Ankersmit's Dutch Writings and Their Audience

journal of the philosophy of history 12 (2018) 450–471 brill.com/jph Ankersmit’s Dutch Writings and Their Audience Jacques Bos Universiteit van Amsterdam [email protected] Abstract This article analyses Frank Ankersmit’s Dutch-language writings in the context of Dutch debates on historical theory. In the 1970s and 1980s historical theory became a flourishing discipline in the Netherlands; it was a compulsory part of all history programmes in the country, and all history departments employed one or more historical theorists. The Dutch theoretical debates of the 1970s and 1980s mainly dealt with the relation between history and the social sciences. In these debates Ankersmit defended the traditional historicist conception of historiography, while developing philosophi- cal views that would remain important in his later work. Especially relevant in this respect is his critique of linguistic transcendentalism. This view is already present in his earliest writings in the 1970s, but it also informs his work on historical representation of the late 1980s and 1990s, and it is very important in his analysis of historical experience, which has its roots in his Dutch writings of the mid-1990s. Keywords Frank Ankersmit – Dutch philosophy of history – historicism – narrativism – historical experience – linguistic transcendentalism Frank Ankersmit has produced an impressive oeuvre, both in Dutch and in English. Of course, there is a significant overlap between Ankersmit’s Dutch and English writings. Many of his Dutch works were translated into English, and the other way round, and apart from that there is much thematic conver- gence between Ankersmit’s writings in Dutch and English; he did not produce two distinct oeuvres. This paper will discuss Ankersmit’s Dutch writings by relating them to the Dutch context in which they were published. This might provide Ankersmit’s international readers, who don’t know this Dutch context, © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/18722636-12341407Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 02:16:50PM via free access Ankersmit’s Dutch Writings and Their Audience 451 with a more complete and richer view of his work. Recently, Herman Paul and Adriaan van Veldhuizen addressed the Dutch context of Ankersmit’s work by emphasising the way in which he draws on the German historicist tradi- tion in the vein of Friedrich Meinecke. According to Paul and Van Veldhuizen, the influence of Ernst Kossmann, Ankersmit’s teacher at the University of Groningen, was especially important in shaping this position.1 The analysis by Paul and Van Veldhuizen is definitely very helpful in deepening our under- standing of the intellectual origins of Ankersmit’s work. Yet, as is inevitably the case in every contextualising interpretation, some aspects of the context could have been given more weight. The aspect that is, in my opinion, under- represented in the picture sketched by Paul and Van Veldhuizen is the context of Dutch historical theory, which strongly flourished from the 1980s onwards, mainly due to an internationally exceptional institutional position. This essay will mainly focus on this dimension of the Dutch context of Ankersmit’s work. In the first part of the text I shall position Ankersmit in the debates in Dutch historical theory in the 1980s, which were not just specialist discussions, but exchanges with a wider impact in the Dutch historical community. Ankersmit and his fellow theorists discussed topics such as historical explanation and postmodernism in general historical journals and wrote textbooks that were used by large groups of students. From the 1990s onwards, theoretical debates lost some of their prominent presence in the Dutch historical world, perhaps because their main protagonists, such as Ankersmit and Chris Lorenz, turned their attention towards the international scene. Illustrative of this tendency is the fact that Ankersmit’s Sublime Historical Experience, in preparation since the 1990s, first appeared in English in 2005, and two years later in Dutch, in a somewhat revised version. Whereas in the 1980s Dutch historical theorists developed their ideas in Dutch debates and later presented them in an international context, after about 1990, and certainly after 2000, the order of Dutch and English seems to have reversed, at least in Ankersmit’s case. The reading of Ankersmit’s work presented here is a contextualising interpretation. This might deserve some explication. What I intend to do is to connect some of Ankersmit’s Dutch writings to their Dutch context and to other texts in that context. This does not necessarily unveil the “true” or “real” intentions behind Ankersmit’s writings. In the end, if these can be known at all, it is only by the author himself, and I have made no effort to reconstruct Ankersmit’s motives in writing certain texts by, for instance, analysing his state- ments in interviews. The aim of my contextual reading of Ankersmit’s Dutch 1 H. Paul and A. van Veldhuizen, “A Retrieval of Historicism: Frank Ankersmit’s Philosophy of History and Politics,” History and Theory, 57 (2018), 33–55. journal of the philosophy of history 12 (2018) 450–471Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 02:16:50PM via free access 452 Bos work is to draw attention to certain connections and contrasts that might shed a new light on his oeuvre for an international audience. One point that will emerge from this analysis is that there is a remarkable continuity between Ankersmit’s earliest Dutch writings and his later work. An important theme in Sublime Historical Experience is the radical rejection of linguistic transcendentalism, the idea that our knowledge and experience are shaped by language. This point of view might seem novel, emerging as a result of Ankersmit’s search for a direct experience of the past. This search had already begun in Dutch in his 1993 inaugural lecture on historical experience. Ankersmit’s criticism of linguistic transcendentalism is even older, though. In his Dutch writings of the 1970s and 1980s he is already very explicit about this topic, and an important ambition in his turn to the concept of representation in the 1990s is to rethink the relation between language and reality in such a way that the pitfalls of linguistic transcendentalism can be avoided. 1 History and the Social Sciences In the 1980s, historical theory became a flourishing discipline in the Netherlands. In all history departments in the country one or more theorists worked with the explicit task of teaching philosophy of history and historiography and doing research in the field. This exceptional situation was codified in the revision of the so-called Academisch Statuut in 1982, which prescribed that every history student in the Netherlands should take at least one course in historiography, methodology and philosophy of history.2 As Chris Lorenz has recently shown, the revision of the Academisch Statuut was not the be- ginning of the rise of historical theory in the Netherlands but rather a formal affirmation of a development that had taken place during the previous de- cade. According to Lorenz, the institutionalisation of historical theory in the Netherlands had already started in the 1970s, as a result of, on the one hand, international developments within the historical discipline, and, on the other hand, Dutch university politics and student activism. In the 1970s the most 2 For an overview of Dutch philosophy of history in the 1980s, see J. Tollebeek, “De ekster en de kooi. Over het (bedrieglijke) succes van de theoretische geschiedenis in Nederland,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 110 (1995), 52–72, and L. J. Dorsman, “Geschiedfilosofie in Nederland na 1945. Een overzicht,” in J. W. ter Avest et al. (eds.), Over nut en nadeel van geschiedtheorie voor de historicus (Leiden: Stichting Leidschrift, 1988), 99–116. A broader perspective on the success of Dutch philosophy of history in the 1980s is developed in the essays in J. Bos, H. Paul and K. Thijs (eds.), Geschiedfilosofie in Nederland, 1860–2000, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 129 (2016). journal of the philosophy of historyDownloaded 12from (2018) Brill.com09/27/2021 450–471 02:16:50PM via free access Ankersmit’s Dutch Writings and Their Audience 453 important theoretical debate within academic historiography was between proponents of social scientific methods and approaches and those defend- ing more traditional historical methods. Critical students tended to identify with the former party in this debate, and in the Dutch context of the 1970s they had a strong say in their programmes of study. Although the Dutch student protests of the late 1960s had been relatively peaceful in comparison with other European countries, the result was a very far-reaching democratisation of university governance, with students and university staff below the rank of full professor acquiring a significant influence in the newly established university and faculty councils. Furthermore, students also got seats in the university delegations to the Academische Raad, which was responsible for the Academisch Statuut and thus for the national regulation of the curricula of the various degree programmes. In the subcommittee for history in 1977, students and non-professorial staff managed to add historiography, methodology and philosophy of history to a proposal to amend the Academisch Statuut. Yet, according to Lorenz, even this early political step should be seen as a confir- mation of changes that were already taking place. In a situation of expanding student numbers and growing government budgets, the history departments in the country had started to create teaching positions for historical theory in order to meet the demand – driven by both developments in the historical discipline and students’ wishes – for expertise in this field.3 In this context Frank Ankersmit was appointed at the University of Groningen in 1974, as one of the first of a group of academics that would shape the Dutch debates on historical theory in the 1980s.

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