Historians' Fallacies

In This House, This Is What We Believe

I once had a teacher who liked to stroke his chin and say ‘history is all about paradox’. Now, I’m as alert as anybody to the fact that – to borrow another teacher’s favourite saying – ‘history is a literary art’, and good literature may indeed be all about paradox. But something about ‘paradoxical history’ always bothered me, for the same reason the verbs ‘complicate’ and ‘problematise’ bother me. History, after all, is a science; and like all science it exists first and foremost to solve problems.

In The Idea of History (1946), R.G. Collingwood famously drew a comparison between the historian and the detective in a whodunnit. The detective in a whodunnit starts with what seems like a paradox – one murder in the recent BBC series Ludwig occurs in a room locked from the inside; another at a building site appears to be the result of a sprawling web of pure coincidences – but, over the course of the narrative, the detective works out that the paradox isn’t a paradox at all. The writing of history should be similar: you might start with a paradox, but you must end with a solution.

Recently I was pleased to see David Hackett Fischer’s 1970 book Historians’ Fallacies: Toward A Logic of Historical Thought receive some well-earned praise on Twitter. As I myself tweeted: if I were charged with designing a history course for undergraduates, this is the first book I would make mandatory reading. It is certainly an order of magnitude better than E.H. Carr and other guff that’s passed on to students as ‘historiography’, as it’s sometimes confusingly known, or (better) ‘historical theory’.

Fischer, now Professor Emeritus at Brandeis University, demanded from history a high degree of scientific rigour. He hated that ‘logic’ has tended to carry a negative connotation in historical writing, from Carlyle’s disdain for ‘dead logic formula’ to Guizot’s epigram that ‘nothing falsifies history more than logic’. And he hated, too, the chin-stroking indulgence of paradox. Amidst his gallery of historians’ fallacies is the ‘fallacy of contradictory questions’, typified by ‘the virtuoso pieces of A.J.P. Taylor, the Paganini of historical prose, who likes to open an essay with a paradox and to close it with a petitio, or else to begin with an insoluble puzzle and end with an insidious quibble’. Consider, for example, Taylor’s appraisal of Napoleon III: ‘The more we strip off the disguises, the more new disguises appear. Such was Louis Napoleon, the man of mystery.’ (I daresay, Taylor excepted, there is something unmistakably French about this style of historical writing.)

Historians’ Fallacies was Fischer’s debut, published almost thirty years before his magnum opus, Albion’s Seed. This makes his refusal to pull his punches all the more impressive. One reviewer compiled a ‘body count’ of 138, ‘beginning with Herodotus and proceeding through Livy, Tacitus, Voltaire, and von Ranke to many contemporary worthies’. In his review for the New York Times, adorning the blurb as a suitable trophy, Robin W. Winks wrote that

the book must be read three times: the first in anger, the second in laughter, the third in respect… The wisdom is expressed with a certain ruthlessness. Scarcely a major historian escapes unscathed. Ten thousand members of the American Historical Association will rush to the index and breathe a little easier to find their names absent.

One can think of others who’d merit a place in Fischer’s firing line. Whoever devises the GCSE History exams, aside from having an unhealthy obsession with ‘The League of Nations’ and ‘Factors’, is also troublingly preoccupied with questions of historical ‘inevitability’: ‘How far did the League’s membership make failure inevitable? (10 marks)’; ‘How far did the League’s idea of collective security make failure inevitable? (10 marks)’; ‘How far did the League’s failures make failure inevitable? (10 marks)’ etc. etc. Historians’ Fallacies would be a good gift for them in any case, in the hope that they come to learn that such ‘metaphysical questions’ are basically untestable and unprovable by historical method.

Sometimes Fischer may be a bit too exacting; although his book itself shows how logic and fun can coexist, often in life the former comes at the cost of the latter. He wishes to banish from history such lines of inquiry as ‘Renaissance man: medieval or modern?’ Being a product of Cambridge’s Historical Tripos, I am rather partial to this dinner-party type of historical reasoning: I once wrote an examination essay in response to the false dichotomy that ‘Pitt, not Fox, was the true revolutionary’, and my favourite questions on the political thought past-papers were ‘Was Hobbes a royalist or a parliamentarian?’ and ‘Was Hume a Whig or a Tory?’. The Tripos, at least under the Ancien Régime, also has a penchant for Fischer’s ‘fallacy of semantical questions’, such as ‘Who, if anyone, writing in America between 1776 and 1788, can be classified as a “democrat”?’. Of course, when faced with such formulae as these, the real strivers know to ‘question the question’, and invoking Fischer’s fallacies may be the winning strategy.

Every student of history should be made to read Historians’ Fallacies as a comprehensive manual of all the things not to do. The book will inculcate good intellectual practices and make more perceptive readers of history; because once you become familiar with Fischer’s catalogue, you start seeing his fallacies everywhere. You learn to throw out ‘Zeitgeists’ and ‘national wills’; you learn to think about history with rigour and precision. And in Fischer’s ‘historical logic’ you find a sturdy armour against academic jargon, which, as he understood, so often is used ‘for purposes of legitimisation, as ritual incantations which serve to camouflage doubt, confusion, illogic, imprecision, and ignorance’. He then remarked that his fellow Americans seemed to be ‘particularly susceptible’ to this unfortunate fallacy.