Perry Miller - Historiography

Historiography

Hollinger (1968) explores the philosophical basis of Miller's historiography, arguing that Miller's formulation of problems was controlled by tensions between 'conscious' and 'mechanical' and between 'understanding' and 'mystery.' For Miller, the mechanical world was devoid of morality and purpose, and was incompatible with conscious beauty and ethics. By contrast, within the 'conscious' realm the drive for knowledge about an intelligible universe controlled by laws vied with the opposite religious faith in an unknowable universe controlled by God. Miller's history was further deepened by his emphasis on development: he sees history as proceeding in a continuing series of interactions between traditional cultural forms and immediate environmental circumstances. For Miller, culture is never merely the product of the environment, but an active agent in the interaction. The search for 'historical knowledge' itself proceeds on the terms of this interaction. Miller rejected both positivism and the relativism of Carl Becker for the harder relativism later developed by Thomas Kuhn. That is, for Miller 'forms' are neither wholly arbitrary nor entirely discovered in 'the facts,' but are instead the inheritance and creation of the historian, altered and confirmed by his experience.