Re-thinking History

‘Far and away the best introduction to the state of the question

currently available.’

Hayden White, University of California at Santa Cruz

‘It is a model of concise argument and poses fundamental questions

concerning the nature of historiography in a post modernist world.’

Alan White, University of East London

‘An excellent introduction to historical method.’

Kevin Harrison, Mancat School

‘A valuable, concise introduction to the influence of post-modernism

on history.’

M. Thomson, Sheffield University

‘A challenging book which makes accessible recent developments in

the philosophy of history.’

David Dean, Goldsmith College, University of London

‘An excellent introductory text to the field, . . . a very manageable and

accessible work written in an attractively informal style.’

C. M. Williams, University of Wales

‘Keith Jenkins’ Rethinking History is a startlingly clear and thoughtprovoking introduction to current central debates in history and historiography. It is accessible to history students, students in subjects

that draw on historical past and to the general reader. Already, a

classic text book.’

Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway, University of London

Keith

Jenkins

Re-thinking History

With a new preface and conversation with

the author by Alun Munslow

London and New York

First published 1991

by Routledge

First published in Routledge Classics 2003

by Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

© 1991 Keith Jenkins

Preface to Routledge Classics edition and ‘In Conversation:

Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow’ © 2003 Alun Munslow

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted

or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,

mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter

invented, including photocopying and recording, or in

any information storage or retrieval system, without

permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0–415–30443–1 (pbk)

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.

ISBN 0-203-42686-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-43977-5 (Adobe eReader Format)

(Print Edition)

For Sue Morgan with much love

CONTENTS

Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition by

Alun Munslow xi

In Conversation: Keith Jenkins and Alun

Munslow xv

Introduction 1

1 What history is 6

2 On some questions and some answers 33

3 Doing history in the post-modern world 70

Notes 85

Index 93

Every discipline, I suppose, is, as Nietzsche saw most clearly,

constituted by what it forbids its practitioners to do. Every discipline is made up of a set of restrictions on thought and

imagination, and none is more hedged about with taboos than

professional historiography – so much so that the so-called

‘historical method’ consists of little more than the injunction to

‘get the story straight’ (without any notion of what the relation

of ‘story’ to ‘fact’ might be) and to avoid both conceptual

overdetermination and imaginative excess (i.e., ‘enthusiasm’)

at any price.

Yet the price paid is a considerable one. It has resulted in the

repression of the conceptual apparatus (without which atomic

facts cannot be aggregated into complex macrostructures and

constituted as objects of discursive representation in a historical

narrative) and the remission of the poetic moment in historical

writing to the interior of the discourse (where it functions as an

unacknowledged – and therefore uncriticizable – content of the

historical narrative).

Those historians who draw a firm line between history and

philosophy of history fail to recognise that every historical discourse contains within it a full-blown, if only implicit, philosophy of history. . . . The principal difference between history

and philosophy of history is that the latter brings the conceptual apparatus by which the facts are ordered in the discourse to the surface of the text, while history proper (as it is

called) buries it in the interior of the narrative, where it serves

as a hidden or implicit shaping device....

Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse, pp. 126–7

PREFACE TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION

Everything, everybody and every book have a history. What Keith

Jenkins’ book Re-Thinking History, published in 1991, made us all

aware of is that such histories are, indeed, just that. They are

only histories. This means we would do well to recognise and

remember that the histories we assign to things and people are

composed, created, constituted, constructed and always situated

literatures. And, what is more, they carry within them their

author’s philosophy or ‘take’ on the world present, past and

future. Such is the importance and influence of this book,

especially among the younger generation of history students,

that it now seems quaintly old fashioned to bother to point out

that ‘history’ is not the same as ‘the past’. By the same token that

as a form of knowledge history is – plainly and palpably – a

narrative representation.

That history is not some kind of mirror of past reality (and

not because it is distorted by the bees in the bonnet of the

historian, or their poor inference, or the poverty of their

sources) seems a pretty obvious thing to say these days. This, the

essential ‘historicist’ message of Re-Thinking History has, of

course, itself a history. Keith Jenkins admits his indebtedness

at the outset with the lengthy quotation from the American

philosopher of history Hayden White. What White is pointing

to is what Keith Jenkins views as the doubtful belief – still

shared by a great many historians – that we can know the

truth of the past through a detailed knowledge of what

happened: the facts of the matter. In other words, through the

‘empirical method’ we ‘discover’ our ‘subject knowledge’,

which constitutes the only way we can possess ‘objective

knowledge’ in our history. And, hence, this is how we get the

story straight.

The point at issue is the one about knowledge – what and how

it is possible ‘to know’ the past? Taking his cue from White but

also the other great contemporary philosopher of history Frank

Ankersmit, Jenkins pointed out that history is first and foremost

a literary narrative about the past, a literary composition of the

data into a narrative where the historian creates a meaning for the

past. The implication is that in producing our historical narratives we must no longer suppress history’s character as literature.

But there is a hugely important consequence of this. As Jenkins

argues, we must acknowledge the epistemological and philosophical assumptions historians make about the ‘proper’ way to

‘do history’.

As you will have gathered by now, the first, most widespread

and most misleading philosophical assumption that Jenkins

nails is that history can correspond with the reality of the

past through a knowledge of its content. Jenkins refuses to let

those historians off the hook who endorse this fundamental

misconception. He brings this crucial issue out into the open,

taking it from the obscurity of philosophy of history seminars,

forcing us to confront it. And in so doing he compels we historians to recognise our basic assumptions about how we conventionally think of history as an empirical method rather than

xii preface to the routledge classics edition

epistemologically as a form of literature that carries within it

our philosophies of life.

Invoking the French theorist of discourse Michel Foucault and

the American pragmatic philosopher Richard Rorty, Jenkins sustains his onslaught on the naïve idea that the past world and the

present word can match each other to do the work of truth.

Jenkins pushes home what we need to be reminded about history. That it is not the same as the past. That history is always for

someone. That history always has a purpose. That history is

always about power. That history is never innocent but always

ideological (and not in the sense of political bias, but moral

judgements about right and wrong and how the individual historian thinks the world works). He insists we think and re-think

that which we call a historical fact so that we understand it is

only a description of things that happened and which, therefore,

cannot have an intrinsic meaning (facts never speak for themselves). Moreover, we cannot empathise with people in the past

because not only is it plainly impossible to ‘get inside someone

else’s head’ but to translate another’s intentions from their

actions is an epistemological step too far. And finally, that the

logic of history is not one of discovery but of construction –

building on referentiality but deploying figurative thinking,

argument, theory, concept and ethics. The past for Jenkins is a

building site, not a foreign land to be explored.

For Jenkins, what all this means is that no amount of archival

immersion, or scientific-like methods, or the wish to be rational

and objective, or to be rigorous in our inferences, or distance

ourselves from the past, or empathise with it, can change the

essential nature of historical study. While all these things do not

necessarily do damage to the past, as a written representation of

something that cannot be recovered, history cannot be rescued

as a form of knowledge by laying it ‘firmly’on its empirical or

analytical foundations. What this means is that there is no

‘hidden’ or ‘true’ story to be ‘found’. There is no centre to

preface to the routledge classics edition xiii

history because there is no knowable past in terms of what ‘it’

means. There is only what we might call the-past-as-history.

This is what the French critic Roland Barthes called the ‘reality

effect’. We can only represent the past through the form we give

to its reality.

Jenkins closes the book by posing the question of how can we

cope with the past under these circumstances? His answer

(which he has developed far more radically of late) is that we

recognise what history clearly is: a knowledge production process that cannot work as a reconstructionist exercise. If we accept

that we all have epistemological choices open to us, that we

make ontological pre-judgements, and that we have methodological preferences, then there is no privileged or ‘right’ route

to the past.

Because of this argument – that all history is unavoidably

situated – the fact that Re-Thinking History is now officially a classic

text does not mean most historians endorse it. I would say they

don’t. Some still regard it as a dangerous book. Often you will

hear something to the effect that it has provided the profession

with a useful reminder that we should pay more attention to the

role of language in doing history and that historians usually do

have bees in their bonnet so readers must be aware. But such

comments only serve to illustrate that the message is still sinking

in. Ahead of its time in 1991, Keith Jenkins’ polemic has earned

its classic status for the way in which, more than any other latetwentieth-century work, it tried to wake up the historical profession from its empirical sleepwalking. And while still too many

in the history profession continue to slumber, the need for this

radical text continues.

A M

J 2002

xiv preface to the routledge classics edition

IN CONVERSATION

Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow

Alun: Can I begin by asking you a rather obvious question;

namely, what made you write Re-Thinking History in the first place?

Keith: There are a lot of reasons, but I suppose the main, underlying one, was my long-time interest in theory – at least a little

bit unusual for a historian. In the 1970s I had read Medieval and

Modern History at the University of Nottingham – a very traditional degree – but then I ‘transferred’ to the Politics Department where I wrote a Ph.D. in political theory (a thesis on

Nietzsche, Freud and Sorel). It was then my intention to lecture

in political theory, but jobs were scarce and in 1978 I joined the

History Department at what is now University College Chichester. At first I taught a range of history courses but, in the early

1980s, I began to work on the History PGCE, an experience

which brought me into contact with postgraduate students

drawn, over the years, from practically every university in Britain

and which – for these were trainee secondary history teachers –

concentrated my mind on the way they thought about the

‘subject’ they were themselves going to teach. And these were

‘theoretical’ issues. For example, what is history? Why should it

be taught? What is the epistemological status of historical knowledge? And so on. And what struck me here was – with notable

exceptions – not only the students’ lack of interest in such theoretical questions but often their intense hostility towards them.

Most had clearly managed to obtain good degrees (and often

higher degrees) in a ‘discipline’ whose epistemological, methodological and ethical constituents remained not only a mystery

but one they had little inclination to probe: why keep thinking

about history – why not just do it! And it seemed to me that this

unreflexive attitude – to my mind a tremendous indictment of

‘our’ history degrees – was unacceptable. Consequently, the

courses I taught right across the board increasingly drew on

historical theorising in ways influenced by my own reading as I

began to ‘move over’ from political to ‘history theory’. And here

my earlier interest in Nietzsche in particular – a ‘post-modernist’

well before the term had been invented – combined with my

discovery, in the early 1980s, of the work of Hayden White,

made me receptive to ‘postist’ theorising then circulating in

literary and cultural theory and, more generally, in philosophy.

Accordingly, it was this experience which provided the more

immediate basis for a series of articles published throughout the

1980s and which I drew on for Re-Thinking History in 1990–1.

Designed to be a short, cheap and cheerful polemic, it was deliberately opposed to the kinds of thinking about history which

undergraduates were overwhelmingly exposed to – if at all – on

their courses, thinking dominated by people like E.H. Carr and

Geoffrey Elton (whose ‘controversy’ was, in the 1960s when it

took place, already passé relative to the developing work of, say,

Barthes and Foucault and White, let alone Derrida), and by

introductory overviews on ‘the nature of history’ by people like

Arthur Marwick and John Tosh. Re-Thinking History, then, gave me

the chance to develop the idea I then had of the ‘best’ way to

xvi in conversation

theorise history – as a narrative prose discourse the content of

which is as much imagined as found and the form of which is

expungeably problematic après Hayden White – in ways which

hadn’t been much done before for history undergraduates as

opposed to ‘philosophy of history’ specialists, and it was this

popularising intention which, I suppose, may have accounted

for its relative success at the time and since.

Alun: Were you surprised at its huge success both in terms of

sales and in helping to get ‘postmodern’ ideas into what was –

and still is – arguably a very conservative ‘discipline’?

Keith: Yes and no. I mean, in many ways the kinds of things I

discussed in Re-Thinking History only appeared ‘radical’ within history. The ideas I discussed had long been circulating in practically all the other discourses around: art, architecture, literature,

sociology, philosophy. Indeed, these were the areas I drew upon,

and so the popularity (and also the vehement attacks on the

book, by Marwick for example) were a little surprising. But, on

the other hand, I knew how intellectually backward the general

condition of ‘the discipline of history’ was, and how rabidly

anti-theoretical the academic pursuit of history was, and so I

thought there was a niche market just waiting to be opened up

. . . and which needed to be opened up. In my view history, like

any other discourse in any culture, is not of ‘a natural kind’, and

is thus a theoretical, speculative experiment ‘all the way down’.

And students ought – simply by virtue of being engaged in the

processes of history production – to know something about the

product they are making and its wider conditions wherein, as an

idea, it seems ‘to make sense’. And they still do.

Alun: This leads me to ask you about the current state of

in conversation xvii

‘history and theory’. Has it developed in the last ten years in

appreciable ways and, if so, would you re-write Re-Thinking

History very differently if you were to write it today?

Keith: Well, things have certainly developed. I suppose I was a

fairly lonely voice – certainly a fairly lonely popularising voice –

in the early 1990s. But today the number of really sophisticated

texts on historical theory, historiography, historical methods

and epistemology, has multiplied enormously; there are some

brilliant texts around. And I think that it is the impact of the

‘posts’ – post-structuralism, post-Marxism, post-feminism,

post-colonialism . . . and especially the influence of various

deconstructionist approaches – which has been responsible for

trying to pull historical study – certainly of the academic, professional type (genre) taught in universities – into the late twentieth century. Whether they can get it into the twenty-first

remains to be seen...

As to re-writing Re-Thinking History differently today, that is

obviously the case: history does not and should not repeat itself!

On the other hand, I think the issues it tried to raise have by no

means gone away, and that is why I haven’t changed anything

for this Routledge Classics edition. Rather, what I have done, as

you know, is to write a new book (which will be out a little time

before this edition – in the Autumn of 2002) called Re-Figuring

History: New Thoughts on an Old Discipline – which tries to bring things

together in ways which, for what it’s worth, I see some things

now. But I regard this text as, in a way, complementing rather

than superseding Re-Thinking History: they’re both part of the same

project of trying to encourage theoretical reflections at a fairly

introductory and hopefully accessible level for students about to

embark on serious historical work.

Alun: My last question and it’s to do with what I’d like to call

xviii in conversation

your style. I know that, personally, you are an enormously laid

back and cheerful person, that you have a certain ‘lightness’ (and

the expected ironic take on things) coupled with an adventurous

openness towards newness . . . and yet you write in ways which

appear to be incredibly serious, even zealous. And, in some

ways, as your own reflections on history have developed since

Re-Thinking History you have become more extreme, writing more

and more not only on the problematical nature of history per se

but on its possible end . . . on ‘the end of history’. So is there, if I

can put it this way, not so much an irony but a paradox or even a

contradiction here?

Keith: I don’t think there is a contradiction. I mean to say, yes,

as a person I think I am (certainly speaking intellectually) fairly

cheerful and, though it may not appear that way, highly optimistic. If you are a mainstream academic historian, or if indeed

you are a radical historian, then my attempt to re-think/refigure/deconstruct/post-modernise an old discourse may

appear destructive. And in a way it is. But as I’ve put ‘if’ before,

there is more to life – more at stake in life – than the hegemonic

continuation of an ideologically positioned set of guild practices

reified by their beneficiaries into tablets of stone, and it may well

be that the having of a ‘historical consciousness’ of that or,

indeed, any other type is no longer necessary in a social formation that is, arguably, ‘no longer modern’. And so in the name

of, I suppose, future emancipation and empowerment, I am

optimistic about the kinds of histories that are now being

written of an experimental kind beyond the limits of the academic

genre – even when most generously construed – if histories per se

are still deemed to be required. And I am also optimistic about

living in a world ‘without histories’ if what passes for history,

however imagined, is a block to the imagining of things that, in

the name of emancipation and empowerment, are altogether

more relevant and to the point.

in conversation xix

As I see it, the historicisation of the past – a particular, peculiar, time-space product of a certain kind of essentially Western

European and North American consciousness of the nineteenth

century – is only one way of ‘past thinking’, only one way of

domesticating and making familiar the radical otherness of the

‘before now’ which, though ideologically understandable, is not

immune from the usual ravages of time. Things come, things go.

History as I read it, in both its meta-narrative forms (certain

Hegelianised Marxisms, say; certain productions of an immanent

kind) and in its academic, professional forms, are both interesting experiments in the construction of, as I say, something peculiar on the face of the earth: historicisations of something that

doesn’t have histories in it: the past; the ‘before now’. And so, as

I say, I’m optimistic about either re-thinking the histories that

were a crucial part of this ‘experiment of the modern’, or of

thinking thoughts of a prescient kind through another gaze,

another discursive practice that will be, hopefully, future orientated and liberating: post-modern (and post-modernism discourses) of a type, perhaps, as yet little imagined.

J 2002

xx in conversation

INTRODUCTION

This book is addressed primarily to students who are embarking

upon a study of the question, ‘what is history?’ It has been

written both as an introduction (in the literal sense that there

may be some points in what follows that have not been

encountered before) and as a polemic. In the following pages I

am running a particular argument as to what I think history is,

not that you should accept it but rather that you might engage

critically with it. The aim, throughout, is to help in the development of your own self-consciously held (reflexive) position

on history . . . to be in control of your own discourse.1

Both these things – an introductory text and a polemic – seem

to me to be necessary at this point in time. For although there are

introductory texts on the market already, popular primers such

as Edward Carr’s What is History?, Geoffrey Elton’s The Practice of

History and Arthur Marwick’s The Nature of History2

 these, despite

their sometime revision, still carry with them the ballast of their

formative years (the 1950s and 1960s) such that they have now

effectively become old favourites. They are also in a sense (as are

more recent additions to the genre such as John Tosh’s The Pursuit

of History3

) very ‘English’ texts, a characteristic which has had the

somewhat unfortunate consequence of helping isolate history

from some of the wider and arguably more generous intellectual

developments that have recently been taking place in related

discourses. Both philosophy and literature, for example, have

engaged very seriously with the question of what is the nature of

their own nature.4

It might therefore well be argued that history is, vis-à-vis these

neighbouring discourses, theoretically backward, a remark that

perhaps calls for an immediate illustration in order to prevent

any misunderstandings.

If you go into an academic bookshop and look over the

shelves occupied by texts on philosophy, you will find a vast

array of works wherein the problem of the foundations and

limits of what can be known and what can be done ‘philosophically’ are the staple diet: texts on ontology (theories of

being), epistemology (theories of knowledge) and methodology; texts on scepticism, on language and meaning, on types

of analysis – idealist, materialist, realist, phenomenological –

and so on. If you then wander over to the shelves on literature,

you will find a separate section on literary theory (in addition to

a section on literary criticism). Here are texts on Marxist and

feminist readings, on Freudian and post-Freudian analyses; on

deconstructionism, critical theory, reception theory and intertextuality; on poetics, narratology, rhetoric, allegory and so

forth. But then continue over to the history area. Here it is almost

certain that there will be no section on history theory (even the

phrase looks odd and clumsy – befitting unfamiliarity) but only,

tucked away discreetly amongst the serried ranks of history

books, the aforementioned Elton and others with, if you are

lucky, perhaps an odd copy of (a now domesticated) Geyl or

Bloch or Collingwood or, if you are luckier still, a ‘recent’

Hayden White or a Foucault.5

 In other words, in moving across a

2 introduction

few feet of flooring you are, in the main, moving across a generation gap; from theoretically rich and very recent texts to works

on the nature of history produced twenty to thirty years ago or,

in the case of Bloch and his contemporaries, in the 1930s and

1940s.

Now this is obviously not to say that enormously sophisticated and more recent texts on history and ‘history theory’ do

not exist (thus, variously, Callinicos or Oakeshott; thus various

post-modernist works; thus developments in the areas of intellectual and cultural history6

). Nor is it to say that this lack of

concern for history theory and its consequences has not been

regularly noticed. Long ago Gareth Stedman-Jones pointed to the

poverty of English empiricism; more recently Raphael Samuel

has commented on the relatively retarded condition of much

historical work with its fetishism of the document, its obsession

with ‘the facts’ and its accompanying methodology of ‘naïve

realism’. David Cannadine’s essay, with his strictures against the

sterility, downright dullness and myopia of much mainstream

history, has been much referred to by professional historians,

whilst Christopher Parker’s study of the major characteristics of

the ‘English tradition’ of historical writing as exemplified by

its leading exponents since c. 1850, is an investigation of

that deep rut within which a certain type of individualism has

run, a methodological perspective largely unreflexive about

its own ideological presuppositions.7

 Yet such developments

and analyses as these have not significantly fed through so as to

inform the more popular surveys and guides to the nature of

history. Theoretical discussions are still on the whole skirted by

robustly practical practising historians, and certainly the occasional text on theory does not exert the same kind of heavy

pressure that the many texts on, say, literary theory, exert on the

study of literature.

But arguably this is the way that history ought to go if it is to

be ‘modernised’. Accordingly I have drawn here on such related

introduction 3

areas as philosophy and literary theory. For if ‘doing history’ is

about how you can read and make sense of the past and the

present, then it seems important to me to use discourses that

have ‘readings’ and the construction of meanings as major

concerns.8

How, then, is the text structured? It has three quite deliberately short chapters.9

 In the first I address directly the question

of what history is and how the history question can be answered

in ways which do not necessarily replicate more ‘English’ formulations, that do not leave such dominant (common-sense)

discourses as unproblematic and which begin to open up history

to somewhat wider perspectives. (Bear in mind that ‘history’ is

really ‘histories’, for at this point we ought to stop thinking of

history as though it were a simple and rather obvious thing and

recognise that there is a multiplicity of types of history whose

only common feature is that their ostensible object of enquiry is

‘the past’.)

In chapter 2 I apply that ‘answer’ to some of the issues and

problems commonly surfacing in some of the more basic and

introductory debates about the nature of history. Here I shall

argue that, although regularly posed, such issues and problems

are more rarely resolved or put into context, leaving them tantalisingly open ended and/or mystifying. These are problems such

as: is it possible to say what really happened in the past, to get to

the truth, to reach objective understandings or, if not, is history

incorrigibly interpretive? What are historical facts (and indeed

are there any such things)? What is bias and what does it mean

to say that historians ought to detect it and root it out? Is it

possible to empathise with people who lived in the past? Is a

scientific history possible or is history essentially an art? What is

the status of those couplets that so often appear in definitions

of what history is all about: cause and effect, similarity and

difference, continuity and change?

In chapter 3 I pull together all the points I will by then have

4 introduction

made by relating them to the position from which I am working; by inserting them into the context that I think informs this

text. I have said already that the point of the text is to offer some

assistance towards the working out of some of the arguments

that gravitate around the question of what is history and so, to

further this aim, I thought it appropriate to say why I consider

what history is in the way that I do and not in other ways, to

position myself in the discourse I have been commenting upon

and consider its possibilities. I hasten to add that I do this not

because my ideas are necessarily of much significance but

because, not existing in a vacuum, it may well be that the times

that have produced me, that have so to speak ‘written me’, will

already have and will continue to write you too. I refer to these

times as post-modern and thus end with a short contextualising

chapter entitled ‘Doing history in the post-modern world’ –

arguably the world we live in.

introduction 5

1

WHAT HISTORY IS

In this chapter I want to try and answer the question ‘what is

history?’ To do this I will look initially at what history is in

theory; secondly examine what it is in practice; and finally put

theory and practice together into a definition – a methodologically informed sceptical/ironic definition – that I hope is comprehensive enough to give you a reasonable grip not only on the

‘history question’ but also on some of the debates and positions

that surround it.

ON THEORY

At the level of theory I would like to make two points. The first

(which I will outline in this paragraph and then develop) is that

history is one of a series of discourses about the world. These

discourses do not create the world (that physical stuff on which

we apparently live) but they do appropriate it and give it all the

meanings it has. That bit of the world which is history’s (ostensible) object of enquiry is the past. History as discourse is thus in

a different category to that which it discourses about, that is, the

past and history are different things. Additionally, the past and

history are not stitched into each other such that only one historical reading of the past is absolutely necessary. The past and

history float free of each other, they are ages and miles apart. For

the same object of enquiry can be read differently by different

discursive practices (a landscape can be read/interpreted

differently by geographers, sociologists, historians, artists,

economists, etc.) whilst, internal to each, there are different

interpretive readings over time and space; as far as history is

concerned historiography shows this.

The above paragraph is not an easy one. I have made a lot of

statements, but all of them revolve, actually, around the distinction between the past and history. This distinction is therefore

crucial for you to understand, for if it is appreciated then it and

the debates it gives rise to will help to clarify what history is in

theory. Accordingly I will examine the points I have just made,

by looking in some detail at the past-history difference and then

by considering some of the main consequences arising from it.

Let me begin with the idea that history is a discourse about,

but categorically different from, the past. This might strike you

as odd for you may have missed this distinction before or, if not,

you may still not have bothered too much about it. One of the

reasons why this is so, why the distinction is generally left

unworked, is because as English-speakers we tend to lose sight of

the fact that there actually is this distinction between history – as

that which has been written/recorded about the past – and the

past itself, because the word history covers both things.1

 It would

be preferable, therefore, always to register this difference by

using the term ‘the past’ for all that has gone on before everywhere, whilst using the word ‘historiography’ for history, historiography referring here to the writings of historians. This

would be good practice (the past as the object of the historians’

attention, historiography as the way historians attend to it)

what history is 7

leaving the word ‘History’ (with a capital H) to refer to the

whole ensemble of relations. However, habit might be hard to

break, and I might myself use the word ‘history’ to refer to the

past, to historiography and to the totality of relationships. But

remember if and when I do, I keep the said distinction in mind –

and you should too.

It may well be, however, that this clarification on the

past-history distinction seems inconsequential; that one is left

thinking, so what? What does it matter? Let me offer three

illustrations of why the past-history distinction is important to

understand.

1 The past has occurred. It has gone and can only be brought

back again by historians in very different media, for

example in books, articles, documentaries, etc., not as

actual events. The past has gone and history is what historians make of it when they go to work. History is the labour

of historians (and/or those acting as if they were historians) and when they meet, one of the first questions they

ask each other is what they are working on. It is this work,

embodied in books, periodicals, etc., that you read when

you do history (‘I am going to university to read history’).

What this means is that history is quite literally on library

and other shelves. Thus if you start a course on

seventeenth-century Spain, you do not actually go to the

seventeenth century or to Spain; you go, with the help of

your reading list, to the library. This is where seventeenthcentury Spain is – between Dewey numbers – for where

else do teachers send you in order to ‘read it up’? Of

course you could go to other places where you can find

other traces of the past – for example Spanish archives –

but wherever you go, when you get there you will have ‘to

read’. This reading is not spontaneous or natural but

learned – on various courses for example – and informed

8 what history is

(made meaning-full) by other texts. History (historiography) is an inter-textual, linguistic construct.

2 Let us say that you have been studying part of England’s

past – the sixteenth century – at A level. Let us imagine that

you have used one major text-book: Elton’s England under the

Tudors. In class you have discussed aspects of the sixteenth

century, you have class notes, but for your essays and the

bulk of your revision you have used Elton. When the exam

came along you wrote in the shadow of Elton. And when

you passed, you gained an A level in English history, a

qualification for considering aspects of ‘the past’. But

really it would be more accurate to say you have an A level

in Geoffrey Elton: for what, actually, at this stage, is your

‘reading’ of the English past if not basically his reading of

it?

3 These two brief examples of the past-history distinction

may seem innocuous, but actually it can have enormous

effects. For example, although millions of women have

lived in the past (in Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages,

Africa, America . . .) few of them appear in history, that

is, in history texts. Women, to use a phrase, have been

‘hidden from history’, that is, systematically excluded

from most historians’ accounts. Accordingly, feminists are

now engaged in the task of ‘writing women back into

history’, whilst both men and women are looking at the

interconnected constructions of masculinity.2

 And at this

point you might pause to consider how many other

groups, people(s), classes, have been/are omitted from

histories and why; and what might be the consequences if

such omitted ‘groups’ were central to historical accounts

and the now central groups were marginalised.

More will be said about the significance and possibilities of

working the past-history distinction later, but I would now like

what history is 9

to look at another argument from the earlier paragraph (p. 5)

where I said that we have to understand that the past and history

are not stitched into each other such that one and only one

reading of any phenomenon is entailed, that the same object of

enquiry is capable of being read differently by different discourses whilst, internal to each, there are different readings over

space and time.

To begin to illustrate this, let us imagine that through a

window we can see a landscape (though not all of it because the

window-frame quite literally ‘frames’ it). We can see in the

foreground several roads; beyond we can see other roads with

houses alongside; we can see rolling fields with farmhouses in

them; on the skyline, some miles away, we can see ridges of hills.

In the middle distance we can see a market-town. The sky is a

watery blue.

Now there is nothing in this landscape that says ‘geography’.

Yet clearly a geographer could account for it geographically.

Thus s/he might read the land as displaying specific field

patterns and farming practices; the roads could become part of

a series of local/regional communication networks, the farms

and town could be read in terms of a specific population distribution; contour maps could chart the terrain, climatic geographers could explain the climate/weather and, say, consequent

types of irrigation. In this way the view could become something else – geography. Similarly, a sociologist could take the

same landscape and construct it sociologically: people in the

town could become data for occupational structures, size of

family units, etc.; population distribution could be considered

in terms of class, income, age, sex; climate could be seen as

affecting leisure facilities, and so on.

Historians too can turn the same landscape into their

discourse. Field patterns today could be compared to those

pre-enclosure; population now to that of 1831, 1871; land

ownership and political power analysed over time; one could

10 what history is

examine how a bit of the view edges into a national park, of

when and why the railway and canal ceased functioning and

so on.

Now, given that there is nothing intrinsic in the view that

shouts geography, sociology, history, etc., then we can see

clearly that whilst historians and the rest of them do not invent

the view (all that stuff seems to be there all right) they do invent

all its descriptive categories and any meanings it can be said to

have. They construct the analytical and methodological tools to

make out of this raw material their ways of reading and talking

about it: discoursing. In that sense we read the world as a text,

and, logically, such readings are infinite. By which I do not mean

that we just make up stories about the world/the past (that is,

that we know the world/the past and then make up stories about

them) but rather the claim is a much stronger one; that the

world/the past comes to us always already as stories and that we

cannot get out of these stories (narratives) to check if they

correspond to the real world/past, because these ‘always already’

narratives constitute ‘reality’. Which means, in the example

being discussed, that the landscape (which only becomes meaningful as a reading) cannot fix such readings once and for all;

thus geographers may interpret and re-interpret (read and reread) the landscape endlessly whilst arguing about just what is

being said here ‘geographically’. Additionally, given that geography as a discourse has not always existed, then not only have

geographers’ readings had to begin and not only have they

differed over space and time, but geographers have themselves

understood/read what constitutes the discourse they are working within differently too; that is, geography itself as a way of

reading the world needs interpreting/historicising. And so it is

with sociology and history. Different sociologists and historians

interpret the same phenomenon differently through discourses

that are always on the move, that are always being de-composed

and re-composed; are always positioned and positioning, and

what history is 11

which thus need constant self-examination as discourses by

those who use them.

At this point, then, let me assume that the argument that

history as a discourse is categorically different to the past has

been indicated. I said at the start of the chapter, however, that at

the level of theory vis-à-vis what is history, I would be making

two points. Here is the second.

Given the past-history distinction, the problem for the historian who somehow wants to capture the past within his/her

history thus becomes: how do you fit these two things together?

Obviously how this connection is attempted, how the historian

tries to know the past, is crucial in determining the possibilities

of what history is and can be, not least because it is history’s

claim to knowledge (rather than belief or assertion) that makes

it the discourse it is (I mean, historians do not usually see themselves as writers of fiction, although inadvertently they may be).3

Yet because of the past-history difference, and because the object

of enquiry that historians work on is, in most of its manifestations, actually absent in that only traces of the past remain, then

clearly there are all kinds of limits controlling the knowledge

claims that historians can make. And for me, in this fitting

together of past-history, there are three very problematic theoretical areas: areas of epistemology, methodology and ideology,

each of which must be discussed if we are to see what history is.

Epistemology (from the Greek episteme = knowledge) refers to

the philosophical area of theories of knowledge. This area is

concerned with how we know about anything. In that sense

history is part of another discourse, philosophy, taking part in

the general question of what it is possible to know with reference to its own area of knowledge – the past. And here you

might see the problem already, for if it is hard to know about

something that exists, to say something about an effectively

absent subject like ‘the past in history’ is especially difficult. It

seems obvious that all such knowledge is therefore likely to be

12 what history is

tentative, and constructed by historians working under all kinds

of presuppositions and pressures which did not, of course, operate on people in the past. Yet, we still see historians trying to

raise before us the spectre of the real past, an objective past about

which their accounts are accurate and even true. Now I think

such certaintist claims are not – and never were – possible to

achieve, and I would say that in our current situation this ought

to be obvious – as I will argue in chapter 3. Yet to accept this, to

allow doubt to run, clearly affects what you might think history

is, that is, it gives you part of the answer to what history is and

can be. For to admit not really to know, to see history as being

(logically) anything you want it to be (the fact-value distinction

allows this; besides there have been so very many histories)

poses the question of how specific histories came to be constructed into one shape rather than another, not only epistemologically, but methodologically and ideologically too. Here, what

can be known and how we can know interact with power. Yet in

a sense this is so – and this point must be stressed – only because

of history’s epistemological fragility. For if it were possible to

know once and for all, now and for ever, then there would be no

need for any more history to be written, for what would be the

point of countless historians saying it all over again in the same

way? History (historical constructions not ‘the past/future’)

would stop, and if you think that the idea of stopping history

(historians) is absurd it really isn’t: stopping history is not only

part of Orwell’s 1984 for example, but a part of European

experience in the 1930s – the more immediate time and place

that made Orwell consider it.

Epistemological fragility, then, allows for historians’ readings

to be multifarious (one past – many histories) so what is it that

makes history so epistemologically fragile? There are four basic

reasons.

First (and in what follows I draw on David Lowenthal’s

arguments in his The Past is a Foreign Country4

) no historian can

what history is 13

cover and thus re-cover the totality of past events because their

‘content’ is virtually limitless. One cannot recount more than a

fraction of what has occurred and no historian’s account ever

corresponds precisely with the past: the sheer bulk of the past

precludes total history. Most information about the past has

never been recorded and most of the rest was evanescent.

Second, no account can re-cover the past as it was because the

past was not an account but events, situations, etc. As the past has

gone, no account can ever be checked against it but only against

other accounts. We judge the ‘accuracy’ of historians’ accounts

vis-à-vis other historians’ interpretations and there is no real

account, no proper history that, deep down, allows us to check

all other accounts against it: there is no fundamentally correct

‘text’ of which other interpretations are just variations; variations are all there are. Here the cultural critic Steven Giles is

succinct when he comments that what has gone before is always

apprehended through the sedimented layers of previous interpretations and through the reading habits and categories

developed by previous/current interpretive discourses.5

 And this

insight allows us to make the point that this way of seeing things

makes the study of history (the past) necessarily a study of historiography (historians), historiography therefore being considered not as an extra to the study of history but as actually

constituting it. This is an area I shall return to in chapter 2; but

now to the third point.

And this is that no matter how verifiable, how widely acceptable or checkable, history remains inevitably a personal construct,

a manifestation of the historian’s perspective as a ‘narrator’.

Unlike direct memory (itself suspect) history relies on someone

else’s eyes and voice; we see through an interpreter who stands

between past events and our readings of them. Of course, as

Lowenthal says, written history ‘in practice’ cuts down the

historian’s logical freedom to write anything by allowing the

reader access to his/her sources, but the historian’s viewpoint

14 what history is

and predilections still shape the choice of historical materials,

and our own personal constructs determine what we make of

them. The past that we ‘know’ is always contingent upon our

own views, our own ‘present’. Just as we are ourselves products

of the past so the known past (history) is an artefact of ours.

Nobody, however immersed in the past, can divest himself/

herself of his/her own knowledge and assumptions. To explain

the past, Lowenthal notes, ‘historians go beyond the actual

record to frame hypotheses in present day modes of thought . . .

“we are moderns and our words and thought can not but be

modern”, noted Maitland, “it is too late for us to be early English”’.6

 There are, then, few limits to the shaping power of

interpretive, imagining words. ‘Look’ says the poet Khlebnikov

in his Decrees To The Planets, ‘the sun obeys my syntax’.7

 ‘Look’, says

the historian, ‘the past obeys my interpretation’.

Now this might look slightly poetical itself, so the point being

made about sources at one and the same time preventing the

historian’s total freedom and yet not fixing things such that they

can really stop endless interpretations might be illustrated by a

mundane example. Thus there are many disagreements as to

Hitler’s intentions after gaining power, and the causes of the

Second World War. One such famous long-running disagreement has been between A.J.P. Taylor and H. Trevor-Roper. This

disagreement was not based on their merits as historians; both

are very experienced, both have ‘skills’, both can read documents

and in this case they often read the same ones, yet still they

disagreed. Thus whilst the sources may prevent just anything at

all from being said, nevertheless the same events/sources do not

entail that one and only one reading has to follow.

The above three reasons for epistemological fragility are based

on the idea that history is less than the past; that historians can

only recover fragments. But the fourth point stresses that,

through hindsight, we in a way know more about the past than

the people who lived in it. In translating the past into modern

what history is 15

terms and in using knowledge perhaps previously unavailable,

the historian discovers both what has been forgotten about the

past and pieces together things never pieced together before.

People and social formations are thus caught up in processes that

can only be seen in retrospect, and documents and other traces

are ripped out of their original contexts of purpose and function

to illustrate, say, a pattern which might not be remotely meaningful to any of their authors. And all this is, as Lowenthal says,

inevitable. History always conflates, it changes, it exaggerates

aspects of the past: ‘Time is foreshortened, details selected and

highlighted, action concentrated, relations simplified, not to

[deliberately] alter . . . the events but to . . . give them meaning’.8

 Even the most empirical chronicler has to invent narrative

structures to give shape to time and place: ‘Res gestae may well be

one damned thing after another . . . but it cannot possibly appear

as such for all meaning would then be extruded from it’.9

 And

because stories emphasise linkages and play down the role of

breaks, of ruptures, then, concludes Lowenthal, histories as

known to us appear more comprehensible than we have any

reason to believe the past was.

These then are the main (and well known) epistemological

limits. I have drawn them quickly and impressionistically and

you might go on to read Lowenthal and the others yourself. But I

now intend to move on. For if these are the epistemological

limits to what can be known, then they obviously interconnect

with the ways historians try and find out as much as they can.

And, with historians’ methods as with epistemology, there are

no definitive ways that have to be used by virtue of their being

correct; historians’ methods are every bit as fragile as their

epistemologies.

So far I have argued that history is a shifting discourse constructed by historians and that from the existence of the past no

one reading is entailed: change the gaze, shift the perspective

and new readings appear. Yet although historians know all this,

16 what history is

most seem to studiously ignore it and strive for objectivity and

truth nevertheless. And this striving for truth cuts through

ideological/methodological positions.

Thus on the empirical right (somewhat), G. Elton in The Practice

of History10 states at the start of his chapter on research: ‘The study

of history, then, amounts to a search for the truth’. And,

although the same chapter ends with a series of qualifications –

‘He [the historian] knows that what he is studying is real [but]

he knows that he can never recover all of it . . . he knows that the

process of historical research and reconstruction will never end,

but he is also conscious that this does not render his work unreal

or illegimate’ – it is obvious that such caveats do not seriously

affect Elton’s originally stated ‘truth search’.

On the Marxist left (somewhat), E. P. Thompson in The Poverty

of Theory11 writes that, ‘For some time . . . the materialist conception of history . . . has been growing in self-confidence. As a

mature practice . . . it is perhaps the strongest discipline deriving

from the Marxist tradition. Even in my own life-time . . . the

advances have been considerable, and one had supposed these to

be advances in knowledge.’ Thompson admits that this is not to say

that such knowledge is subject to ‘scientific proof’, but he holds

it to be real knowledge nevertheless.

In the empirical centre (somewhat), A. Marwick in The Nature

of History12 appreciates what he calls the ‘subjective dimension’ of

historians’ accounts, but for him this doesn’t live in, say, the

historian’s ideological position, but in the nature of the evidence, historians being ‘forced into a greater display of personal

interpretation by the imperfections of their source materials’.

This being the case Marwick thus argues that it is the job of the

historians to develop ‘tight methodological rules’ whereby they

can reduce their ‘moral’ interventions. Thus Marwick links up to

Elton: ‘Elton is keen to establish that just because historical

explanation does not depend upon universal laws, that does not

mean it is not governed by very strict rules’. And so, for all these

what history is 17

historians, truth, knowledge and legitimacy derive from tight

methodological rules and procedures. It is this that cuts down

interpretive flux.

My argument is different. For me what determines interpretation ultimately lies beyond method and evidence in ideology.

For while most historians would agree that a rigorous method is

important, there is a problem as to which rigorous method they

are talking about. In Marwick’s own section on method he

reviews a selection from which one can (presumably) choose.

Thus, would you like to follow Hegel or Marx or Dilthey or

Weber or Popper or Hempel or Aron or Collingwood or Dray

or Oakeshott or Danto or Gallie or Walsh or Atkinson or Leff or

Hexter? Would you care to go along with modern empiricists,

feminists, the Annales School, neo-Marxists, new-stylists, econometricians, structuralists or post-structuralists, or even Marwick himself, to name but twenty-five possibilities? And this is a

short list! The point is that even if you could make a choice, what

would be the criteria? How could one know which method

would lead to the ‘truer’ past? Of course each method would be

rigorous, that is, internally coherent and consistent, but it would

also be self-referencing. That is, it might tell you how to conduct

valid arguments within itself but, given that all the choices do

this, then the problem of discriminating somehow between

twenty-five alternatives just will not go away. Thompson is rigorous and so is Elton; on what grounds does one choose? On

Marwick’s? But why his? So, is it not likely that in the end one

chooses say, Thompson, because one just likes what Thompson

does with his method; one likes his reasons for doing history:

for all other things being equal, why else might one take up a

position?

To summarise. Talk of method as the road to truth is misleading. There is a range of methods without any agreed criteria for

choosing. Often people like Marwick argue that despite all the

methodological differences between, say, empiricists and

18 what history is

structuralists, they do nevertheless agree on the fundamentals.

But this again is not so. The fact that structuralists go to

enormous lengths to explain very precisely that they are not

empiricists; the fact that they invented their specific approaches

precisely to differentiate themselves from everyone else seems to

have been a point somewhat ignored by Marwick and the others.

I want now to deal briefly with just one further argument

regarding method which regularly occurs in introductory

debates about the ‘nature of history’. It is about concepts and it

runs as follows: it may well be that the differences between

methods cannot be closed down, but are there not key concepts

that all historians use? Doesn’t this imply some common

methodological ground?

Now it is certainly the case that, in all types of histories, one

constantly meets so called ‘historical concepts’ (by not calling

them ‘historians’ concepts’ such concepts look impersonal and

objective, as though they belong to a history that is somehow

self-generating). Not only that, such concepts are referred to

quite regularly as the ‘heartlands’ of history. These are concepts

such as time, evidence, empathy, cause and effect, continuity and

change, and so on.

I am not going to argue that you should not ‘work’ concepts,

but I am concerned that when presenting these particular ones,

the impression is strongly given that they are indeed obvious

and timeless and that they do constitute the universal building

blocks of historical knowledge. Yet this is ironic, for one of the

things that the opening up of history ought to have done is to

historicise history itself; to see all historical accounts as

imprisoned in time and space and thus to see their concepts not

as universal heartlands but as specific, local expressions. This

historicisation is easy to demonstrate in the case of ‘common’

concepts.

In an article on new developments in history, the educationalist Donald Steel has considered how certain concepts became

what history is 19

‘heartland concepts’, showing how in the 1960s five major concepts were identified as constituting history: time, space,

sequence, moral judgement and social realism.13 Steel points out

that these were refined (not least by himself) by 1970 to provide

the ‘key concepts’ of history: time, evidence, cause and effect,

continuity and change, and similarity and difference. Steel

explains that it was these that became the basis for School’s

Council History, the GCSE, certain A level developments, and

which have been influential both in undergraduate courses and

more generally. Apparently then these ‘old’ heartlands have been

pumping away for less than twenty years, are not universal, and

do not come out of historians’ methods as such but very much

out of general educational thinking. Obviously they are ideological too, for what might happen if other concepts were used

to organise the (dominant) field: structure-agency, overdetermination, conjuncture, uneven development, centreperiphery, dominant-marginal, base-superstructure, rupture,

genealogy, mentalité, hegemony, élite, paradigm, etc.? It is time to

address ideology directly.

Let me begin with an example. It would be possible at this

point in space and time to place in any school or undergraduate

history syllabus a course that would be quite properly historical

(in that it looked like other histories) but in which the choice of

subject matter and the methodological approach was made from

a black, Marxist, feminist perspective. Yet I doubt if any such

course could be found. Why not? Not because it would not be

history, for it would, but because black Marxist-feminists don’t

really have the power to put such a course into this sort of public

circulation. Yet if one were to ask those who might well have the

power to decide what does constitute ‘suitable courses’, who

might well have the power to effect such inclusions/exclusions,

then it is likely that they would argue that the reason for such a

non-appearance is because such a course would be ideological –

that is, that the motives for such a history would come from

20 what history is

concerns external to history per se; that it would be a vehicle for

the delivery of a specific position for persuasive purposes. Now

this distinction between ‘history as such’ and ‘ideological history’ is interesting because it implies, and is meant to imply, that

certain histories (generally the dominant ones) are not ideological at all, do not position people, and do not deliver views of

the past that come from outside ‘the subject’. But we have

already seen that meanings given to histories of all descriptions

are necessarily that; not meanings intrinsic in the past (any more

than the ‘landscape’ had our meanings already in it before

we put them there) but meanings given to the past from

outside(rs). History is never for itself; it is always for someone.

Accordingly it seems plausible to say that particular social

formations want their historians to deliver particular things. It

also seems plausible to say that the predominantly delivered

positions will be in the interests of those stronger ruling blocs

within social formations, not that such positions are automatically achieved, unchallenged or secured once and for all and ‘that

is it’. The fact that history per se is an ideological construct means

that it is constantly being re-worked and re-ordered by all those

who are variously affected by power relationships; because the

dominated as well as the dominant also have their versions of the

past to legitimate their practices, versions which have to be

excluded as improper from any place on the agenda of the dominant discourse. In that sense re-orderings of the messages to be

delivered (often many such re-orderings are referred to academically as ‘controversies’) just have to be constructed continuously

because the needs of the dominant/subordinate are constantly

being re-worked in the real world as they seek to mobilise

people(s) in support of their interests. History is forged in such

conflict and clearly these conflicting needs for history impinge

upon the debates (struggle for ownership) as to what history is.

So, at this point, can we not see that the way to answer the

question of ‘what is history?’ in ways that are realistic is to

what history is 21

substitute the word ‘who’ for ‘what’, and add ‘for’ to the end of

the phrase; thus, the question becomes not ‘what is history?’ but

‘who is history for?’ If we do this then we can see that history is

bound to be problematic because it is a contested term/

discourse, meaning different things to different groups. For

some groups want a sanitised history where conflict and distress

are absent; some want history to lead to quietism; some want

history to embody rugged individualism, some to provide strategies and tactics for revolution, some to provide grounds for

counter-revolution, and so on. It is easy to see how history for a

revolutionary is bound to be different from that desired by a

conservative. It is also easy to see how the list of uses for history

is not only logically but practically endless; I mean, what would

a history be like that everyone could once and for all agree on?

Let me briefly clarify these comments with an illustration.

In his novel 1984, Orwell wrote that those who control the

present control the past and those who control the past control

the future. This seems likely outside fiction too. Thus people(s)

in the present need antecedents to locate themselves now and

legitimate their ongoing and future ways of living. (Actually of

course the ‘facts’ of the past – or anything else – legitimate

nothing at all given the fact–value distinction, but the point

being addressed here is how people act as if they do.) Thus

people(s) literally feel the need to root themselves today and

tomorrow in their yesterdays. Recently such yesterdays have

been sought for (and found, given that the past can and will

sustain countless narratives) by women, blacks, regional groupings, various minorities, etc. In these pasts explanations for

current existences and future programmes are made. A little further back and the working classes too sought to root themselves

by way of a historically contrived trajectory. Further back still

the bourgeoisie found its genealogy and began to construct its

history for itself (and others). In that sense all classes/groups

write their collective autobiographies. History is the way

22 what history is

people(s) create, in part, their identities. It is far more than a slot

in the school/academic curriculum, though we can see how

what goes into such spaces is crucially important for all those

variously interested parties.

Do we not know this all the time? Is it not obvious that such

an important ‘legitimating’ phenomenon as history is rooted in

real needs and power? I think it is, except that when the dominant discourse refers to the constant re-writing of histories it does

so in ways that displace such needs: it muses blandly that each

generation re-writes its own history. But the question is how

and why? And the arguable answer, alluded to in Orwell, is

because power relations produce ideological discourses such as

‘history as knowledge’ which are necessary for all involved in

terms of conflicting legitimation exercises.

Let us conclude the discussion of what history is in theory. I

have argued that history is composed of epistemology, methodology and ideology. Epistemology shows we can never really

know the past; that the gap between the past and history (historiography) is an ontological one, that is, is in the very nature

of things such that no amount of epistemological effort can

bridge it. Historians have devised ways of working to cut down

the influence of the interpreting historian by developing rigorous methods which they have then tried variously to universalise, so that if everyone practised them then a heartland of skills,

concepts, routines and procedures could reach towards objectivity. But there are many methodologies; the so-called heartland

concepts are of recent and partial construction, and I have

argued that the differences that we see are there because history

is basically a contested discourse, an embattled terrain wherein

people(s), classes and groups autobiographically construct

interpretations of the past literally to please themselves. There is

no definitive history outside these pressures, any (temporary)

consensus only being reached when dominant voices can silence

others either by overt power or covert incorporation. In the end

what history is 23

history is theory and theory is ideological and ideology just is

material interests. Ideology seeps into every nook and cranny of

history, including the everyday practices of making histories in

those institutions predominantly set aside in our social formation for that purpose – especially universities. Let us now look at

history as that sort of practice.

ON PRACTICE

I have just concluded that history has been and will be made for

many different reasons and in many places, and that one such

type is professional history, that is, the history produced by

(generally) salaried historians working (on the whole) in higher

education and especially universities. In The Death of the Past14 the

historian J. H. Plumb described such (Elton-like) professional

history as the process of trying to establish the truth of what

happened in the past and which could then be pitched over

against popular memory/common-sense/recipe-knowledge

‘pasts’ in order to get such half-formed, half-digested (and for

Plumb) half-baked constructions out of the way. In On Living in an

Old Country,

15 Patrick Wright has argued that not only is Plumb’s

task impossible because, as we have seen, there are no

unproblematic historical (historians’) truths as such; and that

not only is Plumb’s aim possibly undesirable because in, say,

popular memory, there may well lie strengths and alternative

readings which it might be necessary to oppose at times to

‘official’ histories (Wright suggests we think here of the proles’

memories in Orwell’s 1984) but also because one type of institution where such eradication might be carried out, the educational institution, is itself intimately involved in popular

memory-type socialisation processes. For although professional

historians overwhelmingly present themselves as academic

and disinterested, and although they are certainly in some ways

‘distanced’, nevertheless, it is more illuminating to see such

24 what history is

practitioners as being not so much outside the ideological fray

but as occupying very dominant positions within it; to see professional histories as expressions of how dominant ideologies

currently articulate history ‘academically’. It seems rather

obvious that, seen in a wider cultural and ‘historical’ perspective, multi-million pound institutional investments such as our

national universities are integral to the reproduction of the ongoing social formation and are thus at the forefront of cultural

guardianship (academic standards) and ideological control; it

would be somewhat careless if they were not.

Given that I have tried so far to locate history in the interstices

of real interests and pressures, I need to consider ‘scholarly’

pressures too, not only because it is their type of history that

predominantly defines the field as to what ‘history really is’, but

also because it is the type of history studied on A level and

undergraduate courses. On such courses you are, in effect, being

inducted into academic history; you are to become like the professionals. So what are the professionals like and how do they

make histories?16

Let us start this way. History is produced by a group of

labourers called historians when they go to work; it is their

job. And when they go to work they take with them certain

identifiable things.

First they take themselves personally: their values, positions,

their ideological perspectives.

Second they take their epistemological presuppositions. These

are not always held very consciously but historians will have ‘in

mind’ ways of gaining ‘knowledge’. Here will come into play a

range of categories – economic, social, political, cultural, ideological, etc. – a range of concepts across/within these categories

(thus within the political category there may be much use of,

say, class, power, state, sovereignty, legitimacy, etc.) and broad

assumptions about the constancy, or otherwise, of human

beings (ironically and a-historically referred to very often as

what history is 25

‘human nature’). Through the use of these categories, concepts

and assumptions, the historian will generate hypotheses, formulate abstractions, and organise and reorganise his/her materials

to include and exclude. Historians also use technical vocabularies and these in turn (aside from being inevitably anachronistic)

affect not only what they say but the way they say it. Such categories, concepts and vocabularies are constantly being

reworked, but without them historians would not be able to

understand each others’ accounts or make up their own, no

matter how much they may disagree about things.

Third, historians have routines and procedures (methods, in

the narrow sense of the term) for close working on material:

ways of checking it for its origins, position, authenticity, reliability. . . These routines will apply to all the materials worked on

albeit with various degrees of concentration and rigour (many

slips and mistakes occur). Here are a range of techniques

running from the elaborate to the nitty-gritty; these are the sorts

of practices often referred to as ‘historians’ skills’, techniques

which we can see now, in passing, as but themselves passing

moments in that combination of factors that make histories. (In

other words history is not about ‘skills’.) So, armed with these

sorts of practices, the historian can get down more directly to

‘make up’ some history – ‘making histories’.

Fourth, in going about their work of finding various materials

to work on and ‘work up’, historians shuttle between other

historians’ published work(s) (stored up labour-time as

embodied in books, articles, etc.) and unpublished materials.

This unpublished ‘newish’ material can be called the traces of

the past (literally the remaining marks from the past – documents, records, artefacts, etc.), these traces being a mixture of

the known (but little used) trace, new, unused and possibly

unknown traces, and old traces; that is, materials used before

but, because of the newish/new traces found, now capable of

being placed in contexts different to those they have occupied

26 what history is

before. The historian can then begin to organise all these elements in new (and various) ways – always looking for that longedfor ‘original thesis’ – and so begins to transform the traces of the

once concrete into the ‘concrete in thought’, that is, into historians’ accounts. Here the historian literally re-produces the traces

of the past in a new category and this act of trans-formation –

the past into history – is his/her basic job.

Fifth, having done their research, historians then have to write

it up. This is where the epistemological, methodological and

ideological factors agains come into play, interconnecting with

everyday practices, as they will have done throughout the

research phases. Obviously such pressures of the everyday will

vary but some include:

1 Pressures from family and/or friends (‘Not another weekend working!’ ‘Can’t you give your work a rest?’);

2 Pressures from the work-place, where the various influences of heads of faculty, departmental heads, peer group,

institutional research policies and, dare it be said, the

obligation to teach students, all bear down;

3 Pressures from publishers with regard to several factors:

wordage: the constraints on wordage are considerable and

have effects. Think how different historical knowledge

could be were all books a third shorter or four times

longer than ‘normal’ size!

format: the size of page, print, with or without illustrations, with or without exercises, bibliography, index,

etc.; in looseleaf, with accompanying tape or video – all

these have effects too.

market: who the historian sees as his/her market will

influence what is said and how: think how the French

Revolution of 1789 would have to be ‘different’ for

young school children, sixth-formers, non-Europeans,

‘revolutionary specialists’, the interested layman.

what history is 27

deadlines: how long the writer has in total to do the

research and write it up, and how that time is allocated

(one day a week, a term off, at weekends) affects, say,

the availability of sources, the historian’s concentration,

etc. Again, the sorts of conditions the publisher sets

regarding completion are often crucial.

literary style: how the historian writes (polemically, discursively, flamboyantly, pedantically, and in combinations of these) and the grammatical, syntactical and

semantic reach, all affect the account and may well have

to be modified to fit the publisher’s house-style, series

format, etc.

referees: publishers send manuscripts to readers who may

call for drastic changes in terms of the organisation of

material (this text, for example, was originally nearly

twice as long); again, some referees have been known to

have axes to grind.

re-writing: at all stages until the text goes to print rewritings take place. Sometimes sections will require

three drafts, sometimes thirteen. Bright ideas that

seemed initially to say it all become weary and flat when

you have tried to write it all a dozen times; again, things

you were originally putting in are left out and things

left in often seem hostages to fortune. What kinds of

judgements are involved here as the writer ‘works’ all

those traces read and noted (often imperfectly) so long

before?

And so on. Now, these are obvious points (think here how many

outside factors, that is, factors outside ‘the past’, operate on you

and influence what you write in essays and studies), but the

thing to stress here is that none of these pressures, indeed none

of the processes discussed in this chapter, operated on the events

being accounted for; on, say, manpower planning in the First

28 what history is

World War. Here, again, the gaps between the past and history

yawn.

Sixth, what has been written so far has been about the production of histories. But texts also have to be read; consumed. Just as

you can consume cake, in many different ways (slowly, gulping

it), in a variety of situations (at work, driving a car), in relation

to other courses (have you already had enough, is digestion

hard) and in a variety of settings (if you’re on a diet, at a

wedding), none of which ever comes round in exactly the same

way again, so the consumption of a text takes place in contexts

that do not repeat themselves. Quite literally no two readings are

the same. (Sometimes you might write comments in the margins of a text and then, returning to it some time later, not

remember why you wrote what you did; yet they are exactly the

same words on the same page, so just how do meanings retain

meaning?) Thus no reading, even by the same person, can be

guaranteed to produce the same effects repeatedly, which means

that authors cannot force their intentions/interpretations on the

reader. Conversely, readers cannot fully fathom everything the

authors intend. Further, the same text can be inserted first into

one broad discourse and then into another: there are no logical

limits, each reading is another writing. This is the world of the

deconstructionist text where any text, in other contexts, can

mean many things. Here is a ‘world of difference’.

And yet these last remarks seem to raise a problem (but on

your reading did a problem arise for you; and is yours different

to mine?). The problem raised for me is this: although the above

seems to suggest that all is interpretive flux, in fact we ‘read’ in

fairly predictable ways. So, in that sense, what pins readings

down? Well, not detailed agreement on all and everything

because the details will always float free – specific things can

always be made to mean more or less – but general agreements

do occur. They do so because of power; here we return to ideology. For what arguably stops texts from being used in totally

what history is 29

arbitrary ways is the fact that certain texts are nearer to some

texts than others; are more or less locatable into genres, into

slots; are more or less congenial to the needs that people(s) have

and which are expressed in texts. And so, après Orwell, they find

affinities and fixing posts (booklists, recommended readings,

Dewey numbers) that are themselves ultimately arbitrary, but

which relate to the more permanent needs of groups and classes:

we live in a social system – not a social random. This is a complicated but essential area to consider and you might note here

texts by theorists such as Scholes, Eagleton, Fish and Bennett,

wherein how this might well work is discussed.17 You might also

reflect upon how this somewhat baffling situation – of the wayward text which does not logically have to settle down but

which does so in practice – relates to an interpretive anxiety

which students often have. Their anxiety is this: if you understand that history is what historians make; that they make it on

slender evidence; that history is inescapably interpretive and that

there are at least half a dozen sides to every argument so that

history is relative, then you might think well, if it seems just

interpretation and nobody really knows, then why bother doing

it? If it is all relative what is the point? This is a state of mind we

might call ‘hapless relativism’.

In a sense this way of looking at things is a positive one. It is

liberating, for it throws out old certainties and those who have

benefited from them are capable of being exposed. And in a

sense everything is relative (historicist). But, liberating or not,

this still sometimes leaves people feeling as if they are in a dead

end. Yet there is no need to. To deconstruct other peoples’ histories is the precondition of constructing your own in ways which

suggest you know what you are doing; in ways which remind

you that history is always history for someone. For although, as I

have said, logically all accounts are problematic and relative, the

point is that some are actually dominant and others marginal. All

are logically the same but in actuality they are different; they are

30 what history is

in evaluative (albeit ultimately groundless) hierarchies. The

question then becomes ‘why?’ and the answer is because knowledge is related to power and that, within social formations,

those with the most power distribute and legitimate ‘knowledge’ vis-à-vis interests as best they can. This is the way out of

relativism in theory, by analyses of power in practice, and thus a

relativist perspective need not lead to despair but to the beginning of a general recognition of how things seem to operate.

This is emancipating. Reflexively, you too can make histories.

ON A DEFINITION OF HISTORY

I have just argued that history in the main is what historians

make. So why the fuss; isn’t this what history is? In a way it is,

but obviously not quite. What historians do in a narrow working

sense is fairly easy to describe; we can draw up a job description.

The problem, however, comes when this activity gets inserted,

as it must, back into the power relations within any social formation out of which it comes; when different people(s),

groups and classes ask: ‘What does history mean for me/us,

and how can it be used or abused?’ It is here, in usages and

meanings, that history becomes so problematic; when the question ‘What is history?’ becomes, as I have explained, ‘Who is

history for?’ This is the bottom line; so, what is history for me?

A definition:

History is a shifting, problematic discourse, ostensibly about

an aspect of the world, the past, that is produced by a group

of present-minded workers (overwhelmingly in our culture

salaried historians) who go about their work in mutually recognisable ways that are epistemologically, methodologically,

ideologically and practically positioned and whose products,

once in circulation, are subject to a series of uses and abuses

that are logically infinite but which in actuality generally

what history is 31

correspond to a range of power bases that exist at any given

moment and which structure and distribute the meanings of

histories along a dominant-marginal spectrum.18

32 what history is

2

ON SOME QUESTIONS AND

SOME ANSWERS

Having given a definition of history I now want to work it

such that it might give answers to the sort of basic questions

that often arise with regard to the nature of history. Because

this text is short my comments will be brief; but brief or not, I

hope that the answers I will be suggesting point both in the

direction and to the way in which more sophisticated,

nuanced and qualified responses can be made. Besides, I think

a guide such as this (a sort of ‘rough guide to history’) is

needed, not least because, although questions on the nature of

history are regularly raised, the tendency is to leave them open

so that you can then ‘make up your own mind’. Now I too

want that, but I am aware that very often the various ‘nature of

history’ debates are perceived only dimly (I mean there seems

so many alternatives to fit in, so many possible orderings of

the basic constituents) such that some doubt and confusion

can remain. So for a change as it were, here are some questions and some answers.

1 What is the status of truth in the discourses of history?

2 Is there any such thing as an objective history (are there

objective ‘facts’ etc.), or is history just interpretation?

3 What is bias and what are the problems involved in trying

to get rid of it?

4 What is empathy; can it be done, how, why, and if it

cannot be achieved, why does it seem so important to try?

5 What are the differences between primary and secondary

sources (traces) and between ‘evidence’ and ‘sources’:

what is at stake here?

6 What do you do with those couplets (cause and effect,

continuity and change, similarity and difference) and is it

possible to do what you are asked to do through using

them?

7 Is history an art or a science?

ON TRUTH

It may look as if I have dealt already with whether we can know

the truth of the past. I have run arguments from Elton and others

where the aim of historical study is to gain real (true) knowledge, and suggested this is, strictly speaking, unachievable.

Again I have tried to show the epistemological, methodological,

ideological and practical reasons why this is so. However, I think

that two remaining areas still need to be explored so that previous points can be developed: first, if we cannot ultimately know

the truths of the past then why do we keep searching for them

and, second, how does the term ‘truth’ – irrespective of whether

or not there is any such thing – function in the discourses of

history?

So why do we need truth? At one level the answer seems

obvious. For without it certaintist concepts – objectivity,

essence, essential, unbiased, etc. – which fix things and close

them down, would be powerless. Without objectivity how do

34 on some questions and some answers

we discriminate between rival accounts of the same phenomenon; more mundanely, how can we actually decide what were

the most important causes of the 1832 Reform Act? These sorts

of worries seem to haunt us.

But why? Beyond the immediately practical, where does this

desire for certainty come from? The reasons are many, ranging

from generalisations about the ‘western tradition’ to psychosocial fears of ‘loss’ before uncertainty. The often-quoted

comment by the philosopher A. N. Whitehead, that the dominant philosophical tradition in the west (‘The Western Tradition’)

is a series of footnotes to Plato explains much, given Plato’s view

that absolute knowledge (of justice, of virtue, of the best polity)

in its pure forms was possible and could be ascertained through

philosophical argument (with the implication that it would not

be rational to act non-virtuously if one knew what virtue was; a

view that good/true knowledge ought to entail good/true practice). Also crucial are Christian arguments that the word of God

was the word of Truth, and that knowing Him was knowing

Truth; that Christianity provides criteria for judging everything

and everyone on the scales of right and wrong. Additionally,

constant attempts within western thought in so many of its

manifestations (philosophy, theology, aesthetics, etc.) to formulate some connection between word and world through correspondence theories of truth, long kept a destructive scepticism

(sophism, nominalism, anti-foundationalism) somewhat at bay.

The development of rationality and science and the fact that

science really does seem ‘to work’ are further contributing factors. Add to them that in everyday life truth and its synonyms are

in common usage (‘tell the truth’; ‘did you truly say that?’; ‘how

can I trust you?’; ‘are you absolutely certain?’); add to that one’s

experiences of education (‘who can give me the correct answer?’

‘do it again, it’s wrong’); add to that all those certaintist ticks and

crosses on all those exercise books; and add to that all those

textbooks that intimidate us because we cannot see how their

on some questions and some answers 35

‘contents’ have been made – in all these ways truth seems naturally at hand.

But in a culture nothing is natural. Today we know of no

foundations for Platonic absolutes. Today we live with the idea of

God’s absence. We have deconstructed and made arbitrary and

pragmatic the connections between word and world. We have

seen, this century, the incapacity of reason to demonstrably disempower irrationalism. Although physicists and engineers get

on with their work and their hypothetico-deductive reasonings,

the grounds for their success remain enigmatic: ‘Why it should

be that the external world, in the naïve, obvious sense, should

concur with the regularity-postulates, with the mathematical

and rule-bound expectations of investigative rationalism, no one

knows.’1

 And we understand, of course, the ‘common sense’, of

persistent habitual homilies, long after the reasons for them have

gone: ‘We still speak of “sunrise” and “sunset”. We do so as if

the Copernican model of the solar system had not replaced,

ineradicably, the Ptolemaic. Vacant metaphors, eroded figures of

speech, inhabit our vocabulary and grammar. They are caught,

tenaciously, in the scaffolding and recesses of our common

parlance.’2

All this then, if we can still use the word, we know. We are (our

culture is) a-moral, sceptical, ironic, secular. We are partners

with uncertainty; we have disturbed truth, have tracked it

down and found it to be a linguistic sign, a concept. Truth is a

self-referencing figure of speech, incapable of accessing the

phenomenal world: word and world, word and object, remain

separate. Let us examine now these points in general terms, and

then relate them to that similar separation between the phenomenal past and discursive history and so draw this first question to

a close.

In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault points to both the

absurdity and yet the practicality of correspondences between

words and things:

36 on some questions and some answers

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the

laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar

landmarks of thought – our thought, the thought that bears the

stamp of our age and our geography – breaking up all the

ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse

our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This

passage quotes ‘a certain Chinese Encyclopaedia’ in which it is

written that animals are divided into:

(a) belonging to the Emperor

(b) embalmed

(c) tame

(d) sucking pigs

(e) sirens

(f) fabulous

(g) stray dogs

(h) included in the present classification

(i) frenzied

(j) innumerable

(k) drawn with a very fine camel-haired brush

(l) et cetera

(m) having just broken the water pitcher

(n) that from a long way off look like flies.

In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in

one great leap, the thing that . . . is demonstrated as the exotic

charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our

own, the stark impossibility of [us] thinking that.

3

Foucault’s point is clear. It is the arbitrariness of the definition,

one that looks so odd to us but not to the encyclopaedist to

whom it literally made sense whilst, of course, any definition we

offered would look odd to him/her. What is missing here then is

on some questions and some answers 37

any necessary connection between word and world. Thus the

literary and cultural theorist, George Steiner:

It is this break . . . between word and world which constitutes

one of the very few genuine revolutions . . . in Western history. . . . The word rose has neither stem nor leaf nor thorn. It is

neither pink nor red nor yellow. It exudes no odour. It is, per se,

a wholly arbitrary marker, an empty sign. Nothing whatever . . .

in its phonemic components, etymological history or grammatical functions, has any correspondence whatever to what we

believe or imagine to be the object of its purely conventional

reference.4

This ‘break’ has been underlined by the American pragmatist

Richard Rorty, commenting that about two hundred years ago

Europeans realised that truth was always created and never

found.5

 Yet, despite the slippage between word and world, and

despite the fact that all meanings/truths are created in contingent circumstances, things do, nevertheless, seem to correspond. But why, given that in our sceptical-ironic situation they

need not do so? Well, for the reasons I have mentioned: that our

culture has a long, dominant tradition wherein truth and certainty have been held to be found and not created – Platonism,

Christianity, reason, science, the habits of everyday life; and, as I

indicated in the last chapter, because of Orwellian/ideological

affinities that still manage to hold off theoretical nihilism by

their certaintist practices. For ultimately what has stopped anything being said, and has allowed only specific things to run, is

power: truth is dependent on somebody having the power to

make it true. This is how the concept of truth is made to function (as I say irrespective of whether such ‘truths’ are really true

or not) as a censor. Here, in Power/Knowledge, Foucault makes this

point:

38 on some questions and some answers

Truth isn’t outside power . . . it is produced only by virtue of

multiple forms of constraint. . . . Each society has . . . its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it

accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and

instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques

and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the

status of those who are charged with saying what counts as

true.

. . . by truth I do not mean ‘the ensemble of truths which are

to be discovered and accepted’ but rather ‘the ensemble of

rules according to which the true and the false are separated

and specific effects of power attached to the true’, it being

understood also that it is not a matter . . . ‘on behalf ’ of the

truth, but of a battle about the status of truth and the economic

and political role it plays.

‘Truth’ is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation

and operation of statements. ‘Truth’ is linked . . . with systems

of power which produce and sustain it. . . . A ‘regime of

truth’.6

All these arguments are readily applicable to history. History is a

discourse, a language game; within it ‘truth’ and similar expressions are devices to open, regulate and shut down interpretations. Truth acts as a censor – it draws the line. We know that

such truths are really ‘useful fictions’ that are in discourse by

virtue of power (somebody has to put and keep them there) and

power uses the term ‘truth’ to exercise control: regimes of

truth. Truth prevents disorder, and it is this fear of disorder

(of the disorderly) or, to put this positively, it is this fear of

freedom (for the unfree) that connects it functionally to material

interests.

on some questions and some answers 39

ON FACTS AND INTERPRETATION

The question of facts and/versus interpretation is typically formulated thus: are there historical facts that we can definitely

know (for example dates) or is history ‘just interpretation’?

Are there ‘past things’ that seem to be factually correct? In

one sense one can say yes. Thus, we know that the so-called

Great War/First World War happened between 1914 and

1918. We know that Margaret Thatcher came into power in

1979. If these are facts then we know facts. However, such

facts, though important, are ‘true’ but trite within the larger

issues historians consider. For historians are not too concerned

about discrete facts (facts as individual facts), for such a concern only touches that part of historical discourse called its

chronicle. No, historians have ambitions, wishing to discover

not only what happened but how and why and what these

things meant and mean. This is the task historians have set for

themselves (I mean they did not have to raise the stakes so

high). So it is never really a matter of the facts per se but the

weight, position, combination and significance they carry vis-àvis each other in the construction of explanations that is at

issue. This is the inevitable interpretive dimension, the problematic, as historians transform the events of the past into

patterns of meaning that any literal representation of them as

facts could never produce. For although there may be methods

of finding out ‘what happened’ there is no method whatsoever

whereby one can definitely say what the ‘facts’ mean. Here

Steiner is again relevant. A text, says Steiner, in as much as its

components are

phonetic, grammatical and lexical . . . can be studied analytically and statistically. . . . But . . . the absolutely decisive failing

occurs when such approaches seek to formalise meaning, when

they proceed upward from the phonetic . . . to the semantic....

40 on some questions and some answers

It is this progression which no analytic-linguistic technique . . .

has ever taken convincingly.7

Clearly this applies to history as discourse. In that the past is a

text (full of ‘old’ texts) to be read and made meaning-full

(remember again the view read as geography), then critiques of

the limits of any textuality apply. There is no method of establishing incorrigible meanings; all facts to be meaningful need

embedding in interpretive readings that obviously contain them

but which do not simply somehow arise from them; to the chagrin of empiricists the fact-value dichotomy allows/demands this.8

Working historians clearly ought to recognise these arguments. Often they do not, or, if they do, they rarely work them.

Historians often seem to assume that interpretations just do

derive from the ‘always already there facts’, and that what is

actually a temporary and local interpretation really is true/

accurate as such; that at ‘the centre’ lie the facts of the matter in

some given, uninterpreted way.

Now this may appear a little abstract, so let me show what is at

stake here by an example.

In a recent (popular) short article9

 the historian Robert

Skidelsky wrote on the very problem we have been discussing.

In it he stressed that most historical facts are not in dispute, that

relativism poses no threat to the orderly discussion of a basically

agreed body of knowledge and that over most of ‘our’ interpretations of the past shared values and views predominate.

Skidelsky agreed that interpretive activity goes on but argued

that it is located on the margins where it does not call into

question that shared centre; indeed, it is from such a centre that

one adjudicates between rival (marginal) perspectives.

In putting this view so clearly Skidelsky speaks for many historians and what he is saying can be briefly illustrated. One

might say that we know the basic facts about the inter-war years

in Europe; we know what happened, when and to a large extent

on some questions and some answers 41

why it happened. Debates have taken place around this consensus – about Munich, appeasement, etc. – but these respect the

facts and seek to re-address them only marginally. Often these

debates are linked to specific historians (D. C. Watt, A. J. P. Taylor)

and this is called the historiographical dimension. That is, historians re-interpret odd bits of the inter-war years and this is historiographical in that students can study what historians say.

Now certain things follow from this position, not least that if

historiography only takes place on the margins of knowledge,

then an approach that sees all history as historiography (my

view) is also marginalised (i.e. deemed incorrect). Students, I

have often heard it said, should stop looking at what historians

say and concentrate on what actually happened; they should do

some ‘proper’ history. But this runs counter to all I have been

saying. If history is interpretation, if history is historians’

work(s), then historiography is what the ‘proper’ study of history is actually about. In my argument everything is a discursive

construct, including the Skidelsky-like non-interpreted centre;

that is, the so-called centre is just a congealed interpretation.

Here then lies a major difference between Skidelsky and others

and myself. I would like to put forward the following argument

to support my point of view.

Using the inter-war period again, my position is as follows.

Skidelsky among others would argue that a large body of agreed

factual knowledge about 1918–39 exists. Around the edges bits

are re-worked, but the main body stands. And it is not unusual

for these authors to characterise these marginal debates to be

between ‘left’ and ‘right’. This model can be shown thus:

42 on some questions and some answers

Here the balanced centre looks undisputed. And it suggests that a

‘balanced’ historian occupying this centre can look objectively at

the points for and against the opposing views of left and right

and weigh them up. One can be ‘liberal’ (non-ideological) in

this centre because the ideological positions are out there, on the

left and right, and if one or the other wins then this will cause an

imbalance. One can adjudicate disinterestedly from this centre:

‘on the one hand – on the other’.

But reconsider. Let me now put the left, centre and right on a

continuous spectrum. Thus the old model,

becomes

Here we immediately see that the centre is not really a centre of

anything. Rather, what we have is an ensemble of left/centre/

right positions towards one end of a given (and logically infinite) spectrum. Hence, when one allegedly answers in a balanced

way from the ‘centre’, one wants to know the centre of what?

For shift the left/centre/right ensemble anywhere on the spectrum and see how the centre is not so much de-centred as the

on some questions and some answers 43

whole concept becomes problematic: a spectrum cannot have a

centre.

If this still appears a little vague let me tighten the rachet a

further notch. One might ask whether, in England today,

marginal/oppositional interpretations, to which we can add and

which we can judge, revolve around a Marxist-Leninist centre?

I think the answer is no. But why not? After all there are a great

many Marxist-Leninist accounts of 1918–39 around (on

fascism, the causes of the Great Patriotic War etc.), so why

isn’t this the (non-interpretative/given) centre around which

other accounts are but marginal interpretations? This is not

an unrealistic example because in the USSR Marxist-Leninist

accounts were in the centre. In the USSR our ‘shared’ centre was

‘bourgeois’; was on their margins. In other words ‘our’ centre is

just ‘ours’. Skidelsky’s argument, that our centre is effectively

everyone’s (universal) and that there really is a centre that is not

just another position, seems fallacious. Rather I think there are

no centres as such, but local patterns of dominance and marginality, which are all historiographically constructed and which

must be historiographically read. As for all of us, Skidelsky and

the specific discourse he occupies (and which in that sense

‘occupies him’; that is, makes him the historian he is) positions

him, and if we are right about the ideological nature of

positions, positions ideologically too: remember there are no

histories that are not for someone. Let us now move on to the

question of bias.

ON BIAS

The concept of historical (historians’) bias is everywhere: in

schools, in the aims/objectives of countless history syllabi, at A

level, in universities and in fact in almost any assessment of

historical texts. It is overtly signalled or tacitly assumed with

regard to the reading of documents, primary and secondary

44 on some questions and some answers

traces and evidence. In effect bias (and its detection) is taken to

be something that is very meaningful. But is it? Let me run a five

stage argument.10

First, bias makes sense only if it is used in opposition to

unbiased; i.e. some sort of objectivity, even truth: unbiased =

running true, as in the game of bowls (can you not see the

problem ‘of bias’ already?)

Second, in historical work, bias appears most regularly in

empiricist history, that is, history of a specific type. Empiricist

history is committed to the idea that somehow the past can be

re-created objectively. Typically the historian goes to the original

traces, constructs these as evidence, scrupulously footnotes, etc.,

and on the basis of this gives a fully documented account. Of

course empiricists – like Elton – know that definitive accounts

are unachievable but they still aim for them. The ambition is to

let the facts speak ‘for themselves’, unmediated by the bulk of

the ventriloquist-like (and possibly biased) historian.

Because this type of approach has objectivity at its centre then

within it bias makes sense. Here bias means the skewing of

sources to fit an argument, the withholding of documents, the

falsification of evidence...

But, and this is point three, history can be things other than

empiricist (think back here only to Marwick’s twenty-five varieties). So, for example, history can be seen as the way groups/

classes make sense of the past by making it theirs: here the past

can be constructed meaningfully for Marxists, right-radicals, feminists, etc. Of course, within each of these constructs there will

be checking mechanisms for validating the readings given (references in footnotes to sources, etc.) but within these discourses

the word ‘bias’ hardly appears. Thus within, say, Marxism, one

will see references to many different (party) lines: one might

read of voluntarist or economistic tendencies, Gramscian or

Althusserian readings, Trotskyist deviations and so on. But these

lines will not be referred to as biases because everyone knows

on some questions and some answers 45

that Gramscians will use the past differently to economistic

Marxists, so what sense does it make to say Gramsci ‘was biased’

– against what unbiased account? A Trotskyist one, a bourgeois

one – the facts?

Point four. Looking at history this way – as a series of readings

all of which are positioned – then there is clearly no unpositioned criterion by which one can judge the degree of bias. In

fact it arguably makes little sense to use the term generally – to

say for instance that feminists are biased – for they merely have

to ask if that judgement is made from a patriarchal position. Not

only that. The empiricist claim – that one can detect bias and

expunge it by attending scrupulously to ‘what the sources say’ –

is undercut by the fact that sources are mute. It is historians who

articulate whatever the ‘sources say’, for do not many historians

all going (honestly and scrupulously in their own ways) to the

same sources, still come away with different accounts; do not

historians all have their own many narratives to tell?

Point five accordingly becomes a question and an answer to it.

The question is: but if this is the case, if bias best makes sense (a)

within empiricism and (b) if its claims to get to the truth

through some source-led account is problematic and (c) if blanket statements of the type ‘feminists are just biased’ makes little

sense, then why is the term ‘bias’ in general use? I think the

answer could be that:

1 Bias is ‘central’ to the empiricist mode.

2 This mode (getting the facts to speak allegedly for themselves) is connected, not logically or necessarily but historically (contingently) to liberalism. Here one learns to

adjudicate, to weigh things up and to see both sides; here

one can pursue the past for its own sake (for the love of it)

as it apparently speaks unaided. This mode is ensconced in

schools, colleges, universities: it is, is it not, the dominant

mode in our social formation.

46 on some questions and some answers

3 Because this mode is dominant it therefore acts as if its

way of doing things is the only way: it universalises itself.

But in so doing empiricism not only universalises its (relative) successes but its failures too. As we know, empiricism’s major problem is the ascertaining of truth in that

it recognises its truths to be, ultimately, interpretation. It

does not want to face this; so to ward off this reality it

holds to the notion of the true account, claiming such

truth is attainable if bias is detected and wiped away. But if

everything is ultimately interpretation and if one person’s

bias is another person’s truth, what then? Thus, the problem of bias is specifically an empiricist one but because it

is the dominant approach then its problems get distributed as if they were everyone’s. But they are not. Of course

– and this must be stressed – other discourses have their

own problems of internal coherence, etc., but bias is not

the way they are expressed.

To conclude. Students in our culture are likely to meet the concept of bias everywhere even though it is problematic only

somewhere. Bias, if and when it is used, ought to be used specifically and locally. (As it is, it is used ideologically.) Elsewhere,

because what is constructed as history is constructed differently,

the problems of veracity are dealt with differently too.

ON EMPATHY

Empathy, like bias, is a term you will surely have met before.11

Here the basic question is whether empathy – the claim that one

has to get into an informed appreciation of the predicaments and

viewpoints of people in the past in order to gain real historical

understanding (to see the past from its point of view) – is actually possible? If it is not, and that is my view, then why should

attempting the impossible be so high on the agenda? I will

on some questions and some answers 47

approach ‘empathy’ by looking initially at why I think empathizing effectively is impossible; second I will examine the pressures

that have put it so high on the agenda; and finally I will offer

some concluding thoughts.

I consider empathy is unachievable for four reasons. Two are

basically philosophical and two are practical.

The philosophical problem of ‘other minds’, as discussed by

Wittgenstein and others,12 considers whether it is possible to

enter into the mind of another person we know well and who is

beside one, and concludes that it is not. Historians, however,

have disregarded this conclusion and have continued to raise

questions that are based on the assumption that it actually is

possible to enter lots and lots of minds, even minds we cannot

possibly know well, and which are far away from us in space and

time.

This links into the second philosophical problem. For what is

effectively ignored in empathy is that in every act of communication there is an act of translation going on; that every act of

speech (speech-act) is an ‘interpretation between privacies’. And

when, as suggested, this act of translation is not between ‘you

and me’ here and now, but ‘us and them’ somewhere else and at

some other time, then the task is extremely problematic. For to

all past events historians bring their own mind-set programmed

in the present. As Steiner says:

Croce’s dictum ‘all history is contemporary history’ points directly to the ontological paradox of the past tense. Historians

are increasingly aware that the conventions of narrative and of

implicit reality with which they work are philosophically vulnerable. The dilemma exists on at least two levels. The first is

semantic. The bulk of the historian’s material consists of utterances made in and about the past. Given the perpetual process

of linguistic change not only in vocabulary and syntax but in

meaning, how is he to interpret, to translate his sources....

48 on some questions and some answers

Reading a historical document, collating the modes of narrative

in previous written history, interpreting speech-acts performed

in the distant or nearer past, he finds himself becoming more

and more of the translator in the technical sense. . . . And the

meaning thus arrived at must be the ‘true one’. By what

metamorphic magic is the historian to proceed?13

Steiner’s point seems to me to be basic, and he goes on to

stress the impossibility of getting into other times: ‘When we

use past tenses . . . when the historian “makes history” (for that

is what he is actually doing), we rely on what I shall call . . .

axiomatic fictions’

14 (that is, contemporary and overwhelmingly

dominant assumptions about what in the main constitutes

historical knowledge).

Given then that there is no presuppositionless interpretation

of the past, and given that interpretations of the past are constructed in the present, the possibility of the historian being able

to slough off his present to reach somebody else’s past on their

terms looks remote. This is a point picked up by Terry Eagleton

in Criticism and Ideology where he poses the same problem for the

literary critic. The job of the literary critic is, it seems, to tell us

what the text under study is about; to make it better understood

so that it is easier to read. But in helping the reader to read better

(just as the historian’s putative task is to help us read the past

better) how, asks Eagleton, can the interpreter’s (historian’s)

bulk not get in the way? Here is Eagleton on the problem of

reading texts – I have added the bracketed words:

It is difficult to see criticism [history] as anything but an innocent discipline. Its origins seem spontaneous, its existence

natural: there is literature [the past] and so – because we wish

to understand and appreciate it – there is also criticism [history]. . . . But . . . criticism [history] as a hand- maiden to literature [the past] prevents [such understanding] everywhere. . . . If

on some questions and some answers 49

the task of criticism [history] is to smooth the troubled passage

between text [the past] and reader, to elaborate the text [past] so

that it may be more easily consumed, how is it to avoid interposing its own ungainly bulk between product and consumer,

over-shadowing its object. . . . It seems that criticism [history] is

caught here in an insoluble contradiction.15

These then are some of the philosophical problems empathy

faces: of the ‘translation between privacies’, of the ‘ontological

paradox of the past tense’; of the present-minded historian

getting ‘back to the past’ uncluttered by all that has made him/

her modern. Further to these problems, empathy has two practical difficulties to overcome.

The first is a reminder of the discussions in chapter 1 regarding history as theory/practice. In theory the historian is working

within all kinds of assumptions of an epistemological, methodological and ideological kind, and we have also seen the practical

problems of making histories (the long weekends, pressures

from work, publishers, literary style . . .), all of which are

inscribed (written into) the historian’s own mind. How then is

this – the very stuff that allows the historian to think historically

in the first place – to be got rid of so that he/she can think ‘the

past’ (‘pastically’)?

The second problem we might consider is one arising if we

transfer the points we have made into a class situation/

examination. Let us imagine we are facing an empathy question;

we are to try and empathise with Thomas Cromwell’s intention

to reform Tudor government. What did he see as the problems;

how did he see the situation?

As students we might read about Cromwell; we might read

(again) Elton or other authorities. We might also read documents relevant to the debate. We may disagree with some interpretations (enter into the debate) but if we are to remain with it

we really must stay in this discursive field. Along comes the

50 on some questions and some answers

question; what were Cromwell’s intentions? Now, we cannot

empathise directly with Cromwell because we have reached him

indirectly (via Elton) so actually we are empathising less with

Cromwell’s mind than Elton’s. This is underlined when we are

asked to put Cromwell’s intentions into the meaning-making

context. For if in, say, educational institutions, it is in history

classes that much of that context is provided (a context the

teacher gets from Elton too) and if this is about all the context

you as students know (and if you were listening all the time,

accurately translating the teacher’s speech acts, and if you can

still find your notes to read) then requests to put Cromwell into

an early sixteenth-century context are actually requests to put

him into the context of your class experience. Here we are

empathising with what the teacher has in his/her own mind

mediated by classroom contingencies; that is, with Elton many

times removed. If this were an examination, then checks made

by external examiners on the answers so produced are checks

against what is in their minds; and so it goes on.

Thus I do not think empathy, as typically understood, is

possible for these philosophical and practical reasons, which we

have touched on only lightly here. Through a lot of critical reading historians may gain ‘tentative understandings’ but that is a

different matter, and empathy may be marginal in reaching such

knowledge. But the point I would like to make here is a different

one. As far as I can see, empathy is on the agenda for reasons

other than giving you the opportunity to try and do it. Empathy

is with us for reasons which come not out of epistemological/

methodological problems as such but from three disparate

pressures, one of which comes out of schooling, one of which

comes from an academic direction, and one of which is clearly

ideological.

Let us begin by looking at the pressure of schooling. This

pressure emerged largely through educational notions of relevance and personal involvement that started initially in primary

on some questions and some answers 51

schools and then became extended. Thus, think here of those

imaginative leaps we might well have been asked to make so that

we could pretend to be a fox, a snowflake, an angry king: such

appeals were (and are) to make pupils feel involved and engaged;

to personalise teaching and learning. Then, with the extension of

comprehensivisation from primary to secondary schools and

with the attendant problems of classroom organisation and

discipline, so the general trend has been toward the breakdown

of hierarchies (streaming etc.) towards an equal (personal)

entitlement to the same (whole) curriculum. Today, this personalisation of pedagogy (teaching-learning) has led to personalised assessment procedures (designer assessment) and in some

ways the end of this process is approaching: personal profiling

and one’s own positive/negotiated record of achievement signifying the end of hierarchical (once and for all) examinations

(people at the top, people at the bottom). Accordingly, in this

democratising context where all pupils bring their equally valid/

valued opinions to school, then opportunities for their expression must be encouraged: what do they think of the past,

what is history for them, what is their explanation – let them try

and put themselves into the mind-set of (their) medieval prince.

This is a bespoke syllabus, made to measure, cut to fit. In everyday practice this is the world of individual tasks, of separate

worksheets, of the personal topic, of the private study, of the

project, of the dissertation . . . such approaches here spill over

into the academic.

The second pressure is the academic. In England this pressure

relies heavily on the specific way of looking at history (idealism)

which is associated with the historian R. G. Collingwood. In a

nutshell, Collingwood argued that all history is the history of

mind, an apparently difficult concept to grasp (and use) when

retained within Collingwood’s own sophisticated discourse, but

when summarised easily understood, not least because by now

much of the argument will be familiar.

52 on some questions and some answers

This, briefly, is Collingwood’s argument. Humans are language animals. Through language things are given meaning.

These symbolic codes (languages) refer to the world but word

and world are categorically different. In different social formations, in different cultures, people speak/spoke differently: the

past is a foreign country – people spoke differently there. As

Steiner puts it:

Different civilisations, different epochs do not necessarily produce the same ‘speech mass’; certain cultures speak less than

others; some modes of sensibility prize taciturnity and elision,

others reward prolixity and semantic ornamentation.16

So, for instance, the actual/potential vocabulary of medieval

peasant or viking was minuscule compared to ours today. To

understand the medieval peasant/viking is thus to understand

their discourses through the examination of the surviving traces

of them: field patterns, monastic records, chronicles, etc.; these

are manifestations of their intentions and concerns, embodiments of these people’s needs; who wanted them for certain

things. In effect understanding history for Collingwood is therefore understanding why these people wanted these things and

nothing else: in a phrase, all history is about the history of what

they had in mind; all history is thus the history of mind(s).

Consequently, to gain historical knowledge we must get inside

such cultural remains/traces to the minds that infused them

with life, to see the world as they did. Accordingly it is this

idealist pressure, variously construed, that legitimates the

empathetic approach for many historians, and indeed for some

this academic argument is what empathy really is. But I think

there is more to it than that. For empathy as constructed by

schooling and idealism needs ideology to complete it. And crucially so. Because it is in ideology that the major characteristics

of empathy are found. This ideology is liberal, and not any kind

on some questions and some answers 53

of liberalism either, but one harking back to, and thus being best

explained by, a brief résumé of J. S. Mill’s idea of reciprocal

freedom.

Central to Mill’s idea of freedom was the notion that the

individual could do what he/she desired so long as the exercise

of that desire did not curtail the liberty of others. To calculate if

this would occur as a consequence of any action, the person

(agent) had to imagine what these consequences would be; to

put himself/herself into other people’s positions; to see their

point of view. In doing so this calculation would have to be both

rational and universalisable, capable of rational reciprocation for

all involved. For if the person(s) affected were ever in a position

to do the same thing back to the agent then mutual harm could

occur. This therefore suggested a pragmatic weighing up and a

balancing of viewpoints, a consideration of the pros and cons

(on the one hand – on the other) and the banishment of all

extremes as rational choices for action.

This approach – being rational, seeing other people’s views

and balancing the options and thus the possibly hurtful consequences of extreme actions (extremism) – is thus what lies

behind all those requests to put oneself into another person’s

position (in the past); to try to see things from their perspective,

to rationally calculate their options and to be ‘open minded’.

This is why, of course, so many empathy questions are problemsolving exercises.

In the middle of this activity, then, is rationality and balance.

Here, empathy draws all reasonable people into the centre. Here

liberal ideology is at work, working to construct us as liberals.

Consequently it is doubtful if this produces what this exercise is

ostensibly about – understanding history. Rather the reverse, for

what this approach does is to universalise throughout space and

time a very local and time-bound ideology, liberalism, to the

calculation of interests per se, thus putting into the minds of all

people (including medieval peasants and vikings who did not

54 on some questions and some answers

know of liberalism and who had unfortunately never had the

pleasure of reading J. S. Mill) Mill’s own mind.

This is ironic. The only way to bring people in the past (who

were so different to us) under our control is to make them the

same as us, propelled everywhere by rational calculation, liberal

style. Here at the heart of the argument that this is the way

of gaining historical understanding we find the very essence

of what it means to think a-historically; quite literally

anachronistically.

So schooling, idealism and ideology thus constitute empathy,

and these are three pressures that do not sit easily together. The

pedagogy of personal involvement puts a stress on the imagination that most historians see as suspiciously ‘fictional’, whilst

the problem between idealism – with its stress on the strangeness of the past – and liberal ideology, which stresses the constancy of human beings/human nature homo economicus style, are

really quite different views as to how (and why) ‘knowledge’ of

the past is possible. And in fact this last point helps explain why,

at the moment of writing, empathy is one of the most discussed

aspects of ‘what history is’, an ideological discussion that needs

to be understood in order to see both what is going on and why

so much seems to be at stake politically in these matters.

As we have seen, the attempt to get into the otherness of the

past is, for idealists, what is at the centre of historical study. But

this requires some imagining, no matter how much one is

enriched by understandings of that past, and it is this stress on

imagination that has been attacked. This attack has come mainly

from liberal and right-wing empiricists. For they think (if I may

generalise) that empathy is basically a waste of time. As empiricists they want to get to ‘the facts’ and thus ‘know’ the past that

way, but they also know that most of the facts are missing so that

knowledge ultimately eludes them. So, to make their accounts as

full as possible, they have to do their own bit of imagining

(interpreting) to fill the gaps. Here the problem is that if people

on some questions and some answers 55

in the past thought all kinds of odd things, then how can historians imagine accurately? The answer has been to deny that oddness of people in the past, and to stress the ‘constancy of human

nature’ argument which says that, stripped of their culture, all

people are and always have been basically the same. That way

you can then fill in the gaps accurately because you work on the

assumption that faced with the same situation all people would

act predictably by (somehow) throwing off their cultural straitjackets and acting naturally. Consequently you don’t need

empathy – you don’t need idealism – because these ideas

encourage you to imagine that people in the past are always

culture-bound, are never natural, and therefore that you can

never really know what they had in mind.

From the liberal-right empiricist position this is the problem,

for two reasons. First, it can lead to relativistic scepticism. Second, it may lead to the possibility of people today imagining that

other (universalisable) responses were made by people in the

past – say, socialist ones. In fact much of the empathy debate has

been tied up with these critiques of ‘left interpretation’; about

whether these imaginative spaces that will always exist will be

filled by the correct ‘human nature’ or not. My own thoughts on

this and on empathy in general are as follows.

I think people in the past were very different to us in the

meanings they gave to their world, and that any reading on to

them of a constancy of human nature type, of whatever kind, is

without foundation. I mean, which sort of human nature do you

want to pick? I don’t think this need lead to scepticism about

knowing ‘history’ because, to repeat, when we study history we

are not studying the past but what historians have constructed

about the past. In that sense, whether or not people in the past

had the same or different natures to us is not only undecidable

but also not at issue. In that sense, the past doesn’t enter into it.

Our real need is to establish the presuppositions that historians

take to the past. It would therefore be more constructive (though

56 on some questions and some answers

again ultimately impossible) to try and get into the minds of

historians rather than the minds of the people who lived in the

past and who only emerge, strictly speaking, through the minds

of historians anyway, a task this whole book is encouraging. Not

so much ‘all history as the history of past people’s minds’ then,

but ‘all history as the history of historian’s minds’.

ON PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SOURCES;

ON SOURCES AND EVIDENCE

Much ink has been spilt over the issue of primary and secondary

sources. Clearly there is a difference between primary sources

(traces of the past) and secondary texts. As you will know, this

difference breaks down especially at the secondary level where it

is obviously possible to use a secondary text as a primary source.

Thus, for instance, E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class can be read both as an introduction to aspects of the

industrial revolution and as a study of what a certain kind of

Marxist historian like Thompson had to say about it in the late

1950s and early 1960s: same text, different use. But if this is

obvious, then why this section on primary and secondary

sources: what is the problem?

It is this. I have argued we can never really know the past; that

there are no centres; that there are no ‘deeper’ sources (no subtext) to draw upon to get things right: all is on the surface. As we

saw in chapter 1, in doing research historians do not go down

but across, moving laterally in the construction of their accounts

from one set of sources to another, effectively doing comparative

work. If this is not seen; if you use the word ‘source’ instead

of ‘trace’; if you refer to some of these sources as primary and

if you sometimes replace primary by original (original and

thus underlying/fundamental source), this suggests that if you

go to the originals, then because originals seem genuine (as

opposed to secondary/second-hand traces), genuine (true/

on some questions and some answers 57

deep) knowledge can be gained. This prioritises the original

source, fetishises documents, and distorts the whole working

process of making history. At root is that perpetual quest for

truth, the quest also apparent in desires for empathetic understanding – to get back into the genuine minds of the original

people so that their views are unadulterated by ours.

If we do not have these ideas, if we are freed from the desire

for certainty, if we are released from the idea that history rests on

the study of primary/documentary sources (and that doing history is studying these alone and that from these originals we can

adjudicate later historians’ disagreements), then we are free to

see history as an amalgam of those epistemological, methodological, ideological and practical concerns I have outlined.

Having made these points, the debate over evidence need not

detain us long. Indeed, were it not for the fact that the ‘problem

of evidence’ is part of the Carr-Elton dispute that is still running

and still causing problems in introductory courses on the nature

of history, then it really need not detain us at all at this stage.

The point at issue, however, is this. Does the evidence of the

past press itself so irresistibly upon the historian that he/she can

do no other than allow it to speak for itself, as Elton has suggested, or does evidence, construed now as an absolutely mute

resource, need to be quite literally articulated by the historian

who, in putting his or her own voice over the evidence per se,

effectively silences it. At stake here, yet again, is the question of

the type and degree of freedom that the past allows the historian

to act as interpreter, expressed, this time, as the ‘evidence

question’.

This problem can be considered in two ways, the first by

seeing that the Carr-Elton rendition of the problem rests on an

elementary linguistic confusion, the second by re-articulating,

rather differently and suggestively, the past-history distinction.

The reason why this specific debate over evidence rests on a

terminological confusion is that the term evidence is being

58 on some questions and some answers

applied, especially by Elton, to the same materials when these

materials appear in different contexts and therefore need to be

understood and called different things. Elton uses the term ‘evidence’ to describe the sources that the historian goes to when

carrying out research (‘the evidence is in the record’) whereas

he ought to have referred to them as, say, traces of the past. By

calling such traces evidence, however, Elton gives the impression

– which of course he wants to give – that such pristine pieces of

evidence always already organise themselves into latent explanations, so that when enough of them have been found and collected together, then such ‘evidence-based’ explanations can

simply become manifest by themselves, irrespective of the predilection of the humble historian who, professionally, then ‘bows

down before their weight’ (extraordinary metaphors these but

understandable in terms of the notion of the sovereignty of the

past which one has a duty to serve, etc.). Carr, on the other hand,

much more ‘bolshy’, realises that it is the active historian who

does all the work of organising the past’s traces (and who thus

deserves all the credit), and that the kinds of explanations the

traces can be found to support depend upon the type of organisation being practised. In Carr’s argument, therefore, the trace

only becomes evidence when it is used to support an argument

(interpretation) prior to which, although it exists, it remains just

an unused piece of stuff from the past. This seems perfectly

acceptable to me and clarifies the position muddied by Elton’s

terminology. However, one of the reasons why the Carr position

hasn’t been seen to be conclusive within the parameters of ‘the

debate’ (and thus partly why the debate has been perpetuated) is

not least because Carr himself sometimes used the word ‘evidence’ in places where he should have retained the term ‘source’

(trace), thus finding himself in the paradoxical position of

apparently arguing that the evidence is both there before it is

used but that it only really becomes evidence when it has been

used. The way out of this Carr-Elton debate is therefore to be

on some questions and some answers 59

consistent and not use the term ‘evidence’ ambiguously. By

which I mean we simply remember the salient points: (a) the

past occurred; (b) traces of it remain; (c) these traces are there

whether the historian goes to them and finds them or not;

(d) evidence is the term used when (some or other) of these

traces are used ‘in evidence’ on behalf of (some or other)

argument (interpretation) and not before. Evidence, therefore,

as opposed to traces, is always the product of the historian’s

discourse simply because, prior to that discourse being articulated, evidence (history) doesn’t exist: only traces do (only the

past did).

At this point we can move to the second way of resolving the

evidence problem; or rather we can, by recasting the points

made in the last paragraph and by again working the past-history

distinction, underline the Carr-like argument that the past’s hold

on history is really the historian’s hold on history; that the past,

itself, in some sort of pre-discursive way, quite literally ‘doesn’t

have a say in it’.

The argument here – one that when developed pushes the

Carr-Elton debate on to more rigorous grounds – is that contrary

to what Elton is effectively claiming, the evidence of the past per

se cannot act logically as a check on the historian’s free play

because, constituted by discourse, as an effect of discourse, it

cannot be made to function as a cause of discourse or as a prediscursive check (on itself). This (perhaps difficult) point has

been explained by Roland Barthes in The Discourse of History where

he attacks those historians – in our context Elton – who want to

deliver ‘true’ accounts as guaranteed by the ‘raw evidence’ of the

‘real’ (the real past). Barthes argues that such historians perform

a sleight of hand whereby the referent (the ‘thing’ the historian

refers to) is projected into a realm supposedly beyond discourse

from which position it can then be thought of as preceding and

determining the discourse which in fact posited it as referent in

the first place. According to Barthes this paradox governs the

60 on some questions and some answers

distinctiveness of historical discourse: ‘the fact [the evidence]

can only have a linguistic existence, as a term in a discourse, and

yet it is exactly as if this existence were merely the “copy” . . . of

another existence situated in the . . . domain of the “real”. This

type of discourse is . . . [one] in which the referent is aimed for

as something external to the discourse without it ever being

possible to attain it outside this discourse.’17 We can leave it

there.

ON COUPLETS: ON CAUSATION, ETC.

The couplets to be referred to here are cause and effect, continuity and change, and similarity and difference. What I intend to

do is problematicise them, not in the sense that they are

generally taken unproblematically as ‘heartland’ concepts – an

argument I have already rebutted – but to question further the

common assumption that these concepts actually can be used

unproblematically; that is, that it is almost routinely easy to

ascertain, say, the causes and consequences of an event. In fact

this is not the case. Although these couplets are said to be the

ones historians use all the time, it is extremely doubtful if they

succeed in using them very rigorously. Accordingly I will examine just one of the concepts, causality, and raise some questions

about it that might then be applied to the others.

Let me start to raise these questions by way of posing some.

When you are told that history is partly about the way that

historians find the causes of past events, with which theories of

causal explanation are you presented? Marxist, structuralist,

phenomenological, hermeneutic? Anything? When you combine causal factors in terms of the various weight they may have

exerted on some event, when the question of their relative influence vis-à-vis each other is raised, how do you do the discriminating? If you were asked now to explain the causes of the French

Revolution of 1789, what would you do?

on some questions and some answers 61

Consider this question then: ‘how far back and how far afield

would it be necessary to go to give a satisfactory analysis of the

necessary and sufficient causes of 1789?’

How do you answer this? Does Marxism tell you? Does

structural-functionalism? Does an Annales approach?

If one of these does; if, say, Marxism lays down a method of

proceeding (crudely, economic conditions must be considered

as basic determinants of superstructural changes within the

thesis of class struggle; crudely, by involving methodological

abstractions, etc.), then how do you work this in detail? For

example, how far back do you (have to?) take the influence of

economics (to 1783, 1760, 1714, 1648?) and what, exactly, do

you include in this category of the economic? How, within the

economic, do you know when aspects of it play a decisive role

and then lie relatively dormant, determining ‘in the last

instance’? Again, how far afield will you go: is France metaphorically an island or inextricably caught up within a general

European trajectory? What counts as Europe in the eighteenth

century? Does America? Again, how do you measure the various

levels and degrees of interpenetration between, say, the economic, the political, the social, the cultural, the ideological; and

what goes into these categories? Again, how far would your

analysis depend upon everyday contingencies: the types of

material available, the times of access to it; on the time you have

been given and give yourself to answer the question, etc.? Again,

what sort of philosophical minefields and stipulated definitions

lurk in the terms satisfactory, necessary, sufficient and analysis?

And so on . . . I mean, how do you begin to tackle all the causal

factors and complexity of analysis suggested by just these few

obvious questions? Where do such questions end?

At this point you may say well, actually, we do not have questions set like that one. They are more straightforward, thus ‘Why

did the French Revolution occur in 1789?’ Although this may be

how questions on 1789 typically read, behind them lies the sorts

62 on some questions and some answers

of questions I have raised; namely, the question of ‘Why 1789?’

means ‘What are the causes of 1789?’ such causes apparently

being an infinite chain spreading backwards and outwards

which you somehow have to cut into despite the fact that no

method (and no amount of experience) can provide you with

any logical or definitive cut in (or ‘cut out’) points in order to

give a sufficient and necessary explanation.

The problem will not go away; so how do you do it? I think

that the answer that actually operates in the main is that you

copy other people. That is, you know you have something like a

satisfactory answer to the question of 1789 because your answer

looks and reads like other people’s operating in the same discourse – give or take the odd lapse or innovation. Learning history is very much about learning how to play the game in the

same way as those already in the game (in the trade) do. In that

sense learning history is like practising a craft, like serving an

apprenticeship, so that you know you have a satisfactory analysis

because it has been constructed from, say, published secondary

texts (books, articles, essays) by master-craftsmen who are also

trying to explain 1789 – texts by Hobsbawm, Hampson,

Schama. Doing history in the main is therefore not all that rigorous theoretically with regard to even some of its most central

preoccupations such as trying to explain why things happened,

and few A level or undergraduate courses consider systematically

and in depth the methodological problems lying in ambush for

those who would actually like to know what they are doing.

Naturally, all courses could do and they all ought to, and

throughout I have footnoted various texts which explore

method. Having said that, we can remind ourselves that we

should not be surprised at this lacuna in ‘training’. For as I

mentioned in chapter 1, the dominant discourse is not too interested in the explicit probe for methodological clarity, for that

can be picked up (for goodness’ sake!) by practising ‘proper

history’ (that is, so the mythology goes, that in the practice of

on some questions and some answers 63

seeking to explain what happened in the past by providing a

precise reconstruction of events reported in primary sources and

contextualised in certain secondary ones, and by suppressing as

much as possible the impulse to interpret or by indicating in the

narrative when the facts are merely being represented and when

they are being interpreted, so one naturally learns what to do).18

No, what the dominant discourse is interested in (though here

again not always consciously) is arguably the transmission of a

certain type of historical culture (which it considers as the historical culture) so that what is crucial is that, within the academic

articulation of that preference, you begin to copy such academics effectively. At these levels of history you are being inducted

into a specific type of academic discourse where it is your ability

to internalise it and then write it down (to pass on; to pass the

‘tests’) that is crucial. Here is Terry Eagleton writing about what

the academic study of literature is predominantly about (for

‘literature’ read ‘history’):

Becoming certified by the state in literary studies [A level,

degrees, etc.] is a matter of being able to talk and write in

certain ways. It is this which is being taught, examined and

certificated. . . . Nobody is especially concerned about what you

say . . . provided [it is] compatible with, and can be articulated

within, a specific form of discourse. . . . Those employed to

teach you this form of discourse will remember whether or not

you were able to speak it long after they have forgotten what

you said.

Literary theorists, critics and teachers, then, are . . . custodians of discourse. Their task is to preserve this discourse,

extend it and elaborate it as necessary . . . initiate newcomers

into it and determine whether or not they have successfully

mastered it.19

64 on some questions and some answers

HISTORY: A SCIENCE OR AN ART?

The debate over whether history is a science or an art, still a

vibrant topic in ‘the nature of history’ debates, is a product of

nineteenth-century ideology.20 In the nineteenth century the

view was widely held that science was the route to truth, and

this idea went across the board from Ranke to Comte to Marx.

But none pressed the case so hard for history’s scientificity as

Marx. Accordingly, from the moment when Marxist socialism

started to refer to itself (and be referred to) as ‘scientific socialism’, so bourgeois theorists were concerned to undercut the

sciences as such in order to catch in their nets the scientific/

certaintist pretensions of the left, and they have done so with

some success, but only at the expense of undercutting any

scientific foundations they might want or need themselves.

Consequently, and drawing heavily on the romantic artists’

antipathy towards science, history was to be considered increasingly as ‘an art’.21 Yet, when pressed to go the whole hog and

express itself as just another narrative discourse admitting to

organising the past through various rhetorical devices, tropes,

emplotments and so forth, historians resisted, falling back on the

view that history was, after all, a semi-science, in that historian’s

data did not lend itself to free artistic licence, and that the form

and content of their narratives was not a matter of choice but

required ‘by the nature of the historical materials themselves’. In

this way science, noisily kicked out of the front door, was halfheartedly re-admitted through the back, the result being that the

oscillation between ‘science and art’ has remained as part of the

internal problematic of mainstream history.

In this regard history is somewhat isolated, in that theorists in

neighbouring discourses do not concur with the ‘conventional’

historians’ assumption that art and science are very different

ways of reading the world, having long seen through the ideological locus of the dichotomy that historians have in general

on some questions and some answers 65

mis-recognised and which they have thus retained as being

really a problem of epistemology and method. The reason for

this continuation of the debate is therefore due not least to that

antipathy towards theory which I noted in the Introduction as a

characteristic afflicting historians, an affliction underlined by the

observation of Hayden White that, since the middle of the nineteenth century, most historians have affected a kind of wilful

methodological naïveté:

as history has become increasingly professionalised and specialised, the ordinary historian, wrapped up in the search for

the elusive document that will establish him as an authority in a

narrowly defined field, has had little time to inform himself of

the latest developments in the more remote fields of art and

science. Many historians are not aware, therefore, that the radical disjunction between art and science which their selfarrogated roles as mediators between them presupposes may

perhaps be no longer justified.22

In effect then, in the epistemological and methodological

terms in which the ‘art-science’ debate is conducted, that debate

is passè. It can be read, however, as retaining its present vitality

through ideological pressures still expressed as ‘method’ not

least because of historians’ relatively cavalier attitude towards

theory and introspection.

CONCLUSION

Looking back over this chapter it seems that the questions I have

been considering as constituting some of the main areas of

introductory debate with regard to the nature of history, have

clustered around the ramifications of the problematic of truth. I

think this is so because practically all the debates generated by

and around the ‘history question’ do in fact have their locus

66 on some questions and some answers

there. Debates over whether the historian’s knowledge can be

gained objectively and through the ‘proper practices’, or

whether it is intersubjective and interpretive; debates over

whether history is value-free or always positioned ‘for someone’; debates over whether history is innocent or ideological,

unbiased or biased, fact or fancy. Or, again, debates about

whether empathy can provide us with real understandings of

people who lived in the past; debates about whether we can, by

going to the original sources (traces) know genuinely and in

depth; debates as to whether those conceptual couplets represent

the essence of history, and finally debates as to whether the real

secrets of the past will be revealed through the rigours of scientific method or the flair of the artist.

My answers to these questions have been on the side of scepticism. Of course, this follows from my treatment of what I think

history is as outlined in chapter 1. There, having made the point

that the past and history are in different categories (and thus

constitute an ontological gap) I indicated some of the epistemological, methodological, ideological and practical reasons that

make the transformation of the past into history problematic.

Thus in coming to a series of conclusions that very much queried the extent to which the past can be known, then, to be

consistent, I was bound to come down against any kind of certaintist knowledge. Thus, vis-à-vis the debates, I have had to argue

that the truth(s) of the past elude us; that history is intersubjective and ideologically positioned; that objectivity and being

unbiased are chimeras; that empathy is flawed; that ‘originals’ do

not entail anything ‘genuine’; that history is, in opposition to it

being an art or a science, something else – something sui generis, a

worldly, wordy language game played for real, and where the

metaphors of history as science or history as art, reflect the

distribution of power that put these metaphors into play.

It may be, of course, that this kind of scepticism towards

historical knowledge may lead towards cynicism and varieties of

on some questions and some answers 67

negativity. But it need not and it does not for me. Along with

and for the same sort of reasons as Hayden White, I see moral

relativism and epistemological scepticism as the basis for social

toleration and the positive recognition of differences.23 As White

has put it:

We do not expect that Constable and Cézanne will have looked

for the same thing in a given landscape, and when we confront

their respective representations of a landscape, we do not

expect to have to choose between them and determine which is

the ‘more correct’ one . . . when we view the work of an artist or

. . . a scientist [or historian] we do not ask if he sees what we

would see in the same general field, but whether or not he has

introduced into his representation of it anything that could be

considered false information for anyone who is capable of understanding the system of notation used.

If applied to historical writing, the methodological and stylistic cosmopolitanism which this conception . . . promotes

would force historians to abandon the attempt to portray ‘one

particular portion of life right side up and in true perspective’ . . .

and to recognise that there is no such thing as a single correct

view. . . . This would allow us to entertain seriously those creative distortions offered by minds capable of looking at the past

with the same seriousness as ourselves but with different . . .

orientations. Then we should no longer naïvely expect that

statements about a given epoch or complex of events in the

past ‘correspond’ to some pre-existent body of ‘raw facts’. For

we should recognise that what constitutes the facts themselves is

the problem that the historian . . . has tried to solve in the

choice of the metaphor by which he orders his world, past,

present and future.24

It is this kind of approach that I have been concerned to argue

for here; a positive reflexive scepticism. This is an attitude that

68 on some questions and some answers

considers knowledge to be a good thing, and that knowledge

does not become bad when the sceptical knowledge we now

have as a culture, shows us the limits of the certaintist knowledge

we once, as a culture, thought we had. Again, by linking history

to the powers that constitute it, history may lose its innocence;

but if that innocence (of history ‘for its own sake’) has been the

way the dominant discourse has articulated its interests, then in a

democratic society this is something we ought to know. In any

case, the aim here has been to help you to be reflexive; to

develop a self-conscious reflexivity not only of the questions one

asks and the answers one accepts, but why one asks and answers

in the way one does and not other; further, of what such

processes signify in terms of one’s position. Such reflexivity

ponders over how the discourse one is studying – history – has

been written by forces and pressures way beyond its ostensible

object of enquiry – the past – forces and pressures that I think

can best be understood today by the practices and ideas of

post-modernism.

on some questions and some answers 69

3

DOING HISTORY IN THE POSTMODERN WORLD

At various times throughout this text, and not least in the

closing words of the last chapter, I have asserted and/or taken

it as read that we live in a post-modern world and that this

condition affects the sorts of views you and I might hold

about history. What I want to do now is to substantiate this

assertion and to say a little more about what such views may

entail. To do this I have divided this chapter into three sections. First I want to work an already existing definition of

post-modernism and look briefly at how the condition it refers

to seems to have come into existence. Secondly I will show

how this type of post-modernism has produced a situation

where there has now developed a mass of historical genres and

what some of the implications of this are for history’s nature

and for historical work. Thirdly I will sketch in an argument

about what history perhaps ought to be that does not seek to

deny post-modernist consequences but which rather suggests a

way of running positively with them; a way of doing history

in the post-modern world that again throws light on ‘the history

question’.

Post-modernism is a difficult area. Because post-modernists see

nothing as fixed or solid this jeopardises the sorts of attempts

that they may make to define what they see themselves as part of,

whilst some commentators have doubted (self-described postmodernists notwithstanding) the very existence of the condition.1

 I have found increasingly that the definition offered by the

French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in The Post-Modern Condition is one that I can make sense of and use.2

 It is inevitable that

Lyotard should have his detractors and my use of his ideas here

does not mean I have simply ignored various critiques. Nevertheless, Lyotard’s analysis about that part of the world in which I

live – a social formation where under the impact of secularising,

democratising, computerising and consumerising pressures the

maps and statuses of knowledge are being redrawn and redescribed – is one that I seem to recognise. Lyotard’s definition

offers a vantage point and a range of concepts from and through

which it appears possible to see what is currently going on both

in general terms and in just one of the areas being affected,

namely history.

Lyotard’s definition at its most basic is rather minimal, characterising post-modernism as witnessing the ‘death of centres’ and

of displaying ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’. What do

these things mean and how can they be explained?

They mean, first of all, that all those old organising frameworks that presupposed the privileging of various centres

(things that are, for example, Anglo-centric, Euro-centric,

ethno-centric, gender-centric, logo-centric) are no longer

regarded as legitimate and natural frameworks (legitimate

because natural), but as temporary fictions which were useful

for the articulation not of universal but of actually very particular

interests; whilst ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ means that

doing history in the post-modern world 71

those great structuring (metaphysical) stories which have given

meaning(s) to western developments have been drained of vitality. After the nineteenth-century announcements of the death of

God (the theological metanarrative), the death of secular surrogates has occurred. The late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries have seen an undercutting of reason and science which has

made problematic all those certaintist discourses built upon

them: that whole Enlightenment project; those various programmes of human progress, reform and emancipation that

manifested themselves in, say, humanism, liberalism, Marxism,

and so on.

Why have such endings occurred? Why this now ‘common

sense’ (of) incredulity? Let me, whilst being conscious of the

constructed nature of all historical narratives, offer a brief

explanatory story.3

Long ago, pre-modern social hierarchies were based overwhelmingly on what were taken to be intrinsic values: divinity,

race, blood, lineage. Here what determined a man’s position was

what he was by birth, by what he had in him, so that a man just

was ‘born to rule’, a man just was ‘born to serve’, a man just did

know and have ‘his place’. But it was precisely these natural

orders, once the legitimisation of kings, aristocracies and priests,

that were undercut by the commercial, financial and industrial

bourgeoisie. Busy manufacturing all kinds of things, the bourgeoisie began to manufacture itself, coming to express its ambitions through the idea of liberal utility. According to this theory,

men were now to be seen to have value not by virtue of birth but

by effort; what value a person was to have in life was to be

earned not given. Hence the hard-working bourgeoisie soon

located its own value in those external objects that expressed and

embodied its toil – private property. From this position the

bourgeoisie was then able to run two critiques that tried to

establish its differences from and importance over everyone else;

that is, from those people whose wealth and property were

72 doing history in the post-modern world

considered unearned (the idle rich) and those who had little or

no property to speak of (the relatively idle poor).

However, this late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century

legitimation was not to last. In developing the capitalist mode of

production the bourgeoisie developed other things too: a

romantic, aristocratic reaction that arguably soured into an élitist

ennui to resurface in unpleasant ways in aspects of the twentieth

century,4

 whilst wage labourers, workers who certainly recognised that they were poor alright but not that they were idle,

preferred to be seen exactly as they were coming to be

described, as the working classes. Consequently it was not long

before such workers began to press the same concept of utility

that the bourgeoisie had used against the old regime, against a

bourgeoisie which was, from the workers’ perspective, itself

relatively unproductive. In this way the idea of utility provided a

sort of ‘rough guide to exploitation’, and to it Marx in particular

constructed for the working classes (the proletariat) a much

more elaborate philosophical and historical understanding of

their position. This was to produce an ideology which did not

value the gaining of some sort of property by the proletariat so

that through it they could then enjoy the same formal rights and

freedoms as the bourgeoisie (the enticing bourgeois carrot of

respectability); but rather the argument was that the route to

substantive freedom was to be via the abolition of property.

Given that the proletariat effectively had no property, then what

better could they value than the one thing that they did own –

themselves. Men, it was argued, had value just by being alive. If

living a life was to all intents and purposes prevented by the type

of property distribution that existed as capitalism, then such

property could go. In the (not so distant) future lay the prospect

of a world held in authentic human freedom and in common –

communism.

In the USSR in 1917 the communist experiment began. From

the start its global ambitions (‘workers of the world unite’)

doing history in the post-modern world 73

received set-backs. The universalism of Marxism became localised quickly into national expressions, and its emancipatory end

soon became embroiled within the contingencies of dictatorial

means. In this way actually existing socialism unintentionally

helped to deconstruct its own potential, turning increasingly

pessimistic what was once the workers’ supremely optimistic

metanarrative, Marxism.

Meanwhile, back in the west, two European-based world

wars, economic crises, Fascism, Nazism, and the guilt-ridden

traumas of de-colonisation, along with further critiques of

capitalism by ‘western Marxists’ (among others Gramsci, the

Frankfurt School, Althusser) and more recently, feminists, had

finally broken down the last remaining theories underpinning

notions of liberal progress, of harmony through competition, of

an optimistic belief in the reasonableness of (bourgeois) rational

man. In this situation capitalism thus had to find itself another

basis for value, and this time it located it in an overt celebration

of what had actually always underpinned it but which it had

long considered as too risky to expose without some kind of

protective human (organicist, humanist, welfarist) face, market

forces as such, a theoretical visibility (in monetarism, etc.) that

went hand in hand with the extraordinary economic productivity of the post-1950 era.

But, of course, as suspected, such an explicit valorisation of

the ‘cash-nexus’, such a heavy prioritisation of consumer

choice, could only be bought at the expense of foregrounding

relativism and pragmatism. In the open market commodities

have no pretence of possessing intrinsic value; the value of

‘goods’ lies in what they can be exchanged for, in their

exchange-value. In such a market, people too take on the garb

of objects, finding their value in external relationships. Similarly, private and public moralities are affected; ethics become

personalised and narcissistic, a relative and free-wheeling affair

of taste and style: ‘You can be anything you like man!’ No

74 doing history in the post-modern world

moral absolutes transcend the everyday. Such relativism and

scepticism affect the status of epistemological and methodological practices too; here there are only positions, perspectives, models, angles, paradigms. The objects of knowledge

seem to be constructed arbitrarily, thrown together in the

manner of collage, montage and pastiche, so that, as Lyotard has

expressed it, ‘Modernity seems to be . . . a way of shaping a

sequence of moments in such a way that it accepts a high rate

of contingency.’5

 Here a flexible pragmatism runs (what is

good is what pays off) resulting in a series of calculating practices. Accordingly, in a culture as informed by relativism as this,

any remaining version of left-wing emancipation – already vitiated by those actual left regimes – has become confused, not

least because of the virtual disappearance of the left’s (objective) object of enquiry/commitment, the proletariat. Due to the

restructuring of older industrial practices in the face of newer

entrepreneurial/service ones, then the proletariat, like the

heavy industry it owed its composition to, has effectively been

decomposed. In its place there is now a series of differences: a

small working-class core, a new(ish) underclass, and the rather

unstable groupings of (some) youth, the unemployed, blacks,

women, gays, Greens.

To bring this story towards a close: in these arguably postist

days – post-liberal, post-western, post-heavy industrial, postMarxist – the old centres barely hold, and the old metanarratives

no longer resonate with actuality and promise, coming to look

incredible from late twentieth-century sceptical perspectives.

(‘Fancy anybody ever believing in that!’) Possibly no social formation we know of has so systematically eradicated intrinsic

value from its culture so much as liberal market capitalism, not

through choice, but through the ‘cultural logic of late-capital’.6

Accordingly, as George Steiner has noted, ‘it is this collapse, more

or less complete, more or less conscious, of those hierarchial,

definitional value gradients (and can there be value without

doing history in the post-modern world 75

hierarchy?) which is now the major fact of our intellectual and

social circumstances.’7

Post-modernism is the general expression of those circumstances. Post-modernism is not a united movement. It is not a

tendency which essentially belongs to either the left of the

centre or the right (at some point on a spectrum) and nor is it a

consequence of post-1968 intellectual/Parisian blues.8

 Rather, as

circumstances have demanded, aristocratic, bourgeois and left

ideologues (from Nietzsche to Freud to Saussure to Wittgenstein

to Althusser to Foucault to Derrida) have had to reappraise,

across a range of discourses (philosophy, linguistics, politics, art,

literature, history), the bases for their positions as they have

adjusted to the wider socio-economic, political and cultural

slippages underfoot. These reappraisals, although conducted

very differently and for oppositional reasons, have all reached

the same conclusion. As they have searched ever harder for some

foundations for their own positions, what they have all realised

is that no such foundations exist either for themselves or for

anybody else – and nor have they ever done so: every idol has

had feet made of clay. As a result scepticism or, more strongly,

nihilism, just do now provide the dominant, underlying

intellectual presuppositions of ‘our times’.9

Of course types and degrees of scepticism have long lived

within the ‘Western Tradition’ (as was mentioned in chapter 2),

but the difference this time is that what had previously been

glimpsed somewhat intermittently and kept largely on the

margins, not only now lies right across our culture, but is also

variously welcomed. For post-modernists not only refuse to

mourn or wax nostalgic for those now ghostly centres and

metanarratives (nor for those who mostly benefited from them)

but, for a range of reasons, celebrate or strategically utilise the

widely acknowledged ‘incommensurability of reality to

concepts’.10

76 doing history in the post-modern world

This then is what I take to be our post-modern world. This is the

pressure that has allowed, or forced, the perspective on history

that I have sketched out in chapters 1 and 2. And it is this same

pressure – this overbearing circumstance – which has also produced what I now want to go on to consider; the consequential

existence of that whole mass of history genres which currently

surround us and which have helped relativise and historicise

history at the very same time as history began to be widely

expressed through these ‘sceptical’ characteristics. This is a postmodern milieu where the concept of ‘ironic re-description’, as

construed by Richard Rorty, appropriately describes our times

and its various workings of the (its) past, and can serve to introduce those genres.

In Contingency, Irony and Solidarity,

11 Rorty has sketched in a figure

that he has called the liberal ironist (actually himself). This person is liberal because s/he thinks that acts of cruelty are the

worst things that people can do to each other, but s/he is also

sufficiently historicist and nominalist enough (‘things’ are

‘words’) to have abandoned the idea that such beliefs refer back

to some kind of real foundation beyond the reach of time and

chance. For the liberal ironist there is no way of demonstrating

to someone who wishes to be cruel that it is wrong to be so.

What has thus been seen from the end of the eighteenth century

until it now lives generally in our culture, says Rorty, is the view

that anything can be made to look good or bad, desirable or

undesirable, useful or useless, simply by being re-described (just

as in my story what counted as value for the aristocrat, bourgeois

and proletarian was re-described). And it is this ‘re-descriptive

turn’ that has encompassed, of course, the particular thing that

we are interested in in this text, the past/history.

For as we have seen, this is a past that can be infinitely redescribed. It can and has supported countless plausible and, vis-à-vis

their own methodological lights, equally legitimate histories; it has unfailingly given whatever historians (and their

doing history in the post-modern world 77

impersonators) have wanted and want: various births, origins,

legitimating antecedents, explanations and lines of descent

(Tory, Whig, Marxist etc.) useful for them as they try to be in

control, so that they can make the past their past and so say,

along with Nietzsche, ‘So I willed it.’

Today more people(s) than ever before are willing things. In

the wake of those absent centres and collapsed metanarratives, so

the conditions of post-modernism have produced that multiplicity of histories that can be met everywhere throughout our

democratic/consumerising culture, a mass of genres (designer/

niche histories) to be variously used and/or abused.

Here we can identify, say, historians’ histories (professional

histories attempting to exercise hegemony over the field, a version expressed in the thesis, the monograph and the text),

teachers’ histories (necessarily popularisations of professional

histories), and then a whole range of other distinctive forms

that can only be listed: children’s histories, popular-memory

histories, proscribed histories, black histories, white histories,

women’s histories, feminist histories, men’s histories, heritage

histories, reactionary histories, revolutionary histories, bottomdog histories, top-dog histories, etc., all these varying constructs

being affected by local, regional, national and international

perspectives.

This is not all. All of these genres have ragged and interlapping edges, all lean on each other and define themselves by what

they are not – inter-textuality. Not only that. All are strafed by

epistemological, methodological and ideological assumptions

that show no one-to-one relationship but which move across the

whole field so that we can look at each of these genres now

structurally or phenomenologically and then empirically or

existentially; from the perspective now of liberalism or Marxism

and then from the radical right, combining and re-combining

the available elements so that none of the resultant histories has

any necessary permanence; is expressive of no essence. What is

78 doing history in the post-modern world

clear is therefore the utter contingency of readings and the

recognition that interpretations at (say) the ‘centre’ of our culture are not there because they are true or methodologically

correct (brilliant histories can be marginalised if their subject

matter is unpalatable) but because they are aligned to the dominant discursive practices: again power/knowledge.

This interpretive flux, when viewed positively, is potentially

empowering to even the most marginal in that they can at least

make their own histories even if they do not have the power to

make them other peoples’. As Peter Widdowson has argued, it is

unlikely that history can now be rescued from a historiographically led and methodologically informed deconstructionism,

‘and nor should it be’.12 Querying the notion of the historian’s

truth, pointing to the variable facticity of facts, insisting that

historians write the past from ideological positions, stressing

that history is a written discourse as liable to deconstruction as

any other, arguing that ‘the past’ is as notional a concept as ‘the

real world’ to which novelists allude in realist fiction – only ever

existing in the present discourses that articulate it – all these

things destabilise the past and fracture it, so that, in the cracks

opened up, new histories can be made.

On the other hand, however, viewed negatively by those who

retain enough power to draw up the boundaries of an ostensibly ‘proper’ history still stubbornly defined by reference to a

putative objectivity, then this freedom to make alternative readings seems subversive; it appears challenging. Accordingly it has

generally been the case that the dominant discursive practices

attempt to close down (effect a closure) on those readings they

wish not to run. At our present conjuncture, two such approaches

to closure can be seen. Either the dominant practices attempt to

recuperate/incorporate unwelcome histories into the mainstream (as in attempts to ‘redomesticate’ feminist readings by

allowing them a proper and respectable place within history per

se rather than letting them remain her-story); or, ironically, they

doing history in the post-modern world 79

capitalise on the phenomenon of post-modern pastlessness,

turning it (re-describing it) to their advantage.

If the past can be read as an endless circulation of insubstantial

interests and styles, then this applies not only to the more dominant readings but to newer alternative ones too. For while there

may be a sense in which everyone is in the same boat, because

not all the boat’s occupants are in the same position, in that

some already have their histories in place, this problematicisation of the foundations for historical building is held to be more

damaging for those whose constructions are at an early stage.

Widdowson again: ‘In this scenario, post modernism is the last

great gambit of capitalism to [try and] defeat opposition, contestation and change . . . “We are left in a world of radically

‘empty’ signifiers. No meaning. No classes. No history. Just a

ceaseless procession of simulacra; the past is played and replayed

as an amusing range of styles, genres, signifying practices to be

combined and re-combined at will. . . . The only history that

exists here is the history of the signifier and that is no history at

all. . . .”’13

My own view on these ‘possibilities’ that post-modernism has

constituted at the very same time as allowing expression, is that

such attempts at status quo recuperation and closure are unlikely to

be effective within the trajectory of democratising, sceptical/

ironic social formations and that, après Widdowson, they ought

not to be anyway. Between the Scylla and Charybdis of, on the

one hand, authorised history and, on the other, post-modern

pastlessness, a space exists for the desirable outcome of as many

people(s) as possible to make their own histories such that they

can have real effects (a real say) in the world. To be sure, in their

direction and in their impact these effects cannot be guaranteed

with precision or (much to the chagrin of, say, Marxist underwriters) definitively underwritten.14 But they can occur and one

can help them. For viewed not in its traditional guise as a subject

discipline aiming at a real knowledge of the past, but seen rather

80 doing history in the post-modern world

as what it is, a discursive practice that enables present-minded

people(s) to go to the past, there to delve around and reorganise

it appropriately to their needs, then such history, as the cultural

critic Tony Bennett has argued, may well have a radical cogency

that can make visible aspects of the past that have previously

been hidden or secreted away; that have previously been

overlooked or sidelined, thereby producing fresh insights

that can actually make emancipatory, material differences to and

within the present – which is where all history starts from

and returns to.

I now come to the third and final section of this chapter. Here I

want to suggest a way in which it might be possible to run

‘historically’ with the consequences of post-modernism as outlined above in the positive direction of democratic emancipation; a democratic emancipation that at one and the same time

further clarifies the question of ‘the nature of history’.

In The Discourse of History, Roland Barthes has argued that the

past can be represented in many historians’ modes and tropes

some of which, however, are less mythological and mystifying

than others inasmuch as they deliberately call overt attention to

their own processes of production and explicitly indicate the

constructed rather than the found nature of their referents. As far

as I am concerned the benefits of this are obvious. To work in

this way is to adopt a method which deconstructs and historicises all those interpretations that have certaintist pretensions

and which fail to call into question the conditions of their own

making; which forget to indicate their subservience to

unrevealed interests, which mis-recognise their own historical

moment, and which mask those epistemological, methodological and ideological pre-suppositions that, as I have tried to

suggest throughout this text, everywhere and everytime mediate

the past into history.

How might this desirable approach to history then – an

doing history in the post-modern world 81

approach designed to develop a democratising critical intelligence laced with irony – be realised? Perhaps two things are

needed. First would be what might be termed a reflexive methodology. What this means is that (perhaps as students) you are

given an explicit analysis of why the history you are getting is

the one you are getting and why you are getting it in the way

you are and not in any other. This analysis would work the fertile

distinction between the past and history out of which emerges

the problematics of ‘the history question’ that I have begun to

introduce and look at in this text. And further, there is then a

need for detailed historiographical studies to examine how previous and current histories have been constructed both in terms

of their method and their content; and here a further text is

needed. What I am suggesting is thus a radical historicisation of

history (‘always historicise’) and I take this as the starting point

for a reflexive historian, going on to suggest that, for subsequent

historical work, you develop a self-consciously held (and

acknowledged) position.

Here a comment about a ‘choice of position’ is necessary.

For in saying that you ought to make an explicit choice of

position I do not want to imply that if you do not want to make

such a choice then you can do a ‘position-less’ history. That is, I

do not want to suggest that you have some sort of freedom to

choose or not; for this is to be unreflectively liberal. In liberal

discourse there is always posited, somewhere and somehow, a

sort of neutral ground from which it looks precisely as if you can

choose or not. This neutral ground is not seen as another position one already occupies, but is considered rather as a disinterested site from which one can sit back and objectively make

unbiased choices and judgements. But we have seen that this is

not so. There is no such thing as an ‘unpositioned centre’ (actually a contradiction in terms); no possibility of an unpositioned

site. The only choice is between a history that is aware of what it

is doing and a history that is not. Here the comments of the

82 doing history in the post-modern world

literary theorist Robert Young are to the point (for his ‘criticism’

read ‘reading’):

No criticism is without an implicit – if not explicit – theoretical

position. Thus the complaint levelled against so-called ‘theoretical criticism’ – that it imposes its theories on to the texts [the

past] themselves – is in fact most applicable to so-called ‘nontheoretical criticism’, whose pre-conceptions about how to

read and what to read for, are so fundamental that they remain

‘natural’ . . . free of theory.15

Thus, all history is theoretical and all theories are positioned

and positioning. In choosing a position of your own I would

thus obviously not want to impose my way of reading the past

on you, but I would ask you to remember that as you choose

you always select a version of the past and a way of appropriating

it that has effects; that aligns you with some readings (readers)

and against others.16 The point is this: that those who claim to

know what history is, is for them (as for me) to have always

already carried out an act of interpretation.17

And finally, the second thing to help realise a sceptical, critically reflexive approach to both the ‘history question’ and doing

history, is the selection of a content appropriate for this practice.

Of course, there is a sense in which any part of the past would

suffice for this, given its readiness to oblige any interpreter.

Nevertheless, other things being equal, my own preference

would be for a series of histories that helped us to understand

the world that we live in and the forms of history that have both

helped produce it and which it has produced. This is an ordinary

enough claim but it can be critically twisted somewhat by using

a form of words by Foucault: not so much a history to help us

understand the world in which we live then, but rather a series

of ‘histories of the present’.

The reason for this choice can be put briefly. If the present can

doing history in the post-modern world 83

best be understood as post-modern (and if, as Philip Rieff has

remarked, we can actually survive this experiment called modernity18) then this suggests to me that the content of a preferred

history should be studies of this phenomenon. That is, that the

analyses of our modern world via the methodologically

informed perspectives of post-modernism not only help us to

locate all those present debates over ‘what is history?’ (who is

history for?), but also provide us, at a moment in time that

hinges between the old and the new, with what in a sense all

these debates want: a context that will make an informed and

workable answer to that question possible. In the post-modern

world, then, arguably the content and context of history should

be a generous series of methodologically reflexive studies of the

makings of the histories of post-modernity itself.

84 doing history in the post-modern world

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1 I use the term discourse throughout this book (e.g. ‘to be in control of

your own discourse’; ‘the discourse of history’) in the sense that it

relates people’s thoughts about history to interests and power. Thus,

to be in control of your own discourse means that you have power

over what you want history to be rather than accepting what others say

it is; this consequently empowers you, not them. Similarly, the use of

the phrase ‘the discourse of history’, means that, rather than seeing

history as a subject or a discipline (schoolish terms) which suggests

that you just learn something that is always already there in some

natural or obvious way and to which you innocently, objectively and

disinterestedly respond, you actually see history as a ‘field of force’; a

series of ways of organising the past by and for interested parties

which always comes from somewhere and for some purpose and

which, in their direction, would like to carry you with them. This field is

a ‘field of force’ because in it these directions are contested (have to

be fought for). It is a field that variously includes and excludes, which

centres and marginalises views of the past in ways and in degrees that

refract the powers of those forwarding them. Using the term ‘discourse’, then, indicates that we know that history is never itself, is

never said or read (articulated, expressed, discoursed) innocently, but

that it is always for someone. This text works on the assumption that

knowing this might empower the knower, and that this is a good

thing. (Note: This way of using the terms is not the same as that

discussed by Hayden White in his introduction to Tropics of Discourse,

London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978; see especially White’s

technical – and brilliant – Introduction.)

2 E. H. Carr, What Is History?, London, Penguin, 1963; G. Elton, The

Practice of History, London, Fontana, 1969; A. Marwick, The Nature of

History, London, Macmillan, 1970.

3 J. Tosh, The Pursuit of History, London, Longman, 1984.

4 For example: R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Oxford,

Blackwell, 1980; R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge,

Cambridge University Press, 1989; T. Eagleton, Literary Theory, Oxford,

Blackwell, 1983; J. Frow, Marxism and Literary History, Cambridge

(Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1986; D. Bromwich, A Choice of

Inheritance, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1989.

5 P. Geyl, Debates with Historians, London, Fontana, 1962; M. Bloch,

The Historian’s Craft, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1954;

R. Collingwood, The Idea of History, Oxford, Oxford University

Press, 1946; H. White, The Content of the Form, London, Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1987; M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, New

York, Pantheon, 1980.

6 A. Callinicos, Making History, New York, Cornell University Press,

1988; M. Oakeshott, On History, Oxford, Blackwell, 1983; R. Chartier,

Cultural History, Oxford, Polity, 1988; S. Horigan, Nature and Culture in

Western Discourses, London, Routledge, 1989; E. Wolfe, Europe and the

People Without History, London, University of California Press, 1982;

M. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, London, Verso, 1983; I.

Hassan, ‘The Culture of Post-Modernism’, Theory, Culture and Society,

2, 3, 1985, 119–32.

7 G. Stedman-Jones, ‘The Poverty of Empiricism’, in R. Blackburn (ed.),

Ideology in Social Science, London, Fontana, 1972; R. Samuel, ‘Grand

Narratives’, History Workshop Journal, 29, 1990; D. Cannadine, ‘British

History: Past, Present – and Future?’, Past and Present, 116, 1987; C.

Parker, The English Historical Tradition Since 1850, Edinburgh, Donald,

1990.

8 This does not mean to say that one must be unaware of the danger of

history’s possible subordination to literary imperialism; thus Bennett:

‘the conspectus on the past as an infinite text which can only be

86 notes

endlessly retextualised rests on a transference to the past of literature’s own object and procedures. It is a literalisation of the past

which must be judged as an attempt to extend the sway of literature’s

own regime of truth into that of history’ (T. Bennett, Outside Literature,

London, Routledge, 1990, p. 280). A self-aware raid on literature’s

procedures as and when required, then, is more to my point.

9 The chapters have been kept short for several reasons, the main one

being the introductory and polemical nature of the text which means

that I have not gone in for a general coverage to dip into (e.g. Marwick, op.cit.) but have tried to keep this introductory argument brief

enough to be read in one or two sittings and thus kept in mind in one

go. I also ought to say that I have not tried to make this text anything

other than basic and ‘teacherly’. I am aware of the way it has simplified complex areas – for example the history of post-modernism – but

my aim has been to put the arguments briefly and then indicate in

footnotes the more sophisticated and scholarly treatments one might

go to. In other words, I have tried to push further reading toward

some of the texts I have used behind the scenes of this book, whilst

deliberately keeping most of them out of it.

1 WHAT HISTORY IS

1 J. Sturrock, Structuralism, London, Paladin, 1986, p. 56.

2 See, for example, the journal History and Gender, Blackwell, which

started in 1989; V. Seidler, Rediscovering Masculinity, London,

Routledge, 1989; E. Showalter, Speaking of Gender, London,

Routledge, 1989.

3 On the relationship between history and fiction see: H. White, The

Content of the Form, London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987; L.

Hutcheon, A Poetics of Post-Modernism, London, Routledge, 1988; T.

Bennett, Outside Literature, London, Routledge, 1990; V. Descombes,

Modern French Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,

1980, especially chapter 4; H. White, Tropics of Discourse, London,

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978, especially chapter 5, ‘The Fictions of Factual Representation’.

4 D. Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press, 1985, especially chapter 5.

5 S. Giles, ‘Against Interpretation’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 28,

1, 1988. A similar point, made for very different reasons, is put

by Michael Oakeshott in On History, Oxford, Blackwell, 1983. For

notes 87

Oakeshott a historically understood past is the conclusion of a critical

enquiry of a certain type, ‘to be found nowhere but in a history book

. . . history is . . . an enquiry in which authenticated survivals from the

past are dissolved into their component features in order to be used

for what they are worth as circumstantial evidence from which to infer

a past which has not survived; a past composed of passages of related

historical events . . . and assembled as themselves answers to questions about the past formulated by a historian’ (p.33).

6 Lowenthal, op.cit., p.216.

7 G. Steiner, After Babel, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1975, p.234.

8 Lowenthal, op.cit., p.218.

9 ibid., p.218.

10 G. Elton, The Practice of History, London, Fontana, 1969, pp.70,

112–13.

11 E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, London, Merlin, 1979, p.193.

12 A. Marwick, The Nature of History, London, Macmillan, 1970, pp.187,

190.

13 D. Steel, ‘New History’, History Resource, 2, 3, 1989.

14 J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past, London, Macmillan, 1969, passim.

15 P. Wright, On Living in an Old Country, London, Verso, 1985.

16 A fuller treatment of these sorts of practices can be found in M.

Stanford, The Nature of Historical Knowledge, Oxford, Blackwell, 1986,

especially chapter 4 onwards.

17 R. Scholes, Textual Power, London, Yale University Press, 1985; T.

Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, London, New Left Books, 1976; S.

Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1980; T. Bennett, op.cit.,

18 This definition is not unlike that arrived at for literature by John Frow,

Marxism and Literary History, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University

Press, 1986. For Frow, literature ‘designates a set of practices for

signification which have been socially systematised as a unity and

which in turn regulate the production, the reception, and the circulation of texts assigned to this category. It thus constitutes a common

form of textuality for formally and temporally disparate texts, although

this shared space may be riven by antagonistic regimes of signification corresponding to different class (or race or gender or religious)

positionings and their different institutional bases’ (p.84).

88 notes

2 ON SOME QUESTIONS AND SOME ANSWERS

1 G. Steiner, Real Presences, London, Faber, 1989, p.71.

2 ibid., p.1.

3 Quoted in A. Sheridan, Foucault: The Will to Truth, London, Tavistock,

1980, p.46.

4 Steiner, op.cit., pp.93–5.

5 R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p.3.

6 M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, New York, Pantheon, 1981, pp. 131–3.

7 G. Steiner, After Babel, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1975, p.110,

passim.

8 Of course I do not in this text deny the existence of the actuality of the

past but only that, logically, that past cannot entail one and only one

evaluation of it (re: the fact-value distinction, which of course, very

obviously, admits of ‘facts’). I do not, moreover, deny that the term

‘truth’ has a literal meaning in certain discourses as a ‘truth effect’.

But, as ‘truth’ is a term that is applied only to statements in analytical

contexts (e.g. deductive logic) and not to the wider contexts themselves of which statements are but one kind of linguistic construct,

then historians, involved as they are in such wider arguments (interpretations) cannot refer to these wider arguments/interpretations as

true. In fact to speak of a ‘true interpretation’ is a contradiction in

terms. See Oakeshott on this (On History, Oxford, Blackwell, 1983,

p.49, passim) and F. R. Ankersmit, ‘Reply to Professor Zagorin’, History and Theory, 29, 1990, 275–96. See also the background to Ankersmit: F. R. Ankersmit, ‘Historiography and Post-modernism’,

History and Theory, 28, 1989, 137–53, and P. Zagorin, ‘Historiography

and Post-modernism: Reconsiderations’, History and Theory, 29,

1990, 263–74. See also R. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism,

Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1982, and H. White, Tropics of Discourse, London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

9 R. Skidelsky, ‘A Question of Values’, The Times Educational Supplement, 27.5.1988. Skidelsky is one of those historians who seem to

believe that different interpretations of the same set of events are the

result of ideological distortions or inadequate factual data, arguing, in

effect, that if one only eschewed ideology and remained true to the

facts then certain knowledge would appear. But, as White has argued,

in the unprocessed record of the past and in the chronicle of events

which the historian extracts from the record, the facts exist only as a

notes 89

congeries of contiguously related fragments which then need to be

put together through some enabling matrix. This would not be news

to many historians ‘were they not so fetishistically enamoured of the

notion of “facts” and so congenitally hostile to “theory” in any form

that the presence in a historical work of a formal theory used to

explicate the relationship between facts and concepts is enough to

earn them the charge of having defected to the despised sociology or

having lapsed into the nefarious philosophy of history’ (White, op.cit.,

p.126).

10 Much of this argument is taken from K. Jenkins and P. Brickley, ‘On

Bias’, History Resource, 2, 3, 1989.

11 The gist of this section is taken from K. Jenkins and P. Brickley, ‘On

Empathy’, Teaching History, 54, April 1989.

12 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford, Blackwell, 1983;

O. R. Jones, The Private Language Argument, London, Macmillan, 1971.

13 Steiner, After Babel, pp. 134–6.

14 ibid., p.138.

15 T. Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, London, New Left Books, 1976, p.3.

16 Steiner, After Babel, p.18.

17 R. Barthes, in D. Attridge et al. (eds), Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, p.3. As

we have seen in this section on evidence, Elton’s views would run

counter both to Barthes’ and my own; Elton talks of a ‘mass of historical facts’ and of the almost unproblematic ‘cumulative building up of

assured knowledge of both fact and interpretation’, G. Elton, The Practice of History, London, Fontana, 1969, pp.84–5. See also M. Stanford

on historical evidence and construction in The Nature of Historical

Knowledge, Oxford, Blackwell, 1986, especially chapter 5.

18 See White, op.cit., p.52.

19 T. Eagleton, Literary Theory, Oxford, Blackwell, 1983, p.201.

20 See for introductory reading on history and science, P. Gardner, Theories of History, London, Collier-Macmillan, 1959.

21 This section draws on White, op.cit., especially chapter 1, ‘The Burden

of History’.

22 ibid., p.28.

23 H. White, The Content of the Form, London, Johns Hopkins University

Press, 1987, p.227, note 12.

24 White, Tropics of Discourse, pp.46–7.

90 notes

3 DOING HISTORY IN THE POST-MODERN WORLD

1 A. Callinicos, Against Post-Modernism, Oxford, Polity, 1989.

2 J. F. Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition, Manchester, Manchester

University Press, 1984.

3 Much of this explanatory story is used to discuss National Curriculum

School History in K. Jenkins and P. Brickley, ‘Always Historicise . . .‘,

Teaching History, 62, January 1991.

4 See G. Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle, London, Faber, 1971, especially

chapter 1: ‘The Great Ennui’.

5 J. F. Lyotard, ‘Time Today’, The Oxford Literary Review, 11, 1–2, 1989,

pp. 3–20, at p.12.

6 F. Jameson, ‘Post-modernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, 146, 1984. See also P. Dews (ed.), Habermas:

Autonomy and Solidarity, London, Verso, 1986.

7 Steiner, op.cit., p.66.

8 See Callinicos, op.cit., especially chapter 5: ‘So What Else Is New?’,

pp.121–71.

9 For a general view of post-modernism see D. Harvey, The Condition of

Post-Modernity, Oxford, Blackwell, 1989.

10 Callinicos, op.cit., p.18.

11 R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, especially the Introduction.

12 P. Widdowson, ‘The Creation of a Past’, The Times Higher Education

Supplement, 3.11.90. See also P. Widdowson (ed.), Re-reading English,

London, Methuen, 1982.

13 Widdowson, The Times Higher Education Supplement.

14 See in particular T. Bennett, Outside Literature, London, Routledge,

1990, especially chapter 3 (Literature/History) and chapter 10 (Criticism and Pedagogy: The Role of the Literary Intellectual). Bennett’s

arguments for a type of post-Marxism and beyond versus postmodernism is interesting and to the point vis-à-vis ‘the nature of history’, wrestling, as he does, with the past as a discursive construct yet

wanting it to somehow prevent any sort of discursive practice

appropriating it at will. See also, for an attempt to produce a form of

solidarity that accepts contingency, irony and freedom and yet which

tries to discourage this from becoming ‘anything goes’, Rorty’s really

quite brilliant (liberal) work, op.cit.

15 R. Young, Untying the Text, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981,

p.viii.

notes 91

16 For a wide-ranging and thought-provoking discussion and critique of

flabby notions of democracy, empowerment, alignment and emancipation, see Bennett, op.cit., chapters 9 and 10. See also the postMarxist discursive approach of C. Mouffe and E. Laclau in Hegemony

and Socialist Strategy, London, Verso, 1985, which Bennett analyses in

chapter 10, deepening the ‘solidarity’ problematics of democracy etc.

only gestured towards in this book.

17 On this see White’s comments that, unlike the twentieth century’s

prejudice for empirical history as the sole access to reality, the great

philosophers of history (Vico, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Croce) and the

great classic writers of historiography (Michelet, Carlyle, Ranke, Droyson, Burckhardt) at least ‘had a rhetorical self-consciousness that

permitted them to recognise that any set of facts was variously, and

equally legitimately, describable, that there is no such thing as a single

correct description of anything, on the basis of which an interpretation of that thing can subsequently be brought to bear. They recognise, in short, that all original descriptions . . . are already interpretations’ (H. White, Tropics of Discourse, London, Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1978, p.127).

18 P. Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, London, Penguin, 1973,

passim.

92 notes

INDEX

accounts of past 14

Althusser, Louis 45, 74

Ankersmit, Frank xii

assessment in education 20, 52

autobiographies, collective 22–3

axiomatic fictions 49

balance 42–4, 54–5; see also bias

Barthes, Roland xvi; The Discourse

of History 60–1, 81; evidence

90n17; reality effect xiv

Bennett, Tony 30; cultural

criticism 81; literalisation of

past 86–7n8; post-Marxism

91n14, 92n16

bias 44–5; empiricism 45, 46; facts

45; objectivity 45; readings 46;

sources 46; truth 47

Bloch, Marc 2, 3

Borges, Jorge Luis 37

bourgeoisie 22, 72–3

Callinicos, A. 3

Cannadine, David 3

capitalism: bourgeoisie 73;

Marxism 74; post-modernism

80; production mode 73;

relativism 74; social formations

75

Carr, E. H.: evidence xvi, 58, 59;

What is History? 1

cause and effect 19, 20, 61–3

censorship 39

centres: see decentring

certaintism 13, 34, 38

change/continuity 19, 20, 61

Chinese encyclopaedia example 37

Christianity/truth 35, 38

chronicles 40

Collingwood, R. G. 2, 52–3

common sense 36, 38, 72

communication/translation 48

communism 73–4

concepts x, xi; heartland 19–20, 23,

61; ideology 20; knowledge

19–20; methodology 19;

philosophy of history xi; truth 36

constructions: empathy 53–4;

history xiii, 9, 14–15, 21;

masculinity 9; meaning 4, 11;

truth 38; see also social

formations

consumption, history texts 29

continuity 19, 20, 61

controversies 15, 21–2, 23; see also

Carr, E. H.; Elton, Geoffrey

Copernican model 36

Croce, Benedetto 48

Cromwell, Thomas 50–1

cultural criticism 14, 81–2

dates 40

decentring 71, 75, 78

deconstructionist approaches 2;

difference 29, 30–1; influence on

history xviii; truth 36

descriptions 11, 92n17

difference: deconstructionist

approaches 29, 30–1; recognition

of 68; series of 75; similarity 20;

see also otherness

disciplines x

discourse: dominant 63–4;

Foucault xiii; history xvii, 1, 6–7,

12, 22, 31–2, 39, 41, 85–6n1;

literary criticism 64; meaning

6–7; perspectives 16–17;

readings 4, 10–11; referent 60–1

documents, fetishised 3, 58

Eagleton, Terry 30, 64; Criticism and

Ideology 49–50

education: assessment 20, 52;

empathy 55; examinations 20;

history 20–1, 51–2; history

teachers xv–xvi; personalised

pedagogy 52, 55; power 20–1;

pressures 51–2

Elton, Geoffrey 2, 18; on Cromwell

50–1; England under the Tudors

9; evidence xvi, 58, 59, 60,

90n17; facts 45; Marwick on

17–18; The Practice of History 1,

17; sources 59; truth 34

empathy 19, 47–8; balance 54–5;

constructions 53–4; education

55; empiricism 55–6; idealism

55; ideology 53–4, 55; literary

criticism example 49–50;

rationality 54–5; socialist

interpretation 56;

understanding 51, 58;

Wittgenstein 48

empiricism: bias 45, 46;

empathy 55–6; facts xii; history

xii–xiii, 3; structuralism 18–19;

truth 47

empowerment 79, 85–6n1

epistemology xvi, xviii, 2, 12–16;

history as art/science 66; past/

history 23; professional

historians 25–6

European inter-war years example

41–2

evidence: Barthes 90n17; Carr xvi,

58, 59; Carr–Elton dispute xvi, 58,

59–60; as concept 19, 20; Elton

xvi, 58, 59, 60, 90n17; falsification

45; professional historians 60;

sources 59

exchange-value 74–5

exploitation 73

extremism 54

94 index

facts: bias 45; concepts x; Elton 45;

empiricism xii; history xiii, 90n17;

interpretation 40–4, 55–6;

meaning 40–1; methodology x;

naïve realism 3; past 40, 89n8;

suppression 64; and theory

90n9; truth 89n8; values 13, 22,

41, 89n8; White 66, 89–90n9,

92n17

falsification 45

femininst approach 2, 9, 46, 74,

79–80

Fish, S. 30

Foucault, Michel xvi, 2; discourse

xiii; histories of the present 83–4;

The Order of Things 36–7;

Power/Knowledge 38–9

Frankfurt School 74

freedom, reciprocal 54

French Revolution example 61–3

Freudian approach 2

Frow, John 88n18

genres of history xviii, 2, 30, 78–9,

80

geography 10, 11

Geyl, Pieter 2

Giles, Steven 14

God 35, 36, 72

Gramsci, Antonio 45, 46, 74

Hampson, Norman 63

hindsight 15–16

historians 3, 8–9; accuracy of

accounts 14; axiomatic fictions

49; controversies 15, 21–2, 23;

interpretation 14–15, 17–18; as

narrators 14–15; objectivity 17;

perspectives xi; presuppositions

13, 25–6; sources 15; subjectivity

17; see also professional

historians

histories xi, 78, 80, 83, 84

historiography x, xviii; description

92n17; English tradition 3; history

7–8, 14, 42–4

history xiv, xvi, xvii, xix, 31–2, 82; as

collective autobiographies 22–3;

as construction xiii, 9, 14–15, 21;

as craft 63; discourse xvii, 1, 6–7,

12, 22, 31–2, 39, 41, 85–6n1; in

education 20–1, 51–2;

empiricism xii–xiii, 3; facts xiii,

90n17; genres xviii, 2, 30, 78–9,

80; historiography 7–8, 14, 42–4;

interpretation 11–12, 50–1;

knowledge xiii–xiv, 17; landscape

example 10–11, 21; and literature

86–7n8; Marx 65; modernisation

3–4; narrative xii; past xi–xiii,

7–9, 12, 16, 23, 29, 58; postmodernism xvii, xx, 3, 70–1, 84;

power xiii, 23–4; readings 9, 46;

as science/art 65–6; truth 17,

66–7, 79; women 9

history of minds 53–4

history teachers xv–xvi

history texts 27–9

history theory xviii, 2–3, 6–7, 30

Hitler, Adolf 15

Hobsbawm, Eric 63

human nature 25–6, 55, 56

ideology xiii, 12, 20–4; concepts 20;

empathy 53–4, 55; interpretation

18, 29–30, 89–90n9; liberalism

43, 53–4; power 21, 23, 29–30;

professional historians 24–5,

29–31; social formations 21

impartiality 28; see also bias

index 95

individualism 3

intentions 51

interpretation 43–4; descriptions

92n17; facts 40–4, 55–6;

geography 11; historians 14–15,

17–18; history 11–12, 50–1; history

theory 30; ideology 18, 29–30,

89–90n9; language 39, 40–1;

left/right/centre balance 42–4;

past 15; presuppositions 49;

readings 7, 29, 83; relativism 30;

sociology 11; sources 48; speech

48, 51; suppression of facts 64

intertextuality 2, 9, 78–9

irony 77, 82

Jenkins, Keith xi, xii; academic

background xv–xvi; Re-Figuring

History xviii; Re-Thinking History

xi, xiv, xvi–xvii

Khlebnikov, V. V. 15

knowledge: absolute 35, 36;

categories 25–6; concepts

19–20; history xiii–xiv, 17;

objectivity xii, 67; past xii–xiii,

55–6; Plato 35, 36; power 79,

86n1; relativism 41; scepticism

67–8, 69; sources 58; truth 36

labour market 74–5

Laclau, E. 92n16

landscape example 10–11, 21

language xiv; as game 39, 67;

interpretation 39, 40–1; meaning

2, 53; past 53

liberalism 43, 46–7, 53–4, 56, 77

literary criticism example 49–50,

64, 83

literature 2, 4, 86–7n8, 88n18

Lowenthal, David 14–15, 16; The

Past is a Foreign Country 13–14

Lyotard, Jean-François 71, 75; The

Post-Modern Condition 71

Maitland, F. W. 15

marginalised people: difference 75;

history 9, 22; past/history 9;

power 20, 79

market forces 74, 75

Marwick, Arthur xvi; on Elton 17–18;

on Jenkins xvii; methodology 18,

45; The Nature of History 1, 17

Marx, Karl 65, 73

Marxism 45–6; capitalism 74;

causality 62; literature 2;

Thompson 17, 57; universality 74

Marxist-Leninist interpretations 44

masculinity 9

materialism, historical 17

meaning: construction 4, 11;

discourse 6–7; facts 40–1;

language 2, 53

metanarratives 71–2, 75, 78

methodology 2, 16–20; concepts

19; diversity 23; facts x; history as

art/science 66; Marwick 18, 45;

naïve realism 3; post-modernism

xviii; professional historians 26,

66; reflexivity 82, 84; truth 18–19

Mill, J. S. 54, 55

modernity 75, 84

moral judgement 20

Mouffe, C. 92n16

Munslow, Alun xi–xiv

narrative x, xii, 11, 14–15, 22; see also

metanarratives

Nietzsche, Friedrich x, xvi, 78

nihilism 76

96 index

Oakeshott, Michael 3, 88n5

objectivity: bias 45; historians 17;

knowledge xii, 67; re-creation of

past 45; truth 34–5

ontology 2

Orwell, George 23; 1984 13, 22, 24

other minds problem 48

otherness 37, 55–6; see also

difference

Parker, Christopher 3

past: accounts 14; facts 40, 89n8;

hindsight 15–16; historicisation

xx; history xi–xiii, 7–9, 12, 16, 23,

29, 58; intentions 51;

interpretation 15; knowledge

xii–xiii, 55–6; language 53;

literalisation 86–7n8; narrative

22; objective re-creation 45;

otherness 55–6; post-modernism

80; presuppositions 56–7;

readings of 8–9; re-description

77–8; truth 24, 67; see also traces

of past

pedagogy, personalised 52, 55

perspectives xi, 16–17, 20–1

philosophy 2, 4

philosophy of history xi, xvii,

92n17

Plato 35, 36, 38

Plumb, J. H.: The Death of the Past

24

post-Marxism 91n14, 92n16

post-modernism: capitalism 80;

histories 84; history xvii, xx, 3,

70–1, 84; irony 77; Lyotard 71;

methodology xviii; past 80; postMarxism 91n14; reappraisal 76;

reflexivity 69; social formation 71

power: education 20–1; history xiii,

23–4; ideology 21, 23, 29–30;

knowledge 79, 86n1;

marginalised people 20, 79;

perspectives 20–1; social

formations 31; truth 38–9

pragmatism 74, 75

pre-modernity 72

present, Foucault 83–4

presuppositions 76; historians 13,

25–6; interpretation 49; past

56–7

professional historians 78;

academic pressures 52–3;

epistemology 25–6; evidence 60;

ideology 24–5, 29–31; as

interpreter 58; methodology 26,

66; pressures 25–8, 52–3;

presuppositions 13, 25–6;

publication 27–8; re-production

of traces of past 27

proletariat 73, 75

property ownership 72–3

rationality 35, 38, 54–5

readings 13–14, 79; bias 46;

discourse 4, 10–11; Eagleton

49–50; feminist approach 79–80;

history 9, 46; history texts 29;

interpretation 7, 29, 83;

intertextuality 9; past 8–9

realism: naïve 3; social 20

reality xii, xiv, 11

reciprocity, rational 54

re-description of past 77–8

referees 28

referent in discourse 60–1

reflexivity 31, 68–9, 82, 84

relativism: capitalism 74;

interpretation 30; knowledge 41;

scepticism 56, 68, 75

index 97

re-production of traces of past

27

retrospection 16

re-writing of history 23

Rieff, Philip 84

Rorty, Richard xiii, 38, 91n14;

Contingency, Irony and Solidarity

77

Same/Other 37

Samuel, Raphael 3

scepticism 2, 76; knowledge 67–8,

69; nihilism 76; reflexivity 68–9;

relativism 56, 68, 75

Schama, Simon 63

Scholes, R. 30

School’s Council History 20

science 35, 36, 38

sequence 20

similarity/difference 20

Skidelsky, Robert 41, 42–3, 44,

89–90n9

social class 72, 73

social formations: ideology 21;

market capitalism 75; postmodernism 71; power 31;

universities 25

social realism 20

socialism 56, 74

sociology 10, 11

solar system 36

sources 57–61; bias 46; Elton 59;

evidence 59; historians 15;

interpretation 48; knowledge

58; unpublished/published

26–7

space concept 20

speech 48, 51

Stedman-Jones, Gareth 3

Steel, Donald 19–20

Steiner, George 38, 40–1, 48–9,

53, 75–6

structuralism 18–19

subjectivity 17

suppression of facts 64

Taylor, A. J. P. 15, 42

teachers of history 51

technical vocabulary 26

text 27–9; accuracy 14; Eagleton

49–50; as sources 57–61;

Steiner 40–1

things/words 36–7

Thompson, E. P. 18; The Making

of the English Working Class 57;

The Poverty of Theory 17

time 19, 20

Tosh, John xvi; The Pursuit of

History 2

traces of the past 27, 57–61

translation 48

Trevor-Roper, H. 15

Trotsky, Leon 45, 46

truth 34–9; bias 47; censorship 39;

Christianity 35, 38; common

sense 36, 38; concepts 36;

constructions 38;

deconstructionist approaches

36; Elton 34; empiricism 47;

facts 89n8; God 35, 36;

history 17, 66–7, 79; knowledge

36; methodology 18–19;

objectivity 34–5; past 24, 67;

Plato 38; power 38–9;

rationality 35

uncertainty 35

underclass 75

understanding/empathy 51, 58

universality: dominant mode 47;

98 index

historical concepts 19, 20;

liberalism 56; Marxism 74;

Skidelsky 44

universities 20, 25

USSR 44, 73–4

values/facts 13, 22, 41, 89n8

World War II 15

Watt, D. C. 42

Western tradition 35, 76

White, Hayden xvi, xvii, 2;

empiricism xii; facts 66,

89–90n9, 92n17;

relativism/scepticism 68;

Tropics of Discourse x–xi

Whitehead, A. N. 35

Widdowson, Peter 79, 80

Wittgenstein, Ludwig 48

women in history 9

words 36–8; see also language

working class 22, 73, 75

Wright, Patrick: On Living in an Old

Country 24

Young, Robert 8