Why All Historical Accounts Are Inevitably Theoretical, but Some Are Preferable to Others

1 2 Historically Speaking · November 2003 Why All Historical Accounts Are Inevitably Theoretical, but Some Are Preferable to OtHERS+ Mary Fulbrook Woody Allen once famously presented a trailerfor a course in epistemology as follows: "Is knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know?" One sometimes gets a similar feeUng of frustration with arguments about the nature ofhistory . On the one hand, historians—and people generaUy—present accounts ofthe past "as it reallywas" aU the time. We recount our own lives and teU each other stories ofwhat happened during the day as though these were in some very simple sense true (and if in doubt, we readily seek other accounts, othersources ofinformation); we argue about historical causation, make historical comparisons , and situate current events in a wider context aU the time. (Was 9/11 another Pearl Harbor? How valid was the supposed evidence for the existence ofweapons of mass destruction in Iraq?) Professional historians in a more disciplined fashion seek to provide an evidence-based account ofselected facets of the past. Historical museums and reconstructions on historical sites, popular history books, and historical themes in television and filmhave been enjoyinga boomwith the general pubUc. And historians frequendy provide critical responses to the popularization of history as though there were some unproblematic way of comparing the popularized representations with "the way it reaUywas," as responses to the recent BBC Hider biography readily demonstrate. On the other hand, there are a variety of challenges to the notion that we can know the pastas itreaUywas. There is a strongtheoretical challenge from postmodernists, who have argued that the historical enterprise is fundamentally flawed. Some (such as Keith Jenkins or FrankAnkersmit) argue that since the pasthas gone forever, it is no longer available as a reaUty againstwhichwe can measure our accounts; there are onlyinterpretations of interpretations, and there can never be any unmediated knowledge ofthe past as itreaUy was. Others (such as Hans Kellner), following the early writings of Hayden White, argue that "stories as a whole" are not "given" in the past; we impose an order on historical material that was not there as it happened. While on this view individual statements about the past may be true, the stories told by historians are essentially "emplotments" of selected tidbits scavenged from the surviving debris ofdie past, and hence imaginative constructions ofthe present rather than genuine representations of the past. Postmodernists thus argue that there is an essentially unbridgeable gap between the constructions ofthe present and the intrinsicaUy unknowable past. And ifaninfinitenumber of stories can be told about the past, and all are equaUynotopen to disconfirmation, how is it possible to choose between them on anything other than aesthetic grounds? There is also a rather more diffuse but essentially poUtical challenge, which takes a variety offorms. "Master narratives," magisterial accounts written from an apparendy sovereign position in a realist mode, have been challenged and displaced by situated "interventions," wiUfullypartisan arguments and constructions. The goal ofsynthesis has been rejected in favor ofdiversity and a multipUcity ofcompeting narratives from different perspectives. There is, perhaps more fundamentally, also the sobering thought that professional historyis characterized by a huge diversity of approaches and theoretical -isms, often with Utde or no agreement over howto define die object of study, let alone how to proceed methodologicaUy, or what would constitute die most acceptable answer to anygiven question . Choice ofhistorical approach and interpretation often seems closelyrelated to poUtical commitments: left-wing historians seem disproportionately attracted to history from below, social history, the new cultural history, the linguistic turn, and of course to Marxist and neo-Marxist history, while right-wing historians appear to remain more comfortable with traditional political narratives, diplomatic and military history, and so on. There seems Utile other than poUtical criteria for choosing between approaches. Thus historians at the start of the 2 1st century are faced with two fundamental questions about the nature of history: in what respects do historical accounts differ from fiction? And in what respects do historical accounts differ from poUtics or ideology ? These questions represent a shift from the older debates over whether history was an art or a science which plagued Western European and North American historians over the last century or so, from...