 1978). For a valuable reading of such work which takes Hegel as a central component, see Partha Mitter, Much-Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford, 1977). 62 Roberto Calasso, Ka, trans. Tim Parks (London, 1998), p. 272.

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Hegel, we know, was deeply influenced by Hindu writings in his conception of history;63 James Mill and Buckle condemned Hinduism for its allegedly fanciful favouring of myth over history, lambasting in particular its extravagant attitudes towards chronology.64 Philosophers can, then, either be imaginative in their absorption of a multiplicity of influences, as, in his paradoxically hegemonising way, was Hegel, or they can be narrowly dismissive, as were Mill and Buckle: there can be little doubt as to which has the richer consequences for the way we think about the past and its relationship with the present in which we find ourselves contemplating those pasts. Not that the philosophy of history is without value, but it is not everything. As Burckhardt observed of the Hegelian philosophy of history, ‘we are deeply indebted to the centaur, and it is a pleasure to come across him now and then on the fringe of the forest of historical study’. What Burckhardt questioned about Hegelianism, I question about Bevir, namely the presumption that the philosophy of history is somehow indispensable when thinking about the past, and that history conducted without its guiding principles is somehow less valid. As Burckhardt concluded, so must I: Every method is open to criticism, and none is universally valid. Every individual approaches this huge theme of contemplation in his own way, which may be his spiritual way through life: he may shape his method as that way leads him.65 Everything in the study of history is provisional to a greater or less degree, and what Sahlins said of anthropology, in an emendation of Keynes on economic theory, also holds true for history: ‘At least as far as anthropology goes, two things are certain in the long run: one is that we’ll all be dead; but another is that we’ll all be wrong. Clearly, a good scholarly career is where the first comes before the second’.66 It is a nicely humbling lesson, but, in the meantime we must go on thinking, quarrelling, and writing, and none of this will be curtailed by the construction of some allegedly ‘complete logic for the history of ideas’.67 Philosophy and political theory may well be able to contemplate a ‘complete logic’, but for an attempt at reaching an understanding of how ‘awfully complicated, and how intractable to logical ordering’ the world, both past and present is, one needs to turn, as Clifford Geertz has observed, ‘to history and anthropology, the complexicateurs terribles of the human sciences’.68 The definite article will never modulate into the definitive article.

63 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. J. Sibree (London, 1905), pp. 145–180 (Part I, Sect. II); Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. T.M. Knox and A.V. Miller (Oxford, 1985), pp. 36–37. 64 James Mill, The History of British India (London, 1817), i. 91–105; Buckle, History of Civilization in England, i. 121–124. 65 Burckhardt, Reflections on History, p. 17 (Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, p. 4). 66 Sahlins, Waiting for Foucault, p. 5. 67 Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, p. 30. 68 Geertz, ‘The World in Pieces’, in Available Light, p. 256.