Does a work of history tells us more about the historian than about its subject?
If one if the tenets of the scientific method is reproducibility, where any independent researcher is able to replicate an experiment under the same conditions and achieve the same results, then history is clearly not in the same league. Given access to exactly the same historical material no two historian will share the same response to their material. Very likely their inquires will lead them to produce quite differing accounts of the same event or events.
Differences
will be in large parts due to the literary style of the historian and the form
he chooses to present the results of his work. However, the focus and essence
of the historians’ analysis of events will differ to an extent that is
predicated by each historian’s present concerns, and their particular ideas and
ideologies that they will bring to bear on the past. When you read a work of history aways look
for the telltale signs that will inform you of what the the historian is trying
to achieve or convey was Carr’s advice in What
is History[1], as “by
and large, the historian will get the facts he wants”. If “history means
interpretation” Carr maintained, then “Study the historian before you begin to
study the facts.”[2]
Indeed we
need to know about the historian, but what exactly about a historian will
inform us about his work.
Arthur
Marwick, when introducing the founders of the Annales school, starts by writing that Lucien Febvre was “born to a
cultivated upper-class family”, and that March Bloch “also came from an
upper-class family”.[3] His
selection of these facts may make us think about Marwick as a historian, but
will not add much to our understanding of the Annales School. I mean what if these historians were not from
upper-class families but from middle-class families, or lower-middle class
families, and what would Marwick expect the implications would have been if
they came from families not of the same but of different social classes. Not
everything that may be interesting to a biographer will necessarily tell us
anything of significance in studying the historian.
In this essay
I shall discuss what I consider to be one of the fundamental qualities of a
historian: the ability and courage to take a critical view of establishment history, or “myths” as
Arthur Marwick aptly calls it. There are other terms that convey the formal
nature of establishment history: “normal” history in the Kuhnian sense,
official history, academic or professional history, or what Ludmilla Jardanova
describes as “public history.”
Let me start
by looking at the historian and his qualities. John Tosh enumerates a number of
qualities that are essential to take the historian beyond the “mastery of the primary sources and critical acumen in
evaluating them.[4] ”
Among the qualities he quotes are the powers of abstraction and
conceptualization that can enable a historian to abstract from the mountains of
detail patterns of periodization, patterns of cause and effect and patterns of
grouping of social classes. Not far down the list of vital qualities required
of a historian are “intellectual cutting edge” and “historical imagination” as
are literary skills:
“But good
writing is more than an optional extra or a lucky bonus. It is central to the re-creative aspect of history.
The insights derived from the exercise
of historical imagination cannot be shared at all without a good deal of
literary flair- an eye for detail, the power to evoke mood, temperament and
ambiance, and an illusion of suspense - qualities that are most fully developed
in creative writing.” [5]
"All history is
contemporary history,"[6] the
Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce once said, of which multiple
interpretations are possible, one of which is that all history is written from
the point of view of contemporary preoccupations. Inevitably, we look at the
past through the eyes of the present and our own views about the present.
This is why every
generation, or more accurately the historians of each generation write their
own history, and they write it influenced by the changing universal values of
humanism as well as by powerful interest groups in academia or outside it.
History as an object of
inquiry, analysis, interpretation and synthesis
does not exist independent of the historian, there can be “no object
without subject”. [7] This is
the classical subject-object duality: just as objects affect the observing
subject (the historian carrying out the inquiry), the subjects’s constitution
affects the way the objects (historical facts, events, etc.) are interpreted.
In cases deemed as raison d'État, that is
when the stakes are high, historians just like the scientists of the
Dark Ages, have the choice of either risking burning at the stake or becoming
the chronicler of the bonfire. Today the stake may be whether tenure is
bestowed on a historian at a University or not, but the underlying conflict may
be as profound[8].
When the issue at stake
hits a raw nerve of a society, of a social class or of a nation there is little
room for the historian to maneuver. The professional historian can decide to
stay within the boundaries of the prevalent historical paradigm or not. At
stake is at the very least disfranchisement form the academic community. I look
here at an example where the controversy on the subject matter was very sharp,
as was the historical debate.
Was the removal of
Armenians from Anatolia during 1915 by the Young Turks, who had taken control
of the Ottoman Empire, a case of genocide or ethnics-cleansing, using terms
that have gained currency later in the century, or a justifiable response of
self-defense by the government against the Armenian population and their
political parties?
I don’t aim to discuss
this issue in this essay, but only to note that all Turkish historians, with
one recent exception, defend the latter version of events that led to the
deportation en-masse of the Armenian population. Bernard Lewis is one of many
international historians who also defend the official account of the events.
But we do have an
exception, as in 1999 Taner Akcam published his interpretation of the events of
1915 and the book was subsequently translated into English as A Shameful Act -
The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility.[9] As the
title suggests, the study makes the case that a planned and coordinated attempt
was made to exterminate the Armenian population of Anatolia. Since then there
has been a number of other historians, sociologists and human rights activists
that have taken up this issue in Turkey.
Studying the historian,
in this case Taner Akcam, the key question that comes to mind is why did he break ranks with the existing
paradigm, his academic Turkish peers and the official version of history? Was
it that, as he was reflecting in the damp vaults where the Ottoman Archives are
kept, and where hundreds of professional historians had previously visited, he
unexpectedly discovered evidence that pointed to a genocide having taken
place? As I do not have access to his as
yet unpublished biography I can only surmise. Akcam was a leader of the largest
left-wing group in Turkey during the latter part of the 1970s called Revolutionary
Way. He went into exile after the
military coup of 1980, later left politics and turned his attention to producing scholarly work. It could be said
that he was not indebted to the state, nor it’s academic institutions or the
official version of the history in any moral or material way. In fact more
likely the exact opposite was true. Circumstances and his own past experiences
placed him in a position that made it possible, once he was able to peer into
the Ottoman archives, to search and find evidence that would enable him to
challenge one of the main historical dogmas of the country.
It can be argued that
this is an extreme case and that historians rarely sit where Galileo did once.
Yet ”the confiscation of history” as was fittingly described by Dr Gary Thorn
in one of the evening history courses at
Birbeck University is a key concern in many situations today, such as in the
case of Israel which we discuss below, and which affects world politics.
Hence reclaiming history
remains on the agenda and for this critical historians are needed to challenge
established history again and again.
Critical
thinking may appear to be quite an elusive quality to define but no more than
those of abstraction, conceptualization and imagination enumerated by John
Tosh. In fact there is a simpler test for critical thinking than for many of
the other qualities that are considered essential to a historian: are the
assumptions that are considered to be the norm or self-evident within a
historical, social or national framework questioned in the process of an
inquiry or not?
Marwick
explains this process of questioning diagrammatically in The New Nature of History [10] which may be summarized as
follows:
The past gives rise to myths,
but also leaves sources which historians can use to challenge the myths. The outcome of
these challenges make up the body of knowledge known
as history.
Repeated
iteratively, this model will give positive results in transforming myths into
“good” or at least better history. The one thing that is missing from Marwick’s
model is the nature of the historian. Marwick claims that the professional
expertise acquired by the historian through academic training and the vigorous
application of historical methods in analyzing facts and evidence are
sufficient to challenge myths and produce good history. Necessary but not
sufficient I would argue. If expertise in the historical methods of inquiry
were sufficient to challenge myths, then given the number of students that
graduate as professional historians every year, the final victory against the
myths of mankind would be assured. This is not the case
Not all of
mankind’s past are still myths. We are indebted to the achievements of the
rationalist and critical tradition of the Enlightenment for the transformation
of most myths into history. However, many persistently hang on.
When
President Bush, to discredit critics of his Administration’s Iraq adventure,
accused such critics of practicing "revisionist history, it was James
M. McPherson the President
of the American Historical Association who came to the defense of revisionist
historians.
“Whatever
Bush and Rice meant by "revisionist historians," it is safe to say
that they did not mean it favorably. The 14,000 members of this Association,
however, know that revision is the lifeblood of historical scholarship. History
is a continuing dialogue between the present and the past. Interpretations of
the past are subject to change in response to new evidence, new questions asked
of the evidence, new perspectives gained by the passage of time. There is no
single, eternal, and immutable "truth" about past events and their
meaning. The unending quest of historians for understanding the past—that is,
"revisionism"—is what makes history vital and meaningful.”[11]
This was
not just an academic question of defending the historians right to interpret
and re-interpret history in light of facts they uncover, but one of immediate
political implications which McPherson pointed to:
“The
administration's pejorative usage of "revisionist history" to
denigrate critics by imputing to them a falsification of history is scarcely
surprising. But it is especially ironic, considering that the president and his
principal advisers have themselves been practitioners par excellence of this
kind of revisionism. Iraq offers many examples. To justify an unprovoked
invasion of that country, the president repeatedly exaggerated or distorted
ambiguous intelligence reports to portray Iraqi possession of or programs to
develop biological, chemical, and nuclear "weapons of mass
destruction" that posed an imminent threat to the United States.”
Every
serious international conflict tends to produce an orthodox, official version
of events that is supported by the state or governmental powers. It often takes
a long period for it to be challenged by historians and for revised versions of
the historical events to go into circulation. In Israel,
it was only when government papers were declassified thirty years after the
founding of Israel, that a group of historians, which included Benny Morris,
Ilan Pappe and Avi Shlaim, were able to
contest the traditional ‘old historians’ image about Israel and the Palestinian
question as both misleading and determined by the political need to be
pro-Israeli. As a result of their challenge of the established historiography
of Israel they have come to be called “the Israeli revisionist, or new,
historians.” Revisionist historians’ studies and expositions have since become
an important framework for the pro-peace movement.
Clearly the challenge to
established history, or myths, cannot be conjured from thin air. The
Israeli revisionist historians made use of Israeli archival materials released
over the past decades. In the case of Taner Akcam, being able to study the Ottoman
archives was crucial to his work.
Evidence
buried in archives or brought into the open when state papers are declassified
provide a necessary but not sufficient basis for the revision of history. It
also needs the critical historian: historians with the awareness of ‘myths’
that need have be challenged. I share the conviction of Eugene D Genovese when
he asserts his belief “that every contribution to history and humanities, to
the extent to which it takes a critical stance, helps defend humanity against
the barbarism of our age....”[12]
The
crucial role of the critical historian in liberating history from myths does
not undermine the work done by professional historians, as was clearly the case
when historians were able to discredit David Irving’s holocaust denial by
examining his evidence and proving them to be falsehoods. Professional and
traditional historians are necessary not only to expose charlatans or
historians who act as propagandists for dominant elites, but also to provide a
system of checks and balances in all historical enterprises, so that the
inevitability of ideological bias does not free the critical historian from the
responsibility to aim for the maximum objectivity.
Dario
Navaro
17 June
2011
Croce, History
as the Story of Liberty. London: George Allen
& Unwin, 1941.pp 19-22
References
by George Allan Assistant Professor at Dickinson College, Carlisle,
Pennsylvania.
[7] “No truth is more absolutely certain than that all
that exists for knowledge, and, therefore, this whole world, is
only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver--in a word, idea.”
Schopenhauer, from The
Word as Will and Idea (my italics)
[8] Norman Finkelstein, author of the Holocaust Industry, was denied tenure in 2007 at DePaul University
after a vigorous campaign led by Alan Dershowitz whose book The Case for Israel Finkelstein had criticized as being
“partially plagiarized and wholly false.” In Beyond Chutzpah by Finkelstein, pp363.
September 2003. Perspectives On
Line
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