I

It has been a curiosity of theoretical discussion in American historiography in the last two decades that the characteristics of a postmodern perspective on historical scholarship have come to seem clear, while the nature of historical “modernism” remains largely unspecified.Footnote ¹ This seems the wrong way around, historically as well as etymologically, but the peculiarity also reflects a deeper uncertainty about what kind of concept “postmodernism” is.Footnote ² For authors such as Fredric Jameson and David Harvey, it is a historical concept, designating a “phase in economic, political, and cultural development” since roughly the 1960s: not “one (optional) style among many others available”, but “the cultural dominant of the logic of late capitalism”.Footnote ³ This kind of postmodernism literally comes after the modern and differs from it in specified respects, even while both the modern and the postmodern exhibit a good degree of internal heterogeneity.Footnote ⁴ This historical development may or may not be a good thing (on balance, Jameson and Harvey think not), but in the first instance moral judgement is beside the point. Postmodernism is simply what is happening to us, and we would do better to attempt to understand what is going on rather than complain about it—or, worse, engage in “complacent (yet delirious) camp-following celebration”.Footnote ⁵

In the literature of historiography, however, the term has come to describe a philosophical position rather than a historical predicament. The publication in 1989 of Frank Ankersmit's “Historiography and Postmodernism” and Gabrielle Spiegel's “History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages”, in History and Theory and Speculum respectively, represented a moment of crystallization in this understanding of the postmodern. Ankersmit and Spiegel were at odds in their normative assessments, with Ankersmit advocating “the postmodernist view” while Spiegel defended a fairly conventional historical contextualism, but both took “postmodernism” to describe a stance of epistemological scepticism with respect to knowledge of the past, and especially towards the possibility of the representation of historical reality in language.Footnote ⁶ (Indeed, it was because both Ankersmit and Spiegel understood postmodernism in such abstract and theoretical terms that the question of its desirability was central to both discussions.) “Postmodernism” in this sense was part of a “linguistic turn” in the humanities, which after the 1960s shifted scholarly attention away from questions of explanation and causality, towards questions about narrative and verbal representation.Footnote ⁷ Both postmodernism and the linguistic turn emphasized what humanity made of its world, and thereby displaced questions about how the world might be in itself.

The philosopher Louis O. Mink was a major contributor to this shift in the theory of historiography, as Richard Vann has shown.Footnote ⁸ Mink's sudden death in January 1983 antedated any explicit discussion of postmodernism in historical studies, but he survived to perceive most of the trends which would subsequently be gathered under that rubric. In 1979, Mink (a shrewd observer of academic fashion) noted a shift of attention in the philosophy of history, “from logical and conceptual problems associated with the explanation of events to logical and conceptual problems associated with the understanding of narrative syntheses”.Footnote ⁹ He emphasized three features of this shift: an increased attentiveness to historical thinking itself at the expense of direct consideration of the objects of that thought (i.e. past events); a greater emphasis on the linguistic form of histories, at the expense of their content; and a tendency towards “relativism” as a perspective on historiography.Footnote ¹⁰ Each of these has featured in subsequent characterizations of postmodernism in historical studies.Footnote ¹¹ The shift Mink discerned, moreover, aptly described his own intellectual trajectory from the late 1960s to the time of his writing.

This essay reconstructs Mink's philosophical development in the context of wider movements and controversies in the American academic humanities between the Second World War and the early 1980s. Such a contextualization deepens the convincing textual interpretations of Mink's philosophical views developed by his former Wesleyan University colleagues Brian Fay, Eugene Golob and Richard Vann.Footnote ¹² It also sheds new light on postwar academic culture in the United States more generally, and especially on the American background to “postmodernism” as an epistemological attitude towards historiography. This epistemological attitude has been widely understood to derive from postwar Continental European thought, especially the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, the key conduit being the rise of “theory” in American literature departments during the 1970s.Footnote ¹³ Mink's case does not conform to this narrative; instead, it draws attention to a set of neglected contexts for the reception of “French theory” by other scholars.Footnote ¹⁴

Although he was interested in an earlier tradition of Continental European philosophy, and taught courses on Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Sartre, Mink himself had little patience with what he called the “Saussure–Freud–Marx ragout” which became fashionable in the last years of his career.Footnote ¹⁵ There is no evidence that Mink ever read Foucault or Derrida closely—though he would have heard of them through his close friend Hayden White—and neither their names nor their views appear in his work. Nor (in his avocational capacity as a scholar of Finnegans Wake) was Mink sympathetic with the shift towards theory he sensed among younger literary scholars by the early 1980s: he sighed after one conference that “I went to one ‘workshop’: ‘Joyce and Bakhtin,’ ‘Joyce and Benjamin,’ ‘Joyce and Lukacs.’ Point seemed to be that Joyce had nothing to do with any of these but they're more interesting than Joyce”.Footnote ¹⁶ Mink's own loyalties lay with the older kind of criticism which “begins with the text and brings everything possible to bear on expanding the understanding of that text”.Footnote ¹⁷

In substance, as well as in its influences, this sensibility was modernist rather than postmodernist.Footnote ¹⁸ Like the literary modernists, Mink did not think that the world presented itself to experience ready-interpreted: understanding was something that was achieved by human beings rather than found in nature itself. He put this unequivocally in comparing Finnegans Wake to a natural phenomenon: “Nature has no theories about itself . . . It is we, not Nature itself, who sort out the important from the unimportant, the normal from the anomalous, the necessary from the contingent, that which supports human aspirations and gratifications from that which threatens them.”Footnote ¹⁹ But Mink did think understanding was something to be striven for: the post-structuralist repudiation of interpretation itself in favour of endless, depthless “play” cut against everything for which Mink stood.Footnote ²⁰ The importance of understanding concerned more than academic literary criticism. Indeed, it was an existential imperative: the alternative was life as “some nightmare quiz show where nothing relates ‘fact’ to ‘fact’ except the fragmented identities of the participants and the mounting total of the score”.Footnote ²¹

The characteristically postmodern gesture has been to deny that this is a nightmare, the post-structuralist case against interpretation being just one version of that denial. Postmodern culture, Harvey and Jameson argue, is characterized by a euphoric embrace of fragmentation and cognitive incoherence, plurality and transience; Ankersmit contends that within “the postmodernist view of history, the goal is no longer integration, synthesis, and totality”—“historical scraps” instead become the centre of attention.Footnote ²² There is none of this anarchistic delight in Mink, for whom the defence of historical understanding was embedded in a traditional view that the study of humanity should contribute to “a philosophy of life which leads to intelligent action”.Footnote ²³ However, Mink was too early to be anti-postmodern: the principal threat he perceived to humanistic scholarship during his career was not epistemological scepticism but the imperialistic ambitions of the advocates of “scientific method” in the humanities. A strong (perhaps exaggerated) sense of this danger shaped Mink's graduate education at Yale, and informed his lifetime preoccupation with the distinctive character of historical understanding. This provided the background for Mink's eventual view that “the difference between narrative history and fiction lies not in the kinds of intelligibility and understanding which they respectively afford, but in the nature and kinds of evidence for the truth of their statements”.Footnote ²⁴ This became an influential proposition in the course of the 1980s, notably through Hayden White, whose thought was deeply informed by Mink's work.Footnote ²⁵ To see the mutual coherence between Mink's critical historical epistemology, his commitment to humanistic understanding and his cultural identity is therefore to see something which has hitherto been missed about the modernist roots of “postmodernism” in the American humanities.

II

Louis Mink's interest in the philosophy of inquiry was born of a culture in which the nature and direction of scholarship were increasingly shaped by the demands of a professionalizing academy. In the postwar decades the prestige of the natural sciences led these demands frequently to take the form of an exhortation to “scientific” rigour and objectivity. Nowhere was this clearer than in philosophy, the discipline in which Mink was trained as a Yale graduate student between 1946 and 1952.Footnote ²⁶ By the late 1940s the dominant self-image of philosophy was theoretical rather than practical, and scientific rather than historical: for the next half-century American philosophy would be characterized by the “analytical” emphasis on “relatively small-scale problems . . . amenable to careful dissection and in regard to which the distinction between good and bad arguments can be readily made”.Footnote ²⁷

The central task of philosophy, according to the analytical view, was the clarification of concepts deployed in other areas of human existence, most prominently in the natural sciences.Footnote ²⁸ The most conspicuous version of this approach in the immediate postwar years was logical positivism, which had its roots in Vienna and Berlin between the wars, and was carried to the United States by a series of eminent philosophical émigrés in the course of the 1930s.Footnote ²⁹ Logical positivism was characterized by an insistence that there existed only two kinds of meaningful statement: those which expressed the necessary relations between concepts, and those which were empirically verifiable. It followed from this that many of the traditional concerns of philosophy—especially in “metaphysics”—involved claims which, because neither true by definition nor experimentally testable, were literally meaningless; the appropriate task for philosophy was the clarification of scientific language, no more and no less.Footnote ³⁰

If it was the most conspicuous strand, however, logical positivism was neither the only nor the dominant strand in postwar American philosophy.Footnote ³¹ Rather, the influence of logical positivism combined with that of two British approaches—the anti-idealist philosophical analysis of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore at the University of Cambridge, and ordinary-language philosophy influenced by the later Wittgenstein—to shape the terms in which the nature of philosophy was discussed in the postwar decades.Footnote ³² Nonetheless, philosophy was increasingly conceived in closer relation to natural science and mathematics than to literature, art or religion, while “logical subtlety and acuteness” were prioritized as philosophical virtues over more traditional ethical and cultural qualities.Footnote ³³ The Yale Department of Philosophy, however, was marked by hostility to these currents. During Mink's years there, differences in descent and doctrine within analytical philosophy were little noted in New Haven, where most philosophers saw positivism, empiricism and professionalism in philosophy as a single scientistic syndrome to which they opposed their own defence of “humanism” and “metaphysics”.Footnote ³⁴ The influence of this outlook on Mink was deep and lasting, and a sense that the philosophy of history was a crucial battlefield in a wider struggle between scientific and humanistic cultures pervaded his subsequent work.Footnote ³⁵

Mink began graduate school immediately following four years of military service in the Pacific, and he later recalled that Yale in 1946 was “the first university I had ever seen”.Footnote ³⁶ Born in Ada, Ohio in 1921, Mink had received his bachelor's degree in 1942 from Hiram College, across the state in what had been the Connecticut Western Reserve. Hiram College was a small, coeducational liberal arts college, where Mink found “intellectual horizons in every direction”. The college had been founded in 1850 by the Disciples of Christ, a consciously inclusive and anti-sectarian Protestant church; Mink's father, an ordained minister of the Disciples, was an alumnus.Footnote ³⁷ As a young man, Mink fils considered it “the most important single factor of my early home life” that he had been born “a child of the manse”, but the influence of Christianity on his subsequent life and thought is obscure.Footnote ³⁸ Hayden White remembers Mink as a Christian, but both Brian Fay and Richard Vann recall that his religious involvement had more or less lapsed by the time they knew him in the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote ³⁹ Mink's formal philosophy shows little direct religious influence, and at a number of points he pointed to a theological escape from a philosophical perplexity, only to decline the option.Footnote ⁴⁰

Nonetheless, Mink seems to have found a religious setting congenial to his intellectual interests. He was involved with the National Council for Religion in Higher Education and its successors from his election to a fellowship in 1947 until his death, and found support there for his own “concern for higher education as personal and life-enhancing rather than merely professional or technical.”Footnote ⁴¹ Moreover, Mink later described the two decades following the war as a “Golden Age” for philosophy at Yale.Footnote ⁴² These were decades in which Yale philosophy retained unusually close relations with theology, and Mink's assessment sharply contradicts that of Bruce Kuklick, in whose view these decades witnessed Yale's increasing irrelevance to the history of American philosophy.Footnote ⁴³ More generally, Mink's admiration for postwar Yale indicated his firm sympathy with the anti-analytical view that philosophy was better understood as a dimension of self-realization than as a specialized academic discipline.Footnote ⁴⁴ Mink saw the drive to identify an independent area of philosophical “research” in logical and linguistic analysis as part of a “theory of departmental sovereignty” long resisted in New Haven: in the early twentieth century, then Philosophy chair George Trumbull Ladd had attacked even the undergraduate elective system as promoting the fragmentation of learning and the marginalization of philosophy, to the detriment of the university's civilizing purpose.Footnote ⁴⁵

Kuklick has suggested that Yale philosophers after the Second World War expected philosophy to yield a “handbook for living”, but this is potentially misleading, for the ethical obligations implied remained specifically intellectual.Footnote ⁴⁶ Philosophy was not intended to issue in direct moral instruction, but to cultivate intellectual integrity as one essential dimension of personal authenticity.Footnote ⁴⁷ Such integrity meant something more than good faith: it indicated rather the ability to see the diverse fields of human understanding as a totality, “to look into the concepts and assumptions of the sciences and to put the results of their inquiries together into one intelligible whole”.Footnote ⁴⁸ This, at least, was the view of Brand Blanshard, probably the most important personal influence on Mink at Yale.Footnote ⁴⁹ In Blanshard's view, both undisciplined eclecticism in the undergraduate curriculum and the professionalization of academic disciplines put such integration in jeopardy, and it was the role of philosophy to avert the twin dangers of “universal superficiality” and disciplinary tunnel vision.Footnote ⁵⁰ The aversion of these dangers was an ethical project. However, the “common standards and principles” that philosophy might supply amounted only to “some intellectual idiom that will make discussion, understanding, and a measure of common judgment possible among educated men”. So understood, philosophy was more language than handbook: it made shared deliberation—and so consensus—possible, but did not itself dictate the outcomes of discussion.Footnote ⁵¹

It was from this perspective that Mink saw history as of central philosophical and cultural importance: historical understanding was uniquely able to render the unfamiliar intelligible without reducing it to the familiar, and thereby foster cognitive wholeness while respecting diversity. It was therefore a paradigm for the appropriate understanding of the human world in general. In “The Autonomy of Historical Understanding” of 1966, Mink suggested that “the nerve of the issue between the philosophical proponents of the proto-science view and its philosophical critics . . . is essentially identical with the issue over behavioral psychology and sociology: can an instance of intentional action be analyzed without remainder into an instance of operationally describable behavior?”Footnote ⁵² The effort to make sense of an autonomous “historical” understanding was, for Mink, animated by the conviction that history aimed at understanding the human world in a distinctively human way—that is to say, in terms of meaningfulness as well as factuality.Footnote ⁵³ Mink's examples of the configurational comprehension which marked historical thinking all involved intersubjective human understanding, for which the explanandum was itself a product of human intelligence.Footnote ⁵⁴ If such understanding was not distinguished from scientific explanation, no qualitative theoretical distinction could be made between the doings and sufferings of human beings and the movements of particles in a cloud chamber.Footnote ⁵⁵

A science of history, limited to the uncontroversially verifiable, would no longer have anything to say to those “matters of feeling, imagination, sensibility and judgment” which Mink saw as the ultimate referent of humanistic inquiry.Footnote ⁵⁶ In assuming that the position of the disinterested observer was the only responsible epistemic standpoint, positivists eliminated the possibility of understanding human actions “from the inside” (to use a metaphor favoured by R. G. Collingwood, one of Mink's most important philosophical influences); with the same stroke they ruled out the possibility that historical understanding could offer anything but instrumental guidance for the practical problems of human existence. For Mink, the whole purpose of humanistic scholarship was to benefit education, understood as the cultivation of a noninstrumental ethos or character.Footnote ⁵⁷ A thoroughly empiricist historiography could tell you under what conditions a people would exterminate a portion of its population in gas chambers; it could also tell you how to do such a thing. But it remained silent on whether one should do it, and it could never tell you what such a people thought it was doing. Consequently, it could neither inform ethical action nor broaden mutual understanding inter homines. Mink compared historical judgement to the “practical wisdom” of Aristotelian phronesis: historical thinking not only enriched the understanding of its object (the world of meaningful human experience), but also constituted one of the most sophisticated experiences and models of the kind of thinking needed in a responsible human life.Footnote ⁵⁸ This conviction drove Mink's commitment to the philosophical defence of such nonnaturalistic understanding: a “science” of history, though not in itself objectionable, threatened to deny the validity of one of the most important ways in which human beings learned to understand each other and themselves.

The issue was pressing in the early years of Mink's philosophical career as a result of the impact of Carl Hempel's article “The Function of General Laws in History”, published in the Journal of Philosophy in 1942. Hempel argued that all credible explanations were of the same syllogistic form, consisting of a statement of initial conditions and a statement of a universal hypothetical (or “covering law”) which together logically implied a statement of the event to be explained. By making the logical structure of explanation explicit, Hempel intended to facilitate empirical criticism of bad explanations: for its proponents, it was a key strength of the covering-law model that both the statement of initial conditions and the alleged universality of the implied hypothetical had clear falsification criteria.Footnote ⁵⁹ However, his wider polemical purpose was to assert the “methodological unity of empirical science” against long-standing claims that history (and the other human sciences) were cognitively different in kind from natural science. In Hempel's view, such claims amounted to little more than mystifying attempts to dress up “pseudo-explanation” as genuine knowledge: his essay exemplified the positivist drive to submit scientific procedure to logical analysis and identify the boundary between science and “metaphysics” with the limit of legitimate knowledge.Footnote ⁶⁰ As such, it exhibited a characteristic impatience with the murky logical texture of the humanities and with the idea that knowledge existed which could not be reduced to a formal schema or submitted to uncontroversial empirical test. This attitude made intellectually disreputable all that Mink found most attractive and important in the historical consciousness.Footnote ⁶¹

If the proto-scientific view of history was to be challenged, however, some alternative to the Hempelian analysis of historical thinking was required. Mink's efforts to develop such an alternative, beginning with a short excursus in his 1952 doctoral thesis, exhibited a number of distinctive features. One of the most prominent was his close attention to the practice of historical scholarship.Footnote ⁶² Another was his consistent emphasis on the nature of historical thinking rather than the nature of historical reality. Like the English idealists Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott, Mink believed that historical consciousness should be understood primarily as a distinctive way of thinking, rather than as knowledge of particular kinds of object. Mink's conviction that such consciousness could be effectively defended only in this way was well established by 1966, and was crucial to his subsequent ability to relinquish the representational claims of historical narratives.Footnote ⁶³

In the background of this attitude was an epistemological view which emphasized the active role of thought in the acquisition of all knowledge: Mink's defence of historical understanding had its place in his distinctive, quasi-idealist reconciliation of the unity and diversity of knowledge. Mink noted in “Modes of Comprehension and the Unity of Knowledge” (1960) that every attempt to construct a general theory of knowledge—the logical positivists being only the most recent—had “taken as a model of knowledge some area of positive science and extended its procedures, presuppositions, and purposes to a definition of knowledge as such”. In order to avoid this fallacy, Mink proposed that it be recognized that a method of inquiry “inescapably prescribes its own subject matter and rejects as irrelevant and unreal whatever cannot be brought under its hegemony”. The upshot of this was that “the separate sovereignties on the map of knowledge must be distinguished not by methods nor by subject matters but by unique and irreducible modes of comprehending the world as a totality”.Footnote ⁶⁴

By “comprehension” Mink meant the ability simultaneously to hold in mind a number of experiences which could be directly encountered only in sequence. This notion had two characteristics which would be important for Mink's philosophy of history. The first was the existence of several modes of comprehension; this justified several methods of inquiry which excluded but did not deny one other.Footnote ⁶⁵ While it was characteristic of the natural sciences to grasp their diverse objects as instances of laws, and of philosophy to comprehend its world in terms of categoreal membership, the objects of historical understanding were held together as “elements in a single complex of concrete relationships”—neither as instances of general truths nor as members of abstract categories, but as parts of particular concrete wholes. Mink called these three modes of comprehension “theoretical”, “categoreal” and “configurational” respectively. This pluralistic theory of knowledge enabled Mink to explain both the urge to unify science (because each mode excluded other modes) and the misguidedness of such an attempt (because no mode could be reduced to any other). Second, comprehension could not be taken to represent or correspond to anything in the extra-mental world; it was essentially an act of the human mind—and an act at once creative and cognitive.Footnote ⁶⁶

It was precisely this dual character of historical understanding, cultivated and expressed in historical narratives, which ensured that the cognitive content of histories went beyond any extent to which they represented past actuality. However, Mink's first systematic attempt to apply his general theory of comprehension to the specific case of historical thought, published as “The Autonomy of Historical Understanding” in History and Theory in 1966, left that epistemological issue firmly in the background. His principal aim was rather to redirect the debate over the logical character of historical explanation which had been provoked by Hempel's 1942 advancement of the “covering-law model”. As Mink noted, this model provided an “admirably clear conceptual map”, which identified a single logical form for understanding, explanation and prediction.Footnote ⁶⁷ Nonetheless, it had by the mid-1960s met with stiff opposition, almost always directed at the formal identification of explanation and prediction. This identification caused historians and their philosophical allies a great deal of distress, for it implied that the ability to explain the past was the same in kind as the ability to predict the future—which either committed historians to too much, or credited them with too little.Footnote ⁶⁸ Further, that identification implied that human actions could be retrospectively explained only insofar as they could have been predicted in advance.Footnote ⁶⁹ This implication raised the spectre of historical determinism.Footnote ⁷⁰

By the mid-1960s, however, this way of framing the issue had become so stale that, as Mink put it a little later, “the rules and tactics of the debate have become as stylized as court tennis”.Footnote ⁷¹ In private, he described the covering-law debate as, by 1966, “ground which has already been ploughed, harrowed, disked, raked, and I think exhausted”.Footnote ⁷² This sterility followed in part from a lack of consensus on what “explanation” was, and in part from different views about the purpose of a theory of explanation. These were not separate issues: for the covering-law theorists, to explain why something happened was to explain why it did not not happen, and the theory of explanation was intended to sort genuine from “pseudo” explanations according to this criterion. For their opponents, though, an explanation was successful if it satisfied less demanding criteria—typically by removing a source of puzzlement—and the purpose of a theory of explanation was to describe in general terms how the trick was done by actually existing explanations. So the argument would run around the following circle: the covering-law model would be proposed, an apparently satisfactory explanation which did not fit that model would be produced and analysed, and the covering-law theorist would respond by denying that what had been analysed was a real explanation at all—just because it could not have been cashed out as a prediction.Footnote ⁷³

It is not surprising that Mink found this circle tedious; indeed, it is remarkable that others took so long to perceive the crossed purposes. Underlying the controversy between the covering-law theorists of historical explanation and their opponents, Mink perceived a deeper conflict between cognitive monism—the covering-law theorists’ “unity of science”—and cognitive pluralism.Footnote ⁷⁴ Thus “[o]ne may accept the thesis that there is no fact incapable of being scientifically explained, and yet hold without inconsistency that there are other ways of understanding the same facts”.Footnote ⁷⁵ It was this neglected position that Mink himself wished to defend. He began by questioning the assumption, widely shared by both proponents and critics of the covering-law model, that “understanding” and “explanation” were equivalent concepts. In his 1952 doctoral thesis, Mink had himself made this assumption, and sought to defend cognitive pluralism by arguing for the recognition of several “different modes of explanation”, with the characteristically historical mode involving the location of an event in “a sequential context which consists of the narration of events”.Footnote ⁷⁶ By 1966, however, Mink had come to the view that “explanation” was an inextricably positivist concept, and that historical thinking could be defended only by abandoning “explanation” to the methodological monists.Footnote ⁷⁷

This conclusion informed Mink's seminal essay “The Autonomy of Historical Understanding”, first published in History and Theory in 1966. This essay was the culmination of fifteen years of reflection, and the single most systematic exposition of Mink's philosophy of historical inquiry; it therefore demands extended consideration. The argument unfolded in a quasi-Socratic manner, beginning with a received view—“that history is not yet a science but by the explicit adoption of scientific methods and criteria may become one”—and then challenging it with various objections and counterexamples. To this end, a series of distinctive features of historical scholarship were brought up for examination in turn. The first of these was indeed the apparent asymmetry between explanation and prediction in historical scholarship. Repeating a suggestion he had made in his doctoral thesis, Mink identified the notion of “historical perspective” with “a claim that for the historical understanding of an event one must know its consequences as well as its antecedents”. By 1966, this argument had been made in great detail by Arthur Danto, but in Mink's case it had an independent origin in direct observation of historical argument.Footnote ⁷⁸ Mink further noted that in history, unlike the natural sciences, particular counterexamples were not taken to falsify general hypotheses as applied to other cases.Footnote ⁷⁹ This latter attitude was simply bizarre in the proto-science view: according to the Humean analysis on which that approach relied, a general law just was a statement of observed constant conjunction between events, so the validity of such a law entirely depended upon the absence of disconfirming instances. Mink accordingly suggested that the function of hypotheses in historical inquiry was different from their function in the sciences, natural or social: a historical hypothesis was not a potential law at all, but “a rule for asking questions, a rule for delimiting the scope of inquiry, a rule for determining the relevance of evidence”. Once a passage of historical inquiry was complete, the hypotheses with which it began were neither confirmed nor disconfirmed, but simply left behind. The role of historical hypotheses was therefore strictly “informal”, and any characterization of their function in abstract methodological terms would necessarily miss their point.Footnote ⁸⁰

Mink next turned to the role of empathetic identification in historical inquiry. Earlier defenders of the qualitative difference between history and natural science such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Benedetto Croce and Collingwood had often claimed that historians, unlike natural scientists, understood events from the “inside” by imagining themselves in the place of historical actors. According to this account, the distinctive act of historical understanding involved the historian's reliving of past experiences in his or her own mind.Footnote ⁸¹ This claim seemed uncomfortably metaphysical in the postwar intellectual climate, and even a sympathetic philosopher such as William Dray expressed unease with the “air of mystery” which surrounded it. Those of more positivistic temperament balked at the apparent implication that historians had access to “an additional power of knowing which allows them to ‘penetrate into’ the minds of the subjects of their study and take, as it were, psychological X-ray photographs.” From this perspective, such sympathetic projection could at best provide untested hypotheses, whose eventual credibility would rest exclusively on “empirically well confirmed assumptions concerning initial conditions and general laws”.Footnote ⁸²

Mink's view was that this analysis of re-enactment as merely a “heuristic device” rested on a petitio principii. The analysis assumed that imaginative insight must be intended to “substitute for scientific method in the discovery of laws” or “establish particular facts for which there is no independent evidence”. This relied on the further assumption that to understand an event was to see it as an instance of a law. But because this was precisely the point at issue, the positivist critique necessarily misunderstood the character of the understanding at which historical “empathy” aimed.Footnote ⁸³ This understanding, Mink now conceded, was not a kind of explanation at all, but was rather concerned with the integration of historical events into wider contexts which were themselves simply “complex events”. The logical relationship with which such understanding was concerned was not between cause and effect, but between part and whole. Drawing (tacitly) on the account of configurational comprehension he had offered in 1960, Mink insisted that the historian's distinctive task was not social explanation, but rather the achievement and communication of a holistic vision in which an aggregate of unrelated facts could be grasped as a total human situation.Footnote ⁸⁴ “Empathy” was simply a name for the historical imagination by which this grasp was achieved.Footnote ⁸⁵

Nonetheless, Mink conceded that it was a potentially misleading term, and preferred to call this mental act of seeing-things-together “synoptic judgment”. He insisted that such judgement constituted a single mental act, “immediate and total”, which could be reduced to neither a method nor a technique.Footnote ⁸⁶ Furthermore, having to do with the integration of particulars rather than the knowledge of facts, such judgement was exhibited in its entirety in the historian's text: a historical narrative itself included all the information required to judge its success in making sense of the events it related. This accounted for the potentially universal audience historians assumed for their work:

Historical understanding thus had an essentially public character which distinguished it from the theoretical explanations of natural science, as well as a potential sophistication which distinguished it from mere common sense. It was on the basis of synoptic understanding that history could “stand apart . . . from the lure of the abstract and the tyranny of the particular, from both the computer and the data-retrieval system”. In Aristotelian fashion, such understanding was both the product and the means of education as the cultivation of judgement; this gave history a public role that the positive sciences could never perform.Footnote ⁸⁸

The public that Mink had in mind consisted largely of undergraduate students who passed through the university before moving on to other walks of professional life. It was in the interaction between teacher and student that the relationship between the academy and wider culture took most concrete form, and much of Mink's philosophical thinking grew out of reflection in and about this context.Footnote ⁸⁹ Indeed, as a young academic Mink was “averse to writing for publication, and regarded the point of scholarship, as far as I was concerned, to be improving the quality and maintaining the vitality of teaching”.Footnote ⁹⁰ Mink spent almost his entire teaching career at Wesleyan University, in the small city and college town of Middletown, Connecticut; he was appointed to teach “humanities” in 1952 and remained at Wesleyan until his death more than thirty years later.Footnote ⁹¹ In the postwar decades, Wesleyan developed “from a small liberal arts college for men into a little university with a diversified student body”—to that extent it reflected wider changes in American higher education—but remained into the 1970s a “settled institution of ivy heritage and New England tradition . . . progressive as well as stable, of first-rank academic quality as well as of solid virtue”.Footnote ⁹²

Mink found this environment congenial; he quickly became “one of the mainstays of Wesleyan's reputation for teaching”, and on his death he would be mourned by colleagues and students as the “soul” of the university.Footnote ⁹³ The integration of intellectual excellence and moral consciousness appealed to Mink, and cohered with his view that teachers and students required “encouragement, opportunities, and support for intellectual and pedagogical forays beyond [their disciplinary] base, for seeing the relations of their discipline to others, and of all to the real world which they are ultimately about”.Footnote ⁹⁴ Brand Blanshard at Yale had also feared that academic professionalization would replace the “intellectual, organic, and inward” unity of culture with merely “the closer juxtaposition of hard, round pellets”, and Mink's curricular interventions as well as his philosophical writings were intended to stave off the contraction of the disciplines of inquiry into “professional islands”.Footnote ⁹⁵ He was centrally involved in the creation of the College of Social Studies and the Freshman Integrated Program, in 1959 and 1960 respectively, each of which aimed to offer undergraduates a holistic educational vision through coordinated interdisciplinary teaching.Footnote ⁹⁶ Mink's view was that philosophy was of more value in its practice than in its conclusions, and that accordingly he “should prefer to teach rather students of the sciences and other humanities than students of philosophy”. Accordingly, many of Mink's courses did not form part of any one disciplinary strand; they instead sought to cultivate, through philosophical reflection, students’ ability to “make sense of a considerable body of knowledge” as a whole.Footnote ⁹⁷ Mink's own views in the philosophy of inquiry developed in relation to these efforts to help students grasp the nature and value of their own increasingly specialized studies.

This was a traditional conception of the purpose of higher education and learning, and a view perhaps too demanding of university teaching resources to be practically compatible with the provision of such education to any but a small proportion of young people. But it would be wrong to assume that Mink was by personal conviction either a reactionary or an elitist. While (writing in 1976) he lamented the diminution of what he called scholarly “fellowship” which had followed from the expansion of higher education in the postwar decades, Mink never betrayed any sense that he equated this loss of imaginative coidentification with a decline in “standards” or the entry of inappropriate social “types” into the university.Footnote ⁹⁸ In the same informal essay in which he lamented the loss of academic Gemeinschaft, Mink himself expressed the worry that to value goods which “cannot be extended beyond a group in which face-to-face relationships are extensive and overlapping” might foster elitism and unfairness.Footnote ⁹⁹ But he insisted that this need not be the case: old-boy networks (which he had encountered at Yale) were “justly criticized”, but neither fellowship nor knowledge was a “nonshareable value”, and Mink declared that “[m]y own hope would be that everyone could belong to some fellowship which embodies his interests and is appropriate to his possibilities of growth”.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Although “possibilities of growth” here might (ungenerously) be read as “social station”, there is no good reason not to take Mink at his egalitarian word on this point, and similarly no reason to believe that Mink's wider defence of traditional educational values implied any defence of traditional social hierarchy. Mink's concrete political commitments remain somewhat obscure, but it is at least worthy of remark that he first became close to Hayden White through their joint involvement in antiwar activity in the late 1960s.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Nor was Mink hostile to the student activism of these decades, which he thought might provide greater experience of “moral passion and rational deliberation” than “assigned readings and classroom discussions” ever could.Footnote ¹⁰² Though his reflections sometimes led him to traditional conclusions, Mink's thought was animated by something other than simple conservatism.

III

“The Autonomy of Historical Understanding” was widely admired in the years following its publication: it was anthologized in William Dray's collection Philosophical Analysis and History, cited approvingly in Geoffrey Elton's The Practice of History, and praised by Mink's colleague Eugene Golob as “by far the most penetrating and effective explication of the autonomy of history”.Footnote ¹⁰³ The essay offered a solution to the problem it addressed, namely the character of distinctively historical thought, and although it also raised a number of unresolved issues about the justification of competing syntheses, it was not until after 1970 that Mink would feel any cognitive pressure to address the questions about history-as-knowledge suggested by his defence of history-as-understanding.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ His immediate project, rather, was a detailed study of the philosophy of Collingwood. Although the latter is best known for The Idea of History, Mink devoted principal attention to Collingwood's developing philosophy of mind as the matrix for his views on other subjects, including both history (“the grammar of action”) and art (“the rhetoric of civilization”).Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Collingwood exemplified, for Mink, the “enterprise of applying philosophy to the human vocations of art, religion, science, history, and philosophy itself”. Mink thereby enlisted him in his own lifetime struggle against professionalized scientific naturalism in philosophy—a tendency which neglected aesthetics and historical understanding indiscriminately.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The depth of Mink's intellectual sympathy for Collingwood was such that it is not easy to assess the causal influence of the latter upon the former. Both men shared a commitment to both history and philosophy as essentially humanistic disciplines, and considered the philosophy of history the field in which this humanistic character must be defended.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Both saw the imperialism of the methods of natural science as the principal threat to a humanistic culture, and both sought to argue that historical understanding was both autonomous and the appropriate cognitive approach to the human world.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Influence cannot be ruled out in any of these cases, for Mink read The Idea of History and other works of Collingwood's as a graduate student. However, such Collingwoodian ideas were so deeply interwoven with Mink's own, even before the sustained engagement which produced Mind, History, and Dialectic in 1969, that any full attempt to isolate the elements of Mink's thought owing to the English philosopher would be futile.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Nonetheless, a brief consideration of one point of difference between Mink and Collingwood is revealing. This is the absence of a metaphysical account of “re-enactment” both in Mink and in Mink's account of Collingwood. In The Idea of History, Collingwood argued that historical thinking involved the literal rethinking of “what mind has done in the past”; Collingwood conceived historical knowledge as knowledge of past thought, but conceived thought as standing sufficiently outside time and space to be capable of transhistorical identity.Footnote ¹¹⁰ As Collingwood himself presented it, this conception relied upon a metaphysically idealist thesis about the full abstractabilty of intellectual “experience” from any material context.Footnote ¹¹¹ But when Mink came to gloss the idea of re-enactment, his approach focused not on the ontological identity of past and present experiences, but rather on “re-enactment” as a quasi-technical term for the description of human action as distinguished from mere behaviour. On Mink's reading,

Although this interpretation arguably retained Collingwood's point, it dramatically reduced the ontological commitments involved. In focusing on human epistemic practice rather than attempting to offer an account of reality, this modification was characteristic of the way in which Mink attempted to keep his philosophical speculation relatively close to the ground of common sense.

Even while working on Collingwood, Mink continued to publish a steady flow of original reviews and essays in historical theory.Footnote ¹¹³ One reason for this continued engagement was his involvement with the journal History and Theory, which he had been instrumental in bringing to Wesleyan, and of which he was associate editor from 1965 until his death.Footnote ¹¹⁴History and Theory was a major commitment, because the four editors assessed most submissions to the journal without resort to external referees; further, each rejected article was returned with a detailed and (at least in intention) constructive critique.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Mink wrote dozens of letters of this kind as associate editor, and there was therefore no question of his losing touch with the state of play in the philosophy of history. More significantly, and indeed to Mink's surprise, that ongoing conversation continued to stimulate fresh thinking on his own part.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Particularly important here was a developing interest among other philosophers in the relation between historical thought and storytelling. This, and his work on Collingwood, led Mink's historical thought to cluster around two new sets of questions by the end of the 1960s. The first had to do with the consequences of conceptual change for historical thinking, and the second with the cognitive properties of narrative form. Together, these questions would lead Mink to a much more explicitly epistemologically sceptical position with respect to historical knowledge than he had previously articulated.

The first indication of both trains of thought came in a 1968 review essay for the Review of Metaphysics.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In his discussion of recent books in the philosophy of history by Morton White, W. B. Gallie and Arthur Danto, Mink for the first time identified a “narrative model” as an alternative account of historical explanation. As Mink described it, this model had much in common with his own earlier concept of sequential explanation; in particular, it insisted “that a story may be a complete and adequate explanation of an event belonging to that story”.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Though only Gallie put quite that case, all three of the books under review made narrative a central concept in their analysis of historiography, and chronology as well as textual evidence suggests that it was reading Danto and Gallie, especially, which turned Mink's own thoughts to the cognitive properties of stories.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Still, at this point there were only glimpses of the distinctive account of narrative comprehension that Mink would develop; much more prominent was his attention to the implications of conceptual change for historical understanding.Footnote ¹²⁰

The immediate stimulus for this was Danto's notion of a “narrative sentence”. Danto argued that the characteristically historical concern was not with events as they might have been witnessed, but rather with the significance of past events as it became clear in the light of subsequent developments.Footnote ¹²¹ A narrative exhibited this significance by exploiting the linguistic possibility of redescription: as time passed, past events acquired more and more connections with events which had previously been future, and thus new descriptions of those events became possible.Footnote ¹²² These essentially retrospective descriptions, or “narrative sentences”, were characteristic of both storytelling and historical thinking. Thus historical understanding was conditioned not only by the historicity of its objects but also by its own position in time.Footnote ¹²³ Mink accepted all this without modification. However, Danto argued as if the relations between historical events were timeless and objective in nature: Danto's past was a kind of endlessly extending Euclidean space.Footnote ¹²⁴ This view treated the historical past as a fully determinate object, to which human meanings and values were irrelevant.

In Mink's view, however, historical understanding essentially concerned the self-conceptions of human beings.Footnote ¹²⁵ Historical narratives therefore involved conceptual understanding twice over: as constitutive of the actions described in their original performance, and again in informing the understanding of past events retrospectively.Footnote ¹²⁶ This was unproblematic only if one did not recognize that these understandings were informed by conceptual systems which were themselves subject to change over time.Footnote ¹²⁷ The crucial development of Mink's thought in the late 1960s lay in precisely this recognition; here Collingwood was clearly the main influence, but Mink was also aware of developments along these lines in the history and philosophy of science—he cited Thomas Kuhn and Stephen Toulmin in particular.Footnote ¹²⁸ Such a recognition transformed the whole notion of historical understanding. Because even the most basic empirical observations were conceptually mediated, claims such as Hempel's to have discerned a single model of rational explanation appeared arbitrary and provincial; more radically, the ideal of historical knowledge as correspondence to a fixed and independent past had to be abandoned.Footnote ¹²⁹

Mink had insisted in his doctoral thesis that the past “can never be a datum of knowledge”, but it was only after 1968 that he emphasized the way in which the ontological absence of the past undermined the basic principle of historical realism.Footnote ¹³⁰ This was because the Collingwoodian recognition of Weltanschauungen as themselves historical exploded the conventional argument that, although inaccessible, the past could be reconstructed from survivals. It was only on the grounds of present concepts that any kind of reconstruction could proceed, and there was no way of knowing whether such concepts were appropriate to the past period under consideration. As Mink put it in 1972, once a certain conceptual structure was assumed to be appropriate, “we could go on happily assuming it forever because it would serve to dismiss or reinterpret any evidence that could count against it. The past might be frantically signaling us to stop while we went on interpreting its gestures as invitations to proceed”.Footnote ¹³¹ The historical consciousness could not therefore escape its own historicity; this did not imply the impossibility of historical knowledge (a “temporal solipsism”), but it did mean that historical consciousness could not be conceived as a mirror, however dark or cracked, of the real past.Footnote ¹³²

Here, Mink's refusal fully to adopt the metaphysics of Collingwood's Idea of History did lead to a substantive break with the latter, or at least a radicalization of one of its central theses. Collingwood described history as “the science of res gestae, the attempt to answer questions about human actions done in the past”, where the past was understood to “consist of particular events in space and time which are no longer happening”.Footnote ¹³³ Confronted with a world of potential sources, the task of the historian, achieved through re-enactment, was “to discover what the past was which has left these relics behind it”.Footnote ¹³⁴ Because Collingwood conceived re-enactment literally, and not (as Mink did) as a shorthand for a particular epistemic attitude, and because for him thought stood in only a contingent relation to specific times and places, the gap between present and past could be bridged by the historical imagination; the historian could know the real past by literally experiencing it.Footnote ¹³⁵ For Mink, however, the plausibility of this account was undermined by his more thoroughly historicist account of mind: there was for him no deeper level of transhistoricity which could ensure correspondence between present understanding and past experience.

At the same time as working through this troubling thought—and there is no doubt that he found it troubling—Mink was bringing the idea of narrative into contact with the account of historical understanding he had developed in the first half of the 1960s.Footnote ¹³⁶ Mink was increasingly convinced by the arguments he had encountered since then that narrative form and historical understanding were closely related. Further, narrative provided the key vehicle by which historians’ scholarship was mediated to the wider cultural consciousness. Attending to narrative as a philosophical problem therefore provided a way of “representing the interests of culture” to a historical profession increasingly devoted to the specialized monograph. Again, the enemy was a philosophical tradition “dominated by the problems of the cognitive status of perception on the one hand and the interpretation of natural science on the other”, which therefore scorned history and “romance” equally. Into the 1970s, Mink continued to see this tradition as a genuine threat to a humanistically oriented historiography.Footnote ¹³⁷

Mink's first attempt at a systematic view of narrative was made in 1970 in a contribution to the recently founded journal New Literary History (whose foundation, like that of Clio, was an indication that Mink's interests were increasingly part of a wider intellectual current).Footnote ¹³⁸ “History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension” took its cue from Gallie's argument that a narrative enabled a reader to “follow” a contingent course of events by exploiting the affective desire to discover the fate of the dramatis personae.Footnote ¹³⁹ Mink had already objected in 1968 that Gallie's account was incompatible in principle with any conception of historical knowledge, for it presupposed ignorance of the story's conclusion. He repeated the point now, adding the arch observation that “of the many historians who regard Garrett Mattingly's The Defeat of the Spanish Armada as the unsurpassed recent example of narrative history, I have never heard one complain that his reading of it was marred by knowing how it all came out.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰

To remedy this deficiency, Mink suggested that analysis should focus not on the experience of following a story for the first time, but on the experience of having followed a story.Footnote ¹⁴¹ It now appeared to Mink that narrative was a vehicle for the achievement and expression of configurational comprehension, as he had described the latter in 1960: a story represented a sequence of events in such a way that the reader could think of temporal succession “in both directions at once, and then time is no longer the river which bears us along but the river in aerial view, upstream and downstream in a single survey”. Through a “network of overlapping descriptions”, the literary form of a narrative fostered the recognition that each event or character or action existed in an intrinsic relation to every other element of the story; that is to say, what each one was was indistinguishable from its relations to the others.Footnote ¹⁴² Here, Mink's thoughts were informed by his own engagement with a particular riverine text, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Mink had a long-standing fascination with Joyce's opaque masterpiece, and after 1968 this became almost an obsession, involving Mink with an international community of “Wakers”.Footnote ¹⁴³ Mink's conception of narrative therefore developed alongside the experience of reading and rereading this exceptionally complex literary artefact, each time bringing his knowledge of the whole to bear on the understanding of each part.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Mink's account avoided Gallie's paradoxical implication that historical understanding and historical knowledge were incompatible, but the epistemological status of the configurational comprehension embodied in historical narrative remained unclear. However, the closing passage of Mink's 1970 essay took issue with the contention that the qualities of narrative were first found in lived experience and merely expressed in art; Mink defended the converse thesis, that narrative qualities were “transferred from art to life”:

The form of a narrative could therefore be neither true nor false, only more or less comprehensive, clear and subtle. (Though this was not to say that these qualities were “aesthetic” in any trivializing sense.) This followed from a more general distinction Mink drew between comprehension and knowledge; he observed that

The view that stories embodied comprehension implied that they were works of thought rather than representations of reality, whether the subject matter in a given case was historical or fictional. This required the abandonment of the idea that a good history was simply “a true representation of the past”, presented in an elegant style; a historical narrative might be made from true statements, but what was made of them was a work of the imagination. The story was already there in the past only in the sense that a sculpture is already there in the clay.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Mink himself conceived this as a Collingwoodian position, but once more his departures from Collingwood's own account are revealing.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ In effect, Mink had brought Collingwood's account of the historical imagination down to the level of concrete historiographical practice by identifying it with the production of historical narratives; this move paralleled Mink's interpretation of the theory of re-enactment. Where Collingwood spoke of a “web of imaginative construction” or “a picture of the past”, Mink argued that the result of a historian's series of questions and answers was a narrative.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Mink's conception of narrative certainly owed much to Collingwood's theory of the historical imagination, not least in being not “a story supported by evidence”, but rather “the statement of the evidence itself, organized in narrative form so that it jointly constitutes the unique answer to specific questions”.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ But Collingwood himself had mentioned narrative form only in passing.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ By this point, Mink's interpretation of Collingwood had come to sound very much like Mink thinking for himself.

IV

By 1970, the intellectual development which led Mink to his final view that histories, insofar as they were narratives, could not be taken to represent “the structure of past actuality” was substantially complete.Footnote ¹⁵¹ This process consisted largely in the elucidation and elaboration of the view of historical understanding first hinted at in Mink's doctoral thesis and articulated most fully in “The Autonomy of Historical Understanding” of 1966: nothing Mink wrote subsequently contradicted the general view of historical thinking defended in the latter essay, and much relied upon it. However, the final decade of his career saw Mink grappling with the counterintuitive implications of his subsequent separation of narrative from representation. The first indication of this was in a 1972 paper on revisionism in historiography. Abandoning his usually sanguine voice, Mink there found inescapable “a sense that our attitudes toward the nature and possibility of historical knowledge are full of latent contradictions”, contradictions which had their source “in our acute consciousness of the difference between history-as-written and history-as-lived”.Footnote ¹⁵² This sense of irresolvable contradiction survived six years later in “Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument”. This essay has been widely cited as a classic and straightforward statement of “narrativist” antirealism in philosophy of history.Footnote ¹⁵³ It was also, however, a strange and uncharacteristically uncertain text, as Mink confronted his theory of narrative as comprehension with the common-sense belief that histories and fictions could be distinguished as true and imaginary stories respectively.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

In 1973, Mink's friend Hayden White had significantly raised the stakes involved in this question with his well-known argument in Metahistory that “the best grounds for choosing one perspective on history rather than another are ultimately aesthetic or ethical rather than epistemological”.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Although White had begun his career as a medieval historian, by the end of the 1960s his main interests were in the theory of historiography, and Metahistory was an innovative attempt to deploy literary-critical methods in the understanding of historical texts.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Mink had met White in the mid-1960s through History and Theory, and encouraged him to pursue his theoretical interests; thereafter the two men regularly exchanged writing and responses. White was a fellow of the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan in the late 1960s, and by the time Metahistory was published Mink and White were both intellectual confreres and personal friends.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ White made clear that his thoughts built on Mink's work on historical narrative, and indeed characterized the latter in 1972 as “an amplification of some of the points raised by Mink”.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The two men shared a hostility to naturalistic scientism, and a preoccupation with the conflict between scientific and Geisteswissenschaftlich intellectual cultures.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Mink's motives for developing an anti-representational account of historical understanding were therefore not unique: White has described Metahistory as an attempt “to deconstruct a mythology, the so-called science of history. It is against positivism, against a positivistic notion of history”.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ In place of value-neutrality, White, like Mink, sought a “conception of historical understanding as the preparation for morally responsible action”.Footnote ¹⁶¹

However, White's interpretation of the contention that stories “were not lived but told” threatened to reduce history to fiction or moralism in a fashion which Mink found no more congenial than the positivistic reduction of history to sociology.Footnote ¹⁶² A central attraction of a humanistic historiography for Mink was that it lay “athwart the areas of theoretical knowledge and moral judgment”.Footnote ¹⁶³ The positivists destroyed this crucial middle ground—the ground on which human life was lived—by denying the cognitive nature of ethics and insisting that history would be scientific knowledge or it would be superstition; it was this view that White and Mink could join in condemning. Yet White threatened the autonomy of historical understanding from the other direction, by insisting that the nonrepresentational aspect of historical understanding was reducible to either ethics or aesthetics. The central contention of Mink's philosophy of history was that historical understanding was not reducible to anything, but rather exemplified a kind of thinking about human existence which evaded positivistic oppositions between the moral and the factual, and between the scientific and the artistic. “Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument” (1978) accordingly insisted with equal vehemence that historical narratives were the product of the individual historian's imagination, and that it would be “disastrous” if “the common-sense belief that history is true in a sense in which fiction is not” were abandoned. Instead, Mink urged that historical research into individual facts remained unaffected by the kind of constructivism he advocated, even while “the significance of the past is determinate only by virtue of our own disciplined imagination”.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

Nonetheless, Mink shared with White a belief that scholarship should make a noninstrumental contribution to the good life beyond the academy walls.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Mink saw history as a field of scholarship that was still able to engage seriously with the overwhelmingly important conceptual space lying between pure theoretical knowledge and individual moral judgement. Synoptic thinking was an aspect of both self-knowledge and practical wisdom—and an aspect which faced a genuine threat of cultural marginalization “as problem-solving and techniques of control and manipulation become dissociated from the satisfactions of understanding”. Mink's thought was thus rooted in a wider anxiety about instrumental rationality and its destruction of reflective responsibility, an anxiety which went back to his graduate years at Yale. For Mink, understanding was always and only a personal achievement: it could be “neither an input nor an output of data-retrieval systems, nor . . . symbolically transformed for convenient reference”. It was also of enormous moral importance. The capacity of historiography to cultivate this kind of understanding was threatened equally by antitheoretical empiricism and by social-scientific positivism, and it was precisely because the historian had no authority with respect to the judgement embodied in her text that the reader's own engagement with that judgement could be a genuinely educational experience. The connection between historical judgement and phronesis was not merely casual; it touched the heart of Mink's intellectual project.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

All of this remained some distance from the moral and aesthetic sensibilities of postmodernism in Jameson or Harvey's wider, cultural sense. In the absence of the modernist concern with general historical tendencies, the postmodern embrace of fragmentation—“the sheer enumeration of changes and modifications”—fairly precisely describes “the complete absence of the capacity to order the world by a scale of relative values” which Mink saw as the consummation of nihilism. Such a refusal to interpret, and so to comprehend, was all very well in the authorial voice of Finnegans Wake, but it was no way to approach the world of lived experience.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Here again Mink had much in common with Hayden White, for whom “a specifically historical inquiry is born less of the necessity to establish that certain events occurred than of the desire to determine what certain events mean for a given group, society, or culture's conception of its present and future prospects”.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

For both Mink and White, Jameson's postmodern “form of image addiction which, by transforming the past into visual mirages, stereotypes, or texts, effectively abolished any practical sense of the future and of the collective project, thereby abandoning the thinking of future change to fantasies of sheer catastrophe and inexplicable cataclysm”, could hold little appeal.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Such historical disorientation was just what Mink feared from the positivist refusal to attend to the texture of human self-understanding. It was certainly something neither he nor White wished to promote. Both are well described as modernists, preoccupied with the contingency and historicity of the human epistemic situation but committed to the effort to find some meaning in it all the same.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ The idea that the past makes sense in itself, and that the historiographical enterprise is an exercise in recovery rather than creation, is as indefensible from such a modernist perspective as from a postmodernist one.Footnote ¹⁷¹ The key dispute between the two is whether the struggle to make sense of the world is worth pursuing. Mink, whatever his doubts about historical realism, remained convinced that it was not an effort we could live without.