Values, Objectivity, and Explanation in Historiography

Tor Egil Førland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315470955
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Bringing sophisticated philosophy to bear on real-life historiography, Values, Objectivity, and Explanation in Historiography rekindles and invigorates the debate on two perennials in the theory and methodology of history. One is the tension between historians' values and the ideal—or illusion—of objective historiography. The other is historical explanation.

The point of departure for the treatment of values and objectivity is an exceptionally heated debate on Cold War historiography in Denmark, involving not only historians but also the political parties, the national newspapers, and the courts. The in-depth analysis that follows concludes that historians can produce accounts that deserve the label "objective, " even though their descriptions are tinged by ineluctable epistemic instability. A separate chapter dissects the postmodern notion of situated truths.

The second part of the book proffers a new take on historical explanation. It is based on the notion of the ideal explanatory text, which allows for not only causal—including intentional—but also nomological, structural, and functional explanations. The approach, which can accommodate narrative explanations driven by causal plots, is ecumenical but not all-encompassing. Emergent social properties and supernatural entities are excluded from the ideal explanatory text, making scientific historiography methodologically individualistic—albeit with room for explanations at higher levels when pragmatically justified—and atheist.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative License.

Part I
Objectivity, Values, and Theory Choice

1
Participants and Fellow Travelers

The Left, the Soviet Union, and the Fall of Objectivism

Should historians make value judgments about the people and societies they study? In all likelihood, the vast majority of academics would instinctively say no: for modern, and indeed postmodern, historians, the task is rather to understand the various actors’ (speech) acts, and potentially also explain them. (The latter ambition is perhaps reserved for the modernists among us.) But condemning or extolling these actors is something we abstain from—or, rather, we relinquish the right to make such judgments to the reader. And if historians are to make value judgments, we must do so by using the actors’ values, not our own. For the proper historicist, every era is equally close to God, and our mission is not to pass judgment on the actors or hold them up as either role models or cautionary examples. History as a morality tale is both premodern and unscientific: Ranke killed off such ambitions for good.

In Denmark there is a historian named Bent Jensen who completely disagrees with this point of view. Jensen is a professor emeritus at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, and he reserves the right to rebuke the Danish politicians and cultural figures he studies for their spine-lessness toward, or willful ignorance of, the communist regime of terror in the Soviet Union. Among Danish contemporary historians he is a lone wolf—and his viewpoints are about as popular as his four-legged cousins are among sheep farmers. But during the first decade of the twenty-first century the center-right government and the majority in the Folketing, the Danish parliament, considered him useful in their cultural war against the enemies of liberalism, that is, those who fail to stand up to pressure from antiliberal movements, whether these movements are Nazi (during the Second World War), communist (during the Cold War), or Islamist (during the so-called War on Terror). Hence, the Liberals (Venstre), the Conservatives (Det Konservative Folkeparti), and the Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti) kept a protecting hand over him, going so far as to establish a Centre for Cold War Studies that he could lead.

In one sense, Bent Jensen is doing precisely what the Norwegian philosopher Hans Skjervheim and other 1960s and 1970s critics of positivism insisted that scholars should do, namely, involve themselves in the society of which they are part. But the positivism critics of that era found themselves predominantly on the Left; Jensen is on the Right. Even though Jensen, as far as I am aware, never took part in the debate on positivism, his engaged—many would say politicized—historiography allows us to study what happens when the positivism critics’ philosophical demands to involvement are turned against the political standpoints of the positivism critics on the Left. Jensen is the unexorcisable poltergeist in the critique of positivism, the Mr. Hyde to Dr. Skjervheim’s Jekyll.

This chapter consists of four parts. The first part deals with the fall of objectivism in the discipline of history, with Norway serving to exemplify developments throughout the Western world. The second part comprises a brief comparative treatment of Norwegian and Danish historical research on foreign policy, in particular, during the Cold War. The third part discusses the culture war in Danish politics in the first decade of the twenty-first century and Bent Jensen’s role therein. In the fourth and final part, I return to the criticism of objectivism and ask what Jensen’s example can tell us about the relationship between historiography, morality, and politics. I conclude by elaborating on two points made previously in the chapter, concerning problems inherent in the critique of positivism and attempts to overcome them.

I. The Fall of Objectivism in Historiography

Sometime between 1965 and 1975, Western historiography lost its innocence. A fairly positivist or at least empiricist outlook on the production and science of historical knowledge, with objective and neutral (in the sense of “impartial” or “detached”) historiography as an ideal, was supplanted by an explicitly antipositivist approach that rejected such more or less critical and empirical objectivism.¹ Though trying to provide a satisfactory definition of objectivity and objectivism is beyond the scope of this chapter, we should nonetheless take a brief look at how the discussion of these concepts should be understood. In That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession—a work that was instrumental in putting the final nail in the coffin of the belief in objective historiography in the United States—Peter Novick uses half a page to provide a “radically compressed… summary of the original and continuing objectivist creed,” taking as its starting point the objective historian’s role as “neutral, or disinterested.” Novick goes on to use a further half page to account for the aspects of objectivity that were “reworked or reinterpreted over the last hundred years” as the belief in the historians’ capacity to disregard all their own values and let the facts speak for themselves was undermined.² This emphasis on neutrality has been criticized by Thomas Haskell, who denies that objectivity requires neutrality. Instead, Haskell emphasizes “detachment,” that is, the ability and willingness to consider other viewpoints than one’s own. Haskell sees an objective historian as one who “makes a serious effort to bracket his own perspective long enough to enter sympathetically into the thinking of others,” adding that “political commitment need not detract from the writing of history—not even from its objectivity—as long as honesty, detachment, and intelligence are also at work.”³ Ottar Dahl, the late doyen of Norwegian philosophy of history, discusses objectivity and value freedom in his 1986 work Problemer i historiens teori (Problems of historical theory), and in line with later thinking he highlights objectivity as an ideal for intersubjectively valid descriptions and explanations.⁴ Jörn Rüsen also underlines that within a Rankean paradigm of historiography—and no alternative paradigms were ever subsequently developed—objectivity entails “intersubjective validity in two respects: it can be verified by a recourse to experience, and it follows generally accepted patterns of interpretation or historical explanation.”⁵

As I see it, there is hardly any doubt that the notion of objectivity that Ranke and his nineteenth-century successors promoted includes neutrality in the sense of “impartiality” as a core component. Gradually, however, only the most theoretically obtuse historians have clung to the belief that historians can “dissolve themselves” and let the sources speak unmediated; likewise, it is generally accepted that things can appear differently when seen from different angles. An ambition of objectivity would today have to be understood as a desire to approach what Novick calls an “ideal observer” who sees the phenomenon from all possible viewpoints.⁶ To the degree that a historian’s own sympathies or antipathies limit his or her field of vision, objectivity is reduced.

The fall of objectivity entailed that a neutral position was regarded as methodologically unattainable, and any ambitions or illusions of such neutrality were deemed anathema as they served as a form of moral and political (self-)delusion. This applied not least to the notion that historians incarnated such neutrality themselves, or at least that it was conceivable that they could. The new ideal, which virtually became the hegemonic norm in disciplines such as labor history and women’s history, was that of engaged historiography, one that still adhered to general requirements to scholarly accountability and verifiability but where historians were aware of their political role. Instead of trying to conceal their political sympathies, historians should admit them, both to themselves and to their readers. In a short while, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the situation was turned on its head: whereas historians were previously seen as dubious if they articulated a clear, political stance, it was now the lack of such a stance that aroused suspicion. It is symptomatic that Ottar Dahl in a retrospective essay he wrote for the 1976 edition of his seminal work Grunntrekk i historieforskningens metodelære (Basic features of historical methodology) from the previous decade, felt the need to address the critics of positivism by referring their attention to antipositivist elements in his book. He also took a further cautious step: “If I, in regard to these points, were to make any concessions today to a more wide-ranging ‘anti-positivism,’ I would perhaps place greater emphasis on, for example, a positive connection between con-temporarily determined value engagement and topical selection.”⁷

This methodological somersault was not particularly endemic to the discipline of history or to Norway. On the contrary, the new ideals within the arts and humanities were only the disciplinary manifestations of a wider turnaround within the philosophy of science, where positivist-inspired notions of objectivity were attacked so vehemently that they fell, at least in the interpretive disciplines within the social sciences and the arts and humanities. But explaining such changes within the philosophy of science itself is an extremely difficult undertaking: How much is due to discipline-specific or wider academic trends, and how much is connected to changes in politics or society more in general? How much is the result of domestic thoughts and actions, and how much can be explained by diffusion or the importing of cultural impulses from abroad? I will hold off on the political angle and first content myself with pointing out two challenges within the philosophy of science that, linked to political and social changes, became more than postwar objectivism could withstand. The first assault came from the American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, whose The Structure of Scientific Revolutions from 1962 replaced the notion of science as a cumulative, objective activity with a notion of competing and incommensurable paradigms where the same set of facts could be used to support theories that contradicted one another.⁸ In hindsight, the impact of Kuhn’s work is comparable with a famous scene from the Viking Age Christianization of Norway, when Kolbein the Strong, upon the king’s orders, struck open an ancient, hollow wooden idol representing the Norse god Thor, and out poured mice, reptiles, and snakes: likewise, Kuhn’s single, mighty stroke obliterated the idol of science and laid bare the low creatures lurking therein, in the guise of all-too-human scientists engaging in at times truly petty quarrels and squabbles with one another.⁹ Extending the metaphor, we can say that Kuhn cut science down to size. What is paradoxical here is that Kuhn’s new paradigm was largely inconsequential for those natural sciences that his work, in fact, addressed. But in a wider context, especially within the social sciences and the humanities, Kuhn’s work played an enormous role given its implicit destabilization of the objectivity that the empirical ideal of science—including within the social sciences and the humanities—rested on.

The second primary assault took place on German soil, with the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer playing the lead. With his monumental Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method) from 1960, Gadamer laid the foundation for modern hermeneutics, at the same time torpedoing the notion of objectivity that characterized positivist-inspired empiricism.¹⁰ An essential point for Gadamer—one that is almost universally accepted by philosophers, not least within the so-called postpositivist philosophy of history of recent years—is that any description contains a subjective element, particularly so that any interpretation of a cultural manifestation (broadly understood) will depend on and vary with the interpreter.¹¹ We only have to carry this viewpoint a bit to the extreme for it to entail that events do not exist independently of the given viewer/describer. To be sure, things do in fact, happen, and that is in one sense an objective fact, but how such an event is understood and shaped into a comprehensible event, and which context this event is situated within, depends on the viewer/describer and is thus subjective.¹² This leads to certain consequential questions: How can an event be defined independently of the person describing the phenomenon? How can it be contextualized independently of the person doing the contextualizing? If objective descriptions (in the sense of descriptions that are independent of the describer) are impossible, so that phenomena can only be regarded under a description—implying that there are several valid descriptions of the exact same phenomenon (with a caveat concerning the problematic nature of the concept of “the exact same phenomenon”)—the foundation of objectivity is torn asunder.

The Norwegian spin-off of what has come to be known as the “positivism dispute,” which was primarily a disagreement among German postwar sociologists, is above all associated with the philosopher Hans Skjervheim.¹³ His most notable work, the essay “Deltakar og tilskodar” (Participant and spectator), was published in 1957 and has attained an iconic ...