TIMELINE 2020
However, to speak of a historical fact presupposes selection and judgement, and so defining historical facts as objective mind-independent reality becomes problematic. Consider the statement: “The Spanish Armada was defeated in 1588.” On the surface this appears to be objective and wholly impersonal since there is no real dispute amongst historians as to the accuracy of this fact. However, the only reason we are interested to know that the Spanish Armada was defeated in 1588 is that historians regard it as a major historical event. The fact that you had breakfast this morning, or went to work by train, car, bicycle etc… is a fact about the past, but it is hardly a historical fact. A historian is necessarily subjective and must choose to include certain facts that enhance their perception of particular issues. This is what R.G. Collingwood meant when he remarked “in actual experience we never get a pure datum: whatever we call a datum is in point of fact already interpreted by thought.” In the same way, Karl Popper argued that our picture about the past has been preselected and predetermined for us, not so much by accident as by people who were consciously or unconsciously imbued with a particular view and thought the facts which supported that view worth preserving. He observed that “the so-called ‘sources’ of history only record such facts as appeared sufficiently interesting to record.” For example, consider the illustration given by E.H. Carr of Gustav Stresemann, the Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic. When he died in 1929, he left behind an enormous mass of papers relating to his tenure as Foreign Minister. These documents were later published by his faithful secretary Bernhard as “Stresemanns Vermächtnis.” However, what is interesting is that when Stresemann died, his western policy seemed to be the most important and rewarding part of his foreign policy - with his negotiation of the Locarno Treaties, the admission of Germany to the League of Nations, the Dawes and Young plans, and the withdrawal of the allied occupation armies from the de-militarised Rhineland. His eastern policy, on the other hand, seemed to lead nowhere, with masses of documents which were not particularly interesting and added nothing to his reputation. As a result, his eastern policy was significantly under-represented in the publication, and Stresemann is largely judged by his relations with the west, despite the fact that he devoted a far more constant and anxious attention to relations with the Soviet Union, and they played a far larger part in his foreign policy as a whole. This example demonstrates Popper’s argument that in history, it is incredibly difficult to separate subject from object and so to speak about history as the study of a wealth of objective mind-independent ‘real’ events is problematic. Both the process of recording and interpreting events is an active selection and evaluation rather than a passive activity. However, the descriptions of historical procedures proposed by Popper and others that make similar criticisms, do not correspond with what most historians think they are doing, or find themselves to be doing in practice. E.P. Thompson noted in “The Poverty of the Theory” that “by far the greater part of historical evidence has survived for reasons quite unrelated to any intention of the actors to project an image of themselves to posterity.” For example, the records of administration, taxation, legislation, religious belief and practice, the accounts of temples or of monasteries, and the archaeological evidence of their sites. The intention of none of the actors involved in these sources was to record interesting facts to some general posterity. It was simply to unite and to secure property in particular ways, to negotiate a human relationship, to show appreciation for a deity, and so on. Moreover, Popper ignores what historians are actually interested in when he criticises the difficulty to separate subject from object. An important concern historical study is, precisely, the intentions of the recorders and through this their interests. The intentions themselves are an object of enquiry from which can be derived explanations and important evidence about the past. For example, when we reconsider the example given by Carr of the foreign policy of Gustav Stresemann, we can see that it is of PAGE 53
