Have historians killed the human subject and betrayed history?

Remarks on Jacques Rancière’s „Die Namen der Geschichte“

Abstract

Rancière tells the story of the French École des Annales as a new historical school suddenly emerging in the early 1920s. However, this story has to be checked. Since the 18th century, modern European historical studies have always been manifold. In particular, at least two paradigms have competed for acceptance: on the one hand, ‘truly’ telling a story about heroes and outstanding events, and on the other hand, explaining and narrating ‘universal’ comparative histories of countries, economies, empires and regions, of communications, and of the people. Some examples of the latter are outlined, such as the eighteenth-century ‘Göttingen School’, the nineteenth-century ‘Leipzig School’ and the ‘Bielefeld School’ from the mid-1970s onwards, all of which show strong similarities to the École des Annales. Each group was ground-breaking in its own way and exercised a strong ifluence on other historians. Hence, the École des Annales was not a unique event, but just one of various western ‘hot-spots’ in a long-lasting epistemological process. Furthermore, the assumption that the longue durée (Braudel) expelled the single event and the human being from history is also put into question. Since then, Rancière argues, historians have become social scientists, unable to grasp history, the uniqueness of the event, and the unforeseeable potential of human passion. ey tend to overestimate historical processes and the determination of an event by its surrounding circumstances. The article counters these arguments. First, the uniqueness of the event was never denied. Rather, since Michelet in France or Max Weber in Germany historians have tried to abstract constitutive elements from the unique event or case in order to explain it. A special type of explanation this in with all historical studies: the narrative explanation. Second, the notions of durée and longue durée do not place in jeopardy the single event. Neither do they devalue human action, belief, passion, or confession; all of them remain constitutive components of the historical past. Braudel’s layered ‘historical times’ (durées) were a brilliant attempt to place time and space in mutual interaction. Third, human beings have never been expelled from history. Since the 1970s, the subject has been re-constructed more carefully as a de-centered, imperfect actor, but also as the co-creator of its own life-world (Lebenswelt) in the sense of social constructivism. This co-creator, however, is unable to view and understand fully material, cultural, religious, political powers which create the limits and restraints of his life-world. What biographical knowledge and experience tell us is not su cient for writing history, but there is no historical writing without analysing properly everyday knowledge and human experience. e histo- rical social and cultural sciences – which Rancière criticized so much – are needed to go beyond pure ‘structures’ and beyond what human beings are able to tell about their daily lives.