In Defence of History

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Taken to excess, postmodernist history can end up being not merely nothing but a mix subjectivity and wishful thinking, it can also open the door to some very serious dangers indeed.

Historical interpretation has evolved 'through contact with the real historical world', a contact said to be 'indirect, because the real historical world has disappeared'; but hey, no worries, for the documents 'which the real world of the past has left behind . I took a doctorate in History long ago, and I still believe with Evans that knowledge (some, not all) about the past is accessible and that there are professional techniques for recovering, arranging,and presenting the past that are both valuable and effective.For example his chapter headings are similar and his concluding paragraph is a homage to the concluding paragraph in Carr’s book.

Postmodernism and relativism (of which postmodernism is the current incarnation) collapse in a performative contradiction when it’s insights are pushed to their logical conclusions. Objek permusuhan beliau adalah pada suguhan pasca-modenisme sebagai suatu mod kognitif di dalam bidang historiografi, bukan sebagai suatu ‘barah’ atau penyakit ketamadunan.Elton is Evans’ standard-bearer for a hardline empiricism; and right from the start he asserts that “few historians would now defend the hard-line concept of historical objectivity espoused by Elton” and certainly Evans does not agree with Elton that what a historian does is “not a question of interpreting fact but of establishing it” . This feeling is exacerbated by the writing style which is a bit like when you come back home from a confrontation at the roller disco and you play back in your head the conversation as it should have gone with all the clever things that you would have said and think about how satisfying it would have been to see the look on your opponent’s face as you comprehensively out-witted them. Muka surat-muka surat seterusnya menyaksikan Evans bergerak melabrak racun-racun yang telah diusung ke dalam bidang penulisan sejarah lewat faham-faham pasca-modenisme. Evans' picks up with an analysis of Carr's progressive view of history writing and Elton's conservative view and introduces his reader to how the discipline has progressed since then.

He tries to be fair, but cannot help but be critical of much postmodernist history; this is quite easy, as many statements by its advocates verge on the ludicrous. His argument is that although postmodernism can offer the historian some useful insights and techniques there is a very real danger of throwing away the baby with the bath water. Antony Easthope has more to say about Evans's treatment of Derrida in his review of In Defence of History.

For me it also succeeds in its argument that we can know about the past and we can find meaning in the past. Het is geen eenzijdige aanval op het postmodernisme, maar veeleer een brede overweging van de geschieddiscipline in haar geheel.

I wish I had However historians cannot simply impose any meaning they want to either, and just come up with fiction. There are serious consequences to postmodernist ideology, in which it gives a license to anybody who wants to suppress, distort, or cover up the past, and thus the truth. In addition, this reply also considers some of the points raised in letters published in The Times Higher Educational Supplement on 19 and 26 September 1997 in reply to my article 'Truth Lost in Vain Views', published in the same periodical on 12 September 1997 (p. and Sir Geoffrey Elton, among others, and he mentions Collingwood only in passing and not in a flattering way.Makna di sebalik sejarah segalanya adalah ciptaan dan rekayasa manusia: mentalite, ideologie, paradigm. Dismissed in a single sentence and a bizarre one at that, to the effect that 'master-narratives are the hegemonic stories told by those in power' (p. Evans contends that the practice of historic study proves this is wrong: the truth, the facts of the past indeed ARE attainable, by applying the correct methodology and when always understood as a preliminary result. Whereas a scientist like Richard Dawkins might say “that’s all very well you saying scientific knowledge is a sham: but the aeroplane still got you from New York to London in 8 hours”.