Current Trends In Historiography Research Paper

Briefly comparing the intellectual and historiographical situation in the year 1970 with that of 2000, we can distinguish certain dominant trends then and now. In neither case, however, is it possible to reduce historical thought to simple common denominators. There are no paradigms in the Kuhnian sense that determine historiographical practice but a great plurality of outlooks that are perhaps even more numerous now than they were then. Nevertheless, in 1970 most historians were still convinced that history was a science, albeit a social science, engaged in recreating a real past as it had actually occurred. Today this confidence in the objectivity of science, including historical inquiry, has come under severe attack, as have the notions still dominant in the early 1970s of a coherent process of history. To be certain, faith in objective truth, in historical inquiry, and confidence in history as the ongoing development of civilization had been undermined as early as the second half of the nineteenth century, e.g., by Jacob Burckhardt and Friedrich Nietzsche, and even in the United States, which remained a citadel of belief in science and progress, by leading historians such as Carl Becker and Charles Beard in the 1930s.

Historical science, as it was generally understood in the Western world around 1970, viewed history as a social science. It replaced an earlier orientation sometimes labeled ‘historism’ (which had been dominant in much of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century), that had argued that history as a Geistesor Kulturwissenschaft required a logic of inquiry different from that of the hard sciences, namely one which takes into account the elements of meaning and intention in human life which cannot be reduced to abstract generalizations. These conceptions of historical study that viewed history as a special sort of Geisteswissenschaft were increasingly replaced in the twentieth century by conceptions of history as a ‘social science.’ The new social science orientations went in several directions discussed below, but they shared certain assumptions. They criticized the older historiography for narrating a history of events, primarily political, focusing on leading personalities in positions of power, and called for a history that proceeded analytically, seeking to examine the social context in which events occurred. While the older historiography relied heavily on philology as a tool for the examination and understanding of texts to fathom human intentions, the new history turned to the neighboring social sciences, sociology, economics, and psychology, and in France also geography, which analyzed social structures and processes and stressed the interdisciplinary nature of historical studies. They strove for a history that was more comprehensive than that of the conventional narrative political historiography. They also wanted to include broader segments of the population into the historical accounts.

But it was only after 1945 that forms of social science history emerged as a dominant model for historical studies. Again it is difficult to reduce social science-oriented history to a common denominator; it ranged from the studies of the material and biological bases of historical life in the French Annales in the 1960s, to the new historical demography in France and Great Britain, to quantitative urban history and electoral behavior in the United States, to the formulation of quantifiable models of economic cycles in the United States, Great Britain, and France, to a ‘historical social science’ in West Germany strongly influenced by Max Weber. Nevertheless, despite their differences, they all agreed that history had more kinship to the social sciences than to the humanities. This assumed, as the earlier social science-oriented history had also done, that there was a real historical past that constituted the object of historical studies. It sought to make historical method conform to the methodologies of other social sciences. Hence, it generally preferred different kinds of sources than did the older historiography; for example, hard economic and demographic data. This made Geoffrey Barraclough comment in a survey written in the 1970s for UNESCO on trends in recent historical studies that:

the search for quantity is beyond all doubt the most powerful of the new trends in history, the factor above all others which distinguishes historical attitudes in the 1970s from historical attitudes in the 1930s (Barraclough 1978, p. 39).

These historians tended to sacrifice individual human beings to structures and processes thus largely ignoring the individuals who compose history.

A key to almost all forms of social science history, with the possible exception of many of the historians in the Annales tradition, was the notion of history as an ongoing directional process. This was true of the various advocates of history as an empirical, analytical social science as it was for the different shades of Marxists and for the German school of ‘Historical Social Science.’ A broadly shared concept was that of modernization. It went back to nineteenth-century positivism and assumed that history, or at least the history of the modern Western world, was marked by an ongoing process towards greater scientific enlightenment followed by technological progress and by the concomitant development of a ‘modern’ society. While most forms of social science history tended to downgrade political history, the German school of ‘historical social science’ (Wehler, Kocka) sought to locate politics in the context of social structures and processes to understand how it was possible for National Socialism to gain power in Germany.

2. Challenges To Social Science Approaches To History: Postmodernism

This widely held confidence in social science and modernization was radically challenged in the 1970s and 1980s, most vocally by postmodernist philosophers and literary critics, but more quietly also by historians, particularly cultural historians. While it is difficult to reduce these critics to a common denominator, they agree in repudiating two assumptions that they consider to be central to the modern historical outlook. The first concerns the belief in the coherence and continuity of world history, the invention of a ‘master’ or ‘metanarrative’ (Lyotard) which sees history as an onward development to the modern Western world with its promise of enlightenment, emancipation, and well-being for the world as a whole. Practitioners of the established historiography, critics charged, had overlooked the close relationship between Western progress and imperialism abroad and the consolidation of power relations based on race, gender, and class at home taken for granted in their view of history. But history, they argued, had no coherence, thus eliminating the possibility of a grand narrative and opening the way to innumerable separate histories.

Closely related to this critical view was the rejection of the possibility of objective historical inquiry into the past. According to Peter Novick the idea and ideal of objectivity lay at the very center of the historical profession as it was constituted with its ‘commitment to the reality of the past, and to truth as correspondence to that reality’ and consequently ‘the separation of history and fiction’ (1988, pp. 3–4). This commitment, Hayden White noted, rests on the ‘illusion that there is a past out there that is directly reflected in the texts’ (1987, p. 209). Postmodernists according to Keith Jenkins seek to free modern historical consciousness from the notion that behind appearances there lies a solid, foundational, real world. ‘In fact history now appears to be just one more foundationless, positioned expression in a world of foundationless, positioned expressions’ (Jenkins 1997, p. 6).

For the postmodernists history consists of texts that are linguistic constructs with no direct relation to reality. It is language that creates reality. Jacques Derrida went further in denying that there is anything beyond the text (il n’y a pas de hors-texte) (see Megill 1985, p. 266). Moreover, for Derrida the text has no stable signification, but is open to an infinity of significations because there is no Archimedean point from which a clear meaning can be assigned. The text, moreover, according to Foucault is seen not only independently of its relation to the external world, but also independently of its author. Derrida criticized what he considered to be the ‘logocentrism’ of the classical Western philosophic tradition since Socrates that rested on the error that reality could be reduced to rational concepts, ignoring that these concepts reflected systems of domination. The idea that reality was not given but was constructed through language was further developed in feminist theory. Gender, for Joan Scott, is not found as such in nature but is socially constructed through language, texts, and cultural symbols that reflect or challenge power relationships. Thus the deconstruction of language is a necessary tool for revealing and dismantling these unequal power relationships.

All this leads to epistemological relativism. Perhaps the most influential proponent of such relativism as it relates to historiography has been White, who argued that historical thought is ‘the captive of the linguistic mode in which it seeks to grasp the outline of objects inhabiting its field of perception’ (1973, p. xi). Consequently it is not the purportedly objective investigations of the historian into a real subject matter which lead to knowledge about history but rather the knowledge at which the historian arrives is conditioned by the linguistic mode in which she he operates. Professional historiography for White generates no more objective knowledge of the past than does speculative philosophy of history or the historical novel. Any attempt to go beyond the facts to a coherent narrative is a ‘poetic act’ so that the ‘best grounds for choosing one perspective on history rather than another are aesthetic or moral rather than epistemological’ (1973, p. xii). ‘Viewed simply as verbal artifacts,’ he notes, ‘histories and novels are indistinguishable from one another’ (1978, p. 122). Similarly, ‘the opposition between myth and history … is as problematical as it is untenable’ (1978, p. 83).

This negation of a distinction between history and fiction is at the core of the French literary critic Roland Barthes’s essay—Le Discours de l’histoire (Discourse of History). For Ankersmit, while ‘science was the alpha and omega of the modernists’ (1995, p. 166), for postmodernism ‘the metaphorical dimension of historiography is more powerful than the literal or factual dimensions … criticizing metaphors is indeed an activity which is just as pointless as it is tasteless. Only metaphors ‘‘refute’’ metaphors’ (p. 180). Hence research is irrelevant because ‘the ‘‘real past’’ does not enter into historiography except rhetorically’ (Jenkins 1995, p. 18).

3. The Turn To Cultural History And The Return To Narrative

Few practicing historians would agree with Barthes, Derrida, White, Ankersmit, or Jenkins that there are no criteria of objectivity. They would continue to hold that historical works in contrast to historical novels must proceed from research that requires standards of objectivity shared by the scholarly community. Postmodernism had reflected a general mood that was shared by many historians. Part of this mood was a general skepticism regarding the nature and quality of modern civilization and its science; the recognition that the historical science of the West, whether in its historicist or its social science form, had legitimized relationships of power in which a middle and upperclass elite had been privileged at the expense of the broad masses of the population, including women, and of the non-Western world. Thus, by the 1970s the old scientific ethos of the social science historians was shaken. In 1979 in a now famous article, The Re i al of Narrative, Lawrence Stone noted that in the 1970s a change had occurred in the way history was viewed and written. The belief, central to social science history, that ‘a coherent scientific explanation of change in the past’ (1979, p. 19) was possible, was widely rejected. In its place there emerged an interest in the most varied aspects of human existence, accompanied by the conviction that ‘the culture of the group, and even the will of the individual, are at least as important causal agents of change as the impersonal forces of material output and demographic growth’ (p. 9). Yet, although Stone emphatically rejected the illusion of ‘coherent scientific explanation,’ he nowhere suggested that historical narrative should surrender its claim to rational inquiry and realistic reconstruction.

4. The Impact Of Cultural Marxism On The Writing Of History

The new directions which historical studies took must be understood within the context of the political climate of the 1960s and after, such as the emergence of a women’s movement, the rise of ethnic consciousness, the struggle for racial equality, anti-colonialism, and environmentalism which all pointed at the inadequacies of the social and economic order of an industrialized, modernizing Western world and the social science which served it. The transformations within Marxist theory and historiography provide important indicators for the change of attitude among historians. Marxism itself was in a deep crisis as indicated in the Soviet power block by the suppression of the Prague Spring and by the rejection of Marxist orthodoxy in the West.

But the significance of a non-dogmatic Marxism on historical thought in Western Europe as well as in Japan, India, and Latin America should not be underestimated. Marxism–Leninism was of little significance there as compared to Western forms of Marxism informed by Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs, and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. Western Marxism preserved the idea of class conflict, the role of domination as a major force in social relations, but gave up the idea of a necessary development to a classless society.

The reorientation of Marxism began in the 1920s and involved an examination of the traditional economic interpretation of history. Gramsci’s writings in Mussolini’s prisons in the 1920s and 30s, which became known in the West only in the 1960s, explained the defeat of the communist workers movement in Italy in terms which involved factors insufficiently developed in traditional Marxist philosophies of history. For him the strength of capitalism rested ultimately not exclusively on its economic strength but on its cultural hegemony over the working classes. Lukacs already in 1923 had seen in the section on ‘The Fetishism of Commodities’ in Capital the core of Karl Marx’ critique of economistic conceptions of capitalism. The empiricism that dominated scientific and social science thought in his opinion failed to understand the broader context of society and culture. A similar note was pursued in the 1930s and 1940s by the ‘critical theorists’ of the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse) who, proceeding from a critique of capitalism that they argued had turned culture into an industry in the service of economic ends, strove for a science which went beyond quantifiable data to the qualitative aspects of society and culture. They nevertheless gave up Lukacs’ historical optimism.

Perhaps no book had as great an impact on the reorientation of social history, at least in the English-speaking world but also beyond, as E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Thompson maintained the concept of class and the notion that ‘the class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born—or enter involuntarily’ (p. 9) But he stressed that class must be seen not as ‘structure,’ or even ‘category’ but as something which in fact happens in human relationships (p. 9). The English working class was thus not primarily the product of economic forces, as it had been in the Communist Manifesto or in structuralist, functionalist sociology, but an active agent, coming from a specific cultural tradition, which made itself as much as it was made. Hence, his reliance on qualitative elements that make up a culture such as literature, art, folklore, and symbolism. Moreover, Thompson emphatically rejected the orthodox Marxist notion that sees the past as a step to the future.

Yet Thompson’s historiographical approach soon came under attack from cultural Marxists who argued that he had not broken sufficiently with classical Marxist notions of class. Even if he saw class in terms of culture, they charged, this culture still focused on an industrial working class in which those not directly linked to the industrial work process played little of a role. The History Workshop: A Journal of Socialist Historians, founded in 1976 in Great Britain—which in 1982 changed its subtitle to A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Historians and in 1995 dropped the subtitle altogether—tried to overcome this by expanding the concept of work in a changing society and including women in the family and the workplace.

From the perspectives of much post colonialist history of the 1980s and 1990s, such as put forward by Latin American Dependencia Theory or Indian Subaltern Studies, Marxism operated with a concept of historical development, akin to that of capitalist writing, for which modernization was understood as Westernization. Edward Said in Orientalism (1978) argued that Western scholarship had invented an Arab culture that rested not on historical knowledge but on preconceptions, pitting an enlightened West against a backward Muslim East which needed to be Westernized. Postcolonialist writings integrating feminist, psychoanalytical, and Marxist theories argued that categories of class, ethnicity, and gender must be seen in their interaction. They held that a Marxist conception of class conflict misses the analysis of power to which Foucault had pointed as an infinitely complex network of micro powers that permeate every aspect of social life and culture.

5. From Macroto Microhistory

While few social historians could be identified as postmodernists or Marxists, certain central ideas of postmodernism and of cultural Marxism impacted a great deal of writing in social history which increasingly moved in the direction of cultural history. The idea of the unity or direction of history gave way to the concentration on small units, on the local and the marginal.

While this same orientation destroyed the credibility of orthodox Marxism, the Marxist commitment to the oppressed, even if oppression was now understood differently, occupied a great deal of the new culturally oriented social history whose subjects were most often ‘the lives and feelings and behaviour of the poor and obscure rather than the great and powerful’ (Stone 1979, p. 19). Anthropology and semiotics replaced sociology and economics as the key auxiliary sciences of social history. But anthropology underwent a sea change. While classical anthropology, e.g., that of Bronislaw Malinowski in the 1920s and 1930s, had tended to a static analysis of ‘primitive’ and ‘timeless’ societies, anthropologists had now become increasingly historical in outlook, recognizing that all, even the most ‘primitive’ cultures, evolve and that modern societies as well are proper subjects of anthropological study.

At the same time, historians increasingly turned to an interpretative, cultural anthropology. As the cultural anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, phrased it:

Believing with Max Weber that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of laws but an interpretive one in search of meaning (Geertz 1973, p. 5).

In Germany, this anthropological turn in the 1980s took the form of Alltagsgeschichte, which sought to reconstruct the experiences and emotions of common people (Hans Medick, Alf Ludtke, Lutz Niethammer) in earlier preindustrial as well as in modern industrial times. In Italy, historians (Carlo Ginzburg, Eduardo Grendi, Carlo Poni, Giovanni Levi) around the journal Quaderni Storici, began in a series of books and articles to give a firm theoretical foundation to a microhistory (microstoria) which reduces historical research to identifiable individuals and from these creates a history from which the net of relationships of these individuals would emerge. In place of the thousands of quantifiable data on which the older social history constructed a history of mentalities, the microhistorians wanted to recapture a fuller picture of individual experiences using transcripts and inquisitorial records in which the voices of the subjects were recorded. Outside of Italy, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in Montaillou (1975) used such records to recapture the lives and emotions of individual villagers in a fourteenth-century village while Natalie Davis in The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), using judicial records, focused on gender in sixteenth-century rural France.

Nevertheless, the new orientations toward microhistory did not necessarily mean a break with the social sciences. Foucault had rejected the idea that theories can be verified because in his view the standards of verification came from a social scientific discipline which represented institutions of power; Geertz had argued that any attempt to approach a historical subject matter with theoretically oriented questions distorts this subject and has to be replaced by ‘thick description’ which immerses itself untheoretically into an alien world. This, in effect, invalidated traditional forms of historical inquiry. But neither Ginzburg nor Levi were willing to go so far. For them, microstoria does not reject the empirical social sciences in toto, but stresses the methodological need for testing their constructs against existing reality on a small scale. Levi’s concern in L’eridita immateriale: Carriere di un esorsista nel Piemonte del Seicento (1983) (Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist) is social scientific insofar as he wishes to test established hypotheses on a local level. His central concern is patterns of power relationships in the village. In studying land purchases, Levi questions the extent to which impersonal market forces and the development of the modern state machinery determine these power relationships and argues that the decisive element in the understanding of the peasant world is ‘the preservation or transmission of intangible or symbolic goods: power and prestige’ (back cover of English paperback edition) Here Levi was much closer to Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of ‘symbolic capital’ than to Geertz’ ‘thick description.’

The gap between social and cultural history began to close markedly in the 1980s and 1990s. On the one hand, there were important works in microhistory emphasizing anthropological aspects of culture (Medick, David Sabean). Despite the reservations these historians expressed in regard to the systematic social sciences, they relied heavily in their work on economic and demographic data and made use of computer analyses. On the other hand, historians coming from a social science orientation recognized the significant role of the cultural dimension in society. The work that the German school of ‘Historical Social Science’ had undertaken in the social analysis of politics now increasingly gave consideration to the interaction of society and culture. An example of this is the major comparative project on the nineteenth-century European bourgeoisie (Burgertum), headed by Jurgen Kocka, which defined the latter as much in terms of culture and education as in terms of economic status. The journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft became an important forum for the presentation and discussion of these tendencies.

The economic analysis of class also began to play a decreasing role in the study of the revolutionary movements since the eighteenth century. By the 1970s not only the economic interpretations of the French Revolution by Marxists such as those of Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul, but also of their non-Marxist critics such as Alfred Cobban and George Taylor, were replaced by new viewpoints (Regine Robin, Francois Furet, Lynn Hunt) which placed greater stress on culture and language. As Lynn Hunt explained in the introduction to her Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984), this work conceived in 1976 began as ‘a social history of Revolutionary politics’ but ‘increasingly turned into a cultural analysis in which the political structures … became but one part of the story’ (p. xi). Linguistic analysis plays an important role in

William Sewell’s analysis of the 1848 Revolution in France, in Gareth Stedman-Jones’ study of British Chartism, and Thomas Childress’ examination of electoral propaganda in the Weimar Republic. None of them, however, would share Foucault’s radical position that ‘reality does not exist, that only language exists’ (quoted in Berman 1988, p. 183). Rather, they would agree with Carroll Smith-Rosenberg that ‘while linguistic differences structure society, social differences structure language’ (Spiegel 1990, p. 84).

6. The Transformation Of Political History

With the move to the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s and to the cultural sciences since the 1970s, the significance of political history has been downgraded. Various forms of social science history, as early as the Annales before 1945, reacted against the focus on political history in conventional historiography. Moreover, the new cultural history that sought to move away from conceptions of centralized power also consciously neglected the state. Yet this led to a certain blindness regarding the realities of the present world. The rapid changes in international relations since the collapse of communism in 1989–1991 have made the significance of politics for society and culture apparent. Recent historical theory with its emphasis on the pluralism of historical narratives has assigned the process of modernization and globalization to the sphere of macronarratives that it rejects. But one cannot escape the reality of processes of modernization, however complex and varied they may be, as significant aspects of modern historical development.

The history of politics, of international relations, of peace and war, and the study of political regimes in the twentieth century continued to occupy an important place in the historiography of the last third of the twentieth century, notwithstanding the new emphases on cultural history. And political history continued to work closely with documentary sources.

Nevertheless, as seen above in recent histories of the French Revolution, greater emphasis was given to cultural factors and to language. Something similar has happened in the studies of the Holocaust. Earlier studies had seen the destruction of the Jews as a vast and complex administrative process, as Raoul Hilberg had described it in The Destruction of European Jews (1961), carried out from their desks by bureaucrats like Adolf Eichmann acting on orders from above. The long debate between the ‘Intentionalists’ and ‘Functionalists’ centered on the question whether the genocide had its roots in the conscious decisions of the Nazi leadership or developed without a clear plan in the course of the war. Both approaches failed to deal concretely with the Holocaust as it involved perpetrators and victims on the local level. More recent studies such as Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Police Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1993) have sought to study the killing through the concrete participation of individual perpetrators.

7. Conclusion

The concerted attack on ideas of objectivity and historical method on the part of postmodernist critics has by no means resulted in the abandonment of serious historical study based on research into the sources. Although the borderline between scholarship and literature has become more fluid, as for example in Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (1991) which points at the tremendous problems in telling a truthful history, few historians, whether in the areas of political, social, or cultural history, would abandon the commitment to honestly reconstructing the past. At the same time, the confidence of nineteenth-century professional historians in the possibility of telling definitely wieves eigentlich gewesen has yielded to the recognition that the same sources and the same set of events lend themselves to a variety of interpretations, but that these interpretations do not necessarily disprove one another but cast different perspectives on a subject. The years 1970– 2000 have seen the collapse of illusions dear to modern historical thought until then: the linear progression of Western history and the accumulation of historical knowledge. The scope of historical study has been expanded immensely. The concentration on centers of political power and macroeconomic and macrosocial processes has been supplemented by a new interest in many aspects of life and culture which previously had not entered the imagination of historians, or at least of professional historians, and which require special research strategies. These two scales, the macro and the micro, by no means exclude each other, and in fact, as we have indicated, political and social historians have become increasingly aware of the role of culture, and cultural historians have become aware of the social and political context in which collective human existence takes place.

Bibliography:

1. Ankersmit F 1995 History and Tropology. The Rise and Fall of Metaphor. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA
2. Appleby J, Hunt L, Jacob M 1994 Telling the Truth about History. Norton, New York
3. Barraclough G 1978 Trends in History. Holmes & Meier, New York
4. Berman A 1988 From the New Criticism to Deconstruction. The Reception of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL
5. Geertz C 1973 The Interpretations of Cultures. Basic Books, New York
6. Green A, Troup K 1999 The Houses of History. A Critical Reader in Twentieth-century History and Theory. New York University Press, New York
7. Hunt L 1984 Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA
8. Hunt L (ed.) 1989 New Cultural History. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA
9. Iggers G G 1997 Historiography in the Twentieth Century. From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge. Wesleyan University Press, Hanover, NH
10. Jenkins K 1995 On ‘What is History?’ Routledge, London
11. Jenkins K (ed.) 1997 The Postmodern History Reader. Routledge, London
12. Lyotard J F 1979 La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir. Editions de Minuit, Paris. (English edn. 1984 The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN)
13. Megill A 1985 Prophets of Extremity. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA
14. Novick P 1988 That Noble Dream. The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
15. Scott J 1988 Gender and the Politics of History. Columbia University Press, New York
16. Spiegel G 1990 History, historicism, and the social logic of the text in the Middle Ages. Speculum 65: 59–86
17. Stone L 1979 The revival of narrative: Reflections on a new old history. Past and Present 85: 3–24
18. Thompson E P 1963 The Making of the English Working Class. Vintage Books, New York
19. White H 1973 Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD
20. White H 1978 Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD
21. White H 1987 The Content of the Form, Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD
22. Windschuttle K 1997 The Killing of History: How a Disicipline is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists. Free Press, New York
23. Wolfe P 1997 History and imperialism: A century of theory from Marx to postcolonialism. American Historical Review 102: 388–420