Two Approaches to Historical Study: The Metaphysical (Including 'Postmodemism') and the Historical

Abstract

'Postmodernist' epistemology and ontology are inescapable, though highly contestable, components of the intellectual world of today, and everyone involved in intellectual and educational activity should have some understanding of their basic contentions. These contentions are now being encountered by history students, particularly if they are also involved in literary or cultural studies; such students may then be faced by a potentially disorienting disjunction between theories of discourse analysis, deconstruction, and the 'historicizing' of texts, and the methods and principles taught, or at least assumed, in most history departments, and may even be persuaded that the history of the historians is worthless, merely ideology, 'the stories we tell', and must be replaced by a history shaped to the needs of contemporary radical politics. The basic theme of this article is that the presumptuous and illinformed criticisms which the 'postmodernists' (a useful, though unsatisfactory label, taken to include post-structuralists, cultural materialists, new historicists, etc.) make of history are best rebutted through a careful restatement of what it is historians actually do, and why they do it. I start with two central problems: (I) that of language (which historians must grapple with both in their research among often intractable primary sources, and in writing up that research); (II) that of history as a social, and indeed, career activity (in which the coveted prizes may be best-sellerdom and literary awards, rather than research grants and professorships). I then, (III), identify the crucial distinction between, on the one side, the study of carefully delimited aspects of the human past, as conducted, through systematic research in