TOPOLSKI Historical Narrative - Towards a Coherent Structure

Wesleyan University

Historical Narrative: Towards a Coherent StructureAuthor(s): Jerzy TopolskiSource: History and Theory, Vol. 26, No. 4, Beiheft 26: The Representation of HistoricalEvents (Dec., 1987), pp. 75-86Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505046 .

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HISTORICAL NARRATIVE: TOWARDS A COHERENT STRUCTURE

JERZY TOPOLSKI

Historical narratives as a means of transmitting by historians their knowledge of the past, in the sense both of description and interpretation, are arousing growing interest in those concerned with the methodology of history and the general philosophy of science. They raise the problem, of fundamental importance for historical research, whether it is possible to obtain a true picture of the past through the intermediary of an historical narrative; and if so, how far that is possible. In other words, the question is the possibility of correspondence between the content of a narrative and past facts. Some answer that question in the affirmative, while others mainLain that an historical narrative is by its very nature a deformation of the past. Some claim, on general philosophical grounds, that we are not in a position to acquire the knowledge of facts, or for more prac- tical reasons, that historians use, or must use, their own constructs, such as "feudalism" or "the French Revolution of 1789," which have no literal analogues in the past. The same applies to concepts - such as, for instance, social structure -

borrowed from disciplines other than history. Those who believe that it is possible to arrive at a true or objective picture of past facts through the intermediary of an historical narrative are convinced that they can obtain such a picture by using definite translation rules, as F. R. Ankersmit calls them.- As examples of such translation rules he quotes Rickert's selection, which refer to values, and Hayden White's rhetorical rules - which however, as Ankersmit emphasizes, are largely a manifestation of a standpoint that comes close to narrative idealism.

Ankersmit himself, while stressing the fact that the past has no narrative structure, tries in his book "to discover the mechanism enabling the historian to give a narrative representation of the past."2 He refers to a "mechanism" which enables one to arrive at a narrative representation of the past, but at the same time he denies - since no narrative structure can be ascribed to the past - the possibility of linking past facts to their representation by any translation rules. According to Ankersmit it is not the past that enforces the ways of its representation, as has been claimed by the adherents of narrative realism, nor are we "able to discover the nature of historical reality by means of an a priori inquiry into narra-

1. F. R. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian's Language (The Hague, 1983), 81.

2. Ibid., 93.



76 JERZY TOPOLSKI

tive philosophy."3 Nevertheless, there is a certain logical structure to historians' narrative knowledge of the past and the narrative presentation of that past which historians must observe. As he emphasizes, it is the same in other disciplines, such as physics, where physicists are obliged to present the results of their research in a logically ordered way. It is only in that sense that we may say that narrative logic constitutes our knowledge of the past, which - as he points out - is not in contradiction with the fact that the establishing of historical facts can take place only through a critical examination of sources, and an historical narrative as a whole should pretend to a possible adequate presentation of past facts. But, in view of the lack of translation rules, that will be not any "picture" or "image" of the past, but merely the setting of the individual and critically estab- lished historical facts within the framework of general theses on the past, which Ankersmit terms narrative substance. That narrative substance, unlike individual statements, has no reference to the real states of things. From two rival narratives containing true statements about the past, preference should be given to that which "takes most risks and is most courageous."

II

Ankersmit's conception, which includes many penetrating analyses of historical narratives, can serve as the starting point for the presentation of some reflections of mine. My principal thesis is that the historical narrative containing only true statements about the past is "better" in that it is more coherent -that is, more connected internally and less scattered. To some extent I am in that respect in agreement with Ankersmit when he ascribes a large role in narratives to theses on the past, which form meaningful totalities from scattered facts. But while Ankersmit believes the construction of such meaningful totalities is merely an art, because, as he claims, there are no rules for forming a narrative, I assert that -beyond the unquestionable role of the narrative talent of the historian - there are such rules, and there are also translation rules which link past facts to their narrative representation.

Also, the statement that the past has no narrative structure seems hardly tenable. It would mean that it is a priori impossible that any historical narrative should give an adequate (true, objective) presentation of the past. It is, of course, impossible to arrive at a perfect representation, as it is impossible to arrive at the absolute truth; but one can try, as has been interpreted by Karl Popper, to come closer to a true picture of the past in one's scholarly texts. As is known, the idea of a better or worse approach to the truth applies, according to Popper, not only to statements on states of things but to theories as well.4 In my opinion one can and should speak not only about the truth of the historical statements included in a narrative, but also about the truth of an entire narrative - that is, a narrative

3. Idem. 4. K. R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York,

1968), 232-233.



HISTORICAL NARRATIVE 77

as a whole and also a set of definite wholes. That truth is strictly related to the problem of the coherence of narrative wholes. In my interpretation the coherence of a narrative is one of the conditions of arriving at the truth. It is its limit, in the same way as the reality itself is the limit of the truth. Thus, taking the above into account, one may say that the narrative comes closer to the truth, and hence reveals vaster areas of the past, which is more coherent. Note that the coherence of historical reality is not constant nor given once and for all; the connections within the process of history change (usually increase) with the changes of historical epochs, and moreover we observe their fluctuations within epochs and periods of history.

I shall now proceed to analyze two in my opinion essential conditions of the coherence of an historical narrative, that is, the conditions of our approaching the more and more true picture of-the past transmitted by such a narrative. They are:

(1) the kind of temporal content, and (2) the kind of conceptual organization of an historical narrative. It is self-evident that the proposal made here is far from an integrated in-

terpretation of the problems of historical narratives. I merely point to certain problems connected with historical narrative, which may prove important for such an integrated approach.

III

The analysis of the temporal content of historical narratives clearly reveals the connection between the past facts examined by the historian and the sentences or sequences of sentences which he or she constructs and which refer to those facts. It may be said that the analysis mentioned above is possible only if it is assumed that the text (picture of the past) refers to that past.

From the point of view of the temporal content of historical narratives we can single out three kinds of such narratives. They must be treated as ideal types in the sense used by Max Weber, and hence as sui generis measures with which real narratives can be compared. Although these rarely occur in their pure form, the three kinds I distinguish reflect to some extent a trend in the evolution of historiography. Historical narratives have been assigned more and more ambitious tasks in representing complex historical reality, internally interconnected in various ways. In this way historical narratives were becoming -in respect to their temporal content -more and more dense, which facilitated the combina- tion of a description of the past with its interpretation (that interpretation being conceived as a more complete description, which refers to even longer stretches of time and sheds light upon events not only in their direct connections but also from the point of view of their antecedents and consequences). In each of the three kinds of temporal content of historical narratives we observe a different way of linking together the historical facts which are described.

The loosest form of internal linking of facts (internal coherence) is seen in those narratives which have the form of annals. It was typical of the medieval



78 JERZY TOPOLSKI

annals, whose authors recorded currently those facts which in their opinion, and probably also in the opinion of their contemporaries, deserved attention and pres- ervation in collective memory. They recorded them in chronological order, for instance:

810. Hard winter. 812. Flood. Famine in the country. 815. Death of Prince X. 816. Military expedition, and so on.

This is obviously a very primitive narrative. It is internally connected in two ways: by the chronological order of the recorded facts, and by the vision of the world of the annalist, which in some way reflects the state of contemporaneous historical consciousness and knowledge of the world and humanity. The annalist did not formulate any general concepts which would enable him to make a more expanded interpretation. He used terms that were commonly used and under- stood, and set the past in the conceptual framework which he himself created.

It is interesting to compare the temporal content of the sentences in annals (the entries could be expanded into complete sentences) with the temporal dimension of the facts described by them. The annalist just flatly recorded facts as they occurred. When reporting on a given fact he did not activate his knowledge about what had happened earlier, and since he was a contemporary of the facts he recorded he was unable (even had he felt the need to do so) to reflect on what happened later, including the consequences of the facts recorded by him.

The primitive narratives of the annalists thus used a small set of translation rules which made it possible for them to represent the past. Those rules included above all the principle of chronological order and the principle of selection based on a definite vision of the world, which made the annalist record above all ex- traordinary events, in particular disasters of various kinds, wonders, and the like.

IV

Narratives which we call chronicles, because they are to some extent typical of various chronicles, especially those from the late Middle Ages, form the second kind of historical narratives classed from the point of view of temporal content. The ideal-type chronicler differs from the ideal-type annalist in that instead of writing a sequence of sentences about past events, connected only chronologically but not forming a narrative in the strict sense, he offers a text which is connected not only by an ordering on the time line from the past to the future but also by causal relations interpreted in various ways. In other words, in a chronicle events follow from one another regardless of whether that relation is autono- mous or determined by other forces (for instance, divine providence) localized outside those events. Note that in both an annalist's narrative and a chronicler's narrative it is the vision of the world and humanity which the author of the narrative has, and which to some extent reflects the social consciousness of the period in which the narrative was composed, which works as the general mechanism




that determines the selection - and in the case of a chronicler's narrative also the hierarchization - of facts.

A chronicler's narrative is thus more coherent that an annalist's narrative, if only because it shows (in the interpretation of the chronicler) how certain events follow from others or how they influence other events. It can easily be seen that it has much better chances of offering a more complete picture of the past than an annalist's narrative, because the reality it describes includes not only isolated events but also various relations among them.

This is, however, not the only reason why a chronicler's narrative is more coherent than that of an annalist. The other difference, of the same or perhaps even greater importance, consists in the temporal content of the narratives of the two types.

Typical of a chronicler's narrative are sentences which have a temporal dimension greater than their references to the past. A sentence in an annalist's narrative (for example, Mesco dux baptisatur, recorded in the Little Poland Annal under the year 966) does not include terms marked by a temporal dimension exceeding one year, but a sentence in a chronicler's narrative does not have such limitations. A chronicler, like an annalist, records events flatly, as they occur, but when describing them he activates his knowledge of what had occurred earlier and he refers to it in his description and tentative explanations. In this way time in his narrative acquires a retrospective depth. Hence his description of the past becomes more complete, more dense, and comes closer to reality with its internal interconnections.

Here is an example taken from the so-called Great Poland Chronicle dating from the fourteenth century:

After the death of King Casimir [1016-1058] the royal rule was taken over ... by Boleslaus the Bold [ca. 1042-1081, reigned until 1079]. When he received the royal crown he started planning to imitate the courage of Boleslaus the Brave [966/7-1025], king of Poland and his great-grandfather, and, giving preference to the hardships of war over comfort and quietude, he dedicated his forces to the cause of recovering those frontiers of Poland which had been set by the said King Boleslaus and lost by his successors who ruled Poland.

In this fragment the description of the assumption of power by Boleslaus the Bold and of his political ideology makes use of the knowledge of the rule of Boleslaus the Brave, who lived more than a century earlier. In this way sentences recorded in the chronicles and reporting on given historical facts increased their temporal content; they thereby lost what was typical of the sentences in the annals and increased the degree of coherence of the narrative.

To put it in general terms, a chronicler's narrative as compared with that of an annalist makes use of a larger set of the rules whereby extralinguistic reality is translated into its linguistic (narrative) representation. The principle of chronological order still holds, although it cannot be observed rigorously and hence it does not occur in its pure form. This is so because a new rule for the construction of narrative intervenes, namely the rule of making use of the time which might be termed retrospective. The line of time still goes from the past to the



80 JERZY TOPOLSKI

future but is no longer a straight line; there may be excursions into the past which link the facts described by the chronicler to facts which occurred in the past. There is no need to add that both the sentences typical of chronicler's narratives and such a narrative itself are categories to be found not only in the texts of medieval historians. The same applies to the sentences typical of annals (with the time content not exceeding the temporal span of the facts reported in them) but probably quite exceptionally to an annalist's narratives.

In the chronicler's narratives we find, next to the said rules of chronological order and the use of retrospective time, a rule which is absent in annalist's narratives. It is the rule of linking together the successively described facts by the relation, interpreted in various ways, of (primarily causal) consequence, mostly un- derstood, as it seems, as the assumption of relations which are necessary conditions. This means the assumption that for a fact being described to take place, another, chronologically earlier, fact was indispensable. In this way we can find the operation in chronicler's narratives of the rule of enforcement of narrative continuity, even though that rule still works in its undeveloped form. That rule has been termed so by G. Zalejko, a member of my seminar, in a paper of his which is in publication.5 It must be noted that the said rule often results in a deformation of the picture of the past, because it makes the historian fill gaps in his source data in a manner which is excessively hypothetical. Finally it must be added that, as in the annalist's narratives, the selection and hierarchization of facts in a chronicler's narratives is guided by the vision of the world and humanity which the author of a given narrative has, with the proviso that the ideological and political views of the chronicler are much more strongly voiced than those of the annalist. They are, of course, a part of that vision of the totality of beliefs based on knowledge of the world and humanity. That vision as the mechanism which controls the selection of facts includes, obviously, the whole knowledge of chroniclers and their valuations, with their acquired schemata in thinking (such as Hayden White's tropics).

V

We now pass to the third kind of historical narratives and the related types of historical statements, marked by a different temporal content and temporal dimension. These are narratives which might be termed strictly historical. They are typical of advanced, professional, or scholarly historiography. They began to develop from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, but took full shape only in the nineteenth century.

Strictly historical narratives differ from a chronicler's narratives (and from an annalist's narratives as well) by the character of their temporal content. Let us consider the following historical statement: "World War II began on September 1, 1939." An annalist could, in view of his temporal position, write only some-

5. More on this subject can be found in J. Topolski, Teoria wiedzy historycznej [Theory of His- torical Knowledge] (Poznaii, 1983), 300ff.




thing like this: "September 1, 1939. The German army attacked Poland," thus continuing records as they are made in diaries. A chronicler, who also records events as they occur but imparts to them a narrative form by observing the re- quirement of continuity and by activating his knowledge of earlier events, could make, for instance, the following entry: "The period of peace which lasted twenty years is over in Europe and perhaps in the world. Germany attacked Poland and thus started a war in Europe." Neither the annalist nor the chronicler could use the term "World War II," which occurs in the first of the statements now under consideration, because on September 1, 1939, he still did not have the necessary knowledge. That is possible only in a strictly historical statement, which, when reporting on given facts, takes into account the knowledge of facts that followed those which are described (and possibly also interpreted), in particular the knowledge of the consequences of the fact being described. Only historians are posi- tioned on the arrow of time in such a way that they can analyze the facts which they describe (and interpret) in shorter or longer perspective and thus make their description richer. It may be said that only historians make use of prospective time (possibly also of retrospective-and-prospective time) when they activate their knowledge of what preceded and followed the fact (event, process, and so on) they analyze. The degree of coherence increases markedly.

Thus a strictly historical narrative is possible only in a certain temporal perspective, in particular when the consequences of the events under consideration manifest themselves to a greater or lesser extent, which makes them characteristi- cally richer. When writing about what occurred on September 1, 1939, historians take into account knowledge about the next few years, that the German invasion of Poland changed into World War II. But that formulation requires in turn reference to the past, namely to the years 1914-1918. Thus to describe an event whose temporal dimension was one day in his or her strictly historical statement of a retrospective-and-prospective nature, he or she has to activate knowledge pertaining to a period of at least thirty-one years (1914-1945). That period became connected by reference to the appropriate historical facts.

A strictly historical narrative need not, of course, consist only of strictly historical statements. In practice, an historical narrative is usually a mixture of annalist's statements, chronicler's statements, and strictly historical statements, both prospective and retrospective-and-prospective. It is a strictly historical narrative if the use of prospective time is always present in it and works as its assumption. It can easily be noted that with reference to latest history, which is concerned with historical facts relatively open, it is difficult to go beyond a chronicler's narrative. In such cases the researcher lacks the knowledge of the later developmental stages of the event, fact, process, or biography, with which he or she is concerned. His narrative is in advance deprived of that very essential element of coherence and also of an element of the process whereby one approaches the truth. In a strictly historical narrative the researcher makes use of certain integrated and relatively closed facts, periods, processes, and so on. He or she need not stress that explicitly in his narrative: very often such knowledge of those integrated wholes is implicitly inherent in the assumptions made. We sense that, for instance,



82 JERZY TOPOLSKI

in the following sentence, in which the author looks at the nineteenth century and at the processes he analyzes, as it were, from above, combining retrospective and prospective time (although he does not directly express that in his narrative):

The way in which Europeans' numbers in the nineteenth century grew faster than the ability of Europe's economic resources and organisation to absorb them, coupled with the fact that for a number of European countries the rapid increase in numbers coincided with the depression in agricultural prices in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, left many Europeans with no other choice than to emigrate.

Retrospective and prospective time occurs directly in such statements as the following one: "When Henry VII came to the throne, the economic organization of the country differed but little from that of the age of Wyclif. When Henry VIII died, full of years and sin, some of the main characteristics, which were to distinguish it till the advent of steam-power and machinery, could already, though faintly, be descried. The door that remained to be unlocked was colonial expansion."7

A strictly historical narrative, which, as we have said, is a manifestation of the emergence of professional (scholarly) historiography, differs from the re- maining two types in the rules of presentation of the past only in that it requires the consideration of prospective time in descriptions and interpretations. The other rules of linking the past to its narrative picture remain the same although, as I shall try to demonstrate, the way in which they are interpreted and applied is not unchanging.

VI

In a strictly historical narrative that element which differentiates it most strongly must be seen in the mechanism on which depends the selection of facts, their hierarchization, and the linking of single statements (and sentences) into meaningful wholes; in a word, it is the mechanism which controls the way in which an historical text is conceptualized. That conceptualization is achieved in two ways. To make this statement sufficiently clear we have to make a distinc- tion between the horizontal and the vertical structure of historical narratives. The former covers historical statements and also theoretical statements, if they occur in a given narrative; they are linked together by a common content into certain wholes which, following the suggestion of 0. Wojtasiewicz, I have termed "stories."8 Those narrative wholes do not form a simple sequence but are a com- plicated structure in which smaller stories are embedded in more comprehensive ones, the process being repeated many times. We thus here are concerned with

6. W. Woodruff, "The Emergence of an International Economy 1700-1914," in The Fontana Eco- nomic History of Europe: The Emergence of Industrial Societies, ed. C. M. Cipolla (Glasgow, 1977), II, 702.

7. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Harmondsworth, 1942), 64. 8. See J. Topolski, "Conditions of Truth of Historical Narratives," History and Theory 20 (1981),

47-60.




a supra-individual linking of sentences occurring in a narrative. It is self-evident that an historical narrative which is perfectly well-connected horizontally should not include loose sentences and loose stories that have no place in the stories contained in that narrative. If no linking is possible, for instance because of a lack of source data, that fact should be made clear; in such a way one avoids an artificial or too hypothetical linking, which one might be inclined to do in view of Zalejko's rule of enforcing narrative continuity, mentioned earlier in the text.

The horizontal structure of an historical narrative with it supra-individual linkings is determined, on the one hand, by its own conceptualization rules, and on the other, by inspirations coming from the vertical structure of the narrative, upon which in the last analysis these special conceptualization rules also depend. We shall not discuss the last-named rules in any detail. Suffice it to say that we mean the whole knowledge of the construction of correct texts, logically precise and clear, and at the same time satisfying definite aesthetic requirements.

The vertical structure of historical narrative is much more important in our analysis. Many strata can be singled out in that structure. One of the various possible solutions of the problem consists in singling out in it the following strata:

(1) the articulated surface stratum, expressed by sequences of sentences and stories, mentioned with reference to the vertical structure of historical narratives;

(2) the non-articulated surface stratum which is an expansion of stratum (1) if, for instance, the author of the narrative refers to statements by other authors, or more generally, if he assumes that the reader has a definite knowledge which enables the author to make mental short cuts, to omit certain information, and so forth;

(3) the non-articulated deep stratum which covers the historical knowledge of the author that enables him to make use of retrospective-and-prospective time;

(4) the non-articulated deep stratum which controls the selection and hierarchization of facts and links knowledge into a narrative whole; it might be termed the theoretical stratum.

Now strata (3) and (4) organize the whole narrative. They usually function as its non-articulated, merely implicit assumption, without which, however, one cannot carry out an integrated analysis of the narrative nor reflect on its truth and adequacy. As has been said, in the articulated stratum there are often statements which are a partial articulation of the non-articulated strata (3) and (4), which may be either incidental or reflect a definite program of the author.

While stratum (3) is a necessary condition of a strictly historical narrative, stratum (4) (which can be singled out also with reference to the narratives of annalists and chroniclers) is that principal factor upon which the quality of the narrative depends. One can distinguish two forms of the manifestation of stratum (4). One of them corresponds to that historiography which might be termed traditional or facto-graphical; the other, to that which might be termed modern or theoretical and explanatory. In traditional historiography, whose rules were codified in particular in the nineteenth century, the structure and content of the surface strata are controlled above all by the system of the ideological and political views of the historian. Analyses of historiography in various countries reveal



84 JERZY TOPOLSKI

that very clearly. This applied, of course, to earlier narratives produced by chroniclers and annalists. Without a reconstruction of the world view that controls narratives, both the content and the trends in interpretation which mark historiography in the various countries would remain incomprehensible. The methodology of such historical research, that is research which postulates selection by reference to values, and hence to the valuating (ideological, religious, political) world view of the researcher, has been, as is well known, most precisely formulated by Rickert. Note that Max Weber, who also drew inspiration from neo-Kantianism, overcame that opinion and strove to construct a methodology that would cor- respond to a more ambitious historiography that would make use of theoretical constructs (of course, in Max Weber's sense). This is why A. Palubicka has defined Max Weber's conception as coming close to theoretical historicism, although it does not assume the existence of regularities in the sphere of social facts.9

In that historiography which is not directly controlled by a system of political and ideological views but by a theory, that control can be in turn controlled - in other words, the mechanism whereby an historical narrative is conceptualized can be controlled. This means also the control of the process whereby an historical narrative is made coherent. There is no need to emphasize that coherence secured by a system of ideological and political views (if that system is coherent itself) is a factor which deprives a narrative of objectivity, which is to say that the more coherent a narrative is (in this sense) the more it is imbued with extra- scientific valuation. Such valuation can dominate scholarly valuation oriented towards arriving at the true picture of the past. Of course, such a striving alone does not suffice, even if it is quite sincere. The historian needs instruments which help him to arrive at the coherence and truth of his historical narrative in a scholarly manner.

In my opinion, the historian can obtain such instruments only by consciously working to provide his research with theoretical foundations which enable him to attain a theoretical conceptualization of reality. That would not be anything new or anything to which the historian is not accustomed; for it turns out, in the light of the empirical studies of historical narratives, that they are all imbued with some theory, although to varying degrees; the degree to which historians realize that fact also varies, but is generally low. The statement that "all Polish uprisings in the nineteenth century ended in failure" is not theoretical in character, but even in that statement there is some theoretical content (be it just in the concept of uprising). But consider the following statement taken from an historical study: "The actions undertaken by the peasants in the Kingdom of Poland in the first half of the 19th century against the nobles owning the manors were due to the contradiction between the still prevailing system of manors based on serf labour and the evolution of peasant farms that strove for independence in view of the developing market."'10 This generalization also has its determinants in time

9. A. Palubicka, Przedteoretyczne postacie historyzmu [Pre-theoretical Forms of Historicism] (Warsaw and Poznaii, 1983).

10. S. Kieniewicz, "Problem rewolucji agrarnej w PoIsce w okresie ksztaltowania sie ukladu kapitalistycznego" [The Problem of the Agrarian Revolution in Poland in the Time of the Forma- tion of the Capitalist System] in The Times of Adam Mickiewicz (Wroclaw, 1956), 3-4.




and space; but, as can easily be seen, its status is quite different from that of the generalization about the Polish uprising in the nineteenth century. First, it refers to epistemologically open facts, that is, those that are not yet known, and not to epistemologically closed classes (while all Polish uprisings in the nineteenth century are known, all actions undertaken by Polish peasants in that period are certainly not). Second, the generalization pertaining to peasant actions refers to relationships, and not to the occurrence of certain facts and their characteristics (such as the failure of the Polish uprisings).

While the generalization pertaining to Polish peasants is more limited in time than the other one, the pinpointing of those relationships may help historians to explain the actions undertaken by the Polish peasants in the Kingdom of Po- land in the first half of the nineteenth century and possibly in extending its va- lidity. One can predict that, if the generalization is valid, every subsequent peasant action against the owners of the manors in the Kingdom of Poland in the first half of the nineteenth century can be explained in the same way."

I believe that both the statement on the Polish uprisings in the nineteenth century and that on the causes of peasant actions against the owners of manors have, regardless of their theoretical content, the same status from the point of view of the relation between them and the facts. In both cases it is possible - and historians do it every day -to investigate how far they agree with facts, that is, how far they are true.

But in historical narratives we encounter statements with a still greater theoretical content, even though, as has been said, control by a theory need not mean the articulation by the historian of that theory. It is inherent in the deep stratum as something assumed but it has to a small extent the form of statements. For instance, when Jan Rutkowski (a Polish economic historian who died in 1949), wanted to explain the emergence and development of a manorial serf economy in Poland in the sixteenth century, he carried out comparative research on the basis of which he formulated the following regularity: manorial serf economies emerged if and only if there were good conditions for the sale of agricultural produce combined with the serfdom of the peasants. It can easily be seen that this formulation is still more general than that on peasant actions in the Kingdom of Poland in the first half of the nineteenth century. It has no temporal and no spatial determinants, and has, therefore, a greater explanatory power because it is not limited formally to any territory and epoch - even though its application may prove limited in research practice. Rutkowski made use of the regularity he had formulated (which had the form of a scientific law) when trying to explain the emergence and development in sixteenth-century Poland of a manorial serf economy in the following manner:

(1) manorial serf economies emerged if and only if there were good conditions for the sale of agricultural produce combined with the serfdom of the peasants;

11. For a more detailed analysis see J. Topolski, "The Concept of Theory in Historical Research: Theory versus Myth," forthcoming in Storia delta Storiografia.



86 JERZY TOPOLSKI

(2) such conditions existed in sixteenth-century Poland while the serfdom of the peasants had survived since the Middle Ages; hence:

(3) a manorial serf economy emerged and developed in Poland in the sixteenth century. 12

Likewise, Witold Kula, as a result of empirical research carried out on a large scale and concerned with the mechanism of feudal economies, formulated the following regularity: "In a feudal economy isolated from the rest of the world the general law of prices is determined by the fluctuations of the prices of the agricultural products, and the latter - in the relatively short period when the de- mand can be treated as constant -are determined by the crops."13

Theoretical content in an historical narrative makes it possible, through the construction of concepts, to link together individual data about historical facts; further, by discovering recurrent relationships (as in the example drawn from Rutkowski and Kula) it makes it possible to explain facts and processes not interpreted in terms of human actions, which in turn must be explained by the dis- covery of their underlying motives. The last-named operation, however, also requires theoretical knowledge. To sum up, the theoretical conceptualization of historical narratives, if it can be verified, not only helps one to neutralize the deforming influence of valuations that do not lend themselves to empirical verification, but also makes those narratives more coherent by linking together scattered facts into certain wholes (such as the French Revolution of 1789, Counter- reformation, and World War II) - and, which is particularly important, by bringing out the relations that link together facts of various kinds. It might be said that the directive of the conscious formulation of theoretical statements (which marks modern historiography based on theory and explanation that re- mains full narrative historiography) is one of the fundamental rules whereby historiography becomes a more and more integrated presentation of the past.

University of Poznan'

12. Cf. J. Rutkowski, Historia gospodarcza Polski [An Economic History of Poland] (Poznafi, 1946), 126,

13. W. Kula, Teoria ekonomiczna ustroju feudalnega: Prdba model [An Economic Theory of the Feudal System: A Tentative Model] (Warsaw, 1962), 84.



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TOPOLSKI Historical Narrative - Towards a Coherent Structure