Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge

Chapter 11. From the Perspective of the 1990s

Chapter 11 From the Perspective of the 19905 In 1979 Lawrence Stone, in his now famous article "The Revival of Narrative," cast doubts on the older social science model of historical studies and endorsed the new orientation toward anthropology and semiotics. In 1991, in a note, "History and PostModernism ,"1 again in Past and Present, he expressed his concern about the radical direction historical discourse had taken since then. As we remember, in "The Revival of Narrative " he had heralded "the end of the attempt to produce a coherent scientific explanation of change in the past." He now saw a triple threat to history: from postmodernism, from linguistics , and cultural and symbolic anthropology, and from the New Historicism. All three agree in dealing with political, institutional , and social practice as "discursive sets of symbolic systems or codes." "Texts thus become a mere hall of mirrors reflecting nothing but each other, and throwing no light upon the 'truth/ which does not exist." From these perspectives, in the final analysis, "the real is as imagined as the imaginary."2 Stone's warnings were promptly challenged by the British social and cultural historian Patrick Joyce. The "real," he admitted , "can be said to exist independently of our representationsof it," but he insisted that "history is never present to us in anything but a discursive form." The major advance of postmodernism, in his view, was the recognition that "there is no overarching coherence evident in either the polity, the economy or the social 134 system" and that "there is no underlying structure" to which the texts from which our understanding of the historical context emerges "can be referred."3 But from the perspective of the 19905, Joyce's position seems much less convincingthan it did a decade earlier. Of course, even in the 19805 the postmodern approach as defined by Joyce by no means had a monopoly. The "linguistic turn" that occupied the pages of the American Historical Review and other American journals in the second half of the 19805 did not have the same fascination for historians outside North America, even in France, although the concepts on which it rested originated in large part in French literary theory from Barthes to Derrida. We have already noted the limited effect radically formulated theories of linguistic determinism had on historical writing, even on writers such as Gareth Stedman Jones, William Sewell, Lynn Hunt, and Thomas Childers, who saw in discourse a significant key to historical understanding. Stone could argueconvincingly "that it is impossible to think of a major historical work written from a thoroughly postmodernist perspective and using postmodernist language and vocabulary."4 Perhaps Simon Schama's Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations5 and Jonathan Spence's The Question ofHu6 went farthest in the direction of a historiography that consciously dissolved the border between scholarly history and historical novel. At the threshold between the 19808 and the 19905 stand the revolutionary changes in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. In retrospect there may be explanations for these changes; at the time they were largely unforeseen. In significant ways they undermined the self-confidence of the older social sciences, which believed in the possibility of coherent social explanation, as well as of the new cultural history, which largely ignored the political context of the culture of everyday life. The collapse of communism appeared to confirm the predictions of Western advocates of capitalism who, like Francis Fukuyama, were convinced that the pressures of economic modernization would necessarily lead to corporate market economies and representative democracy. America would thus become the model for the world—though the events following 1989 soon disproved these prophesies. Notwithstanding these predictions, few anaFrom the Perspective of the 19905 135 lysts had expected the immanent collapse of the Soviet system. While reforms in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European client states in the wake of Gorbachev's Perestroika had been anticipated, it was generally expected that they would occur within the framework of the socialist system and would leave the international order dominated by the two superpowers intact. Largely unexpected was the unification of Germany as well as the dissolution of the Soviet Union. As a matter of fact, it was generally believed that internal reforms in the Eastern states and the Soviet Union would normalize relations between the two blocks. As regards Germany, this normalization would have meant that unification would lose its urgency. Unforeseen were the new forms of...