Whose Truth, Whose History?

Abstract

Telling the Truth about History calls for an amiable approach to studying the past, one in which democratic and consensual historical truth as laid out in narrative instructs us and helps anchor our democratic identities. We enjoy this civilizing kind of history, the authors believe, because much of the arrogance and error of heroic science, a science on which professional history chose to base itself since the nineteenth century, was discredited in the twentieth century as one witnessed the horrors science could inflict on the planet. Instead of following the heroic model, we now engage in and produce a democratic version of history that includes minorities, the underclasses, and women, while the more or less totalitarian kind of objectivity adhered to by professional historians of other generations recedes. The only threats to the steady progress of history are from relativists and postmodernists, who reject the Enlightenment commitment to rationality and intelligibilty. Otherwise a pragmatic commitment to practical realism in historical practice coincides in history as it does in politics to the authors' goals of using historical truth to promote democratic politics and vice versa. I suppose that most historians are indeed practical realists and thus refrain from delving into larger epistemological issues on the grounds that these are marginal to pragmatic questions of writing and teaching. Before celebrating the many promises today's enlightened profession has to offer, Telling the Truth about History recounts the rise of historical science from the late eighteenth century onwards. This account is one that might have been written differently, despite its accurate outline of the commitments of canonical scholars to political history and to archival research. The authors suggest that gender can be included in historical narrative and analysis, and yet almost all the historiographical sections eliminated women and gender from the story of historical science. Historical truth is the achievement of certain great academic historians, who, following the example of natural science, have devised a set of rules and procedures that will ensure objectivity and thus truth. By writing a unitary and essentially univocal account in the heroic mode, Telling the Truth about History provides an example of the ways in which issues of truth are discussed and anchored by excluding