History, the Referent, and Narrative: Reflections on Postmodernism Now

Sixty-odd years ago the historical profession in the United States was confronted for the ﬁrst time with the troubling specter of relativism in the form of a questioning of the possibility of objectivity in the investigation of the human past. The authors of this challenge to objectivity were two distinguished members of the profession, Charles A. Beard and Carl L. Becker, who promulgated their position in various essays and books during the 1930s and later. Both men took some of their arguments from philosophy and showed traces of the inﬂuence of European thinkers such as the Italian idealist philosopher Benedetto Croce. Basically pragmatists in their outlook, they did not despair of historical knowledge or recommend any changes in historical practice. They simply maintained that no student of the past could escape the dominance of the practical problems of the present in determining his or her interests, values, and presuppositions, and that this relationship to the present made historians unable to achieve an objective approach to the past or to know it as it actually was. The extended debate provoked by their relativistic perspective persisted down through the 1950s and beyond before it ﬁnally faded away. In 1988 the entire controversy was retrospectively surveyed in Peter Novick’s excellent study, That Noble Dream. Novick himself held, as he stated in his introduction, that objectivity was not only a delusion but an essentially confused concept. It was thus quite paradoxical that some reviewersof his book praised it for its objectivity, thereby implying its self-refuting character in the manifest contradiction between its author’s practice as a historian and his professed disbelief in objectivity.1 Moreover, if we ask what effect the objectivity debate had upon historians, we see no sign that it shook their commitment to objectivity as an ideal. At the most it may have persuaded some of them that objectivity was not an easy goal and perhaps also induced them to become more conscious of their values and biases as inquirers. As Novick acknowledged, however, the historical profession as a whole continued to give allegiance to objectivity as a regulatory principle and to believe that some approximation to it was attainable.2 In taking this view, it seems to me that its members were implicitly recognizing a fundamental truth, namely, that objectivity, rightly understood and its limits grasped, was not a chimera, but an intrinsic aspect of historical reason which could not be abandoned as an aim or standard without also abandoning history itself as one of the foremost of the human and social sciences. In the aftermath of the objectivity debate has come postmodernism, whoseskeptical questioning and redeﬁnition of history involves a much more radical form of relativism than was ever envisaged by Beard, Becker, and others of their persuasion. By now postmodernism has been with us for well over two decades and generated an extensive literature of exposition and controversy. Today anyone with a theoretical or philosophical interest in historiography, literary studies, or language knows all the cards in the postmodernist deck and how its theories have been applied to history. Possibly this leaves out the majority of professional historians who, as usual, appear to ignore theoretical issues and would prefer to be left undisturbed to get on with their work while no doubt hoping the postmodernist challenge will eventually go away.3 But among the historians who have taken part in the postmodernist debate or attach some importance to the philosophical and methodological foundations of their discipline, a variety of responses can be distinguished. There are some who evince great alarm at the incursions of postmodernism, considering the latter as a new kind of nihilism threatening the very existence of history as an intellectual discipline, and who tend to regard themselves as a beleaguered minority defending the citadel of reason against its hordes of enemies. This, one might not unfairly say, is the impression created by the treatment of postmodernism in writings like Keith Windschuttle’s recent polemic, The Killing of History, Geoffrey Elton’s Return to Essentials, and several of the essays on the subject by Gertrude Himmelfarb.4 Opposite to these are a small number of historians favorable to postmodernism, who embrace it as providing new and profoundly original insights into the nature of history which must decidedly affect historical practice. Among the exemplars of this point of view are the editors and most of the contributors to F. R. Ankersmit and Hans Kellner’s volume of essays bearing the revealing title A New Philosophy of History, and the recent books on postmodernism and historiography by David D. Roberts and Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr.5 Still other historians, while giving respectful and sympathetic consideration to postmodernist ideas or perhapsacknowledging certain contributions postmodernism has made to historiography, draw back or dissent from some of its extreme theoretical claims. Such is more or less the attitude expressed in essays by John Toews and Gabrielle Spiegel, in the collaborative work on the present condition of history by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, and in the dispassionate comments contained in Georg Iggers’s recent survey of twentieth-century historiography. In Defence of History, by the British scholar Richard J. Evans, is another instance of a work that, while generally very critical of postmodernism, nevertheless holds that it has beneﬁted historiography in certain ways.6