Results in History

I hope my thesis will have two kinds of results. Both of them are common types of results in works of history, yet often they are to be merely implicit. First, I hope that my work will give an account of how ideas and mentalities work in society. It would be useful to better understand how thought spreads and changes through society and over time. I hope my examination of a specific case will challenge old and suggest new ways of thinking generally about these processes.

Second, I hope to frame or reveal hidden dilemmas and connections between values or between ideas. The ways Americans in the 1780s thought (for example about liberty and power) are different from how we think now; the changing uses of words both obscure and reveal, in different ways, changing relationships between concepts. Such differences are 'hidden' in the sense that they're immanent, or inherently possible but absent: revealing them could lead to changes in our own thought.

I think both these types of results characterise the usefulness of historical study. At their centre is the typically historical ambivalence between continuity and change, or similarity and difference - the same ambivalence that haunts all human action, not least political action.

Yet most historians seem to prefer to stress an evolutionary or developmental vision. When they explicitly justify their work or point out their results they tend to suggest a linear relationship between their field of study and the present or the future, which is more or less facile or tenuous. Historians who, on the contrary, try to avoid this shadow of the Whig interpretation shy away entirely from the idea of justifications or conclusions. I want my own work to be both meaningful and sincere. Hence the need for theory and reflection.