"History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology"
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Auden’s line pulls a neat switch: it demotes history from a ledger of settled facts to a disciplined form of curiosity. “Strictly speaking” is doing sly work here, a lawyerly throat-clear that pretends modesty while laying down a provocation. If history is “the study of questions,” then its proper subject isn’t the polished conclusion but the live uncertainty: what people thought they were doing, what they feared, what alternatives they couldn’t see, what they refused to name. It’s an argument for history as method, not museum.
The second clause stings on purpose. By assigning “answers” to anthropology and sociology, Auden jabs at the 20th-century appetite for explanatory systems - the desire to turn human mess into models, categories, and laws. Those disciplines, at their best, map patterns; at their worst, they overconfidently generalize. Auden suggests that answers risk becoming an ideological comfort: a way to stop thinking. History, in his framing, should keep the wound open a little longer.
Coming from a poet writing in the shadow of world war, totalitarianism, and the era’s competing grand narratives, the subtext is ethical as much as intellectual. Questions preserve contingency and responsibility; answers can slide into inevitability. Auden isn’t rejecting social science so much as warning against treating human life like a solved equation. He’s staking out a role for the historian - and the writer - as someone who resists closure, because closure is where propaganda loves to live.
The second clause stings on purpose. By assigning “answers” to anthropology and sociology, Auden jabs at the 20th-century appetite for explanatory systems - the desire to turn human mess into models, categories, and laws. Those disciplines, at their best, map patterns; at their worst, they overconfidently generalize. Auden suggests that answers risk becoming an ideological comfort: a way to stop thinking. History, in his framing, should keep the wound open a little longer.
Coming from a poet writing in the shadow of world war, totalitarianism, and the era’s competing grand narratives, the subtext is ethical as much as intellectual. Questions preserve contingency and responsibility; answers can slide into inevitability. Auden isn’t rejecting social science so much as warning against treating human life like a solved equation. He’s staking out a role for the historian - and the writer - as someone who resists closure, because closure is where propaganda loves to live.
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| Topic | Knowledge |
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