The Battlefield of Definition: Theorizing History’s Object and Method

Because theory of history consists of reflexive discussions about history's object, language, and method, we see it actively deployed whenever historians define their discipline. The question "What is history?" arises most frequently in periods of disciplinary uncertainty. The post-Second World War decades of the 1960s and 1970s were such a period, yielding a rich harvest of definitions attempting to establish history's genus proximum (general class) and its differentia specifica (specific difference).

In Germany, historian Karl-Georg Faber attempted to navigate these definitional swamps. His broad survey concluded that history's object comprises "human activities and suffering in the past." Faber remained ambivalent on history's relationship to the social sciences. While noting a qualitative difference based on history's focus on particularity (Einmaligkeit) versus social science's generality, he elsewhere described this difference as merely "relative," leaving it a "difficult problem" since both fields study human action.

The English historian G. R. Elton fundamentally rejected such ambivalence. He agreed that history and social sciences share the same object—"everything that men have said, thought, done or suffered"—but argued they differ in approach. For Elton, history is defined by its concern with events, change, and the particular. This positioned narrative of unique occurrences as history's core methodological identity, directly opposed to social scientific generalization.

In France, Fernand Braudel presented a radically different view, deliberately avoiding a narrow definition. He argued all social sciences cover the same terrain: human actions across past, present, and future. Braudel lamented the imperialist parceling of this terrain into separate disciplines, each defending its borders. To restore unity, he advocated reintegration around a common language of structure and model. For Braudel, the key difference was not object or method, but time frames; history and sociology converge when studying the same temporal scale.

Fellow French historian Paul Veyne exemplified the academic imperialism Braudel warned against. Veyne argued history has neither a defined object nor a unique method, studying anything in the past, both particular and general. Historians' only restriction, he claimed, was not searching for laws—a task left to social scientists. By this definition, Veyne laid claim to nearly the entire field of the social sciences for history, making its domain virtually boundless.

Surveying this definitional battleground reveals no consensus on history's object, method, or scientific credentials vis-à-vis the social sciences. Even history's supposed core—specificity in time and place—is unclear, with the spatial dimension notably absent from most definitions. There is not even agreement on a minimal definition of history as the study of "mankind in the past." Veyne finds humanity too narrow an object, while Braudel sees no clear separation of past from present. Elton champions the event, while Braudel elevates the "un-eventful" structure.

Every definition elevates a particular way of "doing history" to the status of the "real" or "best" practice. All definitions are simultaneously descriptive and normative. As Dutch philosopher Frank R. Ankersmit openly argued when privileging cultural history for its "methodological soundness," such judgments are inherently normative. Definitions rest on a mix of theory's legitimizing, programmatic, and demarcating functions, making controversy inextricable from competition between schools or paradigms.

This entanglement of epistemological and normative ideals mirrors what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison described regarding objectivity in the natural sciences. Theoretical struggles never concern pure knowledge alone; they also involve associated reputations, and financial and institutional resources. This fusion of ideal and material investments, theorized by Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of disciplinary fields and Michel Foucault's power/knowledge concept, explains why battles over defining history are always about more than just theory.