1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,980 So it's the year 1912 and we are high in the 2 00:00:03,980 --> 00:00:07,179 rugged, just totally unforgiving terrain of the 3 00:00:07,179 --> 00:00:09,500 Moroccan highlands. Right. The political atmosphere 4 00:00:09,500 --> 00:00:11,779 up there at this specific time is essentially 5 00:00:11,779 --> 00:00:14,619 a powder keg. Yeah, exactly. Because you have 6 00:00:14,619 --> 00:00:17,440 three entirely distinct groups with completely 7 00:00:17,440 --> 00:00:20,120 different worldviews just colliding in this one 8 00:00:20,120 --> 00:00:22,379 geographic space. And they do not understand 9 00:00:22,379 --> 00:00:24,199 each other at all. No, not even a little bit. 10 00:00:24,260 --> 00:00:26,839 First, you have Cohen, who is a Jewish merchant. 11 00:00:27,309 --> 00:00:29,710 And he relies on these really complex localized 12 00:00:29,710 --> 00:00:32,829 alliances to just run his trade safely. Right. 13 00:00:32,969 --> 00:00:35,929 Then you have the local Berber tribal leaders 14 00:00:35,929 --> 00:00:37,670 who, you know, they govern their people through 15 00:00:37,670 --> 00:00:40,240 these ancient. highly formalized codes of honor 16 00:00:40,240 --> 00:00:43,240 and retaliation, too. Which is very important 17 00:00:43,240 --> 00:00:45,740 to the story. And then suddenly entering the 18 00:00:45,740 --> 00:00:49,359 mix, projecting their own entirely alien, bureaucratic 19 00:00:49,359 --> 00:00:52,340 and military framework onto this region. You 20 00:00:52,340 --> 00:00:54,880 have the French colonial army. Yeah. Represented 21 00:00:54,880 --> 00:00:57,280 in this case by Captain Damari. Right. So it 22 00:00:57,280 --> 00:00:59,500 is a complete collision of realities. And the 23 00:00:59,500 --> 00:01:02,119 spark that sets off this whole powder keg is, 24 00:01:02,179 --> 00:01:04,359 well, it's seemingly small. It's a robbery. Just 25 00:01:04,359 --> 00:01:07,150 a local dispute, really. Exactly. A neighboring 26 00:01:07,150 --> 00:01:10,450 tribe raids Cohen's camp. They steal his flock 27 00:01:10,450 --> 00:01:13,010 of sheep, and in the chaos of this raid, two 28 00:01:13,010 --> 00:01:15,810 of his guests are actually killed. Which is awful. 29 00:01:16,010 --> 00:01:19,230 But now, under the local cultural code, which 30 00:01:19,230 --> 00:01:21,629 is this deeply embedded concept called the R 31 00:01:21,629 --> 00:01:24,989 -Pact, Cohen has a very specific protocol he's 32 00:01:24,989 --> 00:01:27,109 supposed to follow. He doesn't go to the police. 33 00:01:27,409 --> 00:01:30,129 No. Because there are no police. Exactly. He 34 00:01:30,129 --> 00:01:32,170 goes to the local Berber sheik who he has this 35 00:01:32,170 --> 00:01:36,069 formalized pact with, and he demands his claim. 36 00:01:36,450 --> 00:01:38,730 Right. And the sheik is culturally obligated 37 00:01:38,730 --> 00:01:41,150 to help Cohen secure restitution. He has to do 38 00:01:41,150 --> 00:01:43,609 it. Yeah. So they form an armed posse, basically. 39 00:01:43,689 --> 00:01:45,950 They ride over to the offending tribe's camp, 40 00:01:46,069 --> 00:01:48,209 and the sheik demands the stolen sheep back, 41 00:01:48,349 --> 00:01:51,230 plus a penalty. And here is the fascinating part. 42 00:01:51,849 --> 00:01:54,930 The offending tribe actually recognizes the legitimacy 43 00:01:54,930 --> 00:01:57,530 of this demand. Under that specific art code. 44 00:01:57,650 --> 00:02:00,349 Yes, exactly. Under that code, they know they're 45 00:02:00,349 --> 00:02:02,629 in the wrong. So they don't fight. They just 46 00:02:02,629 --> 00:02:04,829 allow Cohen to walk through their flock and pick 47 00:02:04,829 --> 00:02:07,170 out his payment and sheep. So honor is restored. 48 00:02:07,489 --> 00:02:10,289 The cosmic balance of the highlands is righted. 49 00:02:10,389 --> 00:02:13,969 Everybody is happy or well satisfied. Right. 50 00:02:14,110 --> 00:02:16,750 It worked exactly as the system intended. But 51 00:02:16,750 --> 00:02:18,889 right as Cohen and the sheikh are riding back 52 00:02:18,889 --> 00:02:21,689 with this massive herd of sheep. Enter Captain 53 00:02:21,689 --> 00:02:25,610 Dumari. Ah, yes. The French colonial forces arrive. 54 00:02:25,909 --> 00:02:28,849 Yeah. And Dumari looks at this scene. And what 55 00:02:28,849 --> 00:02:31,729 does he see? He sees an armed posse of locals 56 00:02:31,729 --> 00:02:34,490 driving a huge herd of sheep across the highlands. 57 00:02:34,629 --> 00:02:37,810 Because to Dumari's, you know, French military, 58 00:02:38,050 --> 00:02:41,550 very bureaucratic frame of reference, he isn't 59 00:02:41,550 --> 00:02:44,289 witnessing a complex indigenous legal ritual 60 00:02:44,289 --> 00:02:46,909 at all. No, he thinks he is witnessing a riot. 61 00:02:47,110 --> 00:02:49,569 He thinks it's blatant, chaotic theft. So what 62 00:02:49,569 --> 00:02:52,870 does he do? He throws Cohen, the guy who was 63 00:02:52,870 --> 00:02:55,469 the victim of the original robbery, into jail. 64 00:02:55,810 --> 00:02:58,409 It's just wild. So Cohen sits in this colonial 65 00:02:58,409 --> 00:03:01,110 cell just entirely bewildered. I mean, he followed 66 00:03:01,110 --> 00:03:03,050 the law perfectly. That's his law, yeah. Right. 67 00:03:03,090 --> 00:03:05,349 He did exactly what his cultural reality demanded 68 00:03:05,349 --> 00:03:08,069 of him to restore order. Yet here he is punished 69 00:03:08,069 --> 00:03:10,729 by this parallel cultural reality that he barely 70 00:03:10,729 --> 00:03:13,169 even comprehends. And DiMari eventually lets 71 00:03:13,169 --> 00:03:16,389 him out. But the French confiscate the sheep. 72 00:03:16,550 --> 00:03:19,539 Of course they do. Yeah. And Cohen basically 73 00:03:19,539 --> 00:03:23,419 spends the rest of his life futilely petitioning 74 00:03:23,419 --> 00:03:24,939 the French government to get his sheep back. 75 00:03:25,319 --> 00:03:28,319 He is completely unable to bridge the gap between 76 00:03:28,319 --> 00:03:31,439 his understanding of the event and the official 77 00:03:31,439 --> 00:03:34,159 colonial record. It's tragic, honestly. It really 78 00:03:34,159 --> 00:03:36,580 is. But the reason we are starting with this 79 00:03:36,580 --> 00:03:39,460 story, which is a famous anthropological field 80 00:03:39,460 --> 00:03:41,659 note that we'll definitely return to later, is 81 00:03:41,659 --> 00:03:45,479 because it exposes the fundamental, just terrifying 82 00:03:45,479 --> 00:03:48,909 problem of writing history. Right. Because usually 83 00:03:48,909 --> 00:03:51,409 we think of history as this objective recording, 84 00:03:51,610 --> 00:03:54,229 like a security camera pointing at the past. 85 00:03:54,430 --> 00:03:56,830 Yeah. You just record the treaties, you know, 86 00:03:56,849 --> 00:03:58,849 the wars, the dates, the movement of the sheep. 87 00:03:58,870 --> 00:04:00,650 And the historian just points at the tape and 88 00:04:00,650 --> 00:04:02,930 says, there it is. That's what happened. But 89 00:04:02,930 --> 00:04:05,129 if you look at the raw facts of the Moroccan 90 00:04:05,129 --> 00:04:07,370 sheep raid, what we might call the thin description 91 00:04:07,370 --> 00:04:10,530 of the event, the timeline just reads, 1912, 92 00:04:10,750 --> 00:04:13,969 merchant robbed, forms posse, takes sheep, arrested 93 00:04:13,969 --> 00:04:16,759 by military. Which tells you. absolutely nothing 94 00:04:16,759 --> 00:04:18,759 about what actually happened. Nothing at all. 95 00:04:18,819 --> 00:04:21,620 It completely misses the historical truth. The 96 00:04:21,620 --> 00:04:24,519 security camera is broken. Exactly. History isn't 97 00:04:24,519 --> 00:04:27,319 just a timeline of facts. It's an active, highly 98 00:04:27,319 --> 00:04:30,459 subjective, interpretive act. You are looking 99 00:04:30,459 --> 00:04:33,779 at this incredibly murky landscape of human thought 100 00:04:33,779 --> 00:04:36,560 and culture. And to write history, you have to 101 00:04:36,560 --> 00:04:39,839 decide what to look at, and crucially, how to 102 00:04:39,839 --> 00:04:42,389 actually look at it. Which brings us to the mission 103 00:04:42,389 --> 00:04:46,230 of this deep dive. Yes, because you, the listener, 104 00:04:46,389 --> 00:04:49,310 brought us a massive, ambitious challenge today. 105 00:04:49,410 --> 00:04:53,050 A stack of sources from four heavy -hitting academic 106 00:04:53,050 --> 00:04:55,589 theoreticians. We're talking Maurice Mandelbaum, 107 00:04:55,810 --> 00:04:58,410 Quentin Skinner, Clifford Geertz, and Peter Burke. 108 00:04:58,629 --> 00:05:01,029 And you want to know how to actually write history 109 00:05:01,029 --> 00:05:03,769 using their methodologies, like how to practically 110 00:05:03,769 --> 00:05:06,769 apply this stuff. Which is going to require dismantling 111 00:05:06,769 --> 00:05:08,529 a lot of our basic assumptions. Oh, absolutely. 112 00:05:08,790 --> 00:05:11,310 But we are going to build a rigorous, practical 113 00:05:11,310 --> 00:05:13,529 framework for approaching the past today. Right. 114 00:05:13,589 --> 00:05:15,730 We'll start at the abstract heights of how we 115 00:05:15,730 --> 00:05:18,050 track the evolution of ideas, then move into 116 00:05:18,050 --> 00:05:20,310 the mechanics of how to properly read a text 117 00:05:20,310 --> 00:05:23,110 from, say, 400 years ago without just projecting 118 00:05:23,110 --> 00:05:25,370 our modern anxieties onto it. Right. And then 119 00:05:25,370 --> 00:05:27,769 we'll zoom in on how to interpret nonverbal human 120 00:05:27,769 --> 00:05:30,839 behavior. And finally, map how the historical 121 00:05:30,839 --> 00:05:33,540 discipline itself has evolved to balance symbolic 122 00:05:33,540 --> 00:05:37,019 culture with hard material data. I am so ready. 123 00:05:37,160 --> 00:05:39,079 So let's open the cool kit. Let's start with 124 00:05:39,079 --> 00:05:41,939 segment one, looking at the basic building blocks 125 00:05:41,939 --> 00:05:45,600 of historical narrative ideas. Let's do it. Because 126 00:05:45,600 --> 00:05:49,259 if you are a historian looking at a really chaotic 127 00:05:49,259 --> 00:05:52,399 century, let's say the 18th century, you naturally 128 00:05:52,399 --> 00:05:55,399 want to track. The big concepts that drove the 129 00:05:55,399 --> 00:05:58,680 era. Concepts like liberty, romanticism, pragmatism, 130 00:05:58,740 --> 00:06:01,759 the big ismisms. Yeah. And Maurice Mandelbaum 131 00:06:01,759 --> 00:06:04,300 takes direct aim at how historians traditionally 132 00:06:04,300 --> 00:06:07,240 do this. He specifically critiques a very famous 133 00:06:07,240 --> 00:06:10,279 methodology developed by A .O. Lovejoy. Ah, yes. 134 00:06:10,600 --> 00:06:12,939 Lovejoy's unit idea. Exactly. Can you explain 135 00:06:12,939 --> 00:06:15,060 what Lovejoy was trying to do there? Well, Lovejoy's 136 00:06:15,060 --> 00:06:17,220 project was massively influential at the time. 137 00:06:17,560 --> 00:06:19,579 He essentially wanted to break down the rigid 138 00:06:19,579 --> 00:06:22,600 silos between academic departments. Like philosophy 139 00:06:22,600 --> 00:06:24,959 and literature? Right. He thought it was absurd 140 00:06:24,959 --> 00:06:27,660 that philosophers only read philosophy and literary 141 00:06:27,660 --> 00:06:30,300 critics only read poetry because ideas cross 142 00:06:30,300 --> 00:06:32,259 those boundaries all the time. That makes sense. 143 00:06:32,420 --> 00:06:36,180 It does. He argued that if you take a massive 144 00:06:36,180 --> 00:06:40,540 intimidating aphism, like idealism or romanticism, 145 00:06:40,579 --> 00:06:42,860 and you look closely at it, you'll find it is 146 00:06:42,860 --> 00:06:45,379 actually a complex compound. Like chemistry. 147 00:06:45,879 --> 00:06:47,800 He treated intellectual history like chemistry. 148 00:06:47,980 --> 00:06:50,879 That is the exact underlying logic, yes. Lovejoy 149 00:06:50,879 --> 00:06:53,259 believed these massive systems of thought could 150 00:06:53,259 --> 00:06:56,519 be broken down into fundamental, unchanging elements. 151 00:06:56,839 --> 00:06:59,680 And these are the unit ideas. Exactly. His methodology 152 00:06:59,680 --> 00:07:01,819 proposed that these unit ideas have their own 153 00:07:01,819 --> 00:07:04,000 continuous life histories. They just march across 154 00:07:04,000 --> 00:07:06,480 the centuries. Okay, so like Plato invents a 155 00:07:06,480 --> 00:07:08,839 unit idea, then it goes dormant for a bit. Right, 156 00:07:08,860 --> 00:07:10,660 and then maybe a medieval theologian picks it 157 00:07:10,660 --> 00:07:13,199 up, rearranges it, and then a 19th century poet 158 00:07:13,199 --> 00:07:16,430 uses it again. Got it. And the historian's job, 159 00:07:16,550 --> 00:07:19,430 according to Lovejoy, is to track that specific 160 00:07:19,430 --> 00:07:22,949 unit idea through time. That was the goal. Okay, 161 00:07:22,990 --> 00:07:24,350 I have an analogy for this. Let me know what 162 00:07:24,350 --> 00:07:26,089 this tracks. Let's hear it. If I'm trying to 163 00:07:26,089 --> 00:07:28,589 write a history of baking using Lovejoy's method, 164 00:07:28,790 --> 00:07:31,790 I look at every pastry, every wedding cake, every 165 00:07:31,790 --> 00:07:34,449 loaf of sourdough in human history, and I reduce 166 00:07:34,449 --> 00:07:36,889 them all down to their basic chemical components. 167 00:07:37,189 --> 00:07:39,949 Right, to flour and eggs. Yeah. And then I write 168 00:07:39,949 --> 00:07:43,029 a thousand -year history of flour. Which sounds... 169 00:07:43,509 --> 00:07:46,089 incredibly tedious, honestly. It does, and that 170 00:07:46,089 --> 00:07:49,209 is exactly the problem, right? This is Mandelbaum's 171 00:07:49,209 --> 00:07:51,709 core critique, because if you just track the 172 00:07:51,709 --> 00:07:54,689 flour, you entirely miss what made the cake a 173 00:07:54,689 --> 00:07:57,889 cake. Yes, you lose the recipe. You lose the 174 00:07:57,889 --> 00:08:00,509 baker's intent. The flour means nothing without 175 00:08:00,509 --> 00:08:02,970 the specific structure it was baked into. That 176 00:08:02,970 --> 00:08:05,740 is a perfect way to look at it. Mandelbaum argues 177 00:08:05,740 --> 00:08:08,360 that tearing an idea out of its specific philosophical 178 00:08:08,360 --> 00:08:11,720 system to treat it as an independent floating 179 00:08:11,720 --> 00:08:15,379 unit just destroys the unique pattern of the 180 00:08:15,379 --> 00:08:17,680 original thinker. Because they didn't just dump 181 00:08:17,680 --> 00:08:19,660 flour on a table. They made something specific. 182 00:08:20,319 --> 00:08:22,839 Exactly. When a philosopher builds a system of 183 00:08:22,839 --> 00:08:24,680 thought, the connections between their ideas 184 00:08:24,680 --> 00:08:26,540 are just as critical as the ideas themselves. 185 00:08:26,899 --> 00:08:28,819 Right, because the meaning of a concept changes 186 00:08:28,819 --> 00:08:31,620 based on the architecture it sits within. Yes. 187 00:08:31,920 --> 00:08:34,299 Like a brick used to build a cathedral serves 188 00:08:34,299 --> 00:08:36,899 a fundamentally different purpose and holds a 189 00:08:36,899 --> 00:08:39,360 totally different structural tension than the 190 00:08:39,360 --> 00:08:41,980 exact same brick used to build a prison. I like 191 00:08:41,980 --> 00:08:44,350 that. Mandelbaum points out that thinkers are 192 00:08:44,350 --> 00:08:47,570 driven by highly specific, localized intentions. 193 00:08:48,129 --> 00:08:50,649 They are trying to solve immediate problems. 194 00:08:50,730 --> 00:08:54,129 Or they're mad at a rival. Exactly. Or they're 195 00:08:54,129 --> 00:08:56,950 trying to rectify glaring errors they see in 196 00:08:56,950 --> 00:08:59,690 the work of their immediate predecessors. So 197 00:08:59,690 --> 00:09:01,570 they might take an old concept, sure, but the 198 00:09:01,570 --> 00:09:03,850 application and the arrangement of that concept 199 00:09:03,850 --> 00:09:07,370 are entirely novel. So by isolating the unit 200 00:09:07,370 --> 00:09:11,080 idea... The historian basically strips the thinker 201 00:09:11,080 --> 00:09:13,879 of their actual philosophical impulse. Yes. The 202 00:09:13,879 --> 00:09:16,080 unique idea becomes this ghostly abstraction 203 00:09:16,080 --> 00:09:19,120 with no real grounding in human history. Okay. 204 00:09:19,159 --> 00:09:21,100 I see the danger there. But let's pause and look 205 00:09:21,100 --> 00:09:23,379 at this practically for a second. Okay. Because 206 00:09:23,379 --> 00:09:25,419 if I am an archivist or a historian and I want 207 00:09:25,419 --> 00:09:27,000 to write a book about the evolution of the concept 208 00:09:27,000 --> 00:09:29,960 of the social contract, isn't it naturally intuitive 209 00:09:29,960 --> 00:09:33,480 to trace that single thread from Hobbes to Locke 210 00:09:33,480 --> 00:09:35,659 to Rousseau? It is intuitive. Yeah. But if I 211 00:09:35,659 --> 00:09:37,710 abandon that thread. What is the alternative? 212 00:09:37,889 --> 00:09:40,110 Like, how do I organize the absolute chaos of 213 00:09:40,110 --> 00:09:42,789 the archive if I can't track an idea? Well, the 214 00:09:42,789 --> 00:09:44,950 alternative requires recognizing the profound 215 00:09:44,950 --> 00:09:48,450 danger of what Mandelbaum calls monism. Monism. 216 00:09:48,730 --> 00:09:51,710 OK, let's unpack that. When historians try to 217 00:09:51,710 --> 00:09:55,110 find a single clean thread to explain a messy 218 00:09:55,110 --> 00:09:57,690 historical reality, they often fall into the 219 00:09:57,690 --> 00:10:00,929 trap of assuming a single underlying cause dictates 220 00:10:00,929 --> 00:10:03,669 everything. And there are a few different flavors 221 00:10:03,669 --> 00:10:06,169 of monism, right? There are. Mandelbaum identifies 222 00:10:06,169 --> 00:10:09,769 sociological monism as one major pitfall. Which 223 00:10:09,769 --> 00:10:12,529 is what exactly? The classic example is the rigid 224 00:10:12,529 --> 00:10:16,309 orthodox Marxist framework. Ah. Which posits 225 00:10:16,309 --> 00:10:18,889 that the economic base, the material modes of 226 00:10:18,889 --> 00:10:21,370 production, completely and unilaterally determines 227 00:10:21,370 --> 00:10:23,830 the cultural and intellectual superstructure. 228 00:10:23,990 --> 00:10:27,330 So in that framework. Every poem, every religious 229 00:10:27,330 --> 00:10:30,490 debate, every scientific discovery is ultimately 230 00:10:30,490 --> 00:10:32,669 just a reflection of class conflict and economic 231 00:10:32,669 --> 00:10:35,029 conditions. Exactly. It's a monistic view because 232 00:10:35,029 --> 00:10:37,929 it reduces all historical causality down to one 233 00:10:37,929 --> 00:10:40,730 single root. Which feels incredibly reductive 234 00:10:40,730 --> 00:10:43,009 if you were trying to study like a really nuanced 235 00:10:43,009 --> 00:10:46,070 theological debate. Very much so. But Mandelbaum 236 00:10:46,070 --> 00:10:48,629 also critiques intellectual historians who fall 237 00:10:48,629 --> 00:10:51,629 into a different kind of monism, the Geisteschichte 238 00:10:51,629 --> 00:10:54,129 approach. Okay. German word warning. What does 239 00:10:54,129 --> 00:10:57,350 that mean? It's the idea that an entire era is 240 00:10:57,350 --> 00:11:00,429 unified by a singular zeitgeist or spirit of 241 00:11:00,429 --> 00:11:03,570 the age. Oh, right. The zeitgeist. The assumption 242 00:11:03,570 --> 00:11:06,289 there is that a fundamental invisible set of 243 00:11:06,289 --> 00:11:09,730 presuppositions permeated all aspects of intellectual 244 00:11:09,730 --> 00:11:12,830 life in a given century. So it acts as the single 245 00:11:12,830 --> 00:11:15,809 cause for the literature, the science and the 246 00:11:15,809 --> 00:11:18,179 philosophy of the time. Right. You assume that 247 00:11:18,179 --> 00:11:20,340 everyone living in the Renaissance was just vibrating 248 00:11:20,340 --> 00:11:22,860 with the exact same underlying Renaissance energy. 249 00:11:22,960 --> 00:11:26,580 And that energy somehow produced both Machiavelli's 250 00:11:26,580 --> 00:11:29,940 politics and da Vinci's paintings. Exactly. I 251 00:11:29,940 --> 00:11:32,519 mean, it turns history into a tidy novel with 252 00:11:32,519 --> 00:11:34,629 a central theme. You have the Enlightenment chapter, 253 00:11:34,870 --> 00:11:36,730 then you turn the page, and oh, here's the Romantic 254 00:11:36,730 --> 00:11:39,289 chapter. It makes for a neat narrative, but Mandelbaum 255 00:11:39,289 --> 00:11:42,149 argues this forces historical figures to fit 256 00:11:42,149 --> 00:11:44,450 molds they never actually belonged in. Yeah, 257 00:11:44,490 --> 00:11:46,669 you end up ignoring all the thinkers who absolutely 258 00:11:46,669 --> 00:11:48,509 hated the Enlightenment while living right in 259 00:11:48,509 --> 00:11:51,029 the middle of it. Precisely. So to avoid mononism, 260 00:11:51,269 --> 00:11:54,289 Mandelbaum introduces cultural pluralism. Cultural 261 00:11:54,289 --> 00:11:57,549 pluralism, which for the historian organizing 262 00:11:57,549 --> 00:12:00,029 an archive, this has to be a radical shift in 263 00:12:00,029 --> 00:12:03,129 perspective. It really is. Cultural pluralism 264 00:12:03,129 --> 00:12:06,649 demands that we view widespread ideas or presuppositions 265 00:12:06,649 --> 00:12:08,710 as the results of diverse cultural activities 266 00:12:08,710 --> 00:12:12,429 rather than the single cause of them. Wait, that 267 00:12:12,429 --> 00:12:14,629 is a massive inversion of how we usually think 268 00:12:14,629 --> 00:12:17,110 about causality. Yes, it is. So instead of saying 269 00:12:17,110 --> 00:12:20,690 the spirit of the Enlightenment caused these 270 00:12:20,690 --> 00:12:23,350 specific 18th century pamphlets to be written. 271 00:12:24,029 --> 00:12:27,009 A cultural pluralist historian says, a chaotic 272 00:12:27,009 --> 00:12:30,309 variety of highly specific, localized human debates, 273 00:12:30,509 --> 00:12:33,690 economic shifts, and scientific experiments eventually 274 00:12:33,690 --> 00:12:37,250 produced a messy pattern that we, looking backward, 275 00:12:37,490 --> 00:12:39,840 decided to label the Enlightenment. You've got 276 00:12:39,840 --> 00:12:42,440 it. The label is retroactive. The actual history 277 00:12:42,440 --> 00:12:44,779 is pluralistic. Wow. OK. So if you were writing 278 00:12:44,779 --> 00:12:47,419 history, Mandelbaum's mandate is very clear. 279 00:12:47,580 --> 00:12:50,259 Do not force a unified spirit of the age onto 280 00:12:50,259 --> 00:12:52,639 your subjects. Let the chaos be chaotic. Yes. 281 00:12:52,740 --> 00:12:55,220 Do not assume all thinkers in a given century 282 00:12:55,220 --> 00:12:57,740 agreed on some hidden foundational level and 283 00:12:57,740 --> 00:12:59,899 refuse to strip their complex, interconnected 284 00:12:59,899 --> 00:13:02,820 systems of thought down to isolated unit ideas 285 00:13:02,820 --> 00:13:05,980 just to make tracing them easier. You must respect 286 00:13:05,980 --> 00:13:10,320 the dense. often contradictory architecture of 287 00:13:10,320 --> 00:13:13,899 individual thinkers within their specific pluralistic 288 00:13:13,899 --> 00:13:17,460 contexts. Absolutely. Okay, so if we accept Mandelbaum's 289 00:13:17,460 --> 00:13:20,460 premise that ideas don't float freely through 290 00:13:20,460 --> 00:13:23,240 time and they aren't driven by a magical zeitgeist, 291 00:13:23,379 --> 00:13:26,500 we run into a massive practical roadblock. Which 292 00:13:26,500 --> 00:13:28,299 is? Let's say we are in the archive room and 293 00:13:28,299 --> 00:13:30,720 we pull out a dusty political treatise from the 294 00:13:30,720 --> 00:13:33,899 16th century. How do we actually read it? We 295 00:13:33,899 --> 00:13:36,740 can't extract the unit ideas. What are we looking 296 00:13:36,740 --> 00:13:39,100 for on the page? That is the perfect transition 297 00:13:39,100 --> 00:13:41,399 because this brings us to the methodology of 298 00:13:41,399 --> 00:13:44,659 Quentin Skinner. Yes, segment two. And Skinner 299 00:13:44,659 --> 00:13:46,679 launches an absolute scorched earth campaign 300 00:13:46,679 --> 00:13:49,740 against how historians traditionally read texts. 301 00:13:49,820 --> 00:13:51,740 Scorched earth is the right term. He attacks 302 00:13:51,740 --> 00:13:54,399 the foundational pillar of the great books curriculum. 303 00:13:54,659 --> 00:13:57,200 Which is the belief in the text in itself. Yes. 304 00:13:57,399 --> 00:13:59,559 This is the assumption that classic works of 305 00:13:59,559 --> 00:14:01,899 philosophy, literature, or political theory contain 306 00:14:01,899 --> 00:14:04,879 dateless wisdom. Dateless wisdom, like they are 307 00:14:04,879 --> 00:14:07,899 eternal. Exactly. The belief is that if you just 308 00:14:07,899 --> 00:14:10,879 read the pages closely enough, employing strict 309 00:14:10,879 --> 00:14:14,259 textual analysis, the text will reveal universal 310 00:14:14,259 --> 00:14:17,600 truths, completely independent of the messy social 311 00:14:17,600 --> 00:14:19,919 or political context in which the author was 312 00:14:19,919 --> 00:14:22,360 living. It's the idea that you can sit in a modern 313 00:14:22,360 --> 00:14:25,440 coffee shop and have a direct, timeless peer 314 00:14:25,440 --> 00:14:28,159 -to -peer dialogue with Aristotle just by reading 315 00:14:28,159 --> 00:14:30,690 his words. Right. But Skinner argues that this 316 00:14:30,690 --> 00:14:33,809 approach generates massive, embarrassing historical 317 00:14:33,809 --> 00:14:36,750 absurdities. Embarrassing is a strong word. I 318 00:14:36,750 --> 00:14:39,129 love it. Well, historians who read this way fall 319 00:14:39,129 --> 00:14:41,690 victim to what he categorizes as mythologies. 320 00:14:42,169 --> 00:14:44,070 Okay, let's walk through the most dangerous ones, 321 00:14:44,190 --> 00:14:46,730 starting with the mythology of coherence. The 322 00:14:46,730 --> 00:14:49,009 mythology of coherence occurs when a historian 323 00:14:49,009 --> 00:14:51,789 approaches a past writer, especially one deemed 324 00:14:51,789 --> 00:14:54,649 a genius, with the unwavering assumption that 325 00:14:54,649 --> 00:14:56,990 their work must represent a perfectly unified, 326 00:14:57,289 --> 00:15:00,610 non -contradictory system of thought. Even though 327 00:15:00,610 --> 00:15:03,309 human beings are notoriously scattered, and people 328 00:15:03,309 --> 00:15:05,230 change their minds constantly and contradict 329 00:15:05,230 --> 00:15:07,409 themselves over the course of a 30 -year career, 330 00:15:07,610 --> 00:15:10,409 I contradict myself before breakfast. We all 331 00:15:10,409 --> 00:15:13,350 do. But the historian acting under this mythology 332 00:15:13,350 --> 00:15:16,009 cannot accept contradiction in a classic text. 333 00:15:16,210 --> 00:15:18,309 Because it's a classic with a capital C. Exactly. 334 00:15:18,610 --> 00:15:21,190 So when they encounter a scattered thought or 335 00:15:21,190 --> 00:15:24,029 glaring inconsistency in a thinker like Marx, 336 00:15:24,169 --> 00:15:27,399 Hegel, or Plato, They don't treat it as historical 337 00:15:27,399 --> 00:15:30,259 reality. What do they do? They act as an intellectual 338 00:15:30,259 --> 00:15:33,100 mechanic. They invent a conceptual bridge to 339 00:15:33,100 --> 00:15:35,600 make the contradiction coherent. Oh, wow. Yeah. 340 00:15:35,740 --> 00:15:38,960 They take minor incidental remarks, perhaps jotted 341 00:15:38,960 --> 00:15:41,279 down in a private letter or a discarded draft, 342 00:15:41,500 --> 00:15:44,340 and they elevate them into a grand, definitive 343 00:15:44,340 --> 00:15:47,419 doctrine just to plug the hole in the author's 344 00:15:47,419 --> 00:15:50,139 system. That is so intellectually dishonest. 345 00:15:50,259 --> 00:15:52,399 Skinner points out that we end up writing a history 346 00:15:52,399 --> 00:15:54,460 of thoughts that no one ever actually succeeded 347 00:15:54,460 --> 00:15:57,299 in thinking. Precisely. We invent the coherence 348 00:15:57,299 --> 00:16:00,019 for them. We polish away all the messy reality 349 00:16:00,019 --> 00:16:02,659 of their actual intellectual struggle. So we 350 00:16:02,659 --> 00:16:05,220 construct this perfect, crystallized version 351 00:16:05,220 --> 00:16:08,360 of Marx that the real, living Karl Marx never 352 00:16:08,360 --> 00:16:10,820 achieved. Right. It ceases to be an historical 353 00:16:10,820 --> 00:16:12,940 account and becomes an exercise in abstraction. 354 00:16:13,480 --> 00:16:16,720 Okay. But as damaging as the mythology of coherence 355 00:16:16,720 --> 00:16:20,159 is, Skinner identifies another trap that is perhaps 356 00:16:20,159 --> 00:16:22,639 even more prevalent, especially in political 357 00:16:22,639 --> 00:16:26,330 history. Yes. The mythology of prolepsis. Prolepsis 358 00:16:26,330 --> 00:16:29,149 is fascinating. It's the habit of praising past 359 00:16:29,149 --> 00:16:32,429 thinkers for magically anticipating modern ideas. 360 00:16:32,730 --> 00:16:35,250 We do this all the time. We do. We look at a 361 00:16:35,250 --> 00:16:38,090 text from the 14th century, find a sentence that 362 00:16:38,090 --> 00:16:39,830 kind of sounds like modern democratic theory, 363 00:16:39,970 --> 00:16:41,990 and we basically pat the author on the head for 364 00:16:41,990 --> 00:16:44,029 finally agreeing with us. Skinner highlights 365 00:16:44,029 --> 00:16:47,250 how historians have praised Montesquieu for anticipating 366 00:16:47,250 --> 00:16:49,470 the modern welfare state. Which is ridiculous. 367 00:16:49,769 --> 00:16:52,669 Or how they claim Machiavelli's true lasting 368 00:16:52,669 --> 00:16:54,950 significance is that he approached political 369 00:16:54,950 --> 00:16:58,509 science just like us. It's anachronistic absurdity. 370 00:16:58,649 --> 00:17:00,970 I mean, to claim Montesquieu anticipated the 371 00:17:00,970 --> 00:17:03,049 welfare state is to argue he was actively trying 372 00:17:03,049 --> 00:17:05,849 to solve a 20th century bureaucratic and industrial 373 00:17:05,849 --> 00:17:08,289 economic problem that literally did not exist 374 00:17:08,289 --> 00:17:11,190 in 18th century France. Exactly. By committing 375 00:17:11,190 --> 00:17:13,769 the mythology of prolepsis. historians pack their 376 00:17:13,769 --> 00:17:15,950 bags, travel back in time, and just look for 377 00:17:15,950 --> 00:17:18,289 a mirror. We just want to see ourselves. Right. 378 00:17:18,390 --> 00:17:20,990 We only validate the parts of historical thought 379 00:17:20,990 --> 00:17:22,990 that resemble our current political consensus, 380 00:17:23,309 --> 00:17:26,890 entirely ignoring the vast alien context that 381 00:17:26,890 --> 00:17:30,259 actually generated their ideas. So if Machiavelli 382 00:17:30,259 --> 00:17:32,920 is historically significant, it is because of 383 00:17:32,920 --> 00:17:35,400 how radically he disrupted the political thought 384 00:17:35,400 --> 00:17:37,180 of the Italian Renaissance. Right. Not because 385 00:17:37,180 --> 00:17:39,319 he was a modern political scientist accidentally 386 00:17:39,319 --> 00:17:41,759 born in the wrong century. Okay. I need to introduce 387 00:17:41,759 --> 00:17:43,880 some genuine friction here. Yeah. Because this 388 00:17:43,880 --> 00:17:46,079 is getting intense. Go for it. Let's look at 389 00:17:46,079 --> 00:17:49,380 the logical extreme of Skinner's argument. If 390 00:17:49,380 --> 00:17:52,119 Skinner insists that we cannot look to Plato 391 00:17:52,119 --> 00:17:55,119 for modern ethical guidance or to John Locke 392 00:17:55,119 --> 00:17:57,700 for modern democratic solutions because their 393 00:17:57,700 --> 00:18:00,880 contexts were totally alien to ours, doesn't 394 00:18:00,880 --> 00:18:02,940 that render the study of history practically 395 00:18:02,940 --> 00:18:05,940 useless for modern policymaking? That is the 396 00:18:05,940 --> 00:18:08,019 big question. Right. I mean, why shouldn't a 397 00:18:08,019 --> 00:18:11,059 modern leader facing a crisis of statecraft look 398 00:18:11,059 --> 00:18:13,920 to Thomas Hobbes for a roadmap? If there is no 399 00:18:13,920 --> 00:18:16,839 timeless wisdom to be extracted, why are these 400 00:18:16,839 --> 00:18:19,559 books considered classics at all? That is the 401 00:18:19,559 --> 00:18:22,059 existential question for the intellectual historian. 402 00:18:22,400 --> 00:18:25,140 And Skinner's defense is that we do not read 403 00:18:25,140 --> 00:18:28,220 historical texts to answer our modern questions. 404 00:18:28,380 --> 00:18:30,799 OK. We read them to understand what questions 405 00:18:30,799 --> 00:18:32,660 they were trying to answer in their own time. 406 00:18:33,200 --> 00:18:36,359 Because assuming the questions are the same is 407 00:18:36,359 --> 00:18:38,700 the root of the error. Precisely. The assumption 408 00:18:38,700 --> 00:18:40,819 that there are timeless questions like, you know, 409 00:18:40,819 --> 00:18:44,140 what is the ideal nature of the state is structurally 410 00:18:44,140 --> 00:18:47,359 flawed. Why? Because the concept of the state 411 00:18:47,359 --> 00:18:49,640 meant something entirely different to Aristotle 412 00:18:49,640 --> 00:18:52,579 in a Greek polis than it did to Hobbes during 413 00:18:52,579 --> 00:18:55,079 the English Civil War. Right. And something different 414 00:18:55,079 --> 00:18:58,400 again to a modern digital democracy. If you assume 415 00:18:58,400 --> 00:19:00,940 the question is universal, you strip the historical 416 00:19:00,940 --> 00:19:03,599 answer of its actual meaning. So we read the 417 00:19:03,599 --> 00:19:06,400 classics to witness the incredible alien diversity 418 00:19:06,400 --> 00:19:09,720 of human problem solving. Yes. It frees us from 419 00:19:09,720 --> 00:19:11,960 the tyranny of thinking our modern way of framing 420 00:19:11,960 --> 00:19:14,599 a problem is the only way it has ever been framed. 421 00:19:14,799 --> 00:19:18,400 Wow. OK, so the text in itself is dead. Coherence 422 00:19:18,400 --> 00:19:21,539 is an illusion. Prolepsis is a mirror. If we 423 00:19:21,539 --> 00:19:24,460 strip all of that away, what positive methodology 424 00:19:24,460 --> 00:19:27,299 does Skinner leave us with? How does a historian 425 00:19:27,299 --> 00:19:30,400 actually sit down and read a primary source? 426 00:19:30,700 --> 00:19:33,579 Skinner demands that we look at writing not as 427 00:19:33,579 --> 00:19:36,619 the passive recording of ideas, but as a form 428 00:19:36,619 --> 00:19:40,180 of. active targeted behavior writing is an action 429 00:19:40,180 --> 00:19:43,460 yes writing is an action to build this framework 430 00:19:43,460 --> 00:19:46,960 skinner imports heavy machinery from the philosophy 431 00:19:46,960 --> 00:19:50,259 of language specifically the work of j .l austin 432 00:19:50,259 --> 00:19:53,200 and john searle oh centering on the concept of 433 00:19:53,200 --> 00:19:56,420 illocutionary force exactly illocutionary force 434 00:19:56,420 --> 00:19:58,880 this is a brilliant tool it separates the literal 435 00:19:58,880 --> 00:20:01,710 meaning of words from the social action those 436 00:20:01,710 --> 00:20:04,829 words perform. Let's map out how this works mechanically. 437 00:20:04,970 --> 00:20:07,549 Okay. The basic linguistic premise is that when 438 00:20:07,549 --> 00:20:10,390 we speak or write, we aren't just conveying dictionary 439 00:20:10,390 --> 00:20:12,650 definitions. Right. We are doing something to 440 00:20:12,650 --> 00:20:15,410 the world. If I stand by a frozen pond and say 441 00:20:15,410 --> 00:20:17,970 to you, the ice is thin over there, the literal 442 00:20:17,970 --> 00:20:20,069 meaning is just a statement regarding the physical 443 00:20:20,069 --> 00:20:22,609 density of frozen water. Just a fact. But the 444 00:20:22,609 --> 00:20:24,890 illocutionary force of my statement is a warning. 445 00:20:24,990 --> 00:20:28,220 My action is warning you not to step there. So 446 00:20:28,220 --> 00:20:31,240 if a historian comes along a century later, reads 447 00:20:31,240 --> 00:20:33,920 a transcript of your words, and concludes you 448 00:20:33,920 --> 00:20:35,880 were just giving a meteorological lecture on 449 00:20:35,880 --> 00:20:38,539 ice density. They have completely missed the 450 00:20:38,539 --> 00:20:40,500 reality of the event. They missed the warning. 451 00:20:40,740 --> 00:20:43,380 Exactly. Applying this to the archive changes 452 00:20:43,380 --> 00:20:46,660 everything. If you find a treatise by John Locke 453 00:20:46,660 --> 00:20:49,240 on government, you can't just summarize his chapters. 454 00:20:49,339 --> 00:20:52,400 You have to ask, what was Locke doing by publishing 455 00:20:52,400 --> 00:20:55,140 this specific argument in this specific year? 456 00:20:55,339 --> 00:20:59,140 Yes. Was he mocking a political rival? Was he 457 00:20:59,140 --> 00:21:01,519 providing ideological cover for a revolution? 458 00:21:01,740 --> 00:21:04,970 Was he advising a monarch? or attacking a specific 459 00:21:04,970 --> 00:21:07,509 piece of legislation making its way through parliament? 460 00:21:07,750 --> 00:21:10,690 You cannot derive the illocutionary force solely 461 00:21:10,690 --> 00:21:13,029 from staring at the text. You have to reconstruct 462 00:21:13,029 --> 00:21:15,710 the historical environment. You have to know 463 00:21:15,710 --> 00:21:18,230 the drama. You must understand the specific political 464 00:21:18,230 --> 00:21:20,609 debates of the decade, the immediate audience 465 00:21:20,609 --> 00:21:23,390 Locke was trying to persuade, and the opponents 466 00:21:23,390 --> 00:21:25,410 he was trying to dismantle. And this becomes 467 00:21:25,410 --> 00:21:27,690 incredibly vital when historians run into what 468 00:21:27,690 --> 00:21:32,730 Skitter calls oblique strategies. Ah, yes. Because 469 00:21:32,730 --> 00:21:35,309 past authors didn't always have the luxury of 470 00:21:35,309 --> 00:21:37,470 saying exactly what they meant. Right. They faced 471 00:21:37,470 --> 00:21:40,009 censorship, imprisonment, or even execution. 472 00:21:40,269 --> 00:21:43,069 So they used hidden meanings. What happens when 473 00:21:43,069 --> 00:21:46,130 the text you are treating as dry, serious philosophy 474 00:21:46,130 --> 00:21:50,250 is actually a carefully constructed mask? Skinner 475 00:21:50,250 --> 00:21:53,069 points to Pierre Bale for this. The late 17th 476 00:21:53,069 --> 00:21:55,869 century philosopher, Bale published these massive, 477 00:21:55,930 --> 00:21:59,150 incredibly dense historical and critical dictionaries. 478 00:21:59,150 --> 00:22:01,430 I've seen pictures of them. They are huge. They 479 00:22:01,430 --> 00:22:04,150 are. And if a historian applies the text in itself 480 00:22:04,150 --> 00:22:07,490 method, reading only the literal words, Bale's 481 00:22:07,490 --> 00:22:10,309 work looks like a tedious orthodox encyclopedia. 482 00:22:10,470 --> 00:22:12,930 Just a really boring reference book. Right. But 483 00:22:12,930 --> 00:22:15,109 the illocutionary force was radically different. 484 00:22:15,190 --> 00:22:17,660 What's he actually doing? Bale was using the 485 00:22:17,660 --> 00:22:20,119 format of the historical dictionary as an oblique 486 00:22:20,119 --> 00:22:23,559 strategy to smuggle in highly radical, skeptical, 487 00:22:23,759 --> 00:22:26,359 philosophical arguments that undermined religious 488 00:22:26,359 --> 00:22:28,720 orthodoxy. So the dictionary format was camouflage. 489 00:22:29,299 --> 00:22:32,319 Entirely. By burying his radicalism in footnotes 490 00:22:32,319 --> 00:22:34,500 and crossed references, he avoided the censors. 491 00:22:34,559 --> 00:22:37,960 That is so smart. It is. But if you don't reconstruct 492 00:22:37,960 --> 00:22:41,200 the oppressive censorship environment of 17th 493 00:22:41,200 --> 00:22:43,579 century Europe, if you don't know what Bale was 494 00:22:43,579 --> 00:22:46,599 actively doing... You miss his radicalism entirely. 495 00:22:47,079 --> 00:22:49,099 Think of it like finding a scrap of paper in 496 00:22:49,099 --> 00:22:51,200 an archive that contains a record of a single 497 00:22:51,200 --> 00:22:54,619 chess move. Knight to E4. Okay, I like this. 498 00:22:54,839 --> 00:22:57,160 That is the text. You know what a knight is. 499 00:22:57,299 --> 00:23:00,160 You know the coordinates of E4 on a board. You 500 00:23:00,160 --> 00:23:03,009 understand the literal meaning perfectly. But 501 00:23:03,009 --> 00:23:05,089 you have absolutely no idea what the move meant. 502 00:23:05,529 --> 00:23:07,730 Because the move only has meaning in relation 503 00:23:07,730 --> 00:23:10,730 to the other pieces on the board. Exactly. Unless 504 00:23:10,730 --> 00:23:13,049 the historian reconstructs the rest of the chessboard 505 00:23:13,049 --> 00:23:15,710 at that exact moment in time. They have no idea 506 00:23:15,710 --> 00:23:17,950 if knight to e4 was a brilliant aggressive attack, 507 00:23:18,210 --> 00:23:20,289 a desperate defensive retreat to protect the 508 00:23:20,289 --> 00:23:23,210 king, or just a massive blunder. Right. The board 509 00:23:23,210 --> 00:23:26,970 is the historical context. The move is the elocutionary 510 00:23:26,970 --> 00:23:29,650 force. So to write intellectual history, you 511 00:23:29,650 --> 00:23:32,200 cannot just summarize a book. you must reconstruct 512 00:23:32,200 --> 00:23:34,420 the chessboard to recover the complex intention 513 00:23:34,420 --> 00:23:38,160 of the author. Exactly. But Skinner's methodology, 514 00:23:38,539 --> 00:23:41,740 as powerful as it is, relies entirely on the 515 00:23:41,740 --> 00:23:44,339 existence of a text. It works brilliantly for 516 00:23:44,339 --> 00:23:47,079 literate philosophers like Bale or Locke, who 517 00:23:47,079 --> 00:23:49,920 left behind treatises and letters. But history 518 00:23:49,920 --> 00:23:52,539 is overwhelmingly populated by people who never 519 00:23:52,539 --> 00:23:55,180 wrote anything down. Which brings us right back 520 00:23:55,180 --> 00:23:58,930 to 1912 Morocco. Exactly. The Berber sheikh in 521 00:23:58,930 --> 00:24:01,289 our opening story didn't write a philosophical 522 00:24:01,289 --> 00:24:04,029 defense of his sheep raid. The peasant farmers 523 00:24:04,029 --> 00:24:06,769 of medieval Europe didn't publish political dictionaries. 524 00:24:06,890 --> 00:24:10,450 Right. How do we read illiterate non -textual 525 00:24:10,450 --> 00:24:13,049 history? What happens when your primary source 526 00:24:13,049 --> 00:24:15,650 is just human behavior? For that, we turn to 527 00:24:15,650 --> 00:24:17,769 segment four and the anthropologist Clifford 528 00:24:17,769 --> 00:24:20,349 Geertz. Yes. Who provides the framework for the 529 00:24:20,349 --> 00:24:23,049 semiotics of culture. OK, break that down for 530 00:24:23,049 --> 00:24:25,849 me. Geertz acts as the vital bridge between observing 531 00:24:25,849 --> 00:24:28,529 physical behavior and interpreting cultural meaning. 532 00:24:28,789 --> 00:24:31,710 He fundamentally rejects older anthropological 533 00:24:31,710 --> 00:24:34,809 models. Like what? Well, he argues that culture 534 00:24:34,809 --> 00:24:37,349 is not some biological trait inherited in our 535 00:24:37,349 --> 00:24:40,990 DNA. Right. Nor is it some mystical, super organic 536 00:24:40,990 --> 00:24:43,410 entity hovering like a cloud over a society. 537 00:24:44,369 --> 00:24:47,250 Drawing on Max Weber. Geertz famously defines 538 00:24:47,250 --> 00:24:50,690 culture as webs of significance. Webs of significance. 539 00:24:50,730 --> 00:24:53,910 That's a great phrase. He says, man is an animal 540 00:24:53,910 --> 00:24:56,650 suspended in webs of significance he himself 541 00:24:56,650 --> 00:24:59,849 has spun. It's a beautiful definition, but Geertz 542 00:24:59,849 --> 00:25:02,049 is very strict about where those webs actually 543 00:25:02,049 --> 00:25:04,990 exist, right? Yes. He attacks what he calls the 544 00:25:04,990 --> 00:25:07,990 cognitivist fallacy. Which is the idea that culture 545 00:25:07,990 --> 00:25:11,069 exists entirely inside people's heads as private 546 00:25:11,069 --> 00:25:14,009 psychological states. Right. Geertz insists that 547 00:25:14,009 --> 00:25:16,420 meaning is public. It exists in the observable 548 00:25:16,420 --> 00:25:18,859 space between people when they interact. Okay, 549 00:25:18,900 --> 00:25:21,180 to illustrate how a historian or anthropologist 550 00:25:21,180 --> 00:25:23,759 can read this public meaning, Geertz borrows 551 00:25:23,759 --> 00:25:26,039 a brilliant conceptual model from the philosopher 552 00:25:26,039 --> 00:25:29,200 Gilbert Ryle. The wink and the twitch. Yes. Let's 553 00:25:29,200 --> 00:25:31,559 map this out, because it is basically the master 554 00:25:31,559 --> 00:25:34,579 key to cultural history. Go ahead. Imagine two 555 00:25:34,579 --> 00:25:38,259 boys standing in a room. Both rapidly contract 556 00:25:38,259 --> 00:25:41,750 the eyelid of their right eye. Physically, biologically, 557 00:25:41,869 --> 00:25:43,690 if you had a camera pointed at them, the mechanical 558 00:25:43,690 --> 00:25:45,670 movement would look identical. Exactly identical. 559 00:25:45,869 --> 00:25:48,630 The first boy has an involuntary biological twitch. 560 00:25:48,769 --> 00:25:51,390 Right. The second boy is winking to signal a 561 00:25:51,390 --> 00:25:54,029 secret conspiracy to a friend across the room. 562 00:25:54,150 --> 00:25:56,509 The physical movement is the same, but the reality 563 00:25:56,509 --> 00:25:58,650 of the action is entirely different. Because 564 00:25:58,650 --> 00:26:02,009 the twitch is biology. The wink is culture. Yes. 565 00:26:02,130 --> 00:26:05,109 The boy who is winking is communicating through 566 00:26:05,109 --> 00:26:08,400 a shared public code. And Geertz complicates 567 00:26:08,400 --> 00:26:11,140 it even further to show how dense the archive 568 00:26:11,140 --> 00:26:14,319 of human behavior really is. How so? What if 569 00:26:14,319 --> 00:26:17,980 a third boy is doing a burlesqued wink? Like 570 00:26:17,980 --> 00:26:20,720 he is exaggerating the movement to mock the second 571 00:26:20,720 --> 00:26:23,599 boy's clumsy attempt at winking. Okay, yeah. 572 00:26:23,680 --> 00:26:25,740 And what if a fourth boy is at home, standing 573 00:26:25,740 --> 00:26:28,000 in front of a mirror, practicing a burlesque 574 00:26:28,000 --> 00:26:30,700 wink for later? So you have a twitch, a wink, 575 00:26:30,880 --> 00:26:34,619 a parody, and a rehearsal. Yes. And if a historian 576 00:26:34,619 --> 00:26:37,259 relies only on thin description, Just recording 577 00:26:37,259 --> 00:26:40,079 the physical facts, the timeline of eye contractions, 578 00:26:40,119 --> 00:26:42,099 they cannot tell the difference between any of 579 00:26:42,099 --> 00:26:44,319 them. To distinguish the parody from the twitch, 580 00:26:44,519 --> 00:26:46,460 you must understand the webs of significance. 581 00:26:46,900 --> 00:26:48,960 But how does the historian actually do that? 582 00:26:49,079 --> 00:26:51,640 What is the practical methodological tool? Gutes 583 00:26:51,640 --> 00:26:54,299 calls it thick description. Thick description. 584 00:26:54,690 --> 00:26:57,130 Yes, this is the method of clinical inference. 585 00:26:57,529 --> 00:27:00,329 Traditional sciences often try to find broad 586 00:27:00,329 --> 00:27:03,710 universal laws that apply across all humanity, 587 00:27:03,890 --> 00:27:06,349 like a physicist establishing the law of gravity. 588 00:27:06,470 --> 00:27:09,650 Right. A cultural historian using thick description 589 00:27:09,650 --> 00:27:12,549 does the exact opposite. They are not looking 590 00:27:12,549 --> 00:27:14,829 for the universal law of winking. That would 591 00:27:14,829 --> 00:27:17,609 be ridiculous. Right. They zoom in. They ferret 592 00:27:17,609 --> 00:27:20,349 out the deep, unapparent import of highly specific 593 00:27:20,349 --> 00:27:23,690 actions. They diagnose the social discourse of 594 00:27:23,690 --> 00:27:26,509 this specific wink in this specific room between 595 00:27:26,509 --> 00:27:29,170 these specific people. Let's take thick description 596 00:27:29,170 --> 00:27:32,230 and apply it back to our cold open. The Moroccan 597 00:27:32,230 --> 00:27:34,630 sheep raid. Let's do it. When we left Cohen, 598 00:27:34,869 --> 00:27:38,250 the sheik, and Captain Damari, we saw a collision 599 00:27:38,250 --> 00:27:40,529 of realities resulting in Cohen going to jail. 600 00:27:40,849 --> 00:27:43,569 If we apply thick description, we can decode 601 00:27:43,569 --> 00:27:45,609 exactly what happened. Right. Under thick description, 602 00:27:45,809 --> 00:27:48,029 we look past the physical movement of sheep and 603 00:27:48,029 --> 00:27:50,430 examine the public codes of meaning. The webs. 604 00:27:50,490 --> 00:27:53,789 Yes. The Berbershake and Cohen, the Jewish merchant, 605 00:27:54,009 --> 00:27:57,150 were operating under the R Pact. In this specific 606 00:27:57,150 --> 00:28:00,190 cultural web of significance, R isn't just a 607 00:28:00,190 --> 00:28:02,849 trade agreement. It is a mechanism for maintaining 608 00:28:02,849 --> 00:28:05,710 cosmic and social balance in an environment without 609 00:28:05,710 --> 00:28:08,569 a centralized state. So when Cohen's sheep were 610 00:28:08,569 --> 00:28:11,829 stolen. Honor was breached. Exactly. The subsequent 611 00:28:11,829 --> 00:28:13,990 posse and the taking of sheep from the offending 612 00:28:13,990 --> 00:28:17,069 tribe was a highly formalized, culturally sanctioned 613 00:28:17,069 --> 00:28:19,869 ritual. It was a wink. It was a wink. A complex 614 00:28:19,869 --> 00:28:22,410 communication of restoring balance. But Captain 615 00:28:22,410 --> 00:28:24,569 Dumari, representing the French colonial frame 616 00:28:24,569 --> 00:28:27,410 of reference, lacked the cultural code to read 617 00:28:27,410 --> 00:28:29,789 the wink. He was completely blind to it. To his 618 00:28:29,789 --> 00:28:32,410 bureaucratic military mind focused on pacification 619 00:28:32,410 --> 00:28:35,509 and establishing European law, a group of armed 620 00:28:35,509 --> 00:28:38,089 men taking sheep is simply a riot. It's a twitch. 621 00:28:38,349 --> 00:28:40,769 Yes. The violence of colonialism in this specific 622 00:28:40,769 --> 00:28:43,210 instance was a violent misreading of a cultural 623 00:28:43,210 --> 00:28:46,549 text. Dumari imposed his own web of significance 624 00:28:46,549 --> 00:28:49,930 over the local one, completely obliterating Cohen's 625 00:28:49,930 --> 00:28:52,630 reality. Geertz shows us that thick description 626 00:28:52,630 --> 00:28:55,490 isn't just about recording that an event happened. 627 00:28:55,569 --> 00:28:58,509 It's about unraveling the colliding dramas of 628 00:28:58,509 --> 00:29:01,650 pursuing trade, defending honor, and establishing 629 00:29:01,650 --> 00:29:04,589 colonial dominance. Culture, as Geertz argues, 630 00:29:04,809 --> 00:29:06,670 is a story a group of people tell themselves 631 00:29:06,670 --> 00:29:09,890 about themselves. And the historian's job is 632 00:29:09,890 --> 00:29:12,269 to read that story over their shoulders. Okay, 633 00:29:12,329 --> 00:29:15,049 so your takeaway from Geertz is this. You write 634 00:29:15,049 --> 00:29:17,869 cultural history by doing retrospective ethnography. 635 00:29:18,230 --> 00:29:20,710 You abandon the search for universal laws of 636 00:29:20,710 --> 00:29:23,430 human behavior. You dive into the microscopic, 637 00:29:23,529 --> 00:29:26,970 messy details of local events. You treat public 638 00:29:26,970 --> 00:29:30,430 behavior as a text. Yes. And you use thick description 639 00:29:30,430 --> 00:29:32,589 to decode the winks from the twitches in the 640 00:29:32,589 --> 00:29:34,849 archives of human action. We now have a truly 641 00:29:34,849 --> 00:29:37,849 formidable theoretical toolkit. We do. We have 642 00:29:37,849 --> 00:29:40,230 Mandelbaum telling us to avoid monism and embrace 643 00:29:40,230 --> 00:29:43,089 pluralism. We have Skinner giving us the linguistic 644 00:29:43,089 --> 00:29:46,130 tools to recover illocutionary intent and reconstruct 645 00:29:46,130 --> 00:29:48,289 the chessboard. And we have Geertz providing 646 00:29:48,289 --> 00:29:50,630 the anthropological method of thick description 647 00:29:50,630 --> 00:29:54,109 to decode nonverbal public meaning. So what's 648 00:29:54,109 --> 00:29:56,309 left? The final piece of the puzzle provided 649 00:29:56,309 --> 00:29:59,519 by Peter Burke in segment five. We need to understand 650 00:29:59,519 --> 00:30:02,359 how the historical profession itself has practically 651 00:30:02,359 --> 00:30:05,059 applied these tools and how the discipline of 652 00:30:05,059 --> 00:30:07,680 cultural history has evolved over the last century. 653 00:30:07,839 --> 00:30:09,480 Because historians didn't always do it this way. 654 00:30:09,579 --> 00:30:12,500 Not at all. Burke provides us with the historiographical 655 00:30:12,500 --> 00:30:16,230 roadmap. He outlines the phases of the discipline, 656 00:30:16,569 --> 00:30:19,049 starting with what he calls the Great Tradition. 657 00:30:19,089 --> 00:30:21,450 The Great Tradition. This was the classic era 658 00:30:21,450 --> 00:30:24,990 of cultural history, prominent in the late 19th 659 00:30:24,990 --> 00:30:28,210 and early 20th centuries. It was championed by 660 00:30:28,210 --> 00:30:31,059 giants like Jacob Burkhart. who wrote the defining 661 00:30:31,059 --> 00:30:33,380 work on the civilization of the Renaissance in 662 00:30:33,380 --> 00:30:36,400 Italy, or Johann Huizinga, who studied the Middle 663 00:30:36,400 --> 00:30:38,640 Ages. But their methods were very different from 664 00:30:38,640 --> 00:30:41,460 Geertz. Very. The historians of the Great Tradition 665 00:30:41,460 --> 00:30:44,400 were pioneers, absolutely, but their methodologies 666 00:30:44,400 --> 00:30:47,799 were largely intuitive and highly elitist. Elitist 667 00:30:47,799 --> 00:30:50,819 how? They looked almost exclusively at high culture, 668 00:30:50,980 --> 00:30:54,180 the grand paintings, the epic poetry, the elite 669 00:30:54,180 --> 00:30:57,599 philosophy, and they intuitively read the spirit 670 00:30:57,599 --> 00:31:00,259 of the era off of those masterpieces. Oh, kind 671 00:31:00,259 --> 00:31:02,019 of like the zeitgeist thing Mandelbaum warned 672 00:31:02,019 --> 00:31:04,839 about. Exactly. Burckhardt essentially treated 673 00:31:04,839 --> 00:31:06,819 the entire Renaissance state as if it were a 674 00:31:06,819 --> 00:31:09,619 single unified work of art. Which produces a 675 00:31:09,619 --> 00:31:12,059 really beautiful narrative. But Burck details 676 00:31:12,059 --> 00:31:15,339 how the great tradition ran into a buzzsaw of 677 00:31:15,339 --> 00:31:18,400 criticism by the mid -20th century. Yes, primarily 678 00:31:18,400 --> 00:31:20,960 driven by Marxist historians like E .P. Thompson. 679 00:31:21,240 --> 00:31:24,420 Right, because the Marxists looked at this intuitive 680 00:31:24,420 --> 00:31:27,720 reading of elite culture and argued it was fundamentally 681 00:31:27,720 --> 00:31:30,599 dishonest. Thompson famously referred to this 682 00:31:30,599 --> 00:31:33,619 holistic concept of culture as a dumpish term. 683 00:31:33,779 --> 00:31:36,660 A dumpish term. Yes. He argued that by treating 684 00:31:36,660 --> 00:31:39,759 an entire period as one unified culture, the 685 00:31:39,759 --> 00:31:42,059 great tradition was lumping vastly different 686 00:31:42,059 --> 00:31:44,960 human experiences together. Effectively erasing 687 00:31:44,960 --> 00:31:47,440 the harsh realities of economic deprivation and 688 00:31:47,440 --> 00:31:50,180 class warfare. Exactly. You cannot take the culture 689 00:31:50,180 --> 00:31:52,700 of a wealthy Medici prince in a Florentine palace 690 00:31:52,700 --> 00:31:55,579 and the culture of a starving, illiterate peasant 691 00:31:55,579 --> 00:31:58,220 in the fields and lump them together as the Renaissance. 692 00:31:58,500 --> 00:32:00,599 That makes perfect sense. The Marxist critique 693 00:32:00,599 --> 00:32:02,740 demanded that historians acknowledge that culture 694 00:32:02,740 --> 00:32:05,460 is fragmented by class and often used as a weapon 695 00:32:05,460 --> 00:32:08,559 of oppression. And this critique forced a massive 696 00:32:08,559 --> 00:32:11,339 adaptation in the field, leading directly to 697 00:32:11,339 --> 00:32:13,480 what Burke identifies as the anthropological 698 00:32:13,480 --> 00:32:16,359 turn in the 1970s. Oh, right when Geertz was 699 00:32:16,359 --> 00:32:19,599 publishing. Exactly. This is the exact moment 700 00:32:19,599 --> 00:32:22,220 when the theories of Clifford Geertz infiltrated 701 00:32:22,220 --> 00:32:24,660 the history departments. Historians realized 702 00:32:24,660 --> 00:32:27,059 they could no longer just study the Mona Lisa. 703 00:32:27,569 --> 00:32:30,630 They had to study the peasants. And to do that, 704 00:32:30,650 --> 00:32:34,289 they had to zoom way, way in. Which birthed the 705 00:32:34,289 --> 00:32:37,250 movement of microhistory. Yes. Instead of trying 706 00:32:37,250 --> 00:32:39,730 to write a sweeping history of the entire continent 707 00:32:39,730 --> 00:32:42,589 of Europe, a historian would spend years writing 708 00:32:42,589 --> 00:32:45,500 a thick description of a single village. or even 709 00:32:45,500 --> 00:32:48,079 a single peasant. Burke highlights absolute classics 710 00:32:48,079 --> 00:32:50,500 of the genre, like Carlo Ginsburg's book, The 711 00:32:50,500 --> 00:32:52,299 Cheese and the Worms. I love that book. It is 712 00:32:52,299 --> 00:32:55,180 a masterclass in historical anthropology. Ginsburg 713 00:32:55,180 --> 00:32:58,140 didn't study a pope or a king. He studied a single 714 00:32:58,140 --> 00:33:01,180 16th century Italian miller named Minocchio. 715 00:33:01,339 --> 00:33:03,140 And how did he study him? He didn't write books. 716 00:33:03,609 --> 00:33:07,150 No, but he talked. By rigorously examining the 717 00:33:07,150 --> 00:33:09,890 detailed records of the Inquisition that interrogated 718 00:33:09,890 --> 00:33:12,769 Minocchio for heresy, Ginzburg uncovered the 719 00:33:12,769 --> 00:33:16,549 Miller's incredibly eccentric home -brewed cosmology. 720 00:33:16,710 --> 00:33:19,589 Right, the cheese thing. Yes. Minocchio believed 721 00:33:19,589 --> 00:33:22,130 the universe formed out of chaos, like cheese 722 00:33:22,130 --> 00:33:24,990 coagulating from milk, and that angels appeared 723 00:33:24,990 --> 00:33:28,170 within it like worms. That is just incredible. 724 00:33:28,829 --> 00:33:31,490 By zooming in on Minocchio or by studying the 725 00:33:31,490 --> 00:33:33,549 detailed interrogation records of the villagers 726 00:33:33,549 --> 00:33:36,670 in Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie's Montague, historians 727 00:33:36,670 --> 00:33:39,029 were finally doing retrospective ethnography. 728 00:33:39,230 --> 00:33:41,529 They were. They were looking at the winks and 729 00:33:41,529 --> 00:33:43,829 twitches of the lower classes, recovering voices 730 00:33:43,829 --> 00:33:46,569 and webs of significance that the great tradition 731 00:33:46,569 --> 00:33:48,849 had totally ignored. But the evolution of the 732 00:33:48,849 --> 00:33:51,539 discipline didn't stop with microhistory. Burke 733 00:33:51,539 --> 00:33:53,700 tracks the subsequent shift toward the end of 734 00:33:53,700 --> 00:33:56,039 the 20th century into what became known as the 735 00:33:56,039 --> 00:33:58,359 new cultural history. Okay, what defined that 736 00:33:58,359 --> 00:34:01,220 era? It was defined by a heavy focus on practices 737 00:34:01,220 --> 00:34:04,160 and the rise of theoretical constructivism. Let's 738 00:34:04,160 --> 00:34:05,880 define these because they represent a major shift 739 00:34:05,880 --> 00:34:08,940 in how we view reality itself. The focus on practices 740 00:34:08,940 --> 00:34:11,639 was heavily influenced by the French sociologist 741 00:34:11,639 --> 00:34:14,880 Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu argued that culture 742 00:34:14,880 --> 00:34:17,099 isn't just a static collection of paintings or 743 00:34:17,099 --> 00:34:20,579 books. Culture is an active process of reproduction. 744 00:34:21,039 --> 00:34:23,019 Reproduction, like reproducing the social order. 745 00:34:23,199 --> 00:34:26,900 Exactly. Bourdieu mapped how the French bourgeoisie 746 00:34:26,900 --> 00:34:30,320 maintained their elite status, not just through 747 00:34:30,320 --> 00:34:32,960 raw economic capital, but through cultural capital. 748 00:34:33,260 --> 00:34:36,500 They utilized an educational system and a highly 749 00:34:36,500 --> 00:34:39,590 codified set of cultural tastes. what art they 750 00:34:39,590 --> 00:34:42,130 liked, how they spoke, even how they held their 751 00:34:42,130 --> 00:34:45,090 silverware. These practices seemed autonomous, 752 00:34:45,289 --> 00:34:48,170 but they actively served to gatekeep power and 753 00:34:48,170 --> 00:34:51,210 reproduce class hierarchies. Culture is a weapon 754 00:34:51,210 --> 00:34:54,010 of distinction. Which leads directly into constructivism. 755 00:34:58,769 --> 00:35:04,250 Right. They actively construct that reality. 756 00:35:04,570 --> 00:35:06,769 Burke uses the example of a book called Inventing 757 00:35:06,769 --> 00:35:09,849 Ireland. Yes, that's a perfect example. The constructivist 758 00:35:09,849 --> 00:35:13,070 argument is that... There is no essential, objective, 759 00:35:13,349 --> 00:35:15,889 biological Ireland existing out in the world 760 00:35:15,889 --> 00:35:18,090 waiting to be described. Right. Rather, the very 761 00:35:18,090 --> 00:35:21,190 concept of Ireland, its national identity, its 762 00:35:21,190 --> 00:35:24,070 borders, its meaning was actively constructed, 763 00:35:24,369 --> 00:35:26,489 negotiated and fought over through literature, 764 00:35:26,710 --> 00:35:29,050 political pamphlets, maps and cultural symbols. 765 00:35:29,210 --> 00:35:31,250 So under the new cultural history categories 766 00:35:31,250 --> 00:35:34,800 like gender, race. national identity, and even 767 00:35:34,800 --> 00:35:37,820 madness are viewed not as fixed biological facts, 768 00:35:37,940 --> 00:35:40,599 but as cultural constructions. They are texts 769 00:35:40,599 --> 00:35:42,980 written by society. Okay, here's where I have 770 00:35:42,980 --> 00:35:45,820 to introduce a massive existential pushback. 771 00:35:45,960 --> 00:35:47,940 I figured you might. Because if we follow the 772 00:35:47,940 --> 00:35:49,900 new cultural history to its logical extreme, 773 00:35:50,239 --> 00:35:52,619 if everything is a cultural construction, right? 774 00:35:52,679 --> 00:35:55,170 Just a text to be deconstructed. Yeah. Don't 775 00:35:55,170 --> 00:35:57,590 we lose our grip on hard material reality? It's 776 00:35:57,590 --> 00:35:59,989 a very real concern. I mean, a war is not just 777 00:35:59,989 --> 00:36:01,969 a cultural construction of national identity. 778 00:36:02,230 --> 00:36:05,349 It is flying shrapnel and physical death. Famine 779 00:36:05,349 --> 00:36:08,150 isn't a text. It is biological starvation. If 780 00:36:08,150 --> 00:36:10,949 historians abandon quantitative data and objective 781 00:36:10,949 --> 00:36:14,269 facts for purely symbolic interpretation, aren't 782 00:36:14,269 --> 00:36:17,170 we just writing literary fiction? That exact 783 00:36:17,170 --> 00:36:20,469 anxiety triggered the final movement Burke discusses, 784 00:36:20,510 --> 00:36:24,489 the revenge of social history. The revenge. Yes. 785 00:36:24,630 --> 00:36:27,190 A significant faction of empirical historians 786 00:36:27,190 --> 00:36:30,170 felt the cultural turn had gone entirely too 787 00:36:30,170 --> 00:36:33,429 far. They feared the rise of a post -social history 788 00:36:33,429 --> 00:36:36,389 where everything was treated as a floating symbol. 789 00:36:36,650 --> 00:36:38,889 Causing historians to just, you know, forget 790 00:36:38,889 --> 00:36:41,269 about hard social structures, physical violence 791 00:36:41,269 --> 00:36:44,190 and material deprivation. Exactly. So how does 792 00:36:44,190 --> 00:36:46,150 the discipline course correct without losing 793 00:36:46,150 --> 00:36:47,989 all the incredible tools Geertz and Skinner just 794 00:36:47,989 --> 00:36:50,969 gave us? How do you reconcile the symbolic wink 795 00:36:50,969 --> 00:36:53,869 with the physical reality of starvation? You 796 00:36:53,869 --> 00:36:56,570 synthesize them. Burke points to historians like 797 00:36:56,570 --> 00:36:59,070 Daniel Roche in France as the model for this 798 00:36:59,070 --> 00:37:01,369 synthesis. How do you do? Roche didn't abandon 799 00:37:01,369 --> 00:37:03,969 the study of cultural ideas, but he applied rigorous 800 00:37:03,969 --> 00:37:06,789 quantitative methods to them. He grounded the 801 00:37:06,789 --> 00:37:09,070 symbolic in the material. He literally brought 802 00:37:09,070 --> 00:37:12,619 math back into the humanities. He did. Roche 803 00:37:12,619 --> 00:37:14,519 demonstrated that you can study the cultural 804 00:37:14,519 --> 00:37:17,360 impact of the Enlightenment not just by deconstructing 805 00:37:17,360 --> 00:37:19,679 Voltaire's illocutionary force, but by going 806 00:37:19,679 --> 00:37:22,440 into the archives and counting exactly how many 807 00:37:22,440 --> 00:37:25,119 physical copies of Voltaire's books were owned 808 00:37:25,119 --> 00:37:28,800 by urban artisans versus rural nobles. Wow. He 809 00:37:28,800 --> 00:37:31,800 mapped the material transport of ideas. The revenge 810 00:37:31,800 --> 00:37:35,099 of social history served as a vital anchor. It 811 00:37:35,099 --> 00:37:37,579 reminded cultural historians that what meaning 812 00:37:37,579 --> 00:37:40,269 is constructed Those constructions happen in 813 00:37:40,269 --> 00:37:42,730 a physical world governed by real economic and 814 00:37:42,730 --> 00:37:45,289 material limits. So you need the thick description 815 00:37:45,289 --> 00:37:47,750 to decode the wink. Yes. But you also need the 816 00:37:47,750 --> 00:37:49,869 quantitative data to know exactly who in the 817 00:37:49,869 --> 00:37:52,550 room possesses the social and economic power 818 00:37:52,550 --> 00:37:54,550 to wink in the first place. Beautifully put. 819 00:37:54,750 --> 00:37:57,210 Yes. But we have covered an immense methodological 820 00:37:57,210 --> 00:37:59,869 landscape today. Let's synthesize this entire 821 00:37:59,869 --> 00:38:02,670 deep dive into a unified practical guide. Okay. 822 00:38:02,750 --> 00:38:04,809 If you are sitting down tomorrow to write history, 823 00:38:04,949 --> 00:38:08,019 here is your definitive four -part toolkit. Step 824 00:38:08,019 --> 00:38:11,380 one from Maurice Mandelbaum. Reject monomism. 825 00:38:11,579 --> 00:38:14,260 Do not organize your archive around a magical 826 00:38:14,260 --> 00:38:17,159 unifying zeitgeist. And do not strip complex 827 00:38:17,159 --> 00:38:20,000 philosophical systems down to isolated unit ideas. 828 00:38:20,440 --> 00:38:24,039 Employ cultural pluralism. Treat historical eras 829 00:38:24,039 --> 00:38:26,599 as chaotic, contradictory patterns resulting 830 00:38:26,599 --> 00:38:30,019 from diverse, localized human struggles. Exactly. 831 00:38:30,239 --> 00:38:33,719 Step two from Quentin Skinner. Stop reading classic 832 00:38:33,719 --> 00:38:36,139 texts as if they contain timeless answers to 833 00:38:36,139 --> 00:38:38,199 your modern anxieties. Abandon the mythology 834 00:38:38,199 --> 00:38:40,519 of coherence and the mythology of prolepsis. 835 00:38:40,639 --> 00:38:44,219 Treat writing as an action. Reconstruct the political 836 00:38:44,219 --> 00:38:46,719 chessboard of the era so you can uncover the 837 00:38:46,719 --> 00:38:49,199 author's hidden illocutionary intent. Perfect. 838 00:38:49,420 --> 00:38:52,000 Step three from Clifford Geertz. When your archive 839 00:38:52,000 --> 00:38:54,800 consists of human behavior, recognize that meaning 840 00:38:54,800 --> 00:38:58,210 is public. Treat rituals, riots, and daily interactions 841 00:38:58,210 --> 00:39:01,030 as texts. Employ thick description to perform 842 00:39:01,030 --> 00:39:03,710 retrospective ethnography, decoding the layered 843 00:39:03,710 --> 00:39:06,090 wings from the biological twitches within colliding 844 00:39:06,090 --> 00:39:08,570 webs of cultural significance. And step four 845 00:39:08,570 --> 00:39:10,989 from Peter Berg. Remember that culture is not 846 00:39:10,989 --> 00:39:13,730 a monolithic, dumpish term. It is actively constructed, 847 00:39:13,969 --> 00:39:16,610 fiercely contested across class lines, and constantly 848 00:39:16,610 --> 00:39:18,369 deployed as a weapon of social reproduction. 849 00:39:18,769 --> 00:39:22,070 But heed the revenge of social history. Always 850 00:39:22,070 --> 00:39:25,150 anchor your symbolic interpretations in hard 851 00:39:25,150 --> 00:39:28,269 material quantitative reality. Balancing these 852 00:39:28,269 --> 00:39:30,630 four imperatives is the supreme challenge of 853 00:39:30,630 --> 00:39:33,789 the historian. It is how you move past the broken 854 00:39:33,789 --> 00:39:36,670 security camera and begin to actually map the 855 00:39:36,670 --> 00:39:39,329 murky waters of the past. But as we close this 856 00:39:39,329 --> 00:39:41,750 deep dive, I want to leave you with a final provocative 857 00:39:41,750 --> 00:39:44,489 thought. Oh, let's hear it. We spent this time 858 00:39:44,489 --> 00:39:46,389 learning how to navigate the subjective nature 859 00:39:46,389 --> 00:39:49,250 of history. We've learned that meaning relies 860 00:39:49,250 --> 00:39:52,429 entirely on recovering lost intentions and performing 861 00:39:52,429 --> 00:39:55,190 thick descriptions of faded cultural webs. Right. 862 00:39:55,329 --> 00:39:57,750 And we've also acknowledged via the constructivists 863 00:39:57,750 --> 00:40:00,750 that our own modern cultural lenses are heavily 864 00:40:00,750 --> 00:40:02,949 constructed by our present politics, our class 865 00:40:02,949 --> 00:40:05,510 dynamics, and our current anxieties. The historian 866 00:40:05,510 --> 00:40:07,670 is just as entangled in webs of significance 867 00:40:07,670 --> 00:40:10,570 as the subject they are studying. Exactly. So 868 00:40:10,570 --> 00:40:13,619 here is the question for you to mull over. If 869 00:40:13,619 --> 00:40:16,159 we accept that the past is fundamentally an alien 870 00:40:16,159 --> 00:40:18,960 country, And if we accept that every tool we 871 00:40:18,960 --> 00:40:21,380 have for translating it is built out of our own 872 00:40:21,380 --> 00:40:24,380 modern biases. Is the very act of writing history 873 00:40:24,380 --> 00:40:27,119 ultimately just a way of constructing our own 874 00:40:27,119 --> 00:40:31,480 present identity? Yes. When we deploy sick description 875 00:40:31,480 --> 00:40:35,159 or recover illocutionary force, are we genuinely 876 00:40:35,159 --> 00:40:39,099 accessing the reality of 1912 Morocco or 16th 877 00:40:39,099 --> 00:40:40,960 century Italy? Or at the end of the day, no matter 878 00:40:40,960 --> 00:40:43,360 how rigorous our methodology, are we really just 879 00:40:43,360 --> 00:40:45,480 telling ourselves a story about ourselves? That's 880 00:40:45,480 --> 00:40:47,719 the terrifying thought. We aren't looking at 881 00:40:47,719 --> 00:40:49,920 a recording of the past. We might just be looking 882 00:40:49,920 --> 00:40:50,579 into a mirror.