Comment on Christopher Shannon

Christopher Shannon presents a refreshing challenge to the contemporary academic discipline of history, raising fair questions about its bona fides. While others have raised concerns about whether the late 20th-century proliferation of subfields like African-American and women's history lead inevitably to the end of a unified sense of the past, Shannon believes that this "diversity of subject matter masks a fundamental uniformity of method" and interpretive content.

The result is a deeply ingrained hypocrisy that lies at the heart of today's professional assumptions and practice. This is exemplified in the historical monograph, which rests on a pretense of objectivity but all the while embodies Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment commitments. The current scholarly apparatus reflects the rise of modern social science, with its adaptation of procedures from the hard sciences, such as the scientific method and the originating of interpretation in empirical observation and the gathering of factual data. Yet study after study concludes that freedom is good, necessary, and all-important. Further, prominent historians invoke a particular notion of freedom connected to a particular political view: "the whole way of life of liberal modernity, a way of life that holds up individual autonomy as the highest value." This is simply operating in bad faith.

Shannon would like to see the Catholic historical tradition not just admitted more fully into the university, but also welcomed. Rather than see the difference between today's Catholic history and non-Catholic history as rooted in their diverging histories, he would like us to view them through philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre's lens of traditions. Shannon views the difference between current-day "AHA-style history" and the Catholic intellectual tradition as freedom and autonomy versus attachment. But he is calling our attention to the way in which a commitment to freedom is an attachment.

Shannon's application of the concept of a tradition to take stock of underlying assumptions and dominating practices in the profession of history is both illuminating in its own right and provocative. It helps make sense of the quandary of recent scholarship, which has sought out ever-more specialized subject matter, usually (but not always) representing newly defined, marginalized social groupings; and which has also floundered, unable to develop any truly innovative interpretations, at least not the kind to propel widespread discursive engagement beyond those areas of specialization. The primary novelties are new thematic constellations, new arrangements of subject matter, such as Atlantic or Mediterranean history. Beyond an emphasis on ports, intercultural exchange, and commodities, it remains to be seen how these new topics alter our thinking about large questions.

Shannon's paper helps explain this interpretive exhaustion. On the pages of monographs modern so-called truths are splashed liberally. In studies having any bearing on sex, whether homosexual or heterosexual, he points out that while "the goal may be physical pleasure or psychological identity . . . the particular goal matters less than the freedom to choose a goal. Liberal history is the history of such freedom of choice." And in studies of places and times in which little choice existed, the question merely becomes, why not?

Shannon's paper also helps explain the strange purchase of careerism on a field experiencing a dire job market for over a generation. He finds that MacIntyre's notion of tradition helps us see "what actually happens in graduate schools of history and professional conferences": "Academic training imparts certain technical skills, yet also socializes scholars into a certain way of life and a certain ideal of personhood. To become an academic historian, one must generally also internalize the norms of middle-class professionalism. The value of individual autonomy is paramount, and historians read it into all of human history." If only to raise the question of a purpose to historical study other than individual advancement, Shannon's essay should be welcome by all those concerned about the current state of things.

His contribution runs deeper than that, however. He calls attention to the limits of freedom, as defined in the modern procedural sense, as an overarching interpretive lens for the past.

In the post-Enlightenment period, and the crisis of religious faith that ensued for...