Gerard Noiriel's Pragmatic Quest for Paradigms

Abstract

Historians have always disagreed about the causes and consequences of past events, but Gerard Noiriel argues in his important recent book that they now differ even more profoundly in their views of the social and intellectual objectives of their professional lives.' Although many historians might welcome these increasingly diverse social identities and research methodologies as signs of professional vitality, Noiriel worries that fragmentation and theoretical critiques are threatening both the social and the intellectual coherence of the contemporary historical profession. His book describes this historical and also proposes a new conception of historical work that could sustain the unified professional identity that he thinks is needed in an era of stagnating financial support and postmodern epistemological skepticism. Noiriel's descriptions of the crisis as well as his desire for pragmatic solutions resemble comparable professional commentaries among American historians, and one of the striking features of his book emerges in his use of American examples to explain current dangers and his use of American philosophical traditions to construct a new professional paradigm. Sur la ?rise de l'histoire is mostly about France, but the cross-cultural themes suggest that the among historians and the possible responses to it grow out of an international culture of historians and historical work. Like many historians in Europe and America, Noiriel wants to reconstruct a unifying professional paradigm while acknowledging the force of criticisms that have undermined powerful earlier beliefs in scientific history. He thus rec-