Two Approaches To Historical Study: The Metaphysical (Including 'Postmodernism') and The Historical

Two Approaches to Historical Study: The Metaphysical (Including 'Postmodernism') and
the Historical
Author(s): Arthur Marwick
Source: Journal of Contemporary History , Jan., 1995, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Jan., 1995), pp. 5-
35
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/260920
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Arthur Marwick
Two Approaches to Historical Study: The

Metaphysical (Including 'Postmodernism')
and the Historical*
'Postmodernist' epistemology and ontology are inescapable,

though highly contestable, components of the intellectual world
of today, and everyone involved in intellectual and educational
activity should have some understanding of their basic contentions.
These contentions are now being encountered by history students,
particularly if they are also involved in literary or cultural studies;
such students may then be faced by a potentially disorienting
disjunction between theories of discourse analysis, deconstruction,
and the 'historicizing' of texts, and the methods and principles
taught, or at least assumed, in most history departments, and may
even be persuaded that the history of the historians is worthless,
merely ideology, 'the stories we tell', and must be replaced by a
history shaped to the needs of contemporary radical politics. The
basic theme of this article is that the presumptuous and ill-
informed criticisms which the 'postmodernists' (a useful, though
unsatisfactory label, taken to include post-structuralists, cultural
materialists, new historicists, etc.) make of history are best rebut-
ted through a careful restatement of what it is historians actually
do, and why they do it. I start with two central problems: (I)
that of language (which historians must grapple with both in their
research among often intractable primary sources, and in writing
up that research); (II) that of history as a social, and indeed,
career activity (in which the coveted prizes may be best-seller-
dom and literary awards, rather than research grants and
professorships). I then, (III), identify the crucial distinction
between, on the one side, the study of carefully delimited aspects
of the human past, as conducted, through systematic research in
* A response to this article, by Professor Hayden White, will be published in the

April issue.
Journal of Contemporary History (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New
Delhi), Vol. 30 (1995), 5-35.

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6 Journal of Contemporary History
all the available sources, by historians and, on the other, speculat-

ive studies based on the assumption that 'history' already has a
material existence as a set of processes and power relationships
linking past to present, to future, conducted by philosophers, liter-
ary theorists and other non-historians: the former is signified by
'the historical approach' of the title, the latter by 'the metaphysical
approach'. The 'postmodernists', the direct heirs of the 'structural-
ists' of the 1960s, are simply the latest metaphysical interlopers
upon the study of history - a brief discussion of structuralism
and post-structuralism, set within their Parisian context, forms the
subject matter of section (IV). These points made, we come to
the main body of the article (V), a contrast between what the
postmodernists say historians do (in order to revile them), and
what historians actually do do.
Many of the most important words we use have various meanings,

well-known examples being 'ideology', 'culture', 'class', 'the state',
'history'. The rule for historians is always to be clear and explicit
as to which usage is being deployed in any particular instance,
and to identify in the primary sources, and avoid in their writing-
up of their researches, any unannounced slippage from one mean-
ing to another. In writing-up it is impossible (short of going into
the most cumbersome and long-winded rephrasing) to avoid such
metaphors as 'forces', 'factor', 'legacy'. Again the rule is that of
self-awareness, controlling the metaphor, rather than the other
way round, as the historian in control will avoid such apologies
for precise thought as 'climate of opinion' or 'social background'.
Historians, more than anyone, know the difficulties of understand-
ing remote or archaic languages, technical terms, the special
'codes' inscribed within the enormous variety of different types
of primary source. Historians were aware of the ambiguities of
language long before structuralism was ever heard of: one may,
for instance, refer to Louis Gottschalk's discussion of the ambigu-
ities and implied assumptions contained in such an apparently
simple phrase as 'Columbus discovered America on October 12,
1492', or Denys Hay's discussion of 'Geographical Abstraction
and the Historian', or Marc Bloch's analysis of such key concepts
as 'feudalism' and 'revolution', or Alfred Cobban's 'The Vocabu-

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Marwick: Two Approaches to Historical Study 7
lary of Social History'.' Or we can refer to such stimulating recent

contributions as R.J.W. Evans's etymological analysis of 'Frontiers
and National Identities in Central Europe'. Here, enviable linguis-
tic skills (in the most valuable sense of facility in several, and
difficult, languages), integrated with meticulous research, yield
hard knowledge on the way frontiers firmed up and nation states
emerged, besides which Anthony Easthope's pretentious piece
subjecting an article by Lawrence Stone to postmodernist 'analy-
sis' is but belle-lettriste froth.2 All intellectual pursuits require the
deployment of complex concepts; sometimes new coinages are
needed to pin down some aspect of reality which might otherwise
evade us. But, for historians, the rule remains that of caution and
circumspection: awareness that many concepts carry with them a
freight of unsubstantiated assumptions, awareness of the dangers
of mistaking a concept for something real (a major characteristic of
the metaphysicians: the postmodernists, for example, perennially
write as if their 'narratives' and 'discourses' were material realities;
and, given the way events have exploded so much of Marxist
theory, it really is time to question whether there is any validity
at all to that universal explainer-way, 'ideology', when used in its
Marxist sense). It is not unusual for a historian, wishing to illumi-
nate some idea, or drive a point home with particular force, to
resort to a figure of speech; titles of books, chapters, sections of
chapters, ideally expressing complex arguments as faithfully and
pithily as possible, may demand rhetorical devices. If research has
been conducted diligently, and 'results' arrived at honestly, there
is everything to be said for presenting these 'results' as clearly
and forcefully as possible. What - for the historian exercising
proper discipline and control - is unacceptable is the use of
rhetoric with the intention of concealing uncertainties or gaps in
the argument (usually unsuccessful anyway: postmodernist critics
seem curiously unaware of the fact that historical books or articles
are not one-off, self-standing productions, but are read critically -
and sometimes savagely! - by other historians). It takes experi-
ence, and it takes effort, but it is perfectly possible in historical
writing to be both precise and explicit (provided, of course, that
as a result of one's researches, one has something precise and
explicit to communicate); research and writing are not two discrete
activities (as the postmodernists assume - indeed, they usually
ignore the research aspect altogether), but form one interactive
process. In some forms of discourse (using the word in its neutral

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sense - 'speech or writing of more than a sentence') we may

deliberately create ambiguity - in a letter fishing for a job, or to
an estranged lover, for example. Just as it is possible to create
ambiguity, so it is possible (given the discipline and dedication) to
avoid ambiguity. Only too aware of the seductions and traps of
language, serious historians strive to be as precise as is possible.
Or do they? ... Much depends on one's notion of what history
is for. Regrettably there is still, within the profession, much obfus-
cation on this matter, some academics apparently deriving much
pride from not being sure what it is they are doing; or why
thus offering easy hostages to the postmodernists. David Canna-
dine seems keen to reassert the role of the historian as Great
Communicator, as played by G.M. Trevelyan, and approving
quotes Trevor-Roper's words of 1957 that 'the ultimate pur
of history was to edify and educate a non-professional audie
A.J.P. Taylor represented himself as believing that 'the writings
an historian are no good unless readers get the same plea
from them as they do from a novel'. Many historians appea
see history not as cumulative bodies of knowledge, constan
subject to correction and refinement, but as discrete, individ
crafted books, purveying moral truths (whatever they may b
the (relatively limited) book-buying public.3 Examining what
overwhelming bulk of the historical profession actually does,
impossible to believe that these versions of the obsolete noti
history as a branch of literary activity have any real purch
among working historians (though they mesh neatly with the cr
cisms of the postmodernists). Human societies need the a
within the human spirit there is a deep yearning for dance
drama, for music, for colour, for the world of the imaginat
Human societies also need knowledge. Without the sciences th
could be no hope of mastering the natural world. History is
branch of knowledge which caters to society's need to unders
particular aspects of the human past, an understanding wit
which it would be impossible even to attempt to grapple with
problems of the present. History, misconceived as a branch
literature, may be deliberately ambiguous, deliberately loaded
all the tricks of language; history, the history of the histor
existing to meet a social need, must, to dismiss the question
which this paragraph began, avoid ambiguity (as necessary, se
ting out that which is securely established from that which
intelligent conjecture). 'Historians', as Eric Hobsbawm has sa

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'are professionally obliged not to get it wrong - or at least to

make an effort not to'.4 'Not getting it wrong' entails a determined
exactness in the use of language. What I am reasserting, of course,
is the autonomy of the historian in face of claims about the inevita-
bility of 'textuality'. A sympathetic literary critic, Phillipe Carrard,
forgives historians (he is specifically writing of the Annales his-
torians, wrongly swallowing their own claims to have established
a 'new history') for their 'concurrent reliance on such diverging
machineries as narrative, quantification, and figurative language'
since such confusion (as he sees it) is 'a fundamental aspect' of
'the condition of scholarship' - 'of the way humanists and scien-
tists alike conduct their research' and 'textualise their findings'
(my italics).5 I prefer to say that historians (like scientists) 'write
up' their researches, and in so doing control the 'machineries' (!)
they deploy, knowing their work will be subject to the scrutiny of
cold-eyed colleagues.
II
That historians form a profession, closely integrated with their

country's educational institutions, lends support to the notion that
they fulfil a necessary social function. On the positive side, pro-
fessional membership offers support systems (journals, biblio-
graphies, learned societies) for the pursuit of knowledge.
Historians certainly do not operate as solitary geniuses; history
progresses cumulatively, and has to be judged by the achievements
of the profession as a whole, embodied in monographs and learned
articles, rather than by the pronouncements of individual publicity-
seekers. (In case this all sounds too appallingly austere, I should
insert here that I fully recognize that works of history may well -
jolly good if they do - offer general enlightenment or aesthetic
delight; my point is that these are neither the primary nor the
'ultimate' objectives of historical study.) On the negative side,
professionalization entails various kinds of peer-group and career
pressures. Here it is instructive to look at some of the analogous
pressures bearing on scientists. J.D. Watson's exuberant, unbut-
toned account of the hunt for DNA has been a classic for years;
Steven Rose's wickedly witty memoirs of a brain biologist is in
the process of becoming one. To keep the grants rolling in, as
Rose explains, scientists have to keep churning out the research

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papers, sometimes contrived, often trivial, produced at break-neck

speed in order to achieve publication ahead of the opposition,
bland, and sometimes obsequious, in order to avoid offence to
potential referees. But there can be no doubting the commitment
of both Watson and Rose to the scientific enterprise and to the
notion that scientists, too, have an obligation 'not to get it wrong'.6
Traditionally, historians have been less concerned with research
grants than with winning the approbation of the Sunday reviewers
and thus may be tempted to prefer fine epigrams and stunning
paradoxes to the obligation not to get it wrong. But sales in tens
of thousands do not guarantee that a book will be recognized as
having made a lasting contribution to historical knowledge; and
that is what we must continue to focus on here. Historians, like
scientists, may well succumb to the lure of exaggerating the origi-
nality of their own discoveries or interpretations. But they will
then be subject to the competition of the intellectual market-
place: eventually a balanced, well-substantiated, much-scrutinized
account will pass into our textbooks.
Much more serious is the manner in which career aspirations
encourage historians to align themselves with some particular
school or branch of the discipline, often pouring contempt and
scorn on all the others (certain members of the Annales school
have been particularly strident in this respect). There are many
different sorts of questions about the past which require answers,
giving rise to many different sorts of history. But one sort is not
'better' (though it may be more fashionable) than another; and,
in the end, all sorts are based on the same fundamental methods
and principles. The Americans seem to be particularly keen on
compiling the promotions and relegations in some great Super
League of sub-histories, and there are audiences to be won and
reputations to be gained from books of grand, epistemological
character. Out of a continuing obsession with the antiquated philo-
sophical categories and debates of the nineteenth century, one
finds Peter Novick (scholarly historian of second world war
France) producing his massive That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity
Question' and the American Historical Profession. Erudite and
elegant, this book is just the sort to appeal to critics outside the
profession who prefer to read anything other than the actual
history produced by historians. Novick manages to identify a
'crisis' over the issue of objectivity, and concludes that: 'At least
for the foreseeable future there appeared no hope that historians'

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work would converge to produce the sort of integrated synthesis

which had long been the discipline's aspiration.7 Actually, working
historians, like working scientists, concentrate on limited, manage-
able (but difficult enough!) topics. History is a cumulative subject:
historians add to, modify and correct what has been discovered
by other historians. It is difficult to imagine what any 'integrated
synthesis' could possibly look like: if it were presented in the
form that any single person could actually read, then it would
completely lack the detail which we need when we seek infor-
mation on a specific problem - the Turkish occupation of the
Balkans, say, or the Cromwellian occupation of Ireland.
III
What, then, is the history of the historians? I have no wish to

overdo the parallels between history and the natural sciences
there are enormous differences, as, of course, there are lesser, but
still considerable differences between the individual sciences
but comparison with the sciences is the most economical way of
arriving at the definition of history (a compound one) which most
adequately matches the signifier to what needs to be signified.
First, some words about 'the (human) past' - a rough-and-ready
phrase signifying all the events, institutions, ideas, etc., and the
relationships between them, which existed or happened prior to
present time. Through contact with parents and grandparents,
family gossip, old photographs, folk memories, old buildings,
museums, pageants, most of us have little difficulty in accepting
in principle that societies and practices now past (and indeed well
beyond family memories) did once exist; but we can have no direct
apprehension of these societies and practices and, as ordinary
citizens, no serious knowledge of them. Knowledge of the past
comes, at whatever remove, from the work of historians. Knowl-
edge of the natural world (save at the trivial directly observed
level) comes - and it is usually at a much greater remove! -
from the work of the scientists, who devise experiments, observe
natural phenomena, record and analyse data, and develop and
apply concepts and theories. Historians do not devise experiments
and, while almost bound to deploy theory of some sort, do not do
so on anything like the same scale: the only way historians can
study past societies, short of merely speculating about them (the

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metaphysical approach), is by analysing the relics and traces left

by these societies (the primary sources). Just, then, as the natural
sciences are the systematic studies through experimentation,
observation, etc., of the natural world, and the bodies of knowl-
edge which arise from these studies, and, therefore, are the differ-
ent aspects of the natural world, physics, biology, chemistry, etc., as
they are known from the work of scientists (we have no other way
of knowing them), history is the study of the human past, through
the systematic analysis of the primary sources, and the bodies of
knowledge arising from that study, and, therefore, is the human
past as it is known from the work of historians. The human past
enfolds so many periods and cultures that history can no more
form one unified body of knowledge than can the natural sciences.
The search for universal meaning or universal explanations is,
therefore, a futile one. History is about finding things out, and
solving problems, rather than about spinning narratives or telling
stories. History is a human activity carried out by an organized
corps of fallible human beings, acting, however, in accordance with
strict methods and principles, empowered to make choices in the
language they use (as between the precise and the imprecise, for
example), and known as historians.
To the metaphysicians 'history' is something.altogether differ-
ent: though definitions are never offered, it turns out to be nothing
less than the material process by which the past itself becomes the
present and, indeed, the future, unfolding in a series of stages (or
epochs or periods), according to some pattern or meaning, involving
conflicts or accommodations in the exercise of power. The meta-
physician, of course, 'knows' what that meaning is, what these
stages are, and any empirical research which may be conducted is
done within these pre-set parameters. To historians, on the other
hand, periods have no intrinsic existence. Periodization is an ana-
lytical device whose use varies depending on what is being studied:
what may very legitimately be presented as 'a period' in one
type of investigation may well not be one in another type. The
metaphysical tradition is a venerable one, running from Kant, to
Hegel, through Marx. Manifestly it is not necessarily a leftist
tradition. A recent exponent has been Francis Fukuyama, whose
The End of History and the Last Man (1992), based almost exclus-
ively on works of political philosophy, represents 'history' (that is,
'the material process of the past becoming the future') as reaching
its destined conclusion with the triumph of liberal capitalism. The

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postmodernists, while scarcely being able to deny the fundamental

influence on them of Marxism, would object to being included
within this tradition, claiming that they are the ones who have
made the decisive break with the nineteenth century, that they
have no teleology and perceive only chaos, not order and authority.
Yet their very notion of 'postmodernity' (with themselves, of
course, as the holders of its secrets) reeks of the epochalism always
central to the metaphysical approach,8 as does their preoccupation
with the emergence, and then alleged eclipse, of the individual
'subject'. 'Man', in the canonical words of Foucault, probably by
now familiar to everyone, 'is an invention of recent date. And
perhaps one nearing its end.'9 The insistence that language deter-
mines ideas, and is itself a system arising from the existing power
structure in society, is as grandiose a piece of speculative thought
as ever dreamed up by Hegel or Nietzche. The very issues dis-
cussed by the postmodernists, and the very vocabulary used, indi-
cate that postmodernism has roots deep into traditional
philosophy: taken out of context, and used as transparent tools of
epistemological analysis, 'positivist', 'humanist', 'idealist', 'materi-
alist', constantly on the lips of postmodernists, have no salience
for historians. An obvious give-away is the use of grand-sounding
anthropomorphization, now become tawdry cliche: 'the nine-
teenth-century project...'; 'what is at stake...'. Postmodernists
have a totalizing methodology applicable to all 'texts' (primary,
secondary, paintings, poems), known as 'discourse analysis' or
'deconstruction'. Historians are humbler: believing in specializ-
ation and division of labour they will, as necessary, turn to the art
historian or literary critic, just as sometimes the biologist may
need to enlist the help of the physicist. And, like most of the
great metaphysical 'historians', the postmodernists have a political
programme (glorification of the German nation state, or dictator-
ship of the proletariat, yesterday; fundamentalist radicalism and
overthrow of the bourgeois/humanist order, today).
IV
'Structuralism' and then 'post-structuralism' grew up in the elite

educational institutions on the Left Bank of the Seine, where
Marxism was accepted unquestioningly as the basic science of
social and historical development. The first structuralist was the

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Belgian-born, French-educated, philosopher turned anthropol-

ogist, Claude Levi-Strauss, who, in a great imaginative leap, put
together the linguistic theories of the Swiss, Ferdinand de Saussure
(who had died in 1913), and of the Russian-born Roman Jakobson,
whom he encountered in America in the 1940s, with his own not
very extensive empirical work on primitive kinship patterns. It is
characteristic of this entire school of philosophers, psychoanalysts
and literary critics that they were seldom able to set down in their
own words comprehensive, coherent statements of their theories;
'comprehensible', one might say as well, since all exegesists (even
the friendliest) comment on the impenetrability of the style of
Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Barthes, Althusser and Derrida (Foucault,
who did produce monumental statements, was an impressive styl-
ist, though again, often not easy to follow).10 Faced with: 'Ferdi-
nand de Saussure, Cours de Linguistique Generale, publie par
Charles Bally ... et Albert Sechehaye ... avec la collaboration
de Albert Riedlinger ... Payot. Lausanne et Paris, 1916 ...' one
might well conclude that one had in front of one a postmodernist
novel and perhaps an interesting exemplification of the thesis of
the death of the author. In their preface Bally and Sechehaye,
colleagues of Saussure, explained that, unable to find any lecture
notes, they had relied on notes taken by former students to recon-
stitute Saussure's thoughts as presented in courses of lectures in
1906-7, 1908-9 and 1910-11.11 Saussure, though lecturing on gen-
eral linguistics six years before his death, never himself set out his
theories in consolidated form; as every historian knows, you can
get away with murder in a course of lectures, nemesis striking only
when you have to produce a book. Being dead, Saussure had a
perfect excuse for the disorderly nature of Cours de Linguistique
Generale. Much was to be made of a simple point mentioned by
Saussure, that there is no intrinsic relationship between the signi-
fier (the word) and the signified (what the word 'means'). 'So
what?', has always been my own reaction, and indeed the Cours
itself recognizes that the point was already a commonplace.'2 Saus-
sure, however, went on to insist that since words have no inherent
meaning (how could they have?; they are only words after all -
one would assume that their meaning is embodied in their usage),
they could only derive their meaning from within the entire system
of language, and that (here we have the speculative leap into sheer
assertion unsupported by argument or evidence) that system is
external to human beings, arising instead from the power of struc-

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ture of society.13 The postmodernists like to give the impression

that Saussurian ideas are a central and accepted part of linguistics
as a discipline: it is only necessary to consult the standard works
by such authorities as Chomsky, Lyons and Lepschy to discover
that this is quite simply not so.14 Jakobson (a founder of the
'Prague School') produced a prodigious range of scholarship, but
it was his work on the nature of rhetoric, tropes and the literary
devices of metaphor and metonymy which attracted the attention
of Levi-Strauss, and were transmitted to Jacques Lacan, the rogue
psychoanalyst whose lectures on Freud were already central events
for the Left Bank intellectual establishment.15
The blinding revelation which came to Levi-Strauss was that
kinship patterns, and indeed all other human practices, were 'struc-
tures' in exactly the same ways that languages, according to the
Cours de Linguistique Generale were 'structures' or systems. This
'structuralist' position was fully stated in Anthropologie structurale
of 1958; it was La pensee sauvage of 1962, with its open attack on
Jean-Paul Sartre's status as top guru in postwar France, which
signalled to the quality press, where intellectual fashion was
treated in the manner of the latest haute couture, that existential-
ism was on the way out, structuralism about to become all the
rage. The triumph of the new canon was conveniently signalled by
Maurice Henry's cartoon 'Le dejeuner sur l'herbe structuraliste' in
La Quinzaine Litteraire of 1 July 1967, which depicted Levi-
Strauss, Lacan, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault.16 Lacan had
recently published Ecrits, an apparently random collection of
impenetrable essays produced over the years.17 But his contri-
butions to the new thinking were clear: first, he stressed the crucial
importance of the subconscious, with its frightening 'desire';
second, he decreed that the subconscious was structured exactly
as was, according to the now accepted wisdom, a language, mean-
ing that subconscious desires are not those of the individual 'sub-
ject', but of the power structure of the society to which the subject
belongs.'8 A literary critic and prominent figure in France's state-
funded cultural establishment, Barthes, too, was a writer of essays
of great opacity (or of casual brevity).19 He was obsessed by the
problem of expressing anything straightforwardly (at 'degree zero'
as he put it) unencumbered by the sediments of bourgeois society
and custom; he took it upon himself to develop 'semiology' (the
term had been coined by Saussure), the 'science of signs';20 his
criticism of history as merely ideology is well-known.21 He had

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earlier written a study of the early nineteenth-century historian,

Michelet;22 like Hayden White later, Barthes did not seem to
realize that what a nineteenth-century literary historian did was a
poor guide to the professional history of today. Barthes was the
son of a naval officer; Foucault of a surgeon and medical professor:
both enjoyed the education of the highly privileged.23 Foucault
studied philosophy, then psychoanalysis. His first books, and also
his last ones, have historical dimensions, but are manifestly not
those of a professional historian. (But it would be churlish to deny
their stimulating influence: historians can rejoice that they are
never too arrogant to heed the ideas of others; acknowledging a
'rather odd "ally" ', Peter Gay has written that Foucault's
procedure is anecdotal and almost wholly unencumbered by facts; using his

accustomed technique (reminiscent of the principle underlying Oscar Wilde's
humour) of turning accepted ideas upside down, he turns out to be right in part
for his private reasons.24
In 1966 Foucault found himself at the heart of the fashionable

preoccupation with 'structuralism': Les Mots et les choses (in Eng-
lish, The Order of Things, a title Foucault preferred), a study of
the development of philosophy and the sciences since the late
eighteenth century and of the place of the individual human 'sub-
ject' within them, sold 'comme des petits pains'.2 He endeavoured
to extend and clarify (some would say contradict) his main ideas
in L'Archaeologie du savoir (1969).26 Key concepts with respect
to postmodernist attacks on history are those of 'discursive prac-
tices', said to govern what knowledge is actually possible in any
given era, and 'discursive formations', the actual bodies of knowl-
edge; thus, it is maintained, historians can never get near the truth
since they are constricted by the discursive practices of 'bourgeois
society'. Furthermore, historians are mistaken in thinking that
they can identify the actions of individual human beings, who, in
fact, are the playthings of deeper cultural imperatives. Postmod-
ernists, to restate my basic refrain, actually show no familiarity
with the modes of explanation historians actually use, which cer-
tainly do not concentrate exclusively on the actions of individuals,
but involve a varying balance, depending on topic and focus,
between short-term human agency, contingency and convergence,
and longer-term structural, ideological and institutional move-
ments and constraints.

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Francois Furet, who was to succeed Braudel (himself an admirer

of Foucault) as formal head of the Annales school, remarked at
the time on 'the specifically French mutual contamination that has
taken place between Marxism and Structuralism'.27 Foucault was
so skilful in exploiting his connections within the French academic
establishment that there was opposition (unsuccessful) to his
appointment in 1969 to the philosophy chair at Vincennes, on the
grounds that he was a Gaullist.28 But Foucault was always at
bottom a Marxist (admirers who deny this confuse his mockery
of French Stalinism with his fundamental perception of social and
historical development), and he became more and more radical
throughout the 1970s. It was impossible, Foucault said, 'to write
history without using a whole range of concepts directly or
indirectly linked to Marx's thought and situating oneself within a
horizon of that which has been defined and described by Marx',
continuing, 'one might even wonder what difference there could
ultimately be between being an historian and being a Marxist'.29
In a famous debate with Chomsky, in the early 1970s, he referred
to 'the necessity of the class struggle, which is at the present time
essential for the proletariat in their struggle against the ruling
class'.30 This was the common currency of the structuralists and
post-structuralists (Foucault quickly distanced himself from
structuralism), and such ideas remain central to all branches of
postmodernism. Driving this home gives me no pleasure since I
have no wish to associate my criticisms of postmodernism with a
Conservatism which I detest; but it is the mark of the historian,
in contrast with the metahistorian, that he or she separates what
is proper in a historian from what is legitimate in a concerned
citizen. Louis Althusser, the power-broker at the Ecole Normale
Superieure who played a major role in the 'canonization' (as
the literary critics would say) of the entire close-knit group of
structuralists and post-structuralists, was also the central figure in
bringing together Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Texts
had to be 'psychoanalysed', in order to reveal the bourgeois power
structure underlying, and the desires being repressed in them.31
The 'deconstruction' of Jacques Derrida followed along the same
lines, though Derrida at least had a charming playfulness about
him (his concept of 'differance' involves an elaborate pun on
'difference' and 'deferral' which need not concern us here
especially since it does not work in English).32

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Post-structuralist criticism of the writing of history continued in

the 1970s and 1980s in the hands of Paul Ricoeur and Paul Veyne,33
and, most relevantly with regard to the current situation in the
humanities, with the American holder of the chair in the History
of Consciousness at Santa Cruz (a close echo of the title Foucault
chose - Professor of the History of Structures of Thought -
when, at the early age of forty-four, he was elected to the College
de France), Hayden White. White had written a subtle and persua-
sive study of the historical writing of Hegel, Michelet, Ranke,
Tocqueville, Burckhardt, Marx, Nietzche and Croce (Metahistory:
The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe), when,
on this somewhat insecure basis (rendered still shakier by his
apparent faith in the egregious Harry Elmer Barnes as a represen-
tative of professional history34 - you can usually tell the philo-
sophers of history by the absolutely rotten examples they choose),
he started writing about professional historical writing today.35
Unlike many postmodernist relativists ('relativist' is the word most
often used within the scientific community to describe those who
deny a secure epistemological foundation to the sciences - and
history), White appears to accept the claims of scientists as to
their objective achievements. (For myself, I cannot understand
how those who see science as merely ideology reconcile that view
with their use of computers, satellite television and jet planes; and
my contention is that history, too, has objective achievements -
authoritative books on a most astonishing range of periods and
cultures.) White postulates that on one side there is the 'logical
demonstration' of the scientist, on the other 'pure fiction'; in
between is 'discourse'. Imbued in discourse, it is asserted (asserted,
not argued), are all the tricks of language ('tropics') which render
impossible straightforward 'logical demonstration'36 - just why
the research paper of the scientist is thought to be different in
kind from the learned article of the historian is not made clear.
The analysis of the form necessarily taken by historical writing is
examined further in the elegant The Content of the Form: Narrative
Discourse and Historical Representation (1987): the content
entailed by the form is prevailing political values.37 White is clearly
a metaphysician in the nineteenth-century mould: finding the term
'history' ambiguous (as distinct from having distinctively different
usages), he writes of 'historiography' (which to historians means

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'history of history', as there is 'history of science' or 'history of

chemistry'), or sometimes 'narrative history', a smart rhetorical
trick of his own, as we shall see.38 White distinguishes between
'chronicle', the mere listing of events in chronological order, and
events organized and explained, which he defines as narrative
history.39 This imagined disjunction between what the historian
discovers (though White scarcely allows that there is any discovery
process - like all the postmodernist critics he only joins in at the
writing-up stage) and the writing-up of these discoveries is one
more example of nineteenth-century thought-processes, to which
I shall return when I discuss 'facts' and 'sources'. The rabbit-
out-of-the-hat is that, because what historians produce must
narrative, which must in turn obey the codes of narratives an
discourse, history must be rhetorical, never 'logical demon
stration'.40 Now a piece of historical writing does have critica
differences from a scientific report or article, but that does n
mean (as I have argued above) that the historian cannot exerci
control over it. White uses 'narrative' to embrace all elements
of interconnection, explanation, description, motivation - the
function of 'narrative' in the traditional novel. But there is a
confusion here (which historians fatuously trumpeting 'the retur
of narrative' have compounded)41 over the different signifi
cations of the signifier, 'narrative'. Almost all writings-up of
research in history will contain a narrative element, since to study
the past is to study change through time: one does not study th
consequences of the first world war in order to explain the cause
of the French Revolution. The narrative, or sequential, or chrono
logical, element is vital (and sometimes quite hard to establish
White and his like assume that 'events' sit there already set ou
in chronicle form); analytically, it can be separated out from th
elements of analysis and description.42
The difference between primary sources (the relics and traces
left by the past society being studied) and secondary source
(the reports, interpretations, contributions to historical knowledge,
produced by historians working in a later society - which might
in their turn, as pedants sometimes point out, become primary
sources for still later historians, a matter of such triviality as really
to be not worth making) is a critical one, though no historian ha
ever pretended that it offers a magic key to the nature of historical
study, or that primary sources have a necromantic potency denie
to secondary ones. They are different, that is all.43 If you wis

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quickly to learn the history of Caucasia you go to the secondary

authorities (a knowledge of the principles of history being useful
in separating out the more reliable from the less); but if you are
planning to make an original contribution to historical knowledge,
you are unlikely to make much of a stir if you stick strictly to
other people's work, that is, the secondary sources (to which, it
should be stressed, one will frequently return throughout all stages
of research and writing). And the difference is critical in that
strategy which all historians, in one way or another, devise in
embarking on a new research project. It is through the secondary
sources that one becomes aware of gaps in knowledge, problems
unsolved, suspect explanations. It is with the aid of these secondary
sources, and all the other resources of the profession, that one
begins to identify the archives in which one will commence one's
researches. Where they have any conception at all, the metaphysi-
cians have a most peculiar, and limited, notion of primary sources.
The range, in fact, is enormous, each type calling for, within a
broad framework of basic principles of source criticism, a high
degree of specialization with respect both to technique and knowl-
edge: 'deconstruction' and 'discourse analysis' are no doubt admir-
able for producing the answers determined in advance by post-
structuralist theory, but no use to historians looking for precise,
and in some sense unique, answers to specific questions. In their
quaint, old-fashioned way, the critics sometimes speculate that
what historians do is 'apply the laws of evidence' - would that it
were that simple!
Sources, numbingly copious in some areas, are scarce and frag-
mentary in others. Much has to be garnered indirectly and by
inference: attitudes to spouses from wills; responses to crime, not
from the letter of the law, but from the extent and manner of its
enforcement; the nature of social hierarchy from everything from
wage rates to novels. No one but the historian knows the exciting
promise of the most unpromising source; no one but the historian
knows the frustrating opacity and sheer fallibility of many of the
most seductive ones. Historians do not rely on single sources, but
are always seeking corroboration, qualification, correction; the
production of history is very much a matter of accumulating
details, refining nuances. Primary sources did not come into exist-
ence to satisfy the curiosity of historians. They derive 'naturally',
'organically', as it were, or, more straightforwardly, 'in the ordinary
course of events', from human beings and groups of human beings,

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in the past society being studied, living their lives, worshipping,

decision-making, adjudicating, fornicating, going about their busi-
ness or fulfilling their vocations, recording, noting, communicating,
as they go, very occasionally, perhaps, with an eye on the future,
but generally in accordance with immediate needs and purposes.
The technical skills of the historian lie in sorting these matters
out, in understanding how and why a particular source came into
existence, how relevant it is to the topic under investigation and,
obviously, the particular codes or language in accordance with
which the particular source comes into being as a concrete artefact.
Nothing reveals the nineteenth-century mental set more nakedly
than its conception of 'the facts', as in, say, the postmodernist
cliche that the historian 'narrativizes' the 'facts'. For some aspects
of historical research 'the data' may be a useful alternative signi-
fier, though its usage can still conceal the fundamental point that
'facts' (or 'data') are not discrete entities quietly awaiting the
attention of the historian. What is 'fact' or not (at least
provisionally) has to be established from the sources - this is
Gay's point in respect of Foucault. But what are 'facts'? The
second world war is a fact, the Renaissance less certainly so: both
contain almost an infinity of lesser facts of various orders of
magnitude and significance. What historians actually look for in
the mass of sources they analyse and compare, are, certainly,
events, great and small, their dates and chronology; but also inter-
connections between them, and between them and other 'facts'
(it is not a matter of first establishing 'the events', then separately
working out the interconnections - narrativizing! - as White
thinks; establishing interconnections, explanation, analysis, is
imbricated in the research); material conditions, and changes in
them; states of mind; the working of instititutions; motivations,
mentalities, values; the balances between intention and accom-
plishment; and all the other important (and difficult) matters
historians are concerned with. No: a mechanistic conception of
'the facts' is not helpful.44
The metaphysical critics of history, who apparently never read
such accounts as do exist in which professional historians analyse
how they go about their tasks, focus on the writing-up components
of the historian's activities. In fact, these components cannot be
separated from the research components.45 As research proceeds,
the historian begins to feel that some answers, even if only prelimi-
nary ones, are beginning to emerge to some of the questions that

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he or she set out to answer, that certain relationships, certain

chains of explanation, are becoming insistent, that new problems
are emerging and old ones becoming redefined. There is no for-
mula, no timetable, to this, but at a certain point the historian will
feel the need to convert notes into continuous prose, to begin to
draft an article or a book, or to write a section of a chapter of a
book. It is just about possible to imagine some genius who could
put together in her head all answers, all nuances, all issues not
amenable to clear answers, all interrelationships and all links in
causation, without having to write any continuous prose at all.
But for almost all of us, writing is absolutely essential for the
articulating, and even formulating, of the complex, intermeshing
account which written-up history is. If a piece of analysis or expla-
nation does not work on the page, then it quickly becomes clear
that it must be faulty. Quite probably new research will have to
be done, or, at the very least, there will have to be much more
thought and mulling over of notes. If the historian finds himself
resorting to metaphor or cliche, that may well be a warning that
things have not been sufficiently worked out, and substantiated,
to be conveyed in plain simple prose. The production of history
is very much an iterative activity: successive drafts demand further
research, further thought and analysis, perhaps renewed study of
certain secondary sources. There may already be in the research
notes answers to the questions the historian is agonizing over,
but it may take time and effort before these answers are clearly
perceived (perhaps because of some erroneous preconception
about the nature of the question, or about the relative validity of
the different types of sources analysed). It is only by trial runs in
written or printed form that historians can grapple with this par-
ticular kind of problem. Then, usually, there are seminars, confer-
ences and informal discussions, all fitting into the iterative process
through which the completed piece of history finally emerges.
(Help may come from a chance remark in the bar - or a random
thought in the bath: as Rose remarks, scientists receive aid in this
way too.)46
It may well be that in perceiving relationships between different
events, states of mind, material conditions, etc., indicated and
substantiated in the sources, the historian will have had recourse
to theory, derived, perhaps, from psychology, or social psychology,
or economics, or sociology, or anthropology - possibly theories
of social roles, legitimacy, the product cycle, or the socializing

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power of ritual. Again the process will have been iterative, theory
interacting with sources and with first attempts at writing-up. In
all cases, the ultimate control will be the primary sources, and the
need to cite them in the proper scholarly apparatus, if not for
the benefit of all readers (and articles and monographs don't get
that many readers anyway), certainly for that of fellow historians
in the same field. This brings us back to the circumstance which
is always totally ignored by the metaphysical critics of history.
When the particular historical investigation does reach its finally
written-up form (after, it must be repeated, many drafts, and
part drafts, much discussion, many returns to the archives, much
rethinking, much agony, and, throughout, a determination not to
slide over awkward problems, not to dress up incomplete analysis
in metaphor or opacity, not to play to the gallery), that report
does not form a single self-standing account, which is automatically
to be taken as an authoritative, all-encompassing statement, a
secure piece of knowledge. On the contrary, it is merely a contri-
bution to knowledge, immediately open to scrutiny, analysis and
criticism by fellow historians. And even the lay reader, if the work
has been set out in the proper manner, has the opportunity to
enter into dialogue with the historian, perhaps accepting two thirds
as securely based, while rejecting one third as open to doubt,
or perhaps too reflective of the historian's own preoccupations or
prejudices.
What I have shown then is: (a) where the postmodernist critics
of history get their fundamental assumptions from, and (b) how
they totally misconceive the way in which historians go about their
business. So let us now take the case of the criticism by Anthony
Easthope (an enthusiastic disciple of Althusser, and a theorist
whose commitment to radical politics is absolutely explicit)47 of
the 1958 article by Lawrence Stone, 'The Inflation of Honours
1558-1641',48 which is very much a straightforward learned article,
drawing upon a considerable number of major MSS collections,
some printed collections of letters and reminiscences, together
with contemporary printed sources, both informational and pol-
emical in character, to give (a very cogent) account of changing
royal policies on the sale of honours and the reactions these
aroused. In a very brief final paragraph, Stone suggests that his
article adds support to R.H. Tawney's views on the nature and
consequences of the inflation of honours ('Tawney's Law'), and to
his thesis about 'the rise of the gentry'.49 Readers are free to accept

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the well-substantiated account, and reject the conclusion. Both

Tawney and Stone were subject to the usual challenges and criti-
cisms, and the whole issue has long since been swept up in the
great expansion of knowledge about the origins of the Civil War,
based, in particular, on the exploitation in recent years of local
archives largely ignored at the time when Stone was writing. My
comments on Easthope can be conveniently set out schematically:
1. Easthope shows no understanding of the manner in which

historical knowledge develops, nor of the limited and provisional
character, within that development, of the standard learned article.
He treats Stone's piece as if it were a self-standing poem or
short story, rather than as a small, and contestable, contribution
to historical knowledge. The difference is considerable: after all,
poems, stories and novels, as literary artefacts, are not subject to
the challenges, revisions and refinements accorded to works of
history.
2. Easthope echoes Hayden White in making the simplistic dis-
tinction between 'logic' and 'rhetoric': 'What had previously
acknowledged itself only as a neutral record (logic) suddenly
declares itself to be an intervention (rhetoric).'50 Historians do not
claim to present 'a neutral record': to the best of their abilities
they present an account based on the sources, an account which
automatically adds to, or qualifies, existing knowledge, as
embodied, say, in the Tawney thesis. Here historians are operating
analogously to the scientist who adds to (or challenges) existing
knowledge on, say, natural selection, or of the behaviour of liquids
at very low temperatures. That is the way disciplines work. There
is no disjunction between the combined process of research and
writing up research, and 'intervening' in the existing world of
learning.
3. Easthope, who is dismissive of 'so-called "primary
sources" ',51 reveals a total ignorance of the integrated, iterative
processes through which contributions to historical knowledge are
produced. He writes that 'Stone's represented world is supposed
to be just there, a given...;52 this is simply nonsense, since that
'represented world' is only discovered through intensive and tech-
nically difficult research in the primary sources. A further crass
pronouncement shows how very far Easthope is from any grasp
of what historians actually do: 'Footnotes stand to text as the
listing of annals does to history-writing, as facts do to narrative,

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and apparent to real'.53 Again we have this quaintly old-fashioned

invocation of 'facts', and a total confusion between these and
'events' (as listed in annals), sources and footnotes - footnotes
have no material reality, but are simply the schematic, though
essential, indicators of the sources upon which particular state-
ments or arguments are based.
4. Easthope deploys, in a thoroughly authoritarian manner, the
specialist vocabulary coined in the postmodernist scriptures,
though never subjected to critical scrutiny. He first rules that
Stone's article is a 'text' (not a good thing to be in the postmodern-
ist scheme of things): 'where there is textuality', he then pontifi-
cates, 'there is desire'.54 This is a prelude to 'revealing' Stone's
'real' motives in writing this article (Stone's self-identification with
the moneyed gentry, apparently, together with a lust to dominate
the otherness of the past!).55 The postmodernist world view does
not allow for the possibility that historians regard an understand-
ing of the past as vital to human society, and that it is this belief
which provides their fundamental motivation, and willingness to
undertake the taxing, and sometimes boring, grind (unrecognized
by Easthope) of serious research.
5. Easthope's own article ends with a great burst of rhetoric,
which one might take as simply a piece of idiotic self-indulgence,
if one were not aware from his other writings of his quite overt
political agenda.56
At present, at least on the evidence of the Stone example, the historian's

approach to Clio is that of a man after one thing: to penetrate her otherness.
Perhaps if we have a greater respect for her alterity, we might find she welcomed
other forms of writing and relationship, including the possibility that you give
blood to the past in order to nourish posterity.57
What Easthope (and the other critics of history) are saying is

that since history is not a systematic, disinterested (as far as that
is possible) attempt to understand aspects of the past, but is
'constructed within language', and reflects hidden 'desire', one
might as well decide to go consciously for one particular type of
'history', and that, of course, is 'history' which will actively serve
the aims of radical politics.
6. Easthope's style, it will have been perceived, is a weird mix-
ture, running from the puerile pun of his title, through heavy
jargon and old-fashioned philosophizing, to his fatuously rhetorical

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conclusion. It is the postmodernists, not the historians, who are

captives of their own rhetoric.
It may well be that Rethinking History (1991), by Keith Jenkins,

will come to be regarded as the classic of postmodernist ineptitude
and contempt for accepted scholarly practice. I shall confine myself
to noting that there are peculiarities about 'quotations' said to be
in my The Nature of History, and the accompanying page refer-
ences;58 and that Jenkins 'quotes' me as referring to historians
'"bowing down" before the evidence so allowing the past to speak
"directly" ',59 apparently muddling my rather more complex views
with E.H. Carr's somewhat overwrought words on 'the docu-
ments' - 'the reverent historian approached them with bowed
head and spoke of them in awed tones';60 and cites me as accepting
that there are at least twenty-five possible varieties of history61
when, in fact, my clearly stated position is that there is but one
basic framework of methods and principles, within which, most
certainly, very different topics and problems are addressed. His-
torians do not claim that history directly offers solutions to con-
temporary problems. The postmodernists, on the other hand, seem
to specialize in ludicrously inept political pronouncements. Jenkins
(his book was published in 1991!) goes out of his way to insist on
the validity of Marxist-Leninist history.62 Only a couple of years
earlier, 'new historicist' Alan Sinfield had singled out for special
praise the economic organization of then (just!) Yugoslavia.63 The
earlier enthusiasm of post-structuralists for Mao Tse Tung's Cul-
tural Revolution is amply documented: Rosalind Coward and John
Ellis, in a book combining the vogue topics of 'language and
materialism', and 'semiology and the theory of the subject',
explained:
In indicating that ideology is the basis for the subject's activity in society,
Althusser showed it to be a necessary social practice, 'there is no practice
except by and in ideology'.... Ideology, then, governs people's activities within
economic and political practices; so the idea of a social revolution that is not
accompanied by a revolution in ideology is a recipe for disaster; a recipe for a
return to the structures that have been overthrown, brought about by the way
people habitually and unconsciously act and relate. An essential part of the
bourgeois revolution was to remould ideological practice from top to bottom,
instituting a new legal system, a new mode of representation in writing and
graphics (realism). Thus in China, another revolution in ideology is taking
place.... 64

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In their claims to superiority over fuddy-duddy, 'positivist',

'empiricist', 'humanist', historians, then, the postmodernists are
far from unassailable. They regularly invoke 'The Linguistic Turn',
apparently unaware that the essays collectively edited under that
title by Richard Rorty in 1967 were examples of empirical philo-
sophy, whose approach to the significance of language is very
different from that of the post-structuralists.65 The most damning
criticism of postmodernist thinking is that, while it controverts
everybody else's assumptions (and, in particular, the assumptions
of historians about the nature of primary sources), it never applies
the same critical faculties to its own basic assumptions. This criti-
cism is all the more telling for being expressed most recently by
Christopher Lloyd, a philosopher of history who has himself shown
no interest in the nature of primary sources and has generally
advocated a neo-Marxist, structuralist, sociological approach to
history. Lloyd writes that postmodernist relativism is:
unintentionally dishonest in the sense that, disclaimers notwithstanding, it does

contain its own disguised assumptions or tacit commitments to 'privileged' sets
of notions or concepts which are in fact not 'problematized'. For example, the
deep structures of grammar, semantics, and logic are not usually questioned and
the relationship that the universal structures of natural language and natural
logic have within pre-theoretical and pre-scientific forms of reasoning are not
questioned.66
A few historians have put themselves forward as champions of

the post-structuralist cause. It may be that in some branches
of historical study there are lessons to be absorbed, though the
evidence on that score is thin. To my mind, Lynn Hunt's Introduc-
tion to her collection The New Cultural History scarcely carries
overwhelming conviction, and her simplistic historiographical con-
trast between the 1960s and the 1980s is insulting to historians of
both eras:
In the 1960s, great emphasis was placed on the identification of an author's

political bias, on trying to situate oneself as a historian in the broader social
and political world. The questions are now more subtle, but no less important.
Historians are becoming more aware that their supposedly matter-of-fact choices
of narrative techniques and analytical forms also have social and political impli-
cations.67
City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-

Victorian London (1992), by Judith R. Walkowitz, is a fascinating

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study, in which the notion of the 'narratives' through which 'people

represent and understand their world'68 is effectively deployed,
though it does not convince me of the indispensability of the
jargon - it may be noted that in his massive and well-substan-
tiated study of 'bourgeois' mentalities, Peter Gay, while employing
well-established Freudian categories, needs no recourse to 'narra-
tives' or 'discourses', and uses 'ideology' in an entirely neutral
way.69 In her Introduction, Walkowitz seems to distance herself
from basic postmodernist stances and, indeed, to associate her-
self with the methods of professional history.70 Patrick Joyce's
Visions of the People makes full and imaginative use of non-
traditional sources to challenge traditional (Marxist-influenced)
working-class history and its accounts of class.71 The same author's
polemical statement in Past and Present is, as Lawrence Stone
pointed out at the time, 'baffling'.72 Joyce writes:
At one level we may of course posit a dualism between the 'real' or the 'social',
and representations of it. The 'real' can be said to exist independently of our
representations of it, and to affect these representations. But this effect is always
discursive, and it must be insisted that history is never present to us in anything
but a discursive form, here taking 'discursive', of course, to denote all forms of
communication, including those beyond the verbal alone.73
Whether Joyce is himself agreeing with these statements is not

altogether clear, since in his next couple of sentences he says that
'if true' they by themselves 'lead to a pointlessly circular logic';
and that they are 'banal' - which presumably means that they
are true though not intellectually very exciting. To break out of
this 'circularity' and 'banality', it seems, so Joyce maintains, 'to be
vital to take the "linguistic turn" seriously...'.74 History, to his-
torians, is, let us remind ourselves,'bodies of knowledge about the
human past', it is not the human past itself. We only know
the human past through the works of historians. That is common
ground; but, as has been argued throughout this article, it requires
a speculative leap to then decree these works 'discursive', a term
which, at the end of the day is simply a slogan in left-wing propa-
ganda about the inescapably 'bourgeois' character of all current
discourse. Joyce continues:
The major advance of 'post-modernism' needs to be registered by historians:

namely that the events, structures and processes of the past are indistinguishable

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from the forms of documentary representation, the conceptual and political

appropriations, and the historical discourses that construct them.75
Great weight here rests on the fashionable verb 'construct';

trying to puzzle things out logically, it is extremely difficult to
envisage this process of 'construction'. As so often, one feels that
jargon has overwhelmed meaning. Evidently, primary sources and
secondary sources are being run together (characteristic of post-
modernist thought). It is a commonplace to historians that 'the
events, structures and processes of the past' are known only
through the relics and traces of the past, the primary sources,
which are themselves politically and conceptually loaded, biased
and imperfect, in all sorts of ways. It is also a commonplace (as I
have just reiterated) that our knowledge of the past is to be found
in the works of historians, not apprehended directly. But it may
be that 'historical discourses' here signify those discourses of 'feu-
dalism', 'capitalism', 'patriarchy', which are alleged (without
substantiation) to exist as material realities within the past itself.
Not really at all clear; save, of course, that Joyce is presenting
himself (whatever his excellent scholarly work may indicate) as a
champion of post-structuralism and what he calls 'the linguistic
turn'.
What is clear is that in regard to the main problems of under-

standing the past in which historians are involved, the techniques
of deconstruction or discourse analysis have little value compared
with the sophisticated methods historians have been developing
over the years. Postmodernist ideas about language and the 'sub-
ject' make for exciting novels,76 but they are a menace to serious
historical study. When the postmodernists talk of 'historicizing',
this means providing a very naive, formulaic history, one which
stifles genuine curiosity about the past, and is potentially harmful
if students are not also introduced to the history of historians.
Language is important: it is the only tool with which historians can
write up and communicate their results. But given the experience
and the discipline, historians can ensure that language does indeed
remain a tool. All aspects of human activity are socially influenced
(no one knows this better than historians), but that does not mean
that everything is socially constructed, any more than a recognition
of the significance of language entails that all ideas are constructed
within language. We know what we know about the past (and it
is amazing how much we do know) because of the activities of

129.180.1.217 on Thu, 07 Sep 2023 18:35:44 +00:00
working historians, with their limited aims, and devotion to hard

work and a taxing methodology. There has been much self-serving,
propagandist history, designed to sustain the needs of governments
or other powerful interest groups. In his magnificent Use and
Abuse of History, Marc Ferro has shown the way in which govern-
ments (in third world countries as much as any other) have
ensured that their schools teach a history bolstering what are
perceived to be national objectives.77 The exposure of this propa-
gandist history depends not upon postmodernist theories about
narrative and discourse, but upon the existence of serious, system-
atic histories, written by professional historians, against which the
propagandist histories can be contrasted. Society has a right to
demand from historians accounts which can, if so desired, be
used in trying to understand the evolution of political ideas or
institutions, or the origins of the many conflicts throughout the
world, or to gain the necessary contextual information for enjoying
more fully a painting or a poem or some favourite tourist attrac-
tion. Those seeking such understandings will not be helped by
some speculative theory about the need to replace humanism with
radical ideology, or of the inescapability of their situation within
language, but will want to feel that the explanations, interpre-
tations, and information they are provided with are based on
serious study of the evidence; and it will do them no harm at all
if they are also made aware that all sources are fallible, that
all study of them must be carried out in accordance with the
strictest principles, and that there are always things which we do
not know with any certainty. The postmodernist assertion is that
the discipline of history grew up with the nineteenth-century
'bourgeois' novel, and that the two are in essence the same. This
gets things exactly the wrong way round. The discipline of history
only began to take its modern professional and academic form at
the very end of the nineteenth century. By contrast, the very basic
principles, preoccupations and, to a large extent, the vocabulary
of postmodernism developed within the framework of nineteenth-
century metaphysics. In many ways, it might better be termed
'pre-modernism'.

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Notes
This article is based, in part, on a public lecture, under a different title, which I
gave at the Open University in October 1993 and the all-day seminar which
followed. The lecture is available on video; this, as a detailed article supported by
notes, is an artefact of an entirely different type. For helping me to clarify my
thoughts, I would like to thank my critics: Professors Hayden White, Ludmilla
Jordanova, Stuart Hall, Steven Rose and Anthony Easthope; Sir Kenneth Dover,
Drs John Tosh and Alan Bassindale (Dean of Science at the University). I gladly
recognize that some of the same problems have been addressed, in his own
distinctive way, by G.R. Elton, in Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the
Present State of Historical Study (Cambridge 1991).
1. Louis Gottschalk, Understanding History: A Primer of Historical Method

(New York 1951; 1956 edn), 17; Denys Hay, 'Geographical Abstraction and the
Historian', Historical Studies, ii (1959), 1-12; Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft
(Manchester 1954), 172; Alfred Cobban, 'The Vocabulary of Social History', Politi-
cal Science Quarterly, lxxi (1956), 14. The outstanding work, of course, is Asa
Briggs, 'The Language of Class in the Early Nineteenth Century', in Asa Briggs
and John Saville (eds), Essays in Labour History (1960), 43-7.
2. R.J.W. Evans, 'Essay and Reflection: Frontiers and National Identities in
Central Europe', International History Review, xiv (1992), 480-502; Anthony East-
hope, 'Romancing the Stone: History-writing and Rhetoric' in Social History, 18
(1993), 235-49.
3. David Cannadine, G.M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (London 1992), 226;
A.J.P. Taylor, A Personal History (1983), 124. See also Keith Thomas's revealing
address, History and Literature (Swansea 1988).
4. E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, myth,
reality (Cambridge 1990), 12-13.
5. Philippe Carrard, Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse
from Braudel to Chartier (Baltimore 1992), 222.
6. J.D. Watson, The Double Helix (London 1968); Steven Rose, The Making
of Memory: From Molecules to Mind (London 1992), esp. 297-306. For a splendid
rebuttal of 'relativist' (or 'metaphysical') criticisms of the natural sciences, see
Lewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science (London 1992), chap. 6.
7. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the Ameri-
can Historical Profession (Cambridge 1988), 590.
8. Re-reading the interesting collection of essays, Post-structuralism and the
Question of History, eds. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young
(Cambridge 1987), I was struck by the fact that if the metaphysical definition of
'history' were disallowed, these essays simply could not have been written.
9. M. Foucault, Les Mots et les choses (Paris 1966), 398; The Order of Things
(London 1970), 357.
10. Some basic works on the structuralists and post-structuralists are: Edith
Kurzweil, The Age of Structuralism: Levi-Strauss to Foucault (New York 1980),
Edmund Leach, Levi-Strauss (London 1970); Madan Sarup, Jacques Lacan (Hemel
Hempstead 1992); Louis-Jean Calvet, Roland Barthes 1915-1980 (Paris 1990);

129.180.1.217 on Thu, 07 Sep 2023 18:35:44 +00:00
Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes (Cambridge 1991); Steven Ungar, Roland Bar-
thes: The Professor of Desire (Lincoln, NE 1983); Philip Thody, Roland Barthes: A
Conservative Estimate (London 1977); Ted Benton, The Rise and Fall of Structural
Marxism: Althusser and his influence (London 1988); Christopher Norris, Derrida
(London 1987); Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Cambridge, MA 1991); David
Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London 1993); Barry Smart, Michel Foucault
(London 1985); Alan Sheridan, Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth (London 1980);
Mark Poster, Foucault, Marxism and History (Cambridge 1984); Clare O'Farrell,
Foucault: Historian or Philosopher? (London 1991); Colin Gordon (ed.), Michel
Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977
(London 1980).
11. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de Linguistique Generale (Lausanne and Paris
1916), 7-9.
12. Ibid., 102.
13. Ibid., 33-4.
14. Noam Chomsky, Language and the Problem of Knowledge (Cambridge, MA
1988); John Lyons, Language and Linguistics (Cambridge 1981), esp., 38, 221,
261-2, 304-8; Giulio Lepschy, A Survey of Structural Linguistics (London 1982).
15. The clearest accounts are in Benton, Structural Marxism, Eribon, Foucault,
and Sheridan, Foucault.
16. Eribon, Foucault, 160-8.
17. On Ecrits, Sarup, Lacan, 80, writes: 'The book is extraordinarily difficult to
read. . .'.
18. On the essentials of Lacan's ideas see: Sarup, Lacan, ix-xviii; Rosalind
Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology
and the Theory of the Subject (London 1977), 92-101; Sheridan, Foucault, 199-201;
Eribon, Foucault, 160-1.
19. R. Barthes, Mythologies (1957) is largely a melange of articles previously
published in Les Lettres nouvelles (1954-6).
20. R. Barthes, tElments de Semiologie (Paris 1964) - available in English as
Elements of Semiology (London 1967); L'Empire des signes (Paris 1970).
21. The essay 'Historical Discourse', in translation, is conveniently available in
Michael Lane, Structuralism: A Reader (London 1970), 145-55.
22. R. Barthes, Michelet par lui-meme (Paris 1954).
23. For Barthes and Foucault see note 9.
24. Peter Gay, The Education of the Senses (New York 1984), 468-9.
25. 'Like Hot Cakes': heading of article in Nouvel Observateur on best-sellers
of summer 1966, cited by Eribon, Foucault, 155.
26. English translation, M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London
1972). In a penetrating article on 'French History in the Last Twenty Years: The
Rise and Fall of the Annales Paradigm', Lynn Hunt refers to Foucault's 'recurrent
and corrosive attacks on the prevailing methods of historians', Journal of Contem-
porary History, 21, 2 (April 1986), 218.
27. Franqois Furet, 'French Intellectuals: From Marxism to Structuralism'
(originally published 1967), reprinted in Francois Furet, In the Workshop of History
(Chicago 1984), 35.
28. Eribon, Foucault, 202-3.
29. Quoted Gordon, Power/Knowledge, 53.

129.180.1.217 on Thu, 07 Sep 2023 18:35:44 +00:00
30. The debate is printed as Fons Elders (ed.), Reflexive Water: Basic Concerns
of Mankind (London 1974). See 177.
31. Benton, Structural Marxism, 11-12; Sarup, Lacan, xvii; L. Althusser, Lire le
Capitale (Paris 1965); L. Althusser, Pour Marx (Paris 1965) is yet another melange
of previously published essays.
32. Norris, Derrida, 15.
33. P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (3 vols, London 1984-8); Paul Veyne, Writing
History: Essay on Epistemology (Manchester 1984).
34. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation (Baltimore 1987), 4, 216; Hayden White, Metahistory: The Histori-
cal Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore 1972). Very consciously
in the Hayden White mould is Hans Kellner, Language and Historical Represen-
tation: Getting the Story Crooked (Madison, WI 1989).
35. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore 1978). Let me enthusiasti-
cally add that there are thoroughly perceptive accounts of what historians do
by the empirical philosophers, Patrick Gardiner, Maurice Mandelbaum and R.E.
Atkinson.
36. White, Tropics, 2.

37. White, Content, 58-82.
38. Ibid., 4-57.
39. Ibid., 5-13.
40. Ibid., 39-41.
41. See, in particular, Lawrence Stone, 'The Revival of Narrative: Reflections
on a New Old History', Past and Present, 85 (1979), 3-24.
42. G.R. Elton, The Practice of History (London 1967), 126-40. Arthur Marwick,
The Nature of History (3rd edn, 1989), 242-5.
43. For some naivety on this matter (all too typical, and utterly unsupported by
any evidence) see M. Cousins, 'The Practice of Historical Investigation' in Attridge,
Bennington and Young, Post-structuralism, 126-36, esp. 130-1.
44. My account in the preceding two paragraphs may be compared with the
speculations of Cousins, 130-3.
45. Such as: Marc Bloch, Craft; G. Kitson Clark, The Critical Historian (London
1967); H.S. Commager, The Nature and the Study of History (Columbus, OH 1965);
G.R. Elton, Practice; G.R. Elton, Political History: Principles and Practice (London
1970); Gottschalk, Understanding; Oscar Handlin et al., The Harvard Guide to
American History (Cambridge, MA 1954); C.V. Langlois and C. Seignobos, Intro-
duction to the Study of History (new edn, London 1966); Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie,
The Territory of the Historian (London 1979); Marwick, Nature; Arthur Marwick,
'"A Fetishism of Documents"?: The Salience of Source-Based History', Develop-
ments in Modern Historiography (London 1993), ed. Henry Kozicki, 107-38; John
Tosh, The Pursuit of History (2nd edn, London 1991).
46. Rose, Memory, 295.
47. Anthony Easthope, British Post-Structuralism since 1968 (London 1988), esp.
97; Anthony Easthope, Literary into Cultural Studies (London 1991), esp. 71, 120.
48. Lawrence Stone, 'The Inflation of Honours 1558-1641', Past and Present,
xiv (1958), 45-70.
49. Ibid., 65.
50. Easthope, 'Romancing the Stone: History-writing and Rhetoric', 241.
51. Ibid., 245.

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52. Ibid., 245.

53. Ibid., 245.
54. Ibid., 246.
55. Ibid., 247.
56. See note 44.
57. Easthope, 'Romancing', 248-9.
58. Keith Jenkins, Rethinking History (London 1991). On page 14 I am 'quote
directly as using the phrase 'bowing down'; the references (to the outdated 197
edition of The Nature of History) are to pages on which I am, in fact, providin
rather mundane discussions of the writings of G.R. Elton and A.J.P. Taylor. Th
'twenty-five varieties' citation appears on page 15 (repeated as a feeble joke on
page 37), and is said to come from 'Marwick's own section on method' (there a
no page references). In fact the lists of philosophers of history, and then schoo
of history (Annales, etc.) come from, respectively, my sections on Philosophy
History and Historiography, and bear no relation to what I say (in separat
sections) on Method.
59. Jenkins, Rethinking, 14.
60. E.H. Carr, What is History?, 16.
61. Jenkins, Rethinking, 15.
62. Ibid., 15, 37.
63. Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (London
1969), 304; Sinfield refers also to the 'Soviet Union' and Hungary. His book
listed in the series The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Politics, General Edito
Stephen Greenblatt.
64. Coward and Ellis, Language, 72.
65. Richard Rorty, The Linguistic Turn (Chicago 1967). Included are Ryle
Austin, Hampshire. Definitely not in are Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, etc.
66. Christopher Lloyd, The Structures of History (London 1993), 24-5.
67. Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley, CA 1989), 20-1.
68. J.R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in
Late-Victorian London (London 1992), 7.
69. Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (3 vols 1984-93).
70. Walkowitz, 9.
71. Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question
Class 1848-1914 (Cambridge 1991).
72. Patrick Joyce, 'History and Post-Modernism', Past and Present, 133 (1991
204-9; L. Stone, ibid., 135 (1992), 190.
73. Joyce, 'History and Post-Modernism', 208.
74. Ibid.
75. Ibid.
76. I am thinking here of the novels of Peter Ackroyd or, say, of Christoph
Ransmayr, The Last World (Frankfurt 1988).
77. Marc Ferro, Comment on raconte l'histoire aux enfants a travers le mond
entier (Paris 1981); translated as The Use and Abuse of History, or How the Pa
is Taught (London 1984).

129.180.1.217 on Thu, 07 Sep 2023 18:35:44 +00:00
Arthur Marwick
is Professor of History at the Open
University and a Co-Editor of the Journal
of Contemporary History. Among his most
recent publications are: Beauty in History
Society, Politics and Personal Appearance
c. 1500 - the Present (1988); The Nature o
History (3rd edn 1990); (ed.), The Arts,
Literature and Society (1990); Class:
Image and Reality in Britain, France and
the USA since 1930 (2nd edn 1990).

129.180.1.217 on Thu, 07 Sep 2023 18:35:44 +00:00

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