1

Responses to the postmodern challenge; or, What might history become?

Books reviewed in this article:

Stephan Berger, Heiko Feldner and Kevin Passmore, eds, Writing History: Theory and
Practice. London: Hodder Arnold, 2003. xiv + 338pp, £50/£16.99, ISBN
0340761776 (Hb) 0340761768 (Pb)
Ernst Breisach, On the Future of History: The Postmodern Challenge and its Aftermath.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003. ix + 243pp, $41/$16, ISBN
0226072800 (Pb).
Stephen Davies, Empiricism and History. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2003. viii + 163pp,
£12.99, ISBN 0333964705 (Pb).
Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow, eds, The Nature of History Reader. London:
Routledge, 2004. xiv + 352pp, ISBN 0415240549 (Pb).
Alun Munslow, The New History. Harlow: Pearson, 2003. x + 233pp, ISBN 0582472822
(Pb).
Nancy Partner, ed., Writing Medieval History. London: Hodder Arnold, 2005. xvi+
192pp, £16.99, ISBN 0340808462 (Pb).
J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past. 1969; reprint with foreword by Simon Schama and
introduction by Niall Ferguson, Houndmills: Palgrave, 2004. xlii +153pp, ISBN
140390698X (Pb).
Jörn Rüsen, ed., Western Historical Thinking: An Intercultural Debate. New York:
Berghahn, 2002. xiii + 206pp, ISBN 157181454X (Pb).
Willie Thompson, Postmodernism and History. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2004. x + 161pp,
£12.99, ISBN 0333963393 (Pb).

Proscriptive answers to questions of the order ‘what is history?’ tend quickly to falter
over the various possible understandings of what is meant by ‘history’ itself: everything
that happened in the past, what historians pick out from that past, certain elements in the
past that innately highlight themselves as meaningful, the past as a particular kind of
process (either crescendoing or dying away), the past as a series of haphazard conflicts
and unexpected outcomes, the past as the scientific or moral weight behind a particular
political project (marxist, nationalistic, or other), or simply ‘the Past’ in the sense that J.
H. Plumb wrote of it back in 1969 when Death of the Past was first published, as those
shared misconceptions of previous times that persist in the popular imagination. These,
Plumb pointed out, are themselves multiple, being used variously to explain the purpose
of life, support social inequalities, provide authority to government, give moral example,
 2

predict the future, and ‘invest both the individual human life or a nation’s with a sense of
destiny’ (p. 11).

Whilst recognising these popular consumptions of history, when attempting to respond to

such a question – ‘what is history?’ – historians will tend to want to include at least an
element of their own role in its production. Reading the two preening essays by Simon
Schama and Niall Ferguson that Plumb’s reissued text has been lumbered with as
introductions, one is reminded that for some high-profile historians, a simple response
comes swiftly to their lips: what is history? C’est moi!1 Plumb’s book presents a more
complex position, that ‘the Past’ is the mix of myth and received national narrative that
deceives and imprisons the present, and that the task of the historian is thus to demolish
this false idol and ‘create a new past as true, as exact, as we can make it’, that will allow
us to step into the future no longer separated by nationality, race or class, ‘but as men’ (p.
145). One is thus further reminded that the kind of historian that one is may radically
affect how one perceives what it is that historians do. The Institute of Historical Research
in London, for example, hosts a number of evening seminars on different, more or less
tightly defined, themes. At each seminar one will find a group of committed, intelligent,
and experienced historians and research students in conversation. Each group will
understandably tend to feel that it is, if not at, then at least close to, the heart of the
historical enterprise. But any intellectual gadfly who abandons his or her immediate
peers, and wanders from seminar to seminar, will quickly realise that the working
assumptions of each group – about what matters, how we operate, what we practice, what
the main challenges are that face us – can differ greatly.

I present these thoughts as both preface and caveat. My focus here is primarily upon
‘history’ as something undertaken by academic historians. However, any attempt to
describe or outline how history has responded to postmodernism must similarly stumble
over the multiplicity of ‘histories’ that could be discussed; and will also have to realise
that the unhappy term ‘postmodernism’ lumps together, often quite unhelpfully, disparate
 3

critical theories from various conceptual traditions – something that Ernst Breisach, in a
concise and highly intelligent intellectual history, attempts to unpick for the reader in On
the Future of History. Thus, from one perspective, it might appear that the postmodern
challenge (as Breisach terms it) is essentially over, empiricist history having sensibly
incorporated into its regular practice those few elements that it found useful, and
triumphally discarded and vanquished the rest with a giant harrumph of common sense.2
Another view will hold, however, that it is postmodernism that has triumphed over
history, indeed annihilated it; and that any activities that working historians somehow
continue to undertake are nothing but the last, spasmodic muscle twitches of a corpse that
hasn’t yet realised that it is dead.3 It would be tempting to claim that these responses
represent the two furthest poles of argument, and that most historians sit somewhere in
between. But this is not quite the case. For a start, responses to the postmodern challenge
do not arrange themselves neatly into a spectrum, but cluster in certain areas and shun
others, and moreover cut across each other depending upon what facets of
postmodernism it is that either attract or repel them. Moreover, it is not clear that many
historians have even yet encountered the kinds of critical theories that challenge their
subject; or else have, at best, encountered them only through second-order commentaries
or, at worst, through polemical denunciations.4

This last point is slightly depressing. To pick just three key and provocative writers,
Roland Barthes published his essay ‘Le discours de l’histoire’ in 1966; Hayden White
produced ‘The Burden of History’ in the following year; Michel Foucault’s first works
were in print in the early 1960s, and his article ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ arrived in
1971. Admittedly, it took about forty years for historians (in late nineteenth-century Italy)

1
Schama reminisces on claret-sodden tutorials with Plumb, whilst Ferguson curiously attempts to claim
Plumb’s text as socially conservative by quoting him radically out of context (compare Ferguson p. xxxvii,
Plumb pp. 59-60).
2
R.Evans, In Defence of History (London, 1997); A. Marwick, The New Nature of History (Houndmills,
2001). Evans and Marwick differ on certain issues, and neither gives the other a good press in the works
here cited, but their core attitudes toward postmodernism are in fact very similar, and their concluding
thoughts on historiographical practice essentially identical.
3
K. Jenkins, Why History? (London, 1999) and Refiguring History (London, 2003).
4
For example, Jonathan Clark’s Our Shadowed Present: Modernism, Postmodernism and History (London,
2003) which seems to derive its knowledge of that which it denounces almost solely through Keith
 4

to first start thinking seriously about Marx, and a further half-century before a body of
English historians followed suit. In comparison, we are ahead of the game: the first, few
serious engagements with what are probably more accurately termed structuralist and
poststructuralist theories appeared in the mid-to-late 1980s and early 1990s; as, of course,
did the first harrumphings.5 The initial debate tended to be marked by its abstract nature,
and a willingness on both sides to conduct the argument at the extremes of historical
experience – how to represent the Holocaust, what society would be like if lacking any
historical consciousness and so forth – which, whilst producing much heat and some
light, gave few maps to those practising historiography under more normal circumstances
over what, if anything, they should be doing with it all.

In some areas, discussion has not moved on but degraded. Willie Thompson’s
Postmodernism and History represents an intellectual nadir, as a supposed guide for
students that launches a hostile critique upon postmodernism on the basis of knowledge
drawn largely from second-order commentaries. Those source texts that are consulted
largely elude Thompson’s comprehension. The author’s grasp on the subject is
exceedingly weak, and ill-suited to such faux-magisterial pronouncements as (after an
inaccurate summary of Saussurean linguistic theory) ‘Structuralism ... was effectively
dead within a decade’ (p. 9). It is quite plain at various points that he has not properly
read the texts he attacks, for example attempting to dismiss Foucault’s early work on the
cultural meaning of madness by claiming that it ‘ignores the fact that insanity can have
easily identifiable organic causes’ (p. 76) – something of which Foucault was perfectly
well aware.6 This is the kind of book that reproduces not one but two separate,
uncontextualised paragraphs of Derrida’s prose in order to point a sneering finger at its
unintelligibility, inviting the reader to share a sense of virtue in one’s lack of

Windshuttle’s The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past
(New York, 1996).
5
Some serious engagements: D. LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca, 1985); J. W. Scott, ‘Gender: A
Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, American Historical Review 91 (1986), pp. 1053-75; F.
Ankersmit, ‘Historiography and Postmodernism’, History and Theory 28 (1989): 137-53. On the other side:
L. Stone, ‘History and Postmodernism’, Past and Present 133 (1991): 217-8: G. R. Elton, Return to
Essentials (Cambridge, 1991); G. Himmelfarb, ‘Telling It As You Like It’, Times Literary Supplement
16/10/92.
6
M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization (1961. London, 2001), pp. xi-xii; idem, An Archaeology of
Knowledge (London, 1972), pp. 47-8.
 5

comprehension (p. 11).7 Pride in intellectual laziness is not usually a tendency one wishes
to encourage in students, and for this, among many other reasons (including the
dispiriting fact that he repeatedly misspells Carlo Ginzburg’s surname), I cannot
recommend Postmodernism and History for any purposes whatsoever. Thankfully,
however, among the other books under review here, there are some indications that the
debate has matured into a more serious engagement between historians and theorists.
Whilst several continue to demand that one take sides and denounce the enemy, others
are more willing to encourage us to think, and specifically to think about
historiographical practice.

Epistemologies
Key to the postmodern challenge – as presented both by its vanguard and by history’s
defenders – are the interlinked issues of epistemology (how we think we can know about
history), textualisation (how we write history) and self-reflexivity (what we think and
claim we are doing when we write history). Alan Munslow’s The New History (hereafter
NH), a polemical synthesis heavily indebted to Hayden White, emphasizes the
interdependency of these issues, whilst focussing particularly upon the textualisation. But
I would like to separate things out for the moment, and to concentrate initially upon
epistemology. In several of the books reviewed here – Munslow’s account, Munslow and
Jenkins’s reader, Stephen Davies’s student text, and some essays in Writing History – the
nature of the challenge or threat is presented within a narrative of periodization or
intellectual development. The story runs as follows. Antiquity and the middle ages were
each characterized by an alleged historiographical fault: antiquity’s conflation of history
with rhetoric, the religious credulousness of the middle ages. Neither period proffers
serious epistemological arguments for current concern; they act, rather, as a naive, pre-
modern space to contrast with the emergence of ‘history’ as a modern discourse. The real
story, it is suggested, begins only when European society broke away from the
‘irrational’ (NH, p. 103) views of the middle ages, which made no real distinction

7
For the benefit of Thompson’s readers, if such there be, a more useful gloss on Derrida’s concepts of
‘supplementarity’ and the instability of the text can be found in Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction
 6

‘between fact and fiction’ (Empiricism and History, p. 11).8 The Renaissance and
Enlightenment (the two are, particularly in Munslow’s account, somewhat elided)
ushered in a new desire for knowledge, and a new belief that science and rationality could
explain and master the natural world. By the nineteenth century, history had become
thematically dominated by theories of progress, and methodologically dominated by an
empiricism borrowed from the natural sciences. Leopold von Ranke’s source-based
‘scientific’ history formed the apogee of this process, at the same time wedding itself to
the modernity of the nation-state. Historiography of every stripe has remained
comfortably entrenched within this Rankean modernity until the postmodern challenge
arrived later in the twentieth century.

Munslow traces small foreshadowings of this challenge to earlier periods: Vico’s New
Science, the Romantic movement’s emphasis upon empathy, and elements in Kant and
Nietzsche. But, it is claimed, it was only in the 1960s that continental philosophy
launched radical attacks upon the suppositional bases of empiricism, causing history’s
epistemological foundations to crumble into dust (Nature of History Reader, p. 1). Thus,
in the views of both its cheerleaders (Munslow, Jenkins) and its detractors (Davies,
Thompson), what postmodernism challenges – or threatens – has a very long intellectual
tradition. That tradition holds that the past is different from the present, but that
knowledge of the past is possible in the present through a careful and methodical use of
the traces it has left us. Such a knowledge is empirical in that it is based only upon the
available sources, from which materials, via the use of inductive reasoning, a ‘real’ past
can be reconstructed (and then adequately represented – to which matter we will turn a
little further on). Moreover, for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, that
‘real past’ was understood to have an innate shape or trajectory ‘discovered’ by the
historian through careful consideration of the facts he (very rarely she) accumulated; and
from such a shape, one might attempt to divine the innate ‘laws’ of human nature and
political activity.

(London, 1983), particularly pp. 102-6 and 130-4.

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Postmodernism, as represented by Munslow et alia, attacks this tradition (or rather, what
they see as this tradition) on various fronts. Human nature – the philosophers’ stone for
Positivism – is a shifting phantasm. Progress is a dangerous illusion, one which led the
twentieth century into its worst barbarities. Epistemologically, empiricism deludes itself:
there can be no knowledge of the past, as the past is of its nature absent. The meaning
that historians imagine to have discovered in the past is the product only of their own
narrative tropes, and such knowledge cannot be anchored to any stable external referent.
Thus historians should free themselves from the bonds of objectivity – because
objectivity is a dangerous illusion – and embrace the free play of language instead.

Some tendencies in this shared narrative must be noted. The first is that it is narrative –
an account of historiography that progresses via periodization and a rather lumpen
ascription of certain intellectual/ideological trends to certain ‘ages’.9 Thus ‘modernity’ is
loosely fixed as a concatenation of historical forces splashed across the seventeenth to
twentieth centuries; and thus postmodernism becomes the Zeitgeist or mentalité of a new
epoch of ‘postmodernity’ that began …. when? For Munslow and Jenkins it is unclear;
perhaps in the aftermath of World War II, maybe when Jacques Derrida first put pen to
paper. Whichever birth one recognises, the sense of narrative persists. But, whilst
allowing for the fact that books are brief and summaries must elide certain complexities,
it seems to me that the story as presented within these works is inadequate, and ironically
depends upon a very traditional notion of ‘intellectual historical development’, one thing
leading neatly to another. It omits several interesting steps and debates within the
intellectual history it traces (the role of seventeenth-century lawyers and antiquarians in
developing methods of source-criticism and its accompanying epistemologies, for
example; or the degree to which Ranke was reacting against a more partisan but also
philosophically-engaged historiography of the Enlightenment).10 It is also dependent

8
As a corrective to this simplistic caricature, see G. M. Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of
Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1993).
9
See similarly Kevin Passmore’s critique of postmodernism (Writing History, p. 129).
10
For better accounts, see the essays by Heiko Feldner and John Warren in Writing History; and, more
broadly, D. R. Kelley, The Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship (New York, 1970); A. Grafton,
The Footnote; a Curious History (London, 1997); P. Burke, ‘Ranke the Reactionary’, Syracuse Scholar 9
(1988): 25-30. Munslow (NH, p. 51) has a particularly poor understanding of Ranke’s context, ascribing to
 8

upon a very lumpen and homogenizing sense of mentalité that fails, amongst other things,
to recognise the different senses of ‘history’ adumbrated at the beginning of this article,
and thus flattens out the various relationships between academic histories and the sense
of ‘history’ deployed to underwrite the nation state.11

Ernst Breisach, better steeped in the requisite intellectual history, persuasively argues that
this kind of epochal thinking lies at the heart of postmodernism. It had its roots, he
suggests, in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the inherent contradiction found
at the heart of the belief in ‘progress’. Whether Hegelian, Marxist, or scientific, the
dominant intellectual ideologies presented the ‘end stage’ of modernity as simultaneously
producing (a) rational, free and independent human subjects, and (b) complete control
over both nature and society. ‘The odd angle at which the two [desired outcomes] stood
to each other went unnoticed’, Breisach remarks; or did so, at least, until ‘the guns of
August 1914 ushered in a new climate of historical thought … one more conducive to
asserting alternatives to the progressive view of history’ (pp. 30, 38). The two strands of
postmodernist thought he outlines (which he labels ‘structuralist postmodernism’ and
‘poststructuralist postmodernism’) have at their heart a belief in a kind of Hegelian grand
historical process – or belief, rather, in its failure. In the former, whether optimistically or
pessimistically, history is seen as having ‘ended’ by becoming all continuity and no
change: the mathematical limit of reason and progress nears, and social stability is
achieved at the price of innovation and creativity. In the latter (associated particularly
with Foucault and Derrida), all is change: Reason (in its Enlightenment sense) is held to
be a shibboleth, and every place of apparent stability – human nature, social structure, the
state, science, language itself – is flung into endless flux.

Thus one might argue that the two narrative problems already noted are innate to
postmodernism; or perhaps that postmodernism is largely engaged in arguing about a

him for example the belief that ‘history was about judging the past’ when the passage referenced – the
context for the famous wie es eigentlich gewesen – is an explicit reaction against such a viewpoint.
11
Compare for example S. Berger, M. Donovan and K. Passmore, eds, Writing National Histories: Europe
since 1800 (London, 1999); R. N. Soffer, Discipline and Power: The University, History, and the Making
of an English Elite 1870-1930 (Stanford, 1994); W. R. Keylor, Academy and Community: The Foundation
of the French Historical Profession (Cambridge, Mass., 1975).
 9

different kind of ‘history’ than that which academic historians pursue. What I am here
identifying as faults may be ‘failures’ only as assessed within a fairly traditional notion of
historiographical practice: they disappoint because they do a disservice to the past by
mangling it to create a narrative simply to satisfy the authors’ present needs. Such a
criticism is perhaps not licit within a postmodern methodology (as presented by Munslow
at least), confident as it is that all historical narratives are created only to satisfy present
needs. What, then, bothers me most of all in Munslow’s narrative – because of the
confusion it occasions in current debates, which surely is a licit complaint – is the way in
which a particular notion of empiricism is taken to stand for all methodologies wedded to
a critical analysis of historical sources. This is the empiricism of the late-nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries that intermittently made explicit call upon the methodological
models of the natural sciences in order to appropriate for history more or less of their
epistemological claims. Thus the ‘history’ that postmodernism is here presented as
challenging is in large part represented as something unchanged since that epoch, haunted
by the ghost of Positivism. Or rather, in a formulation that appears both in Munslow’s
single-authored study and in the organising framework of the reader edited by Munslow
and Jenkins, this is the empirical epistemology to which ‘reconstructionist’ historians
(such as Arthur Marwick and Geoffrey Elton) are wedded; and it is the epistemology
from which ‘constructionist’ historians (Eric Hobsbawm, Fernand Braudel, John Tosh
and others) have only partly escaped. The constructionists are better than the
reconstructionists, in that they use some tools from social theory; but they appear to
understand those tools as enabling their search for ‘laws’ of human behaviour (NH, p. 16)
and ‘the story’ (Nature of History Reader, p. 11) about the past – thus strongly
resembling late nineteenth-century positivists. Only ‘deconstructionist’ thinkers (Walter
Benjamin, Hayden White, Jacques Derrida) have fully escaped from this paradigm.

There are various problems with this, not least the conceptual haziness of the
categorizations, which could just as usefully be re-labelled ‘historians we don’t
like/historians we can abide, albeit deluded/clever people whose works have influenced
us’. Note the change from ‘historians’ to ‘people’ in the last category; although in the
Nature of History Reader the historians Greg Dening and Richard Price are included as
 10

‘deconstructionists’, this category – and the final Reader category of ‘Endisms’ – are
mainly filled with practitioners of a different stripe, from literary theorists to political
philosophers. This is not to say that such people cannot talk about ‘history’; but it is to
note once again that the kind of ‘history’ they discuss may not be the same as, or have all
that much to do with, the archival engagements of academic historians. One of the
problems with academic historians’ encounter with postmodernism is that in postmodern
theorists’ critiques of ‘history’, that term may often be standing in for either ‘teleological-
Marxist-grand-narrative’ or ‘formative-past-experiences-of-the-psychoanalytic-subject’
rather than anything to do with archives.12 I am not certain that this distinction – not an
absolute one, but helpful nonetheless – is completely grasped by Munslow. As it is, he
seems to be calling for historians to be doing what they – the political theorists,
philosophers and psychoanalysts – are doing. But it’s not clear why, if they’re already
doing it, we all need to join the chorus.

Nor does Munslow have a terribly good grasp of what historians actually do. The
characterization of ‘constructionists’ as people in search of the story of history, wherein
can be found ‘laws’ governing ‘human nature’, is not one that I would recognise for the
vast majority of colleagues. There is an underlying problem here with the intellectual
quality of the debate over methods and epistemology: Munslow argues principally with
those few harrumphers who have formulated explicit, abstract responses to
postmodernism, such as Richard Evans and Arthur Marwick. But Evans’s and Marwick’s
rather poor attempts at expounding philosophical positions do not necessarily reflect the
working practices and embedded epistemological viewpoints of their colleagues.13 Nor
does the kind of position adopted by a general textbook or a popular history narrative (to
cite other of Munslow’s targets) give a very representative example of how most

12
As is the case, for example, for most of D. Attridge, G. Bennington and R. Young, eds, Poststructuralism
and the Question of History (Cambridge, 1987).
13
In his later ‘Response to Critics’ of In Defence of History (2nd edn 2001, and Institute of Historical
Research website at http://www.history.ac.uk/discourse/moevans.htm, accessed 26 July 2006) Evans notes
that the book does not really engage with the real philosophers of postmodernity, only their earthly
representatives such as Keith Jenkins and Frank Ankersmit. Evans could in fact be included in my main
point here also: that the more subtle conceptual apparatus embedded in his own substantive work (for
example Rituals of Retribution [Oxford, 1996]) is not well represented by the explicit statements of In
Defence of History and ‘Response to Critics’.
 11

historical research is conducted, as textbooks have always tended to present smooth,

reconstructionist narratives, largely because this is what publishers believe their target
audiences desire. When Munslow does turn to something that represents at least one (but
only one) facet of academic historical practice – an article on medieval inheritance
patterns among the English baronial class – his grasp on history becomes particularly
weak. The article, by S. J. Payling, analyses quantatively all known marriages by late-
medieval peers to determine the role of heiresses in the transmission of property, in the
process revising certain previous historiographical assumptions about aristocratic
marriage strategy and the ownership of land.14 Munslow’s critique of Payling’s inductive
reasoning concludes (ungrammatically) thus: ‘Broad conclusions such as Payling’s about
the nature of historical change based on a few hundred examples taken from one source
may not sound very scientific, and it isn’t. But it is the nature of explanation in
constructionist history’ (NH, p. 125). This prompts several thoughts, the least of which is
that Munslow clearly has a highly exaggerated estimate of the number of peers that there
were in late medieval England. Clearly, Munslow’s sense of a postmodern methodology
does not incorporate such rudimentary measures as researching the context for one’s
analysis. This may well explain why he is so dismissive of basic historical practice:
skimming the surface as he does, he has very little idea of the effort involved in research.
But his critique – objecting that the data sample is unrepresentative and unscientific – is
in any case a curiously empiricist one. In fact, in both The New History and the editorial
parts of The Nature of History Reader the characterisation and analysis of the
historiographical field depends upon exactly the inductive methodology that Munslow
seeks to criticize: selecting a few individual historical works, Munslow and Jenkins
extrapolate the shape of the whole field, and make ‘broad conclusions … about the nature
of [historiographical practice] based upon a few [dozen] examples taken from [a small
library]’ – to paraphrase Munslow’s own text. Whatever a postmodern historiography
might look like, it isn’t this.

14
S. J. Payling, ‘The Economics of Marriage in Late Medieval England: The Marriage of Heiresses’,
Economic History Review 54 (2001): 413-29.
 12

Empiricisms
The very notion of empiricism as a kind of credulous, science-fixated ideology could in
any case be challenged. Stephen Davies has a valiant stab at doing just that in Empiricism
and History. Acknowledging that many historians have tended to take their empirical
methodology somewhat for granted, as ‘simple common sense’, he helpfully sets out the
philosophical background and epistemological tools upon which empiricism depends.
Davies emphasizes the degree to which empiricism should be understood as a sceptical,
rather than credulous, philosophy: it sees knowledge as arriving only via sense-
impressions, rather than abstract categorizations, and the use of inductive logic provides a
‘truth’ that is much less certain (because limited in its scope, and always liable to be
falsified by the next specific piece of evidence) than that claimed by other forms of
reasoning. ‘If knowledge comes from experience, then human beings can have true
knowledge only of particulars. We do not directly experience categories such as
“oranges”, only specific individual oranges’ (Empiricism and History, p. 5). One might
think that such a philosophy would fit very nicely with the ‘incredulity toward
metanarratives’ that Jean-François Lyotard saw as the mark of postmodernity. However,
empiricism does not usually direct itself toward radical scepticism. Whilst it sees what
can be known as always specific, and always open to doubt, it recognises degrees of
doubt, not just a Truth/Falsity binary, and hence the possibility of building better or
worse cumulative knowledges through a cycle of inductive investigation. Thus
empiricism does not reject ‘concepts’ or ‘categories’ per se, but sees them as intellectual
tools built from, and modified through, the investigation of specific experiences rather
than reasoned from a priori foundations. For historians, as Davies emphasizes, this is a
collective project: each individual historian adds to and modifies the cumulative total of
historical knowledge, and thus that ‘knowledge’, whilst not synonymous with The Truth,
is nonetheless slowly edging toward it; and is at least slowly edging away from past,
inferior ‘knowledge’ built on weaker empirical evidence.

Inasmuch as Davies attempts to give a calm, level-headed and philosophically-grounded

account of empirical history, Empiricism and History is a welcome text, one that could be
used very successfully with students, in dialogue with more relativistic viewpoints. It
 13

eschews the bluster of other books that attempt to defend ‘traditional’ methodologies
against postmodern challenge, and indeed avoids invoking postmodern bogeymen or
limply proffering ‘common sense’ as a sufficient intellectual warrant. I am sympathetic to
the case he makes, and would argue that if one raises as an objection that empiricism
naively believes in a Reality ‘out there’, beyond language, one would have to note that
such a position is not disputed by any major postmodern theorist. Belief in a material
reality is not specific to empiricism. The question is the relationship between language
and reality, and hence our access to that reality; but empiricism’s sense of cumulative
knowledge ‘to the best fit’ can easily be incorporated within a sense that all experience is
mediated via language. Empiricism could thus be seen as one, internally-coherent,
‘language game’ in the Richard Rorty sense; and properly speaking, its epistemological
claims are modest.

However, Empiricism and History also unwittingly demonstrates, despite its better
nature, how historiography that declares itself as ‘traditionally empirical’ in fact quickly
comes loose from the philosophical foundations to which it lays claim. As Davies moves
from the abstract philosophy to historical practice, a number of familiar assumptions –
epistemological, social, political – creep in. One is the Rankean vision of a ‘hierarchy’ of
sources, depicting the historian’s job as simply doorman to the private members’ club of
historiographical truth – suitably ‘trustworthy’ accounts can enter, others
(‘unrepresentative’ sources) are barred from the citadel of history (pp. 28, 73). We have
surely grown past this kind of methodological simplicity: all sources are sources for
something, and ‘bias’ in sources is what gives us something to work with. The notion of a
‘representative’ source is always ideologically positioned, by both the past and the
present. Here, Davies’ version of empiricism does depend upon a naïve idea of how the
language of the sources and ‘reality’ are connected. This becomes clearest in a section
discussing biography: ‘Such matters as the psychological state of the subject cannot be
addressed unless there is some empirical warrant for it in the shape of such sources as
letters, diaries or an autobiography, and even then only with great caution’ (p. 49). This
‘caution’ is an empty caveat; there is no theorization about how one is to link a written
historical source to the ‘psychology and state of mind’ (p. 50) of its author, only a basic
 14

trust that one can somehow do it with the ‘right’ sources. Thus, despite its apparent call
for a constant questioning of assumption and eschewing prior categorizations, traditional
empirical history as practiced takes a lot for granted – about how human beings work,
about how sources relate to reality, and about what ‘matters’ in producing history.
Imprisoned by its sense of the source material, the vision of the past this kind of
empiricism presents slides unthinkingly toward the conservative, the hierarchical and the
masculine.

The other flaw in the claims of traditional empirical history – a flaw in the very basis of
the approach, not in Davies’ lucid attempts to communicate it – is the slippage between
the philosophy of empirical knowledge in the present moment, and the claim for
empirical knowledge of the past. Empiricism lays its epistemological claims upon the
imprint that reality (whatever that truly is) makes upon our senses. But the past itself has
no such impact, because it is, of its nature, absent. What we understand as traces of the
past (though in a very strict empirical methodology, I’m not sure what the basis would be
for describing them thus) may have a sensory impact upon us, in the here and now. But
that is quite a different thing, as Bertrand Russell for example made clear, from claiming
that something in the past itself is known directly through sense-data.15 Thus the kind of
empiricism that traditional history employs is actually rather divergent from the
philosophical roots to which it lays claim.

The problems that I have outlined here are not, of course, remotely surprising. Marxist
historians, social historians, cultural historians and feminist historians have been
objecting to traditional history’s assumptions for years. Not that these historians are anti-
empirical in the broader sense. They all work with sources, using methodologies of
varying degrees of sophistication. They understand themselves to be ‘grounding’ their
history-writing in what the archive will ‘support’. For someone like Munslow, this means
that such projects immediately collapse back into the traditional approach. But, whilst
such a collapse might be noted as one potential fate, it fails to capture the radical
differences between the practices of these varying traditions. Nor does it recognise the

15
J. Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 231.
 15

varied nature of the truth-claims made in these different ‘empiricisms’: it is very far from
the case, for example, that every social historian believes him or herself to be
reconstructing history on the basis of the direct referentiality between the sources and
past reality. On many of the occasions that historians use the term ‘empirical’ they do not
lay claim to the epistemology of the late nineteenth century, but simply mean ‘I have
used a lot of archival source material’. Their specific epistemological claims – explicit or,
more usually, implicit – are essentially second-order to this methodological first step. The
precise truth-claims that then follow, and the tenor in which they are made, do not
necessarily rest upon a naïve belief in a correspondence between evidence and reality.

For postmodernism was not the first to discover the irrefutable absence of the past. What
to do about that essential epistemological hurdle has concerned historians since antiquity;
Thucydides, for example, decided that he would concentrate only upon recent history
accessible via oral sources to combat the problem.16 Some historical methodologies have
made epistemologically-dubious claims about how one leaps that hurdle (such as R. G.
Collingwood’s faith in the mental re-enactment of past thoughts),17 and some individual
historians rely upon ‘common sense’ and a simplistic link between language and reality.
But for the most part, the absent presence of the past has been a conscious spur to
academic history’s project. Ways of addressing the silences of history, the fascinating
chasm between then and now, has been a main concern for generations of historian. Some
methodologies, it is true, attempt to bridge that gap via traditional empiricism – but even
then, for the most part, tentatively, provisionally and with a strong sense of the precarious
nature of our collective project. But others more readily embrace the problem as insoluble
in that form, and instead see their histories as not only provisional but as attempts tied as
much to the time and place of their creation as the period about which they speak. The
response of Jenkins, Munslow (to a degree) and certain others to this problem takes
aporia and makes of it a new idol: the interdeterminability of past reality becomes the
only song one is allowed to sing. This is, I would suggest, but one way in which one can
respond to the past’s absence. What makes it an unsatisfactory one to most historians is

16
See further Breisach, On the Future of History, p. 120.
17
R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946).
 16

partly that in practice it abandons the representation of the past to the vicissitudes of
present power (no history of the working class or women, for example, had historians not
attempted to bridge the chasm). Perhaps most importantly, though, it ignores that which
is as irrefutably present as the past is undeniably absent: the written and material data that
we describe as the ‘traces’ of the past. Attempts to claim that one can reconstruct the
reality of a previous period in time on the basis of these traces are inevitably doomed to
epistemological failure. But the traces themselves nonetheless continue to exist. What we
choose to do with them – and the kinds of lesser truth-claims that we make on the basis of
that praxis – are what concern most working historians. This is not to suggest that one
thus escapes the chasm between past and present. But how one chooses to respond to that
aporia can take different routes. The notion of ‘provisionality’ can, for example, be
played out in more than one register: Realist empiricism posits a certain provisionality,
one that it claims is revised toward Truth in the ongoing cycles of research. But other
approaches may present a more essential provisionality, the inescapable nature of which
repositions the basic project of historiography in a different direction, not toward Truth
(or the construction of some Archimedean Euclidean vantage point from which the
narrative of all time can be surveyed) but as part of the ongoing political struggle to say
what it was, is and shall be, to be human.

In other words, in confronting the absence of the past, something present is at stake, in
the perceived relationship between now and then. All but the most parochial of historians
knows that, whether they hail from the political right or left (although it is the latter who,
over the last century, have most pushed forward the argument). And in that sense, as
Ernst Breisach points out, historians are very much in tune with Foucault, Derrida,
Baudrillard, and any other serious theorist you happen to mention (Breisach, pp. 134-5).
We should not be content to clap our hands with glee at the indeterminability of the sign;
something more is at stake.

Self-reflexivity and the text

 17

The ‘linguistic turn’ has proved one of the least helpful conceptual phrases ever coined. It
confuses several different issues regarding language, some universal to the human
condition, some particular to the production of history, and some (such as the kind of
discourse-analysis associated with Quentin Skinner and John Pocock) simply a particular
kind of analytical tool that certain historians choose to deploy. The universal aspects
concern the Derridean argument that language is essentially unstable, and that every
attempt at a truth-claim made through language carries with it other, undermining,
possibilities (the task of deconstruction being to put those other possibilities into play,
thus destabilizing the text under analysis). The most profound implications for this
argument fall upon Derrida’s main target, philosophy. Historical study is only implicated
at a general level, along with every other pursuit of knowledge that depends upon
language for its communication.

The more particular aspect to history is the production of narrative, or, more broadly, the
way in which we understand the process of textualising the knowledge we have
constructed about the past (regardless of how we understand that knowledge
epistemologically). History can be seen, as Hayden White put it, as a ‘narrative prose
discourse, the content of which is as much imagined as found’ – the ‘imagined’ part
being the way in which the historian arranges and presents the material he or she has
worked upon. White, of course, argued that any arrangement – simply by dint of its
necessarily serial nature – took on the form of one kind of trope or another. Even if the
historian wished otherwise, their histories emplot the past. And each story brings with it a
set of assumptions or implications about causation, meaning, politics and ethics.18 Thus,
White enjoined, historians need to think about the literary nature of the texts they produce
– to become aware, at least, of the effects of their semi-involuntary narrating. As David
Harlan put it, White ‘tried to make historians look at the language they use, rather than
pretending to peer through it, at something presumed to lie beyond it’ (Nature of History
Reader, p. 296).

18
A good guide to this is K. Jenkins, On ‘What is History?’: From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White
(London, 1995), pp. 134-78.
 18

These are the concerns that Munslow and Jenkins echo, and with greater utility than their
epistemological idée fixe. For it is true that one of historians’ most irritating habits is
disowning their own texts; disavowing, that is, the implicit meanings in their words and
defending themselves by claiming the transcendancy of authorial intention.19 But the
meaning of any text always exceeds the author’s avowed intentions, and when the author
is not terribly reflective about their intentions, all kinds of excess possibilities slop around
untended. Worst of all, an historian may attempt to absent him or herself completely,
claiming that the archives ‘speak for themselves’ and that what he or she puts into print is
merely the revealed True Story immanent in the past – that the narrative is found rather
than made. I suspect however that this extreme form of Realism has always been quite a
rare position; historians have long recognised that each age writes history ‘over again to
suit itself’ and its present needs.20 It is perhaps more often deployed as a rhetorical
strategy than a tenet of true faith. The question really is, what limits, if any, are there
upon the historical narrative? If we do not think the past itself has a narrative shape – and
I find arguments to the contrary unconvincing – does the nature of the traces nonetheless
impose some constraint upon our narrative fabrications?

The New History is strong on framing the questions in these areas, and providing a useful
corrective to unreflective historiographical practice. Munslow points out, for example,
the reliance that historians have upon metaphorical language, and rightly shoots down
attempts to defend such figurations as having some direct, unmediated relationship with
past reality (NH, pp. 150-1). As an historian produces a text, so they reveal the
ontological prejudgments they make about reality – the nature of causation, the way in
which society operates, and so forth. Munslow perhaps overplays the programmatic
nature of these prejudgments – he presents historians as almost ‘pre-coded’ and fixed in
their positions, and does not reflect upon the ways in which an encounter with the
historical traces may shift one’s ideas – but the point is nonetheless well made. Historians
do not uncover the story of the past, they produce it (and all its meanings, whether

19
See, for example, Richard Evans’s lengthy rebuttal to apparently every single one of his critics (In
Defence of History 2nd edn; IHR website, see n. 13 above).
20
C. H. Firth, A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History (Oxford, 1902).
 19

explicit or implicit). There is no real way around this, and we need to pay attention to its
implications.

The question then is, having accepted the narrative-making aspect of historiography,
what is one to do? The Nature of History Reader proffers some interesting possibilities.
The editors present extracts illustrating different historiographical modes of
representation, mostly drawn not from the usual ‘what is history?’ genre of texts, but
from substantive books and articles on a variety of historical topics. Thus, in
‘Constructionism’, we get John Tosh discussing masculinity, Paul Thompson on oral
history, and Mark Jenner examining early-modern fears about dogs and disease. As one
cross-section of historiographical practice, they provide a usefully provocative bunch of
texts to use with students. Addressing textualisation head on are various of the
‘Deconstructionist’ and ‘Endism’ extracts. Most intriguing of these are pieces by Walter
Benjamin (from The Arcades Project), Sven Lindqvist (from A History of Bombing), and
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (from In 1926). These works have different aims and means, but
share a certain textual methodology – what Benjamin, borrowing a term from
cinematography, called ‘montage’. Each piece, rather than constructing a linear narrative,
presents a fragmentary text. In Benjamin’s case this relies upon a mixture of quoted
source-extracts (not explicitly glossed), philosophical aphorisms, and ‘impressions’ of the
Paris arcades, brought together as much for their tensions as their mutual illumination.
Gumbrecht focuses upon one year and uses the printed equivalent of hyperlinks to cross-
reference a text that has no beginning and no end, but rather a web of topics and
interlinkages. Lindqvist, perhaps most radically (and most easily misunderstood), builds
his history from numbered paragraphs arranged in the style of those old Steve Jackson
fantasy-adventure books for boys – at the end of each paragraph one is presented with
several ‘choices’ about which number to read next. The paragraphs themselves are a
mixture of personal reminiscences (‘“Bang, you’re dead” we said. “I got you!” we said.
When we played, it was always war.’), nuggets of historical information (the Chinese use
of rockets at Kaifeng in 1232), and political reflections (‘When is one allowed to wage
war against savages and barbarians? Answer: always. What is permissible in wars against
savages and barbarians? Answer: anything’). A History of Bombing was negatively
 20

reviewed by some historians upon publication in 2000, explicitly because of its form. But
of all the attempts at presenting a non-linear, heteroglossic historical text, this is for me
the most successful. The reader is made to work at the text, place effort into
understanding; yet one’s eye always slips disobediently up and down the page, regardless
of which ‘number’ one is supposed to pursue next, producing unsettling and often
moving concatenations of imagery and information.

In presenting, positioning and glossing works such as these, The Nature of History
Reader goes a long way toward imagining what ‘postmodern’ histories might look like,
and challenging the quotidian assumptions of normal historiographical practice.
Conservative responses to such texts tend to fetishize a notion of ‘clarity’ in historical
writing that in fact frequently conceals (perhaps even to the author) as much as it
allegedly reveals; and otherwise tends to have a rather patronizing attitude toward the
reader, scared that he or she will ‘misunderstand’, and hence desires to corrall them
within familiar narrative conventions. Thus historiography, in its published form, tends to
aim no higher than the latest bestselling thriller; not for us the textual experimentation of
a Don Delillo, Angela Carter, or even (in its multi-vocalisations) Louis de Bernières.
And, of course, in practice we often shoot much lower than even the worst foil-covered
potboiler. Accuracy and clarity do not in themselves atone for the many sins of tedium.

My argument – and here I think I diverge from Munslow and Jenkins – is not that we
should all be writing books like A History of Bombing; only that we should not be so
quick to exclude such textual experiments from the field of licit academic expression, and
should think about how the techniques of writing can be adapted to different
historiographical ends. David Harlan’s assessement of Hayden White’s challenge is again
apposite: we should think about the language that we use, the textual effects that we
produce. Our answers should, necessarily, be various. One of those answers will
undoubtedly be to continue to produce narrative history – and one could argue, in fact,
that experiments such as Benjamin’s or Gumbrecht’s only really work because there are
existing, linear narratives against whose sturdy tunes they can weave provocative and
discordant counterpoint. Other, more subtle, responses already exist, though evading the
 21

‘postmodern’ label: the dense and demanding ‘pointillism’ of Robert Brentano, the self-
conscious storytelling of John Bossy, the lyrical poeticism of Peter Brown, to give three
pre-modernist examples.21 I am less enthused by those hybrid mixtures of fact and fiction
that a few historians have produced (some, but not all, of which are seen as
postmodern),22 as it seems to me that a number of skilled novelists already do that rather
better than those who want to retain the label ‘historian’.23 If you want to read a
fictionalisation of the past that reflects intelligently upon its own textuality, go to Thomas
Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon or Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver. But to write as an
historian in such a mode ultimately disempowers the reader, as they are forced to place
their trust in the author’s imagination and ‘sense of the period’, rather than in his or her
footnotes and argument.

The wider response to Hayden White’s challenge leads to the murkier terrain of ‘self-
reflexivity’. This has long been enjoined as a virtue – but not always with much clarity
about what it should involve or why it matters. At its most lumpen, there is the sense that
historians should declare their prejudices openly, which can unfortunately devolve into
the writing ‘as a’ syndrome (‘writing as a feminist’, ‘as a socialist’, ‘as a conservative
misogynist’). Others take self-reflexivity to encourage further reflection upon the
constructed nature of history, the epistemological crisis, and their precarious role as
historian (‘writing as a historian’). Munslow and Jenkins present several examples of this
also. At the most sublime is Greg Dening. His breathtaking prose soars and twists, tracing
in text the trajectory of the migrating birds whose passage supplies a metaphor for writing
the history of the Pacific ocean. Other examples fall flatter, however: Robert Rosenstone
musing on his family’s history, or Elizabeth Ermath on the nature of historical
consciousness, take ‘self-reflexivity’ as a rather solipsistic activity with almost all its

21
R. Brentano, The Two Churches: England and Italy in the Thirteenth Century, 2nd edn (Berkeley, 1988);
J. Bossy, Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair (Yale, 1991); P. Brown, Authority and the Sacred
(Cambridge, 1995).
22
For example, various writers, pro and anti, describe Simon Schama’s work as ‘postmodern’ (particularly
Dead Certainties but also – see NH, p. 4 – Landscape and Memory); but these are works surely rooted in
eighteenth-century models of the historian as belle lettriste and sole ‘authority’ rather than anything
informed by Hayden White (see similarly Breisach, p. 201). For other, less showboating, examples that
incorporate elements of fictional reconstruction amid traditional historical work, see B. Hanawalt, Growing
Up in Medieval London (Oxford, 1995); A. Farge, Fragile Lives (Cambridge, 1993).
23
See similarly Passmore, in Writing History, p. 126.
 22

emphasis upon the first part of the term. There is little sense here of history as a space
wherein one encounters difference – only reflections upon one’s own self, dramatizing
the petty heroism of authorial struggle.

If self-reflexivity is to get beyond intellectual narcissism it must surely engage with a

sense of what is at stake in our attempts to write about the past. This does involve some
reflection upon the constructed position of the author, the provisionality of our
knowledge, the textual nature of one’s enterprise. But it should also be more than that. It
should include a recognition that writing history – and indeed reading history – is a
political act. Historians and their readers, whether they will it or not, are part of a wider
set of arguments about the shape of the world and its possible futures. At the same time,
historical writing – distinct from certain other kinds of writing – is not created only to
satisfy present needs. It also attempts to provide a prompt to the future, the tools of
memory for that future to continue the task of considering the past; and it meditates upon
the absence of the past, and the status of the voices we attempt to bring forth from the
surviving traces. Various postmodern enthusers have leapt upon only one half of what
Hayden White proposed, that history is a discourse ‘the content of which is as much
imagined as found’ – as much not rather than. History is not solely the invention of the
historian. Self-reflexivity, and further encounters with the postmodern challenge, should
involve thinking about what we do in the archive as well as in front of the wordprocessor.

Methodological Strategies
One will find in The Nature of History Reader a few extracts that consider the historian in
the archive, from Greg Dening, Joan Wallach Scott, and Carolyn Steedman in particular.
But to see what practicing historians are currently doing with postmodernism – or, more
precisely, poststructuralism – one can turn to the collections of essays published by
Hodder Arnold in their new ‘Writing History’ series. Berger, Feldner and Passmore’s
Writing History: Theory and Practice (henceforth WH) takes a broad view, attempting to
say something about most areas of historiography. Nancy Partner’s Writing Medieval
History (henceforth WMH) covers a narrower field, and might better have been titled
 23

Writing Medieval Subjectivity as it does not represent the breadth of theoretically-

informed medieval history, choosing instead to focus mainly upon questions of medieval
selfhood and identity. Both, however, show the imaginative ways in which different
historians use various theoretical tools.

Certain interlinked issues are shared between contributors to the two books, and point to
wider trends in current historiography. The first of these is power, and how it is
conceptualised. We are no longer beholden to what might be called a ‘Newtonian’ model
of power: exert force A here, outcome B results there (with force A usually understood to
be consciously applied by a political elite, and outcome B affecting the mass populace). I
am caricaturing, of course, and more subtle examples of such equations can still be
drawn. But poststructuralist theory has prompted the development of much more complex
models of causation, better able to analyse the unintended consequences of actions, and
more attuned to the cultural settings within which power-relations are constituted and
negotiated. Moreover, for those of a particularly Foucauldian allegiance, power is
considered not simply in terms of force or repression, but a more diffuse network of
relations that produces and positions as much as it silences and excludes (see Kevin
Passmore, in WH, p. 127). At their best, studies informed by such conceptualisations of
power make history’s most decisive break yet from the tradition of ‘kings and battles’ or
the deeds of Great Men, whilst retaining a critical purchase upon the workings of the
state, the constitution of political subjects, and the ongoing struggles for social authority
and economic control.

Elsewhere, the role of language, and symbolic systems more broadly, have been seized
upon by historians in various different ways. At the more straightforward end is the
newly-invigorated political history that, as Jon Lawrence outlines, has adopted the kind
of discourse-analysis Quentin Skinner developed for intellectual history, historicizing the
language (and its accompanying unspoken assumptions) that embodied and delimited the
polity of a particular epoch (WH, pp. 186-7). As Sarah Foot and Robert Stein
demonstrate, historians have also adopted various literary-critical techniques in their
analysis of sources as writing. Such approaches make the historian more attuned to the
 24

textuality of the archive – not simply the influence of genre or authorial tradition, but the
witting and unwitting lexical choices made in composition, the narrative structuring of
records, the elisions and silences lurking beneath the communicative surface, and all the
other ways in which the historical traces are formed through the various tricks of
language (WMH, pp. 82, 102). At the most poststructuralist pole, Kevin Passmore lucidly
explains how Foucault’s work demonstrates the multifold ways in which ‘[l]anguage,
particularly professional knowledge, is intrinsically related to power’ (WH, p. 127).
Discourse (which, for Foucault, includes social practices as well as language) can be seen
as constituting reality, and an analysis of its positioned truth-claims allows the historian
to perceive how dominant narratives and sites of authority – Reason, science, medicine,
sexual identity – achieved their dominance and with what displacing effects.

As Thomas Welskopp points out, a Foucauldian approach has often been seen to be in
tension with the traditional project of social history (WH, p. 216), and it is this that has
prompted much of the denunciations of postmodernism from elements of the political
Left.24 However, a new generation of social historians have more readily embraced the
conceptual tools of poststructuralism. The holy trinity of social identity – class, race and
gender – have been repositioned by these new perspectives, and their inter-relationships
more fully explored, particularly the view that ‘social categories should be understood in
terms of difference’ (WH, p. 216). That is, historians (like other writers about society)
have started to relinquish the idea that social identities are constituted objectively from
innate essences, considering instead the ways in which discourses of cultural
differentiation produce and sustain identity. For example, Kevin Passmore explains the
approach that Patrick Joyce takes toward class in the nineteenth century, with his focus
upon language and the cultural resources from which identities were constructed (WH, p.
128); and David Gary Shaw maps the complex construction by external forces of the
‘social self’ in late medieval England (WMH, p. 17). Gender has been perhaps the most
fertile area, following the foundational work of Joan Wallach Scott and others.
Femininity, and more recently masculinity, have become objects of sophisticated analysis

24
See, for example, A. Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (Cambridge, 1989); E.
Hobsbawm, On History (London, 1997), chapters 15, 21.
 25

in conjunction with other discourses (of religion and class, for example); and the human
body itself has been read as a site of competing discourses and representative practices
(see Laura Lee Downs, WH, pp. 272-5; Jacqueline Murray, WMH, pp. 134-8). The
instability of gender identities has been a major insight informed by poststructuralism,
and presents a promising line of analysis for understanding how it is that such seemingly
foundational qualities change over time. Thus Cordelia Beattie discusses the case of a
transvestite medieval prostitute in order to examine how concepts of gender in the period
operated at different, sometimes conflicting, levels; and argues persuasively that
masculinity and femininity differed not only in content but in structure (WMH, pp. 153,
158-9).

Perhaps above all else, poststructural theory has brought the realisation that identity is a
process, one that operates within the domains of power. Thus, as Milla Rosenberg writes,
‘race is not static or fixed – systems of racial classification were profoundly shaped by
political dynamics, scientific priorities, and the increasing demands of mercantile trade’.
E. P. Thompson’s conception of class contained, of course, a sense of process – witness
the title of his most famous work, The Making of the English Working Class. What has
changed in these new conceptualisations however is the sense that such ‘makings’ are
without end, and are more radically unstable than an older historiography (and political
viewpoint) would allow. The ways in which an apparently ‘essential’ quality is cited
within very different discourses produces tensions at a profound level, and complicates
the desire to see such identities as the firm foundation for a productive politics. For
example, race has long been, in different ways, a prime way of asserting status, from the
notion of ‘authentic’ aristocratic stock in the early modern period to the Orientalism
diagnosed by Edward Said in many walks of life (WH, pp. 289-90). Attempts to ‘re-
value’ race (or femininity, or class) are prey to these alternative citations, and cannot be
fixed by reference to a secure, unshifting ‘reality’ that preceeds their linguistic
enunciation. But poststructuralist viewpoints can – and most often do – critique dominant
paradigms, just as much as more traditional Leftist analyses have previously attempted. A
key example of how poststructuralism has prompted the formation of new analytical
 26

approaches and fields of study are the various historicizations of ‘Whiteness’ (WH, pp.
287-8).

One criticism of postmodernism has been that it dissolves all into language (accompanied
by a mistaken sense that this means only language and ‘merely’ language). For various
historians, this prompts the fear that we thus lose once again the voices and experiences
of human actors in history – a prize long and hard fought for by social history. As Laura
Lee Downs puts it, poststructuralism calls into question the very foundations of social
history, namely ‘the logical chain that bound experience to identity, and from there
moved to politics’. The work of Joan Scott and Judith Butler undermines the foundational
aspect of ‘experience’ itself, seeing it not as a priori, but part of the discursive
construction of selfhood (WH, p. 272-3).25 Such a viewpoint, informed particularly by
Foucault’s sense of the discontinuity of the self, certainly renders problematic one long-
standing historiographical project of rescuing subaltern individuals from the
condescension of posterity. But this does not mean that poststructuralist history has
abandoned the search for the voices of the past; only that it tends to reconceptualize how
those voices are perceived. Kevin Passmore makes a persuasive case for adopting the
perspectives of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, so as to view our textual traces as
heteroglossic: irreducible to one ‘authentic’ voice that we can rescue, but containing
multiple voices in conflict. The work of Murray and Beattie illustrates also how new
theoretical perspectives allow the historian to engage sensitively and meaningfully with
those marginalized aspects of the past that were usually previously dismissed as gothic
curios at best. Some historians have also turned to psychoanalysis in an attempt to
reconsider the historical individual – Nancy Partner making a particular bid for using it as
an intellectual tool for rediscovering the complexity of each, individual medieval self,
rather than seeing them as puppets dancing within prescribed cultural codes (WMH, pp.
51, 60). I don’t personally find this particular approach hugely persuasive – as Garthine
Walker points out in an intelligent and balanced discussion, unadulterated psychoanalytic
theory tends toward an unproductive circularity of argument (WH, p. 150) – but the
desire, albeit within a theorized framework, is precisely not to abandon the individual

25
See particularly J. W. Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 773-97.
 27

historical subject (see further WMH, p. xiv). What poststructuralism does do, however, is
encourage the historian to reflect upon the problems that that desire presents, rather than
simply rushing to embrace a resurrected, heroic subaltern. There are complex issues of
agency, audibility, and the presence of the historian her or himself to consider here, as
various writers make clear (WH, pp. 130, 217-8, 274-5).26 This returns us once again to
the politics of historiographical practice, as Beverley Southgate makes clear in a
thoughtful essay on intellectual history: ‘By studying other people at other times and in
other cultures, we are confronted by alternatives ... We may, thus, further come to see
their (and our own) historicity and contingency, and so be empowered to take some
action for the future’ (WH, p. 258).

It is in these works, and the broader practices they outline, that history has risen to the
postmodern challenge, and met it in productive collusion. Historians bring something
different to the game, a viewpoint that differs from the perspectives of those literary
critics and social theorists who most frequently inhabit the postmodern arena. We have, I
think, a particular and distinctive sense of the messy, fascinating, infuriating complexity
of the human condition, and our own inadequacy in attempting fully to represent it. Any
serious encounter with the archives will prompt this attitude, if nothing else in the simple
frustration of how much must necessarily remain unread, unpondered, uncounted, unseen.
History lacks a ‘canon’, in the literary sense, and quite frequently also lacks the
comforting unity of ‘the author’; our texts are not so easily bounded. History’s profound
sense of complexity and provisionality springs from that apparent lack; no-one can
clearly signal at what point we should stop reading. At the risk of re-opening the
epistemological wound once again, I want briefly to return to the matter of the historical
evidence. In the intelligent and productive work sketched above, most of the historians
neither labour under an illusion of direct referentiality, nor are they hypnotized by the
chasm of epistemological aporia. The question regarding the traces of the past is not so
much a matter of whether one can or cannot build a knowledge of the past through such
materials, as what one understands oneself to be doing when working with them; and that
‘doing’ has political and ethical implications as well as philosophical ones. The former

26
For my own attempts in this area, see J. H. Arnold, Inquisition and Power (Philadelphia, 2001).
 28

question – the epistemological one – tends to trap us into a binary of positivism or

nihilism. But I strongly suspect that most historians only end up entering the binary - and
then finding themselves proclaiming commitment to a positivism they do not wholly
embrace - when confronted by a nihilism they must reject. For some historians, rejecting
nihilism becomes the trap in itself, an endless project of repeating ad nauseam the same,
philosophically-inadequate nostrums. But for others, encouraged by poststructuralist
theory to reject the false allure of dyadic oppositions, other paths forward can be found;
and these paths are political and self-reflexive in the best sense.

What is History, Again?

I began this article by alluding to the multifarous concepts or modes of thought that lurk
behind the label ‘history’. It is further worth remembering that the kind of rupture
proclaimed for postmodernism is implicitly located within a particular, Western historical
consciousness, not necessarily a universal condition.27 Where one considers ‘history’ in
its wider, popular, public senses – ‘the Past’ critiqued by Jack Plumb – postmodernism
has perhaps its greatest impact. Texts by Dipesh Chakrabarty, David Roberts, Jean
Baudrillard and to some extent David Harlan – all extracted in The Nature of History
Reader – work best when understood to be tackling the shared cultural narratives of
history or collective historicist perspectives that inform and inflect political discourse in
its widest sense. Very often, the sense of ‘history’ they critique is the hazy-but-powerful
notion of seamless process, judgement and revealed importance that one most frequently
finds in newspaper editorials (‘How will History judge Tony Blair?’). This is not
unconnected with academic history, but neither is it synonymous.

Nor, however, does one supersede the other. In his preface to Western Historical
Thinking and the series that it inaugurates Jörn Rüsen notes that practices of popular
memory incorporate a philosophy of history just as much as academic theorizations.

27
One might also add that for most of the popularizing texts that deal with postmodernism’s impact on
academic history, the focus tends also to be highly anglocentric, with little sense of how France, Germany,
Italy or elsewhere have engaged with these debates. One admirable exception is Peter Lambert’s essay on
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Moreover, ‘[a]s long as we fail to acknowledge this intrinsic connection ... we remain
caught in an ideology of linear progress, which considers cultural forms of memory
simply as interesting objects of study instead of recognizing them as examples of “how to
make sense of history”’ (p. viii). The collection that Rüsen has edited seeks to position
Western, academic historiography as but one strand in our approach to the past; and by
constrasting it with other stances, allow us to see illuminating constrasts and underlying
similarities. Peter Burke opens the volume with a brave attempt at summarizing
characteristic aspects of Western historical consciousness, and the other contributors then
position themselves in regard to his account – some adjusting it, some rejecting it, some
pointing to utterly different historicisms from other cultures, some emphasizing the
interconnectedness of those cultures. Thus Tarif Khalidi presents facets that the Islamic
historiographical tradition shares with the West, and asks whether searching for the
shared stimuli of historiographical productions might not be more rewarding than
pointing to assumed differences (p. 54). Aziz Al-Azmeh, one eye similarly on Islamic
examples, questions whether one can homogenize historical thinking into one Western
tradition, and points out that the set of assumptions loosely tethered to the Rankean
tradition are largely confined to academe. ‘There are layers of historical culture in all
societies, and Westerners are as irrational in the conception of history as any others’ (p.
64).

The snapshots of different historiographical practices – academic and popular – provided

in Western Historical Thinking are intriguing. Yü Ying-Shih describes how the notion of
development or progress (something that Burke describes as a key feature in Western
traditions) was alien to Chinese historiography, up until 1949 and the adoption of
Marxist-Leninists perspectives, whereafter ‘[a] central task set for historians by the Party
is to periodize their national history according to the five-stage theory of social
development’ (p. 153). Masayuki Sato explains how Japanese academic historiography
mimicked the division into amateur and professional that it imported from European
Rankeanism, but with a much stricter and more sclerotic exclusion of interpretive history.

the professionalization of history (in Writing History) which encompasses African and Indian perspectives
to great effect.
 30

Japanese historical novelists, meanwhile, adopt a much more ‘factual’ approach than
their Western counterparts (p. 138). Further contributions take us briefly to Africa and
India, both modern and ancient; and Frank Ankersmit, François Hartog and others reflect
critically upon the history of historical consciousness in the West. Some chapters are
frustratingly brief, but overall Western Historical Thinking is a major contribution to
historiographical analysis. It provides a different, and more textured, route to reflection
upon how we do history, and the implications of our choices, than that proffered by the
cruder proponents of postmodernism.

Or, to put it another way, the postmodern challenge is not peculiar to postmodernism; and
it is not epochal but immanent to human reflection upon the past – an ongoing process of
positively confronting the absence which still lingers. In our continuing responses to that
challenge, we would do well to remember that history is a collective, collaborative act –
no one work of history need necessarily attempt to respond to every element of the
challenge – and that historiography at its best is governed not solely by present needs, but
the attempt to reconcile oneself with that which has gone and yet still speaks to us. As
Greg Dening puts it so lyrically:
There is a heavy obligation that I owe the past. If I claim to represent it – if I
claim to re-present it – I owe it something, its own independence. I owe it a
gift of itself, unique in time and space. The history I write will always be
mine and something more than the past, but there is a part of it that is never
mine. It is the part that actually happened, independently of my knowing that
or how it happened. My true stories are ruled by my belief that I have always
something to learn (Nature of History Reader p. 120).
Failing to grasp this is the abiding sin of both the nihilist end of postmodernism, and the
complacent end of traditional historiography. Both, in their very different ways, expect to
find nothing in history other than their own reflection. But there is always an
unanswerable excess, the reverberating silence that makes us question both past and
present. Framing and responding to that impossibility is what history should be – and
perhaps, sometimes, is.