De spiegel van het verleden. Exploraties I: geschiedtheorie

by Frank Ankersmit

Dit boek presenteert de taal van de historicus als het materiaal waaruit de spiegel van het verleden gemaakt is. De historiografieën van Gibbon, Bilderdijk, Tocqueville, Talmon en Foucault worden getoond als spiegelbeelden van het verleden waarin wij ons ook nu nog kunnen en moeten herkennen.

277 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

aka F.R. Ankersmit

Reviews

[Sense of History]

An early work (1996) from one of the giants of Theoretical History (the title in English: The Mirror of the Past. Explorations in the Theory of History). And it shows, as I explain in the review below.

I agree with Ankersmit that the writing of history does not have to meet the standards of positive sciences. The past is kind of a twilight zone, quite different from the palpable reality: on the one hand it is a foreign country, strange and beyond our reach (forever gone); on the other hand the past in a quite complex way has a lot of impact on the reality we live in today, and so to a certain point it is palpable. This ambiguity imposes a very different kind of exploring and certainly not a reductionistic subject-object-treatment.

But the 'jump' Ankersmit makes to 'transversal reason' (another kind of rationality) and his opposition to statements about the 'real reality', that's a bridge too far for me. Of course, an historical discourse always is a construction (or if you prefer: a narrative), a miserable attempt of man to get grip on reality. But to state that reality doesn't exist and the only thing that exists are texts and discussions about texts, now that is a relapse in solipsism, and it only leads to relativism and arbitrariness.

For me, there is a real 'reality', and so there also is a real 'past', with an existence of its own, that delimits the attempts of man to get a grip on it. The truth is out there, and I agree it is very doubtful man can grasp it in its fulness, but that does not mean that anything goes. The dynamic reality of truth just can't be ignored.

Now I must concede, Ankersmit tries to avoid relativism, and he certainly is not an advocate of "anything goes", in the vain that the pope of postmodernism, Keith Jenkins, meant it. But his propositions about unity, coherence and originality as criteria for a plausible discourse on the past, aren't quite convincing to me.

Addendum: in the meanwhile I read much more on Ankersmit's evolution, and his gradually moving away from a clearly postmodernist stance. In this early work (1996) he clearly hadn't taken the full turn yet. See also Jonathan Menezes. art. The Limits of the 'Autumn of Historiography': on Frank Ankersmit's Postmodernist Moment. In: Journal of the Philosophy of History, vol. 15, nr1, 2021, p84-105.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tough reading, especially the first 3 articles, about the theory of history. Ankersmit is a follower of Hayden White and his linguistic turn, though not without criticism. His sentences (in Dutch ofcourse) are very long with lots of clauses and philosophical vocabulary; sometimes it just isn't Dutch anymore. But nevertheless interesting, about the relationship between subject and reality, and the role of language.
The second half of the book is more about historiography and politics; I appreciated the introduction to Jacob Talmon and the essay on memorials.
See also my review in my SenseofHistory-alias: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2....