Normativity has long been a central concept in ethics, medicine, and the social sciences. It has not been fully explored as an element in historiography or historical thought. This article contends that normativity, when taken as a metaconcept that underpins notions of the “normal,” “norms,” and “normality,” can help us understand changing attitudes to the possibility, actuality, and moral exemplarity of historical phenomena, but only if we disaggregate three different modes or registers of normativity: moral, metaphysical, and phenomenal. After exploring the place of moral normativity in historical thought and writing from antiquity to the early modern era, I discuss metaphysical and phenomenal normativity as filters that, from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century, were applied to reported or recorded experience prior to any decision to derive from it any moral conclusions. I then argue that Baconian empiricism, Humean skepticism, classical probability theory, and mathematical statistics collectively gave rise to a modern sense of what constituted “normality” for past and present events. Finally, I conclude that the late Enlightenment bequeathed to modernity and postmodernity a normalized sense of fundamental rupture (exemplified by the French Revolution and characterized as the “historical sublime”) that we still experience and struggle through as we routinely reconstruct history as both a linear tradition and a discontinuous series of “new normals.” We also contend with this sense of fundamental rupture as we “renormalize” catastrophes that could reasonably be regarded as beyond normalization while simultaneously fetishizing the experience of disruption, which we have defined as a clinamenic swerve from one normality into another. This paradoxical process is accompanied by a deadened capacity to judge that which is, and is not, normal.

中文翻译：

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回归常态：论历史和史学的规范性

规范性长期以来一直是伦理学、医学和社会科学的核心概念。它尚未作为史学或历史思想的一个要素得到充分探讨。本文认为，当规范性被视为支撑“正常”、“规范”和“正常性”概念的元概念时，可以帮助我们理解对历史现象的可能性、现实和道德范例的态度变化，但仅如果我们分解规范性的三种不同模式或记录：道德、形而上学和现象。在探索了从古代到现代早期的历史思想和写作中道德规范性的地位之后，我将形而上学和现象规范性作为过滤器进行了讨论，从中世纪到 17 世纪，在做出任何决定以从中得出任何道德结论之前，已将其应用于报告或记录的经验。然后我认为培根经验主义、休谟怀疑论、经典概率论和数理统计共同产生了对过去和现在事件构成“常态”的现代意义。最后，我得出的结论是，晚期启蒙运动为现代性和后现代性留下了一种正常化的基本断裂感（以法国大革命为例，并被描述为“历史崇高”），我们仍在经历和挣扎，因为我们经常将历史重建为线性的传统和一系列不连续的“新常态”。当我们“重新正常化”可以合理地被视为超出正常化范围的灾难，同时迷恋破坏的体验时，我们也与这种根本性的破裂感作斗争，我们将其定义为从一种常态转向另一种常态的临床转向。这种自相矛盾的过程伴随着一种迟钝的能力来判断哪些是正常的，哪些是不正常的。