Preaching to the Choir: A Response to Christopher Shannon

Christopher Shannon's essay "From Histories to Traditions" (Historically Speaking, January 2011) has the welcome and salutary purpose of shaking up the smug complacency of the modern historical profession. In asking historians to take seriously traditions outside lowest-common-denominator liberal modernity and engage with big questions, he is certainly on the right track. But centering the study of history on alternative traditions, as Shannon would have us do, has quite serious implications for the nature of our intellectual community. His respondents did an excellent job of pointing out some of the consequences that flow from Shannon's approach; I would like to further their critique.

Shannon's position consigns to the ash heap of history most of the work historians have done within the constraints of what he calls the "modern liberal consensus that dominates the historical profession." Bounded by empiricism and prevented by secularism from engaging the most serious questions, "the last hundred years of professional history have been a tautological reflection on the nature of liberal modernity, with the occasional cage rattling of radical challenges quickly domesticated under the big tent of autonomy." While pretending to reject moral judgment, historians in the tradition of liberal modernity in fact approve anything that promises greater individual freedom, whatever its costs. It's not simply that the limitations of "modern historical reasoning" produce an incomplete view of the past, but instead that "we cannot write meaningful history within these limits."

Shannon's judgment that historians are wholly wedded to radical individualism appears to me to rest on dubious empirical foundations. Whole swathes of the historical profession bear little resemblance to the cheering sections for individual autonomy that Shannon describes. The giants of Marxist history (E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, the early Eugene Genovese, for example), for example, clearly make moral judgments about the past and do so in the name of communal solidarity, not individual autonomy. Even outside of the bounds of Marxist scholarship, the historiographies of enclosure and the Industrial Revolution, labor history, and peasant studies have substantial or even dominant communitarian strands.

Those alternatives to the supposed hegemony of liberal, individual autonomy are not particularly religious, however, and that seems to be the crux of Shannon's objection to the contemporary academy. He accepts Alasdair MacIntyre's judgment that belonging to a tradition, "a particular type of moral community, one from which fundamental dissent has to be excluded, is a condition for genuine rational inquiry." For Shannon, the historical profession needs to accept alternative traditions—Catholicism foremost among them but perhaps others as well—that possess quite distinct values and see the world in fundamentally different ways. History has been too focused on the mundane at the expense of the profound, and we must then "move the locus of historical practice from an empirical to a more philosophically reflective mode."

An illustration of Aristotle. From The Poetic of Aristotle, Translated from the Greek, with Notes, by Henry James Pye (London, 1788).

Ironically, though, Shannon's remedy to liberal modernity's atomized individuals implies the very atomization he wants to avoid. His alternative traditions would find themselves, quite literally, preaching to the choir. In Book I, chapter 2 of his Rhetoric, Aristotle famously defined his subject as "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion." When Catholics talk to Catholics, their available means of persuasion include appealing to the moral, philosophical, and metaphysical beliefs that they have in common. Though Shannon is speaking directly to the Catholic tradition, this logic applies equally to evangelicals talking to evangelicals, Islamists to Islamists, or even Marxists to Marxists. Belonging to a tradition in Shannon's use of the term means signing on to a set of beliefs. Why should those outside of that particular tradition pay attention to conclusions that follow from premises they don't happen to share?

Daniel Wickberg asks directly "what this new model of studying the past might actually look like in practice." Shannon's response is that "the collective study of history across traditions then becomes something like interfaith dialogue." This immediately...