Clayton Roberts

I liked the fact that this book lived up to its title. The author approaches history from a fairly strict analytical perspective to which "logic" is an adequate label. He also makes reference to a broad range of previous literature in the field of analytic philosophy of history. I must admit that I had practically no previous familiarity with this literature and I was surprised that there is so much of it. The author also has a gift for clear presentation so this book was a pleasant read. He does not let his readers lose their grip of the argumentative thread like many other academics do.

But despite these positives, I still have to say that I did not like this book. There are two reasons for this. The minor reason is that the author relies too much on citing other writers and this clearly comes at the expense of his own argumentation. The book is essentially a long literature review where the author provides a running commentary on what other theorists have written and follows it up with a few pages of his own thoughts here and there. Even in the last two pages of the book he makes reference to seven (!) other authors instead of concentrating on formulating his own conclusions. It is of course good academic practice to do a literature review and, like I said, this author has a masterful touch for making it interesting, but he still leaves his own points of view far too brief and underdeveloped. Quite often it seems that he is just writing footnotes to what others have said before.

The major reason why I didn't like this book that much is that I think the argument is based on a rather biased view of historical writing. Good historiography, as I understand it, can be written without really "explaining" anything in the narrow logical manner on which the author focuses his analysis. A passage from page 239 of the book illustrates this well. Here the author summarizes the preceding argument with the following words:

"Historical explanation begins with an exact description of the aggregate event whose occurrence the historian wishes to explain. It proceeds by the historian's breaking that event into subevents, discovering the authors of those events, elucidating their purposes relating those purposes to their desires and beliefs, and investigating the origins of those desires and beliefs. When the historian has done all this, he or she has brought the search for a total explanation to an end".

I recognize the form of historiography described here. It is a narrative focused on the actions of selected persons and the consequences that those actions produced. If you are interested in biographical history and inclined to ask "why did this event occur?", then the author's definition of an ideal explanation certainly fits the bill for what you are looking for.

But I've read hundreds of excellent history books where individual actions are at the periphery of the narrative and where nothing is actually "explained". I deliberately avoid biographical history because I dislike its focus on small details. One thing I have learned from my reading is that history can be educational even without being explanatory. For example, I can study a narrative of Hitler's rise to power and learn a lot about organized violence and the preconditions of democracy without asking for an explanation for why he came to power.

I am therefore not at all convinced that the question "Why?" is at the center of historical writing, as the author clearly assumes. He does often recognize that history can be written from many different perspectives, but for reasons that are unclear to me he always returns to the assumption that the historian's only question is "why?. I did not consider that line of thought to be at all correct. The logic which this book presents was for that reason quite uninteresting.… (más)