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Foreword
- State University of New York Press
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Foreword As a history undergraduate, in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, I was told that only through an unrelenting diligence in the archive could I move toward better, balanced, and justified explanations about what happened in the past. And, of course, only through rational inference might I be able to tell what it most likely meant. In this way I learned that the logic of history was empiricism, analysis, and hypothesis testing. I was also schooled to accept that the basis of history was the single statement of justified belief. Moreover, an important corollary to this was also dinned into me. It was that as long as historians are reasonable people, disinterested in their accounts, even-handed and not judgemental in their inferences, and are happy with tiny incremental advances in knowledge, then the discipline does not merely hold to objectivity and truth as regulatory ideals, but they can be achieved. So it is the natural state of affairs, I was also informed, that historical explanations are always provisional and that this provisionality is of a particularly worthy kind, indeed, the only kind of provisionality worth having. It was and is the provisionality of interpretation. History is an interpretation because it is always conditional on the estimable triad of new evidence, better inference, and the application of improved conceptualization/theory that explains the widest possible range of available evidence. This virtuous circle is, therefore, the ultimate shield against mendacity and partiality. Briefly, but sternly, I was warned not to confuse provisionality with relativism . In other words, the possibility of truthful historical knowledge is there, but only if you do not step outside the empirical-analytical pentacle. It was only later—after I had become a professional historian and possessed a hard-core social science PhD—that I read Hayden White’s Metahistory . I then lapsed. I began to wonder if the logic of history that I had been taught might not, in fact, exhaust its nature. Inevitably I began to wonder if provisionality in historical interpretation could have something to do with the possibility of historical knowledge itself. In other words, was the vii ontology of history even more complicated than I had been led to believe? What I got from White (and other philosophers of history such as Mink, Ankersmit, Danto, Carr, Jenkins, and Ricoeur in their own ways) was a profound uncertainty about history as some kind of reconstruction or facsimile or something that was even better: an explanation of what the past really meant! Although the “linguistic turn” now sounds faintly old hat in the face of many new “history turns” it is worth recalling that it was not so long ago that it was briefly fashionable to criticize reconstructionist naïve empiricism. But now that particular stalking horse has gone the way of all horseflesh (surely I am not being too optimistic here?) I still harbor doubts that we are yet, as a profession, self-conscious enough to label our constructionist history with a poststructuralist and antinarrativist health warning. But, as this collection so clearly reveals, history is as much about the historian and the present and its own future as it is about the past itself. Happily, history will always have a future as long as we do not forget to debate the nature of its provisionality and the relationship between interpretation and explanation. Epistemological skepticism is not intellectual irresponsibility. It is, rather, an honest and, perforce, a demanding ethical excursion into that dangerous territory we call “uncertainty”—uncertainty about knowledge of the real, the (im)possibility of objectivity, how we create “historical concepts ” that purport to offer an explanatory match with what happened and, not least, the indeterminacy of our representations. Arguably, the past is only as fixed as our images of it and the metaphors we substitute for it. What we constitute as “the past” is no more rigid than our present practices of classification and description. Once we understand that we can free ourselves of the belief that the past is over and done with: that the past does not change. As this collection so clearly reveals, we can usefully and fully engage with “the-past-as-history,” we can do it “meaningfully,” but only once we let go of the certainties in which I, for one, was trained. This is a collection that I strongly commend to everyone who has an open mind about his or her engagement with the time before now. Alun Munslow viii Foreword ...