Historiography and Destiny
"History is written by the victors."
You probably have read this statement. It's true as far as it goes. But it misses the point. What is the point? The final victor. Who will be the final victor?
This is the issue of eschatology: the doctrine of the last things. Everyone has an eschatology, but most people don't give it much thought.
Cosmic evolutionists have an eschatology: the heat death of the universe. In one phrase: "Eventually, everything will run out of gas." Entropy is a one-way street to oblivion. The triumph of absolute zero will kill all life.
Then who will write history? No one. There will be no further history to write.
Then what is the meaning of life? There is none.
If you want more on this, read Chapter 2 of my book, Is the World Running Down? You can download the PDF for free here.
Conclusion: your concept of destiny shapes your concept of history: past, present, and future. Secondary conclusion: a society's concept of destiny shapes its view of history: past, present, and future.
Reasonable so far? Let us continue.
LOSERS' HISTORY
At the end of the Civil War, a handful of Southerners began writing histories of the war, which they re-named. It was sometimes called the war between the states. Others called it the war of southern secession. Others called it the war of northern aggression. But the term "Civil War" stuck. There were too many rival names. The winners got to name the war. They also got to write the textbooks. Most important, they imposed the public school system on the South so that they could make sure that their textbooks would get read by future generations in the South.
Today, Southerners who know nothing about the history of the South cheer for football teams of tax-funded state universities where running backs and 300-lb lineman are the heirs of slaves. There is probably a white quarterback whose ancestor may have been a draftee into the Confederate Army. (Draftee, as in "forced by the central government to fight.") Or he may be the heir of a Northern steel worker in Pennsylvania whose ancestor voted for Thaddeus Stephens. It all depends on his throwing arm, not his ancestry. Nobody asked Joe Namath about his ancestry. He was a Yankee who threw for Alabama.
The narrative of the post-war monographs written by defeated Southerners did not penetrate the textbooks. There are updated monographs written by the spiritual heirs of Southerners. Their ideas still do not penetrate the textbooks.
Then why write the monographs? Are the writers defenders of a lost cause for the sake of the lost cause? Or do they still believe that the South shall rise again? I think it is the latter motivation.
I do not think that most people with the intellectual ability to write a defense of a lost cause think that the cause is still lost. I think they believe in resurrection.
There are still pro-Soviet historians who are apologists for Stalin. Some of them gained tenure before the fall of the USSR in 1991. They are close to retirement. They have recruited few followers.
There are still defenders of Adolf Hitler. They do not receive tenure. I knew one of them who did: David Hoggan [HOEgun]. He had tenure at San Francisco State College. After suffering a nervous breakdown in 1960, he resigned in a huff in 1961. He never got tenure again. He was a defender of Hitler's foreign policy. He wrote a large book on this in 1955, published in German in Germany, and also one on French foreign policy leading up to World War II. He had been a defender of Hitler's foreign policy in 1942, and he went to prison for refusing induction into the Army. He was not a pacifist. He just would not take up arms against Germany. He told me this in the summer of 1963, when I worked with him as an intern at the Center for American Studies (William Volker Fund).
In the 1960's, Hoggan was still defending his views held as a young man. He did not think that Nazism would rise again. He also never wrote a history of modern Europe which would defend the ideology of the Nazi Party. He limited his public defense to German foreign policy, 1936-1939. He had lots of footnotes in many languages, but you could not safely trust them. You had to verify everything. He gained few followers. No one ever earned a Ph.D. in history to carry on his work. This is "revisionism of the dead end." It bears no fruit.
IDEAL TARGETS
The victors write the textbooks, but these offer ideal targets. A historian who believes that the prevailing Establishment will not maintain its control over the textbooks and media in the future has a chance to write a revisionist history of the nation. A revisionist history can serve as a weapon against the Establishment.
Indeed, without such pre-replacement histories, it is hard to recruit dedicated people who will commit to undermining the prevailing order.
Textbooks let the revolutionary identify the mistakes made by the defenders of the once-lost cause.
Murray Rothbard was one of the greatest economists of all time. He was also a gifted historian. He saw his task as a historian to provide evidence that the free market social order of the nineteenth century was not lost because of the failure of the market. It was lost because the statists were better politicians.
The cause was lost because the voters were not committed to the free society as a matter of principle. They thought they could vote themselves prosperity. Rothbard thought otherwise. So, in defending the free market as a source of liberty and therefore productivity -- he thought these were linked -- he also felt the need to write monographs on the multiple histories of the surrender. He always believed in the victory of liberty. He was a master revisionist historian because he was a master economist. But he was also optimistic about the future of liberty.
He saw the Establishment's historiography as fair game. He took the Establishment historians' narratives apart with the same facility and enthusiasm as he took the Keynesians' theories apart. He saw the Keynesians' theories and the Progressives' historiography as a package deal.
He died in 1995 while working on Volume 3 of his history of economic thought. No previous history of economic thought had combined economic theory and economists' biographies to the degree that his does. The reader can begin to understand why each economist adopted his views in terms of his life and his chronological setting. He understood the truth of Robert Nisbet's dictum: "Ideas do not beget ideas the way that butterflies beget butterflies." Ideas are not autonomous. They are products of the worldviews and experiences of specific thinkers.
WE NEED COMPETING REVISIONIST TEXTBOOKS
History textbooks are written by victors. But they are also written by wanna-be victors.
If you expect your cause to win, you need textbooks that reflect and reinforce this expectation. You need to understand the way the world works in terms of your concept of cause and effect. You need evidence of the following: sovereignty, authority, law, historical sanctions, and time.
If you do not expect your cause to win, you will not read, let alone write, textbooks that reflect and reinforce your views. What is the use? The cost-benefit analysis comes down on the side of this dictum: "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die." This is the outlook of losers.
When the study of history is for amusement rather than conquest, it turns into narratives without significance: one thing after another. The stories can be well written, the way that the Durants wrote their stories. But when it came time to offer an explanation for the lessons of history, they had nothing much to say. No historian cites the Durants. I have never met any academic historian who has told me that he has read even one volume, let alone all eleven volumes. But their books are a gold mine of incidents to liven up monographs and textbooks. These stories are for amusement, not transformation. They do not change people's minds regarding the way the world works. They do not lead to lifetime commitment.
I have offered lists of revisionist history books we need. But we will not get them until a hard core of self-disciplined, self-funded historians gain a sense of destiny.