History : For and Against
USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. By Pieter Geyl. (O.U.P., 20s.) THESE two books are of unequal value. Signor Rossi, whose work is known to students of Lord Herbert, Berkeley and Swift, has written an attack on historicism; in particular, on the historicist idea that all political power is justified as an outcome of ineluctable historical forces. But his attack is spoilt by his constantly trying to refute too much. In order to overthrow historicist interpretations of history he denies the possibility of any genuine knowledge of history at all. This sort of swingeing attack is liable to backfire, for the reader who swallows Rossi's mis-equation of the pos- sibility of historicist theories with the possibility of historical knowledge may infer that since, pace Rossi, fairly reliable historical knowledge does exist, equally reliable historicist theories may also exist. Rossi again tries to refute too much when, against the Hegelian and historicist idea that philosophical thought unfolds itself down the generations with an inherent logic, he depicts philosophy from Thales to Aristotle as a 'dreary story.' This strange thesis involves some amazing misjudgements. The handful of pre-Socratics brought western civilisation to life instead of leaving it tabu-ridden and inert; yet Rossi writes : 'An average mind could have taken any of the steps that lead from Thales to Plato.' Heraclitus and Democritus and Socrates—average minds, forsooth! Even his specific criticism is wrong : the attempt to explain manifold appearances in terms of a single factor, such as water, was abandoned—tacitly by Anaximenes and explicitly by Empedocles, Anaxagoras and the Atomists.
Rossi nowhere criticises the most _seductive and dangerous pretension of historicism, its claim to foretell the broad course of future development, and his way of attacking the idea of progress suggests the reason for this omission. Bertrand Russell has said that he went through a phase in which he believed that the opposite of anything Hegel had said was true. This seems to be Rossi's attitude in this book. Hegel said that things get better and better; therefore, things get worse and worse until, in the end, 'technical improvements are bound to destroy mankind.' It seems that historicists have gone wrong in being optimistic rather than in being historicist.
The avowed aim of A Plea for Man is to free men from the idea of irresistible historical forces. But the author does this by
assuring men that their history is baseless, their philosophy dreall' their science a dangerous and contemptible game with gadgets: and that they are sunk in 'miserable, well-deserved unhapPines5, and in 'moral rottenness' and bound for eventual destruction. back-handed plea. No one is more aware of the distorting uses to which history can be put than Professor Geyl. But he also knows that the only cure for bad history is better history. If his new little book does not carry the argument beyond where he left it in his Debates With Historians, it will at least serve as a clear and courteous introduction to the larger book. J. W. N. WAT/CIS6
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