Ankersmit's Dutch Writings and Their Audience

journal of the philosophy of history 12 (2018) 450–471

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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 philosophical 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 tradition 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 understanding 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 beginning of the rise of historical theory in the Netherlands but rather a formal affirmation of a development that had taken place during the previous decade. 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 defending 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. One year before, in 1973, the sociologist Kees Bertels had published a dissertation that had caused quite a stir in the Dutch historical world. In this book, Geschiedenis tussen struktuur en evenement (History between structure and event, with the spelling struktuur instead of the more common structuur being an indication of the author’s progressive orientation), Bertels argued that historians should abandon their traditional orientation on historical events in favour of a more structuralist approach to the past. Examples of such an approach can be found in the work of historians such as Febvre, Labrousse, Braudel and Fogel, which Bertels extensively discusses. On a more theoretical level Bertels argues that history is the dialectical relation between the anach- ronistic constructions of the historian, aimed at the discovery of structures and processes, and the experience of people living in the past. In the end, Bertels’ aim is to turn history into a truly scientific discipline, producing texts

3 C. F. G. Lorenz, “Typically Dutch? Over de jaren tachtig in de Nederlandse geschiedtheorie,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 129 (2016), 77–96.

journal of the philosophy of history 12 (2018) 450–471Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 02:16:50PM via free access 454 Bos filled with diagrams, models, tables, graphs and maps, informed by Braudel’s three-level analysis of historical reality, and with the philosophical support of authors such as Foucault and Lévi-Strauss.4 One of Ankersmit’s first pub- lications was a polemical sixteen-page review of Bertels’ book in Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden (Low Countries Historical Review), the old and respectable journal of the Royal Netherlands Historical Society, founded in 1877.5 Ankersmit is highly critical of Bertels’ theoretical positions. His criticism first of all concerns Bertels’ discussion of hermeneutics, which tries to replace the traditional theories of interpretation of Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer with a Foucauldian semiotic analysis of past épistémès. What Ankersmit regards as especially problematic in this analysis is Bertels’ emphasis on the inaccessibility of the historical a priori of past thought and experience. At the root of this view lies, according to Ankersmit, a fundamentally flawed linguistic transcendentalism – a position that he would continue to oppose in the next decades, as we can see in Sublime Historical Experience. In this way, Ankersmit writes, Bertels replaces the “bread” offered by traditional hermeneutics with “stones.” In a similar fashion, Ankersmit criticises the structuralist approach defended by Bertels. Somewhat surprisingly, Ankersmit connects structuralism with historicism, claiming that both tend to analyse the historical process as successions of periods with a specific indi- viduality. The difference is that historicism regards the course of history as a continuous, fluid movement, while structuralists emphasise discontinuity. The latter position, however, is seen by Ankersmit as a consequence of “the tyranny of a concept,” precluding the study of processes and continuities in the past. Even worse, despite the scientific nominalism and conceptualism defended by Bertels, structuralists tend to ascribe an ontological reality to structures, resulting in the claim that structures have a coercive force over people. According to Ankersmit, in making this mistake, structuralism resembles positivism, in which the tendency to “ontologise” explanatory concepts is also frequently visible. Bertels’ book could be seen as the opening shot of two decades of often very polemical debates in Dutch historical theory. A central theme in these debates,

4 K. Bertels, Geschiedenis tussen struktuur en evenement. Een methodologies en wijsgerig onder zoek. (Amsterdam: Wetenschappelijke Uitgeverij, 1973). For an overview of the debate on Bertels’ book, see C. van den Akker, “Een knuppel in het hoenderhok der historici. De re- ceptie van Kees Bertels’ Geschiedenis tussen struktuur en evenement,” Ex Tempore, 14 (1995), 173–183. 5 F. R. Ankersmit, “Kees Bertels, Geschiedenis tussen struktuur en evenement,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 89 (1974), 396–411.

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 455 very explicitly introduced by Bertels, is the philosophical evaluation of the turn towards the social sciences that was regarded as the major innovation in historical writing at that time. What we see in Ankersmit’s review of Bertels’ book is not a radical rejection of this turn towards the social sciences as such, although between the lines of the text and elsewhere in his work it becomes clear that his preference is with other forms of historiography. Ankersmit primarily tries to refute Bertels’ philosophical arguments, while also pointing out that these arguments might not be as successful in undermining the traditional historicist perspective in historiography as Bertels would want them to be. A reaction to Ankersmit’s highly critical review came not from Bertels himself, but from the young historian and philosopher Willem Otterspeer. Mapping the debate after the publication of Geschiedenis tussen struktuur en evenement, Otterspeer observes a lack of depth in most reviews, which, in his opinion, tend to criticise marginal issues instead of Bertels’ central theoretical claims. Unlike most other reviewers, Ankersmit does focus on philosophical issues, as the perfect “anti-Bertels.” Yet, Otterspeer argues that Ankersmit’s philosophical arguments, especially his discussions of structuralism, hermeneutics, Popper and Kuhn, are mostly confused.6 Otterspeer does not, how ever, offer an alternative point of view, or a really effective vindication of Bertels’ position. In a reply, Ankersmit points out that Otterspeer does not seri- ously engage with his analysis of Bertels’ book, raising the question what, apart from disagreeing with him as much as possible, Otterspeer actually intended to do in his essay.7 The exact content of the polemic between Otterspeer and Ankersmit, which covers an exceptionally wide range of issues, is less important here than the fact that it was waged. Apparently, in the mid-1970s there was ample space in the pages of a general historical journal in the Netherlands for a philosophical debate on the foundations of historiography. In 1974 a specialised Dutch journal for historical theory, Theoretische Geschiedenis, came into being, but other journals also paid a significant amount of attention to theoretical issues. It has been calculated that 16% of all academic journal articles in history in the Netherlands in the 1970s had a theoretical character, and this pattern remained in place in the 1980s.8

6 W. Otterspeer, “Ankersmit contra Bertels,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 91 (1976), 82–87. 7 F. R. Ankersmit, “Weerwoord,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 91 (1976), 88–93. 8 P. den Boer, “Balans en perspectief. Enkele inleidende opmerkingen,” in F. van Besouw et al. (eds.), Balans en perspectief. Visies op de geschiedwetenschap in Nederland (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff/Forsten, 1986), 15–30, 20.

journal of the philosophy of history 12 (2018) 450–471Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 02:16:50PM via free access 456 Bos

In that decade, the debates that took place between Dutch historical theorists were no less sharp than in the 1970s. A good example is the discussion in 1984 between Chris Lorenz and Ankersmit that took place in the second major historical journal in the Netherlands, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis (Journal of History), founded in 1886. Earlier that year Lorenz had published a scathing review of what was actually the first theoretical textbook of the 1980s, De or ganisatie van het verleden (The organisation of the past) by Hermann von der Dunk, not a specialised historical theorist, but a professor of modern history at Utrecht University. The title of Lorenz’s review, “Van zandbak tot woestijn” (From sandpit to desert), neatly summarises his opinion of Von der Dunk’s theoretical synthesis – a very unsystematic and philosophically sloppy work, according to Lorenz.9 For the article opening his debate with Ankersmit, Lorenz chooses a title that is equally rich in metaphorical associations, though more focused on the content of his opponent’s ideas than on the quality of his work: “Het masker zonder gezicht” (The mask without a face).10 In his essay, Lorenz reviews Narrative Logic, Ankersmit’s 1981 PhD dissertation, which was distributed as a book, as was the Dutch practice at the time, in connection with several articles that Ankersmit had published in various journals in the years before.11 Lorenz criticises Ankersmit’s position, but by analysing his dissertation and several other texts as a coherent whole, he also offers a systematic – and quite plausible – synopsis of Ankersmit’s philosophy of history in the early 1980s. According to Lorenz, Ankersmit’s narrativist theses should be understood against the background of the debate on the relation between history and the social sciences. In this controversy, Ankersmit explicitly chooses the side of the “traditional” historians, emphasising that social scientific approaches involve a misunderstanding of the true nature of historiography. Lorenz sees a striking resemblance between Ankersmit’s view of the nature of historical writing and Huizinga’s historical theory, even to the extent that Narrative Logic can be considered an elaboration of Huizinga’s

9 C. F. G. Lorenz, “Tussen zandbak en woestijn. Von der Dunks omzwervingen in het land van de theoretische geschiedenis,” Theoretische Geschiedenis, 11 (1984), 41–55. 10 C. F. G. Lorenz, “Het masker zonder gezicht,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 97 (1984), 169–194. 11 F. R. Ankersmit, “Éloge voor de cultuurgeschiedenis,” Theoretische Geschiedenis, 5 (1978), 3–16; Ankersmit, “Het narratieve element in de geschiedschrijving,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 91 (1978), 181–213; Ankersmit, “Een nieuwe synthese? Recente ontwikkelin- gen in de Angelsaksische geschiedfilosofie,” Theoretische Geschiedenis, 6 (1979), 58–91; Ankersmit, “Een moderne verdediging van het historisme. Geschiedenis en identiteit,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 96 (1981), 453– 474; Ankersmit, “Over geschiedonderwijs en historische begrippen,” Kleio, 23 (1982), 11–15.

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1929 essay on the task of cultural history.12 Furthermore, Lorenz claims that Ankersmit’s analysis of the state of affairs in historical writing reveals a “mo- nopolising strategy” because Ankersmit suggests that practically all historians work from a historicist perspective and produce narrative historiography. In a 1981 article, Ankersmit had conceptually connected historicism and narrativism, pointing out that what historicism actually aims to do is to construct narrative interpretations of the past with a specific identity, which amounts to a proposal to see the past in a certain way.13 Following the line of thought in this article, Lorenz claims that Ankersmit’s narrativist philosophy of history should in fact be seen as a very sophisticated variety of classical historicism, including its aversion to incorporating the fields and methods of the social sciences into the domain of historiography.14 Lorenz’s central objection to Ankersmit’s philosophy of history is aimed at the strict distinction that Ankersmit maintains between historical research and historical writing (geschiedvorsing and geschiedschrijving – a distinction already made by Huizinga). Consequently, there is no meaningful connection between historical narratives and the past itself; the historical narrative in Ankersmit’s philosophy is a mask without a face behind it. This brings Ankersmit to the claim – incorrect in Lorenz’s opinion – that causal explanation plays no role in historiography, but that historical explanations have a metaphorical character, because narrative substances generate a point of view, just as metaphors. In the end, Ankersmit’s rejection of social scientific approaches in history follows from this set of assumptions. According to Lorenz, however, it is exactly in connecting historical reality with historical writing that social scientific perspectives can play a productive role.15 In his reply to Lorenz, Ankersmit denies that it is his intention to banish all influences of the social sciences from the realm of historiography. Instead, he wants to ask philosophical questions concerning the nature of non-formal disciplines, of which history is the quintessential example. The social sciences, on the other hand, are hybrid disciplines, which have both a formal and a narrative or interpretative element. Thus, the debate on the relation between history and the social sciences should not concern the nature of history but that of the social sciences, especially sociology, which has lost much of its historical dimension. As to Lorenz’s criticism of narrative substances and the gap between historical research and historical writing, Ankersmit points out that

12 Lorenz, “Het masker zonder gezicht,” 170, 178. 13 Ankersmit, “Een moderne verdediging van het historisme.” 14 Lorenz, “Het masker zonder gezicht,” 193. 15 Lorenz, “Het masker zonder gezicht,” 171–172, 188–190.

journal of the philosophy of history 12 (2018) 450–471Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 02:16:50PM via free access 458 Bos

Lorenz defends a realist view on the nature of historical concepts, assuming a more direct correspondence between language and historical reality than in his own narrative idealism. According to Ankersmit, Lorenz’s realist position is the metaphysical option in this debate, corresponding with the foun- dationalist approach rejected by philosophers such as Rorty. It is in this – at the time fairly recent – development in philosophy that Ankersmit positions himself, even claiming that this turn in philosophy of science and epistemology in fact amounts to the absorption of a form of philosophy of history. As a final remark in his reply to Lorenz, Ankersmit expresses his worries about the tremendous production of historical research that he observes. Because of this overproduction, historiography might start to obscure our view of the past, just as Nietzsche feared in On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life. What we need in the present day, Ankersmit contends, is more reflection about the past, not more historical research.16 Lorenz’s reaction to Ankersmit in their three-stage debate reveals that to a large extent their differences of opinion are irreconcilable; they simply dis- agree about philosophical fundamentals.17 The same holds for Ankersmit’s other opponents in the Dutch theoretical debate, such as the Leiden historian Peer Vries, who is an even stronger proponent of an alignment between history and the social sciences than Lorenz, and whose philosophical orientation tends towards positivism.18 In a sense, the lines are drawn quite predictably in the Dutch theoretical debate of the 1980s, largely in accordance with international trends in the philosophy of history. The starting point of the debate in the previous decade was the question of to what extent historians should transform their discipline with the help of theories and methods from the social sciences. Ankersmit has a critical stance towards this reorientation of the historical discipline, but in the context of the discussion with his Dutch coun- terparts he develops a philosophical position that goes beyond the issue of the relation between history and the social sciences. In his brief reply to Lorenz’s criticism we can already see the roots of positions defended (much) later. The themes of anti-foundationalism and historical overproduction would return in his defence of postmodernism later in the 1980s, while the relation between

16 F. R. Ankersmit, “Antwoord aan Lorenz,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 97 (1984), 555–561. In 1983 Ankersmit wrote an afterword for the Dutch translation of Nietzsche’s tract, F. R. Ankersmit, “Nawoord,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Over nut en nadeel van de geschiedenis voor het leven. Tweede traktaat tegen de keer (Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij, 1983), 141–165. 17 C. F. G. Lorenz, “Er bestaat geen masker zonder gezicht. Een antwoord aan F. R. Ankersmit,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 98 (1985), 56–61. 18 See for instance P. H. H. Vries, Vertellers op drift. Een verhandeling over de nieuwe verha lende geschiedenis. Cahiers Sociale Geschiedenis 8 (Hilversum: Verloren, 1990).

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 459 language and historical reality is a recurring theme in his work. What we can see very clearly in the discussion with Lorenz is that Ankersmit rejects both a realist position, in which language in some way corresponds with reality, and a position in which our concepts shape reality – the point of view that he already described as “linguistic transcendentalism” in his 1974 review of Bertels’ dissertation.

2 A Textbook

In the 1980s, Dutch historical theorists produced a small wave of textbooks for the courses in historical methodology and philosophy of history that were now compulsory parts of the Dutch degree programmes in history. On the one hand, these textbooks aimed to provide an overview of the most important issues in historical theory, but on the other hand, they inevitably reflect their authors’ positions in the polemical Dutch debates of the 1980s. Some of the Dutch textbooks of the 1980s were quite explicitly intended to defend a certain position, such as Antoon van den Braembussche’s Theorie van de maatschappijgeschie denis (1985) (Theory of the history of society) and Chris Lorenz’s De constructie van het verleden (1987) (The construction of the past).19 Van den Braembussche supported a form of historical writing oriented towards the social sciences; with his textbook he also provided a theoretical foundation for the newly established history programme at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, which was distinct from other Dutch history programmes because of its social scientific character. Lorenz, who defended his introduction to historical theory as his PhD dissertation, tried to develop a “third way” in historical explanation, in between positivism and hermeneutics, rooted in comparative models of explanation in the social sciences. Although the other Dutch textbooks of the 1980s were perhaps less conspicuous in their promotion of a specific theoretical position, they nevertheless clearly displayed their authors’ perspectives. In 1990, in the introduction to De navel van de geschiedenis, a collection of previously published essays, Ankersmit writes that Dutch historical theorists were using their textbooks to have a debate without being openly polemical. Textbooks, according to Ankersmit, claim to be impartial introductions to the field of historical theory, but the genre offers scholars the opportunity to avoid talking about what they don’t like, instead of arguing against it, and provides a way

19 A. A. van den Braembussche, Theorie van de maatschappijgeschiedenis (Baarn: Ambo, 1985); C. F. G. Lorenz, De constructie van het verleden. Een inleiding in de theorie van de geschiedenis (Meppel and Amsterdam: Boom, 1987).

journal of the philosophy of history 12 (2018) 450–471Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 02:16:50PM via free access 460 Bos to win intellectual debates not by strength of argument but by expanding the number of adherents of one’s views.20 In a recent discussion of the Dutch textbooks on historical theory of the 1980s, Chiel van den Akker further pursues Ankersmit’s analysis, arguing that the central issue in the undeclared textbook war was the relation between history and social sciences, grafted onto the traditional distinction between nomothetic and idiographic disciplines.21 In 1984, Ankersmit was the first of his generation of historical theorists to publish a textbook: Denken over geschiedenis (Thinking about history). According to the subtitle, Een overzicht van moderne geschiedfilosofische opvattingen, this book was meant to provide an overview of the main ideas and positions in modern philosophy of history.22 And this is what it does. In slightly more than 300 pages Ankersmit summarises what he regards as the most important issues in the field. It is worthwhile to delve a little deeper into this textbook because that might reveal what Ankersmit considered to be the state of the art in philosophy of history in the mid-1980s. Ankersmit divides his book into three parts: a relatively short part (three chapters) about specula- tive philosophy of history, a much longer section (nine chapters) about critical philosophy of history, and a concluding three-chapter section about the relation between historiography and society. Ankersmit’s textbook is quite densely written, often involving fairly subtle philosophical arguments. It might have been quite a challenge for history undergraduates in the 1980s and 1990s to comprehend these arguments. In any case, the book would be far beyond the reach of students in the 2010s, as the author of a recent Dutch introduction to historical theory observes.23 Not surprisingly, most of the contentious issues are discussed in the chapters on critical philosophy of history. In these chapters Ankersmit more or less neutrally discusses the various positions concerning the topics at hand, though not without defending his own point of view. In his discussion of historical explanation – the longest chapter in Denken over geschiedenis – he acknowledges, for instance, that the covering-law model might have important advan- tages, if only because of its clarity and simplicity. Yet, it is also clear that in

20 F. R. Ankersmit, “Inleiding. De navel van de geschiedenis,” in De navel van de geschiedenis. Over interpretatie, representatie en historische realiteit (Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij, 1990), 9–42, 38. 21 C. van den Akker, “Methodisch dualisme. Wilhelm Windelband in Nederlandse hand- boeken geschiedfilosofie,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 129 (2016), 59–73. 22 F. R. Ankersmit, Denken over geschiedenis. Een overzicht van moderne geschiedfilosofische opvattingen (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1984). 23 H. Paul, Als het verleden trekt. Kernthema’s in de geschiedfilosofie (Den Haag: Boom Lemma Uitgevers, 2014), 12.

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 461 the end his assessment of this model is negative, essentially because it does not match some of the most fundamental beliefs held by the great majority of historians, such as their focus on the specific and unique character of historical phenomena and their view of the past as an essentially foreign world. Typically, in his critique of the covering-law model, Ankersmit often contrasts the advo- cates of this model with “the historian.” At the end of his chapter on historical explanation, he even questions the value of the principle of causality in history, in keeping with his narrativist philosophy. “Cause” and “effect” are concepts used in language, but, according to Ankersmit, in the past itself causes and ef- fects cannot be adequately distinguished. Thus, the use of causal explanations involves a transposition of linguistic categories onto reality, which Ankersmit regards as highly problematic.24 What we see here, in Ankersmit’s undergradu- ate textbook, is a very concise exposition of the theoretical position that is at the heart of his disagreement with Lorenz. The following chapter is about historicism and narrativism, an uncommon combination in a textbook, which reflects Ankersmit’s unique theoretical position. Starting out from the arguments of his 1981 essay “Een moderne verdediging van het historisme” (A modern defence of historicism) Ankersmit gives both a more specific analysis of historicism, focusing on its core doctrine of the historische Ideenlehre, and a more extended discussion of narrativism. He now also indicates an important distinction between the two: unlike narrativists, historicists assume that the historical ideas that organise their historical narratives are present in the past itself, as active principles that shape historical reality. This is, not surprisingly, Ankersmit’s main point of critique regarding historicism.25 In 1981, Ankersmit had identified the political dimension that is often present in historicism as its most problematic aspect, though not without connecting it with the tendency inherent in historicism to assume that the identities it narratively constructs also exist in reality. In his discussion of historicism in Denken over geschiedenis, this critique is absent, but he does address the political dimension of historiography in more general terms. When discussing the role of values in historical writing, Ankersmit defends a moderately subjectivist position. In the end, he considers the requirement that historical writing should be objective hard to realise and especially problematic when it results in the claim that subjective values should be banned from the realm of historiography by turning it into a (social) science. On the contrary, Ankersmit

24 F. R. Ankersmit, Denken over geschiedenis. Een overzicht van moderne geschiedfilosofische opvattingen, 2nd ed. (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1986), 108–128, 159–168. 25 Ankersmit, Denken over geschiedenis, 187.

journal of the philosophy of history 12 (2018) 450–471Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 02:16:50PM via free access 462 Bos argues that even when a historiographical point of view is strongly shaped by ethical and political values, it does not mean that nothing can be said about the quality of that perspective, since historians tend to approach such points of view with the same set of criteria they use when evaluating issues without a strong political dimension. In this way, historiography comes to involve a rational discussion about the plausibility of its underlying social and political values, which might provide us with a useful way of orienting ourselves in our social environment. A conclusion that might be drawn from the impossibil- ity of objectivity in historiography is that historians should study the past to contribute to a better world. Ankersmit, however, does not join the plea for a socially engaged history. Using historical writing as an instrument to realise a set of present-day values would prevent us from seeing the unexpected in the past, thus closing off novel perspectives for the future.26 This is clearly a classical liberal perspective on values and engagement in history, a vindication of a moderately subjective and restrainedly political form of historiography. Other Dutch theorists had a different take on the problem of values and politics in history, but this did not result in radically different conclusions. Chris Lorenz, for instance, took German critical theory as his starting point and argued that historians should more directly and more explicitly deal with social injustice, though without giving up the ideal of relative objectivity established through open academic debate.27 The Dutch philosophers of history of the 1980s were primarily discussing other things than values and politics.

3 Postmodernism and Beyond

In 1990, Ed Jonker observed a remarkable parallel between Dutch historiography and Dutch philosophy of history. For decades historical writing in the Netherlands had been characterised by a broad liberal consensus and a lack of debate, hidden behind a veil of academic professionalism. According to Jonker, Dutch philosophy of history almost perfectly mirrors this state of affairs. There is a little more debate in this field, with theorists searching for opponents but not always succeeding in finding them, because in the end there is no fundamental disagreement about the nature and purpose of the discipline of history. Jonker acknowledges that there was a theoretical debate in the 1970s and 1980s but regards this as simply a continuation of the familiar nineteenth-century

26 Ankersmit, Denken over geschiedenis, 289–292, 305–307. 27 C. F. G. Lorenz, De constructie van het verleden. Een inleiding in de theorie van de geschiede nis, 2nd ed. (Meppel and Amsterdam: Boom, 1990), 234–281.

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 463 discussion between historicists and positivists. In the 1970s, the debate also involved broader political and cultural divergences, but in line with the Dutch tradition of political accommodation and searching for consensus, the po- tential conflicts did not escalate, and moderate views prevailed. In the 1980s, Dutch philosophy of history became more technical. Especially Ankersmit and Lorenz developed sophisticated philosophical arguments, although without much of an audience.28 In the same year as Jonker, in 1990, Ankersmit came to a different conclusion about Dutch philosophy of history. In the mid-1970s, historical theory started to flourish in the Netherlands, driven by various innovations in academic historiography, and resulting in both highly combative and highly sophisticated debates. According to Ankersmit, these debates generated a lot of interest in the historical community at large. Many historians were convinced of the benefit of theoretical reflection on the foundations of historiography, and Ankersmit observes a close connection between historians and philosophers of history in the Netherlands. Somewhat cynically, he claims that Dutch historical theory had the function of absorbing disciplinary innovations, which in other countries was part of the normal course of affairs in academic historiography.29 Ankersmit’s analysis is in a sense the inverse of Jonker’s view, especially concerning the evaluation of the connection between philosophy of history and the historical discipline at large. In my opinion, Ankersmit’s analysis seems to be the more plausible one. As we have seen above, general historical journals offered ample space for theoretical debates, which suggests that the editors of these journals assumed that philosophy of history was not just an esoteric specialism but relevant for the larger community of academic historians. Furthermore, in the 1970s and 1980s there was a substantial interest among history students in theoretical issues. Student journals devoted special issues to topics such as “language and history”, “time,” and “text and context,” and there were a lot of discussion nights and symposia drawing quite substantial audiences. Especially important were the conferences “Balans en perspectief. Over aard en functie van kennis van het verleden” (Balance and perspective: On the nature and function of knowledge of the past), organised by Utrecht history students in 1986, and “Over nut en nadeel van geschiedtheorie voor de historicus” (On the uses and disadvantages of historical theory for the historian), which took place in Amsterdam in 1987. The papers presented at both

28 E. Jonker, “Consensus, conflict en conciliantie in de Nederlandse geschiedfilosofie,” in E. Jonker and M. van Rossem (eds.), Geschiedenis en cultuur. Achttien opstellen (’s-Graven- hage: SDU Uitgeverij, 1990), 29–42. 29 Ankersmit, “Inleiding. De navel van de geschiedenis,” 33–35.

journal of the philosophy of history 12 (2018) 450–471Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 02:16:50PM via free access 464 Bos conferences were published in edited volumes. Ankersmit spoke at both occa- sions, presenting papers in which a new direction in his work became visible, as will be discussed below.30 According to Jo Tollebeek, around 1990 Dutch philosophy of history started to show signs of exhaustion. Historical theorists were still highly productive, but also seemed unable to move beyond the positions they had taken up in the 1980s, perhaps with the exception of Ankersmit. Their arguments became so subtle and sophisticated that the connection with historical practice began to wane.31 Here, Tollebeek’s diagnosis comes to resemble Jonker’s view, though the latter regards the esoteric tendency in the Dutch theoretical debates as something that was present from the start, rooted in the fundamental pen- chant for consensus that had characterised Dutch historiography for decades. In a similar vein as Tollebeek, Ankersmit observes a “recession” in Dutch historical theory around 1990. In his opinion, this recession was caused by the declining appeal of philosophy of science, which had informed much theoretical work in the 1970s and 1980s, and by the fact that most theorists tended to remain within the boundaries of their own intellectual traditions, without debating the fundamental assumptions underlying their views.32 Speaking of a deadlock or a recession in Dutch philosophy of history around 1990 seems somewhat exaggerated. The academic production of Dutch theorists continued to be noteworthy, both quantitatively and qualitatively. What did change, though, was that some participants in the Dutch debates of the 1980s started to shift their efforts to the international arena. This is especially true for Ankersmit and Lorenz, who became frequent contributors to History and Theory and leading voices in the international community of philosophers of history. Due to this international activity the distance grew between the most important Dutch philosophers of history and the Dutch historical community, which became more oriented towards fellow specialists abroad as well. Besides, the debate among historians about the direction that their discipline should take had lost much of its intensity in the late 1980s. The proponents of a social scientific history were less vocal or had watered down their point of view, while new historiographical approaches, such as cultural history, had come to the fore. What also played a role in the growing distance between theorists and practising historians were the kinds of views that the former started to develop. Ankersmit in particular began to present ideas that many historians could not really connect to.

30 Tollebeek, “De ekster en de kooi,” 58–61. 31 Tollebeek, “De ekster en de kooi,” 61–64. 32 Ankersmit, “Inleiding. De navel van de geschiedenis,” 35–39.

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In the mid-1980s Ankersmit turned to postmodernism. The first sign of that turn is his provocative lecture at the conference “Balans en perspectief” in 1986. Ankersmit’s starting point is the diagnosis that there is a tremendous overproduction in academic historiography, which obscures our view of the past itself and compels us to search for new theoretical perspectives. The mod- ernist, scientistic view on historiography cannot explain the endless multipli- cation of historical knowledge and the never-ending debates about the past. Postmodernism, however, offers a more useful perspective. It destabilises the notion that historians can discover the essence of the past with scientific means, visible in most modern approaches in historiography, from historicism – which Ankersmit now calls remarkably naive – to historical social science. Postmodernism acknowledges that the traditional dichotomy between language and reality has lost its meaning, which opens the way for an aesthetic approach to the entire domain of the representation of reality, including the representation of the past in historical writing. A central assumption in this aesthetic perspective is the idea that language and art are not opposed to reality but form a kind of reality in themselves. The type of historical writing that best corresponds to Ankersmit’s postmodern point of view is microhis- tory, which examines “the leaves of the historical tree,” without searching for overarching schemes or underlying essences.33 Ankersmit’s lecture and subsequent article generated a lot of controversy among historians, many of whom had the experience that the foundations of their discipline were being radically undermined. As Tollebeek suggests, Ankersmit might bear quite a lot of the responsibility for opening the chasm between theorists and practising historians.34 The 1986 lecture is also the beginning of a new period in Ankersmit’s work in which he addresses a different set of problems than before. He already briefly mentions the key concept and the central theoretical outlook of this new intellectual orientation in his text: representation, primarily approached from the perspective of aesthetics. To a certain extent, the notion of representation does the same things as Ankersmit’s earlier concept of a narrative substance: it organises knowledge from a particular perspective, it involves a proposal to look at reality in a certain way. But, and here I follow the interpretation of Piet Blaas, Ankersmit starts speaking about “representation” for two reasons. First, the concept of representation has an

33 F. R. Ankersmit, “Tegen de verwetenschappelijking van de geschiedbeoefening,” in F. van Besouw et al. (eds.), Balans en perspectief. Visies op de geschiedwetenschap in Nederland (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff/Forsten, 1986), 55–72. This essay appeared in English as “Historiography and Postmodernism,” History and Theory, 28 (1989), 137–153. 34 Tollebeek, “De ekster en de kooi,” 60.

journal of the philosophy of history 12 (2018) 450–471Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 02:16:50PM via free access 466 Bos existential dimension that is lacking in the notion of a narrative substance; without representation we would not be able to relate to and to live in reality. Secondly, by using the term “representation” we can avoid the pitfalls of the epistemological opposition between realism and idealism, and we can rethink the relation between knowledge and reality. Representations can be regarded as autonomous in relation to what they represent, without having to assume any form of linguistic transcendentalism.35 In the years after 1986, Ankersmit was tremendously productive. He published countless essays in both Dutch and English, which were regularly brought together in edited volumes. In this period, the relation between Ankersmit’s Dutch and English writings began to change. Whereas previously his views were first shaped in the context of the Dutch theoretical debate and then transferred to an international setting, from the late 1980s onwards he was, so to say, active in two contexts at the same time. Some of his English articles are translated into Dutch, but it also occurs that a text originally written in Dutch is later published internationally.36 The central theme of Ankersmit’s work in these years, representation, is not only applied in the philosophy of history but leads him into other philosophical domains as well, primarily aesthetics and political philosophy. This expansion of Ankersmit’s philosophical scope also involves a shift of audience. Published in 1990, De navel van de geschiedenis (The navel of history), a collection of essays centred around the theme of historical representation, was still primarily intended as a con- tribution to the Dutch discussion on historical theory. Several reviews by his theoretical colleagues – often quite critical – show that it was also received as such.37 In 1996 and 1997 Ankersmit published three volumes of essays under the title Exploraties (Explorations), the first dealing with themes from the philosophy of history, the second about aesthetics, and the third about political philosophy.38 Now, there was much less debate among the Dutch historical

35 P. B. M. Blaas, “Op zoek naar een glimp van het verleden. De geschiedfilosofie van Frank Ankersmit,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 119 (2006), 377–386, 381–383. Ankersmit’s most important essay on this topic is “Historical Representation,” History and Theory, 27 (1988), 205–288, later published in Dutch as “Historische representatie,” in De navel van de ge schiedenis. Over interpretatie, representatie en historische realiteit (Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij, 1990), 150–180. 36 See notes 33 and 35 for examples. 37 Tollebeek, “De ekster en de kooi,” 64. 38 F. R. Ankersmit, De spiegel van het verleden. Exploraties I: geschiedtheorie (Kampen: Kok Agora and Kapellen: Pelckmans, 1996); Ankersmit, De macht van representatie. Exploraties II: cultuurfilosofie & esthetica (Kampen: Kok Agora and Kapellen: Pelckmans, 1996); Ankersmit, Macht door representatie. Exploraties III: politieke filosofie (Kampen: Kampen: Kok Agora and Kapellen: Pelckmans, 1997).

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 467 theorists. Illustrative of this reception is the remark in Leen Dorsman’s review of the volume on historical theory that “deep in his heart Ankersmit is more a political philosopher than a historian.”39 In the meantime, Ankersmit and Lorenz had moved their sophisticated theoretical debates to the pages of History and Theory.40 A very important Dutch text from the 1990s is the inaugural lecture that Ankersmit gave in 1993 when he became professor of historical theory at the University of Groningen. The title of this lecture was De historische ervaring (Historical experience). Here, Ankersmit already starts to explore the ideas that he would later elaborate in Sublime Historical Experience. His starting point is the observation that neither analytical philosophy of history nor narrativism pays any attention to the experience of the past, and that Gadamerian hermeneutics makes the past itself completely inaccessible. In order to show what a direct experience of the past can involve Ankersmit gives two examples: Huizinga’s notion of historical sensation and the way we can experience an eighteenth-century capriccio by Guardi. What makes the contact with the past in these two examples authentic is always a defect or something paradoxal. To understand this kind of imperfection Ankersmit invokes the notion of the sublime as it was developed by Burke and Kant. It will be experience and the sublime, Ankersmit writes, “that will correct the postmodern sense of life and in the name of which the tyranny of concepts will come to an end.”41 The fact that Ankersmit uses Huizinga to clarify his notion of historical experience may very well be related to a relatively short but intense Huizinga re- vival in the Netherlands around 1990. In just a few years four PhD dissertations about Huizinga appeared.42 Perhaps this small wave of Huizinga studies can be seen as a kind of “post-theoretical” phase in the Dutch reflection on history. After the highly sophisticated philosophical debates of the 1970s and 1980s, centred around the relation between history and the social sciences, theoreti- cally inclined historians searched for another form of inspiration, which was

39 L. Dorsman, review of F. R. Ankersmit, De spiegel van het verleden, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 113 (1998), 209–211. For Ankersmit’s political theory, see Paul and Van Veldhuizen, “A Retrieval of Historicism,” 47–54. 40 See for instance, C. F. G. Lorenz, “Can Histories be True? Narrativism, Positivism and the ‘Metaphorical Turn’,” History and Theory, 37 (1998), 309–329. 41 F. R. Ankersmit, De historische ervaring. Rede uitgesproken bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van bijzonder hoogleraar in de geschiedtheorie aan de Rijksuniversiteit te Groningen op din sdag 23 maart 1993 (Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij, 1993), 25. 42 Paul and Van Veldhuizen, “A Retrieval of Historicism,” 44–45.

journal of the philosophy of history 12 (2018) 450–471Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 02:16:50PM via free access 468 Bos certainly not free from nostalgia. In Ankersmit’s work, however, the references to Huizinga served a clear philosophical purpose. The reader of Sublime Historical Experience will immediately recognise key arguments from that book in Ankersmit’s inaugural lecture. Therefore, Blaas regards 1993 as the beginning of a third period in Ankersmit’s work, centred around the notion of experience.43 It should be noted, however, that there are twelve years between the inaugural lecture and the publication of Sublime Historical Experience. During these years Ankersmit continued to publish about the concept of representation, both in Dutch and in English. Therefore, 1993 might not be a very radical rupture in Ankersmit’s oeuvre. Yet, in De histo rische ervaring he seems to distance himself from the postmodernism that he embraced in the mid-1980s. At the same time, there are important continuities throughout the various periods in Ankersmit’s intellectual life. Perhaps we can say that it is the resistance to “the tyranny of concepts” that remains in place behind his various reorientations. In the preface to the Dutch edition of Sublime Historical Experience, which appeared in 2007, Ankersmit writes that he considers this edition significantly stronger than the original English version of his book, published two years before.44 I shall discuss the changes in the Dutch edition at some length here in order to make them accessible to Ankersmit’s international readers. One of the most conspicuous changes is that the first two chapters have been completely rewritten. The complex analysis of Rorty’s work in the English edition has become part of a broader, more historicising discussion of the relation between language and experience in Western thought. Ankersmit observes a turn towards experience in the shift from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, and it is in this Romantic tradition that he positions himself. Most strands in Western thought, however, tend to marginalise experience, which is, according to Ankersmit, a reason to reject them. This holds for epistemology, one of the central fields in analytical philosophy, but also for the wide range of approaches – from structuralism to narrativism and deconstructivism – that is usually labelled as “theory.” The common problem in all these perspectives is linguistic transcendentalism, a point of view that Ankersmit already strongly condemned in the English edition of Sublime Historical Experience, but also,

43 Blaas, “Op zoek naar een glimp van het verleden,” 381, 383–385. 44 F. R. Ankersmit, De sublieme historische ervaring (Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij, 2007), 9. For the following discussion of the differences between the Dutch and the English edition of sublime historical experience, I draw on my review of the Dutch edition, “De sublieme historische ervaring revisited,” Krisis, 9 (2008), 62–69. See also F. R. Ankersmit and J. Menezes, “Historical Experience Interrogated: A Conversation,” Journal of the Philosophy of History, 11 (2017), 247–273, 266–271.

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 469 thirty years earlier, in his review of Kees Bertels’ dissertation. In this respect at least, his views have remained remarkably consistent over time. A second important change in the Dutch edition of Sublime Historical Experience can be found in the epilogue. Ankersmit concludes the English edition with a somewhat lyrical discussion of Rousseau and Hölderlin. In the Dutch epilogue Ankersmit asks whether it might be said that we now live at a rupture between two eras, similar to, for instance, the period of the French Revolution in which the sublime historical experience completely reshaped the perception of the past. On the one hand, there is little in our present age that points towards the traumatised relation to the past that occurs in periods of dramatic historical change. On the other hand, we seem to have the experience that the present moves away from the past at an increasingly fast pace. This experience, however, is more individual than collective. It has become a personal experience, a sign of the “privatisation of the past” that is characteris- tic of our times. This might lead to nostalgia, though this need not necessarily be detrimental, depending on the kind of nostalgia that is at play. Nostalgia might involve a transhistorical reconstruction of a mythical past, but it can also leave the distance between past and present intact. What distinguishes nostalgia from historical experience is that the latter creates the gap between past and present, while it is already given in the former. The creation of a sud- den distance between past and present can occur at a collective level, as was the case in the French Revolution, but it can also occur at the level of the individual historian. This is the kind of experience that is at play in Huizinga’s historical sensation. Especially conservatives are susceptible to this experience of an unexpected breaking away of the past because their political in- clination makes them want to keep the past connected to the present for as long as possible. Thus, the historical experience also has a political dimension, which is not surprising to Ankersmit, because, as he states in the final sen- tence of De sublieme historische ervaring “politics is the alpha and omega of all historiography.”45 That the revised epilogue has come to include an element of cultural critique might be a matter of increasing insight. Possibly, however, it might also be related to the fact that it concludes the Dutch edition of the book. In the 1980s, academics in the Netherlands published primarily in Dutch. That is no longer the case in the twenty-first century. English has become the dominant language in academia, and publishing a book in Dutch now inevitably implies the ambition to reach a wider audience than one’s academic peers. Perhaps the Dutch edition of Sublime Historical Experience gives us a glimpse of Ankersmit

45 Ankersmit, De sublieme historische ervaring, 408–421.

journal of the philosophy of history 12 (2018) 450–471Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 02:16:50PM via free access 470 Bos in the role of public intellectual. Since the 1990s Ankersmit has been a frequent contributor to political debate in the Netherlands, mainly by publishing op-ed pieces, but also as a prominent member of the conservative-liberal Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (VVD, People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy). The emphasis on politics in the epilogue to De sublieme histo rische ervaring might be seen as a mirror of Ankersmit’s political activity.46

4 Conclusion

In 2011 the Dutch philosophy journal Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte (General Dutch journal of philosophy) published a so-called focus issue, consisting of an article by Ankersmit and six brief reactions by other authors. Ankersmit’s article was called “Representatie als cognitief instrument” (Representation as a cognitive instrument).47 The article drew on Ankersmit’s new book, Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation,48 ex- amining the notion of historical representation and arguing that from a philosophical perspective there are two “pure” sciences, physics and historiography. There is a remarkable continuity between the ideas expressed here and Ankersmit’s work from the early 1980s. Yet, the route of publication that these ideas have travelled is different, from English to Dutch instead of the other way round, and the discussants and the audience are different as well. Of the group of historical theorists with whom Ankersmit debated the foundations of historiography in the 1980s only Ed Jonker contributes to this journal issue, and the audience of historians has been replaced by an audience of philosophers. All historical writing involves an exploration of the relation between continuity and change. That is also the case in this micro-level intellectual history of the development of Ankersmit’s Dutch work. Discussions of Ankersmit’s work regularly emphasise ruptures and discontinuities, often resulting in the distinction between a “good” – usually the earlier – and a “bad” – usually the later – Ankersmit.49 As I hope to have shown in this discussion of Ankersmit’s

46 For Ankersmit as public intellectual, see Paul and Van Veldhuizen, “A Retrieval of Historicism,” 51–54. In 2009 Ankersmit left the VVD because of its embrace of neoliberalism. 47 F. R. Ankersmit, “Representatie als cognitief instrument,” Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte, 103 (2011), 243–262. 48 F. R. Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012). 49 See for instance P. Icke, Ankersmit’s Lost Historical Cause: A Journey from Language to Experience (New York: Routledge, 2012).

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Dutch writings, behind all reorientations – or apparent reorientations – in Ankersmit’s work we can observe a remarkable level of continuity. Especially his critique of linguistic transcendentalism, his resistance to “the tyranny of concepts”, seems to be a constant factor in his oeuvre. The audience of his writings is less constant, at least in the Dutch context, and an awareness of changes in this respect might help us to acquire a more thorough understanding of certain developments in Ankersmit’s work.

journal of the philosophy of history 12 (2018) 450–471Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 02:16:50PM via free access