Pseudo-history, and related issues

[D B Campbell]

Here in the Netherlands, any first-year student knows what Weber has written (usually through an excerpt in his handbook on theory by either Lorenz or Ankersmit). It may be that in other countries, this is not treated in the first year, or perhaps not treated at all, but it is simply impossible that a professor in Cambridge is fully unaware of the logical foundations of his discipline.

I was trained as an archaeologist, which lets me off the hook! //www.amazon.co.uk/What-History-E-H-Carr/dp/B0007EGPIU/:1kw9ie4m]What is History?[/url], 1961+) and Sir Geoffrey Elton (The Practice of History, 1967+). Max Weber seems to be known in the English-speaking world more for his sociology ... and I freely admit that I normally run a mile rather than tangle with sociologists and their impenetrable jargon (post-processualism, anyone?).

My jargon-immersed prehistorian colleagues used to smile condescendingly when I admitted the rather basic Rankean foundations of my own work: Wie es eigentlich gewesen ("how it essentially was"). (I was amused to read that it was von Ranke's horror at the extraordinary historical liberties taken by Sir Walter Scott that prompted him to apply his intellect to history!) I also have a lot of time for R.G. Collingwood (The Idea of History, 1946), who said (something like) "History is the re-enactment in the historian's mind of the thought whose history he is studying".