The historian as political activist: the legacy of Michel Foucault
Keith Windschuttle
Paper to conference of The Historical Society and the History Department, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill:
Reconsidering Current Fashions in Historical Interpretation
December 8, 2001

In the preface to his book The Order of Things, the French poststructuralist historian Michel Foucault opens with a paragraph that has since become one of his most famous. Foucault describes a passage from 'a certain Chinese encyclopedia' which, he claims, breaks up all the ordered surfaces of our thoughts. By 'our' thoughts, he means the Western thought of the modern era. The encyclopedia divides animals into the following categories: '(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (m) [I'm skipping a few] having just broken the water picture, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.' Foucault writes that, thanks to 'the wonderment of this taxonomy', (or form of classification) we can apprehend not only 'the exotic charm of another system of thought' but also 'the limitation of our own'. What the taxonomy reveals, says Foucault, is that 'there would appear to be, at the other extremity of the earth we inhabit, a culture ... that does not distribute the multiplicity of existing things into any of the categories that make it possible for us to name, speak and think.' [1] Foucault says the stark impossibility of our thinking in this way demonstrates the existence of an entirely different system of rationality -- a different perception of the world and a different kind of knowledge to the western variety.

The American anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins, cites Foucault and the Chinese taxonomy as part of his case against his opponent Gananath Obeyesekere, in the most publicly-contested debate in historical anthropology of the past decade. Obeyesekere had denied the thesis of Sahlins that the natives of Hawaii in 1779 had regarded Captain James Cook as their returned god Lono. Obeyesekere had claimed that the Hawaiians had too much 'practical rationality' to mistake an Englishman, who wore strange clothes, spoke no Hawaiian and knew nothing of their religious beliefs or practices, for one of their gods. Sahlins replies that Obeyesekere, though a Sri Lankan, is a captive of Western concepts, a man who cannot think outside this form of rationality and who imagines that Western thought constitutes the universal mind of humanity. However, says Sahlins, the existence of radically different systems of classification like that of the Chinese encyclopedia is evidence that different cultures both perceive the world and order their perceptions in radically different ways. Sahlins argues:

If the classifications of the same sets of organisms by different peoples so vary, it must mean that objectivity itself is a variable social value … One cannot do good history, nor even contemporary history, without regard for ideas, actions, and ontologies that are not and never were our own. Different cultures, different rationalities. [2]

In 1995 I spoke at a seminar at the University of Sydney about the themes of my book The Killing of History, which is a critique of attempts by relativists like Foucault and Sahlins to write history. Although most of the postmodernists in the history department declined to attend, they deputised a colleague to reply to my talk and, hopefully, to tear me apart. My respondent opened his remarks by citing Foucault and the Chinese taxonomy. Didn't I realise, he chided me, that other cultures have such dramatically different conceptual schemes that the traditional assumptions of Western historiography are inadequate for the task of understanding them. Foucault and his followers, I was told, have been sources of genuine enlightenment because they have lifted the veil of Western arrogance from our eyes, allowing us to see that Western thought is but one among many.

There is, however, a problem rarely mentioned by those who cite the Chinese taxonomy as evidence for these claims. There is no Chinese encyclopedia that has ever described animals under the classifications listed by Foucault. In fact, there is no evidence that any Chinese person has ever thought about animals in this way. The taxonomy is fictitious. It is the invention of the Argentinian short story writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. [3] Foucault himself openly cites Borges as his source and has no problem in using the mere fictional possibility of such a radically different taxonomy as grounds for his belief that Western forms of classification are the arbitrary products of our own time and space. The example, however, is now so frequently cited in academic texts and debates that it is taken as a piece of credible evidence about the state of mind of non-Western cultures. It deserves to be seen, rather, as evidence of the contemporary degeneration of debate where a piece of fiction can be seriously deployed to make a case in history or anthropology.

We now inhabit an intellectual environment strongly influenced by the purported 'linguistic turn' in the humanities in recent decades. This is the notion that French poststructuralist philosophy and literary theory, sometimes linked under the title of postmodernism, but today more commonly called 'cultural studies', have toppled the old certainties of Western culture. Let me summarise their assumptions:

1. Truth is a relative rather than an absolute concept. Different cultures produce their own, different "truths".

2. Neither the human sciences nor the natural sciences provide us with what can be called knowledge in any absolute sense. We invent scientific theories rather than make scientific discoveries. Different cultures have different "ways of knowing".

3. All observations are contaminated by the prevailing ideology or culture. Hence there can be no value-free observations, a claim that is fatal for the idea of objective, empirical research in any of the social or natural sciences.

4. History is not fundamentally different to myth or to fiction. When historians look at past cultures they cannot be objective, nor can they escape the cocoon of their own culture.

What historians see in the past are their own values and interests reflected back at them.

Michel Foucault is one theorist who has contributed more than most to this kind of mindset. In the 1960s, the movements of students and anti-Vietnam war activists promoted a great revival of Marxist ideas within the universities. However, some of the other radicals who emerged at the time found the central tenets of Marxism difficult to follow. In particular, movements of radical feminists, homosexuals, prisoner activists, ex-psychiatric patients and other marginalised minorities were not impressed by the Marxist concept that the leading role in history was to be played by the industrial working class. Radical feminists saw the working class as a phenomenon defined by male theorists and dominated by men. They found in Foucault a more androgynous theory. Gay liberationists found Foucault was not only one of their own but that he had a theoretical approach that rejected universal norms, including those which defined heterosexuality as the social ideal. To political activists inside prisons and other institutions who could see little point in joining political parties or trade unions, Foucault said that local struggles, not universal programs such as socialist revolution, were the real stuff of resistance.

Foucault's approach, moreover, was peculiarly suited to the university environment. It held that the main revolutionary struggle was not against political or economic institutions. He presented the notion that the true radicals were those who challenged the major Western philosophies or 'systems of thought'. This was a radicalism perfectly suited to practice in the academic realm of tutorials, conferences, cafes and bars. None of this, Foucault argued, was a less practical or inferior variety of politics. 'Theory,' Foucault declared , 'does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice.' [4]

In 1966, Foucault had attracted a great deal of academic attention by coining the phrase 'the death of man'. [5] His obvious allusion to Nietzsche's well-known proclamation of 'the death of God' drew a considerable notoriety to himself and to the then burgeoning school of 'anti-humanism'. By 'the death of man', Foucault meant two things: first, the end of the humanist concepts of man as a creature ruled by reason and will, and second, the end of the notion that history was a phenomenon governed by the decisions of powerful individuals. [6] Instead, history, he claimed, was a process without a subject. Not only did men not make their own history but the concept of 'man' itself, he argued, was passé.

Foucault shared this thesis with other anti-humanist thinkers of the time, including the Annales school of French historians, all of whom regarded history as being driven by forces far more powerful than those of any individual. Anti-humanism's main proposition was that the autonomy of the individual subject was an illusion. The humanist tradition had been wrong to assign the central roles of human affairs to the conscious mind and free will. Instead, some strands of anti-humanism claimed that human behaviour and thought were dominated by the unconscious, and hence humanists should abandon their assumption that purposive behaviour was consciously directed. Others, like the Annales school, held that the impersonal forces of geography and demography governed the destiny of mankind.

At the same time, Foucault believed the historian could not avoid the role of political activist. All knowledge exudes power, he insisted, so the knowledge produced by the historian must serve political ends, of one kind or another. Most historians, he claimed, were traditionalists who supported the established regime. However, he also identified 'the new historian', someone who could help foster an 'insurrection of subjugated knowledges'. [7]

In the 1970s Foucault claimed this insurrection was being led by outcast groups struggling against authority, especially psychiatric patients and prisoners. At the time he proclaimed these ideas, Foucault himself was engaged in the radical prison activist movement, attending meetings and offering advice. He argued that the 'local knowledges' of groups such as prisoners were crude responses to their immediate situation. They lacked any historical knowledge of predecessors who might have emulated their deeds. So their demands needed to be supplemented by the interpretations of a sympathetic academic like himself-a person he defined as 'the specific intellectual'-to unite his 'erudite, historical knowledges' with the 'disqualified knowledges' of the outcasts. This union would produce 'subjugated knowledge' or a 'historical knowledge of struggles', that was formidable enough to challenge the power of those knowledges that sided with authority. [8]

Foucault's version of partisan history, however, involves a self-contradiction. The notion that history is a process without a subject is in direct conflict with the role he prescribes for the 'new historian' to foster the 'insurrection of the subjugated knowledges' of outcast groups in their struggle against authority. By calling for the emergence of the 'specific intellectual' to advise these groups, Foucault is appealing to a conscious subject who can act upon his own free will. The same is true of those he defines as the oppressed: people will not automatically resist unless their conscious mind gives them some reason to believe there might be some point in it; and they simply cannot resist unless they have the will to do so. Foucault's politics, then, are in direct conflict with his philosophy of history.

This is, in fact, a familiar dilemma that has faced previous generations of historians who also wanted to be political partisans. They were invariably historical determinists who believed history was moving towards some goal and that the intervention of individual human subjects was largely irrelevant. Marxism is the best known of the theories hung on the horns of this dilemma. Marx was a revolutionary political activist who claimed the proletarian revolution was built into the course of human history. But if revolution is historically inevitable there is little point in being a revolutionary yourself because it will all come about, without any individual agency.

Nonetheless, just like Marx, Foucault predicted that human history was on the verge of entering its next stage. Foucault divides history into epistemes, or ages. He says the three epistemes in the recent past were the Renaissance, the Enlightenment; and the modern age. He doesn't discuss the coming stage of history in any detail, so denies us a vision of the postmodern equivalent of the Communist utopia. He says this future age can only be seen now as 'a light on the horizon'.

To achieve the next episteme, Foucault rejects most of the familiar concepts of Western radical politics. He rejects the notion of political revolution based on the large-scale transformation of society following the overthrow of the central state. The bases of power come not from the centre, he argues, but from the 'capillary' levels of the political body. From these outer levels, it flows to the larger, centralised structures, just as the blood flows from the capillaries to the central organs. Hence, without changes to the outer, local sources of power, changes made at the centre will be ineffectual. Postmodern politics holds that because power is decentralised and plural, so too must be the forms of political struggle.

There is one area, however, where Foucault demonstrably fails to break with the Western revolutionary tradition. Every grand scheme to transform society that has ever been dreamed up by an intellectual or academic has always given a major role to the figure of the intellectual or academic himself. Foucault rejects the idea of the 'universal intellectual' who claims to represent or speak on behalf of the oppressed masses in order to institute a new world order. Instead, he substitutes the idea of the 'specific intellectual' who advises the locals to help them with their immediate struggle. However, the essential role for the intellectual is different in nominal terms only. In Marxist theory, the proletarian masses need the universal intellectual to inform them of their historic mission and to help them realise it; in Foucault's version of politics, more specific groups identify their own immediate issues but still cannot define their historic significance nor conduct an effective resistance without the intervention of the intellectual. Despite his support for a less centralised politics, Foucault's postmodern intellectual still wants to be the centre of attention, just like all the radical intellectuals who have gone before him.

I chose Foucault as my topic today because I believe he has been the most influential radical historical theorist since Marx. One of his central concepts is that all intellectual fields are politically motivated. He argues that a site where power is enforced is also a site where knowledge is produced; and conversely, a site from which knowledge is derived is a place where power is exercised. In his book Discipline and Punish he wants to show the prison as an example of just such a site of power, and a place from which knowledge essential to the modern social sciences was formed. And, reciprocally, the ideas from which the social sciences were formulated were the ones that also gave birth to the prison. So, instead of referring to 'power' and 'knowledge' separately, he used the compound term 'power/knowledge'.

This concept is also central to another intellectual I want to discuss today, Edward Said. Although Said is a literary critic, he has had a major impact on the study of history. The recent prodigious reference work, Companion to Historiography, devotes an entire chapter to the work of Said. No other single author receives such extensive treatment. He gets as much space as the entire corpus of ancient Greek history. This is a measure not only of his influence on the contemporary historiography of the relations between Western and Eastern cultures but also of the degree to which the discipline of history has been penetrated in recent decades by the methods and interests of literary critics. In fact, in this period, the field of cultural history has to a large extent been re-defined by literary critics, who have become its leading lights. Much of this is due to the example set by Said in his celebrated 1978 book Orientalism, in which he charged the academic discipline of Oriental Studies with being the handmaiden of Western imperialism. It is now almost impossible to study the relations between Western and other cultures in the imperial era without paying at least some attention to Said.

In his book, Orientalism, Said makes two major points. He derives the first from Foucault's claim that all knowledge is politicised. Said argues that although Oriental Studies purported to be an objective, disinterested and rather esoteric field, it functioned to serve political ends. It was complicit in imperialism by providing the information on which European conquest of the Orient was based. Said is quite clear about the causal sequence: 'colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact'. [9]

Said's second major argument is that Orientalism has produced a false description of Arabs and Islamic culture. This arose primarily because of the essentialist nature of the enterprise, that is, the belief that it was possible to define the essential qualities of Arab peoples and Islamic culture in terms of the founding principles of their religion. These qualities were seen in uniformly negative terms, he says. The Orient was defined as a place isolated from the mainstream of human progress in the sciences, arts and commerce. Hence: 'its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habit of inaccuracy, its backwardness'. [10]

However, these two claims are quite incompatible. If the picture of the Orient produced by Oriental Studies is false, then it is difficult to see how it could have been the source of the knowledge that led to the European imperial domination of the region. According to Said, Oriental essentialism is not knowledge but a series of beliefs that are both distorted and out of date. Surely, though, if these beliefs are wrong, they would have contributed to poor judgements, bad estimates and mistaken policies. Hence the political power of Western imperialism must have been gained despite them, not because of them.

Said's supporters, however, are largely unconcerned about such inconsistencies. On campus, he has generated a considerable following in the tendency known as postcolonialism. This is an intellectual movement focussed primarily on the study of history and literature, although it is usually conducted at such an arcane level of theory that many former students of either history or literature would find their subjects unrecognisable. Postcolonial social theorists and critics have gained a major foothold in academic life in the United States.

The aim of their project is to use postmodernist and poststructuralist literary analysis to deconstruct historical documents to recover the voice of the colonial oppressed and, in turn, to suppress the voice of those who colonised them. Dipesh Chakrabarty, a postcolonial historian recently appointed to a personal chair at the University of Chicago, has written a book called Provincialising Europe (2000), whose title neatly summarises the intellectual ambitions of the movement. [11] Chakrabarty says "provincialising" means to "re-read the European philosophers of modernity in order to show up the parochialism of their imagination". [12]

The postcolonialists want to subvert the logic of history as a field that produces knowledge. In general, if a category or concept is used by Western historians, this identifies it as part of Western or Enlightenment discourse and so the postcolonialists insist on rejecting it. In using postmodernism and poststructuralism, they are adopting theoretical tools used by other currently fashionable political movements. The journal Postcolonial Studies describes their political alliances and connections. It says:

Postcolonialism has much in common with other related critical endeavours -- such as women's studies and gay/lesbian studies -- classified under the rubric of the "new humanities". Marked by an underlying scepticism, these closely aligned projects find their shared intellectual vocation in a determined opposition to coercive knowledge systems and, concomitantly, in a committed pursuit and recovery of those ways of knowing which have been occluded -- or, in Foucault's terminology "subjugated" -- by the epistemic accidents of history. Given its particular inheritance, postcolonialism has directed its own critical antagonism toward the universalising knowledge claims of "western civilization". [13]

In other words, although it claims to eschew Western culture, the methodology of the postcolonial critique derives from one radical stream of the West itself. The members of this movement want to reject the West, but all they are doing is rejecting one aspect of its intellectual culture, empirical historiography, while accepting another, poststructuralist theory.

The point of all this theory, it is important to recognise, is to apply it to politics. In 1993, when Edward Said's most ambitious work, Culture and Imperialism, was published, Ernest Gellner wrote a scathing critique in Times Literary Supplement that prompted an acrimonious debate between him and Said. Gellner asked: What is the point of denouncing Western culture and imperialism when your political position doesn't warrant it? Said's multiculturalist politics, he said, were little more than a mild form of internationalism and endorsed a world where the different races and cultures should be nice to one another. [14] Now it is true that there are places where Said does endorse these kinds of values but what characterises his book, and indeed all his work, is a kind of double-speak where he says one thing at one place and something quite different about the same subject at another place.

Had Gellner read Culture and Imperialism a little more closely, he would have found Said recommending the politics of the French colonial author, Frantz Fanon, and his book The Wretched of the Earth, which became the single most influential manual in the twentieth century about how to conduct anti-imperialist warfare and revolution. It is one of the sacred texts of the post-colonial movement. Fanon's book was the source of inspiration for Pol Pot's drive in 1975 to empty Phnom Penh and to murder the middle classes and other supposed collaborators with the former French colonists. Said actually endorses the same program. He says that after a colonial revolution, wherever it might occur, the capital of the country should be 'deconsecrated' and 'demystified'. [15]

'Deconsecrated' is the term Fanon used to advocate abandoning the capital after the colonial revolution and taking the government to the countryside among the rural masses, which is exactly what Pol Pot did. [16] Said is aware of all this. He says that there is "an understandable tendency" to see in Fanon's writings a blueprint for the Pol Pot regime and he then goes on to attack those on the political Right who make this connection. But Said makes no attempt to dissociate himself from these views. [17]

The violence that Said supports in the Third World is matched by the violence of his followers at home. Although the movement that organised the recent anti-globalisation riots in Seattle, Washington and Genoa is composed of a young generation of student-age radicals, much of its thinking is a replica of its elders like Said and his anti-American alter ego Noam Chomsky. In fact, on www.nologo.org, the website of the Canadian journalist and unofficial spokeswoman of the movement, Naomi Klein, the first interview published after the September 11 terrorist attack was with Chomsky himself, who pushed the now-familiar line that America had got what it deserved. Said's articles are frequently either published or linked on the nologo site as well. Naomi Klein also wrote an article for the American weekly, The Nation, in which she responded to charges that the terrorism of September 11 was part of a continuum of anti-American violence started by her own adherents. Rather than being intimidated by such charges, she wrote, the anti-globalists saw the terrorist attacks as an opportunity to promote their movement. [18] By early October, they had announced a campaign of "economic disruption" against the Conservative provincial government of Ontario. This involved an attempt to shut down the financial district of Toronto. At the same time, they were organising another mass campaign to disrupt meetings of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation.

If you've watched the television news coverage of the anti-globalisation riots, you can see the demonstrators are your typical upper middle class university students. They are not a rent-a-crowd who are likely to be discouraged easily. They are here for the political long haul, just like the protestors against the Vietnam War in the 1960s. This is because their motivation is sustained, intellectually, by a substantial body of theory. As I've argued here, this corpus, derived from principles established by Foucault and Said, is internally incoherent, indeed self-contradictory, but that has not prevented similar movements in the past from gaining wide support, and it is unlikely to do so this time either. It is a political movement that has all the intellectual accoutrement needed to attract young intellectuals: an epistemological foundation, a theory of history, a cultural critique, an economic analysis and a political agenda. It also has a postmodern political methodology derived from Foucault's idea of power originating in the 'capillary' levels of the political body, from where, via local organizations and individuals connected by the Internet and cell phones, it hopes to eventually overcome the larger, centralised structures.

Foucault's claim that historians should be politically partisan originally derived from an argument that long pre-dated postmodernism. It is one that many people still find seductive. This argument begins with the premise that we are all creatures of our own times and culture, so it is impossible for us to be completely objective. If objectivity is unattainable, then historians must take some perspective or other. If they are taking a perspective, then they are being politically partisan in some way. If all is perspective and everything is political, then it would seem to follow that history is indeed a discourse of political myth or fiction.

To begin to answer this case, let me make a defence of the empirical methods on which the discipline of history has been traditionally based. Empiricism has recently grown unfashionable. In academia today, to publicly declare yourself an empiricist is to provoke many knowing winks and nudges.

Empiricism differs from historical theory of the kind written by Hegel, Marx and Foucault in the respect it gives to historical evidence. While it is true that historians often come to their task with the aim of pushing a certain line, of establishing a certain point, or of solving a certain problem, one of the most common experiences is that the evidence they find leads them to modify their original approach. When they go looking for evidence, they do not simply find the one thing they are looking for. Most will discover many others that they had not anticipated. The result, more often than not, is that this unexpected evidence will suggest alternative arguments, interpretations and conclusions, and different problems to pursue. In other words, the evidence often makes historians change their minds, quite contrary to the practice of theorists, whose aim is primarily to find evidence that fits their preconceptions. For the theorist, if the evidence poses problems for the theory, it is the evidence itself that has to be rejected or explained away. For the empiricist, in the end it is the evidence itself that determines what case it is possible to make.

There is another crucial distinction that needs to be made. This is between propositions about history and works of history. This is the distinction between particular pieces of knowledge about what happened in the past, or the facts of history, and the explanations made by historians, that is, explanations made in extended pieces of writing such as articles and books. Some of the philosophical critics of history, like Keith Jenkins, the editor of The Postmodern History Reader, who claim 'epistemology shows we can never really know the past', do acknowledge the existence of historical facts but dismiss them as inconsequential. Facts such as the dates of events, Jenkins says, are ' "true" but trite'. [19]

It is not difficult to show that there are a great many facts or propositions about history that are not subject to any doubt or uncertainty at all. That such facts exist is itself quite enough to dispel any attempt from philosophy to impose a blanket scepticism on the whole of the field. Historians know countless numbers of facts about the past that no sane person would question. The names of the elected officials of most democratic nations over the past two centuries, for instance, are obviously in this category. Or take the following proposition: The Viet Minh defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Every term in this proposition-the names of the two protagonists, the concept of military defeat, the name of the place, the date the event occurred-is a construct of language and culture. Yet the proposition is true. What's more, it is true in a culturally objective sense. There is nothing relative about it. It is a proposition that is equally true in either French culture or Vietnamese culture, as well as the culture of any other peoples of the world. Moreover, far from being trite, this is a very important proposition. Because the event it describes actually occurred, it affected the subsequent history of the whole of South East Asia. The political allegiances and the lives of the inhabitants of the countries of the region would not be as they are today if this proposition were untrue.

Any reader with the slightest familiarity with the world he inhabits can immediately think of dozens of historical facts with the same status, that are just as objectively true and just as substantial in their consequences. Moreover, facts with this degree of certainty are by no means confined to events within living memory but go back to the medieval and ancient worlds, and even well beyond antiquity. That the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, that the ancient Greeks wrote poetry and philosophy, and that human beings have inhabited Australia for at least 40,000 years, are all facts that one would have to be either highly ignorant, or decidedly perverse, to want to question. Of course many of the details surrounding or supporting these facts may not themselves be finally known. We may not know all the tactics or armaments General Giap used when he surrounded the French forces at Dien Bien Phu, but incompleteness in our accounts of his victory does not affect the fact that we know it occurred.

On the other hand, whole works of history are often culturally biased. An extended historical explanation may use as evidence historical propositions that in themselves are objectively true, but may nonetheless provide a cultural or political slant on this material that distorts the reality under discussion. Lack of objectivity often derives from the process of selection when the historian chooses some facts as evidence for his case but omits others. But just because the process of selection is often based on the historian's cultural predilections, this does not mean that it must necessarily or always be so. The simple act of selection does not mean, as Simon Schama has asserted, that 'claims for historical knowledge must always be fatally circumscribed by the character and prejudices of its narrator'. [20] The selection process of the historian is a contingent matter that may itself be criticised by other historians.

Indeed, the charge of cultural, political or moral bias is one of the most common criticisms that historians make of each other's work. In some cases, criticism of this kind might mean that the historical community jettisons an entire explanation. In others, however, it may allow some aspects of a work to be rejected while permitting the remainder to go on to become part of the overall store of historical knowledge. But if all historians were as cocooned within their own cultural mindset as postmodernist philosophers claim, they would lack the very ability to detect cultural bias in their colleagues. They would be unable to make the kind of extra-cultural critique of each other's work that is so common. Bias and lack of objectivity among historians are issues that have to be decided in individual cases, not by an appeal to epistemological necessity. We are all creatures of our own times and culture, it is true, but the responsibility of the scholar should be to try to recognise this and rise above it. Even where this is not possible or even desirable, if a scholar does his or her empirical work thoroughly and scrupulously, that work will endure.

We should also recognise that the concept of objectivity is crucial to historical debate, to the resolving of historical controversies and, indeed, to the ability of historians to discuss matters sensibly with one another. Historians from widely different cultural backgrounds can often agree that some historical explanations do not work, either because the known evidence does not support them, or because the evidence actually contradicts them. This kind of exchange is possible only because many of the propositions that constitute historical evidence are themselves independent of any one historian's culture. A person of any cultural background who investigated the history of the Byzantine empire would find the same outcome for the siege of Constantinople in 1453. If the notion of objectivity were to be entirely eliminated from the historian's methodological tool box, the use of evidence to resolve issues in historical debate would become impossible. Scholars would simply talk past one another, confined to their own cultural and political shells, insulated in their own beliefs but unable to contest the views of others or, indeed, to learn anything from members of other cultures.

Although individuals write history books, the accumulation of historical knowledge is a great, collective, scholarly activity. No historian ever writes entirely from the archival record. We are all indebted to others. For this reciprocity to occur, historians have no choice but to rely upon some of the findings of their colleagues as being objectively true. Otherwise, history is impossible.

No doubt, to many people outside academic life, this quarrel might appear an esoteric matter confined to the margins of methodological disputation. Yet it deserves to taken more seriously than this for it has much wider implications. If we deny the possibility of discovering objective knowledge about human affairs, if we succumb to cultural relativism and the kind of overt politicisation advocated by the current array of critics, we give away history altogether. Ever since Thucydides wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War, historians have been distinguished by their efforts to distance themselves from their own political system and their own culture and to write from a position beyond both. The attempt to be objective and self-critical, rather than subjective and self-defensive-fraught with all the difficulties that we know this involves-defines the historian's profession. In the current contest over historical methodology, what is ultimately at stake is the preservation of this vital component of Western intellectual heritage.

Notes

1. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, (French edn 1966), Vintage Books, New York, 1994, p xix
2. Marshall Sahlins, How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, For Example, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1995, pp 14, 163
3. Jorge Luis Borges, 'The Analytical Language of John Wilkins', Alamut: Bastion of Peace and Information, (trans. Lilia Graciela Vazquez), www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/language/johnWilkins.html Also in Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions 1937-1952, (trans. Ruth L. C. Simms), University of Texas Press, 1993
4. 'Intellectuals and Power: a conversation between Michel Foucault and Giles Deleuze', in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, p 206
5. The Order of Things
6. This is not the only meaning he was to ascribe to the phrase. For an extended discussion see Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An essay on antihumanism, trans. Mary S. Catani, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1990, pp 100-5
7. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, Colin Gordon (ed.), Pantheon Books, New York, 1980, pp 81, 84
8. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, pp 81-3
9. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, (1978) Penguin Books, London, 1995, p 39
10. Edward Said, Orientalism, p 205
11. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2000, p
12. Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'Trafficking in History and Theory: Subaltern Studies', in K. K. Ruthven (ed.) Beyond the Disciplines: The New Humanities, Australian Academy of the Humanities, Canberra, 1992, p 108
13. 'Postcolonial Studies: A beginning', Postcolonial Studies, Vol 1, 1, April 1998, pp 7-11
14. Ernest Gellner, 'The Mightier Pen: The Double Standards of Inside-out Colonialism', reprinted in Ernest Gellner, Encounters with Nationalism, Blackwell, Oxford, 1994, pp 159-69
15. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, Vintage, London, 1994, p 330
16. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press, New York, 1963, pp 186-7
17. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p 331
18. Naomi Klein, 'Signs of the Times', The Nation, 22 October 2001
19. Keith Jenkins, Re-Thinking History, Routledge, London, 1991, pp 19, 32
20. Simon Schama, Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations), Granta Books/Penguin, London, 1991, p 322