Abstract
Postmodernist questioning of historians' claims to historical truth has created a sense of crisis in historical consciousness. The essay argues that the crisis is not a crisis in the writing of history, as most historians still continue with business as usual, but a crisis in the cultural meaning of history. While this crisis has been associated with the so-called “linguistic turn” which was to result in a paradigm shift in historiography in the 1970s, it has other important dimensions; including Third World questionings of EuroAmerican understandings of the past and, perhaps even more importantly, the intrusion into the representations of the past of the new media. The essay argues that new kinds of history that have appeared since the 1970s from women's history to the history of social movements to “microhistory” have themselves contributed to the complication of our understanding of the past, and what might be called postmodernity's histories. It suggests that historians have always assumed the tentativeness and contingency of claims to historical truth, and argues against a premature panic concerning the status of history. Constructivism is here to stay, but that does not necessarily point to the disappearance of history, only to more complicated ways of grasping the past. The new emphasis on history as a form of literature is related to the reduction of history to language. Hayden White is... quite right in insisting that every historical text is also a literary text and that as such it is governed by literary criteria. But White goes beyond this to conclude that a historical text is in essence nothing more than a literary text, a poetical creation as deeply involved in the imagination as the novel. The history the historian writes is determined ultimately not by any reference to his subject of study but by literary decisions, by the limited choices permitted by such literary determinants as “emplotment” and “choice of tropes”... <ce:cross-ref refid="BIB11">[11, p. 28]</ce:cross-ref> In Continental Europe, speculative philosophy of history is not only very much alive, the kinds of problems it poses and the questions it raises stand at the center of a debate over the purpose of historical inquiry and the cultural utility of historical consciousness. In part, this is due no doubt to the philosophical traditions prevailing on the Continent. Throughout the nineteenth century, European thought remained more metaphysical in its orientation than its British or American counterparts; European thinkers remained much less convinced of the power of science to substitute for metaphysics; but more importantly, perhaps, the Continental experience of the two world wars and of fascism served to give ethical thought and ontological inquiry a different orientation. <ce:cross-ref refid="BIB12">[12, p. 49]</ce:cross-ref> The historical mode may be the dominant mode of constructing the past in most parts of the globe but it certainly is not the most popular mode of doing so. The dominance is derived from the links the idea of history has established with the modern nation-state, the secular worldview, the Baconian concept of scientific rationality, nineteenth century theories of progress, and, in recent decades, development. <ce:cross-ref refid="BIB35">[35, p. 44]</ce:cross-ref>