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

Introduction

Introduction Over twenty years ago I published a small book about the state of historical studies in Europe at that time, in which I showed how the traditional forms of scholarship were replaced by newer forms of historical research in the social sciences.1 Historians in all countries were largely in agreement that research as it had been practiced internationally since the beginning of historical studies as a professional discipline in the early nineteenth century corresponded neither to the social nor to the political conditions of the second half of the twentieth century nor to Ihe demands of a modern science. Meanwhile ideas about history and historiography have again undergone a profound change. This volume should therefore not be seen as a continuation which, so to say, would bring my publication of 1975 up to date. Instead, it is mainly concerned with a select number of basic changes in the thinking and in the practice of historians today. Although there are many continuities with older forms of historical research and historical writing, a basic reorientation has taken place. Increasingly in the last twenty years the assumptions upon which historical research and writing have been based since the emergence of history as a professional discipline in the nineteenth century have been questioned. Many of these assumptions go back to the beginnings of a continuous tradition of Western historiography in Classical antiquity. What was new in the nineteenth century was the professionalization of historical studies and their concentration at universities and research cenI ters. Central to the process of professionalization was the firm belief in the scientific status of history. The concept sciencewas, to be sure, understood differently by historians than by natural scientists, who sought knowledge in the form of generalizations and abstract laws. For the historians history differed from nature because it dealt with meanings as they expressed themselves in the intentions of the men and women who made history and in the values and mores that gave societies cohesion. History dealt with concrete persons and concrete cultures in time. But the historians shared the optimism of the professionalized sciences generally that methodologically controlled research makes objective knowledge possible. For them as for other scientists truth consisted in the correspondence of knowledge to an objective reality that, for the historian, constituted the past "as it had actually occurred."2 The self-definition of history as a scientific discipline implied for the work of the historian a sharp division between scientific and literary discourse, between professional historians and amateurs. The historians overlooked the extent to which their research rested on assumptions about the course of history and the structure of society that predetermined the results of their research. The transformation of history into an institutionalized discipline must not, however, lead us to overlook the continuities with older forms of historical writing. The historiography of the nineteenth century stood in a tradition that went back to the great historians of Classical Greek antiquity. They shared with Thucydides the distinction between myth and truth, and at the same time, despite their stress on the scientific and hence nonrhetorical character of historical writing, proceeded in the classical tradition of historical writing in presupposing that history is alwayswritten as a narrative. The problem with historical narrative, however, as Hayden White3 and other recent theorists of history have pointed out, is that, while it proceeds from empirically validated facts or events, it necessarily requires imaginative steps to place them in a coherent story. Therefore a fictional element enters into all historical discourse. Hence the break between the "scientific" history of the nineteenth century and the older literary traditions of history was by no means as great as many nineteenth-century historians had Historiography in the Twentieth Century 2 assumed. "Scientific" historical discourse involved the literary imagination while the older literary tradition also sought truth in the reconstruction of a real past. The "scientific" orientation since Leopold von Ranke shared three basic assumptions with the literary tradition from Thucydides to Gibbon: (i) They accepted a correspondence theory of truth holding that history portrays people who really existed and actions that really took place. (2) They presupposed that human actions mirror the intentions of the actors and that it is the task of the historian to comprehend these intentions in order to construct a coherent historical story. (3) They operated with a one-dimensional, diachronical conception of time, in which later events follow earlier ones in...