Clio and Chronos an Essay on the Making and Breaking of History-Book Time

Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone. John Donne's lament has appeared with remarkable frequency a thousand times in the past forty years, according to Douglas Bush in recent scholarly studies. This reiteration reflects, I believe, not only an interest in seventeenth-century reactions to the Copernican hypothesis, but also a cr de coeur about the state of their own craft on the part of many historians. No single new philosophy of history has called all the old ones in doubt. Yet a clutter of broken historical perspectives points to the shattering impact of some sort of collision, produced by forces that remain undefined. Ostensible diagnoses turn out to be symptomatic and self-contradictory. Although preoccupation with discontinuity is currently displayed in many ways, two incompatible schools of thought appear dominant. The first stresses a recent acceleration in the rate of historical change that has rendered prior experience irrelevant. An unprecedented increase in cognitive and technological innovations has so drastically altered the intellectual and material environment of Western man that a kind of evolutionary mutation a great leap into the future has resulted.1 By and large, this view is an extension of nineteenth-century elaborations on ideas of progress.2 It thus emphasizes open-ended, developmental forms of change, stressing what

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