Excerpt

Historical Modes: Particular Events and General Trends

When considering these two quotes from Newton’s early and late scholarship [23, 24], we can discern a significant shift of interest and of approach or method. In the Principia, Newton sought to reconcile the regular motion through space and time of all massive bodies, regardless of size, position or composition. The tone is one of parsimonious reasoning coupled to a mild contempt for storytelling or “hypotheses.” In the Chronology, Newton provides a list of names and places which he sought to tether to an objective astronomical calendar. There is no effort to discern regulatory, only a temporal sequence. These two perspectives can be seen to constitute two poles of historical inquiry, one mechanistic and regular, and the other, incidental and particular. This tension lies at the core of most, if not all, historical inquiries. In this chapter I shall outline a few of the implications of these polarizing tendencies of history through the lens of evolutionary biology and complexity science, and search for a means of overcoming them through an appropriate transdisciplinary language. The example of Newton serves to establish that these two approaches to dynamics can reside within the same research mind and program, and secondarily, serves to preemptively refute a few of the more tendentious dichotomies that arise in discussions between the “star-gazing” scientist and “flesh-eating” humanist. 

I take the position that historical explanation (as opposed to historical recreation or reconstruction in the form of systematic description and other forms of historical scene-setting and portraiture) seeks to account for some pattern of behavior in what we might call the arbitrary present. The arbitrary present (AP), in contrast to the chronological present (CP)—the temporal now. The arbitrary present is any date over the course of history for which we seek an explanation in terms of a series of antecedent events. The AP could just as well be 1492, 1687, 1914, or 2050. This idea was articulated, somewhat furtively, by Braudel when he suggested that “is it not the secret aim and underlying motive of history to seek to explain the present?” [2]. Perhaps this is the primary aim of history, and that reconstruction of the past is a step towards this goal, and not the natural terminus of historical inquiry. I will have much to say about “events” in the course of this argument. The claim is that when historians move towards the analysis of well-curated, quantitative data sets in the near future, this concept will again become central, as it will be necessary to organize observations in a time series, and events will represent preferred and principled levels of granularity for these observations. 

Newton’s work reveals at least two tendencies, or modes of historical explanation (these are in contrast to non-historical means of accounting for the AP which I shall discuss shortly). One historical mode is to enumerate, in as much detail as there are facts available, the causal sequence of events culminating in the desired variables describing the AP. Hence if we are interested in the colonial history of Mexico, to take one classic example [25]: 

While at Cempoalla Cortes received a message from Escalante, his commander at Villa Rica, informing him there were four strange ships hovering off the coast, and that they took no notice of his repeated signals. This intelligence greatly alarmed the general, who feared they might be a squadron sent by the governor of Cuba to interfere with his movements. In much haste, he set out at the head of a few horsemen, and, ordering a party of light infantry to follow, posted back to Villa Rica. The rest of the army he left in charge of Alvarado and of Gonzalo de Sandoval, a young officer, who had begun to give evidence of the uncommon qualities which have secured him so distinguished a rank among the conquerors of Mexico.

 —William H. Prescott,
History of the Conquest of Mexico 

References

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[18] Kirkwood, Burton. The History of Mexico. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2005. 

[19] Krakauer, D. C. “Evolution, Complexity and Metahistoricism.” Nouvelles perspectives en sciences sociales 4 (2009): 53-67.

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[23] Newton, Isaac. The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728). Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010. 

[24] Newton, Isaac. Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687). Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2007.

[25] Prescott, William H. History of the Conquest of Mexico. The Modern Library. New York, NY: Random House, 1843, 2001 Edition.

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[27] Thomas, Hugh. The Spanish Civil War. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1994.

[28] Vilar, Pierre. “The Age of Don Quixote.” New Left Review, I/68, 1971.

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