History for losers
Getting beaten can teach you something
I have been trying and often failing to read Reinhart Koselleck's writing for some time. However, when I can make progress with it, I often find things that I really like.
One of the points I knew he had made, but hadn't read before, relates to the the differing perspectives on history of the victors and the vanquished. Simply put, he suggests that actually it is the vanquished rather than the victors who often provide the most significant perspectives on history.
So I got a secondhand copy of The Practice of Conceptual History (which I have found hard work so far), and in one of the essays he articulates precisely this point. Here is a short excerpt.
The historian who is on the side of the victor is prone to interpret short-term successes from the perspective of a continuous, long-term teleology ex post facto. This does not apply to the vanquished. Their first primary experience is that everything happened differently from how it was planned or hoped. If they reflect methodologically at all, they face a greater burden of proof to explain why something happened in this and not the anticipated way. From this, a search for middle- or long-range reasons might be initiated to frame and perhaps explain the chance event of the unique surprise. It is thus an attractive hypothesis that precisely from the unique gains in experience imposed upon them spring insights of lasting duration and, consequently, of greater explanatory power. If history is made in the short run by the victors, historical gains in knowledge stem in the long run from the vanquished.
In the essay Koselleck refers to both political and military defeats from different historical eras. As someone who voted Remain in 2016 it did make me think about the immediate aftermath of the referendum. I think there was a lot of reflection on the losing side about what drove the defeat. For example, there was a lot of discussion of fraying political loyalties, particularly those based on class. This in turn fed into analysis of the 2019 election result, and the loss of 'Red Wall' seats.
In contrast, some of those who were on the winning side in 2016 and 2019 exhibited exactly the kind of hubris that Koselleck identified.
I think the line 'if they reflect methodologically at all' in the excerpt above matters a great deal, since we can all think of examples of where the defeated don't reflect at all. Or they look for excuses - the 2016 was lost because of Cambridge Analytica, Russian interference or hedge funds, or the 2020 US election was 'stolen', there were dodgy voting machines and so on.
Nonetheless the overall point that if something you hoped for and expected does not happen, this is likely to make you think more about why than if it does, seems very solid to me. Getting beaten can teach you something.
Looking more widely, Koselleck's field is conceptual history, which considers, for example, how important concepts such as ‘liberty’ change over time. His writing on the concept of 'progress' is very interesting. He looks at both what came before the concept of progress - rise and decline was a common viewpoint (as an aside, J B Bury's The Idea of Progress is also a great read on this topic) - and how the idea of progress itself changes.
Koselleck (in common with others) sees in the concept of progress a secularised teleology. There is a direction in which history is heading. Seen from this perspective any failures are temporary setbacks - they may even inspire a greater reaction that accelerates progress. Whether that is an accurate view is rather more open to question.