PART THREE

A New Republic of Learning

Truth and Objectivity

IN THE PRECEDING CHAPTERS we have traced the development of
three kinds of intellectual absolutism and looked at their consequences for
historians. The first, the Enlightenment faith in the heroic model of science,
prompted historians to become like scientists and turn themselves into
neutral and passionless investigators in order to reconstruct the past exactly
as it happened. The second, the idea of progress, encouraged them to look to
history to discover the laws of human development as those laws worked
themselves out in sequential stages. This search for enduring principles of
social action, of course, carried with it the assumption that beneath the flow
of the daily actions of men and women there was an undertow of forces
pulling those actions into orderly processes of change.
The last intellectual absolutism arose from the powerful national
sentiments that nineteenth-century men and women drew upon for a sense of
identity. Powered by the revolutionary forces unleashed at the end of the
eighteenth century, the engine of nationalism drove historians to place their
countries—and by extension their fellow citizens—into the larger design of
world history. Building the nation became an absolute value, and history’s
contribution to that effort was assumed unreflectively. Behind all of these
absolutisms was the radiant concept of nature—not the lush and untamable
nature of the primitive world or the nature that pushed Adam and Eve to sin,
but the nature of science, of progressive improvement and spontaneous order
that human inquirers now perceived beneath the flotsam and jetsam that
floated to the surface of daily life.
This highly volatile mix of aspirations for history coexisted with
surprising ease for over a hundred years. All these ideas could harmoniously
occupy the same intellectual space because they were freshly minted
theories unscarred by rough encounters with verification. The notion that
random events actually composed themselves into invisible processes of
change compelled belief in part because Newtonian laws of gravity had
made people familiar with the paradoxical contrast between appearances and
reality: what was seen deluded the senses and belied the invisible, real
structuring of the physical world. Throughout the nineteenth century,
science—its methods, projects, expectations, and heroes—put into
circulation new coins for cultural negotiation as Western societies moved at
different paces toward modernity. Science gradually replaced religion as the
provider of models and metaphors for comprehending social experience.
Every carefully researched work of national history shared in the warm
approbation accorded science because it revealed how each country figured
in the overall framework of social progress. This twinned respect for science
and nationalism deflected attention from the possibility of their divergence,
from the real prospect, for instance, that histories about national grandeur
might conflict with those that used scientific methods to investigate how
nations have persecuted their minorities. The tension between patriotic
presentations of one’s country and accurate reconstructions of national
failures remained to be probed in the future, leaving nineteenth-century
scholars free and undisturbed to gather records and perfect research
methods, taking in their industry hostages for future skeptics to liberate.
Since the scientific enterprise involved drawing a fixed boundary
between the objective reality of things-as-they-are and the subjective realm
of things-as¬we-would-like-to-them-to-be, historians were loath to explore
the subjective component of history-writing. Fact had to be distinguished
from opinion, documentary evidence from interpretation. In this intellectual
milieu of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the historian’s
practice of merging the two remained in a conceptual limbo, undiscussed
and unacknowledged. A Carl Becker might wryly comment that the
historian “does not stick to the facts; the facts stick to him,” but this belle-
lettristic needling was easily shrugged off. American historians chose to
think of themselves as empiricists seeking to discover and document
objective facts.11 Even to entertain the proposition that knowledge was an
intellectual production rather than a disinterested reading of physical and
textual evidence induced a dizzying uncertainty that one scholar aptly
termed the “vertigo of relativism.” 22 Quite naturally wishing to avoid the
seasickness of shifting personal perspectives, historians generally sought to
avoid philosophical issues, which they dismissively categorized as “theory.”
Many wrote as though analyzing the course of human progress was as
straightforward a task as isolating disease-causing germs. Others recognized
changes in standard interpretations of events, but ascribed them to a kind of
Oedipal tendency for successive scholarly generations to revise the findings

1
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American
Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988). The Becker quote appeared in Carl Becker,
“Detachment and the Writing of History,” Atlantic Monthly, CVI (October 1910): 528.
2
Clifford Geertz, “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man,” in The
Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), p. 44.
of their fatherly predecessors.

The Relativist Attack on Truth and Objectivity

Since the 1960s, all the regnant absolutisms of the nineteenth century
have been dethroned. A many-pronged attack coming from a variety of
perspectives has zeroed in on the goals of objectivity and truth-seeking. A
fluid skepticism now covers the intellectual landscape, encroaching upon
one body of thought after another. The study of history has been questioned
and its potential for truth-finding categorically denied. “Who said that
history is about truth?” asks the skeptic. Having been made “scientific” in
the nineteenth century, history now shares in the pervasive disillusionment
with science which has marked the postwar era.
Some skeptics are social constructionists, once called strong
programmers, who see both science and history as intellectual contrivances
or discourses, spun out of words, which only incidentally touch things that
exist outside the separate, seamlessly interwoven linguistic tapestry. In the
Anglo-American academy, social constructionism surfaced in the history
and philosophy of science in the late 1970s. Postmodernists, many with
debts to French theorists, have since then joined the ranks of skeptics. In
their deconstructive enterprise, they have fastened onto the irreducible
element of arbitrariness in the production of all knowledge, going on from
this observation to question the capacity for human beings to understand
anything outside of their own closed systems of communication. 33
All of these contemporary thinkers have attacked the scientific influence
of their forebears with a passion equal to the rage once reserved for the
infamies of the old regime. Raising a banner more appealing than that of the
esoteric philosophers of science, postmodernists have captured the public
attention as the quintessential relativists of the day. In their view, since all
historical inquiries grow out of the inquirer’s linguistic frame, the results
follow all too predictably from the hegemonic power of the Western white
males initially responsible for the linguistic structure. The writing of history,
these critics maintain, is not about truth-seeking; it’s about the politics of the
historians. One man’s truth is another woman’s falsity, and they point to the
historiographical wars of the last twenty years as proof. Dorothy’s dog Toto
exposes the Wizard of Oz as an ordinary middle-aged man; similarly, the
skeptics believe, they have revealed historians to be no more than
specialized storytellers whose claims to recover the past as it actually
happened belong to the smoke screen of scientific pretentions. Historians, as
3
There are differences and disagreements between postmodernists and strong programmers.
See Andrew Pickering, ed., Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago, 1992).
Hayden White has maintained, “do not build up knowledge that others might
use, they generate a discourse about the past.”44
Moving beyond the undeniable subjectivity of history-writing,
contemporary critics have also weighed and found wanting the rhetorical
strategies and narrative form of historical scholarship. As hermeneutically
astute analyzers of how words can promote illusions, these commentators
rightly point out that historians have minimized the limitations of their
perspective by speaking from an omniscient point of view: “Napoleon
marched his armies across the continent of Europe,” “Americans believed
that a manifest destiny carried them across the North American continent.”
With such verbal derring-do, historians, they charge, give the impression
that they have levitated themselves off the ground to a superior
observational position.
The language of scholarship, moreover, makes it sound as if history, not
historians, were doing the talking, the authoritative voice of the all-seeing
author lulling readers into believing that the information comes from a
transcendent place. These conventions for presenting historical knowledge,
moreover, create the appearance of a dispassionate approach,
uncontaminated by partiality or interest, unconstrained by the limitations of
a single vantage point. Flawed too, in the critics’ opinion, are the words
employed to describe the past, because words lack the fixing precision of a
photograph and hence can change their meaning, chameleonlike, with every
reading. Evicting history from the category of knowledge, these doubters
prefer to lodge it along with poetry and novels in the expansive domain of
literary constructions, thus turning a grand pillar of objective knowledge into
a literary genre.
Much must be given up to the discerning skeptics who have done battle
against the nineteenth-century scientific claims that objective truth can be
definitively captured. In dragging out from the shadowy world of
unexamined assumptions the discrete propositions undergirding the
objectivity of science, these Davids of dissent have taken on the mighty
Goliath of Western metaphysics. Refusing to become worshipers at the altar
of progress, successive groups—inspired first by Nietzsche—confronted the
celebratory self-defining ideas of the West and showed that they owed more
to the hubris of power than to any rigorous examination of how knowledge
was constructed. Their efforts to liberate the thinking of historians from the
tyranny of positivism have continued to generate intellectual excitement,
because these critics forced into the open the centrality of interpretation in
4
As quoted in Sande Cohen, “Structuralism and the Writing of Intellectual History,”
History and Theory 17 (1978): 184–85.
all historical scholarship. Moving beyond the reconstruction of the past to
the whole domain of written histories where research designs and rhetorical
strategies are worked out, they have alerted an unwary public, as well as
their peers, to how the different perspectives of historians enter into their
books. Focusing fresh attention on the range of interpretive and linguistic
choices at play, all this detective work has led critics to the scene of the
primal crime—the individual consciousness where choices are negotiated.
The understanding of the processes through which human beings create
information has been greatly extended by examinations of historians as the
carriers of culturally encoded ideas. Similarly, hermeneutics has shown
scholars and their readers how words shape consciousness.
These sophisticated insights into how knowledge is produced have been
greeted more as clever exposés than as advances in human understanding.
We attribute this perverse reaction to the fact that despite this generation’s
well- broadcast scorn for positivism, positivism has left as its principal
legacy an enduring dichotomy between absolute objectivity and totally
arbitrary interpretations of the world of objects. When postmodernists mock
the idea that the human mind mirrors nature or that historians write the past
as it actually happened, they are knocking over the straw men of heroic
science and its history clone. Similarly, when readers, confronted with
various interpretations of the causes of the First World War, conclude that
subjectivity taints all history, it is heroic science’s disdain of any element of
subjectivity that prompts this resort to the lexicon of impurities. Nineteenth-
century philosophers so overdichotomized the difference between
objectivity and subjectivity that it is difficult, when using their terms, to
modify the absolute doubt that springs from the recognition that human
minds are not mirrors and recorders.55 Denying the absolutism of one age,
the doubters, however, seem oblivious to the danger of inventing a new
absolutism based upon subjectivity and relativism.

Practical Realism
In the post-heroic situation, the world described by science is separate
from language and yet inextricably tied to it. 66 Contemporary understanding
of how knowledge is created now prompts calls for a different, more
nuanced, less absolutist kind of realism than that championed by an older—
we would say naive—realism. The newer version—what is called practical
5
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations, 40 (Fall
1992): 81–128.
6
We are indebted here to Hilary Putnam in James Conant, ed., Realism with a Human Face
(Cambridge, Mass., 1990), pp. 274–75.
realism—presumes that the meanings of words are never simply “in our
head,” nor do they lock on to objects of the external world and fix reality for
all time. Linguistic conventions arise because human beings possessed of
imagination and understanding use language in response to things outside of
their minds. The structure of grammar is a linguistic artifice, but
significantly one that has been developed through an interaction with the
objective world, through a struggle to name things that human beings would
encounter, even if unnamed. In contrast to poststructuralists, practical
realists emphasize the function of words in articulating the multifarious
contacts with objects. Communicative and responsive, words serve the goal
of truth-seeking exactly because they are not the arbitrary tools of solipsists.
Grammar may be deeply embedded in the human mind, but words result
from contact with the world.
Contemporary philosophers have reminded historians, as well as readers
of histories, that there cannot be an exact correspondence between words
and what is out there, between the conventions employed when speaking
about the world itself and its contents. Their admonitions point to the fact
that the myth of correspondence inherited from the philosophical realists
owed much too much to heroic science and not enough to the intuitive
wisdom of the practitioners of history.
Let us try now to conceptualize the relationship of the world and human
investigators shorn of a belief in correspondence, i.e., in the precise fit
between what is in the human head and what is out there. Put in terms useful
to the historian, there are the records of the past and there is the
interpretation of those records. The gap between them is the source of
concern. At best, the past only dimly corresponds to what the historians say
about it, but practical realists accept the tentativeness and imperfections of
the historians’ accounts. This does not, however, cause them to give up the
effort to aim for accuracy and completeness and to judge historical accounts
on the basis of those criteria. By contrast, relativists (who are antirealists)
say that such confidence in historical narrative is self-serving and untenable,
because any kind of correspondence is impossible.
Making modified, practical realism an ally in the campaign against
relativism does require some explaining of motives. The aesthetic appeal
should not be overlooked. Some historians, like old-fashioned artists, find
realism attractive.77 They are attracted by the challenge of reconstructing
7
For such artists, see Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago, 1990); and Svetlana
Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, 1983). For
another perspective on realism, see Christopher Braider, Refiguring the Real: Picture and
Modernity in Word and Image, 1400–1700 (Princeton, 1993).
what appears in the mind when it contemplates the past, much as Vermeer
might have been attracted to the challenge of representing the city of Delft.
However, historians must deal with a vanished past that has left most of its
traces in written documents. The translation of these words from the
documents into a story that seeks to be faithful to the past constitutes the
historians’ particular struggle with truth. It requires a rigorous attention to
the details of the archival records as well as imaginative casting of narrative
and interpretation. The realist never denies that the very act of representing
the past makes the historian (values, warts, and all) an agent who actively
molds how the past is to be seen. Most even delight in the task.
The experience—as distinct from the writing—of history can help to
make practical realism more concrete. The very effect of historical change,
the ending of wars, for example, and the influence that such external
changes have upon thinking give the lie to the notion that words are
arbitrarily connected to things. Events can irretrievably alter the way words
are arranged in our minds. Yet, as the phrase “better dead than red”
illustrates, words can also be arbitrarily affixed.
Once the phrase described a bellicose mind-set and, for those who
possessed it, a conviction. Yet the time may soon come when children will
need an explanation for the statement lest they think it to have been the
rallying cry of an especially violent school of expressionist painters.
Descriptions of “reality” can on occasion lose their meaning, and then the
words become unstuck from the reality which their believers once so
ardently endorsed.
People who think or write about the past should take consolation from
knowing that no philosopher (whether from Paris or Vienna) has ever
succeeded in proving that meanings are simply “in our head” or, the reverse,
that human language can be fixed on objects and describe for all time the
way the external world is. In other words, the “facts” need the “conventions”
and vice versa. Put another way, the historian does not say that an
interpretation can exist separate from the practices and discourses employed
by the author. The historian is not the alchemist who invented the reality of
the past by happily mixing the black facts of the past with white verbal
descriptions nor the scientific observer who claims to produce a gray
narrative that transparently corresponds to what went on back there, then.
The historian is someone who reconstructs a past pieced together from
records left by the past, which should not be dismissed as a mere discourse
on other discourses.
Practical realists are stuck in a contingent world, using language to point
to objects outside themselves about which they can be knowledgeable
because they use language. This slightly circular situation in which the
practical-minded find themselves may not make for heroes, but it does help
locate truths about the past. More important, practical realism thwarts the
relativists by reminding them that some words and conventions, however
socially constructed, reach out to the world and give a reasonably true
description of its contents. The practical realist is pleased to have science as
an ally, because the study of nature suggests that having knowledge of a
thing in the mind does not negate its being outside of the mind behaving
there as predicted.
Well over a century ago, the American pragmatist Charles S. Peirce said
that the realist makes “a distinction between the true conception of a thing
and the thing itself... only to regard one and the same thing from two
different points of view; for the immediate object of thought in a true
judgment is the reality.”88 That something exists as an image of something’s
being in the mind does not in the least diminish its external existence or its
knowability through the medium of language. That it could be in both
places, out there and in here where words reside, seems only to verify the
objective nature of everything from buildings to time. They are knowable,
usable things separate from the linguistic expressions used to describe them,
yet capable of being “captured” in the mind by words that point back out
toward the thing itself.
The modified, or practical, realism endorsed here connects words to
things by using words, but it does more than that. Practical realism serves
another goal: it fuels, rather than debunks, the passion to know the past.
Practical realism endorses knowability experienced by human agents able to
use language, whether alphabetical or numerical. This is not, however, to
presume that there can be any “algorithm” or single path to truth. At the
philosophical level, realism permits historians to aim language at things
outside themselves. Being practical realists means valuing repositories of
records as laboratories. The archives in Lyon, France, are housed in an old
convent on a hill overlooking the city. It is reached by walking up some
three hundred stone steps. For the practical realist —even one equipped with
a laptop computer—the climb is worth the effort; the relativist might not
bother. Historians find more than dust in archives and libraries; the records
there offer a glimpse of a world that has disappeared. Assuming a tolerance
for a degree of indeterminacy, scholars in the practical realist camp are
8
Charles S. Peirce, “Critical Review of Berkeley’s Idealism,” in Philip P. Wiener, ed.,
Values in a Universe of Chance: Selected Writings of Charles S. Peirce (New York, 1958), p.
84. (Originally published in 1871.)
encouraged to get out of bed in the morning and head for the archives,
because there they can uncover evidence, touch lives long passed, and “see”
patterns in events that otherwise might remain inexplicable.
From the seventeenth century onward, science made such spectacular
progress that almost everyone fell under its sway. Historians once called
their methods scientific and strove for detachment because they thought
science provided the only road to truth. Having become less awestruck, less
convinced that all truth must be packaged in an equation, historians now
look back on the yearning to behave like scientists as part of their own past.
It is time to move on, but not without retrospective gratitude.

The Link Between Natural and Human Sciences

Leaving behind heroic science and heroic models of knowledge,
historians must still participate in the ongoing discussion between the
natural and human sciences. The debt of the social and human disciplines to
science is so great— they share so much history and so many common
epistemological problems— that divorce is simply not an option. Many of
the same theoretical issues, as well as moments of cultural optimism or
pessimism, affect all the available forms of human inquiry. Notice that just
like historians, scientists confront relativism, if only in the form of anti-
science movements, from creationism to New Age cults, or simply as
promoted by the information disseminated by the Tobacco Institute. These
may not seem like very formidable challenges in comparison to those faced
by the social sciences, but science’s relative insulation from skepticism has
more to do with the public’s old habits of deference than with any natural
protection. The privileged position of postwar American science may also
require—as our final chapter suggests—some new and serious rethinking.
Despite their relationship to the natural sciences, the human sciences,
such as history, have a distinct set of problems. Any analogy to natural
science falters because the historian or sociologist, even the economist,
cannot effectively isolate the objects of inquiry. Even when they study living
creatures, the scientists’ and historians’ attentions diverge. Humanists study
action which is responsive to intentions, whereas naturalists investigate the
bounded world of behavior.
Because they are most often found in texts, the remnants of the past
usually present themselves in words. Unlike atoms, however, words cannot
be disentangled from one another or their referential framework. There are
no supercolliders into which historians can funnel the words from old
records and manuscripts to be bounced around in a sealed environment and
examined for traces of meaning. Indeed why would historians want to? The
point of any scrutiny of texts for evidence of the past is not to isolate the
language, however delightful and liberating the play of words disconnected
from “reality” can seem. The task is to connect one text to another, to
retrieve word by word, a forgotten, but never wholly lost moment in time. If
by deconstructing a text the critic means to show its inability to represent a
fixed past, this can only be done as a result of a prior reconstruction.
Historians cannot comprehend all the variables bombarding a single
event. Human beings participate in a dense circuitry of interacting systems,
from those that regulate their bodily functions to the ones that undergird
their intellectual curiosity and emotional responses. A full explanation of an
event would have to take into consideration the full range of systematic
reactions. Not ever doing that, history-writing implicitly begins by
concentrating on those aspects of an event deemed most relevant to the
inquiry. The historians’ laboratories, which are seminar rooms and archives,
are also constantly being invaded by robust words—those used in the past as
well as those currently in use. Historians cannot quarantine their texts, even
though such attempts at isolation occur every time a text gets classified, e.g.,
“Those records are about shipping,” “That book is about religion.” In fact,
these classificatory systems are always porous and frequently misleading.
Historians think categories like science, magic, gender, and sexuality are
value-free, but then their divisions turn out to reveal more about present-day
categories than about what people in the past thought or did. Even the
academic disciplines around which university departments are organized
represent rough and-ready classifications which can’t stop historians from
drawing upon anthropologists, philosophers, biologists, or literary theorists.
The most distinctive of historians’ problems is that posed by temporality
itself. For the historian, truth is wrapped up with trying to figure out what
went on in time past. The records are left by people who lived in the past,
but—and this is the tricky part—the records are extant in the present. The
past, insofar as it exists at all, exists in the present; the historian too is stuck
in time present, trying to make meaningful and accurate statements about
time past. Any account of historical objectivity must provide for this crucial
temporal dimension.

A New Theory of Objectivity

A theory of objectivity for the twenty-first century will owe as much to
science’s critics as to its champions. Most of all it will be indebted to this
generation’s collective capacity to hold on to what can be known while
letting go of much of the territory staked out for mastery during the heyday
of positivism. We think that a case can be made for a qualified objectivity
after this refurbished objectivity has been disentangled from the scientific
model of objectivity. What we will offer is a late-twentieth-century
understanding of historical truth. We start with the object that first engages
historians—the past—and build our case by retrofitting the house of history
that we’ve inherited, stripping away the plaster of grand expectations so that
we can see once more the beams and joints of modest inquiries about what
actually happened and what it meant to those who experienced it.
No longer able to ignore the subjectivity of the author, scholars must
construct standards of objectivity that recognize at the outset that all
histories start with the curiosity of a particular individual and take shape
under the guidance of her or his personal and cultural attributes. Since all
knowledge originates inside human minds and is conveyed through
representations of reality, all knowledge is subject-centered and artificial,
the very qualities brought into disrespect by an earlier exaltation of that
which was objective and natural. Our version of objectivity concedes the
impossibility of any research being neutral (that goes for scientists as well)
and accepts the fact that knowledge- seeking involves a lively, contentious
struggle among diverse groups of truth-seekers. Neither admission
undermines the viability of stable bodies of knowledge that can be
communicated, built upon, and subjected to testing. These admissions do
require a new understanding of objectivity.
At the popular level where deconstruction still refers to razing buildings,
there is a pervasive opinion that somehow the past lingers on to force the
hand of those who study it. In reality, the past as a series of events is utterly
gone. Its consequences, which are very real, remain to impinge on the
present, but only a retrospective analysis can make their influence apparent.
What stays on visibly in the present are the physical traces from past living
—the materials or objects that historians turn into evidence when they begin
asking questions. These traces, alas, never speak for themselves (even oral
histories occur after the event). Neither do they totally disappear. Usually
they remain where people left them in discarded trunks in attics, in
inscrutable notations in ledgers, in the footings of abandoned buildings;
sometimes they are collected in repositories and archives. Some of this
physical residue lies forgotten, but close enough to the surface of life to be
unexpectedly happened upon. Then like hastily buried treasure or poorly
planted land mines they deliver great surprises. History is never independent
of the potsherds and written edicts that remain from a past reality, for their
very existence demands explanation. The past cannot impose its truths upon
the historian, but because the past is constantly generating its own material
remains, it can and does constrain those who seek to find out what once took
place.
Two questions go to the heart of the issue about historical objectivity.
Just how much and in what ways does the inert past exercise an influence
upon active historians? The extreme, literal answers would be “not at all”
and “in no way,” since the past has no power to impose itself, whereas the
historian is a human agent capable of initiating almost anything. But the
question becomes more meaningful when a specific social context is posited.
Thus a philosophical question leads to a different answer when posed
sociologically. How much and in what ways do the material remains of the
past affect the historian who works in a scholarly community whose
principal task is to reconstruct, interpret, and preserve artifacts from the
past? In this cultural milieu the practitioners of history are constrained by a
complex set of rules. Within a society committed to accuracy in
representations of the past, the preservation of evidence imposes definite
limits to the factual assertions that can be made; it even sets up boundaries
around the range of interpretations that can be offered about an event or
development.
There are limits, however, even to the efficacy of rules; they cannot
discriminate among interpretations that rest on different assumptions. Let’s
take the examples of a historian who concludes that the American
Revolution happened because colonial leaders construed the new British tax
measures as efforts to curtail their colonies’ self-governing traditions and
another scholar who is convinced that colonial merchants and farmers
resisted British authority in order to protect the profitability of their firms
and farms. Material remains from the past cannot resolve the disparity
between these two interpretations because they start from different
assessments of the interests, values, and motivations of the principal actors.
Indeed, the two historians would use a different scale for weighing the
influential actions of the participants themselves—be they legislators,
pamphleteers, or entrepreneurs.
For some of history’s critics, the presence of different interpretations
suggests the impossibility of validating historical knowledge. The very
existence of a variety of witnesses and partisans in past events is evoked in
arguments to make the skeptic’s point. Differences of perspective, however,
should be distinguished from different interpretations. The two explanations
given for the causes of the American Revolution reflect different
assessments of human motives and social action and could only be
reconciled, if at all, by extensive debate. Historians’ interpretations can be
mutually exclusive, but their differing perspectives are not. If one sees an
event from a slave’s point of view, that rendering does not obliterate the
perspective of the slaveholder; it only complicates the task of interpretation.
Taking the metaphor of perception literally helps make the point.
Perspective does not mean opinion; it refers to point of view—literally,
point from which something, an object outside the mind, is viewed. Let’s
imagine witnesses to a violent argument arrayed around the room where it
took place. The sum of their vantage points would give a fuller picture, but
the action they were witnessing would not be changed because there were
many people watching it. Unless they were standing in each other’s way, the
perspectives would not be mutually exclusive; nor could the multiplication
of perspectives affect the viewers. The validity of each reconstruction would
depend upon the accuracy and completeness of the observations, not on the
perspective itself. Objectivity remains with the object. As one contemporary
philosopher trenchantly put it, “Objectivity does not require taking God’s
perspective, which is impossible.”99
Genealogists, antiquarians, and chroniclers share the historian’s concern
with the past, but the differences among them help clarify the role of
interpretation in the historians’ work. Genealogists, as the word suggests,
search the past for the carriers of a specific genetic endowment. They follow
human beings backward as they exponentially collect forebears—two
parents, four grandparents, etc. They labor to gather the vital statistics of a
specific family. Chroniclers take each day at a time, recording events from
the immediate perspective of the moment past. Antiquarians range more
widely, but their abiding passion is for things that are old. They love the past
in the raw, as it were, unmediated by analysis or interpretation. Curiosity
stays fixed to the something that is old whether it is a battlefield or a set of
china. With all of them, the historical imagination never sails beyond the
object to the larger social universe that produced it. Antiquarians preserve,
chroniclers record, and genealogists trace. Historians aim at more. They
share with all these others an orientation toward the past as an object of
curiosity, yet also seek significance, explanation, and meaning, a triumvirate
of intellectual entailments that has exposed their work to the radiating
skepticism of the age.
Postmodernists have collapsed the tension between the conviction that
objects have an integrity that can sustain itself through external investigation
and the awareness of the snares and delusions that accompany efforts to
make sense of objective reality. As Carlo Ginzburg has put it, they have
9
Mark Johnson, Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason
(Chicago, 1987), p. 212.
turned evidence into a “wall which by definition precludes any access to
reality.” The postmodernist critics of historical objectivity have made
“knowing the past completely” so fixed a concept that they have had to rely
on a “sort of inverted positivism” to press their case against historians. 1010
The full unknowability of a past event becomes the only real thing in
contrast to which the imaginative effort to reassemble a picture of past
reality from the remaining fragments appears pathetic. It is a rhetorical
exaggeration that calls to mind William James’s retort to an insistent
disputant at one of his lectures: “Madam, I cannot allow your ignorance
however great to take precedence over my knowledge however small.”
Knowledge of the past, however small, begins with memory. Because
people have a memory, they know from experience that there was a past,
although it should be noted that an important philosophical tradition
associated with David Hume denies the knowability of things outside
ourselves, even of memory as an indicator of past experiences. Taking the
more commonsensical view of the reality of objects, we credit memory with
the verification of there having been a past. 1111 History fulfills a
fundamental human need by reconstituting memory. Memory sustains
consciousness of living in the stream of time, and the amour proper of
human beings cries out for the knowledge of their place in that stream.
Westerners have learned how to externalize this curiosity about the past.
They even distance themselves from its impertinent subjectivity by directing
questions to such objects as the rise of the nation-state or the impact of the
printing press, but the renewable source of energy behind these inquiries
comes from the intense craving for insight into what it is to be human. Thus
memory that has been trained to seek an objective verification of the past is
nevertheless inextricably tied up with the powerful personal longings of all
who write or tell histories.
A convincing case for the qualified objectivity we advocate must come
to terms with the undeniable elements of subjectivity, artificiality, and
language dependence in historical writing. We have redefined historical
objectivity as an interactive relationship between an inquiring subject and an
external object. Physical scientists validate their work through the external
process of experimentation. Many social scientists attempt to imitate them
by reducing their questions to phenomena explicable by survey data,

10
As quoted in Cushing Strout, “Border Crossings: History, Fiction, and Dead Certainties,”
History and Theory, 31 (1992), p. 153.
11
An extreme form of skepticism would argue that people have no way of disconfirming the
assertion that the world was created yesterday complete with fossils, a geological record, and
our memories of the past.
experimentation with laboratory animals, or other external tests. Historians
cannot similarly rely on external validation because they seek to understand
the internal dispositions of historical actors: what motivated them, how they
responded to events, which ideas shaped their social world. Such
understandings depend upon convincing, well-documented and coherently
argued interpretations that link internally generated meanings to external
behavior.
Having talked about remembering and believing in the transactions
between the historian and the past, we want also to consider the role of
curiosity. Knowledge is above all the accumulation of answers to questions
that curious men and women have asked about the physical and social
worlds they encounter. History is crucially distinguished from fiction by
curiosity about what actually happened in the past. Beyond the self—outside
the realm of the imagination— lies a landscape cluttered with the detritus of
past living, a melange of clues and codes informative of a moment as real as
this present one. When curiosity is stirred about an aspect of this past, a
relationship with an object has begun.
Objects can be tough to abandon, for they exist. The very objectiveness
of objects—their failure to accommodate all interpretations—helps explain
why scholars quarrel among themselves. The skeptic says that the quarreling
is proof of subjective perspectives. We’re inclined to think it attributable to
the commanding and often unyielding presence of those objects which
people seek to incorporate into their world of understanding. In the West,
natural philosophers were the first to grapple in disciplined ways with the
otherness of objects around them—think of Newton in his alchemical
moments, sitting in his Cambridge laboratory trying to turn an ordinary
metal into gold. Like science, objectivity in history began with curiosity
about the otherness of the past.
As long as people assumed that those in the past were essentially like
them, there was little curiosity about the past itself and little sense that past
societies were as different from their own as a foreign country. The fact that
curiosity about objects is a deeply personal response produces the
conundrum that objective investigations begin with the subjective curiosity
of an inquirer. Having made subjectivity itself an object of investigation,
theorists in recent years now claim to have revealed the fallacy of objective
knowledge. Because positivists ignored the undeniable subjectivity of the
sentient beings who alone initiate all scientific inquiries, they had set up a
straw man just waiting to be pushed over once the cultural cloak of awe
draped over science had been lifted. Realists now must think more deeply
about the nature of the relationship between a curious, imaginative,
culturally shaped investigator and the passive objects under investigation.
Objects arouse curiosity, resist implausible manipulation, and collect layers
of information about them. Objectivity can only refer to a relationship
between persons and these fascinating things; it cannot reside outside of
persons. Any standards of objectivity we erect must focus on that
relationship.
Heroic science went wrong by grounding objectivity upon value-free,
neutral experimentation. The notion of objectivity inherited from the
scientific revolution made it sound as if the researcher went into a trance,
cleared his mind, polished the mind’s mirror, and trained it on the object of
investigation. Of course, there were methods to be followed, but the beliefs,
values, and interests that defined the researcher as a person were simply
brushed aside in this depiction to allow the mirror to capture the reflection of
nature’s storehouse of wonders. The positivists simply developed too
restricted a definition of objectivity. We have redefined historical objectivity
as an interactive relationship between an inquiring subject and an external
object. Validation in this definition comes from persuasion more than proof,
but without proof there is no historical writing of any worth.

Psychological Dynamics of Knowing

In exploring how memory affects the writing of history, we have drawn
attention to the psychological need for comprehending experience which
calls for accuracy, as well as the human drive for personal recognition that
encourages myth-making. Either can come into play, whether the product is
a study of constitutional law or a biography. What this book insists upon is
the human capacity to discriminate between false and faithful
representations of past reality and, beyond that, to articulate standards which
help both practitioners and readers to make such discriminations. Here the
crucial relationship between the creators of knowledge and their critics
enters in. When we say that the memory of the past or the objects left over
from past living restrain historians, we are not saying that all people submit
themselves to the discipline of studying evidence. The contemporary
example of the bogus scholars who say there was no Holocaust painfully
demonstrates the contrary. Rather we are pointing to the fact that history-
writing and history-reading are a shared enterprise in which the community
of practitioners acts as a check on the historian just as Newton’s experiments
on moving objects and Darwin’s observations of fossils constrained what
they could say.
Historians’ questions turn the material remains from the past into
evidence, for evidence is only evidence in relation to a particular account.
(Think of the detective who notices a telltale streak of shoe polish on a
doorjamb; a perfectly ordinary trace of passage becomes a clue.) But once a
story is told, an argument made, or an interpretation advanced, the objects
that compose the supporting evidence come under scrutiny. Evidence
adduced to an explanation can never be kept secret in a society that prizes
historical knowledge, and it is the accessibility of evidence in publicly
supported archives, libraries, and museums that sustains the historical
consciousness of this culture. An audience of peers derives its power from
equal access to the evidence and to publication, a reminder that democratic
practices have an impact far beyond the strictly political. They permit
replicability and testing, honest and often stormy controversy.
The bits and pieces of records left from the past can be arranged into
different and contending pictures. To be more direct, since human society is
composed of relationships, many of them carrying implications of power
and elements of concealment, one’s point of entry into a past moment will
always affect one’s findings. No workable definition of objectivity can hide
the likelihood that students of the human past will always have to deal with
more than one version of what has happened. The fact that there can be a
multiplicity of accurate histories does not turn accuracy into a fugitive from
a more confident age; it only points to the expanded necessity of men and
women to read the many messages packed into a past event and to follow
their different trajectories as that event’s consequences concatenate through
time.

Narratives and Language

The human intellect demands accuracy while the soul craves meaning.
History ministers to both with stories. Postmodernist critics delight in
pointing out that historical narratives are actually a literary form without any
logical connection to the seamless flow of happenings that constitute living.
Again, summoning memory, we can concur. The routines and occasions we
experience follow one another without interruption. It is only when we begin
to tell another about them that a story emerges. Indeed, the very idea of an
event or development depends upon already having such concepts to
describe the passage of time. Western histories are embedded in a matrix of
cultural properties like those of progressive development or cycles of
degeneration, to speak of the regnant ideas of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. The storytelling voice and arrangement of incidents into a
narrative are but the most familiar of these. Personal interpretive
assumptions guide historians as they compose their stories, but it is only in
contrast to an image of historians’ mirroring the past that this fact raises
doubts about the enterprise. To deny the writing of history objective validity
because of the historian’s essential creative effort is to remain attached to a
nineteenth-century understanding of the production of knowledge.
While philosophers and literary critics in recent years have exposed the
artificial status of narrative, they have also given narrative form an attention
which has enhanced appreciation for it. The flow of time does not have a
beginning, middle, and end; only stories about it do. Yet lives share the
structure of narratives, and perhaps a familiarity with their beginnings,
middles, and ends predisposes people to cast their histories into narrative
form. Historians should attend to the pervasive appeal of stories. Just think
of the awakening of interest that comes with the start of a tale; even the body
relaxes at the sound of “In the beginning, Omaha was run by cattle men,” or
“Let me tell you how Joan came to buy that house.”
The fascinating thing about telling stories is that they start with the end.
It is a conclusion that arouses our curiosity and prompts us to ask a question,
which then leads back to the beginning from which the eventual outcome
unwound. A happy relationship goes on the rocks. The unhappy finale
becomes the starting point for searching questions. To explain the breakup
of what once was whole, a story is told, and every element in the ensuing
narrative will carry with it a clue about its conclusion. It is the perception of
a closure or outcome to a string of occurrences that first starts people asking
questions, which then guide them toward relevant facts. The Cold War’s half
century of frozen immobility ended in a thaw. In China, the Statue of
Liberty briefly graced Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Germany recomposed
itself into its earlier national entity. Yugoslavia has disaggregated into
warring ethnic factions. All these recent and unexpected happenings
provoked new questions, and from them will come new histories of this
century.
This impulse to tell new stories points up that time itself is a
perspective. Nineteenth-century men and women posed different questions
about the settling of the trans-Mississippi plains than are currently brought
to the subject. They called it the westward movement, kept their eyes glued
to the white “pioneers,” and sought out those incidents that explained the
fulfillment of America’s continental destiny. Contemporaries now have
located the Plains Indians on the landscape along with those Mexicans
whose homes had been rudely denationalized by war. The presence of these
groups powerfully shapes the imaginative recreation of the territory between
the Mississippi and the Pacific, prompting consideration of the multiple
encounters with others involved in the westward trek of black and white
Americans.
Distance and changes of sensibility regularly open up novel lines of
inquiry as boredom and irrelevance close others. Through most periods of
our national existence, slavery was too acutely embarrassing a subject to
permit historians to probe its origins in colonial Virginia. Nor was much
research done on the work routines, the housing, and the family lives of
slaves until the atrocities of World War II shocked scholars into exploring
the origins of American race prejudice. Soon African-Americans entered the
academic profession, changing forever the limited perspective of their Euro-
American colleagues. With different time periods as with the diverse
vantage points, the past as an object of curiosity changes, and so do the
stories told about it.
The written word preserves the histories told; time makes those words
obsolete. Because historical accounts always explain the meaning of events
in terms relevant to the immediate audience, curiosity about the past is
inextricably bound up in the preoccupations of the present. The past as an
object will be read differently from one generation to another. Nineteenth-
century Southern defenders of slavery when writing about the causes of
secession placed their facts in an altogether different context from that of
twentieth-century historians who connect the Civil War with the momentous
accomplishment of abolishing slavery. Or, to take another example,
historians, no longer believing that women are incapacitated for public life,
now read older prescriptions of their natural domesticity with a degree of
skepticism, if not anger. The very plausibility of a historical account,
dependent as it is upon the interpretive interlarding of values, will always be
subject to change.
Skeptics count this constant reassessing of the past against history’s
claim to objectivity, whereas it can better be considered testimony to the
urgency each generation feels to possess the past in terms meaningful to it.
The incontrovertible existence of various interpretations of past events by no
means proves the relativist’s case, but it certainly demands that everyone
shed the positivist’s notion of historical truth. If the past was simply
composed of material objects or recordable actions, one good “snapshot” of
it could capture the essential contours for all eternity. Happily, it is the
human experience both in the past and the present which compels attention.
Successive generations of scholars do not so much revise historical
knowledge as they reinvest it with contemporary interest. Each generation’s
inquiries about the past actually carry forward the implications of its
predecessors’ learning. New versions of old narratives are not arbitrary
exercises of historical imagination, but the consequence of the changing
interest from cumulative social experience. If history did not involve a
relationship with an object outside the self, it would have no capacity to
extend the range of human understanding; its disclosures would only be
reflections of ideas already known. The Dutch historian Peter Geyl
commented that all history is an interim report, but he would not have
denied that within those interim reports were residues of research that would
be studied long after the interim of the report had passed.

The Textuality of Texts

The difference between oral and written traditions is critical to the
consideration of objectivity. When storytellers narrate in person, they can
change the details or modify their meaning every time they give a rendition
of their story. An oral tradition is almost always the work of successive
retellings of a past event, each narrator transmitting and refashioning the
tales that form the collective memory. In written history, the text itself
becomes an object with properties of its own. Preserved in an unvarying
form, it freezes in time one rendition that can disclose over time just how
meaning and the words that convey meaning have changed. Written histories
permit—even compel—readers in one age to take stock of the distance
they’ve moved from their forebears. These confrontations, more than
anything else, have deepened an understanding of the interpretive element in
historical writing, reinforcing the strength of the link between present and
past.
When written history takes over from memory, as we have noted, it
creates an object—a text—which itself invites external examination. Unlike
the stories told by balladeers or the oral traditions kept alive in small
communities, written histories are exposed to the critical scrutiny of
unknown, unseen outsiders. Since at least the seventeenth century the
histories written by Europeans or Euro¬Americans have been subjected to
intense criticism, but it is only with the postmodernists that the probing
scalpel of the expert has cut through the histories to the words that compose
them.
In analyzing texts, postmodernists have made two linked assertions.
First, texts—a word which ranges far beyond the meaning of a piece of
writing to include any element of culture—conceal as much as they express
and must not be read literally or solely with an eye to recovering the
authors’ intentions. Instead they must be deconstructed, which means
locating the blanks, gaps, and interruptions of thought or plot which, once
found, will bring to light the contradictions, inversions, and secrets
embedded in the text. Writing, for the postmodernists, bristles with
perversity, reflecting the bad faith and hidden agendas within a given
culture. Secondly, they insist that the fact that a given text can be read so
many different ways proves that there is no stability to language. Hence the
authors don’t exercise any control over the reader’s imaginative
reconstruction of their words. Decoupling these central contentions of
postmodernism is profoundly important, for the benefits to be derived from
their first insight must be separated from the exaggerated skepticism about
the stability of language in the second.
To interrogate a text is to open up the fullness of meaning within.
Everyone uses language largely unaware of the cultural specificity of words,
the rules and protocols of expression, the evasions in their euphemisms, the
nuances from group associations, or the verbal detours imposed by social
taboos. When an astute reader points out these intriguing elements in a text,
our understanding of what is being communicated, both intentionally and
unintentionally, is vastly increased. The fact that authors do not intend all
that they say does not render their intentions uninteresting or irrelevant; it
merely highlights the subterranean quality of many of the influences that
play upon word choices.
The stability of language is a different matter. Building on Ferdinand de
Saussure’s insight that words change their meanings in relation to other
words, linguists have described languages as internal systems rather than
organizations of referents to an outside world. Postmodernists have gone one
step further and given a new fluidity to words by denying that there is any
bonding between the word signifier and the object signified. Without this
bonding, they say, it is theoretically possible to have an infinite number of
meanings to any sentence. With rapturous playfulness, they have spoken of
words dancing, cascading, colliding, escaping, deceiving, hiding, leaving
less imaginative word users to wonder why they bother with them at all.
Once again, the true situation has been overdichotomized. Words rarely
separate from their conventional referents, nor are they glued to them either.
Their adhesion to a definition is more like Velcro, strong enough to stick if
undisturbed, but not so strong that social usage can’t peel them off for
reattachment elsewhere. To lavish all one’s attention on the possibility of
personal inventiveness on the part of those reading a text to the neglect of
the probability of shared understanding of words is to distort the reality.
Worse than this distortion is the fact that this emphasis obscures the more
important fact that people living at the same time construct their own
lexicons. Words change meaning in response to experience; shared
experience creates a shared language. Far from exercising individual
idiosyncrasies in reading, a community of readers will build up a strong
consensus on meaning.
Still, language presents problems for historians, particularly those
unwilling to acknowledge the code-making propensities of human groups
and the use of those codes to distinguish insiders from outsiders. Because
words can change their meaning without changing their visual representation
—the word “freedom” always looks the same even though its import has
varied dramatically over the centuries—the historical text should be
addressed as a puzzle. Its expressions will certainly be read differently by
successive generations, but the survival of its material integrity guarantees
that someone’s curiosity about its original meaning will be provoked.
With this stronger, more self-reflexive and interactive sense of
objectivity, historians are more likely to submit to the rules of evidence.
Recognizing that everyone is situated, hence embedded in a cultural
perspective, they can use that perspective as a foil against which to project
the particularities of the age being studied. Standing firmly in the place that
heritage and experience have put them, inquirers into the past can use their
self-understanding to probe the past with imagination. They can be “finite,
embodied, and fragile” and still seek and find knowledge. 1212 The telescope
of an inquiring mind that they train on objects may later seem concave or
convex, at moments fogged, even cracked, in constant need of repair, but it
remains an operational tool. Knowing that there are objects out there turns
scholars into practical realists. They can admit their cultural fixity, their
partial grasp of truth, and still think that in trying to know the world it’s best
not to divert the lens from the object—as the relativist suggests—but to
leave it on and keep trying to clean it.
Americans keep telling themselves that they are a pragmatic lot, eager to
judge methods by their results. This has led to an instrumental approach to
life, a tendency captured in a bill-board depicting a happy group with the
caption “The family that prays together stays together.” The profundity of
sacred worship is thus reduced to the utility of staying out of divorce court.
In this book, we have avoided utilitarian arguments in our defense of
objectivity because we think that they trivialize the important issues skeptics
have raised. If it is possible to create knowledge, then one believes it
because reason compels one; no list of good consequences can redeem the
falseness of a proposition. This being said, it is not amiss to point out the
12
Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in
Contemporary Ethics (New York, 1992), p. 5.
benefits of a shared commitment to objective knowledge. It forces people to
examine rigorously the relation between what they bring to their subject and
what they find; it undergirds methodological rules that facilitate debate; it
encourages people to perform the arduous tasks of knowledge-seeking.
Edward Leigh Mallory said that he climbed Mount Everest because it was
there; historians carry their laptop computers up the three hundred stone
steps in Lyon because records from the past are there. From that conviction
of their knowability, knowledge grows.
Both the promise and the problems of history spring from its linkage to
memory. The promise is memory’s validation of the objective reality of the
past. The experience of remembering underpins the belief that the past
existed and hence makes possible, even imperative, an effort to reconstruct
what happened. At the same time, the personal craving for meaning which
memory serves also fosters the temptation to use history to inflate
reputations, deny past cruelties, dispense comfort, and rationalize actions. It
is exactly the psychological potency of written history that makes it so
important to nations. Just as memory in all its visible and invisible forms
sustains personal identity, so national memory, kept alive through history,
confers a group identity upon a people, turning association into solidarity or
legitimating the coercive authority of the state. Milan Kundera has said that
the struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against
forgetting. As a novelist, Kundera conceived this contest as a conflict
between the independent witness and the official manipulators of evidence.
For historians the struggle of memory against forgetting also involves
power, but with them it requires the power to resist the debilitating doubts
that the past is knowable, that the forgetting is about something real.