Hitler, Stalin and You: What is History?

 

The video above is a lecture by Prof. Timothy Snyder that introduces a series of his lectures on Hitler and Stalin Today. The first lecture (above) starts by asking the question "What is History?" The ten lecture series is available on YouTube at Timothy Synder: Hitler and Stalin Today.

For me, the lecture is interesting because it provides an opportunity to explain how Quantitative History, Cliometrics or General Systems History differ from the academic discipline of History. 

My interest in General Systems Theory and General Systems History is as a framework for developing quantitative, historical models of societal development.

There are a few points from the lecture that I want to emphasize:

• It's difficult to make policy change without knowing history. We have to know what is possible and what is meaningful.
• What Can Happen: (1) It's not true that "anything can happen". There are limits. (2) It is also not true that "Nothing is possible". Everything isn't over-determined. Some things are possible and somethings are not! The more you know about the past, the more you understand what is possible.
• Lines Coming from the Past in History: If you are not on one of these lines, the present will seem confusing (see below).
• No one knows what is going on right now. There is no way to start from the present and try to understand the future. You can have some confidence in things that have happened in the past!
• History Doesn't Repeat. You can recognize patterns. Living people are the actors.You cannot go back to the "Golden Age". Nazism and Stalinism (and Trumpism?) are schemes about the past that are designed to disempower you.
• The things that actually happened must be possible because they actually happened. If you are aware of the terrible things that have happened (mass murder, concentration camps, genocide, etc.) you can make them less likely to happen in the future.
• History involves Testing Hypotheses and finding out that some hypotheses are wrong.
• History, Texts and Data: History is Imperial (consuming everything) as long as there are texts. No texts, no history. For Quantitative History, no data, no history (we do have some data all the way back to the year zero from the Maddison Project).
• Mental models vs. Mathematical Models  From the standpoint of General Systems Theory, historians deal with mental models, flexible generalizations that can be used to explain events. Quantitative history deals with formal models (usually mathematical) that are applied to historical data. In the early days of Quantitative history, a lot of sterile academic arguments revolved around whether formal models were better. They are not; they are complementary and one cannot exist without the other.
• History is a guard against simplifying narratives. For example, 19th Century Germany failed because it had a Welfare State.
• In History, everything is related to everything. Good history asks what is meaningful.
• History has to be communicated using narratives that people understand. This is a problem for Quantitative History, Cliometrics and General Systems History.

Spaghetti Plots: Lines from the Past

The graphic above is taken from the IPCC Climate Scenarios that show actual historical CO2 emissions (the early dark black line) and Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) which are possible future emissions pathways, lines of the past projected into the future. The RCPs  show what is thought to be possible.

The graphic above shows Global Temperature projects from my WL20 World Model (see Global Temperature Projections) given various input variables:  RW (Random Walk), W (World System), TECH (Technological Change), CO2 (Only CO2 emissions as an input variable) and BAU (Business as Usual, no input variables). Notice how the actual data from 1970 to beyond 2000 diverges from all projections.

In the sense of RCPs and WL20 World Model projections, lines of the past are projected into the future using different Geopolitical inputs, a link between Quantitative and General History. There are other links between mental and formal models; one is neither right nor wrong without hypothesis testing.

Playlist

The ten lecture series is available on YouTube at Timothy Synder: Hitler and Stalin Today:

• What is History? Reviewed in this post.
• A World of Empire
• What is Fascism?
• What is Communism?
• What is Ukraine?
• Why was Communism Appealing?
• How was Mass Killing Possible? 
• Back to Colonialism
• East European Dissident Thought
• Oligarchy, Neofascism and Liberation

Notes

• Timothy Synder (born August 18, 1969) is an American historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. He holds the inaugural Chair in Modern European History, supported by the Temerty Endowment for Ukrainian Studies, at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. From 2017 to 2025 he was the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University.
• Tadeusz Borowski a Polish writer and journalist. His wartime poetry and stories dealing with his experiences as a prisoner at Auschwitz are recognized as classics of Polish literature.
• History the systematic study of the past, focusing primarily on the human past. As an academic discipline, it analyses and interprets evidence to construct narratives about what happened and explain why it happened.
• Nazism also known as National Socialism (NS), is the far-right, ultranationalist, totalitarian ideology associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP). It emerged in Germany during Hitler's rise to power and was frequently called Hitlerism. Nazism is a form of fascism that emphasizes pseudo-scientific theories of racial hierarchy which identify ethnic Germans and Nordic Aryans as a master race.
• Stalinism a political ideology advocating for the totalitarian means of governing and Marxist–Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1927 to 1953 by dictator Joseph Stalin and in Soviet satellite states between 1944 and 1953. Stalinism included the creation of a one man totalitarian police state, rapid industrialization, the theory of socialism in one country, forced collectivization of agriculture, intensification of class conflict, a cult of personality, and subordination of the interests of foreign communist parties to those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which Stalinism deemed the leading vanguard party of communist revolution at the time.
• Trumpism the political ideology behind Donald Trump, the 45th and 47th president of the United States, and his political base. It is often used in close conjunction with the Make America Great Again (MAGA) political movement. It comprises ideologies such as right-wing populism, right-wing antiglobalism, national conservatism, Christian nationalism, and neo-nationalism, and features significant illiberal, authoritarian,^[1][2] and autocratic beliefs and practices.^[b] Other ideologies include nativism,^[5][6] economic nationalism,^[7][8] anti-environmentalism,^[25] interventionism, and anti-intellectualism..\ 
• World History a field of historical study examines history from a global perspective. It emerged centuries ago; some leading practitioners have included Voltaire (1694–1778), Hegel (1770–1831), Karl Marx (1818–1883), Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), and Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975). The field became much more active (in terms of university teaching, textbooks, scholarly journals, and academic associations) in the late 20th century.
• Societal Collapse (also known as civilizational collapse or systems collapse) is the fall of a complex human society characterized by the loss of cultural identity and of social complexity as an adaptive system, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence.
• The Maddison Project also known as the Maddison Historical Statistics Project, is a project to collate historical economic statistics, such as GDP, GDP per capita, and labor productivity.
• Quantitative History a method of historical research that uses quantitative, statistical and computer resources. It is a type of the social science history.
• Cliometrics sometimes called 'new economic history' or 'econometric history', is the systematic application of economic theory, econometric techniques, and other formal or mathematical methods to the study of history (especially social and economic history). It is a quantitative approach to economic history (as opposed to qualitative or ethnographic). There has been a revival in 'new economic history' since the late 1990s.
• General Systems Theory  the transdisciplinary study of systems, i.e., cohesive groups of interrelated, interdependent components that can be natural or artificial. Every system has causal boundaries, is influenced by its context, defined by its structure, function and role, and expressed through its relations with other systems. A system is "more than the sum of its parts" when it expresses synergy or emergent behavior.
• Complex Systems  a system composed of many components that interact with one another. Examples of complex systems are Earth's global climate, organisms, the human brain, infrastructure such as a power grid, transportation or communication systems, complex software and electronic systems, social and economic organizations (like cities), an ecosystem, a living cell, and, ultimately, for some authors, the entire universe.
• Heterarchy a system of organization where the elements of the organization are unranked (non-hierarchical) or where they possess the potential to be ranked a number of different ways. Definitions of the term vary among the disciplines: in social and information sciences, heterarchies are networks of elements in which each element shares the same "horizontal" position of power and authority, each playing a theoretically equal role. In biological taxonomy, however, the requisite features of heterarchy involve, for example, a species sharing, with a species in a different family, a common ancestor which it does not share with members of its own family. 
• World-Systems Theory (also known as world-systems analysis or the world-systems perspective) is a multidisciplinary approach to world history and social change which emphasizes the world-system (and not nation states) as the primary (but not exclusive) unit of social analysis. World-systems theorists argue that their theory explains the rise and fall of states, income inequality, social unrest, and imperialism.
• Geopolitics the study of the effects of Earth's geography on politics and international relations. Geopolitics usually refers to countries and relations between them. According to multiple researchers, the term is currently being used to describe a broad spectrum of concepts, in a general sense used as "a synonym for international political relations", but more specifically "to imply the global structure of such relations"; this usage builds on an "early-twentieth-century term for a pseudoscience of political geography" and other pseudoscientific theories of historical and geographic determinism.
• Level of Analysis used in the social sciences to point to the location, size, or scale of a research target. It is distinct from unit of observation in that the former refers to a more or less integrated set of relationships while the latter refers to the distinct unit from which data have been or will be gathered. Together, the unit of observation and the level of analysis help define the population of a research enterprise.
• Spaghetti Plots (also known as a spaghetti chart, spaghetti diagram, or spaghetti model) is a method of viewing data to visualize possible flows through systems. Flows depicted in this manner appear like noodles, hence the coining of this term.

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