Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (review)

The charge is often made that most historians fail to think very deeply about epistemology or to think clearly enough when they do. That criticism is difficult to refute, and Megill seeks to rectify the discipline’s bad habits by posing clear, straightforward questions about the nature of historical knowledge, questions that address topics—memory, identity, narrative, objectivity—that invoke terms currently much in vogue. Most of the book’s ten chapters were previously published over a couple of decades; in this volume, they are usefully grouped into four sections. The many references from one chapter to another, although somewhat disorienting, demonstrate intellectual coherence. Together, they treat all of these complicated matters and more, offering by way of examples extended criticism of specific historians.

Demanding intellectual rigor, Megill re-defines familiar terms and interjects his own firm opinions, leading readers along a circuitous path through the brambles of his own impressive learning. Readers can only trail along after this insightful and candid guide as he provocatively cites noted philosophers and historians, chastising them for solecisms commonly encountered in the press and classroom. While his often idiosyncratic use of learned references hastily expands the wide relevance of his analysis, it leads in many directions at once and becomes frustratingly idiosyncratic; for Megill rarely takes time for the fuller argument that might compel agreement. Firm questions posed in philosophical terms launch discussions marked by a (sometimes dense) search for intellectual precision and then quickly spill over his carefully constructed conceptual dykes. To read his essays is like auditing a bracing seminar conducted by a stimulating, opinionated teacher.

Megill attacks current fashion that privileges memory as personal and significant in its own right. Using examples from Herodotus to the Holocaust and the Vietnam memorial, he rejects the conflation of memory with history, which must require evidence. He warns against the political purpose of historical accounts that seek to reinforce identity. Conceding that in the postmodern world, historians’ grand narratives (of Christianity or progress) no longer carry the conviction that gave them power, he makes a case for the hermeneutic importance of historical narrative, despite its limitations. These points are all part of a larger schema. Narrative leads to “The Four Tasks of History-Writing.” Preoccupation with whether history can have a coherent meaning runs throughout the volume, to be taxonomically pulled together in “Four Ideal Typical Attitudes toward the Overall Coherence of History,” followed by “Four Postulates.”

The Annales school in particular comes in for sustained criticism, but Megill finds much to warn against in many other contemporary approaches to the past, from neopositivist imitations of science to cultural studies. He uncovers underlying biases in methodological preferences for problem-oriented history and for seeking underlying causes, and he distrusts syntheses that imply causation without proving it. Not surprisingly, his conclusion is titled “Against Current Fashion.” The surprise lies rather in the traditional moderation of his recommendations for the proper conduct of historical inquiry. Historians should avoid propagandizing or any claim to exclusive truth; they should cross disciplinary lines while respecting disciplinary boundaries; and they must attend to evidence. He hopes “that the conceptual devices offered . . . in this book will be taken seriously both by those who are attempting to read works of history in a critical frame of mind and by those engaged in the difficult task of writing history in an epistemologically responsible mode . . . [without being] paralyzed by the uncertainties of historical knowledge” (167). Taking these recommendations seriously does not make that challenge easier.