WEBVTT NOTE Conjectural History 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.680 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with 2 00:00:09.680 --> 00:00:13.240 Jeff Rigenbach. 3 00:00:13.240 --> 00:00:17.280 All history is at least partly conjectural. 4 00:00:17.280 --> 00:00:21.920 If we think about the enterprise of history for a moment or two, we can easily see why 5 00:00:21.920 --> 00:00:23.980 this must be so. 6 00:00:23.980 --> 00:00:29.560 For when we walk outside our dwellings and take a look at the world around us, one inescapable 7 00:00:29.560 --> 00:00:34.560 A remarkable fact is that much of the past is still here, still with us. 8 00:00:34.560 --> 00:00:40.240 Particularly if the town or city we live in has been in existence for a while, walking 9 00:00:40.240 --> 00:00:45.560 through such a place is something like being a geologist and passing through a present 10 00:00:45.560 --> 00:00:54.560 world in which outcroppings of the past, buildings, statues, place names, institutions, even transportation 11 00:01:24.560 --> 00:01:31.920 How are we to know about that part of the past that has not survived? 12 00:01:31.920 --> 00:01:37.720 The answer is that we rely on documents for information about those aspects of the past 13 00:01:37.720 --> 00:01:41.600 that we can no longer witness directly for ourselves. 14 00:01:41.600 --> 00:01:47.940 For as the English historian John Tosh reminds us, from the High Middle Ages onwards, which 15 00:01:47.940 --> 00:01:53.900 is to say for approximately the last thousand years, the written word survives in greater 16 00:01:53.900 --> 00:02:19.260 The surviving written word is of a number of types. 17 00:02:19.260 --> 00:02:22.460 There are published and unpublished sources. 18 00:02:22.460 --> 00:02:28.780 The unpublished sources include the diaries, journals and letters of individuals, the records 19 00:02:28.780 --> 00:02:34.500 and correspondence of those engaged in business enterprises, and the paperwork generated by 20 00:02:34.500 --> 00:02:37.020 government at all its levels. 21 00:02:37.020 --> 00:02:43.740 The published sources include flyers, pamphlets, almanacs, catalogues, newspapers, magazines 22 00:02:43.740 --> 00:02:45.020 and books. 23 00:02:45.020 --> 00:02:50.940 And not all of these, whether published or unpublished, may safely be relied upon. 24 00:02:50.940 --> 00:02:57.820 As John Tosh observes, many primary sources are inaccurate, muddled, based on hearsay, 25 00:02:57.820 --> 00:02:59.780 or intended to mislead. 26 00:02:59.780 --> 00:03:06.840 Indeed, the majority of sources are in some way inaccurate, incomplete, or tainted by 27 00:03:06.840 --> 00:03:09.660 prejudice and self-interest. 28 00:03:09.660 --> 00:03:16.220 So some of the facts the historian needs are inaccessible, and much of what is accessible 29 00:03:16.220 --> 00:03:18.840 is also unreliable. 30 00:03:18.840 --> 00:03:24.320 What do you do then if you're writing an account of some historical event or some historical 31 00:03:24.320 --> 00:03:30.500 period or some individual's life and career, and you come to a point where the available 32 00:03:30.500 --> 00:03:35.960 information thins out and you don't know for sure what happened next? 33 00:03:35.960 --> 00:03:40.880 What if there appear to be no documents that provide that information? 34 00:03:40.880 --> 00:03:45.440 Or if there are several documents that give conflicting information? 35 00:03:45.440 --> 00:03:50.640 If it's a minor issue, one that doesn't really matter that much to the overall point you're 36 00:03:50.640 --> 00:03:56.520 making in the article or chapter you're writing, you can work around it, simply say nothing 37 00:03:56.520 --> 00:03:58.840 about it one way or another. 38 00:03:58.840 --> 00:04:04.360 In some cases, however, you're going to feel that you need to know what happened, if only 39 00:04:04.360 --> 00:04:09.740 in order to tell a coherent story, one that doesn't leave nagging questions in the minds 40 00:04:09.740 --> 00:04:12.080 of your readers or listeners. 41 00:04:12.080 --> 00:04:13.960 So what do you do? 42 00:04:13.960 --> 00:04:18.880 The answer is that you make your best guess about what actually happened. 43 00:04:18.880 --> 00:04:24.640 You use words like probably and presumably so that your readers or listeners will know 44 00:04:24.640 --> 00:04:29.780 that you're dealing in conjecture, not facts, and you make your best guess. 45 00:04:29.780 --> 00:04:33.200 And what is that best guess based upon? 46 00:04:33.200 --> 00:04:39.240 It's based upon your knowledge of the historical situation, of course, the facts you do have, 47 00:04:39.240 --> 00:04:45.320 Plus your understanding, or at least your beliefs, about human nature and about the 48 00:04:45.320 --> 00:04:47.120 way the world is. 49 00:04:47.120 --> 00:04:53.280 The historian John Lewis Gaddis in his book The Landscape of History has proposed that 50 00:04:53.280 --> 00:04:59.960 every historian approaches his subject with certain assumptions based on personal experience 51 00:04:59.960 --> 00:05:06.720 about how things happen in the world, assumptions about the way the world works, sorting out 52 00:05:06.720 --> 00:05:13.020 About the difference between how things happen and how things happened, Gaddis writes, involves 53 00:05:13.020 --> 00:05:15.840 more than just changing a verb tense. 54 00:05:15.840 --> 00:05:21.420 It's an important part of what's involved in achieving a closer fit between representation 55 00:05:21.420 --> 00:05:23.860 and reality. 56 00:05:23.860 --> 00:05:29.000 Even if a particular historian is not very philosophical of temperament, not much given 57 00:05:29.000 --> 00:05:35.360 to reflecting on the nature of the human condition, and this perfectly describes most historians, 58 00:05:35.360 --> 00:05:41.480 by the way, that historian will still be operating under certain assumptions about how things 59 00:05:41.480 --> 00:05:44.560 happen in this world and this life. 60 00:05:44.560 --> 00:05:50.440 Ayn Rand used the phrase sense of life to describe what I'm talking about here. 61 00:05:50.440 --> 00:05:58.400 A sense of life, Rand wrote in 1966, is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, 62 00:05:58.400 --> 00:06:04.600 an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence. 63 00:06:04.600 --> 00:06:10.920 Long before he is old enough to grasp such a concept as metaphysics, man makes choices, 64 00:06:10.920 --> 00:06:18.320 forms value judgments, experiences emotions, and acquires a certain implicit view of life. 65 00:06:18.320 --> 00:06:24.320 Every choice and value judgment implies some estimate of himself and of the world around 66 00:06:24.320 --> 00:06:29.240 him, most particularly of his capacity to deal with the world. 67 00:06:29.240 --> 00:06:35.300 He may draw conscious conclusions, which may be true or false, or he may remain mentally 68 00:06:35.300 --> 00:06:41.000 passive and merely react to events, that is, merely feel. 69 00:06:41.000 --> 00:06:47.920 Whatever the case may be, his subconscious mechanism sums up his psychological activities, 70 00:06:47.920 --> 00:06:55.120 integrating his conclusions, reactions or evasions into an emotional sum that establishes 71 00:06:55.120 --> 00:07:01.320 a Habitual Pattern and becomes his automatic response to the world around him. 72 00:07:01.320 --> 00:07:08.060 What began as a series of single discrete conclusions or evasions about his own particular 73 00:07:08.060 --> 00:07:15.600 problems becomes a generalized feeling about existence, an implicit metaphysics with the 74 00:07:15.600 --> 00:07:22.340 compelling motivational power of a constant basic emotion, an emotion which is part of 75 00:07:22.340 --> 00:07:38.460 According to Rand, the key concept in the formation of a sense of life is the term important. 76 00:07:38.460 --> 00:07:45.580 What is important, worth noticing, worth heeding, paying attention to about life? 77 00:07:45.580 --> 00:07:52.580 What aspects of life are important in the sense that they encapsulate and, in effect, 78 00:07:52.580 --> 00:07:58.460 represent something about the way the human condition is in its essence? 79 00:07:58.460 --> 00:08:04.140 Rand employed this concept of sense of life principally in her discussion of the arts, 80 00:08:04.140 --> 00:08:10.600 especially the art of fiction writing, arguing that it is the artist's sense of life that 81 00:08:10.600 --> 00:08:17.200 that controls and integrates his work, directing the innumerable choices he has to make, from 82 00:08:17.200 --> 00:08:24.400 the choice of subject to the subtlest details of style, as he selects those aspects of existence 83 00:08:24.400 --> 00:08:31.760 which he regards as metaphysically significant, and by isolating and stressing them, by omitting 84 00:08:31.760 --> 00:08:38.840 what he regards as the insignificant and accidental, presents his view of existence. 85 00:08:38.840 --> 00:08:44.480 But is it not obvious that what she says here is no less true of the historian, who tells 86 00:08:44.480 --> 00:08:50.700 stories about actual events, periods, and individual human lives of the past? 87 00:08:50.700 --> 00:08:57.280 For the historian selects those aspects of the past which he regards as significant, 88 00:08:57.280 --> 00:09:05.120 and by isolating and stressing them, by omitting what he regards as the insignificant and accidental, 89 00:09:05.120 --> 00:09:12.240 Once his view of the event, period or individual life he is writing about, and what he regards 90 00:09:12.240 --> 00:09:19.440 as significant will be in the end at least partially determined by his sense of life, 91 00:09:19.440 --> 00:09:25.020 by his notions about how things happen in this world of ours. 92 00:09:25.020 --> 00:09:30.040 And what if the events the historian is writing about took place earlier than a thousand years 93 00:09:30.040 --> 00:09:31.040 ago? 94 00:09:31.040 --> 00:09:36.400 What if they took place so long ago that no documents regarding them have survived? 95 00:09:36.400 --> 00:09:42.360 What if they took place before written records of any kind were even systematically created 96 00:09:42.360 --> 00:09:43.360 and kept? 97 00:09:43.360 --> 00:09:50.680 I'm thinking here of two particular historical works that loom large in the libertarian tradition. 98 00:09:50.680 --> 00:09:58.720 Folkways by William Graham Sumner and An Essay on the History of Civil Society by Adam Ferguson. 99 00:09:58.720 --> 00:10:05.840 Folkways, which is subtitled A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, 100 00:10:05.840 --> 00:10:11.880 Customs, Morays and Morals, begins by discussing the origin of folkways. 101 00:10:11.880 --> 00:10:18.080 If we put together all that we have learned from anthropology and ethnography about primitive 102 00:10:18.080 --> 00:10:24.400 men and primitive society, Sumner writes, we perceive that the first task of life is 103 00:10:24.400 --> 00:10:26.000 to live. 104 00:10:26.000 --> 00:10:29.640 One begin with acts, not with thoughts. 105 00:10:29.640 --> 00:10:34.760 Every moment brings necessities which must be satisfied at once. 106 00:10:34.760 --> 00:10:40.200 Need was the first experience, and it was followed at once by a blundering effort to 107 00:10:40.200 --> 00:10:42.020 satisfy it. 108 00:10:42.020 --> 00:10:48.480 In the beginning, the method was that of trial and failure, which produces repeated pain, 109 00:10:48.480 --> 00:10:51.140 loss and disappointments. 110 00:10:51.140 --> 00:10:53.700 was the impelling force. 111 00:10:53.700 --> 00:10:59.460 Pleasure and pain, on the one side and the other, were the rude constraints, which defined 112 00:10:59.460 --> 00:11:03.000 the line on which efforts must proceed. 113 00:11:03.000 --> 00:11:08.440 The ability to distinguish between pleasure and pain is the only psychical power which 114 00:11:08.440 --> 00:11:09.940 is to be assumed. 115 00:11:09.940 --> 00:11:14.480 Thus, ways of doing things were selected, which were expedient. 116 00:11:14.480 --> 00:11:20.240 They answered the purpose better than other ways, or with less toil and pain. 117 00:11:20.240 --> 00:11:27.620 During the course on which efforts were compelled to go, habit, routine and skill were developed. 118 00:11:27.620 --> 00:11:34.520 The struggle to maintain existence was carried on not individually but in groups, each profited 119 00:11:34.520 --> 00:11:37.120 by the other's experience. 120 00:11:37.120 --> 00:11:42.560 Hence there was concurrence toward that which proved to be most expedient. 121 00:11:42.560 --> 00:11:46.840 All at last adopted the same way for the same purpose. 122 00:11:46.840 --> 00:12:07.120 At this point it seems to me any properly skeptical reader simply has to ask, how on earth does 123 00:12:07.120 --> 00:12:09.160 Sumner know all this? 124 00:12:09.160 --> 00:12:14.500 No documents exist that could possibly give him this information, and the events he is 125 00:12:14.500 --> 00:12:19.900 is describing happened so long ago that they could scarcely have left much physical evidence 126 00:12:19.900 --> 00:12:21.340 behind. 127 00:12:21.340 --> 00:12:27.020 Sumner's remark at the beginning of the passage about all that we have learned from anthropology 128 00:12:27.020 --> 00:12:35.500 and ethnography with regard to primitive men and primitive society is the tip-off. 129 00:12:35.500 --> 00:12:40.460 Anthropologists and ethnographers take the fragmentary and often suggestive but always 130 00:12:40.460 --> 00:12:47.380 These ambiguous remains of events in the remote past, and combining this scanty information 131 00:12:47.380 --> 00:12:53.260 with what is known about so-called primitive people living a primitive lifestyle in more 132 00:12:53.260 --> 00:12:59.880 recent times, and with the anthropologists and ethnographers' own notions, whether consciously 133 00:12:59.880 --> 00:13:06.060 or unconsciously held, about the nature of the human condition and how things happen 134 00:13:06.060 --> 00:13:13.260 in the World, they attempt to infer what life must have been like for these ancient people. 135 00:13:13.260 --> 00:13:18.640 These anthropologists and ethnographers, then, are doing essentially the same thing every 136 00:13:18.640 --> 00:13:23.780 historian, every police detective, every natural scientist does. 137 00:13:23.780 --> 00:13:30.640 They are looking at an existing situation, an existing state of affairs, and asking themselves, 138 00:13:30.640 --> 00:13:33.500 how did things come to this pass? 139 00:13:33.500 --> 00:13:40.600 What events, if they had happened, would have led inexorably to what I see before me? 140 00:13:40.600 --> 00:13:45.260 The method by which natural scientists generate hypotheses. 141 00:13:45.260 --> 00:13:52.260 The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce called it abduction or retroduction to distinguish 142 00:13:52.260 --> 00:13:54.960 it from induction and deduction. 143 00:13:54.960 --> 00:14:00.720 But whatever you call it, it has much in common with what the elementary textbooks in logic 144 00:14:00.720 --> 00:14:07.280 call the fallacy of affirming the consequent, if it rains, then the streets will be wet, 145 00:14:07.280 --> 00:14:13.760 the streets are wet, therefore it has rained, logically not necessarily, but the scientific 146 00:14:13.760 --> 00:14:19.480 method says, the streets are wet, that would be the case if it had rained, maybe it has 147 00:14:19.480 --> 00:14:27.020 rained, then the scientific method tests that hypothesis, has it rained, what does the empirical 148 00:14:27.020 --> 00:14:28.700 Imperial data show. 149 00:14:28.700 --> 00:14:34.500 If it hasn't rained, what else might account for the wet conditions we see around us? 150 00:14:34.500 --> 00:14:40.140 For the historian, as we have seen, the empirical data may not be conclusive. 151 00:14:40.140 --> 00:14:46.800 He or she may have to make his or her best guess, based at least in part on his or her 152 00:14:46.800 --> 00:14:53.680 views on the human condition and how things happen in this world we all live in. 153 00:14:53.680 --> 00:15:00.200 At one point in the opening pages of Folkways, Sumner writes that it is of the first importance 154 00:15:00.200 --> 00:15:07.720 to notice that from the first acts by which men try to satisfy needs, each act stands 155 00:15:07.720 --> 00:15:13.060 by itself and looks no further than the immediate satisfaction. 156 00:15:13.060 --> 00:15:19.480 From recurrent needs arise habits for the individual and customs for the group. 157 00:15:19.480 --> 00:15:26.580 But these results are consequences which were never conscious and never foreseen or intended. 158 00:15:26.580 --> 00:15:31.800 They are not noticed until they have long existed, and it is still longer before they 159 00:15:31.800 --> 00:15:33.720 are appreciated. 160 00:15:33.720 --> 00:15:39.420 Another long time must pass, and a higher stage of mental development must be reached 161 00:15:39.420 --> 00:15:45.800 before they can be used as a basis from which to deduce rules for meeting, in the future, 162 00:15:45.800 --> 00:15:49.040 problems whose pressure can be foreseen. 163 00:15:49.040 --> 00:15:55.560 The folkways, therefore, are not creations of human purpose and wit. 164 00:15:55.560 --> 00:16:01.960 This bears an almost uncanny resemblance to an observation made by Adam Ferguson nearly 165 00:16:01.960 --> 00:16:11.380 140 years earlier, in 1767, in his book, An Essay on the History of Civil Society. 166 00:16:11.380 --> 00:16:20.560 One was a Scot, born 288 years ago this month, on July 1, 1723, the son of a clergyman. 167 00:16:20.560 --> 00:16:27.280 He entered the ministry himself in 1745 at the age of 22, but found he had little talent 168 00:16:27.280 --> 00:16:28.720 for the work. 169 00:16:28.720 --> 00:16:33.760 After nine years, he gave it up, traveled on the continent for a time, then returned 170 00:16:33.760 --> 00:16:39.700 to Scotland and spent a couple of years working as a librarian and as a private tutor before 171 00:16:39.700 --> 00:16:44.420 for joining the faculty of the University of Edinburgh, where he remained for most of 172 00:16:44.420 --> 00:16:46.760 the next three decades. 173 00:16:46.760 --> 00:16:53.800 After resigning in 1785 at the age of 62, he devoted himself to travel and writing. 174 00:16:53.800 --> 00:16:59.540 He died early in 1816 in Scotland at the age of 92. 175 00:16:59.540 --> 00:17:04.700 He wrote an essay on the history of civil society not long after beginning his teaching 176 00:17:04.700 --> 00:17:11.140 in the University of Edinburgh when he was in his early 40s and in its pages he noted 177 00:17:11.140 --> 00:17:18.320 that human beings living in communities frequently stumble upon establishments which are indeed 178 00:17:18.320 --> 00:17:24.740 the result of human action but not the execution of any human design. 179 00:17:24.740 --> 00:17:30.860 Ronald Hamowy in his excellent article on Ferguson in the Encyclopedia of Libertarianism 180 00:17:30.860 --> 00:17:37.060 calls this insight of Ferguson's possibly the single most spectacular contribution to social 181 00:17:37.060 --> 00:17:40.460 philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. 182 00:17:40.460 --> 00:17:47.100 He finds it reflected in Adam Smith's description of the market as an invisible hand and in 183 00:17:47.100 --> 00:17:51.980 David Hume's discussions of the origin and nature of justice. 184 00:17:51.980 --> 00:17:56.660 And of course, in the more recent works of Friedrich Hayek, it has become one of the 185 00:17:56.660 --> 00:18:00.900 The most influential ideas in modern social thought. 186 00:18:00.900 --> 00:18:07.060 And where did this idea, this linchpin of the libertarian tradition, come from? 187 00:18:07.060 --> 00:18:14.020 From what Hamowy describes as a conjectural history of social institutions, full of Adam 188 00:18:14.020 --> 00:18:20.660 Ferguson's best guesses as to what probably happened many millennia ago, when human beings 189 00:18:20.660 --> 00:18:24.660 were first bringing order to their social life. 190 00:18:24.660 --> 00:18:28.720 Ferguson had little solid factual basis for his guesses. 191 00:18:28.720 --> 00:18:34.280 He had to base them mostly on his beliefs about the human condition generally and about 192 00:18:34.280 --> 00:18:38.240 the way things happen in this world we all share. 193 00:18:38.240 --> 00:18:45.320 Not for nothing did he entitle his first chapter of The General Characteristics of Human Nature. 194 00:18:45.320 --> 00:18:50.280 Ferguson's beliefs on these issues, which he had formed gradually over 40-odd years 195 00:18:50.280 --> 00:18:55.920 of Living led him to see something different when he looked closely at the same social 196 00:18:55.920 --> 00:19:01.000 institutions that people had been looking at for centuries before him. 197 00:19:01.000 --> 00:19:07.560 They led him to see what we now, thanks to Hayek, know as spontaneous order. 198 00:19:07.560 --> 00:19:13.900 As Hamowy writes, embedded in Ferguson's conjectural analysis of the historical development of 199 00:19:13.900 --> 00:19:20.740 of Societies is the notion that the institutions under which men live are not the product of 200 00:19:20.740 --> 00:19:26.340 deliberate contrivance, but take their form through a process of evolution. 201 00:19:26.340 --> 00:19:32.420 Indeed, these institutional arrangements are of such a high order of complexity that their 202 00:19:32.420 --> 00:19:38.780 structure and interconnections with each other are beyond the comprehension of any mind. 203 00:19:38.780 --> 00:19:46.260 Rather, they come into being and are shaped by numerous discrete individual actions, none 204 00:19:46.260 --> 00:19:51.860 of which aims at the formation of coherent social institutions. 205 00:19:51.860 --> 00:19:58.680 Society is not the result of calculation but arises spontaneously, and its institutions 206 00:19:58.680 --> 00:20:05.440 are not the result of intentional design but of men's actions, which have as their purpose 207 00:20:05.440 --> 00:20:10.280 and Array of Short-Term Private Objectives. 208 00:20:10.280 --> 00:20:17.420 It seems clear, does it not, that this almost certainly is what happened long, long ago? 209 00:20:17.420 --> 00:20:23.460 That this is how humans came to have the social institutions we see before us when we go out 210 00:20:23.460 --> 00:20:26.600 to look at the world of 2011? 211 00:20:26.600 --> 00:20:33.000 Yet it is an historical truth arrived at not by studying the documents and other artifacts 212 00:20:33.000 --> 00:20:36.240 What's left over from the time in which it happened? 213 00:20:36.240 --> 00:20:43.080 It is an historical truth, as profound an historical truth as anyone has ever identified, 214 00:20:43.080 --> 00:20:50.560 which was arrived at by a man who looked intently at what little was known in the mid-18th century 215 00:20:50.560 --> 00:20:58.000 about the early social experience of human beings, and then offered his best guess. 216 00:20:58.000 --> 00:21:12.560 This is Jeff Riggenbach.