In Defence of History

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Because there seems to be a quite widespread misunderstanding of what I mean by historical objectivity, with numerous reviewers assuming that because I actually dare to use the word it can only have one meaning, that is, a strong and traditional one, rather than, as I intended, a weak and qualified one, I have added a sentence to the penultimate paragraph in the American and German editions: 'Objective history in the last analysis is history that is researched and written within the limits placed on the historical imagination by the facts of history and the sources which reveal them, and bound by the historian's desire to produce a true, fair, and adequate account of the subject under consideration.' Any questions this might seem to beg are, I hope, dealt with in the preceding text of the book.

Matthew Trinca ignores the carefully circumscribed definition of objectivity given in the book's final Chapter, and, simply assuming that the word can only be used in the absolutist sense intended by traditionalists like Elton, places the book's central argument squarely in the Eltonian camp. While Trinca obviously disapproves of this, David Gress, advocating a return to military history and the 'rote learning of facts' in school history lessons, sees it as a confirmation of his conservative approach. Gress enlists In Defence of History in support of his call for a rejection of the 'present-mindedness and political correctness' through which he thinks social history, women's history, and other relatively recent new developments in historical scholarship and teaching have created a 'barrier to learning'. Thus Gress finds the book's criticisms of Elton to be an 'almost ritualistic' cloak for 'true respect and admiration' on the part of its author (myself). A similar position is taken in the review by Greg Munro, who thinks the book does indeed 'embrace wholeheartedly' the 'hard-line concept of historical objectivity espoused by Elton', for all its protestations to the contrary. Evans is arguing for a middle position- one that emphasizes the recalcitrance of the "facts", i.e., the historical records. Evans denies that all of history is interpretation and that no one interpretation is better than any other. He believes that careful and honest shifting of the historical record will show some or one interpretations to be better grounded in that record than others. On the other hand, he is excited by some of the possibilities for history that have been opened up by those working historians whose work he admires and who are identified with the postmodern camp, e.g., Simon Schama, Theodore Zeldin and Orlando Figes. Appleby's claim that the book 'certainly will please those who think that pre-1970 history needed no defending' is somewhat untypical in this respect. Leaving aside the mysterious question of what happened in 1970 to make history worth defending in some people's eyes afterwards but not before, it seems strange that a book explicitly devoted to defending history (both before and after 1970) should please those who think it needs no defending at all. And in fact this is what a number of reviewers have more or less said. The fact that over 40,000 British 'A' level students took history examinations in 1997 and over 15,000 students were reading the subject at university, history in the same year means, according to Niall Ferguson, that 'history does not need much defending.' Of course, these figures are a substantial decline on those of previous years, the numbers of students taking history at A level have been falling for over a decade, and in the USA there were only a third as many students reading history at university in 1990 as there were in 1970. But this does not seem to bother Ferguson. As an economic historian, he should know that it is trends that count, not single-year figures. Written at the height of what was perceived as an “onslaught of postmodernism” , Evans’ book ‘In Defence of History’ seeks to restate the case for a version of historical writing that is grounded in an empirical understanding of the discipline. Evans warns against both a “rank indifference” toward the linguistic challenge as well as a “drawing up [of] the disciplinary drawbridge” against new and strange forces. Instead, what Evans attempts is to thoroughly investigate this challenge and to “distinguish those who have made a creative contribution to historical understanding” . This leads to the overall theory the book espouses; an approach to historiography that states that constant challenge by, and assimilation of, new theories leads to a richer and stronger discipline. This is a book completely set in the context of its time, but as a guidebook to “how we study history, how we research and write about it, and how we read it” it succeeds on its own terms and maintains a relevancy 23 years later. But while Carr provides the bones of the story, the post-modernists provide the meat – they are the ones who Evans really wants to get his teeth into. How has the study of history changed over time?

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The book challenges the self-designated left-wing radicalism of postmodernists. And the challenge came from a leftist. Postmoderism is a extreme relativism form of thinking, that opens the door to fascists and racists as well as radicals and progressives by allowing anybody to claim that their view of history, their reading of a document, is as valid as anybody else's, and by making it impossible to refute their arguments on anything but political grounds. 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.” Joyce Appleby, 'Does it really need defending?' The Times Literary Supplement, 31 October 1997, p. 10.

The need for such an addition is further illustrated by the misunderstandings present in the review by the Soviet history specialist Steve Smith, who supposes that In Defence of History argues that 'there is a singular truth to be told about the past' and that it can be 'discovered' from the evidence. The book goes to some length to argue that what historians write is the result of a dialogue between their own purposes and ideas and what they find in the sources. Unwilling to re cognise this, Smith proceeds to entangle himself in a web of contradictions, as he argues on the one hand that historians' interpretations of past events cannot stand or fall by the extent to which they conform to the historical evidence, and on the other accuses the Harvard historian Richard Pipes of providing 'a deeply distorted representation' of the Russian revolution. The historical interests of most Marxist historians were not so much in the base - the economic infrastructure - as in the relations of base and superstructure. This socio-economic current was wider than Marxism. These historical modernisers asked the same questions and saw themselves as engaged in the same intellectual battles, whether inspired by human geography, Weberian sociology or the Marxism of the communist historians who became carriers of historical modernisation in Britain.

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. In Defence of History was well received by some London reviewers on grounds that it saw off the invading hordes of postmodernist. It is depressing to think that this uninformed yet totally self-confident work of naive provincialism should come from close to the heartlands of English culture. [Just to finish: the more correct term for 'subconscious' (p. 206) is 'unconscious'.]

Or in the re-quoted words of Jacques Derrida, history is “an inscription on the past pretending to be a likeness of it” (1968). Learning from the enemy 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. The reason why the book refers so frequently to Elton and Carr is simply that, as many historians of a variety of different persuasions have conceded, their books still form the basis for much if not most teaching of historical epistemology today. They are still much the most readable and approachable accounts of the nature of historical knowledge written by practising historians. Lynn Hunt finds this a 'disappointing...flight...into "daddyism", the search for fatherly figures that warrant the legitimacy of an approach. Evans', she says, 'refers almost obsessively to Carr and Elton as if to reassure himself that he will be their appointed successor; his criticisms of them sound like those of a deferential grandson.' In fact, I n Defence of History is intended, not to replace their books, but to be read alongside them; hence the chapter headings, borrowed from Carr, or the final paragraph, a parody of Carr's final paragraph. Thirty or more years ago there were hardly any books which introduced history students to the conceptual and methodological problems which they faced, so Carr and Elton virtually had the field to themselves. Now there are many such competing texts, and the very idea of any single book achieving the kind of status theirs did is ridiculous. Easthope concludes this part of his argument by citing the book's 'resoundingly empiricist conclusion that, despite it all, "it really happened", we can "find out how" and know "what it all meant".' What this passage in the book actually says, following on a series of references to the theses of various postmodernist writers on history, is as follows: '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.' By removing all the qualifications from this statement, Easthope has manipulated it to give the appearance of a dogmatic confidence in the possibility of absolute knowledge that was a very long way from what was intended. Thus he has only managed to support the charge he levels against the book, of mindless empiricism, by giving a deliberately false and distorted version of what it actually says. While cultural history, intellectual history and even the history of high politics have received a fillip from the new theories and approaches of the late 1980s and 1990s, the principal victims have been social and economic history; precisely the areas, as we shall now see, which experienced the greatest growth and expansion in the 1960s and 1970s (my italics here).Jenkins indulges in his usual self- dramatization as a radical opponent of bourgeois orthodoxy by presenting the reader with a version of In Defence of History that gives the book some kind of would-be official status, laying down the law to everybody as to how history should be studied. He repeatedly alleges that In Defence of History was written in defence of 'proper' history and 'proper' historians. Nowhere in fact do I use this term, nowhere do I attempt to define what might be an 'improper' history; on the contrary, I argue repeatedly and at length that there is a huge variety of ways of approaching the past, and that this plurality and diversity are to be welcomed and defended. I would not for one minute wish to say t hat the kind of history I engage in myself is the only 'proper' kind, and I have never done so. On the contrary, it is Jenkins who is being prescriptive and dogmatic, declaring repeatedly that postmodernity is the only proper epistemological, moral and political position to adopt, that history is outmoded, irrelevant, pointless and impossible, and that the only option for historians is to join the postmodernists, though of course only if the postmodernists judge them fit to do so. No room f or plurality and diversity here, then. Hurtling into this academic conflict comes the postmodernist challenge. Evans uses the debate among those he considers acceptable historical theorists as a counterpoint to hyper-relative postmodernism, which he deems an unacceptable aberration. To distinguish the two he uses the example of the holocaust as a “litmus test for his arguments about historical evidence and representation” . For Evans, the idea of history simply as discourse falls down because “Auschwitz was not discourse. It trivialises mass murder to see it as a text” . This quote cuts through the noise of theoretical word games and grounds history in reality. Evans is reminding us that treating reality as simply “useful fiction” has serious real-world consequences. In his introduction Evans makes clear the book is a response to postmodernist criticism of historical practice. I was also amused to note that he cites a source as saying that historians were resistant to philosophising about their subject and criticism of their methods. As a scientist it sometimes feels as if other academic disciplines, such as philosophy and history, are on a crusade to "help" science with their criticism – this has never felt at all supportive or helpful. What this book makes clear is that one shouldn’t lump all such outsiders into one hostile blob! They all saw each other as allies against historiographical conservatism, even when they represented mutually hostile positions. This front of progress advanced from the second world war to the 1970s. There followed a transition from quantitative to qualitative studies, from macro- to micro-history, from structural analysis to narrative, from the social to the cultural. All this has nothing to do with Holocaust denial, and I am not aware of anybody apart from Nolte who has ever claimed a connection. What Nolte seems to be suggesting is that my concept of historical objectivity rules out any dispute of any kind about Auschwitz. But it does not. Of course there is room for argument and debate. But only within the limits set by the evidence. A claim such as the familiar Holocaust denial assertion that nobody was gassed at all clearly steps beyond these bounds.