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  • From Histories to Traditions:A Response
  • Christopher Shannon

In responding to the comments of Professors Weiner, Wickberg, and Lasch-Quinn, I would first like to thank them for sparing me the task of having to restate or reformulate my account of the epistemology and practice of academic history. Though accomplished scholars who have achieved recognition within the standards of the profession as it is, they share my sense of the intellectual and moral limitations of those standards. It is refreshing not to have to mount yet one more critique of common-sense empiricism. Refreshing, but challenging, for it shifts the burden of my response from the critical to the constructive. After stating their sympathies with my critique, each respondent in different ways raises questions about what an alternative, tradition-based history would look like; Wickberg and Lasch-Quinn more pointedly raise the possibility that moving from histories to traditions would leave the delusions of liberal pluralism intact. Serious objections indeed, and ones that deserve a serious response.

What would tradition-based history look like? In some aspects it would entail no radical departure from current historical practice. That is, I accept that the analytic techniques developed over the past 200 years of professional history writing stand as a positive advance in human knowledge. I have made use of them in my own work, and I would expect any practitioner of tradition-based history to be held accountable to them as well. The turn to tradition should not entail the abandonment of modern historical reasoning, only a recognition of its limits—and a recognition that we cannot write meaningful history within these limits. That is, our analytic should have a clearly stated purpose beyond analysis itself—a normative purpose integral to the argument, not merely an edifying afterthought. No simple "useable past," [End Page 19] this model shares something with Wickberg's and Lasch-Quinn's notions of meaningful history as inevitably a history of the present.

I have tried to integrate the normative orientation of Catholicism in my books on U.S. intellectual history, yet I concede that much of the normative element remains confined to the introductions and conclusions, with the body of the books focused on analysis. I concede also that my books have been focused on the critique of a non-Catholic tradition rather than an engagement with Catholicism itself—certainly not the best model for a history that not only analyzes but also participates in a tradition. In proposing a model for Catholic history, I would defer to the work of Eamon Duffy. A tradition-based Catholic history would synthesize the analytic, "outsider" achievement of Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars with the normative, "insider" voice of his popular essays collected in Faith of Our Fathers and Walking to Emmaus.1

Beyond Catholic history, I welcome Mark Weiner's invocation of Hayden White and the appeal to 19th-century historians as stylists. One may not agree with Macaulay's Whiggery, but no one can doubt his commitment to integrating the normative and analytic dimensions of history. Still, White's insistence on the inescapability of narrative should point us less to models of writing than to models of reading. The recognition that we are always thinking within some narrative structure should call into question the value of "original" research and move the locus of historical practice from an empirical to a more philosophically reflective mode. Tradition-based historians would come to a deeper understanding of their own tradition by engaging the best that has been thought and said about the past by other traditions. Doctoral training and undergraduate teaching alike would of necessity become organized more around historiography—how people have thought about the past—than the conventional division of history into periods and topics.

This brings us from the micro to the macro level of historical practice. Let us suppose that the historical profession opens itself to accommodate tradition-based history. Will we then in any way have moved beyond liberal pluralism? Lasch-Quinn's invocation of Philip Rieff raises the possibility that traditions might easily become yet another resource for a therapeutic pursuit of a sense of well-being apart from matters of truth...

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