The Postmodernist Challenge to History

Richard J. Evans
Ever since history started to be written, historians have reflected on the theories and methods with which they approach the past, and the possibilities and limitations of acquiring reliable knowledge about it. From the ancient Greek historian Thucydides to historical scholars of the Enlightenment and the Romantic periods such as Edward Gibbon and Leopold von Ranke, they have maintained in different ways a fundamental distinction between history and myth, objective knowledge about the past and poetic reinventions of it, historical fact and historical fiction.
In the last quarter of the 20th century, however, this distinction was challenged by a number of writers and thinkers, mainly from the disciplines of literary and linguistic studies. Taking their cue from French linguistic theories grouped generally under the label of ‘poststructuralism’, these writers have argued that since the human mind understood everything through the medium of language, everything could be regarded, in some sense, as a text. Nothing, indeed, could be shown to exist outside texts. Moreover, the language of which texts were composed bore no demonstrable, direct relation to the concepts of the things to which it referred; it took its meaning from the linguistic context around it. Thus for example chien no more suggested in itself a meat-eating, social, four-legged, barking animal than did dog or Hund—the word in question was only understood to have such a reference because it formed part of a larger system of words, a language. This system of meanings was not fixed, however. On the contrary, it was reinvented every time a text was read. Meaning in a text was thus constituted by the reader, not by the author, whose purposes and intentions in writing it were more or less irrelevant.
The implications of such ideas for the study of history are radical indeed. If meaning is put into a text by the reader, then historical texts—the sources on which all historical scholarship has traditionally depended—have no meaning apart from what the historian puts into them. Thus historians do not discover anything about the past; they simply invent it. One historian’s view is therefore as good as another’s; there are no reliable criteria for assessing which of two opposing historical interpretations of, say, the French Revolution is correct. The point and purpose, and indeed the only possibility, of history as a subject is thus to study historians; about the past itself we can know nothing, since it is gone.
These arguments have proved widely influential in the growing specialist area of historical theory and historiography. They have also had a vaguer but none the less clearly discernible influence on the study of history itself. In an encyclopedia such as this one, for example, far more space is devoted to presenting and discussing changing or rival interpretations of past events than would have been the case in an encyclopedia written half a century ago, when interpretations were presented as unquestionably established facts and arguments as unassailable empirical knowledge.
Moreover, these ideas have encouraged the belief among many historians, especially in the United States, that the concept of historical objectivity is a myth invented by ruling groups or classes in society in order to suppress alternative versions of the past that express the aspirations of oppressed minorities. Women will have a different view of the past from men, African-Americans from White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, gays and lesbians from heterosexuals, and so on; and far from it being the case that one of these views is true and the other false, the fact is that each of them is true according to the perspective from which it is seen: African-Americans have their truth about the American past, for example, just as White Anglo-Saxon Protestants have theirs. The only criteria for choosing between these different views are aesthetic and above all political.
Put in this extreme way, however, such views are obviously self-contradictory. To begin with, presumably all poststructuralists believe that their own view of language, history, and truth is true and correct, not just from their own perspective but in a generally valid sense. They maintain, for example, that the view that there is a clear distinction between history and fiction is a false view. In order to maintain this position, they must concede that there are such things as truth and falsehood that are independent of any perspective. Once the principle of truth is conceded, it follows that there must be criteria by which truth can be distinguished from falsehood, in history as in everything else; criteria such as, for example, whether or not a proposition fits the evidence to which it applies.
The evidence would seem to suggest, moreover, that language did not evolve arbitrarily, but in an attempt to describe the real world; and that there are real limits to the possible interpretations that will fit the evidence of the language assembled in a given historical text. Thus, for example, if a text written by some European monarch in the 17th century states that he is not going to do something, a reading of the text that argues that it states that he is going to do it is, to say the least, highly implausible. The documents, in other words, have a kind of right of veto over what the historian can say. They impose the limits within which historical argument and interpretation have to remain if they are not to stray beyond the bounds of historical objectivity. Such limits do not exist in the worlds of poetry and fiction, where authors can write more or less what they like in order to achieve a satisfying aesthetic effect.
Historians do not normally use the evidence of the past simply to shore up the ideas and interpretations they bring to it. On the contrary, the evidence is used to test these ideas and interpretations and to discard them if they do not fit, or amend them and modify them until some kind of defensible fit is achieved, by which time they have often become virtually unrecognizable. If you simply ransack the documentary record left by the past to support a political argument in the present, then what you are writing is not history, but propaganda.
Presumably, in fact, historians writing from, say, an African-American perspective do not simply believe that what they are writing is as valid as what White Anglo-Saxon Protestant historians are writing, but no more so; they believe, on the contrary, that they are right and those whose views they criticize are wrong, and that there are objective criteria by which the issues at stake can be resolved. Moreover, once the floodgates of total relativism are opened, they cannot be closed against ideas we do not like. If everything is true according to the perspective from which it is seen, then how can we refute racist or fascist views of the past? How indeed can we refute the ugly phenomenon of Holocaust denial, the belief that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz and that there was no systematic extermination of the Jews by the Nazis during World War II, if not by an appeal to criteria of evidence that transcend perspectives of any kind? In the libel action fought by David Irving, a British historian, against the American academic Deborah Lipstadt in the British High Court early in the year 2000 over the latter's accusation that Irving was a Holocaust denier who falsified history, the defence won precisely on the basis of a close examination of Irving's writings that demonstrated he had inserted into quotes from documents words that were not in the original, relied on sources he knew to be forged because they supported his point of view, suppressed passages in texts that were inconvenient for his argument, and in general doctored the historical record in the interests of his political views, which the judge affirmed to be racist and extremist. If we were unable to identify the manipulation and falsification of historical sources in this way, on the grounds that we can read into them whatever we like, then refuting Holocaust deniers would be impossible.
In practice, too, it has often been the case that when challenged, writers of poststructuralist texts have alleged that they are being misunderstood, misinterpreted, or misrepresented. In taking this stance they are in effect stating that authors do have some control over the way their work is read, and that the meaning of the texts they write is put there by themselves rather than by their readers; otherwise they would have no grounds for saying that some readings of their texts are correct and others are not. And if texts of this kind are only susceptible of a limited number of legitimate interpretations, then why not the texts left to us by the past as well?
If the poststructuralist critique of history is so self-contradictory, then why did it become so widespread in the late 20th century? Answers to this question can only be speculative. Poststructuralism places enormous power in the hands of the interpreter, the critic, and the reader, and perhaps this compensates for the loss of real power and influence which academics, and above all left-leaning academics, have experienced over the last quarter of the 20th century. Clearly, too, the spread of poststructuralist ideas has coincided with the decline and fall of Marxism, as the notion of the laws of historical progress towards a socialist future has become steadily more questionable, to be decisively discredited by the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-90.
Here, however, we can also find a stimulating and beneficial aspect of the impact of poststructuralism on historical studies. By emphasizing language, discourse, and textuality, it has successfully challenged the widespread assumption, shared by many non-Marxist historians as well as by Marxists of various kinds, that historical causation worked upwards, as it were, from economy and society through to politics and culture. Instead it has liberated historians to look at causation in a more complex and fruitful way, to take beliefs and ideologies seriously on their own terms, and to treat culture as a causative factor in history in its own right.
It has also led to a mass of exciting new work in cultural history, not least by directing historians’ attention away from the search for the progress of reason in society and towards the attempt to understand the irrational, the marginal, and the strange in the past. It has put a question-mark under the social historian’s obsession with quantities and averages and let back the individual into history, the ordinary individual, that is, the representative, or emblematic, or indeed the eccentric and the peculiar individual, not the “great man” so beloved of the mainstream political historians of the past.
These developments can be seen as part of a broader reorientation of historical studies towards the end of the 20th century. Theories, whether Marxist or non-Marxist (such as modernization theory) which measured everything in the past according to whether it furthered or impeded progress towards economic prosperity, political democracy, and equality of social opportunity, have been sharply challenged as the costs of economic progress have become clearer, from environmental degradation to social alienation. Class, whether based on economic position or social consciousness, has given way to a more complex mode of social cleavage, including gender, religion, national identity, and sexual orientation, none of which can easily be shown to be based purely or even principally on economic factors.
History in this postmodern mode has become a multifaceted discipline in which the old priorities of the political, the economic, and the social no longer obtain. Historians now study a staggering variety of subjects, from love and hate to smell and taste, from health and sickness to madness and fear, from childhood to old age, from water to smoke, from crime and justice to sex and pleasure, from tiny villages to great cities, from obscure individuals to huge collectivities, from seemingly irrational folk-beliefs to constructs of collective memory and forgetting. History has always been a diverse subject, but the sheer range of its concerns at the beginning of the 21st century is surely unprecedented.
All these are positive developments that have been greatly accelerated by the advent of postmodernism, of which poststructuralist theory is merely one among many different aspects. Many historians have greeted the spread of extreme scepticism and relativism about historical knowledge with alarm and even despair, but it too can be turned to good advantage, if it is treated as a challenge to historians to rethink the way they do things and the theories of knowledge on which their work implicitly rests.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ankersmit, Frank, and Kellner, Hans, eds. A New Philosophy of History. London: Reaktion Books, 1995. Collection of papers advocating poststructuralist approaches to the problem of historical knowledge.
Berkhofer, Robert F. Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. Intelligent exposition of moderate postmodernist position.
Evans, Richard J. In Defense of History. New York: W. W. Norton and Sons, 1999. Revised edition of book first published in England in 1997 (pbk, Granta Books, 1998).
Iggers, Georg G. Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge. Hanover, N. H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1997. Lucid account of the development of historiography in a number of Western countries.
Jenkins, Keith, ed. The Postmodern History Reader. London: Routledge, 1997. Useful collection of extracts and texts on postmodernist theories of history.
Lehman, David. Signs of the Times. Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. London:
André Deutsch, 1991. Highly readable account of poststructuralism and critique of its implications. McCullagh, C. Behan. The Truth of History. London: Routledge, 1998. Reasoned defence of history against extreme postmodernist relativism. Novick,
Peter. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Outstanding accounts of what American historians have thought about historical objectivity. Spitzer,
Alan B. Historical Truth and Lies about the Past. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1996. Case-studies in postmodernism and historical objectivity.
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