History and Reflection Suvasree Bandyopadhyay

Historical discourse: A conceptual analysis with reference to three essays by E.H. Carr, Noah Harari and Francis Fukuyama

The historical discourse has always been one of the fundamental revolutionary aspects that determines in a direct and indirect way all the industrial, psychological, economic and socio-political advancements in a macrocosmic way. Several critics and research scholars have developed their own theories and put forth their notions of the role of History in the world of art, culture and literature. This article aims at representing the concept of history as put forward by E.H. Carr, Yuval Noah Harari and Francis Fukuyama in a chronological manner.

Carr’s “What is History” is a collection of essays that plays an important part in the domain of historical and developmental studies.

The first essay “The Historian and his facts” starts with the most important question “what is history”. Apparently, it can be considered to be a unique opportunity of recording. He criticizes the common and general misconception made by many people who think history is simply about gathering facts in a chronological order.

Positivists, who believe in the Empirical Theory of knowledge believe that history can be read as a hard core science subject. This belief however is fabricated and based on a simple assumption that conclusions can be extracted by simply going through the empirical facts. They believe that the incidents or the events in the record are able to speak for themselves. In other words, they believe gathering incidents does not depend on the issues of language and translation.

On the contrary, Carr claims that these incidents can not speak for themselves. He believes that historians have a major role to play who would pick and highlight major facts that need to be recorded and shown. According to him, historical facts are thus seen as being formed by the historian and not just discovered. All nations create their own myths in order to foster a sense of unity and collective identity to unite groups of people. Therefore History can also be seen as a major tool in shaping the nation at a macrocosmic level.

History is never neutral. Since a historian’s ideas and worldviews are influenced by his own cultural surroundings, he can never be able to put himself in an absolute neutral position and create “history” without being biased. Therefore,History can never be objective. Historians are given a certain level of “creative license” to interpret and write history according to their own ideological beliefs.

Carr has also established the point that history is always subjective since it completely depends on the historian who is limited to his own subjective worldview.

In the second essay “Society and the Individual”, Carr deals with several societal positions and circumstances and how these things affect an individual residing in that society and vice versa.

The question which one comes first is like the question of the chicken and the egg. However, the language that an individual speaks is not an individual inheritance but a social acquisition influenced by the group he grows up with. Simpler societies are more uniform in nature. Due to less diversity individual skills are appreciated more unlike a complex society that has to deal with a vast range of people followed by distinct ethnic moral views, ideas, values and beliefs.

Carr moves on to talk about different historians (Mommsen, Trevelyan and Namier) and their ways of dealing with history. He makes another significantly important point about the objective of History that it should be able to deliver not only the influences of other sources but also our influence on our own existential nature and the way our circumstances and ambience affect it in terms of socio-political, economic and psychological nature.

He also highlights another point i.e a historian who is truthfully conscious about his own surroundings, his own culture along with the other neighbouring culture is more capable and less biased in recording the events than someone who goes on protesting about others influences rather than trying to concentrate on gathering events in an unbiased and honest way.

History, then, can be considered as an enquiry conducted by the historian who is a part of a social process and it affects his gatherings some way or the other. Therefore, the interaction of the historian and his facts is nothing but a conversation of the present and the past i.e the society of today and the society of yesterday. The dual function of history, hence, consists of enabling man to understand the society of the past (history) that eventually helps them to understand the present scenario in a better way.

There is No justice in History (Noah Harari)

“There is no justice in History” is an important chapter of the book “Sapiens” written by harari. This book is one of the most significant and important texts in the field of revolutionary studies that deals with a lot of controversial and problematic issues related to the development of mankind in the simplest way possible.

In the beginning of the chapter the author raises a very important question: how did humans organize in mass cooperation networks when they lacked the biological instincts since the very beginning.

 He goes on discussing the different boundaries caused by several socio-psychological binaries that exist in our social system. For instance, when the Americans created the hierarchy in 1776, it mostly came up in a generalised form that seemed to decide and divide soci0-cutural norms and societal positions according to that. The upper section of the society enjoyed unlimited entitled privilege and power while the poor kept on suffering. According to them the rights of “men” had very little to do with the rights of Negroes. Similarly, the Hindus always believed and imposed the ideology that some supreme spiritual force made them placed at the top of the cast system. Hammurabi saw it as an order prescribed by God, similar to how Aristotle believed slaves tend to have a “slavish” nature while free people have a free nature.

These social distinctions, however, came to existence only from human imagination. Imagined make-believe hierarchies were believed and imposed upon everyone by those holding power since the beginning and those who dared to come up with questions against those imposed notions were simply thrown out of the system by the upper class.

He goes on with a parallel discussion describing how the Africans were transported to America as slaves by the Europeans and how the invasion of India by the Aryan conquerors took place in a very similar manner and he also mentioned how these major historical events eventually helped these social binaries to develop further. Many people think these make-believe imaginary distinctions might fade out with the passage of time, but nothing but the opposite happened. These binaries gradually became firmer and static in the system with the help of people for ages.

The violation against women’s rights rather basic human rights, has also been highlighted further by the author. In many societies women were treated simply as the man’s property due to which if she happens to get raped, it eventually reflects the insult toward the Man who “owns” her. The Bible decrees if a man rapes a woman, he has to marry her, and this, seemed like a reasonable and logical solution to the problem to many ancients Hebrews since the man who happens to insult another man by raping his “property”, ends up being the one who marries that violated i.e degraded woman which eventually lessens the burden and compensates for the insult to the “property owner”.

He moves on to discuss the cultural and social binaries between the two genders prescribed by the society. Scholars see “sex” as a biological and “gender” as a cultural category. Both these genders suffer prove their respective “masculinity” and “femininity” according to the prescribed societal standards. He also highlights the problems that each society faced since the agricultural revolutions due to their fragile patriarchal mind-sets. Men, in any form have been always placed higher than women. Very few women have had the opportunity and courage to break thorough what is already given i.e the preconceived societal conventions. Patriarchy has not limited itself into being a mere fragile mind-set, but it has gone to the extent of weathering several political upheavals, social revolutions and economic transformations. The fact that physical power has been considered to be one of the major factors in creating the sphere of discrimination between the genders , has also been highlighted further.

The End of History by Francis Fukuyama

 Fukuyama begins the essay with a sense there is some larger process at work that will take place shortly and bring about coherence and order in the chaotic futile flux of the system. Several evolutionary incidents have taken place over the past few decades , some have assumed that peace has been attained by many countries. However, Fukuyama believes some extraordinary process is about to take place that will eventually bring about a balance in the chaos that has been caused by an obscene accumulation of power politics.

The propagator of the notion of the end of the history is Karl Marx who believed that there is a purposeful direction followed by historical developments determined by the interplay of material forces. This very concept of a historical process as a dialectical one with a beginning, a middle and an end was borrowed by Marx from his predecessor Hegel. He believed mankind has progressed through a series of stages which are interdependent yet self-explanatory (tribal, theocratic, democratic-egalitarian etc).

Hegel’s idea of the relationship between the real and the ideal realm was a very complex and critical one. He did not believe that the real world could be made to conform to ideological preconceptions. Therefore, the distinction between these two realms is quite an apparent one.

However many people tend to make the mistake of not believing or rather merely misunderstanding the concept of human behaviour lying on a realm of consciousness which leads to the error of considering material causes as the essential ones ideal in nature.

As kojeve has pointed out, the understanding of human behavioural development depends upon the comprehension of a certain consciousness since this consciousness helps re-imagine and re-shape the material worldview in its own image.

Fukuyama raises the doubt if we have already reached the end of the history and immediately answers the question with a view that we should not focus on finding this answer in particular but we should rather concentrate on the major historical events that eventually help to shape the world history.

He moves on to discuss the religious fundamentalism that has been noted in recent years in Christian, Muslim and Jewish traditions which has supposedly caused a broad unhappiness in the liberal consumerist societies is a remarkable movement in history. Another major contradiction is the one posed by nationalism and other forms of racial consciousness. However nationalism is not a single phenomenon, but it ranges from different doctrines which eventually ends up creating a confusion.

The post-historical consciousness however reflects a “new thinking”. Although many people consider going back to Marxism and Leninism as the only reasonable and logical solution, these mobilizing ideologies have died in many countries like Poland and so on. Hence an ambiguity takes over adding to the chaos further.

He further talks about a powerful nostalgia that has always existed and will continue to exist which will gradually continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world.