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  • Response to Christopher Shannon
  • Daniel Wickberg (bio)

It is a pleasure to respond to Chris Shannon's thoughtful and challenging essay. He represents a point of view that rarely gets an airing in the mainstream history conferences and journals, but one that is salutary at a moment when religion is becoming increasingly central to the practices of professional historians. While much of the current revival of interest in the history of religion is concerned with religion as an empirical object of study, that very approach has raised questions about whether secular and empirical modes of thinking, given their post-Enlightenment history, are inevitably hostile to or uncomprehending of some of the most widespread and historically significant intellectual traditions—traditions that presuppose a rather different conception of personhood, social order, and cosmos than modern social thought. Further, secular social and cultural thought has increasingly turned an eye on its own limitations and exclusions, calling into question its own authority and opening up a space for the kind of critique and agenda Shannon lays out in this essay. I find Shannon's arguments both timely and challenging, and am largely sympathetic to the perspective he advocates. Given the brevity of the essay, however, it contains several assumptions and assertions that need to be developed; and it raises fairly significant questions about what this new model of studying the past might actually look like in practice.


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Alasdair MacIntyre, John Henry Newman Annual Lecture, St John's College, Oxford University, June 9, 2009.

Shannon's bracing critique is unusual in at least one sense: it is deeply conversant with the practices and epistemic conventions of academic history, but, at the same time, stands outside those conventions. The problem with the usual culture-war critiques of history as an academic project taken over by postmodern relativists and nihilists (I'm thinking here of the popular commentary of self-styled cultural warriors like Dinesh D'Souza, Victor Davis Hanson, Keith Windschuttle, and David Horowitz) is that they show a shallow understanding of the commitments of academic historians and advocate a return to "objectivity" as a solution to some vague postmodern "radical" bias. The very "inclusions" that Shannon points to (e.g., ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality) as expansions of content only, rather than expansions of ways of knowing or approaching the past, are portrayed by these cultural warriors as radical departures. In fact, there is a certain irony in Shannon's characterization of "AHA-style history" as committed to common-sense empiricism and liberal autonomy, given that the Historical Society launched itself because of the perceived abandonment of those values by the AHA leadership and to defend empiricism and professional standards of "evidence" against politicized "bias."1 Most observers would not be able to distinguish between the kinds of history practiced under the umbrellas of the AHA and the Historical Society today—although the AHA would probably find less room for a full-throated embrace of the linguistic turn and radical uncertainty in the service of a tradition-rooted pluralism with no universal standards than apparently Historically Speaking does. Ironies indeed! [End Page 13]

Historically Speaking is, in fact, to be commended for finding a space for the voice from the margins represented by Shannon—a voice that is at once steeped in the epistemic challenges of successive 20th-century relativisms (pragmatism, cultural relativism, Kuhnian history of science, Foucauldian genealogy, Rortian neopragmatism, etc.) and deeply committed to an alternative body of thought that finds a place for dogma, orthodoxy, and tradition as sources of epistemic, moral, and political commitments. Such an approach is articulated in the writings of figures such as MacIntyre and Cavanaugh from whom Shannon draws, as well as others such as Charles Taylor who he does not mention.2

Over the entire period in which history supposedly took a linguistic turn, many of its proponents were busy finding ways to short-circuit that turn, to turn it into a matter of method and object of study as away to circumvent its more disturbing potential to undermine the kinds of truths the historical profession has sought to preserve. When John Toews announced the arrival of the linguistic turn...

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