Historical Representation

by Frank Ankersmit

This book fully recognizes the aestheticism inherent in historical writing while acknowledging its claim to satisfy the demands of rational and scientific inquiry. Focusing on the notion of representation and on the necessity of distinguishing between representation and description, it argues that the traditional semantic apparatus of meaning, truth, and reference that we use for description must be redefined if we are to understand properly the nature of historical writing. The author shows that historical representation is essentially aesthetic, though its adequacy can be discussed rationally. He defines the criteria for representational adequacy, and examines the relationship between these criteria and value judgments. He also investigates the historicist conception of historical writing and the notions of identity and narrativity. This investigation takes place against the backdrop of the ideas of four of the most influential contemporary historical Erich Auerbach, Arthur Danto, Hayden White, and Jörn Rüsen. The book aims to identify and to explore for historical theory the juste milieu between the extravagances of the literary approach to historical writing and the narrow-mindedness of empiricists. The search for this juste milieu leads to a rationalist aesthetics of historical writing, a position that repeats both the aesthetic dimension of all historical writing and the criteria defining the rationality of the discipline of history.

Genres: History, Philosophy

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 2, 2002

About the author

aka F.R. Ankersmit

Reviews

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

For full disclosure I did not read all of this book, just the sections that were relevant to the project I am working on.

Ankersmit's book is a very intelligent and challenging exploration of the role language plays in constructing histories, and the ethical importance of working with histories, rather than History. Ankersmit is very interested in the nature of representation, which it turns out is a much more complex question than one might initially think. Ankersmit's theory suggests (if I understand him correctly) that representation is the wrong way to go about thinking about history, instead of thinking that a text 'represents' say the Renaissance, we should say that the text is 'about' the Renaissance. Although this may seem like a minor distinction, 'aboutness' acknowledges the limitedness of any given historical account and the multiplicity of other accounts that all have some degree of validity in describing a particular historical event, era, or trend. In other words, to be 'about' an event like the Renaissance suggests that this individual historical account presents a specific interpretation of one or more components of the thing being linguistically identified as the 'Renaissance,' but there are other potential accounts focusing on other potential components and understanding the term 'Renaissance' in a different way.

[mahatmanto · Rating 4 out of 5]

the etymology of representation gives us access to its ontological properties: `we may re-present something by presenting a subtitute of this thing in its absence. the real thing is not, or is no longer available to us, and something else is given to us in order to replace it... representation and what they represent are ontologically equivalent` [11-12:]