66

CONSTRUCTIONISM

In re ce n t years, the self-critical m om entani o f lh s historical profession has been njai^ taincc by fem inist historians caliing on the profession to recognize the contributions.and the separate needs of w oraen throughout o u r history. n the f e m i n i s t s c h o o , contemporary politics and prdfessionalism have onee again com bined to invigorate h is to ric a ! vvriting and to prove th at historians are historical actors. j T he m ost recent generation of historians does n o t show the dom inance o f any one d o c trin e, how ever. Indeed, o lder scholars have recently com plained that the historical vvriting o f younger scholars is to o fragm ented and diverse. O n e characteristic does shine th ro u g h this diversity, and th at is an attraction to m ethodological rigor and innovation Y ounger historians have em braced interdisciplinary studies and boldly b o rro w concejits from econom ics, sociology, anthropology, and literary criticism . C om puter printouts of data figure prom inently in th eir w ork. O n e m ight call the proponents o f this kind .{of history a t e c h n o c r a t i c s c h o o l because its leaders are so concerned w ith getting tie m ethods and the definitions of the m ethods right. T hey do n o t have an overarching theoj-y o f o u r history; in fact, they attack the very notion of such a theory. O f course, if history is any guide, the next generation o f historians will cast aside the technocrats assumptions and proclaim its ow n vision o f o u r past. N one o f the schools of history described is really as uniform o r as narrow-minde^l as w e have suggested. In fact, m ost historians in this country are un will irig to classify therm selves o r to labei th eir w ork, m uch less adm it that they belong to a particular school of thought. It is only through the fine-grained tex tu res o f their argum ents that w e can even a tte m p t to categorize the w riting o f a particular historian as belonging to a distinct school.

C H A P T E R

12

Eric iito sb aw tn
ON H I S T O R Y
( 1 9 9 7 )*

In certain respects a very different 'W hat is History?' book is E ric Hobsbawm's On History (1997). Professor Emeritus at Birkbeck Col lege, London University, as he says in his recent autobiography, he was and remains an 'unrepentant communist'. Among his many books he is perhaps best known for his trilogy: The Age of Revolution (1962), The Age o f Capital (1975) and The Age o f Empire (1987), as well as his enormously popular Industry and Empire (1968). W hile Hobsbawm would not fit into the Hoffer and Stueck classifications, he has, iike them, an epistemological model at work. A t the outset he acknowledges an essential paradox in what it is that historians do - they must discover and record the past, but they also have 'im portant social and political functions'. As a constructionist of the political left, Hobsbawm accepts that truth must be pursued, while recognising that all pursuits are politically motvated. But, interestingly, he immediately chooses to take a swipe at the idea of 'history as fiction' - postmodernism - before pursuing his belief that a detailed knowledge of the data

* Eric H obsbaw m (1997) On History, London: O rion, pp. 269 -72

II allowthe historian to dispense with myths - invariabiy those myths of the political right. argument against postmodernism is that it is 'profoundly relativist'. He anchors his own leftist history and his antagonism to epistemoiogical scepticism on 'the supremacy of the 'v'idence', citing the existence of the Nazi gas ovens. His conciusion is that, like the law courts, historians can demonstrate the difference between 'historical fact and falsehood' but, most jmp0rtantly, this procedure is 'not ideological'. The implication is that a detailed knowledge of the evidence, despite ideology and theory, w iil authenticate the past as history.

H E P R O B L E M F O R professional historians is th at th eir subject has im p o rt ant social and political functions. These depend on their w o rk w ho else discovers a n d records the past but historians? b u t at the same tim e they are at odds w ith their professional standards. This duality is at the core of our subject. T he founders of the Revue Historique w ere conscious o f it w hen they stated, in the avant-propos to th eir first num ber that To study the past of France, w hich will be our m ain concern, is today a m atter of naional im portance. It will enable us to resto re to our country the unity and m oral force of which it has need. O f course, nothing was fu rth er from their confident, positivist m inds than serving their nation otherw ise than by the search for tru th . And yet the non-academ ics w ho need and use the com m odity w hich historians produce, and who constitute the largest and politically decisive m arket for it, are untroubled by the sharp distinction b etw een the strictly scientific procedures and the rhetorical constructions w hich was so central to the founders of the Revue. T heir criterion of w hat is good history is history that is good for us our country, our cause, or simply our em oional satisfaction. W h eth er they like it o r not, professional historians produce the raw m aterial for the non-professionals use o r misuse. That history is inextricably bound to contem porary politics as the historiography of the French Revolution continues to prove is probably today n o t a m ajor difficulty, for the debates of historians, at least in countries of intellectual freedom , are conducted within the rules of the discipline. Besides, m any o f the m ost ideologically charged debates am ong p ro fessional historians concern m atters about which non-historians know little and care less. How ever, all hum an beings, collectivities and institutions need a past, b u t it is only occasionally the past uncovered by historical research. The standard exam ple of an identity culture w hich anchors itself to the past by m eans of m yths dressed up as history is naionalism. O f this E m est Renan observed m ore than a century ago, Forgetting, even getting history wrong, is an essential factor in the form ation of a nation, w hich is w hy the progress o f his torical studies is often a danger to nationality. For nations are historically novei entities pretending to have existed for a very long tim e. Inevitably the nationalist version o f their history consists of anachronism , om ission, decontextualization and, in extrem e cases, lies. To a lesser extent this is true o f all form s of identity history, old or new . In the pre-academ ic past th ere was little to prevent p ure historical invention, such as the forgery of historical m anuscripts (as in Bohemia), the w riting o f an ancient, and suitably glorious Scottish naional epic (like Jam es M acphersons Ossian), o r the production of an entirely invented piece o f public theatre p u rporting to re p re se n t the ancient Bardic rituals, as in W ales. (This still form s the clim ax of the annual N ational Eisteddfod or cultural festival o f that small country.) W here such inventions have to be subm itted to the tests of a large and established scholarly com m unity, this is no longer possible. M uch of early historical scholarship consisted of the disproof o f such inventions and the

68

CONSTRUCTIONISM

d e construction o f the my'chs built on th e m . The great English m edievalist j . H orace Round m ade his reputation by a series of m erciless dissections of the pedigrees of British noble familie w hosc claim to desccnt from N orm an Invaders he show ed to be spurious. The tcsts are n o t necessarily only historic. The T urin shroud, to nam e a recent exam ple of a holy relic of the kind th at made the fortunes o f m edieval pilgrim age eentres, could not resist the test o f carbon-B dating to w hich it had to be subm itted. H istorv as fiction nas, how ever, recejved an academ ic rein fo rcem en t from an unexp ectcd qu arter: the grow ing scepticism concem ing the E nlightenm ent p ro jec t o f rationality . T he fashion for w hat (at least in Anglo-Saxon academ ic discourse) is know n by the vague te rm p ostm odernism has fortunately n o t gained as m uch ground am ong historians as am ong literary and cultural theorists and social anthropologists, even in the USA, but it is relevant to the question at issue, as it throw s dou b t on the distinction b etw een fact and fiction, objective reality and conceptual discourse. It is profoundly relativist. If there is n o clear distinction betw een w hat is tru e and w hat I feel to be tru e , then m y ow n constru ctio n o f reality is as good as yours o r anyone elses, for discourse is the m aker of this w o rld , n o t the m irro r. To cite the same author, the object o f ethnography, as presumably o f any o th er social and historical enquiry, is to produce a co-operatively evolved text, in w hich neith er subject n o r a uthor n o r re ad e r, n o r indeed anyone, has the exclusive right o f synoptic transcendence. f, in historical as in literary discourse, even presum ably descriptive language constitutes w hat it describes, then no narrative am ong the m any possible ones can be regarded as privileged. It is n o t fortuitous that these view s have appealed particularly to those w ho see them selves as representing collectivities o r m ilieux marginalized by the hegem onie culture o f som e group (say, m iddle-class w hite heterosexual males o f W e ste rn education) w hose claim to superiority they contest. But it is w rong. W ith o u t entering the theoretical debate on these m atters, it is essential for historians to defend the foundation o f their discipline: the suprem acy of evidenee. If th eir texts are fictions, as in som e sense they are, being literary com positions, the raw m aterial o f these fictions is verifiable fact. W h eth er the Nazi gas ovens existed o r n o t can be established by evidenee. Because it has been so established, those w ho deny their existence are not w ritin g h istory, w hatever their narrative techniques. f a novei w e re to be about the re tu rn o f the living N apoleon from St H elena, it m ight be literature b u t could n o t be history. If history is an im aginative art, it is one w hich does n o t invent b u t arranges objets trouves. T he distinction m ay appear pedantic and trivial to the non-historian, especially the one w ho uses historical m aterial for his o r h e r ow n purposes. W hat does it m a tte r to the theatrical audience that th ere is no historical re co rd of a Lady M acbeth urging h e r husband to kill King D uncan, o r o f w itehes predicting th at M acbeth w ould be king of Scotland, w hich in d eed he becam e in 1040-57? W hat did it m atter to the (pan-A frican) founding fathers o f W est African post-colonial states th at they gave their countries the nam es of m edieval African em pires w hich had no obvious connection w ith the territo rie s o f the m odern G hana o r Mali? W as it n o t m ore im p o rta n t to rem ind sub-Saharan Africans, after generations o f colonialism , that they had a trad itio n o f independent and pow erful states som ew here on th eir contin en t, if n o t precisely in the hinterland o f Accra? Indeed, the historians insistence, once again in the w ords o f the first issue o f the Revue Historique, on strictly scientific procedures, w here every statem en t is accom panied by proofs, source-references and citations, is som etim es pedantic and trivial, especially now that it n o longer form s p art o f a faith in the possibility o f a definitive, positivist scien tific tru th , w hich len t it a certain sim ple-m inded grandeur. Yet the p rocedures o f the law co u rt, w hich insist on the suprem acy o f evidenee as m uch as historical researchers, and

ON HISTORY

69

ften in n1 1 -10^1

same ro^nner, dem onstrate that the difference b etw een historicai fact

and falseh o o d is n o t ideological. It is crucial for m any practicai purposes o f everyday life, jf only because life and death, o r w hat is quantitatively m ore im p o rtan t m oney, depend

oft it W hen an innocent person is trie d for, m u rd er, and wishes to prove his or her
jnn ocen ce, w hat is required is the techniques n o t o f th e p o stm o d ern theorist, b u t o f the old-fashioned historian.

CHAPTER

13

Johti Tosh
T HE P U R S U I T OF HISTORY: AI MS, M E T H O D S AMD N E W DIRECTIONS IN T H E S T U D Y OF MO DE RN HI S TORY

( [ 1 9 8 4 ] 2 0 0 0 )*
The third extract in the 'W hat is History?' form of constructionism is taken from The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History ([1984] 2000) by the British social historian John Tosh. Tosh is the only historian to have two entries in this section (the other being on masculinity -se e Chapter 22, pp. 102-4). In the following extract, Tosh, also a M arxist of a kind, offers us his rationalisation for social theory in history. He argues that there are three reasons for the theoretical nature of 'historicai explanation'. First, it is to address the 'enlargement in the scope of historicai inquiry'. This is done by supplying a means by which historians can provide 'some theory of the structure of human society in its widest sense'. As a materialist himself, it is not surprising that he notes that the metaphoric analogies often used in this endeavour are drawn from the physical world. The second reason for 'the application of the ory' is the nature of historicai change. He maintains that historians are often attracted by the notion of revolutionary (economic or demographic in his examples) material change. The final reason for using social theory is to extend beyond historicai explanation to determine 'the direction in which all change is moving'. This is to give 'a meaning to history'. Here Tosh is changing historicai explanation, while also endeavouring to validate his own materialist position. He ends by acknowledging that some historians (we refer to them in this book as 'reconstructionists') reject the use of theory, arguing that if patterns exist they are unknowable and always speculative. The other reason is that, given poor evidence or a questionable selection, much theory is the refuge for 'mere supposition and wishful thinking'. Tosh recognises that any theory can be 'proved' by gathering enough illustrative material, but it is the testing of theory that counts in the end.

* John Tosh ([1984] 2000) The Pursuit o f History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study o f Modem History, London: Pearson-Longm an, pp. 135-7.