The Quest for Historical Truth
Ernst Breisach, prominent historian and the author of the seminal “Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern,” spent a chapter of the aforementioned book discussing the debate between assimilationist and autonomist historians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The assimilationists believed that historical truth united with scientific standards and endeavors were the best avenues to historical truth (whatever that may mean). Autonomist historians saw the road to historical truth in the need for discipline specific theories and viewing the difference between human and natural phenomena as the essence of these theories. Breisach’s presentation of this debate is important in the current context of anti-intellectualism in America, the debate between secular and religious study in the world, and historical debates in areas like evolution that have aroused the ire of a great many people.
Breisach traces the assimilationist school’s intellectual arc as a transition from speculative studies of human behavior to analytical studies, from disciplinary blocks between science and liberal studies to a connection between science and events, language, and methods. The two historians at the vanguard of the assimilationist movement in historiography were Karl Popper and Carl Hempel. Popper saw as fact that interpretation invades every part of historical argument, that the only consistency possible was with the use of unified studies to break through subjective thoughts and get to what was objective.
Carl Hempel, as Breisach stated, said that, “…if one assumed that human beings and nature were part of a uniform reality, historical theory, too, would have to conform to the hypothetic-deductive model, better known as the Covering Law theory of history. Historians must go beyond describing individual events and link types of events causally to other types of events.” While these sentiments are panned by devotees of separate academic disciplines and Creationism as the weakness of secular humanism, the millions of college graduates in America can thank these two for promoting interdisciplinary studies as part of core curriculums throughout the United States.
Several historians led the way for autonomists in the early 20th century, in response to the rise of relativism in places like Germany and the United States. Frederich Meinecke felt that relativism would stoke the memory of a creative culture in Germany to act as a counterweight to the dangers of relativism. Ernst Troeltsch hoped that a synthesis of traditional European values would provide a firm basis for historical writing. Carl Becker and Charles Beard epitomize the American response to relativism during the Progressive Era, which was to embrace relativism as a positive social reform tool. Becker saw one depiction of historical events as impossible and therefore historians should tend fables and myths to be politically useful in order to make historical study important instead of staid.
Charles Beard saw history so full of values to society that historians could not stay impartial. Beard, like many Progressives, saw the dangers of relativism not comparable to the dangers of allowing big businesses and the elite to take over America. However, Becker and Beard were incapable of maintaining the momentum for a relativist history beyond their generation.
