The Uncertainty of History and the Potential Chaos of Ideas, Essay Example

As the title of the work clearly foretells, Ferling’s A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic approaches the early ideas and actions that informed the U.S. independence movement, the Revolution itself, and the Post-Revolution period from a perspective of chance and uncertainty. The author is quite explicit at the outset of the work in regards to this approach. Noting that as an undergraduate Ferling was interested in a historiographical method that emphasized the influence of ideas on history[1], his approach has shifted to a synthesis of individual or group self-interests – i.e., a realist approach – with concepts of chance, contingency and chaos. My primary interest in regards to the book, as influenced by these remarks in the preface, was determined precisely by this greater historiographical framework Ferling introduces and how he uses it to construct his history.

Whereas Ferling notes that an approach to historical writing which stressed the power of ideas was current at the time of his undergraduate studies, thus influencing his own strategy, I believe the author fails to observe that such emphasis on chance and contingency appears to be a trend in the contemporary literature, as I remarked in my previous review of Tuchman’s March of Folly. Although Ferling states that ideas were crucial to informing the revolution, he simultaneously wishes to stress the underlying uncertainty of any idea: I think this could be conceivably interpreted as a basic re-iteration of the classic dualism and perhaps inevitable gap between theory and practice. To use Ferling’s terminology from the title of the monograph, there is a certain “struggle” that indicates precisely the tension inherent to this gap. However, I feel that a shortcoming of the work is that Ferling does not offer a rigorous conceptualization of struggle, chance, contingency, and uncertainty, although it could be argued that the author tries to show how the American independence movement corresponds to these terms, thus allowing the concept to become fleshed out through history. Hence, Ferling stresses the various uncertainties that existed at every step of the independence process: from the pre-revolution ideas to post-revolution ambiguities in regards to a certain uncertainty as to whether the Union itself could continue to subsist on, for example, an economic level. Following this approach, I felt that Ferling infused his version of realism with uncertainty, as the calculation of personal interests in this regard becomes closely related to the underlying problem of how to identify personal interests and realize them: the thesis that Ferling continually pursues is that there is no inevitability to anything. In this regard, I think that Ferling’s use of sources is employed in a strategic manner that attempts to deconstruct any illusory inevitability regarding the events of the time period.

At the same time, Ferling’s work opened for me a greater historiographical question: does historical writing require a rigorous formulation of these concepts of contingency and chance, in order to properly employ such an approach to sources materials? Upon further research into this question, I encountered texts on historiographical writing that, for example, emphasize the application of “chaos theory” in regards to history, such that the former becomes a framework with which to approach the latter – such a framework is clearly consistent with what Ferling, I believe, is trying to accomplish in his work insofar as it emphasizes notions of uncertainty. Ahmad summarizes this approach as follows: “chaos theory is also about complexity. It is no longer only a world of cause and effect, as described in traditional histories. The past is also filled with chance, and it is the historian’s task to explain how chance fits into the scheme of facts.”[2] This movement away from simple causality in historical writing is a development that I personally welcome. The notion that event X will invariably yield event Y appears too simplistic; and it is precisely this notion that I feel Ferling attacks and undermines in his own book. Cheong’s description of the historian’s task from the perspective of chaos theory in terms of the reconciliation of “chance and facts” seems to coincide with Ferling’s broader approach in this work. In my view, the treatment of history as a both complex and chaotic system – and I think Ferling to some degree adequately captures this in his book, although perhaps not explicitly – essentially means that for a given cause any number of effects could be produced. The task is to attempt to delineate precisely how what we retroactively consider to be a fact was historically engendered. Yet some problems that interest me in regards to this approach, generated by my reading of Ferling, are as follows: How can the historian rigorously identify the given elements constitutive of system? How can the historian synthesize some given material conditions with the chance of individual subjectivities and the influence of ideas?

Despite the difficulty of this problem, I think that its challenging nature is part of what makes it such a compelling approach to history. In this regard, I would have liked to see Ferling further embellish the implicit historiographcial framework operative in his work. Furthermore, a particularly compelling approach from my viewpoint would be to somehow synthesize the idea-based approach to history that Ferling mentions with frameworks of contingency and uncertainty: this entails a certain chaos of ideas inherent to the formation of ideas, which conflict or become synthesized with the conflict and chaos of real material conditions that exist, as it were, “on the ground.” I think that in his quick dismissal of the ideas-based approach, Ferling overlooks the potentially chaotic and contingent formation of ideas themselves, for example: the bizarre fusions of certain ideas to other ideas, unfinished thoughts, uncertain thoughts, ideas that only offer a promise and cannot guarantee themselves, etc. With such an approach, purely “intellectual” history is separated from the image of a stable subjectivity that “has” these ideas – perhaps this “stable subjectivity” is a residue of Cartesian cogito modes of thought and the proclaimed certainty of “I think therefore I am” (I am not certain here, this is speculative) – and now itself joins the chaotic flux of events, so that thinking itself becomes an event. This is perhaps the historiographical promise of Ferling’s book, although one that is ultimately unrealized.

Works Cited

Cheung, Yong Mun. “Southeast Asian History, Literary Theory, and Chaos.” In Abu Talib

Ahmad (ed.) New Terrains in Southeast Asian History. Athens, OH: Ohio University, 2003. 82-104.

Ferling, John. A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003.

[1] John Ferling. A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. xii.

[2] Yong Mun Chung. “Southeast Asian History, Literary Theory, and Chaos.” (In Abu Talib Ahmad (ed.) New Terrains in Southeast Asian History. Athens, OH: Ohio University, 2003), p. 100.