Professional argumentation about historical explanation in our times begins in the 1940s with a paper by the positivist Carl Gustav Hempel and a book by the idealist R.G. Colllingwood. Historians found it hard to square Hempel’s ideas with their actual practice. Collingwood was a leading historian of Roman Britain and a practicing archeologist as well as Waynfleet Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford and his book rang more true but seemed to license anything. There was much literature for a time (even a journal); but the field seems to have largely faded from broad professional interest in the 1970s. Interest has been revived by a 2019 book by Paul Roth in the analytic philosophical tradition but taking (I would say) post-modernism seriously. I think there is much to admire in Roth’s book but that it is fundamentally misconceived. The paper sketches these debates and lays out an alternative conception of historical explanation, exploring its implications and developing the way that it at once justifies historians’ focus on agency and disrupts without destroying social scientists’ desire to link the idea of explanation to an image of a law-like causal ordering.
Historians as a group seem to shy away from talking about this sort of thing. Some even go so far as to say that offering explanations is the farthest thing from their minds, their project being, instead, merely to offer an account of events. This paper has three substantive objectives: to clarify the sense in which such accounts are indeed a form of explanation, to show how helpful this clarification is in cutting through barriers to extra-departmental communications with social scientists, and to show how that notion of explanation exposes a somewhat novel but I argue very helpful agenda of practices and issues which would illuminate histories of operating business organizations.