Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge

Chapter 10. The "Linguistic Turn": The End of History as a Scholarly Discipline?

Chapter 10 The "Linguistic Turn": The End of History as a Scholarly Discipline? I have already referred to postmodern theories of history that take up the questions of the possibility or impossibility of historical knowledge and the forms historical writing should assume in a postmodern age. In this chapter I would like to raise the question of the extent and manner in which postmodern theories of history and language have actually served as the basis of historical writing. These theories proceed from the conviction, to cite Lawrence Stone once more, "that a coherent scientific explanation of change in the past"1 isno longer possible. But postmodern theories go beyond Stone's formulation in claiming that any coherence issuspect. The basic idea of postmodern theory of historiography is the denial that historical writing refers to an actual historical past. Thus Roland Barthes2 and Hayden White asserted that historiography does not differ from fiction but is a form of it. Accordingly White tried to demonstrate in Metahistory : The Historical Imagination in the Nineteenth Century in Europe (1973), by the example of four historians (Michelet, Tocqueville, Ranke, and Burckhardt) and four philosophers of history (Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Croce), that there are no criteria of truth in historical narratives. Therefore, he argued, there is also no essential difference between the writingofhistory and the philosophy of history. The critical philological occupa118 tion with the sources can, to be sure, discover facts, but any step beyond this toward the construction of a historical account is determined, for White, by aesthetic and ethical, not by scientific considerations. Form and content, he argues, cannot be separated in historical writing. Historians, he continues, have at their disposal a limited number of rhetorical possibilities that predetermine the form and to a certain extent also the content of their account so that, as we saw, "historical narratives are verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented asfound and the forms of which have more in common withtheir counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences."3 Here White goes far beyond a tradition of historical thought that, from Herodotus to Natalie Davis, recognized both the literary aspects of historical accounts and the role of imagination in constructing them, but nevertheless maintained a faith that these accounts offered insights into a real past involving real human beings. Natalie Davis frankly admitted that invention occupies a crucial place in the reconstruction of the past, but she also insisted that this invention isnot the arbitrary creation ofthe historian but follows the "voices of the past" as they speak to us through the sources.4 Ranke similarly recognized the role of imagination in reconstrucing the thought processes of his historical actors. There is therefore a difference between a theory that denies any claim to reality in historical accounts and a historiography that is fully conscious of the complexity of historical knowledge but still assumes that real people had real thoughts and feelings that led to real actions that, within limits, can be known and reconstructed. To be sure, as Patrick Bahners put it, science since Kant has possessed no "material criteria of truth."5 But Kant and subsequent scientific and social scientific thought, including that of Max Weber, still assumed that there existed a logic of scientific inquiry, which could be communicated and which, while not providing material criteria, offered formal standards for the examination of the world of nature and of men. But even these criteria have been questioned by some contemporary theorists of science. Among modern and contemporary theorists of science who have challenged the notion that scientific inquiry leads to a progressive understanding of reality, one must distinguish between The End of History as a Scholarly Discipline? 119 radical skeptics such as Gaston Bachelard6 and Paul Feyerabend7 on the one hand, and historical relativists such as Thomas Kuhn on the other. Bachelard and Feyerabend understand science as a poetic activity for which there is no binding logic or method of inquiry. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1960)8 Kuhn too argued that science cannot be understood as a reflection of an objective world. He did not regard it as fiction, however, but as a historically and culturally conditioned discourse among people who are in agreement about the rules that govern their discourse. For him science is an institutionalized form of scientific inquiry, a way of dealing with reality in a scientific community, whose...