Historical Theory

Mary Fulbrook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134680788
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Practising historians claim that their accounts of the past are something other than fiction, myth or propaganda. Yet there are significant challenges to this view, most notably from postmodernism. In Historical Theory, a prominent historian develops a highly original argument that evaluates the diversity of approaches to history and points to a constructive way forward.

Mary Fulbrook argues that all historians face key theoretical questions, and that an emphasis on the facts alone is not enough. Against postmodernism, she argures that historical narratives are not simply inventions imposed on the past, and that some answers to historical questions are more plausible or adequate than others.

Illustrated with numerous substantive examples and its focus is always on the most central theoretical issues and on real strategies for bridging the gap between the traces of the past and the interpretations of the present. Historical Theory is essential and enlightening reading for all historians and their students.

Part I

INTERPRETATIONS: APPROACHES TO HISTORY

1
INTRODUCTION

Reading certain theoretical works of the past few decades, one might be forgiven for thinking that until the later twentieth century, everybody had agreed that historical accounts were simply accepted as True Stories containing Important Facts about Things Which Really Happened. History was, at least since the more scientistic turn of the twentieth century, a discipline quite distinct from literature. Literature was about things that had not happened, and history was about things that had. Literature was about imagination and invention; history was about telling the truth. Historians wrote about facts, to be clearly distinguished from fiction and myth. And, on this allegedly traditional view, historians were trained to do it properly, objectively; using appropriate sources and methodology (known by critics as ‘source fetishism’), with appropriate time spent sweating in the archives (‘archive positivism’), their results could be trusted. Then along came some theoretically sophisticated postmodernists, much influenced by French post-structuralism, who mounted a mortal attack on this happy picture of historians earnestly in pursuit of truth. With the ‘linguistic turn’, history dissolved into relativist discourse; the ‘truth’ could not only never be known, but was indeed itself merely an article of faith. Historical works were essentially fictions written in realist mode, with conventions such as quotations from sources and scholarly footnotes serving to bolster the reality effect. Meanwhile, however, the vast majority of practising historians ignored the unintelligible theorists, and simply got on with the job of reconstructing the past; and their readers continued to read their books as if they had something interesting and accurate to say about the past.

Of course such widespread agreement on the nature of history never existed. Differences over the character of history as a discipline for acquiring knowledge of the past are hardly a recent development. Debates over approaches to knowledge, understanding and explanation in the historical and social sciences have been going on for generations, indeed centuries.¹ Recent skirmishes over postmodernism have merely added some new twists to old scepticisms. In the context of current debates, I seek in this book to argue a case for historical knowledge as distinctively different from fiction or propaganda, but to argue this without falling into a naïve empiricism resting on a simplistic appeal to ‘the facts’. I seek to explore the extent to which historical knowledge can in some sense be ‘true’, testable, capable of progress within certain parameters; the extent to which, and the bases on which, there will remain fundamental and irresolvable differences of approach and assumptions among different historical communities; and the extent to which the human imagination and capacity for inter-subjective communication have roles to play in bringing knowledge of aspects of the past to different audiences in an ever-changing present.

My underlying premise is that theory is fundamental to historical investigation and representation. Part of my aim in this book is to raise certain theoretical issues to the attention of those who remain relatively blind to the importance of theory in history. All history writing is, whether historians acknowledge this or not, an intrinsically theoretical as well as empirical enterprise. There are historians who consciously claim to be theoretical – who claim that their work is informed by explicit bodies of theoretical debate such as Marxism, structuralism, discourse theory, or feminism. And there are historians who, in contrast, claim to be simply ‘doing history’, exploring the archives, trying to find out as best they can ‘what really happened’ or ‘how it really was’. Implicitly they, too, are working within bodies of assumptions of which they may be more or less aware: assumptions about what is already ‘common knowledge’, assumptions about how best to pose and frame the questions guiding their inquiry, assumptions about what to look for and where to look for it, assumptions about how to define who are the key historical actors (social classes, ‘great men’?), and assumptions about what would constitute satisfactory answers to their questions. These often hidden, implicit assumptions are as much bodies of theory as are the concepts and strategies of those operating within an explicitly theoretical ‘-ism’.

This book is thus about the ways in which all historical writing is inevitably theoretical. It is not about ‘history and theory’, as though the latter were in effect an optional add-on; such an approach is based in a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of historical inquiry, as though ‘history’ could simply choose whether or not to ‘borrow’ theories and concepts from cognate disciplines in the social sciences, such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, geography, or economics. As I hope to show, even the most wilfully ‘a-theoretical’ historians actually operate – and have to operate – within a framework of theoretical assumptions and strategies. Nor is the book about particular ‘theories of history’, ‘theoretical approaches to history’, or substantive historical controversies. There have been many such books, serving to introduce readers to particular bodies of debate and controversy; I take these as given and have no desire to seek to replicate the often excellent surveys and introductions to particular approaches to history or bodies of substantive historical work.² Finally, the book is not in the nature of an introductory methodological survey, however sophisticated, where again there are a number of useful primers.³ This book is, rather, about the intrinsically theoretical nature of historical investigation and representation. More particularly, it seeks to explore and come to a view on two specific issues which have concerned and puzzled me over a long period of time, and it is written in the context of a more general challenge to the nature of history.

The two major issues which puzzle or bother me may be put quite simply, although it is far harder to work through to a satisfactory solution of the questions they raise. I have in part written this book because I wanted to work out an answer to the conundrums they pose. The first issue is precisely that of the multiplicity of theoretical approaches to historical investigation referred to above. If we believe that historical investigation is the pursuit of true accounts of selected aspects of the past, and yet we have competing accounts of the same phenomenon – for example, Marxist and non-Marxist accounts of the origins of the French Revolution, or ‘functionalist’ and ‘intentionalist’ accounts of the genesis of the Holocaust – is there some way of deciding between them on grounds that are not purely rooted in political, moral, aesthetic or personal preferences and prejudices? How, in other words, do we deal with the plethora of competing theoretical approaches or ‘paradigms’ of historical inquiry? The second issue is closely related to this. If we (want to?) believe that historical investigation is the pursuit of truth about the past, and yet competing paradigms seem to be closely related to particular positions on the political spectrum – left-wing, radical, conservative and so on – what, if anything, is left of notions of ‘value-freedom’ or ‘objectivity’? Should such notions be simply jettisoned as intrinsically unattainable, even undesirable, and replaced with a wilfully situated, partisan notion of historical inquiry? But what then – if anything – distinguishes history from myth, ideology, propaganda? What is left of a notion of history as the pursuit of truth about the past?

The more general context of current debate is that of the new twists provided by postmodernist challenges to long-running controversies about relativism, radical scepticism, and the possibility of saying anything at all about the past which is not in some sense fictional, constructed, contestable, unstable, incapable of any form of rational verification (if only in the sense of being in principle open to falsification). In the past few decades, a number of scholars have brought insights from linguistics and literary theory to bear on history, seeking to argue that history is in some senses merely another form of fiction. These challenges have taken several different forms: some postmodernists argue that we can never really know anything about the ‘past as such’; others concede that individual factual statements about the past may be true, but hold that the infinity of possible ways in which we can ‘emplot’ individual facts into coherent narratives, or ‘impose’ stories on the past, indicates that historical interpretations are essentially constructions in the present, not – as traditional historians would claim – reconstructions of the past.

The debates about postmodernism have recently provoked a number of quite heated responses, many of which seem to me not to deal adequately with the issues raised by the more serious postmodernist theorists. A thread running through this book, therefore, will be that of responses to postmodernism. But I do this alongside trying to grapple with what seem to me the more fundamental questions raised by the issues of paradigms and politics mentioned above. I seek to provide a view of historical investigation as a matter of collective and theoretically informed inquiries into selected aspects of the past, in which it is possible to make ‘progress’, at least within given parameters of inquiry, and to be clear about the roots of or bases for residual differences in fundamental – metatheoretical – assumptions.

It seems to me that part of the problem lies in the way in which recent debates have become unnecessarily polarised, both in terms of substance and in terms of tempers. While empiricists tend to focus on the evidence of past reality, driven by a degree of optimism about their capacity to evaluate and make good use of that evidence, postmodernists tend to focus rather on issues relating to the lability and unrootedness of current representations of that past (whether or not they have much faith in the ‘evidence’). The two barely meet. In particular, postmodernists tend to emphasise heavily the gap between an essentially unknowable past and an imposed (and, it is often implied, almost arbitrarily constructed) representation in the present, while empiricists often tend almost to ignore the character of this gap altogether. Meanwhile, walls of values separate a variety of general approaches from one another, less on theoretical or empirical grounds than on political and personal ones. There has been a relatively widespread temptation to be content with simple assertion, enumeration or juxtaposition of opposing views. This book seeks to analyse the nature of the gap between the ‘facts’ and empirical traces of the past, so heavily emphasised by empiricists, and the constructions, interpretations or even ‘fictions’ of the present on which postmodernists tend to lay most emphasis. The gap, I believe, can be bridged only by developing a degree of theoretical awareness.

The facts of the matter?

Why do these issues matter? Why bother our heads with often abstruse theory? Should not historians simply ‘get on with the job’, rather than engaging in introspective examination of their own enterprise; should they not leave theorising to intellectual historians and philosophers who, by not engaging in the hard slog of substantive research, have the luxury of time to spare for such ruminations? Many practising historians arguably share Geoffrey Elton’s ‘suspicion that a philosophic concern with such problems as the reality of historical knowledge or the nature of historical thought only hinders the practice of history’.⁴ By and large, probably a majority of historians persuade themselves that postmodernist positions, in particular, are rather extreme and need not be taken seriously, although views vary as to whether there is a real threat or not. Lawrence Stone’s beleaguered perception of a ‘crisis of self-confidence’ among practising historians, and his fear that history might become ‘an endangered species’, are disputed by postmodernist Patrick Joyce, who suggests that, at least in Britain, ‘rank indifference rather than outright hostility’ is ‘the dominant response’.⁵ Would it not be better, then, just to turn to practical manuals of ‘how to do it’, guides to ‘source criticism’ and the like?

There are several reasons why answers to perennial questions about the nature of history matter, and should matter even for those historians who think they can ignore such questions. Most historians make at least an implicit claim for some degree of truth value for what they are saying. They are generally viewed by the public as ‘experts’ whose accounts should be distinct from, and superior to, those of myth-mongers, propagandists, pleaders for special interests. Those historians with paid positions in the education system and in what may be termed the ‘public history’ industry bear a degree of public responsibility and accountability for the ways in which they spend their time. Lay readers on the whole turn to the works of historians with the assumption that they have some expectation of (to use the much-cited quotation from Ranke) finding out ‘how it really was’: not how someone imagined it might have been, with a combination of inspiration, invention, rhetoric on the one hand, and selection, exploitation and collation of the flotsam and jetsam of surviving ‘evidence’ on the other; nor how someone would prefer one to think it had been, in order to argue a political or moral case for one side or another in a particular controversy, or to construct an acceptable identity in which a previously underprivileged or marginalised group can take pride.

Yet the very plurality of approaches in history suggests that there is in fact no single disciplinary approach: that ‘history’ actually only refers to the subject matter – that which has gone, the past – and not to a distinctive set of theories and methodologies. Even what is worthy of constituting an object of inquiry in the past is itself often a matter of controversy: for example, the narrow definitions of their subject matter by historians of high politics have increasingly come under fire from those who view other aspects of human experience as being equally valid or at least potentially illuminating objects of study. But also, and more importantly: if mutually competing accounts are produced, from different theoretical (or political, or personal) perspectives, of the same phenomenon in the past, and there appears to be no rational – or at least mutually agreed – means of adjudicating between these approaches, then what is the status of any notion of historical truth? Are not the competing accounts simply acts of faith? If there is no agreement on the character of the phenomena to be studied, then what has become of a ‘discipline’ which cannot even agree on its object of inquiry, let alone any mode of interpretation or explanation?

A familiar, if somewhat extreme, example will serve to illustrate some of the basic issues. In Nazi Germany, around six million people were murdered on grounds of ‘race’, politics, religious belief, or alleged physical ‘inferiority’ (the Nazi notion of ‘life unworthy of living’, lebensunwertes Leben). There are an almost infinite variety of ways of trying to recount and represent this horror – none of them, arguably, adequate to its reconstruction and explanation. Any notion of history writing as mimesis – an accurate reproduction of the past in its entirety, or in its ‘essence’ – instantly breaks down in face of this tragedy. This extreme example also presents an extreme challenge to notions of history as rational explanation in terms of a complex combination of causes under particular circumstances, or as interpretive understanding of the motives of actors. Even the very construction of a single explanandum – the Holocaust – rests on the assumption that millions of different individual acts of brutality and murder, scattered across different parts of a continent over an extended period of years, can be brought together under a single conceptual heading positing some unity and cohesion to these disparate events. As such, constructions and interpretations of the Holocaust would appear to give important fodder to the postmodernist case.⁶

Those historians coming from an essentially empiricist position would place primary emphasis on empirical accuracy. It is of course important to ensure that ‘the facts’ are correct – as illustrated in the notorious libel case brought (and lost) by David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt and the publisher of her book on revisionist interpretations of the Holocaust, Penguin Books. The facts are clearly essential building blocks in the development of historical accounts. But investigating history is about more than simply digging up ‘true facts’ about the past, and jettisoning false assertions or exposing fraudulent misrepresentation. Even a very brief glance at historical controversies over Nazi Germany will reveal that there are a wide range of positions which may be held by historians who do pay appropriate respect to the evidence. There is, for example, the so-called ‘intentionalist/functionalist’ controversy over the way in which Nazi racism developed into mass genocide, with major differences in theoretical assumptions between those placing primary emphasis on Hitler’s intentions, on the one hand, and those explaining increasing radicalisation in terms of the way the regime functioned, on the other.⁷ A quite different approach is developed by those such as Daniel Goldhagen, who effectively resurrects older notions of ‘national character’ by positing some form of German collective mentality characterised by ‘eliminationist anti-semitism’ persisting over centuries.⁸ Similarly, in explaining Hitler’s rise to power, there are worlds of theoretical difference between those who emphasise long-term structural features such as Germany’s alleged ‘special path’ to modernity, or Sonderweg; those who put a heavy explanatory burden on the medium-term consequences of Germany’s defeat in the First World War and the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, or the weak structure and development of the Weimar economy; those who lay primary emphasis on the alleged charisma of Hitler, coming as it were out of nowhere; or those who highlight the political narrative of short-term decisions and mistakes of individual politicians in the closing years of Weimar democracy. Thus, even among historians with a serious respect for the evidence, the self-same historical facts can be emplotted in many different kinds of narrative.

Thus, while an emphasis on empirical evidence, and on the skills of critical evaluation and interpretation of sources, is highly important, it is not in itself sufficient as an argument for history being more than ideology or myth, a belief system akin to any other. This is the somewhat unsatisfactory position which, at heart, Richard J. Evans’ In Defence of History boils down to.⁹ I agree with Evans that it is essential to get the facts right. But I do not think that he has dealt adequately with related arguments about varieties of possible ways of emplotting the same facts. Nor is it sufficient to say that there may be many perspectives on a phenomenon, all potentially of equal value, as some other commentators argue. Historical knowledge and interpretations are too important an aspect of our lives for us to rest content with a view that history is all ‘just perspectival’, or that, essentially, ‘anything goes’ and that evaluation is more a matter of where one’s political sympathies lie than of the (essentially unattainable) ‘truth’ of any given account. Oddly, Ludmilla Jordanova’s recent account, History in Practice, combines both these views. She places a great deal of emphasis on the essentially ‘common sense’ skills of the practitioner, and brushes off very lightly the problem of personal moral and political sympathies, simply acknowledging and accepting these as an element in adjudicating competing accounts. This is also the central problem with the attempt to rescue some notion of truth presented by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacobs, in Telling the Truth about History.¹⁰ Their essentially whiggish (though transposed to American history) account of the development of historical approaches culminates in the proposal that we should simply celebrate a democratic, multi-cultural, multi-perspectival, pluralism of historical approaches without seriously addressing the – still – relativist implications of this view, which (if taken to its logical conclusion, which they fail to do) would imply that only political sympathies can ultimately adjudicate between ‘better’ (= underdog, enabling, empowering, e...