Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis - Volume 129, Issue 1, 2016

Temporal orientation. Philosophy of history in the Netherlands, 1860-1940

David Carr recently argued that philosophy of history in the Hegelian tradition was practical in the Kantian sense of that word: it provided temporal, moral, and political orientation by locating present-day experience on a large-scale historical canvas. This article extends Carr’s claim by arguing that much the same was true for positivist philosophy of history as practised by Henry Thomas Buckle and Herbert Spencer, for neo-Kantian philosophy of history in the Baden School, and for early twentieth-century debates over Oswald Spengler’s The decline of the West (1918-20) and Ernst Troeltsch’s Historicism and its problems (1922). Through the prism of the Dutch reception of these philosophies of history, which includes, of course, Dutch contributions to the genre, this article shows that philosophy of history in the decades between 1860 and 1940 was primarily valued for its practical dimension. Even such apparently technical issues as the nature of value-relevance in Heinrich Rickert’s understanding of historical interpretation almost invariably served as arguments in debates charged with moral, political, and/or religious implications.

Before the parting of the ways: Dutch philosophers on history and historiography, 1920-1970

Institutionally, the flourishing of Dutch philosophy of history after the 1970s was primarily connected with history programmes and departments. Dutch philosophers, on the other hand, have not shown much interest in philosophy of history in the past four decades. Before 1970 this situation was completely different: philosophy of history was an important theme in Dutch academic philosophy. It is sometimes assumed that philosophy of history in The Netherlands before the 1970s mainly involved speculation about the meaning of the historical process from a religious perspective. Most academic philosophers, however, rejected more speculative forms of philosophy of history, and focused on a critical analysis of the foundations of historiography. This article examines the work of four Dutch philosophers of history in the period between 1920 and 1970, Goedewaagen, Pos, Kuypers, and Beerling, and positions their work within the historical development of Dutch philosophy. The strong interest in philosophy of history before 1970 and its sudden disappearance thereafter is explained by the late occurrence in The Netherlands of the parting of the ways between analytic and continental philosophy.

Methodological dualism: Wilhelm Windelband in Dutch philosophy of history textbooks

This article is concerned with Dutch textbooks on the philosophy of history. Special attention is given to the three out of five (!) textbooks written in the 1980s that deal extensively with the question whether history is a social science or not. These textbooks were written by Frank Ankersmit (1984), Antoon van den Braembussche (1985), and Chris Lorenz (1987). The two introductions not dealing with this question are written by the same author, Jan van der Dussen (1986 and 1988). While dealing with this question, the authors invoke the influential distinction made by the German philosopher Wilhelm Windelband (1828-1915) between the idiographic and nomothetic sciences (Wissenschaften). Curiously, his distinction is used to argue for very different and even opposing views on whether history is or should be a social science. Moreover, as it turns out, his reason for distinguishing between the idiographic and nomothetic sciences is very different from what the textbooks would have us believe.

Typically Dutch? About the 1980s in Dutch philosophy of history

According to received opinion, the international high tide of philosophy of history in the Netherlands from the 1980s onwards can be explained by its official institutionalization in academic history education in 1982: in no other state did philosophy of history became an obligatory part of the curriculum – creating a small academic job market for Dutch philosophers of history. This article questions this explanation and argues that the Dutch institutionalization of philosophy of history had already taken place in the 1970s as a result of two interrelated developments: leftist political student activism, aiming at a ‘critical university’, and a simultaneous disciplinary crisis of history as a science. Combined they produced a window of opportunity for university and disciplinary reform in the 1970s, a window that was firmly closed again from the neo-liberal 1980s onwards, although the argument also suggests that in politics past struggles never belong only to the past (as both the introduction of the MUB in 1997 and the Maagdenhuis occupation of 2015 exemplify). Moreover, the success story of Dutch philosophy of history is more complicated than the received view supposes, because many history departments have presented courses in historiography under the label of theory.

The German connection. On the relationship between West German historians and Dutch philosophers of history in the late 20th century

During the high tide of philosophy of history in the Netherlands, German historiography was intensively monitored and debated. Theory of history, however, meant different things in both countries. This article explores the perceptions, the transfers, and the differences between both discourses. It argues that theoretical discussions in the FRG were always tied to concrete German history (i.e. National Socialism). This was one of the reasons why critical philosophy of history did not reach such a high degree of specialization as in the Netherlands. Moreover, Bielefeld modernists deeply distrusted the concept of narrative and rejected most forms of (French and American) postmodernism. These were discussed in the Netherlands at a much earlier stage. Therefore it was only with the erosion of the ‘theoriegeleitete historische Sozialwissenschaft’ after 1990 that a certain degree of return transfer could develop. Dutch theory of history was adopted and translated in the context of the deconstruction of the Bielefeld school and the rise of postmodernism in German historiography.

A Great Divide? Meta-historical reflection in Belgium against the background of the Dutch success story (1900-present)

This article focuses on the history of meta-historical reflection in Belgium and makes a comparison with the Netherlands. Meta-historical reflection is defined broadly as including the traditions of so-called substantive philosophy of history and critical philosophy of history as well as more general reflections on the social relevance of history. The article starts with a bibliometric analysis which is used as a first indicator for the changing success of meta-historical reflection in the Low Countries. A more qualitatively-oriented analysis of the theme follows. It is stressed that a relatively large interest in meta-history existed in Belgium starting from the early 1960s until the second half of the 1970s. This interest was shared by historians as well as philosophers (of science). The third part of the article raises and (partly) answers the question of why this interest in meta-historical reflection declined again during the 1980s. It also asks why meta-historical reflection, in contrast to the situation in the Netherlands, has until today hardly been professionalized and institutionalized in Belgium.