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Epilogue: A Retrospect at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century
- Wesleyan University Press
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Epilogue: A Retrospect at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century It has been seven years since this book first appeared in English and more than ten years since the original German edition was published.1 The important changes in the world scene brought about by the end of the Cold War had by then been reflected only in small part in historical studies. In the last third of the twentieth century, the turn from an emphasis on the analytical social sciences to cultural factors continued, but with more diversified foci in the face of the rapidly changing world scene. At the end of this book considerable attention was paid to the so-called postmodernist challenges to objective historical scholarship , but in recent years postmodernism has received less attention among historians.2 In fact, the radical postmodern position was largely restricted to the United States—and, as we shall see, India— and to a lesser extent to Great Britain, although many of its intellectual roots derived from French poststructuralism. Its basic assumption —that language is a self-referential system that does not reflect but creates reality—denied the possibility of reconstructing the past as it was actually lived by human beings and abrogated the borderline between historical narratives and fiction. An extreme formulation of this radical position was voiced by Keith Jenkins in 1997, when he wrote that the whole modern conception of history (that is, that the historian can recapture the historical past), "now 149 appears as a self-referential, problematical expression of interests, an ideological-interpretative discourse . . . In fact, history now appears to be just one more foundationless, positioned expression in a world of foundationless, positioned expressions."3 But this hardly corresponds to the assumptions with which historians operate, even today after the postmodernist challenge. The question of how one re-creates the past has become considerably more complex than it was either for the older political school or for social science-oriented historiography. The sheer objectivism of older historical scholarship has long been abandoned. As a matter of fact, it had never been unqualifiedly accepted by serious historians . Yet the awareness grew in recent years that historians approach their subject matter with questions and that the way to answer them is affected by the linguistic and conceptual tools with which historians construct their account.4 But the radical form of postmodernist epistemological relativism has had little influence on historical study and historical writing. Nevertheless, ideas deriving from postmodernist thought and from the "linguistic turn" are reflected today in a great deal of historical writing, although these ideas originate not directly from postmodernism as such but from related developments in historical thought and practice. Thus, indirectly, ideas similar to those of postmodernism continued to exert a profound influence on the reorientation of historical thought. This involves the questioning of history as a unilinear directional process leading to present day Western civilization. The radical consequence drawn from this redefinition of history— that history lacks all coherence—did not necessarily follow. Yet historians began to turn from constructing macrohistories to paying greater attention to smaller segments: to the lives and, significantly , to the experiences of little people. All this also had relevance for the way in which historians dealt with sources. The great impact here came less from postmodernist theories than from cultural anthropology,5 linguistics, and semiotics, which all shared in the transformation of the intellectual climate in the last decades of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. As we already saw, since the "linguistic turn" of the 19808, attention increasingly was paid to the role of language in the form of discourse. Nevertheless, historians differed on the significance of language for historical inquiry.6 While Joan Scott7 argued that the texts with 150 Historiography in the Twentieth Century [107.21.137.184] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:26 GMT) which the historian worked had no direct relation to an actual past—that language did not reflect but created reality—many more historians saw language and discourse as important tools for historical understanding yet also were aware that this linguistic turn occurred within specific socio-historical contexts. At the same time, the conviction held by many social scienceoriented historians, that political changes and events can best be explained in terms of social and economic factors, continued to lose credence. In the last ten years there have been two distinct new emphases in the treatment of political history.8 The conception of what constitutes the...