Note that according to Weber, a charismatic leader does not have to be a positive force; thus, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler could be reasonably considered charismatic leaders. Furthermore, sociology is axiologically neutral towards various forms of charismatic domination: it does not differentiate between the charisma of a Berserker, of a shaman or of that displayed by Kurt Eisner. For Weber, sociology considers these types of charismatic domination in “an identical manner to the charisma of heroes, prophets, the greatest saviours according to common appreciation”.
38、個人崇拜
A cult of personality or personality cult arises when a country’s leader uses mass media to create a larger-than-life public image through unquestioning flattery and praise. Cults of personality are often found in dictatorships but can be found in some democracies as well.
A cult of personality is similar to general hero worship except that it is specifically built around political leaders. However, the term may be applied by analogy to refer to adulation of non-political leaders.
39、個人崇拜的目的
Generally speaking, personality cults are most common in regimes with totalitarian systems of government, that seek to radically alter or transform society according to revolutionary new ideas. Often, a single leader becomes associated with this revolutionary transformation, and he becomes treated as a benevolent “guide” for the nation, without whom the transformation to a better future cannot occur. This has generally been the justification for personality cults that arose in fascist of the 20th Century such as that of Adolf Hitler.
Not all dictatorships foster personality cults, however, and some leaders may actively seek to minimize their own public adulation. For example in Cuba public images of Fidel Castro are rare, and a personality cult around Castro is not officially encouraged, although images, posters, and billboards of Che Guevara abound. Even in the totalitarian regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia the image of Pol Pot himself was rarely seen, though in the latter’s case this was merely to perpetuate the image of a faceless, invisible, omnipresent state leadership.
40、環形曆史的概念
Most ancient cultures held a mythical conception of history and time that was not linear. They believed that history was cyclical with alternating Dark and Golden Ages. Plato called this the Great Year, and other Greeks called it an aeon or eon. In researching this topic, Giorgio de Santillana, the former professor of the history of science at MIT, and author of Hamlet’s Mill, documented over 200myths from over 30ancient cultures that generally tied the rise and fall of history to one precession of the equinox. Examples are the ancient doctrine of eternal return, which existed in Ancient Egypt, the Indian religions, or the Greek Pythagoreans’ and the Stoics’ conceptions. In The Works and Days, Hesiod described five Ages of Man: the Gold Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, the Heroic Age and the Iron Age, which began with the Dorian invasion. Other scholars suggest there were just four ages, corresponding to the four metals, and the Heroic Age was a description of the Bronze Age. A four age count would be in line with the Vedic or Hindu ages known as the Kali, Dwapara, Treta and Satya yugas. The Greeks believed that just as mankind went through four stages of character during each rise and fall of history so did government. They considered democracy and monarchy as the healthy regimes of the higher ages; and oligarchy and tyranny as corrupted regimes common to the lower ages.
41、環形曆史和線性曆史
Given that human beings are currently understood by humans to be the single earthly creatures capable of abstract thought, a perception of time, and a manipulation of thought concerning the past, the future and the present, an inquiry into the nature of history is based in part on some working understanding of time in the human experience.
History （as contemporarily understood by Western thought）, tends to follow an assumption of linear progression: “This happened, and then that happened; that happened because this happened first.” This is in part a reflection of Western thought’s foundation of cause and effect. But this linear assumption is not universally biologically inherent in the human species. There are other cultures with other assumptions about the nature of time and, as such, the philosophy of historical inquiry would be affected. If time is cyclical, then can “the past” also be “the future”? （as remarked by Santayana “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, which suggests the past will not forever remain in the past but may happen again in the future. If time is a line, we are both moving away from the past and towards the past as future, as would occur if the line were a circle）.
42、啟蒙運動的發展理想
During the Enlightenment, history began to be seen as both linear and irreversible. Condorcet’s interpretations of the various “stages of humanity” or Auguste Comte’s positivism were one of the most important formulations of such conceptions of history, which trusted social progress. As in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile （1762）treatise on education （or the “art of training men”）, the Enlightenment conceived the human species as perfectible:human nature could be infinitely developed through a well-thought pedagogy. In What is Enlightenment? （1784）, Kant defined the Enlightenment as the capacity to think by oneself, without referring to an exterior authority, be it a prince or tradition:
Enlightenment is when a person leaves behind a state of immaturity and dependence for which they themselves were responsible. Immaturity and dependence are the inability to use one’s own intellect without the direction of another. One is responsible for this immaturity and dependence, if its cause is not a lack of intelligence or education, but a lack of determination and courage to think without the direction of another.
43、康德觀點：被啟蒙的專製
In a paradoxical way, Kant supported at the same time enlightened despotism as a way of leading humanity towards its autonomy. He had conceived the process of history in his short treaty Idea For A Universal History With A Cosmopolitan Purpose （1784）. On one hand, enlightened despotism was to lead nations toward their liberation, and progress was thus inscribed in the scheme of history; on the other hand, liberation could only be acquired by a singular gesture. Thus, autonomy ultimately relied on the individual’s “determination and courage to think without the direction of another”.
44、進步不一定是積極的
Progress was not necessarily, however, positive. Arthur Gobineau’s An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races （1853-1855）was a decadent description of the evolution of the “Aryan race” which was disappearing through miscegenation. Gobineau’s works had a large popularity in the so-called scientific racism theories which developed during the New Imperialism period.
After the First World War, and even before Herbert Butterfield （1900-1979）
harshly criticized it, the Whig interpretation had gone out of style. The bloodletting of that conflict had indicted the whole notion of linear progress. Paul Valéry said:“We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.”
45、後結構主義對曆史研究的有益影響
Here, however, we can also find a stimulating and beneficial aspect of the impact of poststructuralism on historical studies. By emphasizing language, discourse, and textuality, it has successfully challenged the widespread assumption, shared by many non-Marxist historians as well as by Marxists of various kinds, that historical causation worked upwards, as it were, from economy and society through to politics and culture. Instead it has liberated historians to look at causation in a more complex and fruitful way, to take beliefs and ideologies seriously on their own terms, and to treat culture as a causative factor in history in its own right.
It has also led to a mass of exciting new work in cultural history, not least by directing historians’ attention away from the search for the progress of reason in society and towards the attempt to understand the irrational, the marginal, and the strange in the past. It has put a question-mark under the social historian’s obsession with quantities and averages and let back the individual into history, the ordinary individual, that is, the representative, or emblematic, or indeed the eccentric and the peculiar individual, not the “great man” so beloved of the mainstream political historians of the past.
46、曆史編纂的概念
Historiography studies the processes by which historical knowledge is obtained and transmitted. Broadly speaking, historiography examines the writing of history and the use of historical methods, drawing upon such elements such as authorship, sourcing, interpretation, style, bias, and audience. The word historiography can also refer to a body of historical work. As the tools of historical investigation have changed over time and space, the term itself bears multiple meanings and is not readily associated with a single all-encompassing definition.
Historiography is often broken down topically, such as “Historiography of Islam” or “Historiography of China”. There are many approaches or genres of history, such as oral history and social history. Beginning in the 19th century with the rise of academic historians a corpus of literature related to historiography has come into existence, with classic works such as E. H. Carr’s What is History? （1961）and Hayden White’s Metahistory （1974）.
47、曆史事實的獲取
Except for the special circumstance in which historians record events they themselves have witnessed, historical facts can only be known through intermediary sources. These include testimony from living witnesses; narrative records, such as previous histories, memoirs, letters, and imaginative literature; the legal and financial records of courts, legislatures, religious institutions, or businesses; and the unwritten information derived from the physical remains of past civilizations, such as architecture, arts and crafts, burial grounds, and cultivated land. All these, and many more, sources of information provide the evidence from which the historian deciphers historical facts. The relation between evidence and fact, however, is rarely simple and direct. The evidence may be biased or mistaken, fragmentary, or nearly unintelligible after long periods of cultural or linguistic change. Historians, therefore, have to assess their evidence with a critical eye.
48、曆史學家重建曆史
Many scholars have commented on the difficulty in producing secondary source narratives from the “raw data” which makes up the past. Historian/philosopher Hayden White has written extensively on the rhetorical strategies by which historians construct narratives about the past, and what sorts of assumptions about time, history, and events are embedded in the very structure of the historical narrative. In any case, the question of the exact relation between “historical facts” and the content of “written history” has been a topic of discussion among historians since at least the nineteenth century, when much of the modern profession of history came into being.
As a general rule, modern historians prefer to go back to primary sources, if available, as well as seeking new ones, because primary sources, whether accurate or not, offer new input into historical questions, and most modern history revolves around heavy use of archives for the purpose of finding useful primary sources. On the other hand, most undergraduate research projects are limited to secondary source material.
49、對曆史文本客觀性的爭議
The implications of such ideas for the study of history are radical indeed. If meaning is put into a text by the reader, then historical texts—the sources on which all historical scholarship has traditionally depended—have no meaning apart from what the historian puts into them. Thus historians do not discover anything about the past; they simply invent it. One historian’s view is therefore as good as another’s; there are no reliable criteria for assessing which of two opposing historical interpretations of, say, the French Revolution is correct. The point and purpose, and indeed the only possibility, of history as a subject is thus to study historians; about the past itself we can know nothing, since it is gone.
These arguments have proved widely influential in the growing specialist area of historical theory and historiography. They have also had a vaguer but none the less clearly discernible influence on the study of history itself. In an encyclopedia such as this one, for example, far more space is devoted to presenting and discussing changing or rival interpretations of past events than would have been the case in an encyclopedia written half a century ago, when interpretations were presented as unquestionably established facts and arguments as unassailable empirical knowledge.
50、作者與曆史客觀性
In practice, too, it has often been the case that when challenged, writers of poststructuralist texts have alleged that they are being misunderstood, misinterpreted, or misrepresented. In taking this stance they are in effect stating that authors do have some control over the way their work is read, and that the meaning of the texts they write is put there by themselves rather than by their readers; otherwise they would have no grounds for saying that some readings of their texts are correct and others are not. And if texts of this kind are only susceptible of a limited number of legitimate interpretations, then why not the texts left to us by the past as well?
51、對書寫曆史準則的挑戰
In the last quarter of the 20th century, the distinction between history and myth, objective knowledge about the past and poetic reinventions of it, historical fact and historical fiction, was challenged by a number of writers and thinkers, mainly from the disciplines of literary and linguistic studies. Taking their cue from French linguistic theories grouped generally under the label of “poststructuralism”, these writers have argued that since the human mind understood everything through the medium of language, everything could be regarded, in some sense, as a text. Nothing, indeed, could be shown to exist outside texts. Moreover, the language of which texts were composed bore no demonstrable, direct relation to the concepts of the things to which it referred; it took its meaning from the linguistic context around it. Thus, for example, chien no more suggested in itself a meat-eating, social, four-legged, barking animal than did dog or Hund—the word in question was only understood to have such a reference because it formed part of a larger system of words, a language. This system of meanings was not fixed, however. On the contrary, it was reinvented every time a text was read. Meaning in a text was thus constituted by the reader, not by the author, whose purposes and intentions in writing it were more or less irrelevant.
52、曆史編纂中的資料分類
The delineation of sources as primary and secondary first arose in the field of historiography, as historians attempted to identify and classify the sources of historical writing. In scholarly writing, an important objective of classifying sources is to determine the independence and reliability of sources. In contexts such as historical writing, it is almost always advisable to use primary sources if possible, and that “if none are available, it is only with great caution that the author may proceed to make use of secondary sources”. Many historians believe that primary sources have the most objective connection to the past, and that they “speak for themselves” in ways that cannot be captured through the filter of secondary sources.
53、曆史證據
Historians do not normally use the evidence of the past simply to shore up the ideas and interpretations they bring to it. On the contrary, the evidence is used to test these ideas and interpretations and to discard them if they do not fit, or amend them and modify them until some kind of defensible fit is achieved, by which time they have often become virtually unrecognizable. If you simply ransack the documentary record left by the past to support a political argument in the present, then what you are writing is not history, but propaganda.
54、書寫曆史的準則
Ever since history started to be written, historians have reflected on the theories and methods with which they approach the past, and the possibilities and limitations of acquiring reliable knowledge about it. From the ancient Greek historian Thucydides to historical scholars of the Enlightenment and the Romantic periods such as Edward Gibbon and Leopold von Ranke, they have maintained in different ways a fundamental distinction between history and myth, objective knowledge about the past and poetic reinventions of it, historical fact and historical fiction.
55、語言與曆史客觀性
The evidence would seem to suggest, moreover, that language did not evolve arbitrarily, but in an attempt to describe the real world; and that there are real limits to the possible interpretations that will fit the evidence of the language assembled in a given historical text. Thus, for example, if a text written by some European monarch in the 17th century states that he is not going to do something, a reading of the text that argues that it states that he is going to do it is, to say the least, highly implausible. The documents, in other words, have a kind of right of veto over what the historian can say. They impose the limits within which historical argument and interpretation have to remain if they are not to stray beyond the bounds of historical objectivity. Such limits do not exist in the worlds of poetry and fiction, where authors can write more or less what they like in order to achieve a satisfying aesthetic effect.