In Defence of History

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Or in the re-quoted words of Jacques Derrida, history is “an inscription on the past pretending to be a likeness of it” (1968). Learning from the enemy Methodologically, the major negative development has been the construction of a set of barriers between what happened in history and our capacity to observe and understand it. It is denied that there is any reality that is objectively there and not constructed by the observer for different and changing purposes. It is claimed that we can never penetrate beyond the limitatio In a similar way, Peter Schöttler claims that the book avoids discussing, indeed basically dismisses, the new cultural history which has (in his view) been one of the principal and most welcome consequences of postmodernism. Nevertheless, relevance can be found for Evans’ arguments in a modern context. His definition of a historical fact as “something that happened in history and can be verified as such through the traces history has left behind” can be applied effectively to the current debates around ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’. In fact, there are clear parallels between these seemingly modern phenomena and the postmodernism assertion that “no one can know anything beyond their own bodily identity” . This descent into post-truth can be halted however, by Evans’ reassertion that “today we need to say, again, that there is such a thing as the truth and you can find it out” . He believes that manipulation of the truth can be rooted out by empirical method. In this volume, the renowned historian Richard J. Evans offers a fervent and deeply insightful defense of his craft and its importance to civilization. At a time when fact and historical truth are under unprecedented assault, Evans shows us why history is necessary. Taking us into the historians' workshop, he offers a firsthand look at how good history gets written.

Jenkins suggests that what I am defending is simply my own individual practice as a historian ('Evans's history is just him: it's just his', p. 101), and that I present my own work as an ideal example of how history should be done. How can I be a spokesman for historians in general, how can my view be lumped together with those of 'Geoffrey Elton, Gertrude Himmelfarb, John Tosh, J. H. Hexter, C.B. McCullagh, Lawrence Stone' and others (p. 9), how can my arguments indeed be described as 'Evansist/bourgeois' (p. 101) if they are only justifying what I practice as an individual historian? Moreover, nowhere do I present my own work as the ne plus ultra of historical scholarship; on the contrary, I should have thought that the emphasis of the book on how history changes and (sometimes) advances as a discipline, how the past is continually being reinterpreted and so on, would have made it clear enough that I expect my own work to be superseded in the future.At times Hunt's misreading of the book becomes almost comical, as when she objects to the sentence in the Chapter on causation where I remark that social and economic history have become the 'principal victims' of 'the new theories'. 'What does this have to do with causation?' she asks rhetorically. The answer is, not a lot, because it's the last sentence in the Chapter and is intended to point the way to the next Chapter, which is precisely about social and economic history. Let me quote the sentence in full, to make it clear how misleading Hunt's paraphrase of it is: The need for such an addition is further illustrated by the misunderstandings present in the review by the Soviet history specialist Steve Smith, who supposes that In Defence of History argues that 'there is a singular truth to be told about the past' and that it can be 'discovered' from the evidence. The book goes to some length to argue that what historians write is the result of a dialogue between their own purposes and ideas and what they find in the sources. Unwilling to re cognise this, Smith proceeds to entangle himself in a web of contradictions, as he argues on the one hand that historians' interpretations of past events cannot stand or fall by the extent to which they conform to the historical evidence, and on the other accuses the Harvard historian Richard Pipes of providing 'a deeply distorted representation' of the Russian revolution. The characteristic postmodernist distancing device of the inverted commas around the word 'truth' suggests that he thinks otherwise, else why would he have put them there? Moreover, what Jenkins says here goes completely against what he and others have written at such length about the impossibility of inferring past events, situations, beliefs and so on from documentary evidence. Enormous amounts of postmodernist ink have been spilled on trying to prove that documents are so unreliable you can never tell anything from them, that you can never recover the intentions of their authors, and so on. It is a fundamental premise of postmodernist critiques of history that a document is re-invented and re-interpreted every time someone looks at it, so that it can never have any fixed meaning. If this claim doesn't mean that we can never use documents to find out basic historical facts, then it doesn't mean anything at all. Jenkins tries to recover a little of the ground he has conceded here by insisting on the difficulty of recovering the past through historical documents; but simply because that recovery may be partial or provisional, may involve argument and interpretation, may be open to criticism from others, or may never be definitive, doesn't mean that it's impossible, as Jenkins previously claimed. Jenkins seems to be undermining his whole larger argument here, and goes much further in the direction of an empiricist defence of 'facts' than I would. In fact, of course, In Defence of History goes to some length to point out that postmodernist ideas and trends have not simply been 'assimilated' into the practice of historical writing and research insofar as they have been useful to it, they have actually materially altered the way many historians see the past. Indeed, the book argues that aspects of postmodernist thinking need to be taken on board by historians precisely because they will alter the discipline of history , perhaps even in some respects transform it. The book tries to show, inevitably briefly, how much of the most exciting and innovative work in history in recent years has taken its cue (though, it goes without saying, not always uncritically) from Foucault, the 'linguistic turn', and so on; some of it is mentioned above, but let me add that I found Hayden White's work on narrative and metaphor stimulating and important for my own recent book Tales from the German Underworld, as Jenkins would have noticed had he read it (not that there is any evidence in his book that he has read any history at all, and why should there be, since he thinks it so useless?). Nor do I think that Holocaust denial has performed any real service to genuine scholarship, because it has nothing to do with reinterpretation. It is nothing more than a simple falsification of history, undertaken for political motives that have nothing to do with real historical investigation. On the other hand, the work, say, of Goldhagen, though in my view demonstrably wrong on a number of accounts, has stimulated historians to think afresh about such issues as the reasons why ordinary men, or ordinary Germans, participated in the extermination of the Jews, the strength of anti-Jewish sentiment in Imperial Germany, the extent to which antisemitism was increasing during the Weimar Republic, and so on. In other words, on the evidence o f his review, Nolte and I are in broad agreement on all the issues he raises. On the evidence of my In Hitler's Shadow and his Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, however, we are still a long way apart.

If Nolte misunderstands my notion of objectivity in one way, then Peter Ghosh misunderstands and misrepresents it in a whole variety of ways. In his review, he claims that the book is engaged in a 'polemic against history since 1960', that it defends an 'exaggerated empiricism' based on the 'fetishising of documents' and that I believe that facts and documents 'speak for themselves'. It is hard to believe that Ghosh has read the book properly, or that he is familiar with my other work. In Defence of History actually argues that history has undergone a welcome renaissance since the 1960s, and defends explicitly and at length in Chapter 6 the broadening of the discipline which has taken place in this period against conservative historians who would like to see it return to its old concentration on the politics of the nation-state. My own work on the social history of medicine and disease, the history of ritual, the history of feminism, the history of death, and other topics, would not have been possible without all the changes that have taken place in historical studies over the last forty years. Because there seems to be a quite widespread misunderstanding of what I mean by historical objectivity, with numerous reviewers assuming that because I actually dare to use the word it can only have one meaning, that is, a strong and traditional one, rather than, as I intended, a weak and qualified one, I have added a sentence to the penultimate paragraph in the American and German editions: 'Objective history in the last analysis is history that is researched and written within the limits placed on the historical imagination by the facts of history and the sources which reveal them, and bound by the historian's desire to produce a true, fair, and adequate account of the subject under consideration.' Any questions this might seem to beg are, I hope, dealt with in the preceding text of the book. Easthope concludes this part of his argument by citing the book's 'resoundingly empiricist conclusion that, despite it all, "it really happened", we can "find out how" and know "what it all meant".' What this passage in the book actually says, following on a series of references to the theses of various postmodernist writers on history, is as follows: 'I will look humbly at the past and say despite them all: it really happened, and we really can, if we are very scrupulous and careful and self-critical, find out how it happened and reach some tenable though always less than final conclusions about what it all meant.' By removing all the qualifications from this statement, Easthope has manipulated it to give the appearance of a dogmatic confidence in the possibility of absolute knowledge that was a very long way from what was intended. Thus he has only managed to support the charge he levels against the book, of mindless empiricism, by giving a deliberately false and distorted version of what it actually says. Written at the height of what was perceived as an “onslaught of postmodernism” , Evans’ book ‘In Defence of History’ seeks to restate the case for a version of historical writing that is grounded in an empirical understanding of the discipline. Evans warns against both a “rank indifference” toward the linguistic challenge as well as a “drawing up [of] the disciplinary drawbridge” against new and strange forces. Instead, what Evans attempts is to thoroughly investigate this challenge and to “distinguish those who have made a creative contribution to historical understanding” . This leads to the overall theory the book espouses; an approach to historiography that states that constant challenge by, and assimilation of, new theories leads to a richer and stronger discipline. This is a book completely set in the context of its time, but as a guidebook to “how we study history, how we research and write about it, and how we read it” it succeeds on its own terms and maintains a relevancy 23 years later. Jenkins describes the book as 'mean-spirited, often rather arrogant and dismissive' (p. 95). But what could be more deserving of epithets such as these than Jenkins's own book? Here, Jenkins repeats several times his by now very familiar assertion that the study of history is about to come to an end if it has not already done so. We can, Jenkins says, now forget history (p. 9). Any defence of it is beside the point because 'the invaders have been and gone', the citadel of 'proper' history, as he calls it, has been destroyed, and the only choice left to 'proper' historians is to join the postmodernists (a term with which, incidentally, Jenkins appears to have no problems, repeatedly identifying himself as a postmodernist), or remain located in an outmoded and increasingly distant past, like, one supposes, the practitioners of a truly dead discipline like medieval scholasticism. For Jenkins, historians like myself inhabit a mental 'world of the flat-earth variety' (pp. 95-9), and this means that students should treat 'Richard Evans as "someone to forget"' (p. 201).The book begins with a history of history: raising first pre-modern styles of history, such as the chronicle and the morality tale of Gibbon’s "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". Leopold von Ranke is cited as the father of the modern method, that’s to say the inspection of contemporary documents in the historical record using them to identify causes for historical events and "facts". Here the distinction is made between the primary sources and secondary sources. For Ranke the key subject of history was politics, a view that held sway for many year but more recently has been receding. The key to the historical method therefore is hunting down original documentation and reading it with a mind to its original purpose and the context of other documents of that period with a care not to be caught out by changes in language and unspoken purposes. The historical interests of most Marxist historians were not so much in the base - the economic infrastructure - as in the relations of base and superstructure. This socio-economic current was wider than Marxism. These historical modernisers asked the same questions and saw themselves as engaged in the same intellectual battles, whether inspired by human geography, Weberian sociology or the Marxism of the communist historians who became carriers of historical modernisation in Britain.

Hunt, in other words, is mistaking style for content. This is particularly clear when she comes to deal with the book's account of Carr's notions of causation, which she considers to be merely a 'rehash' of Carr's own views. The conclusion she cites from the book, that 'Carr did not really think his argument through' comes, contrary to what Hunt maintains, not at the end of a mere repetition of his views, but at the end of a lengthy and reasoned criticism of them. This criticism is base d principally on my objection to Carr's view that historians should only be interested in understanding the cause of a past event if it could help us change the present and shape the future. Hunt's misrepresentations continue even when she is positive about the book, as in her view that it is at its best when it 'unravels controversies that have nothing to do with epistemological issues, such as the one about David Abraham' s reading of sources in his analysis of business interests in Nazi Germany'. The whole point of recounting this controversy, however, as the book makes quite clear in the course of its analysis of the affair, is that it has a direct bearing on central issues of historical epistemology: namely the relationship between fact and interpretation, the possibility of falsifying interpretations by referring to evidence, and the argument of Hayden White that a Marxist historical interpretation such as Abraham's cannot be disproved because what Marxists view as relevant evidence is not so viewed by non-Marxist historians. Each generation reflects on the sense and non-sense of history - and a historian ambitioning to be a "master practitioner" sooner or later succumbs to the urge to write a book on this topic. By stepping in the footsteps of E. H. Carr and Sir Geoffrey Elton, the author stakes out the claim. This urge is given urgency by post-modernism, which (in the author's view) is savaging the discipline. In so doing, the author has simply written a tract. All tracts (as all incidental matters) in the end disappoint. This book is no exception: it is rather dull, repetitive, and meandering, and in the end, too self-consciously self-important.This is not the only example of Jenkins distorting what I wrote for polemical effect. The book asserts for example that the epistemological issues it discusses are relevant to the problem of how society can obtain the kind of objective certainty about the great issues of our time that can serve as a reliable basis for taking vital decisions for the future. This, says Jenkins, means that I think the fate of history is integral to the fate of civilisation itself. But the book does not say that it is integral, only that it is relevant, a far more modest claim. There are two further points worth making in reply to Johnson's criticism. The first is that the book does endorse the writing of popular history by academic historians, and mentions a number of books which provide good examples of this . The more that the gap can be bridged, the better. The second, also mentioned (briefly) in the book, is that it is essentially not true that professional, university-based historians are facing a new challenge from popular representations of history in the media. Popular representations of history have always been widespread, whether in folksong and ballad, saga and legend, or broadside and chapbook, and they have always structured the historical perceptions of the majority. Two and a half thousand years ago, the Greek historian Thucydides complained in the preface to his history of the Pelopponesian War that poets and others were purveying false and imaginary accounts of what had happened, and announced his intention of setting the record straight. In the past, only a tiny minority of the literate and the educated were exposed to professional history and historians. Today, at the end of the twentieth century, with over a third of the entire population passing through higher education when they reach the end of their teens in most advanced industrial societies, and a growing proportion of mature and part-time students entering an ever-expanding process of lifelong learning, the number of those who have access to and are influenced by university-based history and historians is probably greater in absolute terms than it has ever been before. What Ghosh seems to be advocating is the method pioneered by Quentin Skinner, of fixing the meaning of a past text by comparing the language it uses with the language used in other, contemporaneous texts: thus we will be able to determine once and for all the meaning of Hobbes's Leviathan, for example, by fixing the meaning of the language and concepts it uses through locating them in their contemporary linguistic context. This is a very fruitful and influential approach, but it is not synonymous with the entire 'modern discipline of the history of ideas', and indeed postmodernist writers on historiography regard it (without much justification, it has to be said) as an outdated form of historicism. Since Ranke’s time history has diversified immensely with the increasing focus on non-political history such as social history and an appreciation of a wider range of themes , I find this liberating since my interest in history is primarily in "people like me", therefore social and scientific, rather than political.

The confusions and contradictions in Ghosh's review are compounded in his subsequent response to the points made above in a letter to the London Review of Books, where he goes on to declare that a 'Rankean' approach to history as described in my book is an invention of the last thirty years, and asserts roundly that I am a Rankean. 'Rankean' in this sense seems to involve the kind of documentary fetishism that Ghosh accuses me of in his review. But what could fetishize the documents more than Ghosh's own apparent belief that interpretations and theories in history can only be legitimate if they spring from history itself, or in other words, from the documents? while a chemist… knows in advance the result of mixing two elements… the historian has no such advance knowledge of anything, nor is trying to gain such knowledge central to the business historians are engaged in.” Jenkins immediately contradicts himself, however, by going on in his very next sentence to assert 'that it really is history per se that radical postmodernism threatens with extinction' (p. 9). So he accepts that the book is a broadly-based defence of all approaches to the study of the past, not just a defence of one particular approach. What other kind of history is there anyway, apart from a history that starts from the premise that we can know about the past? The author rejects the idea that "narratives do not exist in the past itself but are all put there by the historian" (p. 120) and points to "the narrative is there in the sources, lived and thought by the people we are writing about: German or Italian unification...". Lived through in the case of Italy? One is left wondering: 2% of Italians spoke the language! Italian historiography is tentatively emerging just now from the nationalist drall that has transformed a civil war after the occupation of the Kingdom of Naples into "banditism". And the mainstream history-writing about WWI still has to face up to the fact that "irredentism" was a sham for a few politicians' ambition to create an empire in the eastern Mediterranean. Even mainstream American history is not devoid of glaring selectivity in the presentation of the "the evidence". The role of slavery in the US Constitution is hardly properly mentioned (or the 3/5 rule); the pivotal role of Spain in the Revolutionary War is seldom referred to, for it detracts from Yorktown; the indirect yet critical involvement of New England in the running of the Caribbean sugar economy is forgotten; and there are more instances of "gaps"...The reason why the book refers so frequently to Elton and Carr is simply that, as many historians of a variety of different persuasions have conceded, their books still form the basis for much if not most teaching of historical epistemology today. They are still much the most readable and approachable accounts of the nature of historical knowledge written by practising historians. Lynn Hunt finds this a 'disappointing...flight...into "daddyism", the search for fatherly figures that warrant the legitimacy of an approach. Evans', she says, 'refers almost obsessively to Carr and Elton as if to reassure himself that he will be their appointed successor; his criticisms of them sound like those of a deferential grandson.' In fact, I n Defence of History is intended, not to replace their books, but to be read alongside them; hence the chapter headings, borrowed from Carr, or the final paragraph, a parody of Carr's final paragraph. Thirty or more years ago there were hardly any books which introduced history students to the conceptual and methodological problems which they faced, so Carr and Elton virtually had the field to themselves. Now there are many such competing texts, and the very idea of any single book achieving the kind of status theirs did is ridiculous.