Richard J. Evans

(In Defence of History. Granta Books, September 1997. ISBN 1-86207-068-7).

This is a reply to my critics. It will be updated periodically, as more reviews appear; the next updating will be undertaken early in 1999, after the publication of the American edition by W.W.Norton & Co. and the German edition (Fakten und Fiktionen) by the Campus Verlag. This is the first version, written in March 1998. It deals with the following reviews and reviewers, which are listed here in order of appearance:

1. Michael Burleigh, 'Making history or making-up history?', The Sunday Telegraph 14 September 1997, review section, p. 13.
2. Roy Porter, 'Defending History', BBC Radio 3 Book of the Week, 15 September 1997.
3. Bernard Crick, 'The truth, the whole truth - and nothing but', The Independent Saturday Magazine, 20 September 1997, p. 14.
4. Niall Ferguson, 'History is dead. Long live history!', The Sunday Times, 21 September 1997.
5. Ronald Hutton, 'What is history really about?', The Times Educational Supplement, 26 September 1997.
6. Samuel Brittan, 'The many failings of post-modernism', The Spectator, 27 September 1997.
7. John Charmley, 'Time to move past postmodernism?', The Daily Telegraph, 27 September 1997, p. A4.
8. Steven Kassem, 'In Defence of History', Epigram, 16 October 1997.
9. Keith Thomas, 'A good kicking', New Statesman and Society, 17 October 1997, p. 46.
10. A. C. Grayling, 'Historical truth put on the line', The Financial Times, Weekend Supplement, 25/26 October 1997, p. vi.
11. Joyce Appleby, 'Does it really need defending?'. The Times Literary Supplement, 31 October 1997, p. 10.
12. Steve Smith, 'Truth in an age of challenge', The Times Higher Educational Supplement, 28 November 1997, p. 26.
13. Stefan Collini, 'The truth-vandals', The Guardian, 18 December 1997, p. 15.
14. Daniel Johnson, 'The History Man', Prospect, November 1997, pp. 64-65.
15. Matthew Trinca, 'History's Impossible Dream', The Australian, 3 December 1997, p. 40.
16. Chris Harman, 'Subjects and Objects', Socialist Review 215 (January, 1918), p. 27.

In addition, this reply also considers some of the points raised in letters published in The Times Higher Educational Supplement on 19 and 26 September 1997 in reply to my article 'Truth Lost in Vain Views', published in the same periodical on 12 September 1997 (p. 18), and summarising some of the main arguments of the book.

The reply tries to deal with the various points made by critics under a number of headings. The criticisms that have been made can be summed up as follows.

1. The book tries to defend traditional historical empiricism by attacking postmodernism but misses its target because it doesn't engage fully and directly with the great postmodernist philosophers.
2. The book is unnecessary because history doesn't need defending, least of all against absurd and trivial writers of the sort it targets.
3. The book is too sympathetic to postmodernism and unfairly critical of conservative historians.
4. The book misunderstands, or misrepresents, key arguments of the postmodernists and is unfairly critical of postmodernist writers.

I will deal with each of these basic criticisms in turn in the following pages.

Criticism 1

(The book tries to defend traditional historical empiricism by attacking postmodernism but misses its target because it doesn't engage fully and directly with the great postmodernist philosophers.)

In Defence of History is a book that emerged out of the experience of teaching. In the mid-1990s, I agreed to take on the history element in a series of lectures and classes on the epistemology of the social sciences in a joint Birkbeck BA degree in Politics, Philosophy and History. Looking around for suitable textbooks, I was dismayed to find that the most widely used books in this subject seemed to be more than thirty years old - E. H. Carr's What is History? and G. R. Elton's The Practice of History. Rereading these books for the first time in many years made me only too aware of their inadequacies. Worse still were the alternatives. On the one hand there were tedious history primers which talked down to the student in solemn and patronising tones. On the other there was a rash of new books, many of them explicitly designed for teaching, which disputed the legitimacy of history altogether and mobilised postmodernist theory in the service of the argument that it was no different from fiction or poetry. A glance at journals like History and Theory made it even clearer that this latter view was now more or less the orthodoxy among those who specialized in the theory and philosophy of history, which indeed had become a separate branch of learning in its own right since the days of Carr and Elton (as is indeed pointed out in the book: a reviewer such as Steven Kassem, who finds it 'puzzling' that many of the writers discussed in the book are not practicing historians, has not been paying attention).

It seemed to me that there was a need for a new book that tackled these problems, as Carr and Elton had tackled the problems of their own day, from the point of view of the practicing historian, and gave readers some examples of what historians were actually doing in the 1990s as well as putting forward some general arguments about it. The lectures I gave on the course duly became, after many revisions, In Defence of History. In the book, I tried to steer a middle course between the extremes of postmodernist hyper-relativism on the one hand, and traditional historicist empiricism on the other. But the weight of the argument was directed against the postmodernists. This was not because I thought, or think, that they are becoming dominant in the historical profession as a whole. On the contrary, their presence is felt amongst practicing historians in only a relatively few areas, such as European intellectual history, or some kinds of feminist history, for example. The reason why I felt history needed defending was principally because of the dominance of hyper-relativism and skepticism about history's validity as an intellectual enterprise amongst those who write about historiography and history as a discipline in a general, theoretical sense. In the 1990s increasing numbers of history degree courses, both undergraduate and postgraduate, have included a substantial element of historiography in them, and it seemed to me that it was at this level that the intellectual validity of history really needed defending in the light of the kind of literature that was, and is still being published on the subject. Beyond this, too, growing numbers of historians, particularly on the left, have been voicing a growing degree of skepticism about the possibility of doing history at all, and more broadly still, historians of all persuasions have been talking in increasingly alarmist tones in recent years about the state of crisis they see as overwhelming their profession as a whole. Here too, I wanted to persuade people that it was possible to defend history as an intellectual undertaking by genuinely confronting and arguing with the extreme skeptics rather than by simply ignoring them or covering them with abuse.

These aims, I thought, were clear enough from the book. But a number of critics mistook them and thought the book was trying to do something else. Joyce Appleby, for example, thought that I was trying to discredit postmodernism as a whole by attacking its silliest and most extreme manifestations. But in doing so, she succumbed to precisely the kind of dichotomous thinking of which her review argued postmodernism had taught scholars (though not apparently myself) to be wary. As she surely knows, however, and as the book makes perfectly clear, 'postmodernism' is a label covering a wide variety of positions, and just because the book rejects some of these, it doesn't follow that it rejects them all. Pursuing this Manichean misreading of the book, Appleby goes on to convict it of an outdated belief in the historian's 'impartial and omniscient voice of a reconstructor of events and analyser of developments.' In fact the book uses up a good deal of space trying to demolish such simplistic denials of the historian's subjectivity, and to deny the possibility of historical omniscience.

'Historians', she goes on, 'prefer to think that they reconstruct the past, rather than acknowledge that in the process of doing so they also create texts and construct knowledge.' Contrary to what readers of her review might suppose, the book defends the latter position and deploys a range of arguments against those who, like Elton, take the former. On pages 125-6 of the book, far from ignoring Hayden White's ideas on this subject, as Appleby claims, the book explicitly endorses White's most recent account of how historians go about their work of writing and research. Thus Appleby's patronising conclusion that British historians preserve simplistic ideas about truth and objectivity which have long been discarded in the more sophisticated intellectual atmosphere of the United States is based on a superficial (and indeed unsophisticated) misreading of the kind she claims the book itself is guilty of when it tackles the postmodernists.

The same misreading seems indeed to be characteristic of a number of reviewers. Matthew Trinca, for example, ignores the carefully circumscribed definition of objectivity given in the book's final Chapter, and, simply assuming that the word can only be used in the absolutist sense intended by traditionalists like Elton, places the book's central argument squarely in the Eltonian camp. Similarly, Steve Smith gets it completely wrong when he supposes that the book argues that 'there is a singular truth to be told about the past' a truth which can be simply 'discovered' from the evidence unaided by the historian's theories and questions. The book goes to some length to argue that what historians write is the result of a dialogue between their own purposes and ideas and what they find in the sources. Unwilling to recognise this, Smith proceeds to entangle himself in a web of contradictions, as he argues on the one hand that historians' interpretations of past events cannot stand or fall by the extent to which they conform to the historical evidence, and on the other accuses the Harvard historian Richard Pipes of providing 'a deeply distorted representation' of the Russian revolution. How can Smith consider Pipes's account to be distorted if not by an appeal to the evidence? Not just the evidence which Pipes himself cites, that is, but more importantly, as Smith surely knows, the massive amount of evidence which Pipes has omitted from his account. Saying that he, Smith, brings a different narrative perspective to bear on the Revolution doesn't amount to any criticism of Pipes at all, since in this way of thinking there is no criterion by which anyone can decide whether it is Smith's narrative or Pipes's which is distorted; the inescapable conclusion of Smith's general argument is that both are equally valid just as the inescapable conclusion of his particular remarks about Pipes is that this general argument is invalid.

Smith demands 'more philosophical spadework' to clear up some of the issues at hand, and Appleby also charges that 'what is lacking in A Defence of History' (it is symptomatic of her scholarly standards that she even manages to misquote the book's title) 'is a serious discussion of the way that postmodernists have examined the tools and strategies involved in the production of knowledge.' In similar vein, Stefan Collini is critical of the fact that the book tackles what he calls 'a blend of vulgarised post-structuralist theories of language with self-consciously radical notions about contesting hierarchy, hegemony, and so forth' instead of grappling 'at the appropriate level of abstraction' with the French epistemology which is behind all this. The result, he says, is a series of 'vulgarised rebuttals of vulgarised ideas'. If by 'vulgarised' he means 'popularised', then I gladly plead guilty. The book is not meant to be about major thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Ferdinand de Saussure, or Roland Barthes, though they do get a mention from time to time, but much more about second-or third-rank thinkers such as Hayden White, Frank Ankersmit, Keith Jenkins, Patrick Joyce, Dominick LaCapra, Beverley Southgate and their likes; it's precisely not an attempt to tackle the complex epistemologies of modern French philosophy head-on.

What it precisely is, is an attempt to deal with the application of some of these epistemologies, often in a simplified and, yes, vulgarised form, to the theory and practice of history by people whose intellectual home is half-way between the two disciplines of history and philosophy. Collini's dismissive argument that historians are not qualified to write about French epistemology, coupled with his view that a vulgarised rebuttal of vulgarised versions of them is not really worth writing, is to my mind excessively Mandarin. If the only kind of book that is worth writing about postmodernism is a philosophical dissection of the central theories of Foucault, Derrida and other French thinkers at a high (or 'appropriate') level of abstraction, then the field really will be left open to the Jenkinses and the Ankersmits and the Southgates. Somebody has to take them on at their level, and that is what my book tries to do. From the point of view of the state of health of the discipline of history, this is certainly something that is worth doing.

Moreover, it is misguided of Collini in my view to tell historians, as he does, just to get on with writing history and leave the theorizing to the experts. We all have to make some fundamental decisions about what we are doing nowadays before we do it, history is becoming a more theoretically and epistemologically self-conscious discipline, and that's all to the good. To follow Collini's advice would not only be foolish, it would not really be possible either any more. To reiterate: In Defence of History is about the influence of post-structuralist and other postmodernist epistemologies on historical theory and practice, not about those epistemologies themselves. It is a book that emerged from, and is intended to be used in, history teaching. It is not a monographic study in philosophy or the history of ideas.

That is why, finally, the book does not discuss 'important thinkers' such as Michael Oakeshott, whose omission is deplored by Niall Ferguson. I read Oakeshott and thought seriously about including a discussion of his writings on the philosophy of history, which are both extensive and important and certainly not to be dismissed out of hand. But the fact is that he plays no part whatsoever in the current debate about history, which has entirely different theoretical and philosophical origins, and it would have been both confusing and unnecessary to have included him. Sir Herbert Butterfield, whose omission Ferguson also deplores, is another matter. If he is remembered nowadays by non-specialists in his chosen field of eighteenth-century British political history for anything, it is for The Whig Interpretation of History, an attack on teleological history written in the 1930s, the main argument of which is that what happens is often an unintended consequence of something else that happened earlier. This is such a truism that it hardly seemed worth mentioning, and in any case it was put much earlier, and much better, by Frederick Engels, with his notion of history operating through a 'parallelogram of forces' in which pressure at one point would result in movement, unintended by the author of the pressure, at some other point far away. Like Oakeshott, Butterfield doesn't really feature in the current debate; unlike Oakeshott, he made to my mind no really serious contribution to the theory and philosophy of history, so the case for including him is even weaker.

Criticism 2

(The book is unnecessary because history doesn't need defending, least of all against absurd and trivial writers of the sort it targets.)

This argument follows on from some of those discussed above, which alleges that the book is only 'defending history from attacks that must surely have vaporized in their own light-headedness', as Joyce Appleby puts it. Other reviewers concurred in thinking that writers such as Keith Jenkins are not worth spilling much ink on. 'Is it really worth refuting such views?' asks Samuel Brittan. Its 'destruction of postmodernism may be a little wearying', he confesses in his review of the book, 'with chapter after chapter and example after example'. It could easily be done 'in a few lines'. Appleby's claim that the book 'certainly will please those who think that pre-1970 history needed no defending' is somewhat untypical in this respect. Leaving aside the mysterious question of what happened in 1970 to make history worth defending in some people's eyes afterwards but not before, it seems strange that a book explicitly devoted to defending history (both before and after 1970) should please those who think it needs no defending at all. And in fact this is what a number of reviewers have more or less said. The fact that over 40,000 British 'A' level students took history examinations in 1997 and over 15,000 students were reading the subject at university, history in the same year means, according to Niall Ferguson, that 'history does not need much defending.' Of course, these figures are a substantial decline on those of previous years, the numbers of students taking history at A level have been falling for over a decade, and in the USA there were only a third as many students reading history at university in 1990 than there were in 1970, but this does not seem to bother Ferguson. As an economic historian, he should surely know that it is trends that count, not single-year figures.

If there is a threat against which history needs defending, it is according to Ferguson not postmodernism but 'the expansion of the subject at the universities since the 1960s'. Most historians, one would imagine, would welcome such a development, but not Ferguson, who as an Oxford don presumably thinks that universities other than his own and a handful of others should either teach useful subjects like carpentry or accountancy or not exist at all. What has been the result of this expansion? he asks. 'Cosy enclaves such as "gender studies" or "gay history" exist to protect the talentless from serious intellectual challenge.' Something of the kind probably used to be said about economic history too. It should not be necessary to rebut such a statement of crass prejudice in detail; nowadays, more imaginative, pathbreaking and first-rate scholarship is probably being devoted to these areas which Ferguson so despises than to the often narrowly technical and unimaginative discipline of economic history which he himself has so far practised (and which, indeed, as the book points out, is rapidly disappearing as Economic History Departments are closed down or merged, and membership of the Economic History Society undergoes a steady decline).

A more subtle argument is put forward by Daniel Johnson, with implicit support from Michael Burleigh and Matthew Trinca, and that is that 'it is not history that needs defending, but professional historians', and this is what the book sets out to do. History books, Burleigh and Johnson point out, are more popular than ever, but on the whole those that are widely read are written by non-academics, and the popular view of history is stamped not by the Oxbridge professoriate but by cinema and television, and by writers such as Antonia Fraser. Similarly, Roy Porter, reviewing the book on BBC Radio 3, wished that it had 'looked beyond the walls of academe', just as Daniel Johnson criticises its author for giving 'no credit to those who practise his craft outside the university'. In Johnson's view, therefore, the book is written in defence of the academic historical profession, what Trinca calls 'a capital H History that is professional, discretely packaged with neat sub-specialisms, and manageable', not in defence of history per se. 'In Defence of History remains the swansong of a golden age of academic supremacy.'

This is an interesting criticism, and perhaps the most difficult to answer of all those that have been made of the book to date, not least because there is something in it. The book does defend academic and scholarly standards in history and attack those who violate them. I considered at one point including a chapter about popular representations of history but in the end concluded this was a subject too vast to treat briefly, and deserved a separate publication in itself. In Defence of History focuses on the issue of how we define and achieve such things as truth and objectivity, whatever kind of history we are practising. These matters are, to my mind, the same whether you are Antonia Fraser, writing for a broad general public outside the academy, or whether you are Joyce Appleby, writing predominantly for a readership of students and other professional historians. It was gratifying, therefore, to see this view confirmed when Antonia Fraser named In Defence of History as her book of the year in the Christmas books issue of The Guardian in 1997. Clearly some popular historians at least do think that the book applies to them as well as to their colleagues in academia.

There are two further points worth making in reply to Johnson's criticism. The first is that the book does endorse the writing of popular history by academic historians, and mentions a number of books which provide good examples of this. The more that the gap can be bridged, the better. The second, also mentioned (briefly) in the book, is that it is essentially not true that professional, university-based historians are facing a new challenge from popular representations of history in the media. Popular representations of history have always been widespread, whether in folksong and ballad, saga and legend, or broadside, chapbook and historical novel, and they, rather than the work of professional historians, have always structured the historical perceptions of the majority. Two and a half thousand years ago, indeed, the Greek historian Thucydides complained in the preface to his history of the Pelopponesian War that poets and others were purveying false and imaginary accounts of what had happened, and announced his attention of setting the record straight. In the past, only a tiny minority of the literate and the educated was exposed to professional history and historians. Today, at the end of the twentieth century, with over a third of the entire population passing through higher education when they reach the end of their teens in most advanced industrial societies, and a growing proportion of mature and part-time students entering an ever-expanding process of lifelong learning, the number of those who have access to and are influenced by university-based history and historians is probably greater than it has ever been before. This returns us to Ferguson's original point about the popularity of history as an academic subject today, even if he did overdo it a little. So while Johnson is correct to say the book defends history as an academic discipline, principally against its critics within the academy, he is wrong to say it represents in so doing the swansong of a declining elite, and wrong to say that it has no application to non-academic versions of history.

Criticism 3

(The book is too sympathetic to postmodernism and unfairly critical of conservative historians.)

The review pages of the daily, weekly and weekend quality press in Great Britain are still dominated by a generation of young, conservative historians and journalists who came during the Thatcher years to such intellectual maturity as they possess. With the sole exception of John Charmley, writing in the Daily Telegraph, they regretted the fact that, as one of them, Michael Burleigh, put it, 'unfortunately Evans keeps a foot in the "progressive" camp'. Why this should be unfortunate may be clear to the readers of the Sunday Telegraph, who, one imagines, would not take kindly to the pages of their newspaper being filled with articles written by the apostles of Derrida and Baudrillard, but it is not at all clear to me. Nor does Burleigh do very much to make it clearer to those of us who do not automatically assume that everything that is progressive is necessarily wrong. All of Burleigh's criticisms on this point are based on tendentious misrepresentations of passages from In Defence of History. At the risk of descending into triviality, it is necessary to deal briefly with each of these in turn.

Burleigh charges the book with inconsistency in saying on the one hand that postmodernists write jargon and on the other hand that they have encouraged more literary ways of writing history. But there is no inconsistency here, for it is not postmodernist historians (Burleigh's word) who are criticized in the book for jargon, but postmodernist literary theorists who adopt jargon in order to seem scientific. Paradoxically, the book argues, by treating history as literature although not writing it themselves, these theorists have encouraged practising historians to write better. This still seems to me to be an advance.

Burleigh's paranoia about the book's attitude towards well-known conservative historians leads him into misrepresentations even more crass than this. 'Andrew Roberts', he thunders, 'is ticked off for his personal sources of income; John Vincent for writing in a tabloid newspaper; Arthur Marwick for being slow with his inaugural lecture. Gossip involving Hugh Trevor-Roper figures more prominently than his major contributions to European history.' Let us look at the passages in question and see what they really say.

On page 210 the book says the following of Andrew Roberts, after outlining John Vincent's argument that historians nowadays are all left-liberal because they work for the state:

If we really believed his somewhat reductionst view, we would only expect robust right-wing opinions from historians who lived off a private income, and while it is certainly true that there are some individuals, such as Andrew Roberts, author of the neo-Thatcherite text Eminent Churchillians, who fit into this pattern, there are many more who do not.

No hint of criticism here either of the man or of his work: Roberts is merely used in an entirely neutral sense as an example in an argument.

What about Vincent himself? There are many references to him in the book a good number of them favourable, including, in the argument just quoted, a mention of the fact that his most original and unconventional historical work was written while he held a university appointment, as indeed he still does, and was not dependent on a private income, which to my knowledge he has never been. But the one to which Burleigh presumably objects is the following, in note 15 to Chapter 4, on page 268:

Vincent...cites with approval A.J.P.Taylor's belief that no new secrets were to be found in unpublished archival sources. Vincent himself advocates paying greater attention than is customary to the newspapers, and declares that newsprint is 'the Venetian archive of tomorrow'....Vincent's partiality to newspapers as unbiased sources of information may possibly be coloured by the fact that he himself wrote a column in the Sun for a number of years, until student demonstrations at his own university forced him to abandon it - an event which, however deplorable in itself, would scarcely have taken place had the column been a model of impartiality.

This passage also enraged Daniel Johnson, who devoted a whole paragraph to denouncing it, accusing the book of unfairness towards Vincent and of 'justifying the silencing of a scholar by the mob'. But the passage in question was intended to suggest that newspapers have their biases, not just in columns written by moonlighting dons, but also in their reporting and in their general editorial line, whether it be that of the Sun, the Telegraph or the Guardian. The use of the word 'deplorable' gives the lie to Johnson's suggestion that I actually approved of the demonstrations in question. As for Burleigh's objection, nowhere in the passage is there any hint of disapproval for Vincent's work for the Sun in itself.

Similarly, on page 299 the reference to Arthur Marwick having delivered his 'inaugural lecture after decades of occupation of the Chair of History at the Open University' contains not so much as a hint of criticism for the delay, however critical the discussion of the lecture is in other respects. The criticism is a pure figment of Burleigh's imagination; I included the delay in the reference merely as a curious and possibly amusing fact.

As for Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre), it is difficult to work out what Burleigh means by 'gossip', unless it is perhaps a reference on page 19 to his 'authentication' of the Hitler diaries, which is not gossip but fact, on the basis of a cursory examination of the 'diaries' in a Swiss bank vault - all of which is documented in Robert Harris's excellent book Selling Hitler. Why I should have heeded Burleigh's call and devoted pages of In Defence of History to Trevor-Roper's other work on European history is a mystery. His important work on seventeenth-century British history and his acute review of Carr's What is History? are both mentioned favourably, and at length. This clearly is not enough for Burleigh. But mentions of work such as this are all designed to illustrate arguments in the book; the book is not about giving out pluses and minuses to practising historians on the basis of a complete assessment of all their work. Most of Trevor-Roper's (often important and influential) work on European history is simply not directly relevant to the arguments advanced in my book. Failure to mention it is not intended as a slight.

By contrast, Burleigh finds the book gives 'generous treatment' to 'the American neo-Marxist David Abrahams' (Burleigh is not the only reviewer to misspell Abraham's name) in its account of the controversy over the gross errors in his book which led to his losing his job as a historian. At least Stefan Collini finds the book's handling of the Abraham case 'exemplary'. Given the fact that the book's account convicts Abraham of subconsciously manipulating evidence to fit a thesis, inability to tell fact from fiction, failure to follow basic historical procedures, poor research skills and excessive haste in research, it is difficult to see how its treatment of him could be fairly be described as 'generous'. I cannot imagine that Abraham and his friends (including Peter Novick) will be very pleased with the account. Burleigh is imagining things here again.

Michael Burleigh is not the only young fogey to be upset by the book's criticism of admired figures on the right. Niall Ferguson also convicts the book of 'rudeness' towards 'historians of broadly conservative inclinations' (Steven Kassem alleges that the book's treatment of those it disagrees with is abusive; Keith Thomas thinks it is brisk; Bernard Crick thinks the book deals with them 'clearly and calmly, treating fools with scholarly courtesy', so different reviewers have taken its tone in different ways). Let us take in turn the examples Ferguson cites.

'John Kenyon, for example', he says in his review of In Defence of History, 'is (found) guilty of "mental insularity and prejudice"'. This remark, which Ferguson quotes correctly from page 179, is a comment on Kenyon's claim, advanced in 1993, that undergraduate courses on the history of West Africa and Indochina were 'hastily cobbled-up' by history departments acting on the dictates of fashion, but soon faded away because the difficulty of finding competent external examiners left students 'at the mercy of their tutor's whims and prejudices'. I have to say that (a) the book's description of this view as reflecting its author's mental insularity and prejudice is no ruder or more insulting than Kenyon's own remarks are to the many distinguished historians of Africa and Indochina teaching and researching in British universities at the time he wrote, and (b) it seems to me to be entirely justified to call it insular and prejudiced.

Ferguson goes on to attack the book for describing Hugh Trevor-Roper (here he is again) as 'stubbornly parochial'. This phrase refers not just to Trevor-Roper but to 'a number of stubbornly parochial specialists in European history', among whom he is placed by his remark (made some years ago) that Africa has no history, merely 'the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe'. Once more, the term used seems to me merely to be accurate rather than to be rude as a way of referring to this remark by Trevor-Roper, who of course has proved himself no amateur at invective either.

Finally Ferguson takes exception to the book's remark that John Vincent's comment that 'History is deeply male...History is about the rich and famous, not the poor' shows its author's 'deep ignorance of other kinds of history than the history of British high politics in the nineteenth century which he himself writes'. By omitting the context of the remark and all the words in the quotation except 'deep ignorance', Ferguson gives the impression that the book is claiming Vincent suffers from 'deep ignorance' in every respect, which is not true at all, of course. Apart from this, the book's statement seems to me once more to be entirely justified, and no less insulting to Vincent than he is to those many fine historians who have devoted their lives to writing about the female, the poor, and the unknown. In a similar way, it would not seem unjustified to describe Ferguson's own remarks about gender history as deeply ignorant. It may be rude to say so, but it also happens to be true.

All these points are in the end somewhat trivial ones. More serious by far is the one made, yet again, in the most intelligent of the critical reviews to appear immediately after the book's publication, namely Daniel Johnson's article in Prospect magazine. Johnson argues that the book is 'not so much a defence of history as of one school (left, populist, socially conscious) against another school, less fashionable but no less respectable (conservative, elitist, high political). He notes that intellectual history is elitist, economic history can be right-wing, and there are even socialist historians of high politics. But these points, while perfectly valid, do not alter the fact that there are a number of historians (including, again, Kenyon and Vincent, but also others who write prescriptively about how history should be researched and studied, such as Gertrude Himmelfarb) who dismiss all kinds of history beyond that of high politics within the framework of nation-states as trivial, irrelevant, or not history at all. It is against this narrow conception of history that the book is in part arguing, and it is an inescapable fact that the majority of those who believe in it are politically conservative, although the book goes to some lengths to point out that E. H. Carr, a Stalinist if ever there was one, dismissed the history of the great mass of ordinary and people and unpolitical subjects as irrelevant as well.

But while it argues that history needs defending against the crippling and stultifying influence of narrow and elitist conceptions of what it is, or should be, about, the book does not argue for any one particular conception of history in itself as an alternative. Nor does it say that intellectual history, the history of elites or the history of high politics are in any way wrong in themselves. Its purpose here, as a number of other reviewers, from Ronald Hutton to Roy Porter, have recognized, is to argue for a broad, inclusive conception of history, to celebrate its diversity while at the same time as trying in various ways to overcome its fragmentation, and nowhere does it in fact argue that left-wing versions of history are inherently superior as history to those practised on the right. Indeed it has been sharply attacked on the left by, for example, the convenor of the London Socialist Historians Group, Keith Flett, who thinks that the book needed to be 'more hard-hitting still to repulse the postmodernist challenge', and the Trotskyite writer Chris Harman, who has convicted it of 'backsliding towards postmodernism'.

Criticism 4

(The book misunderstands, or misrepresents, key arguments of the postmodernists and is unfairly critical of postmodernist writers.)

While some of the reviewers who are sympathetic to postmodernism, such as Joyce Appleby, or who are philosophically trained, like Anthony Grayling, accept that In Defence of History gives an accurate representation of the postmodernist theories it is attacking, others do not. This was particularly the case with those who wrote on 19 and 26 September 1997 criticising the preview of the book printed in the Times Higher Education Supplement. John Arnold, for example, claimed that it was wrong of me to argue that postmodernism holds that 'there is a multiplicity of equally valid truths'. Rather, he went on, 'it is that truth (as a claim to one dominant and essential position) is untenable...all truth (with a small "t") is situational, political and engaged. To claim that something is true' he concluded, 'is to attempt to place it beyond discussion.' This argument seems to me to be a tissue of contradictions. Is Arnold saying there is no such thing as truth at all? Or is he saying that there is truth with a big 't' and truth with a small 't'? If the latter, then he is surely saying that there is indeed a multiplicity of equally valid truths. If the former, then how can he believe that what he is saying himself is true?

Secondly, Arnold charges that 'Evans misunderstands the notions of "text" and "discourse"'. He seems to think that I argue that discourse is a false image of reality, whereas in fact in his view it is reality 'or at the very least, as close to reality as we are ever going to get'. Already here he has introduced another confusion into his argument (which of these two does he mean?). I suspect that what he is trying to say is that we can never know reality at all; everything is discourse because everything is mediated through language. I thought that this was the view I was summarising in my brief discussion of Barthes and Derrida and the wider view, deriving from some of their ideas, that texts are not a window through which we can perceive the reality of the past, but that they in some sense are the reality of the past, because the past as such no longer exists. I do not think I gave the impression that discourse, as understood by postmodernists, is merely an image of reality; if Arnold took this impression away from what I wrote, then he was under a misapprehension of what I meant to say.

Among a variety of arguments the book and the preceding article deploy against this view, is the admittedly rather bald statement that Auschwitz is not a discourse, and it trivialises mass murder to see it as a text. To counter this, Arnold points out that 'the gas chambers were a physical expression and outcome of a particular discourse that presented a 'reality" wherein Jews, homosexuals, communists and others were sub-human.' This brings yet more confusions into Arnold's argument. For here he is reintroducing a distinction between Auschwitz and discourse in which the former is the product of the latter; an entirely unexceptionable point made by almost every historian who has ever written about Nazi anti-Semitism in theory and practice, even if they have used words like 'ideology' rather than 'discourse'. But it is a point that totally undermines Arnold's earlier argument that discourse is reality in the sense that Auschwitz itself is discourse because we only know about it through language; a position that is far less easy to defend, in my view. We may agree that Jews were beaten, starved, and sent to the gas chambers because of the Nazi discourse of anti-Semitism, but it is quite a different matter when someone tries to tell us that being beaten, starved to death or gassed is also a 'discourse'.

A related argument to that put so confusingly by Arnold is made by David Andress, who suggests that In Defence of History fails to understand a significant point about the relationship between truth and power. Andress asserts that truth is a moral category rather than something defined by its relation to reality. Thus, he says, E. P Thompson's influence over subsequent historians was greater than that of G. R. Elton not because Thompson had a better control of fact but because he had a more morally appealing vision of the British past than Elton did. He triumphed, as it were, because his truth was morally superior to Elton's. Andress makes this point in response to the argument of In Defence of History that the influence of a particular historical work or view of history is not a function of the institutional power of its author, contrary to claims made by writers such as Keith Jenkins. Thus Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class had a huge influence despite the fact that its author was never a member of a university history department, while Elton's Tudor Revolution in Government was widely disputed and never fully accepted by historians despite the highly influential positions he occupied in academia. Andress argues that it is moral rather than institutional influence which makes historical arguments influential and causes them to attain the status of 'truth', so that truth is in the end indeed a function of power, contrary to what In Defence of History tries to claim.

Andress's point is an interesting and perceptive one, and prompts me to think I should have put my argument a little differently. For if one thinks about it, the central historical thesis in Thompson's book - that the English working class was 'made' by 1832 - was even less widely accepted than the central historical thesis in Elton's - that there was a 'revolution' in government and administration under Henry VIII's minister Thomas Cromwell. An examination of subsequent research monographs, articles and textbooks would soon show that very few historians of any kind incorporated Thompson's central thesis into their work, while some at least gave credence to Elton's. The difference in influence between the two historians lay far more in their method and approach to history than in their interpretation of it. Here Thompson was immeasurably more influential than Elton. Thompson's book had many imitators. Elton's had few. Thompson inspired a whole generation of social historians to study a whole new range of topics in working-class history, or to revisit old ones with new questions. Elton did not start a wave of studies of administration and government in early modern history. When the question is seen from this point of view, Andress is right: Thompson was influential because his vision of history was more in tune with the spirit of the younger generation of social historians in the 1960s and 1970s.

Yet this has nothing much to do with the truth or otherwise of the interpretations each of the two historians advanced about the past subjects and events they were investigating. Andress is wrong therefore to say that Thompson's influence was greater because he told a story that was morally appealing enough to be regarded as true. Thompson was influential because even if historians thought he was not giving a true picture of English plebeian and working-class society and politics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they none the less thought that the approach he adopted would enable them to give a true picture of the (usually much smaller) historical topics to which they chose to devote their own researches.

The argument which Andress puts forward thus in no way supports the hyperrelativist version of the truth-concept which he is advocating ('history...is an exercise in language because that is all it can be'). Andress takes the alarmingly anti-intellectual position that 'the marshalling of facts behind an argument is rendered irrelevant by the reply "I don't believe you, or "I don't care"'. The kind of anti-Semitism that led to Auschwitz, he says, is dead not because it has been shown to be untrue, but because 'we live in a truth-regime where the values behind those "facts" have been rejected.' If he actually believes that rational argument is so irrelevant, what is he doing teaching in a university? If somebody tells him he or she doesn't accept an argument, why doesn't he challenge them to disprove it rationally? Does he really want to live in a society where the evidence for an argument counts for nothing and the moral (or immoral) force behind its advocacy for everything? Surely the duty of an intellectual or an academic is to fight blind prejudice of the kind Andress so depressingly thinks unanswerable, not to give in to it. Contrary to what he argues, there is plenty of evidence to show that the truth prevails in the end because it is true; that anti-Semitism, for example, is no longer widely accepted because among other things it has been seen to be based on lies. Having reformulated the question of the relationship between power and knowledge in a stimulating way, Andress then delivers an answer that reduces the whole problem to the most basic level of 'might is right'.

While Arnold and Andress attack particular aspects of my arguments as based on misunderstandings of postmodernist concepts, William Keenan, also writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement, finds my whole depiction of postmodernism to be a 'caricature'. In a rather polemical letter, Keenan criticises me for my 'apparent unawareness' of the fact that everything I am saying is an assertion or an opinion and not an objective truth. How can we arbitrate between arguments in such a situation? he asks, admitting that his own views are only opinions too. To this, like Andress, he gives no answer, taking refuge in the paranoid assertion that any criticism of postmodernist relativism is evidence of negative stereotyping and a determination on the part of people like me 'to cleanse academic life of views contrary to their own'.

Unfortunately, Keenan fails to provide any evidence demonstrating that my account of postmodernist theories is the kind of caricature he says it is. And while he urges 'open discussion' on the topic, he is unable to say how this can take place at all if there is no objective, over-arching principle of evidence or rationality to which we can appeal in order to assess the merits and defects of opposing points of view. In fact the language Keenan uses suggests he does believe it is possible to provide a full, objective and fair description of an argument (the opposite, presumably, of caricature), on the basis of which a reasoned debate can actually take place. Otherwise, why is he complaining of an attempt to suppress postmodernism, if he believes it is all about power, and polemicises so violently himself in order to suppress the modernist views to which he is so vehemently opposed?

Finally a number of reviewers, such as John Charmley and Ronald Hutton, not necessarily defenders of postmodernism, have suggested, that Keith Jenkins's hostility to conventional history as practised in the universities is ascribed by In Defence of History to the fact that he has never had a job in a university himself. But this is not so. What the book actually says, after summarising Jenkins's argument that professional historians believe in an 'objective' and on the whole liberal-conservative interpretation of the past because they teach in 'multi-million pound' universities engaged in the 'ideological control' of society, is as follows:

That Keith Jenkins sees university history departments in this jaundiced way may, if one wishes for a moment to borrow his own mode of argument, have something to do with the fact that he is only a lecturer in an institute of higher education, as so feels excluded from the multi-million pound institutions he is criticising so aggressively. Doubtless this would be an unfair charge, but no more unfair than the charges he is leveling at the university historical profession as a whole.

In other words, the book was not saying that Jenkins takes the views he does because he is not teaching in a university, only that if he applied his own arguments to himself, that is the kind of argument he would end up with. Indeed it is actually put forward as an example of how unfair postmodernist arguments can be. As Hutton observes, one of the main techniques of In Defence of History is to apply the postmodernists' theories to their own writings, and no more should be read into this passage than precisely that. Elsewhere, indeed, the book points out that a number of postmodernists have major posts at senior universities, so the argument as applied to Jenkins falls down on this count too, since I explicitly argue that contrary to what some postmodernists appear to believe, we are not dealing with conservative empiricist orthodoxies in major citadels of academe confronting progressive thinkers deliberately excluded from the centres of academic power.

This argument, like some of the others dealt with in the last few paragraphs, comes down again to the relationship between knowledge and power. I confess that when I wrote the book, I did not realise quite how dangerous the cruder attempts to link the two could be. If you think knowledge attains the status of truth solely through the exercise of power, then power is what you will try to get, and there might indeed be some justification in the Marxist writer Chris Harman's claim in his review of In Defence of History that 'popular postmodernist arguments have been used to terrorise students in innumerable university departments into submission to their lecturers' dogmas'. If this were true, it would be a betrayal of all the values of rationality and the free exchange of ideas which the idea of a university is supposed to be about. In this sense, it is not just history that needs defending, but the spirit of rational argument and the free exchange of views, indeed the whole spirit in which academic and intellectual life is lived.

Richard J. Evans
London, March 1998.

Discourse index | back to the top