THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022 65rian of Tudor England, seems to have
meant when he described history as
“imagination, controlled by learning and
scholarship, learning and scholarship
rendered meaningful by imagination.”
A German term for this (which Cohen
misattributes to Ranke) is Einfühlungs
vermögen, which Cohen defines as “the
capacity for adapting the spirit of the
age whose history one is writing and of
entering into the very being of histori-
cal personages, no matter how remote.”
A simpler translation would be “empa-
thy.” It’s in short supply today. We live
in a judgy age, and judgments are quick.
But what would it mean to empathize
with a slave trader? Is understanding a
form of excusing?
History writing is based on the faith
that events, despite appearances, don’t
happen higgledy-piggledy—that al-
though individuals can act irrationally,
change can be explained rationally. As
Cohen says, Gibbon thought that, as
philosophy was the search for first prin-
ciples, history was the search for the
principle of movement. Many Western
historians, even “scientific” historians,
like Ranke, assumed that the past has a
providential design. Ranke spoke of “the
hand of God” behind historical events.
Marxist historians, like Hobsbawm,
believe in a law of historical develop-
ment. Some writers of history, such as
those in the Annales school, think that
political events do happen pretty much
higgledy-piggledy (which is why they
are notoriously difficult to predict, al-
though commentators somehow make
a living doing just that), but that there
are regularities beneath the surface
chaos—cycles, rhythms, the longue durée.
Still, history is not a science. Essen-
tially, as A.J. P. Taylor said, it is “simply
a form of story-telling.” It’s storytelling
with facts. And the facts do not speak
for themselves, and they are not just
there for the taking. They are, as the
English historian E. H. Carr put it, “like
fish swimming about in a vast and some-
times inaccessible ocean; and what the
historian catches will depend, partly on
chance, but mainly on what part of the
ocean he chooses to fish in and what
tackle he chooses to use—these two fac-
tors being, of course, determined by the
kind of fish he wants to catch. By and
large, the historian will get the kind of
facts he wants.”
It’s interpretation all the way down.
The lesson to be drawn from this, I
think, is that the historian should never
rule anything out. Everything, from the
ownership of the means of production
to the color that people painted their
toenails, is potentially relevant to our
ability to make sense of the past. The
Annales historians called this approach
“total history.” But, even in total history,
you catch some fish and let the others
go. You try to get the facts you want.A
nd what do historians want the
facts for? The implicit answer of
Cohen’s book is that there are a thou-
sand purposes—to indoctrinate, to en-
tertain, to warn, to justify, to condemn.
But the purpose is chosen because it
matters personally to the historian, and
it is, almost always, because it matters
to the historian that the history that is
produced matters to us. As Cohen says,
it is a great irony of writing about the
past that “any author is the prisoner of
their character and circumstances yet
often they are the making of him.”
What history never does is provide
an impersonal and objective account of
past events. As the anthropologist Claude
Lévi-Strauss once put it (dismissively),
all history is “history-for.” What did
Gibbon write the “Decline and Fall” for?
Cohen says it was to warn eighteenth-century Britain of mistakes that might
threaten its empire, to prevent it from
suffering the fate of Rome. In other
words, Gibbon thought his story could
be useful. He therefore needed to por-
tray Roman civilization in ways that
Britons could identify with, and Chris-
tianity in ways that suited the anticler-
ical prejudices of the Age of Reason.
And what about the poor fellow’s body
and its sad infirmities? Cohen thinks (as
Woolf did) that his unattractiveness pro-
vided Gibbon with an impenetrable cloak
of irony. He learned to keep his emo-
tional expectations in check, and this
made him a cool analyst of religious zeal.
Lévi-Strauss maintained that history
in modern societies is like myth in pre-
modern cultures. It’s the way we explain
ourselves to ourselves. The decision
about what we want that explanation
to look like can begin with the simple
act of picking the date we want the story
to start. Is it 1603 or 1619? We choose
one of those years, and events line up
accordingly. People complain that this
makes history ideological. But what else
could it be? “The Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire” is ideological
through and through. No one thinks it’s
not history. Certainly Gibbon never
doubted it. “Shall I be accused of van-
ity,” he wrote in his will, “if I add that
a monument is superfluous?” ••