Postmodernism for Historians

Callum G. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780582506046
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317869863
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Postmodernism is an essential approach to History. This is the first dedicated primer on postmodernism for the historian. It offers a step-by-step guide to postmodern theory, includes a guide to how historians have applied the theory, and provides a review of why its critics are wrong. In simple and clear language, it takes the reader through the chain of theory that developed in the 20th century to become now, in the early 21st century, the leading stimulant of new forms of research in History.

With separate chapters on The Sign, The Discourse, Post/Structuralism, The Text, The Self, and Morality, this book will encourage a new critical awareness of Theory when reading books of History, and when writing essays and dissertations. Armed with the principal ideas of Saussure, Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, the historians can formulate how to combine empirical History with the excitement of fresh perspectives and new skills, merged in the new moral impetus of the postmodern condition. Designed for the beginner this is the essential postmodern starting point.

Chapter 1

Empiricism

Empiricism of the late seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is the root of postmodernism. Out of the various phases of the Enlightenment came a philosophy of knowledge that is still extremely influential today. It defined our modern form of education and learning, created modern science and social science, and forged the academic discipline of History. This chapter explores it briefly, and how it has become the root of postmodernism.

Theory

Postmodernism is a critique of modernism. It is a reaction to the modernism of intellectual thought that dominated from around 1800 to 1960 – a period of dominance known as modernity. As major philosophical positions, modernism and postmodernism are opposites as ying and yang. There is much in modernism that postmodernism denies, subverts and inverts (as we shall see). Equally, though, there is much from modernism that is adopted by postmodernism. Most of what postmodernism takes from modernism can be described as the empiricist skill-base. Equally, most of what postmodernism criticises in modernism may be described as empiricist philosophy. This seems at first to be confusing, but it is readily explained.

The Enlightenment

The pre-modern world before c.1600 had been composed of ranks and orders, of feudal and Christian hierarchies that defined God and Christ above kings and queens, who in turn ruled over the people. All of society was arranged in layers in which each person owed allegiance to those above. Premodern knowledge itself had been perceived in the same way – in layers of authority. Information was understood in terms of layers in which access to knowledge was privileged, with the top privilege belonging to God and to monarchs. Knowledge was divine, God-given, as was the right to govern. Knowledge reflected society by being understood in terms of layers.

This system of knowledge started to break down in the early Enlightenment (c.1650 – 1770), known to some scholars as the Classical period of thought. This redefined European civilisation by a new intellectual, social and moral movement. Its very name, ‘Enlightenment’, describes a coming out of darkness into light, a movement from ignorance and superstition to the light of knowledge and benevolence. The revolution in knowledge accelerated during the later Enlightenment (c.1770 – c.1830). It is the impact of this later Enlightenment that is critical to understanding the heritage of the Enlightenment, and the eventual emergence of postmodernism. After the Enlightenment came a period referred to by postmodernists (and many others) as ‘modernity’. It lasted from about 1800 to about 1960. Modernity was a period in which the system of knowledge promoted by the Enlightenment came to dominate, though filtered through political and religious movements and ideals which adapted to its modes of thinking. In total, the history of the West was dominated for over 200 years by the Enlightenment and its heritage. We must spend a few moments considering what postmodernists identify as the key characteristics of the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment created a new centre of intellectual life erected upon a concern for rationality. Rationality was a system of thinking based on empiricism – discovering reality (or the truth) – then applying reason to derive conclusions and further new thoughts from that knowledge.

Box 1.1 Rationality/empiricism

Rationality is the system of reasoning by logic, usually induction (from example to generalisation). The system attained an iconic status within the Enlightenment as embodying the basis of scientific method in all forms of human inquiry (including History), banishing myth and superstition, and having moral attributes in defining the functionalist tolerance of the modern democratic state.

Within rationality, empiricism is the system of acquiring knowledge in cognitive terms, checking sources and preparing them for study (with which postmodernists agree). Separately, it is a philosophy of knowledge that posits that cognitive empirical method gains access to a reality and to incontrovertible truth at the level of interpretation (with which postmodernists do not agree).

Where previously intellectual life had presented knowledge as a revelation emanating from religion (the Christian religion, to whose God knowledge was submissive), the Enlightenment emphasised that science had an empirical independence from religious ideas. From seventeenth-century pioneers of new science like Galileo and Newton can be traced early beginnings of modern notions of God-free science based on observation, experimentation and inductive reasoning – a formula for defining science that reached a high standing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This extended well beyond science to apply reason in philosophy (as represented by men like Voltaire, Rousseau and Hume), political science (as represented by Locke) and in History (by Vico). New notions of constitutional government, of human rights (including toleration of difference) and of democracy were to grow from the same intellectual roots. More broadly, a new humanist morality was to emerge from Enlightenment thought, and to keep developing. This was a morality that emphasised the educative power of reason (rather than the shackling power of a vengeful state) to transform the individual (especially the young, the deviant, the criminal, the insane and the disabled). This was achieved by means of the state’s corrective power in the form of its new medical and intellectual apparatuses. The individual citizen was called upon in this system of knowledge to adopt an internal rationality to guide behaviour and morality – a rationality that could be discerned from history (the past) as much as from God.

So, justification by historical knowledge became a substitute for justification by divine knowledge. This was a two-stage process. The early Enlightenment eroded hierarchies of knowledge by its characteristic classification and ordering of knowledge in alphabetical encyclopaedias. The later Enlightenment after c.1770 moved on to arranging knowledge in narratives, and especially in the form of historical narratives. This was pioneered especially by Giambattista Vico (1688–1744) who argued for a universal history that every nation passed through (sometimes repeatedly), composed of three periods of human development (the ages of gods, heroes and men) – a theory of historical rather than eternal human nature, separating the historical from the physical sciences. This was a major intellectual breach with the pre-modern world of ranks and orders, and a breach from the early Enlightenment’s obsession with encyclopaedic ordering.

This signalled the arrival of History (the subject) on the scene as central to the intellectual system of modernity. This happened for two main reasons. Firstly, History provided the empirical evidence from the past for the origins of things under investigation. Instead of understanding things according to their place within rank orders, we could understand all manner of scientific or governmental issues by knowing what had gone before. A history of something, be it science or humanity, conferred authority, substance and a justification. This is still a powerful notion in our contemporary world. But secondly, History underlay the Enlightenment because of the centrality of the notion of progress – of the upward movement of mankind from primitive states to civilised states, and the belief that the present state was the best that there had ever been. This optimistic certainty in the upward trajectory of history is known as whig History.

Underlying the History that was promoted by Enlightenment thought in modernity from 1800 to 1960 was the idea of reality. The Enlightenment promoted the idea that all of science and learning was devoted to the discovery of reality. Man might not know the whole of this reality, but he knew some of it, and he could (and probably would) discover the rest of it in time. This reality ranged widely and was the object of research in many fields. It was to be found in astronomy, science and medicine (in all of which Enlightenment scientists were busy at work) and in economics (where the laws of economics were discerned by people like Adam Smith and David Ricardo). In demography Thomas Malthus contributed to discerning laws of population growth and the factors that retarded it. In what became known as sociology, human society started to be understood in terms of structures (like social class and gender) by which the impact of economic and demographic change might account for how society was evolving. In psychology, doctors started to claim province over not just the body but also the mind, where they discerned a ‘normal’ mind to be admired and an ‘abnormal’ mind that could be cured.

From this discoverable reality, social science and modern government emerged. Civil servants started to apply the best of this new knowledge to the problems of good management of state institutions and social conditions (especially in industrial cities). Social scientists developed new professions (like that of social worker) and techniques, with which to apply the new knowledge in the solution of practical problems. Society started to be managed by a rationality based on knowledge. In this way, knowledge became ‘useful’, or what is known as ‘applied’ – meaning that it had application to real problems. Our modern world became based on professions and institutions founded on the expansion of knowledge, the circulation of applied skills, and the dissemination of belief in the rational solution of all human problems.

Rationality implied an ‘empiricist method’. This was the collection of evidence by meticulous research, good recording, and minute concern for the origins and authenticity of every item of information. The good researcher took notes of where information came from, and wrote this up in reports with footnotes and bibliographies. One consequence of this was the temptation to prioritise empiricism – the collection and ordering of ‘facts’ – above all other activities in rational reasoning. Facts could become an obsession of the observer. In this way, there was a strong sense in which modernism characterised the search for knowledge as a virtuous exercise, and objectivity and neutrality became seen as the virtuous characteristics of the inquirer. Moral certainty became attached to ‘facts’, and reference to ‘facts’ became a clincher in argument and debate. (One that is heard today is the notion of ‘good science’ as an irrefutable basis for decisionmaking in government.) In the Enlightenment system, ‘knowledge’ became envisioned as practical, purposeful and virtuous, contributing to a know- able and discoverable central reality. Ironically, many Christian clergy became the most fierce advocates and practitioners of ‘knowledge’ collection in the eighteenth century. They joined scientists, doctors and social scientists in promoting local history, archaeology, vaccination against illness, and modern learning. In this way, most Christian churches sought to reposition and modernise themselves in the age of the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment privileged scientific method in all branches of human endeavour. It set in train the development of modern universities, education, government, discovery (of this world and the cosmos) and the modern tolerant Christian religion. The Enlightenment shaped key western concepts of democracy, tolerance, liberal values, freedom of conscience, and free-market economics. The law, justice and punishment became judged by new ‘rational’ measures that abhorred absolutist monarchy (because of its inefficiency, absurdity and lack of reasoned justification) and pre-modern Christian religion (because of its irrationality, intolerance and barbarity). In this sense, the Enlightenment made modern Europe. It was decent, logical and reasonable. It made much of the modern world in its own image.

However, the Enlightenment is not a blame-free territory. Later in this chapter we shall approach the postmodernist criticisms of it.

Empiricism and history

At the root of the modernist system of knowledge lies empiricism. Empiricism is seen to be a simple, common-sense method of objectivity and fact-collection in which all knowledge has to be proven before it can be accepted. It rejects a priori knowledge (that is, knowledge that is assumed to exist without any proof being required). It relies solely on experience (or observation or reading) of knowledge. When combined with inductive reasoning, it allows the scholar to move from particular bits of knowledge (cases) to generalisations (conclusions). This process involves an awareness of the past. Everything in science, nature and human experience is to be understood by discovering and appreciating the history of everything – of words, things, the planet, the animals, the history of human societies and individuals. As the later Enlightenment overtook the earlier, it allowed History (the subject) to replace the divine order of things, and allowed the historical narrative to replace the encyclopaedia.

An immediate consequence was the raised status of the narrative. Until the eighteenth century, the writing of History had been taken to be akin to the writing of novels or poetry. Indeed, much of the History written in the mediaeval and early-modern periods was written either in the form of a novel, or in poetic form. History was seen in many ways as a creative and an artistic exercise using oral tradition and folk tales. Indeed, in premodernity many felt that there had been no essential difference drawn between recounting History and recounting fiction. This changed, however. For the new breed of Enlightenment empiricists, pre-modern History-writing had been fictive rather than, as it was to become prized in modernity, ‘factual’. So, History was changed by the Enlightenment into the task of observation (through reading documents and interpreting artefacts), and constructing logical and consistent general conclusions about what happened in the past. Being an historian came to be seen as being a scientist of the past. As J.B. Bury, Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, declared in his inaugural lecture in 1903: ‘History is a science, no less and no more.’¹

To meet this requirement in the new History discipline, the historical narrative had to meet exacting standards. An historian’s writing-up leads from the state of existing knowledge through the new facts to a new conclusion. If passed by the acceptance of other historians through a process known as peer review, the new conclusion enters the body of known knowledge to form, in turn, the starting point for the next historian. Differences of interpretation arise and are resolved by judgement of the most relevant facts and the most plausible explanation of them. The professionalism of the historian is judged on these abilities. Their earliest exponent, Leopold von Ranke, regarded the historian as being in ‘a struggle with documents’. He summed up the task of the historian in the preface of his first book. This has been translated as: ‘To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire: it wants only to show what actually happened.’ A second version of the translation is that the History book ‘merely wants to show how, essentially, things happened’.² What became seen as an empiricist historical method emerged from the example he set, emphasising the testing of primary sources for forgery and internal consistency, comparing accounts, and challenging older histories based on memory, folk-wisdom or literary tradition without records written by reliable (usually upper-class or government) people. The more primary sources used, the more reliable the History, leading to what one postmodernist historian, Alun Munslow, has termed the reconstructionist approach to the past – the use of sources to reconstruct the past as near as possible to its ‘real’ condition.

With empiricist method placed central to historical skills, the historian was raised to the status of a trained professional, free as far as possible of bias, prejudice and ideology, aiming to understand the past in its own terms. The History-writings produced in this tradition tended to focus on power – meaning political, administrative, military and diplomatic history. History became about great men, few women, and was limited as a subject to areas which mattered and which had significant ‘reliable’ written records (from elite sources, generally). The past was conceived by most practitioners as an upward movement of mankind (and I mean mankind) to reach a present that was close to perfect. This made the History subject parallel with evolutionary sciences like geology and Darwinian biology. Man was evolving to a better, finer state, and that state was to be measured in terms of governments, c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Empiricism
• 2. Sign
• 3. Discourse
• 4. Poststructuralism
• 5. Text
• 6. Self
• 7. Morality
• 8. Criticism of postmodernism in History
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Further reading
• Web links
• Index