In Defence of History

Product Information

The text of the book was revised and updated for the US edition, partly to rectify mistakes, partly to deal with criticisms and clarify passages that had given rise to misunderstanding, and partly to take account of significant work in the field that had appeared in the year or so since the publication of the first British edition. The book's central arguments, however, remain essentially the same. The US edition also contains some new examples drawn from American history. It serves as the basis for all translations. In Defence of History aims to defend a mainstream notion of history-writing against 'intellectual barbarians' (p. 8), namely 'the invading hordes of semioticians, post-structuralist, New Historicists, Foucauldians, Lacanians and the rest' (p. 9). That statement is pretty typical of the tone of the book, a robust, earthy common sense in which the word 'paranoia' would be less likely to appear than 'parakeet'. It admits that there is more than one kind of postmodernism ('there are many different varieties', p. 205) yet rides roughshod over all these differences in its lampoon. Evans may not know much about postmodernism but he knows what he doesn't like.

The events have to be taken as given; they are certainly not constructed by the historian. It is quite otherwise with 'facts'. They are constructed: in the documents attesting to the occurrence of events, by interested parties commenting on the events or the documents, and by historians interested in giving a true account of what really happened in the past and distinguishing it from what may appear to have happened. It is the 'facts' that are unstable, subject to revision and further interpretation, and even dismissable as illusions on sufficient grounds.

What is History?

Methodologically, the major negative development has been the construction of a set of barriers between what happened in history and our capacity to observe and understand it. It is denied that there is any reality that is objectively there and not constructed by the observer for different and changing purposes. It is claimed that we can never penetrate beyond the limitatio

The characteristic postmodernist distancing device of the inverted commas around the word 'truth' suggests that he thinks otherwise, else why would he have put them there? Moreover, what Jenkins says here goes completely against what he and others have written at such length about the impossibility of inferring past events, situations, beliefs and so on from documentary evidence. Enormous amounts of postmodernist ink have been spilled on trying to prove that documents are so unreliable you can never tell anything from them, that you can never recover the intentions of their authors, and so on. It is a fundamental premise of postmodernist critiques of history that a document is re-invented and re-interpreted every time someone looks at it, so that it can never have any fixed meaning. If this claim doesn't mean that we can never use documents to find out basic historical facts, then it doesn't mean anything at all. Jenkins tries to recover a little of the ground he has conceded here by insisting on the difficulty of recovering the past through historical documents; but simply because that recovery may be partial or provisional, may involve argument and interpretation, may be open to criticism from others, or may never be definitive, doesn't mean that it's impossible, as Jenkins previously claimed. Jenkins seems to be undermining his whole larger argument here, and goes much further in the direction of an empiricist defence of 'facts' than I would. With friends like this, who needs enemies? Such a reading of the book, however complimentary it might be, is, of course, extremely selective. The book actually rejects Elton's simplistic view that the historian could shake off all present-day beliefs and ideas when studying the documents. It rejects his narrow-minded empiricism and his parochial insistence on the political history of the nation-state as the only real history. It rejects his belief that interpretations sprang unaided from the sources. It rejects his whole account of how historians go about the business of research. It explicitly welcomes developments which he found objectionable, such as women's history, social history and so on - all these are, after all, areas of history which have been the subject of much of my own work. On all these points, I side with Carr. On the other hand, this doesn't mean that I'm simply a follower of Carr. The book rejects Carr's account of objectivity and causation, for example, since both of them are tied to his belief in the defining quality of a human future locate inevitably in a Soviet-style planned economy.

What is history?

What Evans is doing here...is giving the past the same characteristics as he gives himself/the bourgeoisie, on the (unwitting) assumption that if he treats the past in the same way as he (and the bourgeoisie) like to be treated (humbly, scrupulously, with care...rationally, objectively, etc.), then the past, he and the bourgeoisie will be cooperative. Steve Smith, 'Truth in an age of challenge', The Times Higher Educational Supplement, 28 November 1997, p. 26. David Gress, 'The "End" of History?', in Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs, Spring 1999, pp. 314-336. I will look humbly at the past and say despite them all: it really happened, and we really can, if we are very scrupulous and careful and self-critical, find out how it happened and reach some tenable though always less than final conclusions about what it all meant.” Auschwitz is not an invention, Nolte says, but it has constantly to be rediscovered and reinterpreted. No generation has the right to close off research for the future by declaring we know all we can ever know. Auschwitz must be studied with the same historiographical tools of source-criticism and so on as any other subject. And it must constantly be compared with other genocides. Who knows whether, at some future time, its singularity will be compromised by some other case of mass murder similar in scope and method? Historical relativization, Nolte concludes, is not the same as moral relativization. Moreover, incorrect arguments are often beneficial to scholarship because they sharpen and improve better arguments.