Whose Choir? Which Gospel?

Over forty years ago, David Hackett Fischer concluded his Historians’ Fallacies by conceding that any attempt to raise foundational questions about the meaning and purpose of history writing is likely to generate a “violent reaction” from academic practitioners of the craft of history.¹ The profession trains historians not merely to avoid such questions, but to deny their very validity. In David R. Stone, we have Fischer’s model historian. Stone’s critique of my essay, “From History to Traditions,” speaks for the common sense of the profession, a voice that, I acknowledge, did not quite make it into the responses comprising the symposium that followed my essay in the January 2011 issue of this publication.² Bloggers on the U.S. Intellectual History website expressed concern that my symposium respondents appeared to accept my critique of common-sense empiricism uncritically. Stone’s insistence that historians limit their arguments to empirically verifiable “evidence” affirms that common sense. As I stated in my essay, I accept that common-sense empiricism is a mode of technical reason open to people of any and all faith traditions; I insist only that in practice this reason never exists apart from some faith, and that for the life of professional history writing in America, that faith has been some form of Enlightenment liberal modernity.

I am not sure how many examples I would have to produce to convince Professor Stone that I have the evidence to support my claim, but let me start by returning to David Hackett Fischer. Written in 1970, nearly twenty years before the linguistic turn invaded theoretical reflection on historical practice, Fischer’s Historians’ Fallacies subjects common-sense empiricism to the most brutal beating one could imagine this side of Friedrich Nietzsche. Readers who make it through the 300 pages of this densely argued deconstruction of nearly every possible explanatory framework at the disposal of professional historians might well wonder why anyone—most of all Fischer himself—would bother trying to write academic history at all. Yet Fischer concludes with what I can only interpret as an affirmation of his faith in historical reason. The alternative to existing historical fallacies lies in greater empirical and theoretical rigor. Why should we bother with any of this? The pressing political needs of the day demand it:

The vital purpose of refining and extending a logic of historical thought is not merely some pristine goal of scholarly perfection. It involves the issue of survival. Let us make no mistake about priorities. If men continue to make the historical error of conceptualizing the problems of nuclear war in prenuclear terms, there will not be a postnuclear world. If people persist in the historical error of applying yesterday’s programs to today’s problems, we may suddenly run short of tomorrow’s possibilities.³

Faced with the threat of nuclear annihilation, the duty of historians “consists in teaching men somehow to think reasonably about their condition. Reason is indeed a pathetically frail weapon in the face of such a threat. But it is the only weapon we have.”⁴ Fischer’s cri du coeur is the type of existential affirmation that continues to underlie most mainstream academic history. It is no more empirically verifiable than the Catholic soteriology of communion, yet it shapes liberal history as thoroughly as theology might shape a traditionalist Catholic history.

For more evidence, we need look no further than the subject of another recent Historically Speaking forum, Daniel Rodgers’s Age of Fracture (April 2011). Rodgers is certainly one of the leading American historians of his generation, but his stature follows as much from the stories he chooses to tell as from the skill with which he tells them. His Atlantic Crossings rode the wave of a neoliberal historiography that, following the triumph of conservatism at home and the collapse of communism abroad, sought to rehabilitate the Progressive-New Deal tradition as social democracy, the last best hope of man in a world where socialism no longer seemed possible.⁵ Age of Fracture tells the story of the breakup of the New Deal/Cold War liberal order...