There are thus serious difficulties with explanation by laws, by intentions, or by appeal to providence or teleology. If historians believe they are explaining things, it might be that they pay little attention to these philosophical arguments, or it might be that they tacitly abandon the goal of giving a logically compelling explanation and settle for one that is highly plausible. A third possibility is that they looked in the wrong place for a warrant for their explanations. Perhaps they should have looked to the explanatory power of narratives.
During the ascendancy of social-scientific approaches to history, narratives acquired a bad name. The term suggested the logical fallacy post hoc, ergo propter hoc—the belief that simply arranging things in chronological order proved a causal sequence. As the quantifiers suffered various reverses, some of their old supporters moved back to the claim that constructing a narrative was essential to the historian’s activity and that narratives could convey understanding of the past in a distinctive fashion. If so, the autonomy of history as a discipline could be defended against the charge that it was a defective science.
During the 1970s in particular, there was a surge of interest in narrative throughout the human sciences, including anthropology, psychology, and sociology. Literary critics developed “narratology,” the systematic study of narratives, especially novels and histories. In the process they greatly enriched the simple Aristotelian notion of narratives, making it possible to see that many histories, including quantitative ones, were narratives that achieved their persuasive effects in part because they were narratives. Many features of historical interpretation could be understood as properties of narratives. The choice of central subject, the decision as to when to begin and when to end the story, the characterization of the principal actors, the drawing out of moral import, and the identification of turning points are all activities that both historians and novelists perform.
The cogency of the analysis of historical narrative was enhanced by emphasizing that historians use ordinary language. Although they may borrow technical words from other disciplines, they are committed to words such as so, hence, thus, and therefore and hence to the causal linkages that these words imply. Similarly, there is no way to purge ordinary language of its normative connotations. It is therefore vain to dream of a value-free historiography or one free of any causal inferences.
One might expect the rehabilitation of narrative, even more than the emphasis on explanation through intentions of the actors, to give historians a sense that theoreticians of history were finally attending carefully to actual historical practice. As it turned out, the reaction of historians was less than enthusiastic. Narrative might convey understanding, but its advocates usually avoided using words such as explanation. There seemed to be no way for explanations to be anything more than highly plausible.
Insofar as histories interpret rather than explain, there appears to be no way to escape a relativism that would qualify, if not altogether subvert, any claim that histories are true. Proposed explanations can be contrasted and argued about, with the aim of reaching the true explanation; interpretations can be more or less plausible, deep, or ingenious but not true to the exclusion of every other possible interpretation. In the construction of narrative, Hayden White pointed out, a fictive element is inevitably introduced. The historical narrative should consist only of true statements (that is, those most consonant with the appropriate evidence), but in making them into a narrative the historian draws on the same sorts of plots and metaphors that are common to generic narratives. Their readers are prepared to believe them not just because they accept that all the individual statements are true but also because they respond to the story elements common to their culture. Making an even more relativistic claim, White argued that the same set of events could be worked up into different histories, each containing nothing but true statements and thus not vulnerable on empirical grounds but informed by different tropes and “emplotted” in a variety of ways. What looked to one historian like a comedy might seem to another a romance. His position was not that no one true history could be written—the extreme skeptical view of René Descartes—but that a variety of true histories could be written about the same events. This variety is inevitable in the absence of an acceptable master narrative, which would allow stories to be fitted together so as to make them episodes in one overarching narrative.
For generations historians have posed this rather silly question: Is history an art or a science? Usually the comforting answer has been: Both. But in the late 20th century critics said: Neither. History certainly does not meet the criteria for being called a science in the rigorous sense of the word common in the Anglo-Saxon world. It has no laws, no essential use of mathematics, and no technical language that might stand in for mathematics. In the more lenient definition of science (scienza, Wissenschaft) found in Continental languages, it is, because it has a recognizable body of practitioners and generally accepted protocols for validating its claims to truth. The story of how these have developed has taken up much of this article, and there is no reason to downplay their usefulness. But one should not ask too much of history; it cannot be, as many 19th-century thinkers hoped, the master science. Before placing that crown on some other discipline (anthropology, say, or biology), however, a careful study of their epistemological problems and pretensions should be made. The presentation of history
This theme naturally leads to an exploration of the artistic elements in history. It is as naive to think of the historian merely writing up findings as to picture him handing over facts to the sociologist to be allocated to the proper laws. Some idea of the literary forms that history might take are present throughout the research process, but they are also to a degree controlled by that process.
Although Aristotle said that it made no difference to the essence of a history whether it was in prose or in verse, no truly historical epic poem has ever been written. Historians do not even go in for ballads, nor is one likely to see them trying their hands at history painting or writing librettos for operas. The vast majority of historical writing will thus be discursive prose works, though the chance that some of their words may be performed by actors is greater now than it once was.
Writing with wit and elegance is like moving with speed for an athlete—it cannot be coached. Anyone, however, can learn to write clear, plain prose. Luckily, that is what colleagues and even the general public expect from historians. Besides mastering the rules that books—or computer programs—recommend for this style, such as avoiding passive verbs, substituting short or at least Germanic for Latinate words where possible, and the like, there are some problems peculiar to historical writing.
One is how much of the sources to quote. The American historian Jack Hexter wrote entertainingly about this issue, pointing out that excessive quotation breaks up the flow of the narrative and introduces discordant voices into the text. On the other hand, there are times when a point can be made only with the exact words of a source. There is no rule that shows where the happy medium lies, and this is one of the facts that justify calling history a craft. Another case for tact and discrimination is the use of footnotes. Here good writers recommend not showing off. The reader is entitled to some way of seeing how accurately the historian has interpreted—or quoted—the evidence, but footnotes should not be overlong and in particular should not be converted into minibibliographies, especially when these have as one purpose to show how many books and articles the historian has read (or wants to persuade the reader that he has read).