Hacker News Reader

Re:whiggish-ness

https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers...

Thanks for posting this. That essay is fantastic. It's actually a perfect complement to that article and the discussion happening in this entire thread.

It beautifully highlights the modern historian's crisis.

You cannot distill history into a framework because any unique set of events seem to be reproduced somewhere else in history with different outcomes.

You must distill history into a framework otherwise it's impossible to reason about and understand.

This seems like a good spot to link to one of my favorite essays on the theme you've raised here - the historian and philosopher Isaiah Berlin (of the hedgehog and the fox fame) on "The Concept of Scientific History." (Short version: he argues that there's no such thing). By the way, I'm happy to see such an interesting discussion of my favorite historical topic on HN - thanks.

http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/cc/scihist.pdf

Reply on news.ycombinator.com