Coherence in Politics and History
When we think about the past, or people, we are often told to desire ideological coherence or internal unity of thought. Rarely, however, is that actually possible. One need only look at the median American voter to realize that our ideas are not part of some grander ideological scheme. Claims of hypocrisy are wielded as "gotchas" to show that someone is not really sincere in their beliefs. Undoubtedly this is true in the most craven cases, but for the vast majority of people I think this is far too cynical a view of how people understand the world. People do not easily slot into one single idea. Their actions and motivations are the combination of personality, social forces, and their own educations.
I've been thinking about this question quite a bit as I prepared the materials for the class I am teaching this fall. I want students to come away with a less cynical view of history, one that is more open to agency and contingency. This requires looking at events and history as composed of choices, which can be positive, negative, successful, or failures. That is, I don't think we can write good narratives about the past without understanding that the past was contingent and often the result of unpredictable and incoherent events.
Importantly, what may seem contradictory or incoherent to us may not be so to them. The challenge is us imposing coherence on a fundamentally incoherent situation. As Quentin Skinner argued "it will become dangerously easy for the historian to conceive it as his task to supply or find in each of these texts the coherence which they may appear to lack."[1] We see similar mental maneuvering when people claim Trump can say one thing but "mean" something entirely different. Because we have been told that ideas and actions must be coherent, imaginations run amok to contort everything into either a fun house mirror reality, or to present a given person's actions not as contradictory but as playing some type of mastermind game against their imagined opponents. Importantly, this narrativizing is not about the object, but about the narrator. Creating a coherent explanation for Trump's actions ignores the fundamental incoherence of his beliefs and actions and favors instead conspiracism (on the left, that every action is always a targeted part of some broader anti-democratic scheme) or pure intentionality ("owning the libs"). It forms part of a theory of historical change that wants, or needs, protagonists and direction.
Yet if history really is a "process without a Subject or Goal(s)," as Louis Althusser argued, then we need to understand historical change differently.[2] Althusser locates it within class struggle, which may work for some events and times, but not all. If we take incoherence as a feature of human ideas, not an aberration, then it means treating historical actors differently. Instead of trying to fit them into prescribed motives or ideologies, we need to think about the constellation of ideas they hold, the sources of those ideas, and the broader socio-political context.
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There are lots of issues with assuming coherence not just ideologically, but temporally and historically too. Periodization is a constant vexation for historians, because it means reducing time to a series of discrete chunks. What defines a period? Is it something related to the politics of the time, the culture, the people? We might think it is easy to define "the Carolingians" but it is quite challenging because politics, practices, and traditions shifted over time. Assuming coherence means that something must bind together Pippin III and Charles the Fat. Different medieval kings chose to emphasize different parts of medieval rulership. Some were more religious, some more warlike, but most subscribed to certain basic ideals of kingship. Indeed the periods themselves ("medieval") are subject to processes of politics and historiographical interventions.[3]
As Fredric Jameson wrote in 1981, periodization implies "the impression of a facile totalization, a seamless web of phneomena each of which, in its own way, "expresses" some unified inner truth -- a world-view or a period style or a set of structural categories which marks the whole length and breadth of the "period" in question."[4] For instance we can talk of "Tang" or "Song" China, but are they really coherent periods? Or do we adopt these shorthands for the ease they provide in creating a structure to time?[5] On some level we need categories to make discussing easier, but we also can overrely on them. Categories themselves do not mean coherence, that is ascribing two things the label "Carolingian" doesn't mean they share all the same attributes. This has prompted Simon Groth to even go so far as asserting there "was neither 'Carolingians or 'Ottonians.'"[6] Choosing to write about Song China from Song sources, as Xin Wen argues in his recent book The King's Road, means that the parts of Tang China lost to the Song "transitions out of Chinese history after the An Lushan Rebellion."[7] This isn't the place for me to fully develop my ideas around periodization and dynasty, that needs to wait for another time, but the coherence implied by dynastic succession and periodization sit uneasily with historical evidence of variance and change.
At the same time, our understandings of coherence, or rather our value of coherent ideas, is a function of modernity. We prioritize logical connections and ordering because our understanding of knowledge is to leave no room for slipperiness. Being precise and "not vague" are hallmark admonishments to young writers everywhere. Strip the vagueness of the past and only discuss what can be proven. To take incoherence seriously is to take seriously the messiness of human society and activity. Marc Bloch reminds us to "guard against stripping our science of its share of poetry."[8] To me there is a deep cynicism at work here, that people must be categorized, with every action, idea, etc. placed into an overarching conceptual realm. That is, there is sometimes an expectation that people should embody their political ideologies in a maximal way. Hence criticisms of socialists who come from wealth, the underlying assumption that they cannot seriously believe their ideas. What they embody is their more elite backgrounds, not the ideas they proclaim. Critics charge, "why do those who paid off their student loans support forgiveness for others?" and other claims of rejecting the system they either inhabit or benefit from (for instance, rejections of white privilege is often claimed to be nonsensical). This leaves little room for actual agency, instead everyone is operating within their proscribed tracks. If consumption and embodying ideas is the end, then we don't need to know much, only their (true) belief. Any action can thus be reduced to the basest and most cynical reasoning.
For most, this probably sounds like the familiar call of the historian to contextualize, but it is also about thinking through the problems of coherence both ideologically and historically. It is about thinking more earnestly about the past and people, instead of constant cynicism or making everyone a miniature proponent of Realpolitik.
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- Quentin Skinner, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1969), pp. 3-53 at p. 16.↩︎
- Louis Althusser, "Reply to John Lewis," in Essays in Self-Criticism, p. 99. Althusser is attempting to counter John Lewis' critique that Althusser does not understand Marxist theory. My problem with Marxist theories of history is that they can often be too structural, though in Althusser's defense he would not agree that people are removed from history, but they are still largely subsumed into the broader processes of social and economic change that actually moves history.↩︎
- See for instance Michael Höckelmann, “Middle Ages or Late Antiquity?: On a Conceptual Aporia in Chinese Historiography,” Essays in Long Late Antiquity 1, no. 1 (2026), pp. 41–71 or the older Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).↩︎
- Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 27.↩︎
- Nicolas Tackett, "The Tang-Song Transition, Political Fragmentation, and the "Global Middle Ages,"" Early Medieval China 30, no. 1 (2024), pp. 156-160.↩︎
- Simon Groth, In regunum successit: "Karolinger" und "Ottonen" oder das "Ostfränkische Reich"? (Vittorio Klostermann, 2017), p. 453: Einerseits gab es weder ‘Karolinger’ noch ‘Ottonen.’↩︎
- Xin Wen, The King's Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road (Princeton University Press, 2023), p. 300.↩︎
- Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft, p. 8.↩︎
