J.B. Bury's philosophy of history

Abstract

As a ground-breaking historian of Byzantium, Ancient Greece and Imperial Rome, J. B. Bury has earned almost universal respect from his colleagues. However, his reputation as a philosopher of history is not so glittering. His well-known assertion in “The Science of History", the inaugural lecture he delivered on 26th January 1903 upon being appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, that "history is a science, no less and no more", has been widely dismissed as ridiculous or naïve or a statement of the obvious. Most scholars, perhaps, have understood it to be the cri de cœeur of a dusty pedant determined to preserve the dry, impersonal prose of the antiquarian historian from the inroads of his mote progressive, literary-minded colleagues. A significant number of other scholars have understood it to be an emphatic declaration that history is a science along the lines of physics or chemistry, and that its guiding aim should be to discover laws of historical cause and effect. It is argued in this thesis that these and other common interpretations of "The Science of History” are incorrect. In the first place, it is maintained that Bury considered history to be a science in the sense that it was a discipline operating independently within the overall complex of knowledge. In the second place, it is maintained that Bury believed history to deserve such a position not so much because it can legitimately claim to tell the truth about the past, nor because of its pseudo-scientific methodology, but because the knowledge it produces is of practical value. It is further asserted that Bury derived the practical utility of historical knowledge from what he termed the "idea of human development", the idea, it is contended, that humanity is developing teleologically, in accord with its own internal principles of change. And it is argued that because, according to Bury, historians and historians alone are able to reveal the underlying nature of this teleological process, its broad outlines and final end, history deserves to be enshrined as an autonomous discipline, a science, no less and no more.