The criticism of the possibility of historical knowledge
More recently, disputes turn around the special status that historians accord to the kinds of evidence they use and the status of the histories they write as a kind of privileged or true narrative of past events. Emanating largely from literary theorists like Jacques Derrida, a considerable body of work over the last few decades has contributed towards a critique of both, arguing that historians merely study the relationship between texts that, while being generated in the past, exist purely in the present. Moreover, the narratives they produce are simply that: stories that are not essentially different from those produced by writers of historical novels.

The reactions of the historical profession to this have been various. Many historians have simply disregarded the debate and got on with their business. Others, such as Richard Evans in his In Defence of History have directly countered the arguments of what is known as (perhaps unhelpfully now) postmodernism and defended the status of historical writing.

Yet others have engaged with these trends and, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, tried to incorporate some new perspectives into their work. A positive summation of some of these trends can be found in Rethinking History by Keith Jenkins. This form of disagreement cuts to the very heart of what history is and what historians can legitimately claim to do. It is impossible to be conclusive about it because the arguments are still going on around us. But there seems at the moment to be a retreat from the position of extreme doubt. Literary historians, taking a lead from Stephen Greenblatt, have argued for a new kind of 'literary historicism', while 'postmodernist' historians of popular politics such as Patrick Joyce, have called for a return to history.

Focus and aim
We should be very cautious, however, about assuming the real root of disagreement among historians lies in the clash of modern political ideologies or the philosophical and methodological disputes associated with postmodernism. This will become clearer if we flip back two-and-a-half millennia to the men generally regarded as the first two historians. Writing in the fifth century BC, both Herodotus and Thucydides took the origins and course of war as their subject. In spite of this underlying similarity, the differences between them were profound.

The Histories of Herodotus attempt to explain the causes and course of the great war between the Greeks and the Persians but they do much more than this. His interests were vast, taking in what we would now call geography, natural history and anthropology as well as history. He accounted for the customs and beliefs of Greeks and barbarians as well as their histories, he describes the floods of the Nile and the margins of the known world.

Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian Wars dealt with the war between Athens and Sparta that tore the Greek world apart. This is accounted for in a much more disciplined, methodical and constrained way. He stuck more conscientiously to the political and military issues related to the wars themselves and gave himself less licence to digress into other areas. Thucydides decided to do less but do it better.

On matters of evidence they were also at odds. Herodotus stretched his history back beyond living memory and famously reported hearsay as evidence. It is not altogether fair to thus accuse him of credulousness; he merely reports these things for his readers to make judgements for themselves. He does, however, on odd occasions ascribe historical causation to the will of the Gods.

Thucydides would have none of this. He stuck to the period of living memory where a principle of verification can be brought more easily to bear and he was more sceptical about what he was told. His views of the cause of events in general reflected a more systematic understanding of the structures of politics and human motivation. We are certainly left with a more satisfying account of why wars start. And the Gods have no part to play at all.

If in this first historical dispute we see a shift to greater disciplinary rigour, it seems to be at the cost of a breadth of vision, a concern with the diversity of human experience and a willingness to take real risks with evidence. Many of the differences between the new cultural history and traditional historical methods today are reflected in Thucydides’ response to the methods of Herodotus – breadth and imagination versus precision and rigour. You could tell a lot about a modern historian by asking how they position themselves in relation to the first two historians.

Further Reading

Herodotus The Histories (Penguin, 2003)

Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian Wars (Hackett Publishing, 1998)

Richard Evans, In Defence of History (Granta, 2001)

Pat Hudson The Industrial Revolution: Reading History (Hodder Arnold, 1992)

Links
Institute for Historial Research 'Reviews in history'. - Historians reviewing each others' books, and responding to the reviews.