Teaching Method and Theory to History Undergraduates. Intellectual Challenges and Professional Responsibilities

Abstract

AbstractThis article seeks to demonstrate why university instructors should make greater efforts to teach our undergraduates about historical methods and the challenges to traditional ways of doing history posed by important recent theoretical approaches and critiques. The stakes are high because liberal progressivist narratives of historical progress are inadequate for the professional study of history, though very powerful for legitimating the political status quo. It is also my goal to show why our experience (and what common sense can make of it) cannot lead us to intellectually responsible methods for the study of history. Unfortunately, 'common sense' can, on the other hand, lead us to ways of doing history that shore up existing power structures. Every refusal to engage with theoretical and methodological issues implies taking a political position about power and the ways in which traditional history‐writing helps to construct and legitimate power. A historian who employs only traditional empiricist methods (common sense, arguments from human nature, etc.) is not really refusing to articulate and apply a theory, but holds and applies a theoretical approach while at the same time denying its existence, its effects and its power to organize and shape historical issues. Hiding behind commonsensical and other unexamined methods reduces history as a practice and as a profession to either antiquarianism or partisanship, both in the service of the (neo‐) liberal establishment. Any such engagement (for or against an establishment) must be clear and declared, not camouflaged as objectivity, neutrality or freedom from theory. We owe it to our students to declare our positions and to encourage them to think systematically and in an informed fashion about theirs as well.