THE ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCEBETWEEN HISTORY AND SCIENCE

RAYMOND MARTIN

ABSTRACT

My thesis is that there is a deep, intractable difference, not between history and scienceper se, but between paradigmatically central kinds of historical interpretations—callthem humanistic historical interpretations—and theories of any sort that are character-istic of the physical sciences. The difference is that unlike theories in the physical sci-ences good humanistic historical interpretations (purport to) reveal subjectivity, agency,and meaning. I usethe controversy provoked by Gordon Wood’s recent reinterpretationof the American Revolution to illustrate and substantiate this thesis. I also use it tosupport the claim that unless one attends to the ways in which humanistic historicalinterpretations reveal subjectivity, agency, and meaning one has no hope whatsoeverof getting the epistemology of historical studies right.

I. INTRODUCTION

The difference isn’t really essential. And it’s not between history and science.Even so, Idealist philosophers of history who argued that there is an essentialdifference between history and science and made various proposals about whatit is were more right than their positivist antagonists who argued that historyis merely proto or applied science. There is a deep, intractable difference, notbetween history and science per se, but between paradigmatically central kindsof historical interpretations—I shall call them humanistic historical interpreta-tions—and theories of any sort that are characteristic of the physical sciences.

Simply put, the difference is this: Good theories in the physical sciences (pur-port to) reveal the nature of things, as well as how kinds of things are relatedto each other and why. Sometimes they reveal which particular things happenedand why. Usually they don’t reveal what it is (or was) like to be those things(or kinds of things) since usually—we assume—there is nothing it is (or was)like. And usually they don’t include an account of what events mean. Goodhumanistic historical interpretations do. That is, usually they (purport to) re-veal not only what happened and why but also what it was like to be the peoplewho did and/or suffered whatever happened and what it means (to us now)that these people did and/or suffered whatever happened.

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Successfully revealing what it was like to be the people whose history is underconsideration involves portraying their points of view and agencies accuratelyand in a way that is balanced and that facilitates empathic identification withthem. By their points of view I mean how they understood and experiencedtheir lives. By their agencies I mean the narratively important roles they playedin the story that’s being told.

Historians give a balanced portrayal of point of view and agency when theirinterpretations are appropriately inclusive, that is, when they give due repre-sentation to all of the points of view and agencies that are importantly relevantto whatever is being interpreted. They portray subjectivity and agency in a waythat facilitates empathic identification when their interpretations help us—theiraudiences—to imagine ourselves experiencing, understanding, and acting asthe people whose history is being interpreted experienced, understood, andacted.

Conveying meaning typically involves portraying the events under discussionso that we can grasp them whole, that is, so that we can get an accurate overviewof what happened in a way that facilitates our appreciating its human signifi-cance. Since there is no limit to the ways in which something can be humanlysignificant there is no such thing as the meaning of events. Even so, since formost historical interpretations there are better and worse ways of relating theevents under discussion to the shared concerns and values of those who want tounderstand them, there are better and worse accounts of meaning. In historicalinterpretations one conveysmeaning successfully to the extent that one conveysit in one of these better ways.

In saying that good humanistic historical interpretations reveal subjectivity,agency, and meaning I’m not making a conceptual point, say, about the notionof “historical interpretation.” I’m not even saying that all humanistic historicalinterpretations reveal subjectivity, agency, and meaning. What I’m saying,rather, is that humanistic historical interpretations are central to historicalstudies proper, and that given the norms that currently exist both among profes-sional historians and also among sophisticated consumers of historical studies,humanistic historical interpretations tend to be regarded as more adequate,all else being equal, as they more successfully reveal subjectivity, agency, andmeaning. Nothing of the sort can be said of theories in the physical sciences.That is why it is a mistake to regard historical interpretations generally or eventypically as if they were theories—proto, applied, or whatever—of any sort thatare characteristic of the physical sciences.

Most historians, I think, would not regard what I am claiming as controver-sial. With respect to the issue of revealing subjectivity, J. H. Hexter, for in-stance, has said that a chief value of historical studies is that they enhanceone’s “ability to know and understand what it is like to be another.”1 E. P.Thompson has stressed the importance of focusing on what he called the “lived

1. J. H. Hexter, The History Primer (New York, 1971), 207, 215.

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experience” and agency of those at the bottom of society.2 And David Cannadinerecently remarked that A. J. P. Taylor’s inability “to get beneath the skins ofother people, to project himself imaginatively and empathically into their heartsor minds” was “a great limitation” in his work as a historian.3

With respect to the issue of portraying subjectivity inclusively and in a bal-anced way, Isaiah Berlin has said that in historical studies “we wish, ideally atleast, to be presented, if not with a total experience—which is a logical as wellas practical impossibility—at least with something . . . seen from as many pointsof view” as possible.4 Bernard Bailyn has said that even though recent interpre-tations of the American Revolution “have allowed us to see with some claritythe pattern of fears, beliefs, attitudes and perceptions that became the ideologyof the Revolution” they have “not yet made clear why any sensible, well-in-formed, right-minded American with a modicum of imagination and commonsense could possibly have opposed the Revolution. . . . [And] until that is done,until we look deliberately at the development from the other side around, wehave not understood what the issues really were, what the struggle was allabout.” 5 Howard Zinn has reminded historians of the importance of their re-porting “accurately all of the subjectivities in a situation,” in particular, thatthey balance their accounts of slavery in America by conveying what it was likenot only from the slaveowner’s point of view but also from the slave’s point ofview.6 And so on.

If we turn from the things historians say about historical interpretations tothe interpretations themselves, the same preoccupation with subjectivity,agency, and meaning shows up. Consider, for instance, the following represen-tative sample of remarks about subjectivity scattered throughout GordonWood’s recent and highly acclaimed The Radicalism of the American Revo-lution:

We will never comprehend the distinctiveness of that premodern world until we ap-preciate the extent to which many ordinary people still accepted their own lowliness.Only then can we begin to understand the radical changes in their consciousness . . .that the American Revolution brought about.7

[T]he colonists were much more acutely conscious of legal dependence—and perhapsof the valueof independence—than Englishmen across the Atlantic. Under such circum-stances it was often difficult for the colonists to perceive the distinctive peculiarity ofblack slavery.8

2. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American HistoricalProfession (Cambridge, Eng., 1988), 441.

3. David Cannadine, Review, TLS (February 4, 1994), 4.4. Isaiah Berlin, “The Concept of Scientific History,” History and Theory 1 (1960), 1–31. Re-

printed in Philosophical Analysis and History, ed. William Dray (New York, 1966), 5–53.5. Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), x.6. Howard Zinn, The Politics of History (Boston, 1970), 41.7. Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992), 30.8. Ibid., 54.

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Since people in this society noticed everything, personal reputations counted a greatdeal. . . . We today may be astonished by the “triviality” of these defamation cases, butslander was anything but a frivolous matter for the people of that very different society.9

In this face-to-face society, particular individuals—specific gentlemen or great men—loomed large, and people naturally explained human events as caused by the motivesand wills of those who seemed to be in charge. . . . No one as yet could conceive of themassive and impersonal social processes—industrialization, urbanization, moderniza-tion—that we invoke so blithely to describe large-scale social developments. Such com-plicated processes were simply not part of people’s consciousness.10

We shall never understand the unique character of the revolutionary leaders untilwe appreciate the seriousness with which they took these new republican ideas of whatit was to be a gentleman. No generation in American history has ever been so self-conscious about the moral and social values necessary for public leadership.11

In modern eyes Washington’s concern for his reputation is embarrassing; it seemsobsessive and egotistical. But his contemporaries understood. All gentlemen tried scru-pulously to guard their reputations, which is what they meant by their honor. To havehonor across space and time was to have fame, and fame . . . was what most of thefounding fathers were after, Washington above all.12

So, Wood has been preoccupied with subjectivity. Whether his account of it isbalanced is a separate question. As we shall see, some of his critics feel that itis not.

What I’m claiming about the importance in humanistic historical studies ofportraying point of view and agency accurately and ina way that is balanced andthat facilitates empathy has been ignored or denied in almost all positivistically-inspired philosophy of history, which includes almost all analytic philosophyof history. The tendency among positivists and their philosophical descendantshas been to regard historical interpretations as if they were proto or appliedtheories of a sort that issue from the physical sciences. Typical, for instance, hasbeen Ernest Nagel’s view that “the distinction between history and theoreticalscience” is “fairly analogous to the difference between geology and physics, orbetween medical diagnosis and physiology” 13 and Murray Murphey’s view thatsince historical interpretations “explain facts in just the way physical theoriesexplain the behavior of subatomic particles” 14 they should be evaluated in justthe same ways. I claim that such views overlook the obvious: that it is a desider-atum of humanistic historical interpretations but not of theories in the physicalsciences that they reveal subjectivity, agency, and meaning.

II. HUMANISTIC VERSUS PHYSICALISTIC UNDERSTANDING

Even though positivists and their philosophical descendants have tended toreject what I am suggesting, it still may seem as if what I am suggesting is old

9. Ibid., 59–60.10. Ibid., 60.11. Ibid., 197.12. Ibid., 207.13. Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation

(London, 1961), 550.14. Murray G. Murphey, Our Knowledge of the Historical Past (Indianapolis, 1973), 112.

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hat. After all, ever since Vico it has seemed to many philosophers of history,but particularly to Idealists, that properly understanding and/or interpretingthe human past centrally involves putting oneself imaginatively into the placesof the people whose behavior one is trying to interpret. The point of doing this,these Idealists claimed, is to reexperience or rethink how the people one istrying to understand experienced or thought. In other words, it has seemed tothese Idealists, first, that properly understanding and/or interpreting the humanpast centrally involves appreciating what it was like to be the people underconsideration, second, that there neither is nor could be any such role for thissort of empathy in the sciences, and, third, that the role of this sort of empathyin historical studies is therefore a defining difference between historical studiesand the sciences.

Instead of these claims, I want to suggest that what these philosophersthought was true of historical studies, in contradistinction to the sciences, isactually true of humanistic studies in contradistinction to physicalistic studies,including physicalistic historical studies. In other words, for the point that thesephilosophers were trying to make the proper cut is not between science andhistory, not even between a scientific and a historical way of understanding(since history too may be regarded appropriately as including a scientific wayof understanding), but, rather, between a physicalistic and a humanistic wayof understanding.

Idealists assumed, plausibly at the time, that it is because historical studiesare about humans and science is about mere physical objects and events thatempathic attempts to understand what it was like to be someone figure impor-tantly only in historical studies. However, there are scientific studies, such ashuman physiology and kinesiology, that are about people and their activitiesand yet that have little, if any, role for the sort of empathy the Idealists had inmind. Others have suggested that historical studies differ from the physicalsciences in that onlyhistorical studies attend to point of view.However, theoriesin the physical sciences do not ignore point of view. In optics, for instance,scientists have attempted to account for how changes in an individual’s pointof observation produce systematic “flow” patterns in his or her visual field.15

Of course, there is a deep difference in the way in which humanistic historicalinterpretations and theories in the physical sciences portray point of view. Thedifference is that only humanistic historical interpretations include in their ac-counts of point of view the role of ideology, beliefs, and values. The more fullya historical interpretation does this and in particular the more fully it portraysthe ways in which humans now and at the time under consideration explain(or, explained) their own behavior in such terms the more humanistic it is.By comparison, the ways in which theories in the physical sciences sometimesattempt to account for “point of view” are “external” (or, physicalistic).

15. Ulric Neisser, “Five Kinds of Self-Knowledge,” Philosophical Psychology 1 (1988), 37–59.Reprinted in Self and Identity, ed. Daniel Kolak and Raymond Martin (New York, 1991), 386–406,at 387–388.

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This way of understanding the differences between humanistic historicalstudies and physicalistic scientific studies sheds light not only on the differencesbetween theories in the physical sciences and interpretations in historical studiesproper but also on differences within the discipline of history among more andless humanistically oriented studies. Among historians of colonial America,for instance, there has been throughout most of this century a split betweenthe more humanistically oriented Whig and neo-Whig historians, on the onehand, and the more social-science oriented Progressives, on the other. The cruxof their disagreement has been and still is over how much explanatory weightto give inexplaining peoples’ behavior to the rich array of thoughts and feelingsthat the people themselves appealed to in explaining their own behavior. CharlesBeard, for instance, the quintessential Progressive, argued that the delegatesto the Constitutional Convention of 1787 designed the Constitution as theydid not for the reasons they gave but, rather, to advance their own economicinterests.16 The neo-Whig Edmund Morgan, on the other hand, in respondingto a question that he said “everyone who examines the American Revolutionmust sooner or later face”—the question, “Were the colonists sincere in theirdeclarations of principle or were they merely trying to avoid the unpleasanttask of paying taxes that they ought to have paid?”—answered that his “bookhas proceeded on the conviction that the colonists’ attachment to principle wasgenuine.” 17 For present purposes the important point is not who, if either, ofthese historians is right, but that Beard’s suggestion that “economics explainthe mostest” does not circumvent appeals to human motives and values, as intheories in the physical sciences, since self-interest is a motive as well as a value;rather, it reduces radically the complexity of this appeal.

It is primarily this reduction in thecomplexity of the appeal tohuman motivesand values that provokes the ire of more humanistic historians. Perry Miller,for instance—who gained his considerable fame primarily by showing that themembers of one major segment of colonial American society, the Puritans,experienced the New World and particularly the progression of events that ledto democracy in America not as a triumphal march toward freedom, but rather,with initially high hopes followed by bitter disappointment—wrote recentlythat he is vulnerable to the charge of “being so very naive as to believe thatthe way men think has some influence upon their actions.” In a recent review,Miller wrote of a younger group of historians whose work he likes that they“write from a depth and with a fluency unknown to [the Progressives] Beardand Curti because theyunderstand what ideas mean . . . because they have takenthe life of ideas into their own consciousness.”18 In expressing such sentiments,Miller, in my terms, has opted for humanism. More recently, it should be noted,many historians, including some neo-Progressives, have integrated social-science and humanistic orientations.

16. Charles Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States [1913](New York, 1935), 7–8.

17. Edmund Morgan, The Birth of the Republic 1763–89 [1956], 3d ed. (Chicago, 1992), 50.18. Both of Miller’s remarks are quoted in Novick, 380–381.

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III. THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

I want now to use the controversy provoked by Gordon Wood’s recent reinter-pretation of the American Revolution to illustrate and substantiate my claimthat revealing subjectivity, agency, and meaning is central to humanistic histor-ical studies and in particular to the ways historians evaluate the merits of com-peting interpretations; indeed, it is so central that unless one attends to it onehas no hope whatsoever of getting the epistemology of historical studies right.I also want to use this controversy to illustrate a way in which philosophy ofhistory can be done that is both responsive to traditional analytic epistemolog-ical concerns yet closely tied to data derived from actual interpretational con-troversy among historians.19

Wood’s study is regarded by manyas one of the most important contributionsto early American history in thirty or so years. During most of those decadeshistorians bemoaned the absence of new interpretive frameworks for under-standing the American Revolution. Wood has now provided one. Moreover instriking contrast to the trend among historians to characterize the Revolutionas conservative—in the opinion of some hardly a revolution at all—Wood hasargued that it was “as radical and as revolutionary as any in history”—notprimarily because of how it changed political arrangements, but rather, becauseof how it changed social relationships.20 Wood portrays these changes by de-scribing a transformation that occurred in America not just at the time of therevolutionary hostilities but throughout the eighteenth and into the nineteenthcentury. The transformation was from a monarchically to a much more demo-cratically organized society. He says that to the Revolutionary leaders suddenly“all the fine calibrations of rank and degrees of unfreedom of the traditionalmonarchical society became absurd and degrading” and that, whatever mayhave provoked the Revolution initially, it soon “became a full-scale assault ondependency.” However, in his view, instead of creating a new order of enlight-ened Republicanism, that is, of benevolence and selflessness, the Revolution,to the dismay of its leaders, instead bred “social competitiveness and individu-alism.” Wood concludes that by the time the Revolution had run its course,American societyhad been radically transformed. “Oneclass did notoverthrowanother; the poor did not supplant the rich. But social relationships—the waypeople were connected one to another—were changed, and decisively so. Bythe early years of the nineteenth century the Revolution had created a societyfundamentally different from the colonial society of the eighteenth century. Itwas in fact a new society unlike any that had ever existed anywhere in theworld.” 21

19. For more on this approach see Raymond Martin, The Past Within Us (Princeton, 1989);Martin, “Objectivity and Meaning in Historical Studies: Toward a Post-Analytic View,” Historyand Theory 32 (1993), 25–50; Martin, Review essay of Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and MargaretJacob, Telling the Truth about History, in History and Theory 34 (1995), 320–329.

20. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 5.21. Ibid., 6.

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Joyce Appleby, whose interpretation of the Revolution is in many ways quiteclose to Wood’s, objects towhat she sees asWood’s suggestion that the transfor-mation from Republican ideals to democratic reality was brought about merelyby ordinary people pursuing their economic self-interests. In Wood’s account,she says, thefailure ofAmericans to live up to the standards of disinterestednessthat define enlightened republicanism betrays the Revolution: “republicanismrepresents the pinnacle of civilized social order”; the transformation to democ-racy—ideologically as well as socially—is all down hill. Wood’s interpretation,she points out, is like Perry Miller’s account of Puritan declension—a story ofinitially high hopes that get dashed.22 In Appleby’s view, that is the wrong story-line:

Only democracy comes into being without a singular will. Wood’s depiction of democ-racy as indifferent to virtue permits him to elide the question of agency in the radicaltransformation he describes. Rather than detail how the opponents [led by Jefferson]of the Federalist gentry carried the day, Wood depicts radicalization devoid of intention-ality except the assumed common impulse to strive for more. It [democracy] just hap-pened when the elite made critical concessions, giving ordinary men an opening forexpressing their ordinary desires. . . . [T]here is no examination of the new intellectualcommitments and political organization that it took to usher in democracy.23

In other words, the problem with Wood’s view, according to Appleby, is thatwhile “monarchy and republicanism are the products of intention” democracyis merely a by-product of self-serving attempts by people to better themselvesmaterially. If Appleby is right about this, then the topography of Wood’s inter-pretation is wrong because his account of subjectivity and agency is deficient.

In Appleby’s alternative interpretation, three things primarily explain the“new ideological imperatives” that underlay the transition to democracy: first,the abolition movement, which she says “brought northern slavery to an end”and turned the Mason-Dixon line “into the most conspicuous ideological dividein the world”; second, sympathetic interest among Americans in the ideals ofthe French Revolution, which she says gave the movement toward democracyin the United States “its epoch-making momentum”; and, third, philosophy, inparticular a view of the world and of social relationships that was inspired byEuropeans and articulated in America by Jefferson.24 Wood barely discussesany of these three. In Appleby’s view, had Wood taken them into accountproperly it would have forced him to change his view of what was radical aboutthe Revolution and, hence, his view about its meaning; specifically, she thinks,it “would have pushed to the fore the role of conflict in the radicalization ofthe United States, and with the spotlight trained on conflict, issues of power,in particular of the connection of ideas to assumptions and both to the exerciseof power, would have become more conspicuous.” This, she thinks, would have

22. Joyce Appleby, “The Radical Recreation of the American Republic,” William and MaryQuarterly, 3d series, 51 (1994), 681.

23. Ibid., 682.24. Ibid.

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“thrown up obstacles” to Wood’s “reducing democratic values to crass materialstriving and competitive individualism.” 25 In sum, Appleby says that to leaveout of one’s account, as Wood does, the philosophical underpinning of democ-racy leaves us “with a basket of consumables and an empty library shelf—a lotof elbowing competitors in a capitalist economy and no participants in a publicdebate over what is natural, what is just, and what is true”; in her alternativeaccount, she says, eighteenth-century American radicalism emerges as moreliberating, more intellectual, and even more revolutionary than it does inWood’s account.26

Barbara Clark Smith is decidedly less sympathetic than is Appleby toWood’saccount. Smith has two main criticisms, one theoretical and the other ideolog-ical. Her theoretical criticism is that Wood “keeps ‘the Revolution’ in the handsof an elite, thus encouraging a ‘narrow’ understanding of eighteenth-centuryexperience.” 27 She thinks he does this, first, by seeing the experiences and agen-cies of ordinary people not as they saw themselves but as they were seen byelites. For instance, she says that

what interests Wood most about African-American slavery is whether that institutionwas conspicuous to eighteenth-century Euro-Americans. (His preoccupation with thatissue underscores how greatly the book is about what only some Americans saw.) Otherhistorians have taken the denial of slavery as a historical fact of extraordinary signifi-cance; Wood takes elite subjectivity as unproblematic. Most slaveholders and otherssaw no evil, Wood tells us, as if that were all we need to know about them or as iftheirs were the only subjectivities that mattered. Surely African-American slavery wasconspicuous to some Americans; it depends on who was looking. Yet a host of peopleremain throughout Wood’s account merely the object of others’ acknowledgement ordenial.28

And, second, Smith criticizes Wood for leaving out of his account those partsof the resistance movement that had to do mainly with ordinary people. Hedoes this, she thinks, by providing almost no information about the politicalresistance itself—little to nothing, say, about the Boston Tea Party, the BostonMassacre, the Sons of Liberty, the women mobilizing to disuse tea and take upthe spinning wheel, the merchants and artisans negotiating over terms of non-importation, the committees of correspondence feverishly linking inland vil-lages and seaports, and so on.29

In leaving these episodes out of his account, Smith says, “readers receive nopicture of the unfolding of resistance, the moves and countermoves of differentactors, the reluctance of merchants and the energy of artisans; the fears ofindebted slaveholders as they faced fervent evangelicals and unruly African-American workers.” 30

25. Ibid.26. Ibid., 683.27. Barbara Clark Smith, “The Adequate Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series,

51 (1994), 684.28. Ibid., 688.29. Ibid., 686–687.30. Ibid., 687.

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Wood does not consider whether the relatively humble patriots who joined the Revolu-tion actively shaped the coalition and contributed their own understandings of events.If there was something radical about the era, it seems, it could not be the plebeiancapacity for interracial alliance, for running away, rising up, contesting the law, andotherwise presuming their own competence to occupy a public terrain. If there wassomething radical about patriot leaders, it could not be their capacity to ally themselvesand hence negotiate with those beneath them on the social scale.31

So, Smith concludes, “the long sweep of Wood’s Revolution, from colonialsociety to Jacksonian America, takes place at the surface, absent a careful ac-count of revolutionary events, absent the agency of artisans, sailors, and footsoldiers, absent the full daring of elite patriots, who staked their all on theirinferiors’ competence to resist constituted authority and to commit themselvesto liberty.”32 As a consequence, she says, Wood “sets sail leaving Jack Tar onshore” and, so, his revolution “takes too much credit. It slights the agency ofthose who did struggle to end slavery and makes it difficult to comprehend oreven credit those who opposed abolition.”33 It “elides the actual experience,the small gains and setbacks, the lived struggle for freedom and for dignityand meaning when freedom could not be reached.” 34 “One is left with theimpression,” she says, “that Wood’s purpose is less to discover American radi-calism than to avoid acknowledging radicalisms of the wrong kind.”35

In this theoretical part of her criticism Smith, like Appleby, is worried aboutWood’s sins of omission. But the omissions that worry the two of them aredifferent. In Appleby’s view, Wood’s sins of omission occur primarily in thesecond part of his story; in Smith’s view, they occur throughout. For Appleby,the problem is not so much that Wood’s account is elitist—after all, the mainperson she wants him to take into account more fully is Jefferson—but thatonly the views of Republican elites are mentioned. For Smith, on the otherhand, the problem is not that Wood ignores the ideological underpinnings ofdemocracy but that he doesn’t adequately portray the experiences and actionsof ordinary people. Both Appleby and Smith accept Wood’s view that the Rev-olution was radical but disagree with him as to why it was radical and, hence,disagree with him about its meaning. For Appleby what was radical about theRevolution included the development of a democratic ideology; for Smith itincluded the radicalizing of ordinary people.

Smith has another main criticism of Wood in which she faults him on ideolog-ical grounds. She thinks his interpretation sends the wrong political message.She is worried about its legitimizing impact. In Wood’s view, she says, “forRevolutionaries we look to the Founders and for radicalism we ultimately lookto impersonal demographic and commercial forces”36; as a consequence by

31. Ibid.32. Ibid.33. Ibid., 688–689.34. Ibid., 690.35. Ibid., 688.36. Ibid., 689.

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“harnessing our approval of the Revolution to nineteenth-century capitalism,[Wood makes] mobile, competitive, and individualistic elements of the Jackso-nian era not just revolutionary but American Revolutionary, hence worthy ofcelebration and deference.” 37

Smith endorses Nathan Huggins’ view, according to which “the master narra-tive” of American history is one “within which slavery and racial caste can beheld apart as sad ‘exceptions’ to the true American story” of “the inevitable ifsometimes slow expansion of liberty under the auspices of the American state.”According to her “what is left out and unexplained thereby” is not only theagencies of ordinary people but also “the society’s central and persisting is-sues.” 38 For instance, she says that in Wood’s account “women of any circum-stance figure largely as an absence. The Revolution failed to liberate womenin this period, he notes, although it would do so later.”39 But Smith insists thatit was people, not the Revolution, that would ultimately liberate women. “TheRevolution was not a transhistorical agent that could go marching throughthe ages to bestow economic, social, or political rights on waiting womankind.Women’s inequality was a presence in the nineteenth century, and present withit were ideological visions of women’s nature that have profoundly affectedfemale Americans for over a century.”40

Thus, in Smith’s view, Wood got the meaning of the Revolution wrong. Shethinks that contrary to what he says “this Revolution did not bring about a fullscale assault on dependency” so much as “a reformulation of dependence thatbanished it from the consciousness of the public world, set apart African Ameri-cans, children, women, tenants, and other poor people, remade the Americanstate, recast forms of participation, and constructed a narrative of the Revolu-tion and of American-ness without theiraspirations, experiencesand agency.”41

She concedes that to Wood herobjection may “appear tobe quibbling, stressingthe things the Revolution did not do, when in fact it accomplished so much”since, in his view, “the Revolution made possible later movements for abolitionand women’s rights” and, indeed, “all our current egalitarian thinking.” How-ever, according to her, those movements and that thinking have also takenplace “against the weight of the American past,” for the Revolution not onlyextended but also contained liberty, offering a particular heritage of participa-tion, particular possibilities for public life, but not others.

In sum, according to Smith “there are few losses in the successful Revolutionpainted by Wood and hence few possibilities for imagining American freedomin terms not well within its compass.” In Wood’s account, she says, “materialabundance and mobility” pose “as substitutes for participation in a publicrealm.” What is worse, “these developments are not just described but universal-

37. Ibid., 689–690.38. Ibid.39. Ibid.40. Ibid.41. Ibid., 691.

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ized and celebrated.”42 “Given the power of the narrative of the AmericanRevolution to frame our sense of identity, the nation, and the politically pos-sible,” she says, “we are in danger of concluding,” with Wood, that “nothingcould be more radical than” these aspects of the American case. It would bea pity, she thinks, for us to leave out of account the many Americans andRevolutionaries who dissented from that view, thus getting the meaning of theRevolution wrong, and by getting it wrong sending the wrong message.43 If wehave to legitimize something, Smith seems to think, let’s legitimize not capi-talism but the continuing struggles for freedom of ordinary Americans.

Perhaps the harshest of any published criticism of Wood’s account is that ofMichael Zuckerman, who says that it is “not integrative, or integrated, or forthat matter even very interesting” but, rather, an account that is “utterly andauthentically in what Santayana called the genteel tradition”:

It is a book of rhetoric uncontaminated by any significant sociology, a book that confinesthe American Revolution and America itself to what the better and often the best sortwrote. It allows other Americans to appear primarily through the accounts of those inpositions to pronounce upon them and it presents them as an undifferentiated mass notbecause they were but because their betters saw them that way and because Woodidentifies profoundly with their betters.

Zuckerman, then, like Smith, is bothered that Wood’s account is elitist and bybeing elitist doesn’t give an accurate and balanced portrayal of subjectivity andagency. But Zuckerman’s worries are not simply that Wood’s account is elitist,but also that he

excludes from any consequential place in his account the vision and the violence, thesoaring and sometimes outlandish ideals, the seething and sometimes appalling passionsof ordinary Americans. Or rather he transmutes them all into simple ambitions of eco-nomic success. And in the exact tradition that Santayana scorned he sets those transmu-tations forth in a bland parable of irresistible individualism, a comfortably conservativetale of a people finding its destiny and fixing it forevermore. . . .44

The reality, Zuckerman thinks, is much messier.One way in which he thinks it’s messier is that Wood exaggerates the differ-

ences between the three stages of American society that form the backbone ofWood’s interpretation. Zuckerman concedes that by the nineteenth centuryAmerica may have been, as Wood maintains, the most egalitarian, most materi-alistic, most individualistic society in Western history, but he claims that beforethe Revolution it was already all of that, even on Wood’s own evidence.45 Thatis, “just as Wood exaggerates aristocratic and discounts egalitarian elementsin his idealization of pre-Revolutionary monarchy, he equally but oppositelytrumpets leveling innovations and mutes hierarchical persistences in his exalta-

42. Ibid.43. Ibid., 692.44. Michael Zuckerman, “Rhetoric, Reality, and the Revolution: The Genteel Radicalism of

Gordon Wood,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 51 (1994), 694–695.45. Ibid., 696.

13THE ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HISTORY AND SCIENCE

tion of post-Revolutionary democracy.” 46 Zuckerman says that Wood “cannotcountenance the obvious implication of continuing tension between aristocracyand democracy because it would attenuate the ineluctable linearity of his inter-pretation and vitiate the only sort of significance he can attach to the Revo-lution.” 47

So, like Appleby and Smith, Zuckerman is worried about what Wood leavesout. But whereas what mattered to Appleby was Wood’s omission of the ide-ology of democracy, and to Smith his omission of the experience and agencyof ordinary people, what matters to Zuckerman is Wood’s way with everyone’sexperience and agency, especially those he ignores but even those he doesn’t.For instance, according to Zuckerman, Wood’s “inexplicable elision of slaveryfrom the story of advancing equality misses the effect of the institution onmasters as well as slaves, misses Jefferson’s anxiety that black servitude ‘nursed,educated, and daily exercised’ whites in ‘the most boisterous passions’ and ‘themost unremitting despotism,’ misses, in other words, the ways in which slaveryprecluded inculcation of the kind of character Wood claims republicanism anddemocracy alike required.” 48 Zuckerman concludes that aside from a few “de-lectable details” Wood’s account is “essentially untouched by life.”

For present purposes what is interesting about these three critiques is notwhether they are right or wrong—Wood, it should be noted, responds forcefullyto all three—but what they show about the ways in which historians debate themerits of competing interpretations. What they show, rather dramatically Ithink, is that humanistic historical interpretations are expected to reveal whathappened and why, and what it means that it happened; they are also expectedto convey the meaning of what happened against the backdrop of a balancedand empathy-facilitating portrayal of the experiences and agencies of thepeople whose history is being interpreted. The critiques also show that how ahistorian decides to portray subjectivity, agency, and meaning not only impor-tantly influences the meaning he or she finds in events, but even which whatsand whys get mentioned in an interpretation. Wood, for instance, passes overalmost without mention the actual revolutionary activity that occupies the bulkof most historians’ accounts of the Revolution.

What is of concern in this debate among Wood and his critics is typical ofhumanistic historical studies. As this debate clearly shows one cannot under-stand how historians assess the merits of competing humanistic historical inter-pretations unless one attends centrally to the ways in which such interpretationsportray subjectivity, agency, and meaning. These are among thevery features ofhumanistic historical interpretations that most visibly and decisively distinguishthem from theories in the physical sciences. The question of how properly toportray such features is irrelevant to any debate over the adequacy of competingtheories in the physical sciences; moreover, it is alien to the kinds of questions

46. Ibid., 697.47. Ibid.48. Ibid., 698.

14 RAYMOND MARTIN

that are central to such debates. The conclusion is inescapable, I think, thathumanistic historical interpretations are quite unlike theories in the physicalsciences and not primarily because they are proto or applied versions of suchtheories, but because they are animated at their core by radically differentconcerns. In sum, humanistic historical interpretations, unlike theories of anysort in the physical sciences, are fundamentally an attempt to interpret experi-ence on the level of experience. Quibbles and qualifications aside one mightsay that in the physical sciences the goal is to transcend subjectivity whereasin humanistic historical studies the goal is to embrace it.49

University of Maryland

49. Thanks to John Barresi, Kevin Levin, and Sara Vollmer for many useful criticisms andsuggestions, and also to those who commented so helpfully when I read an earlier version of thispaper at Dalhousie University in the summer of 1995.