Objectivism is subjective

Article by Marc Geddes. Edited by Liam Geoghegan. 

As a profession, History is an evolving phenomenon that seeks to answer questions most pertinent to the present; moreover, the essence of history has always been to obtain knowledge. Yet what knowledge? Different historiographical approaches have attempted to provide answers to different questions – historicism focuses on the state, political history on institutions, social history on the individual and cliometric history on the dominance of economics. However, none of these really penetrate the true nature of history – discovering and understanding the way that the people of our past lived. They have missed the point, by looking at how we lived through the medium of one theory or another, instead of looking at the culture of the people in and of itself. Previous approaches have certain epistemological and methodological issues that fail to consider the broader questions regarding the society of the past. Predominantly, only the new cultural history and the more recent linguistic turn in historiography have been able to overcome such criticism in the field and shaped much of the solution. 

Over the last twenty years the explanatory paradigms of the historical profession have been largely reshaped. The most important change has been the new emphasis placed on meaning and interpretations, rather than the application of concepts in somewhat simplistic terms. The new cultural history has questioned the way that all other historical approaches have attempted to view history itself. Historicism, for example, has focused on the so-called “truth” – Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) tried to ‘extinguish [his] own self… to let the past speak’. The inherent problems here are obvious, and have been acknowledged throughout the continual professionalisation of the twentieth century. Bias and partiality were in all likelihood the most common problems to face von Ranke, of which he could not have been aware. It would be impossible for him to let the past speak, because he himself had his own conceptualisations of the past, preconceptions of the basis of society, and other normative, value-laden ideas. No approach has attempted to address this issue directly – political history, for example, assumes that the nation is governed by the state and the political leaders; economists argue that the economic process determines social structures; and social history attempts to show the gulf between the poor and neglected and the rich and privileged. Crucial questions remain unanswered – who are the leaders of a nation, what is the meaning of social structure and who is neglected in what sense and why? It is axiomatic that historical approaches pose more questions than history itself can ever answer. And whilst the new cultural approach cannot give comprehensive answers to such problems, it opens up the floor for debate and further examination of the concept. Of course, cultural historians themselves have offered interpretations on these discussions, yet without the teleological implications that social history or economic history imply. 

The basic issue that has been raised is that historians of other approaches do not question their own definitions and concepts; in other words, they fail to explore the nature of their subject in any depth. There are those who will go no further in trying to expand the constructed meaning of social class – yet it is only a construction of us, the historians. To look further into this example, “social class” was first used by Karl Marx, and later adopted by social historians. Many professions accepted the term and applied it copiously to their discussions in political science, economic explanations, sociological phenomena, and many more. Yet this idea of “social class” did not exist in Elizabethan England, and social strata were not divided in such way. So why would should such a term be applied to the sixteenth century too? Where is the social construction when discussing Indian history or when looking at the development of the Qing Dynasty in China? An explanation or discussion of the term outside European history in nineteenth and early twentieth century history is impossible, rendering the concept of a “universal” sociological concept of humanity almost useless. Only if a culture and a people view themselves coherently as “working class” or “middle class” would it make sense to stress the term in historical understanding. However, most individuals’ lives went far beyond this, for a human culture is far more diverse and complex than the straightjacket any concept would put it in. 

Such a harsh foundational problem for historical approaches has had profound ramifications for the methodology used in history. Clifford Geertz has underpinned this change of cultural analysis through the use of anthropology and the ambivalent idea of ‘thick description’. Historical approaches have been unable to seriously interpret deeper cultural phenomena, other than the value-laden concept of social class. History is dependent on the interpretation of meaning and symbols, rather than scientific discoveries of social explanations. It is axiomatic that anthropology has its own limitations, namely that it too suffers from subjective dilemmas and preconceptions of cultural “phenomena”. However, the new cultural history has gained some self-awareness of this issue and so does not attempt to make unrealistic assumptions – which cannot be said of historicism, cliometrics or social history in particular. It is only in the past few years that the historical professions have regained their confidence and tried to incorporate these problems within their own discussions. Nonetheless, the centrality of discourse and the idea of common codes of knowledge cannot be swept away. The birth of the idea of discourse itself signalled a momentous change of historical perceptions towards the past. Other approaches of History have continuously been limited to looking at their own field of study without much concern of other ideas. Social history has failed to look at cross-cultural and inter-class phenomena in any great amount of depth. The new cultural history has offered us new insights in terms of a dialectical interplay of numerous factors which allow for a greater, more comprehensive understanding of the past. The “bipolar” viewpoint between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is slowly being eradicated – it can be witnessed, for example, in the studies of the middle class and its influence on the lower and higher strata of society in Imperial German historical studies. 

The historical profession has, over the past twenty to thirty years, witnessed insurmountable change. The new cultural history has been the main focus, even proponent, of such changes. New insights into the way we understand the past have come to light as a result. Previous approaches have failed to overcome very basic epistemological and methodological problems. Whilst this discussion in itself is limited in the sense that no deeper cultural analysis can be made here, this article has attempted to offer a tentative approval of the dominance of the new cultural history in the face of its adversaries.

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