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History and Theory 43 (October 2004), 341-359 © Wesleyan University 2004 ISSN: 0018-2656

REVIEW ARTICLE

OBJECTIVITY: PERSPECTIVE AS PROBLEM AND SOLUTION

HISTORIANS AND SOCIAL VALUES. Edited by Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000. Pp. 243.

There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”;

and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more
eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more
complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity,” be.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals1

All knowledge of cultural reality . . . is always knowledge from particular

points of view. . . . Without the investigator’s evaluative ideas, there
would be no principle of selection of subject-matter and no meaningful
knowledge of the concrete reality . . . . the direction of his personal belief,
the refraction of values in the prism of his mind, gives direction to his work.

Max Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,”2

Competent readers have long understood that history is written from a perspec-
tive shaped by political and ethical values. The variety and seeming incommen-
surability of rival historical interpretations have always afforded skeptics an
opening, but only in our generation has perspective become the entering wedge
for a boundless and facile skepticism that shrugs aside objectivity as a “noble
dream” and construes historical interpretation as little more than politics by other
means. The stark question confronting us today is whether the undeniably per-
spectival character of historical interpretation is some sort of congenital defect
that prevents historians from achieving the knowledge to which they aspire, or—
on the contrary—a condition of the very possibility of historical knowledge that
helps specify the meaning of objectivity in human affairs, but does not weaken
history’s truth claims in any way that need surprise or trouble us in the least.
The relation between perspective and objectivity came under sustained scruti-
ny at an important conference on “Social Values and the Responsibilities of the
Historian” that was held in Amsterdam at the Huizinga Research Institute and
Graduate School of Cultural History in 1997. The editors of the resulting volume

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage,
1969), 119.
2. Max Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” in The Methodology of the
Social Sciences, ed. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1949), 81-82.
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342 THOMAS L. HASKELL

of essays, published in 2001, are Joep Leerssen, Professor of European Studies,

University of Amsterdam, and Ann Rigney, Professor of Comparative Literature
at the Free University, Amsterdam. Most of the contributors teach either in the
United States or the Netherlands, but France, Germany, and Italy are also repre-
sented. All contributions are in English. Except for Rigney’s introduction and an
afterword by Richard Rorty, the fifteen essays are all written by historians, and a
very distinguished group they are. The collection is made up of four sections. In
section one, under the rubric “Scholarship and (Im)partiality,” are essays by
Carlo Ginzburg, Peter Gay, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, and Jörn Rüsen. In the next
section François Bédarida and Ed Jonker write on “Scholarship and Responsi-
bility,” a category closely linked to the essays of the third section, “Varieties of
Commitment,” where we find the work of Geoff Eley, Arthur Mitzman, and Jo
Tollebeek. The final section, devoted to “Constituencies,” includes essays by
Michael Adas, Michelle Perrot, Niek van Sas, and Lucette Valensi.
The essays that take the largest and most systematic view of the problem of
value commitment and objectivity are the ones in the first section, together with
Rorty’s “Afterword.” Admirable as the other essays are, these are the ones that
demand closest attention in the pages of History and Theory. The contributors
whose essays I will not be discussing supplied specific cases, illustrations, and
examples that significantly enhance the collection’s value as an aid to reflection.
But bringing together Ginzburg, Rorty, Mommsen, and Rüsen was an inspired
choice, and teasing out the implications of that intriguing juxtaposition requires
a level of attention that cannot be extended to more than a fraction of the fifteen
essays. Not least among the serendipitous benefits produced by that juxtaposition
is a heightened appreciation for the insights of Max Weber, whose essay on
objectivity arguably remains unsurpassed a century after it was written.

In her introduction, Rigney, the author of two impressive books on history as a

literary genre,3 reminds us of Lucian’s advice that the historian should “be in his
books a stranger and a man without a country” (9). The question that interests her
is one often pressed by postmodernists: whether making a “stranger” of oneself
is either possible or desirable. She describes the book as “an attempt to re-exam-
ine the relationship between historical scholarship and social involvement” and
then poses three questions to suggest its intended scope: “In what way are the
goals of professional historiography compatible with social commitment and
identification with popular memory? Do historians have particular responsibili-
ties? Does professional historiography ultimately exercise more influence by
staying in the ivory tower of the academy than by taking to the streets” (9)?
These specifications of the conference topic left considerable leeway for partic-
ipants to expand or contract its perimeter as they saw fit, yet the topical core of
3. Ann Rigney, The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the
French Revolution (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and Imperfect Histories:
The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
2001). See also Rigney’s gem of an essay, “Semantic Slides: History and the Concept of Fiction,” in
History-Making: The Intellectual and Social Formation of a Discipline [Proceedings of an
International Conference, Uppsala, Sweden, September 1994], ed. Rolf Torstendahl and Irmline Veit-
Brause, Konferenser 37 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wicksell International, 1996), 31-46.
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OBJECTIVITY: PERSPECTIVE AS PROBLEM AND SOLUTION 343

the collection is authoritatively established by the book’s lead essay, an excep-
tionally illuminating meditation on distance and perspective by Carlo Ginzburg.
The charm of the essay lies in Ginzburg’s subtle demonstration that recognition
of the inescapably perspectival character of history long preceded both post-
modernism and Nietzsche and was often welcomed as a vindication of historical
inquiry, not a token of its frailty.
Ginzburg begins by alluding to the Sokal hoax.4 He has no more affection for
postmodern relativism than Paul Boghossian, the philosopher who wrote up the
Sokal story for the Times Literary Supplement.5 But Boghossian charged post-
modernism with a limitless relativism that allows for “no question of truth out-
side of perspectives,” a judgment that Ginzburg bluntly labels “simplistic” (19).
Ginzburg contends that “the argument connecting truth to perspective deserves a
more serious approach, which should take into account both its history and its
often overlooked metaphorical dimension” (19-20). On Boghossian’s account,
postmodernists are so indiscriminate as to take equally seriously two wildly
incongruous accounts of the origins of native Americans, one tracing their ances-
try back to Asia, the other holding that they emerged from a subterranean world
of spirits. Boghossian’s ridicule is directed against what we can call “ethnic per-
spectivalism,” the idea that people of different ethnicity occupy such different
perspectives and subscribe to such alien truths that in passing judgment on the
claims of others we risk succumbing to ethnocentrism.
Although Ginzburg is plainly more receptive to ethnic perspectivalism than
Boghossian, what mainly interests him as a historian is that the idea had no coun-
terpart in the ancient world. He finds its distant origins not among the Jews or
the Greeks, but the early Christians. Its principal architect, he argues, was
Augustine, and what occasioned its formulation was the necessity of accommo-
dating ethnic difference. Augustine built upon Paul’s momentous appropriation
of Jewish ritual, which “transformed Jesus’s body into a corpus mysticum, as it
was later called—a mystical body in which all believers were incorporated.” This
implied the “disappearance of every specificity—ethnic, social, or sexual: ‘there
is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female; for you
are all one person in Christ Jesus.’ In this universal perspective,” Ginzburg
writes, “the connection with the past—and especially the Jewish past—took a
new form” (21-22).
This was a perspective that had work to do in the world. Reconciling out-
landish Old Testament practices such as human sacrifice and polygamy with
those enjoined by the New Testament obviously posed for early Christians seri-
ous problems of historical interpretation. Ginzburg credits Augustine with devel-
oping a charitable mode of interpretation well calculated to accommodate seem-
ingly incompatible elements of faith—“divine immutability and historical
change, the truth of the Jewish sacrifices in their own time as well as of the
Christian sacraments that had superseded them” (25). Augustine accomplished

4. Alan D. Sokal, The Sokal Hoax: The Sham that Shook the Academy. (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2000).
5. Paul Boghossian, “What the Sokal Hoax Ought to Teach Us,” Times Literary Supplement (13
December 1996), 5-6.
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344 THOMAS L. HASKELL

this by projecting into the temporal realm a conceptual framework that allowed
for a degree of incommensurability between eras, enabling the Old Testament to
be seen as at once “true and superseded.” The entire argument hinges on
Ginzburg’s conviction that in the history of world religions the relationship
between Christians and Jews uniquely mingles “continuity and distance, close-
ness and hostility” (30):
Neither the Greeks nor the Jews ever thought of something comparable to our notion of
historical perspective. Only a Christian like Augustine, reflecting on the fateful relation-
ship between Christians and Jews, between the Old and the New Testament, could have
come to that idea, which . . . [ultimately] became a crucial element of historical con-
sciousness: that the past must be understood both in its own terms and as a link in a chain
which ultimately leads to us. I would like to suggest that this ambivalence is a secularized
projection of the Christian ambivalence toward the Jews. (25)

This unsettling observation, which discovers the origins of ethnic perspecti-

valism in a theological project designed to accommodate ethnic differences even
while establishing the superiority of one group to another, sets the stage for a leap
forward in time, to the early modern era. In Machiavelli, Ginzburg finds a fully
developed conception of political perspective that was inspired by the
Renaissance revolution in visual representation and based, not on accommoda-
tion, as Augustine’s conception was, but conflict. Dedicating The Prince to the
Duke of Urbino, Machiavelli coyly excused his boldness in prescribing rules for
his superiors by likening himself to “those who sketch landscapes.” Just as artists
place themselves “down in the plain to consider the nature of mountains” and
“high atop mountains” to consider the nature of low places, “similarly, to know
well the nature of peoples one needs to be a prince, and to know well the nature
of princes one needs to be of the people” (26).
Given Machiavelli’s passionate concern for “the truth of the thing as it is,”
Ginzburg suggests that his
alleged cynicism—more appropriately, his tragic awareness that reality is as it is—was in
a sense the outcome of his passionate plea for theoretical detachment. The lessons which
he drew from the craft of perspective, in comparing himself with “those who sketch land-
scapes,” can be spelled out as follows: 1) different points of view lead to different repre-
sentations of political reality; 2) none of these representations—neither the prince’s nor
the people’s—can be considered as more truthful than the other; 3) the only way to
achieve objectivity is to be, in a metaphorical sense, a distant observer: an outsider. (27)

Machiavelli accorded to perspective an unprecedentedly decisive role in the

interpretation of human affairs, yet one that did not so much weaken claims to
objective knowledge, as strengthen them:
Instead of a model of divine accommodation leading from truth (Judaism) to superior
truth (Christianity), Machiavelli sketched a purely secular model based on conflict.
Representations of political reality are conflictual, Machiavelli tells us, because political
reality, rooted in human nature, is inevitably conflictual. Knowledge of human reality as
it is can indeed be achieved, but only through a specific point of view. (27)

The next stage in Ginzburg’s argument brings us up to the edge of our own era.
For Leibniz in the seventeenth century as for Machiavelli in the sixteenth, per-
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OBJECTIVITY: PERSPECTIVE AS PROBLEM AND SOLUTION 345

spective “was a cognitive metaphor that allowed the construction of a model
based on a plurality of viewpoints” (28). Although the model of Leibniz was
based, not on conflict, but on the “harmonious coexistence of an infinite multi-
plicity of substances,” he explicitly related his philosophy to “inventions of per-
spective” and was familiar with Machiavelli’s writings—even, Ginzburg
believes, the particular passage in which Machiavelli likened himself to “those
who sketch landscapes” (28).
Johann Martin Chladenius, the early eighteenth-century theologian and
philosopher whom Reinhardt Koselleck puts at the very headwaters of German
historicism, credited Leibniz with being the first to use the German term for
“viewpoint” in a sense that was not strictly optical. When Chladenius writes that
“a rebellion will be perceived in different ways by a faithful subject, a rebel, a
foreigner, a courtier, a citizen, a peasant,” Ginzburg invites us to hear echoes of
both Leibniz and Machiavelli (29). The relevance of the three models of per-
spective—keyed respectively to accommodation, conflict, and multiplicity—
does not end there. Ginzburg finds it useful to think of Hegel’s philosophy of his-
tory as a combination of the conflictual model with a secularized version of
Augustinian accommodation. Marx’s theories, he suggests, can be construed as
elaborations of the conflictual model (29).
Although Peter Novick and others impressed by postmodern skepticism have
discerned in mainstream contemporary historical practice an enduring (though
utterly implausible and unachievable) ideal of objectivity that equates it with
neutrality, Ginzburg takes it for granted that acceptance of the limits and condi-
tions implied by perspective—which aspires to see things as they are, but
expressly abstains from any claim of neutrality—is among the most widely
accepted and deeply rooted assumptions of modern historiography.6 “A secular-
ized version of the accommodation model, combined with conflict and/or multi-
plicity, in different proportions is, I would argue, the core of the current histori-
ographical paradigm” (30). Recent challenges to that paradigm have come, he
remarks, from “fundamentalists of all kinds,” who spurn accommodation, as well
as from those who claim to have glimpsed the end of history, for whom conflict
has implausibly come to seem an “antique” (30). But the principal threat to the
prevailing paradigm comes from those who love perspective too much, and are
loath to admit that the model’s implications need not all run in the direction of
subjectivity and relativity:
The multiplicity model . . . has become more and more fashionable, although in a skepti-
cal version that assumes that each group in society—based on gender, ethnicity, or reli-
gion, etc.—is committed to its own set of values and ultimately enclosed within it. . . .
Perspective has been such a powerful cognitive metaphor in the past because it conveyed
a tension between subjective standpoints and objective testable truths. Even today, per-
spective implies a distantiation from objectivism—that is from an ideal of objective
knowledge being equated, as Thomas Nagel put it, to “a view from nowhere.” But per-
spective also implies a distantiation from relativism: “a way of being nowhere while
claiming to be everywhere equally,” as per Donna Haraway’s ironic remark. A debate on

6. Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession
(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
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346 THOMAS L. HASKELL

the social responsibilities of the historian might (and in my view should) start from this
double gesture, and its implications. (30-31)

Ginzburg’s “double gesture” was not (and probably could not have been) taken
up for discussion by his co-contributors at the Amsterdam conference. But his
two central claims, that acknowledgement of the force and constitutive power of
perspective has been one of the “core” assumptions of modern historiography at
least since Leibnitz and Claudinius, and that until recently the idea of perspec-
tive was not tied to either subjectivism or objectivism, but helped sustain a fruit-
ful tension between the two, are insightful, provocative, and timely. One obvious
question to ask in light of Ginzburg’s essay is why that tension seems to have
broken down in recent decades. Another is whether the breakdown can be reme-
died, or must instead be accepted as part of a new dispensation, as radical skep-
tics will presumably contend.
Having begun with the collection’s first essay, let us now turn to its final one,
Richard Rorty’s “Afterword.” One might have expected Rorty to take an interest
in Ginzburg’s essay, given its stress on perspective and its challenge to the views
of the analytical philosopher, Boghossian. But Rorty’s brief contribution does not
comment directly on any of the arguments presented at the conference. Pitched
at a high level of generality and written with his customary blend of pugnacity,
charm, wit, and invincible self assurance, the essay gives historians advice of
three kinds. The first warns them that philosophers have nothing of value to tell
them about historical inquiry and urges that “theory” be regarded as an optional
mode in history, not a competence that any able practitioner should be expected
to possess (197-198). The second item of advice chides historians for
overindulging in the “pathos of distance” and assures them that understanding
even the most ancient or exotic forms of life is no different than understanding
one’s next door neighbor (201). The third urges historians to embrace what Rorty
calls “honesty” as the polestar of professional life and abstain altogether from
such heady questions as what it would mean to be “objective,” or “see their dis-
cipline from the outside,” or ponder “what it is to be a historian” (199).
All this is vintage Rorty. It follows predictably from his stance as an antireal-
ist, who regards epistemology as a hopelessly misguided enterprise and objec-
tivity as a will-o’-the wisp. Epistemology takes for granted what Rorty denies:
that even when all the frailties of the correspondence theory of truth are taken
into account, there remains at least a kernel of merit in the commonsense
assumption that there is a real world out there, independent of consciousness, for
us humans to “get right.” Contending as he does that “our justificatory practices
supply the only criteria for the application of the word ‘true,’” the issue for him
comes down to a question that can only be asked rhetorically: “Does the nature
of the truth outstrip those practices?” (198).
Pragmatists like myself think that once you know the criteria for the application of a word,
you know all there is to know about the nature of the things signified by the word. Our
opponents, who nowadays tend to call themselves “realists,” argue that we should distin-
guish between criteria for the use of the word and the nature of the thing referred to by
that word . . . . To say, with the realists, that there must be something beyond consensus
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OBJECTIVITY: PERSPECTIVE AS PROBLEM AND SOLUTION 347

to refer to—whether this non-human thing be the called the Will of God or Historical
Reality—is to say that such agreement is a means to something else. (198-199)

Rorty’s advice faithfully recapitulates the implications of his principal philo-

sophical commitments, but its relevance to historians remains elusive, perhaps
because its antirealist premises require such awkward contortions when the real-
ity in question is the human past. People are not easily persuaded that their own
personal past is unreal, or that there is nothing about it for a biographer to “get
right.” Historians who are familiar, for example, with the racialized modes of his-
torical interpretation that persisted in this country for some decades after World
War I will feel that “agreement among inquirers” is indeed only a “means to
something else,” and that written history must refer to “something beyond con-
sensus.” Consensus among historians is, after all, always provisional, always
subject to revision, and historians in the act of revision are unlikely ever to think
of their accomplishment strictly in terms of virtuosity in marshaling “justificato-
ry practices.” They will feel instead that their account “gets it right”—or more
nearly right than some targeted alternative.
Let us grant that Rorty could refine the argument that he presents so compact-
ly here and could perhaps induce conscientious historians to believe that “‘cor-
respondence to reality’ is a term without content.”7 Maybe historians could even
be persuaded to stop using the word “reality” for what is finally only an infer-
ence from conventional justificatory processes. But what exactly would be
gained by this shift of vocabulary? What harm is done when historians rely on
the commonsense assumption that there is a historical reality out there to “get
right?” Rorty himself expresses wonderment that historians would care who wins
the philosophical struggle between antirealists and their realist critics (198). His
hunch that the realism/antirealism debate has little relevance for historians seems
to me right on target, but then he belies his own best instincts by working hard
to persuade his readers that the antirealists are right and the realists wrong. An
alternative strategy, which would have arrived at the same destination, but much
more quickly and transparently, would have required Rorty to concede from the
outset that antirealism is the artifact of a particular conjunction of debates and
rivalries within philosophy, no doubt legitimate and illuminating within the cul-
ture of the tribe that gave rise to it, but too tightly linked to the preoccupations
of its originators to be suitable for general importation into the discourse of other
academic tribes.8
Consider Rorty’s third piece of advice for historians. Confident as always that
anything objectivity can do, solidarity can do better, Rorty contends that “what
matters” is not the nature of truth or objectivity, but “the creation of self-disci-
plining communities of inquirers trying to reach consensus.” The “honesty” that

7. Rorty, “Does Academic Freedom Have Philosphical Presuppositions?” in The Future of

Academic Freedom, ed. Louis Menand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 26.
8. Perhaps I concede too much in suggesting that Rorty’s war on objectivity makes any more sense
in philosophy than in history. Philosopher John McDowell has argued—from a position quite sym-
pathetic to Rorty—that Rorty’s “phobia” about objectivity is, in the last analysis, “infantile.” John
McDowell, “Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert B. Brandom
(Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 109-123.
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348 THOMAS L. HASKELL

he urges upon historians turns out to have more to do with facilitating the oper-
ation of those communities than it does with individuals being “honest” in any
familiar sense of being scrupulous, or abstaining from theft, lies, and half-truths.
What begins as advocacy of a distinctively personal virtue gradually morphs into
extravagant praise of dutifulness to one’s peers for the sake of communal soli-
darity, as if that were an end in itself:
It is enough to be an honest historian. “If you take care of honesty, you need not worry
about the nature of truth and objectivity” (199)

To be honest is to repay the trust placed in you by your fellows. . . . it is, among other
things, to be a reliable witness to what is in the archives . . . . It is a matter of doing what
is expected of you . . . conforming to the expectations common to those formed in the
same disciplinary matrix. (199)
History is a cooperative activity. . . . The historian is responsible to his fellow historians.
“Honesty” is the wholehearted acceptance of the need to convince those fellow historians,
and to do so in ways that the community of historians recognizes as appropriate. (203)

Rorty knows better than to leave this lavish praise of disciplinarity unquali-
fied; he eventually acknowledges the dangers of conformity and admits that
“keeping a profession healthy is a tricky business.” His litmus test of good health
in the case of history is that the profession must be “tolerant enough neither to
command nor to forbid the use of history for political purposes” (203). I, too, am
an admirer of disciplinarity, so all this, to my way of thinking, is quite accept-
able.9
But why does Rorty feel any need to pump up the utterly uncontroversial
virtue of “honesty” to make it stand for such community-oriented practices as
“doing what is expected,” “conforming to expectations,” and wholeheartedly
accepting the cognitive values and standards of one’s professional community?10
The reason, I submit, is that this enables him to sidestep the entire question of
“answerability to the world” and thereby finesse the contortions that antirealism
requires. As an antirealist and antirepresentationalist, he can make no more sense
of objectivity than of epistemology. In his own words, “the meaning of the term
‘true belief’ [is] exhausted by describing the justification a belief has received .
. . the meaning [does not] include reference to the way the world is in itself”
(198).11 In lavishly endorsing disciplinarity at the Amsterdam conference, he was
affirming the sufficiency of the commonsense justificatory processes that all of

9. My views on disciplines and the manner of their functioning appear in “Professionalization ver-
sus Capitalism: Tawney, Durkheim, and C. S. Peirce on the Disinterestedness of Professional
Communities,” and “Justifying Academic Freedom in the Era of Power/Knowledge,” in my
Objectivity is not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1998), 78-114, 174-224; “Menand’s Postdisciplinary Project,” in Intellectual History
Newsletter 24 (2002), 107-119; and The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American
Social Science Association and the Nineteenth Century Crisis of Authority (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2000).
10. Rorty never addresses an obvious but presumably unwanted implication of this line of argu-
ment, namely, that members of a community of inquiry who are not content with conventional justi-
ficatory procedures and dissent from prevailing disciplinary practices thereby expose themselves to
the unjust charge of “dishonesty.”
11. Here I have transformed Rorty’s rhetorical question into an affirmative statement.
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OBJECTIVITY: PERSPECTIVE AS PROBLEM AND SOLUTION 349

us, realists and antirealists alike, routinely rely on, while obliquely downplaying
the sensational implications that made “antirealism” a word to conjure with in
the so-called “postmodern” academy a decade or two ago.12 Labeling the result-
ing apotheosis of disciplinarity as “honesty” is best understood as a packaging
ploy, a way of “speak[ing] with the vulgar and think[ing] with the learned.”13
The strain that Rorty’s usage puts on the homely virtue of honesty became all
too obvious near the end of his conference paper when he inflated the word
beyond its bursting point. This he did by identifying “honesty” with the term
“Wissenschaftliche Distanz,” which he borrowed from Wolfgang Mommsen’s
contribution to the conference. Mommson’s term carries a daunting burden of
intellectual baggage, most of it more readily borne by realists than antirealists,
yet Rorty found it entirely to his taste. He even went so far as to declare that
Wissenschaftliche Distanz is “another word for what I have been calling hon-
esty—for the ability to distinguish between one’s own moral identity and one’s
responsibility to one’s fellow historians, and to one’s readers” (203).
Rorty’s decision to align himself with Mommsen carries fascinating implica-
tions, for among all the conference papers none was more forceful than
Mommsen’s about the importance of distinguishing sharply between objective
historical scholarship and undisciplined political advocacy. How, one wonders,
can an antirealist like Rorty subscribe to an intellectual project as deeply invest-
ed in the idea of objectivity as Mommsen’s? In the 1980s, when Peter Novick
wanted to exemplify the defining flaws of mainstream objectivism in history, he
naturally relied on Rortyean language: The problem with the objectivists, Novick
wrote, was their “commitment to the reality of the past, and to truth as corre-
spondence to that reality.”14 Now Rorty, the most eminent of the antirealists,
pulls the rug out from under everyone’s feet, declaring that the lessons of antire-
alism and Wissenschaftliche Distanz come to pretty much the same thing.
12. Rorty’s endorsement of disciplinarity squares with my own views in all but one vital respect—
he gives no reason why the public should defer to, or rely upon, the opinions of the disciplinary com-
munity, much less pay its expenses or put up with its findings when they turn out to be disturbing.
Must not the duty to be “honest” in this very expansive, community-oriented sense entail some spec-
ification of what it is about the community of inquiry that makes its members’ opinions more author-
itative than those of any Tom, Dick, or Harriet? Charles S. Peirce, whom William James regarded as
the founder of pragmatism, had no doubt about the superior truth-finding power of a properly organ-
ized community of inquiry, but he was an unabashed realist, who identified the real with that which
is fated to be agreed to by all who investigate, including the yet-to-be-born. Sensing in Peirce’s real-
ism the seeds of tyranny, Rorty has done his best to demote him from the front ranks of the pragma-
tist tradition. Yet even Thomas Kuhn, who shared Rorty’s aversion to realism (and whose work Rorty
continues to praise in all matters save incommensurability), came back again and again (especially
in his final chapter, “Progress through Revolutions,”) to the proto-realist thought that the world and
the human mind’s relation to it must be of a very special kind in order for science to achieve as much
as it does. As long as Rorty’s antirealism deprives us of any respectable sense in which we can say
that there is something beyond consensus for inquirers to “get right,” it will remain unclear why, on
his premises, anyone should defer to the judgment of inquirers, pay their expenses, or bend over
backwards to tolerate their “findings” when they offend. Thomas S. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 160-173.
13. Rorty, “Does Academic Freedom Have Philosphical Presuppositions?” 35. In the passage from
which I quote, Rorty alludes to Bishop Berkeley’s practice of “speaking with the vulgar” while
“thinking with the learned” as a means of explaining away John Dewey’s routine use of the word
“truth,” which Rorty wants to expunge from the pragmatist vocabulary.
14. Novick, That Noble Dream, 1.
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350 THOMAS L. HASKELL

To be sure, the distinction Mommsen draws between unacceptable advocacy

and objective scholarship is an excruciatingly fine line, no more easily defined
than the one drawn by Max Weber (to whose work Mommsen has, of course,
devoted much of his professional career).15 Unlike Rorty, Mommsen takes the
regulative ideal of objectivity with utmost seriousness, but this does not dimin-
ish in the least his insistence that historians are, not just entitled, but obliged, to
craft their work in such a way as to responsibly engage with the moral and polit-
ical issues of their own time. He goes out of his way to dramatize the conflicting
demands that commitment and objectivity impose on historians, insisting all the
while (just as Weber did) that historians must honor both ideals equally. The “risk
of partisanship” is a perpetual temptation for historians, warns Mommsen.
“Moral commitment and scholarly detachment are both in equal measures part of
their craft” (45). History for Mommsen, as for Weber, is a high-wire act, in which
the slightest misstep to either side, the least imbalance between commitment and
objectivity, imperils the integrity not only of the historian, but of the historian’s
entire culture:
The account given by the historian should in all respects be as objective as possible . . . .
historical imagery and consciousness are usually colored by inchoate memories of an
emotional nature. . . . it is the professional historian who should lift such [public] memo-
ries to the level of what ought to be rationally controlled historical propositions. This is a
matter not only of scholarly interest, but at the same time of moral duty.
What is at stake is, in the final analysis, the future of Western culture itself. (45-46)

Like Ginzburg, Mommsen takes it for granted that the only sort of objectivity
worth pursuing in history is inescapably conditioned by the historian’s values.
“Values, ideological positions and different normative systems—these are the
very fabric of what [the historian] studies, and their mutual confrontation consti-
tutes, in a way, the dynamism of the historical process” (48):
But that is not all. . . . values define the very parameters within which such a ‘history’ is
recounted, its beginning, its icon (as Hayden White calls it), and its presumed closure . . .
. Thus, the history of European expansionism can be told from many different perspec-
tives, and it would be senseless to festoon it (as young students often do) with crushing
denunciations of the immorality of oppressing colonial peoples and destroying their
indigenous cultures. Yet there is a fundamental difference between writing the history of
colonization preponderantly or exclusively from the viewpoint of the colonizers . . . and
systematically taking the position and experience of the indigenous population into
account. (48-49)

The first challenge is to strive for scholarly objectivity. But having said that,
Mommsen does not hesitate to add a few lines later that objectivity “will only
take us so far” (49). In limit cases such as the Armenian genocide, the Stalinist
terror, and the Holocaust, “‘understanding’ cannot be the final word, and cer-
tainly not in the sense that tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.” In such cases,
he says historians have three duties: “First, to represent the terrible events
frankly; second, to chart them in the context of ideological concepts and of insti-
15. Wolfgang Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics 1890–1920, transl. Michael S.
Steinberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); The Political and Social Theory of Max
Weber: Collected Essays (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity Press, 1989).
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OBJECTIVITY: PERSPECTIVE AS PROBLEM AND SOLUTION 351

tutional or structural violence; third, to demarcate the moral responsibility of the
actors involved—including those who share in the guilt because of their passiv-
ity” (50).
Readers will misunderstand Mommsen unless they realize that, in his eyes,
these three duties that historians owe the public in relating history’s most trau-
matic stories can all be accomplished without crossing the razor-thin line that
separates scholarship from political advocacy and inappropriate moral preach-
ing. He recommends these duties precisely because they need not entail “sit[ting]
in judgment over the past,” which he, no less than Ranke, condemns as inappro-
priate (50, 46):
The historian is not a judge, who pronounces verdicts on the basis of fixed, existing rules,
regardless of his own feelings in the matter, but a scholar, guided by ethical principles of
responsibility . . . . It is not his task to offer a moral evaluation of the case he describes,
but rather to make sure that the case is presented to the public, and brought into public dis-
course, without neglecting the aspect of the moral responsibility involved. (50)

Whatever one may think of Rorty’s warm embrace of Wissenschaftliche

Distanz, there is no denying that Mommsen assigns historians a cultural role that
is precarious and difficult. How, in practice, are historians to achieve the deli-
cately “balanced combination of moral engagement and critical detachment” that
Mommsen demands (53)? It is in response to that tacit question that Mommsen
delivers what I regard as the most telling insight to come out of the Amsterdam
conference. It takes the form of a suggestion that the composition of historical
work be understood as a three-way negotiation, overseen more or less con-
sciously by the historian, who, in order to win the accolades of his or her pro-
fessional peers, knows that s/he must bring about a harmonious integration of
facts, narrative structure, and moral/political perspective. In this triangular nego-
tiation, perspective is not a given; not anything fixed; not anything that just “hap-
pens” to the historian. Instead, the historian’s perspective is understood to be a
contingent array of suppositions that stands or falls in accord with its capacity to
bring facts, narrative form, and ethical imperatives into a compelling unity in the
particular work at hand. If the historian’s value-laden perspective cannot be rec-
onciled with the cognitive and aesthetic demands of historical composition, then
it must give way. Perspective on Mommsen’s account is not a product merely of
fate, circumstance, and the unfathomable mysteries of personal temperament, but
a cognitive tool, deliberately crafted by historians, who must take responsibility
for their handiwork. Here are Mommsen’s own words:
Historians have to face this task with a balanced combination of moral engagement and
critical detachment. The first requirement is to give an account of their own standpoint;
this implies that they must candidly hold up for scrutiny the values and ideals which
inform their work. Usually these are closely linked with one’s historical research. Any his-
torical interpretation, any historical narration which derives its telos from an ultimately
normatively underpinned perspectival approach, will necessitate, as the presentation of its
events and interpretive schemata unfolds, an ordering and prioritizing of the historian’s
own ideals and values, which initially were perhaps tacit and implicit but which are then
called into the limelight. If a history cannot incorporate all the relevant facts and eludes
plausible narration, the historian will have to modify the original perspective and its pre-
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352 THOMAS L. HASKELL

suppositions. Thus, historical thinking is necessarily enlightening [to author and audience
alike] as regards its normative presuppositions. (53)

The vital point here is that the historian’s perspective, far from being an invi-
olable given, bestowed by fate and exempt from rational reconsideration,
becomes subject to modification in the service of intellectual integrity, exposito-
ry persuasiveness, and the hope of earning and maintaining the respect of one’s
peers, including those who do not share one’s own values and priorities. In a
word, one might say that perspective is subsumed by Mommsen (as it arguably
was by Weber) under the tradition of Bildung, as but one aspect of the life-long
project of self-realization and enlightenment to which historian and audience
alike are presumed to be dedicated. “In the actual practice of the historian’s
work,” Mommsen continues, “this entails a duty never to commit oneself uncrit-
ically to a certain perspective but to reflect, as free from prejudice as possible, on
the assumptions informing one’s work” (54). Explicitly invoking Weber,
Mommsen calls upon historians to live up to an ideal of “scholarly asceticism”
that abstains from uninhibited advocacy, even for the best of causes, understand-
ing history’s paramount task to be that of enabling people to formulate for them-
selves an account of the ultimate meaning of their own conduct (54).16
Had he not been confined to the mandatory brevity of a conference paper, I
like to think that Mommsen would have said a few words more about Weber’s
understanding of perspective. Mommsen would agree, I assume, that our osten-
sibly “postmodern” generation has nothing to teach Weber about the pervasive
influence of subjective values in constituting the objects of historical inquiry. As
I see it, there could be no fuller acknowledgement than Weber’s of the inevitabil-
ity of value commitment, or its legitimacy in shaping both the questions we his-
torians ask about the past, and the empirical standards of relevance that we
employ in answering those questions. For Weber as for Nietzsche, there truly is
“only a perspective seeing.” It is only by means of these value-laden perspectives
that the cultural world takes on meaning for us:
All knowledge of cultural reality . . . is always knowledge from particular points of view.
. . . Without the investigator’s evaluative ideas, there would be no principle of selection
of subject-matter and no meaningful knowledge of the concrete reality. . . . Without the
investigator’s conviction regarding the significance of particular cultural facts, every
attempt to analyze concrete reality is absolutely meaningless, so the direction of his per-
sonal belief, the refraction of values in the prism of his mind, gives direction to his work.17

This does not mean that “anything goes.” When Weber likened the investiga-
tor’s “evaluative ideas” and “point of view” to a “prism,” through which alone
the world could be meaningfully refracted, he counted on his readers not to take
the figure of speech too literally. What he was talking about was no rigid, glassy
object, implanted at birth and incapable of modification, but a dynamic, life-long
process of perspectival reflection and self-clarification that leaves no room for
moral complacency or self indulgence. Given his acknowledgement of the pow-

16. Here I loosely paraphrase from Weber’s “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays
in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958) 152.
17. Weber, “Objectivity,” 81, 82.
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OBJECTIVITY: PERSPECTIVE AS PROBLEM AND SOLUTION 353

erfully constitutive role of perspective, and given also his firmly held conviction
that “it can never be the task of an empirical science to provide binding norms
and ideals,” Weber had little choice but to conclude that we scholars have a “duty
to stand up for our ideals.”18 In that life-long project of clarifying and refining
one’s perspective lies the importance of Fritz Ringer’s recent reminder that
Weber was just as deeply concerned “to safeguard the autonomy of the student’s
value choices against certain forms of scientism and conformism as . . . to pro-
tect Wissenschaft from the intrusion of personal value preferences. As an educa-
tor and moralist, he meant to foster the capacity for independent commitment to
a ‘cause’ as well as minds capable of intellectual clarity and tough-minded real-
ism. . . . Weber was in no sense a ‘subjectivist’ or a ‘relativist’”19
The constitutive role that values play in historical inquiry extends even to the
little-understood processes of causal attribution, by which we organize our world
as a dense web of cause and effect linkages and configure our temporal experi-
ence in terms of the beginnings, middles, and ends of narrative form. As Ringer
has taken pains to demonstrate at length, Weber was keenly aware that none of
this causal thinking could be done without the conceptual schemes that our
“guiding points of view” help us imaginatively construct, and yet it is precisely
here, in the construction and use of these schemata, that the constraints imposed
by the ideal of objectivity should grip us most powerfully. This is exactly where
loyalty to moral/political projects must, according to Weber, give way to the
“norms of our thought,” to the criteria of “scientific truth”:
The choice of the object of investigation and the extent or depth to which this investiga-
tion attempts to penetrate the infinite causal web are determined by the evaluative ideas
which dominate the investigator and his age. In the method of investigation, the guiding
“point of view” is of great importance for the construction of the conceptual scheme
which will be used in the investigation. In the mode of their use, however, the investiga-
tor is obviously bound by the norms of our thought just as much here as elsewhere, for
scientific truth is precisely what is valid for all who seek the truth.20

For Weber, a scholar’s perspective on life—his or her “moral and political iden-
tity,” as Rorty might call it—is not inherited at birth or defined by race, class, gen-
der, or any other concatenation of circumstances, but a personal accomplishment
that—within limits, of course—the individual freely constructs and revises, over
and over again, in light of lessons learned in settings that vary unpredictably over
the course of an entire lifetime. In all of Weber’s writings there are few lessons that
elicit from him greater pedagogical passion than this one. Although our “concep-
tual schemes”—or “ideal types,” as he usually preferred to call them—are
“utopias” that are deeply influenced by subjective values and can never be pre-

18. Weber, “Objectivity,” 52, 58.

19. Fritz Ringer, Max Weber’s Methodology: The Unification of the Cultural and Social Sciences
(Harvard University Press, 1997) 141. Italics deleted.
20. Weber, “Objectivity,” 84. For a meticulous and admirably clear headed reading of Weber’s
often misunderstood views on value judgments and objectivity, see Jay A. Ciaffa, Max Weber and the
Problems of Value-Free Social Science: A Critical Examination of the Werturteilsstreit (Lewisburg:
PA: Bucknell University Press, 1998). Ciaffa’s book, which came to my attention only after comple-
tion of this essay, promises to inject new energy into a century-long debate that has already spawned
dozens of books and articles.
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354 THOMAS L. HASKELL

sumed to correspond with the real, they can, nonetheless, be of immense human
utility insofar as they are intelligently and responsibly crafted to illuminate some
relevant segment of that “infinite causal web” in which our lives play out.21
When Weber speaks in the passage quoted above of the “construction of the
conceptual scheme that will be used in the investigation,” he has in mind ideal
types. That is again what he has in mind in the passage quoted below, where he
speaks of the “unremitting application of viewpoints of a specifically particular-
ized character”:
In the empirical social sciences, as we have seen, the possibility of meaningful knowledge
of what is essential for us in the infinite richness of events is bound up with the unremit-
ting application of viewpoints of a specifically particularized character, which, in the last
analysis, are oriented on the basis of evaluative ideas. . . . which alone make them worth
knowing . . . . Life with its irrational reality and its store of possible meanings is inex-
haustible. The concrete form in which value-relevance occurs remains perpetually in flux,
ever subject to change in the dimly seen future of human culture. The light which
emanates from these highest evaluative ideas always falls on an ever changing finite seg-
ment of the vast chaotic stream of events, which flows away through time.22

On the face of things, Weber’s 1904 essay on objectivity was simply an effort
to spell out ground rules for the new journal that he, Werner Sombart, and Edgar
Jaffe were to edit. In light of the essays we have examined from the Amsterdam
volume, however, it seems clear that more was at stake. We would do better to
regard Weber’s remarkably wide-ranging essay on objectivity as a none-too-suc-
cessful effort by him and his co-editors to launch themselves and their genera-
tion of cultural and historical inquirers upon a vast and distinctively historicist
project of cognitive retooling. The basic outline of the project was made explic-
it in the essay’s second paragraph, where the editors explained that “agreement
as to certain fundamental issues is a presupposition of the joint assumption of
editorial responsibility.” What the editors were in agreement about is then suc-
cinctly stated: “This agreement refers particularly to the value of theoretical
knowledge from ‘one-sided’ points of view, the construction of precisely defined
concepts and the insistence on rigorous distinction between empirical knowledge
and value judgments as here understood.23
To put it in a nutshell, we might say that the aim of the project was to make
flexible cognitive tools out of the spontaneously occurring “viewpoints” and
“perspectives” that Machiavelli, Leibniz, and Chladenius had first held up for
close examination. For the project to succeed, it would have been necessary to
win general recognition throughout all the cultural and historical sciences for two
vital propositions. First, that values and the “one sided” perspectives they inspire
legitimately play an indispensable role in posing questions, constituting the
objects of inquiry, and establishing standards of relevance, especially when cast
in the form of “precisely defined concepts” or “ideal types.” Second, because
these value-laden types and concepts are prompted in part by wishful thinking
and manifest all the passions and cognitive infirmities of the inquirers who for-

21. Ibid., 90, 84.

22. Ibid., 111.
23. Ibid., 49.
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OBJECTIVITY: PERSPECTIVE AS PROBLEM AND SOLUTION 355

mulated them, they must be seen as nothing more than contingently useful fic-
tions, or “utopias,” never to be conflated with the real, and never to be dignified
by inclusion in the category of “knowledge.” Their intellectual utility is not to be
sought in the fidelity with which they represent “the way things really are,” but
in their ability to engage and focus the attention of inquirers who subscribe to
rival values and perspectives, thereby sustaining an entire community of inquiry
and fueling an unending process of creative destruction that will continue across
the generations, enabling human beings to make what precious sense they can of
that “vast chaotic stream of events, which flows away through time.” Weber
knew very well that “the history of the social sciences is and remains a continu-
ous process passing from the attempt to order reality analytically through the
construction of concepts—the dissolution of the analytical concepts so con-
structed through the expansion and shift of the scientific horizon—and the refor-
mulation anew of concepts on the foundations thus transformed.”24 Not for noth-
ing did he concede near the end of the essay that it is but a “hair-line which sep-
arates science from faith.”25
Weber’s complex legacy also figures importantly in the work of Jörn Rüsen.
Like Ginzburg and Mommson, Rüsen acknowledges that “commitment to social
values and claims for objectivity [can] seem to contradict each other,” even
though in fact “historical thinking is a mental procedure in which both elements
play a decisive role.” Both values and objectivity are constitutive for history; nei-
ther can be omitted. Even in its pre-modern forms, history was understood to be
knowledge about the past upon which the living could rely for “cultural orienta-
tion” in the present (57). Under the auspices of historia vitae magistra the histo-
rian’s job was to distill the experience of the ages, impartially reporting not only
the objective facts of the past, but also the equally objective values that the past
was thought to exemplify and thereby commend for present use. It was this
understanding of history that Ranke was rejecting in saying that he “merely
wanted to show how things actually happened,” as opposed to “judging the past”
or “instructing men for the profit of future years” (58).
The rise of the academic research ideal and the accompanying development of
rigorous methods intended to guarantee intersubjective validity undeniably made
the role of values in historical thinking “problematic in a new way,” says Rüsen,
but by no means did it simply pit perspective against objectivity. On the contrary,
as we can see from its remarkable title, Chladenius’s 1752 book Allgemeine
Geschichtswissenschaft (General science of history) revealingly claimed for his-
tory the status of a science even as it broke the news that “every historical
account . . . is shaped by the historian’s Sehepunkt (point of view).” In the mod-
ern concept of history, Rüsen says, “the historian’s commitment to social values
was radicalized to the relativity of standpoints” as part and parcel of the “sub-
jection of historical thinking to the strict rule of research methods” (58). In short,
rigor and the relativity of perspective arose in unison as practitioners responded
to escalating demands for methodical discipline, even while acknowledging that

24. Ibid., 105.

25. Ibid., 110.
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356 THOMAS L. HASKELL

“historical knowledge can neither be gained nor presented without a perspective

linked to the situation of the provider or the target audience” (59): “The history
of modern historical thinking in general, and of historical studies in particular,
can be characterized by a permanent oscillation between emphasis on practical
commitment and an emphasis on methodical objectivity. This long debate can be
summarized in the short conclusion that neither element can be reduced to the
other, that both elements are constitutive” (59).
The benign oscillations of the past ended with the emergence of postmodern
critics who “stressed the dependence of historical thinking upon social values to
such a degree that there is no space for the claim to general validity” (59). Their
assault on narrativity, in particular, is construed by Rüsen as a radicalization of
Weber’s position that threatens to deprive history of truth claims altogether and
relegate historical consciousness to “nothing but irrationality” (64). In response
to these challenges, he proposes to show that the role of both narrative form and
social values in history can be fully acknowledged in such a way as to strength-
en, rather than weaken, history’s claim to objectivity. Although there is probably
no one on either side of the Atlantic who has done more to think through the
development of historical consciousness from Chladinius to our era, Rüsen’s
major works have not yet been translated into English and his contribution to this
volume is so dense and tightly compressed that I can only hope to convey the
argument’s flavor, not its intricate structure.
Rüsen holds that social values enter vitally into the production of history in
three ways: by constituting its objects; by shaping its linguistic form; and by
assigning history a cultural function of personal identification and temporal ori-
entation so elemental that life in its absence would be unrecognizable to us.
Human beings feel a deep need to be oriented in time. History, which begins with
memory, is in the last analysis “time transformed into sense.” It is “an incorpo-
ration of social values in the empirical body of the past” (61). Its narrative form
is, in Rüsen’s eyes, an “anthropological universal,” and “every narrative is con-
structive and perspectival” (61). The perspectives that narratives establish func-
tion as “filters” that enable individuals to exclude from consciousness all but the
tiny fraction of events that is personally relevant, thereby helping them cope with
suffering, manage contingency, and persevere in the face of the myriad dilemmas
and disappointments of social affiliation. “With this perspectivity, selectivity, and
particularity, historical narration expresses the specificity of those whom it impli-
cates. In doing so it deploys the set of social values by which this specificity is
constituted in the minds of the people themselves” (62).
Although in the past the personal identities supplied by history have tended to
be overwhelmingly ethnocentric, Rüsen is hopeful that ethnocentrism’s negation
of intersubjectivity can be reversed by two principles, or regulatory ideals, which
promise to foster intersubjectivity on a scale suitable for a globalizing world. The
two principles are equality and the solidarity of humankind (65). In practice, uni-
versal acceptance of these principles would mean that all historical narratives
would be subjected to a test of plausibility: Can all parties implicated in the his-
torian’s account (whether defined by nationality, ethnicity, gender, class, etc.)
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OBJECTIVITY: PERSPECTIVE AS PROBLEM AND SOLUTION 357

agree with the historian’s version of their differences? The implementation of
such a threshold of plausibility is arguably already nascent in the growing force
of human rights that circulate beyond national boundaries. Rüsen asks us to
entertain the hope that “agreement on differences can be brought into a method-
ological rule to which every historical narration can be submitted” (66). Were
this development to be fully institutionalized among historians, transcending eth-
nocentrism in all its forms would become a stringent criterion of historical objec-
tivity, for Rüsen regards empirical validity as a “necessary, but by no means a
sufficient condition for the plausibility of a historical narrative” (63). Broadly in
accord with Mommsen and Weber, he insists that
empirical validity must be complemented by the narrative’s normative validity. This
validity involves the plausibility of the constitutive values of the historical narration. It
consists of a congruence between the narrative and the normative convictions and value
system of the addressees, including a correspondence between the perspectivity, selectiv-
ity, and particularity of the historical narrative and the particular social identity of the
authors and their addressees. (63)

Rüsen’s linkage of empirical, normative, and aesthetic validity has no greater

enemy than the idea that objectivity requires neutrality. “Only if the empirical
evidence of the past is shaped according to the standpoints of those who com-
municate in the realm of historical consciousness and according to the value sys-
tem which is derived from this standpoint does it acquire the quality of a plausi-
ble history; neutrality is the end of history” (63).

In a passing comment, possibly inspired by Peter Novick’s history of the

American historical profession, Rüsen expresses the fear that a misguided pur-
suit of neutrality is today “widespread” among professional historians (63).
Perhaps so, but in the volume under review I find no evidence to substantiate that
fear. On the contrary, the reader of these essays is left with the impression that
historians on both sides of the Atlantic take it for granted that political and moral
commitments are perfectly acceptable, indeed indispensable, as long as they are
coupled with a scrupulous effort to be objective.26 Even Peter Gay, who proudly
labels himself a “hyperobjectivist” and lashes out angrily at Foucault, Rorty,
Schama, and other “postmodernists,” acknowledged at Amsterdam that histori-
ans’ convictions shape their interpretations, that objectivity is a “counsel of per-
fection,” and that disagreement is endemic to the historical enterprise (42, 40, 39,
36). In contrast, Ed Jonker provocatively declares that although objective schol-
arship is often said to differ greatly from ideology and propaganda, no effort to
draw the line between them has ever been convincing. Yet the lesson he draws
from that observation is simply that historians should proceed with caution and
humility—not that the ideal of objectivity can be abandoned (87, 88-89).
The fruitful tension between commitment and objectivity that Ginzburg iden-
tifies with the modern era runs through virtually all the essays from the
Amsterdam conference. The one apparent exception is the essay of Geoff Eley,
26. The most articulate and thoughtful comments on objectivity and commitment seem to me to
have been written by the European contributors, but at the level of practice I detect little or no dif-
ference between them and the American contributors.
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358 THOMAS L. HASKELL

which contends that the discipline of history has been rendered obsolete by the
rise of “interdisciplinarity” in the form of “cultural studies.” In the proudly “un-
disciplined” domain that he now calls home, the question appears not to be about
the place value commitments should occupy in scholarship, but the place—if
any—that objectivity should occupy. Eley regards interdisciplinary scholarship
as a living legacy of the 1960s: “It means transgression, it means disobeying, it
means rule-breaking, it means making trouble, it means shaking things up, it
means . . . finding spaces of possibility on the other side of what we already do.”
It is concerned with “the release of meaning rather than its predictable accumu-
lation” (99). In an essay that has much to say about the political perspectives that
graduate students should want to embrace, scarcely anything is said about the
constraints that objectivity might entail.
Although Michael Adas’s essay endorses political commitment by scholars no
less passionately than Eley’s, the two historians have in mind very different sce-
narios. Adas, too, writes of the 1960s, when he and other graduate students at the
University of Wisconsin marched in the streets over Vietnam and civil rights.
They quickly found, however, that effective political action required more than a
militant posture. Finding their scholarly expertise unappreciated and “largely
irrelevant” to what was going on in the streets, they “retreated to the lecture halls
and libraries of a campus under a fitful and increasingly aimless siege. . . . Rather
than taking to the streets, where their expertise counted for little and they were
inevitably thrown together with dubious allies, historians and other social scien-
tists turned to archival and field research aimed at bringing peasants, slaves,
laborers, and other groups . . . ‘people without history,’ into the scholarly main-
stream,” an outcome in which Adas rejoices (143).
Michelle Perrot also testifies to the powerful political currents that threaten to
compromise the authority, or “expertise,” as Adas called it, of any effort to give
voice and a sense of historical identity to hitherto silent populations.
Courageously acknowledging that the possibility of limits to the historicity of
gender has thus far been a question so thorny that historians of women have been
unwilling to take it up, she speaks warmly of the “importance of memory and
history to social actors” and she clearly treasures the deep satisfactions of
responding to that “existential desire to discover and understand oneself” (168,
166).
“But what is the nature of this duty?” she pointedly asks (166). “It brings with
it both advantages and risks; the risk of a militant, teleological history, the risk
of a subjective, partial history, one at odds with the historian’s professional duty
to be truthful. At the same time, however, the invention of a new historical object
. . . . aims to contribute to an even greater understanding of reality, albeit by
revealing even more complexity” (166-167).
If asked whether the multiplicity of human perspectives makes objectivity an
unattainable goal for history, what would Perrot say? I will not presume to speak
for her, but she and most of the other participants in the Amsterdam conference
could reasonably and consistently reply that since discernment of multiple per-
spectives is a condition of understanding human affairs, it is also a prerequisite
of attaining reliable historical knowledge. To be sure, that leaves the historian on
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OBJECTIVITY: PERSPECTIVE AS PROBLEM AND SOLUTION 359

a high wire, still grappling with the crosswinds of perspective and objectivity
without any explicit instructions about how to proceed. Those who will settle for
nothing less than algorithmic solutions are best advised to seek alternative forms
of employment. But what of those who acknowledge no need for balance? What
of those who are so confident, either that value judgments have no proper place
in scholarship, or that striking blows for one’s values is all that counts, that they
make history exclusively one or the other, refusing to concede that it is a bal-
ancing act? What should worry us is that recklessness of this sort, rooted in con-
fusion about the meaning of objectivity, appears to be more widespread in the
scholarly world today than it was in Weber’s generation, a century ago.27

Rice University

27. I am indebted to George Levine and his colleagues at the Rutgers Center for the Critical
Analysis of Contemporary Culture whose lecture series on “Objectivity, Ethics, and the Disciplines”
provided a stimulating sounding board for some of these thoughts about perspective and objectivity
in October 2002.