THINKING HISTORICALLY ABOUT THINKING HISTORICALLY: IS HISTORICAL THEORY A HISTORICAL OR A METAHISTORICAL PRACTICE?

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis intimidating and massive collection of twenty‐nine extended, diverse essays by distinguished scholars, organized around the general theme of the current state and future direction of historical theory, raises some fundamental questions about historical theory as practiced over the past half century as well as about the distinctive nature of historical theory within the broader context of the production of historical knowledge. The editors of the volume suggest that the postmodern linguistic turn in historical theory, especially as articulated by Hayden White and Michel Foucault, marked a decisive, epochal turning‐point in human historical self‐consciousness, the attainment of a mature stage of autonomous metahistorical reflection on the essential nature of what it means to be historical, on historicity per se. What came before is imagined as a series of preliminary stages, what came after as a working out of implications and consequences. I suggest that a close reading of the implicit and explicit arguments of the individual essays reveals a rather different kind of historical moment, one in which postmodern historical theory has increasingly been demystified of its alleged metahistorical status, and has emerged as a situated object of historical reflection and thus has itself become increasingly defined as historical, recognized in its particularity as a temporally and culturally framed form of historical knowledge.