History must prevail against cultural studies
by Keith Windschuttle
The Australian, Higher Education Supplement
November 23, 1994

Historians have always claimed to be discovering the past, not inventing it. Since the ancient Greek historians first plied their trade more than 2400 years ago, the two objectives that have governed historical practice have been the pursuit of truth and the establishment of knowledge about society and the passage of human affairs. Even in the act of criticising and overturning the claims of their colleagues, debate among historians has been based on the premise that, given proper evidence, the truth is accessible. The discipline has been defined by these principles. Without a claim to be pursuing truth and knowledge, writing history would be indistinguishable from writing a novel about the past.

But in the last decade, the English-speaking academic world has seen the rise to prominence of a body of theory which challenges the foundations on which history has so long stood. These theories claim that knowledge can never mean certainty, that truth is not an absolute concept, that science can never produce knowledge, and that most of the traditional divisions of academic disciplines especially in the humanities and social sciences, are inappropriate.

There are at least three separate points of origin of these theories: the linguistics of Ferdinand Saussure which produced structuralism; the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger which founded poststructuralism and postmodernism; and the scientific scepticism of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn which has claimed that neither the social sciences nor the physical sciences can produce anything that might count as knowledge.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, the influence of this triple alliance was confined largely to literary theory and media studies, places where adherents could make a lot of noise but do little damage to anything further afield. However, in the last decade it has moved into the teaching of art, architecture, law and, most recently, history.

Most Australian university history departments, which since the early days of the Cold War have prided themselves on their pluralism, have regarded the growth of this movement within their midst as an interesting but harmless new development and have been generous towards those of their colleagues who have taken up the new cause. The 1991 centenary history of the Department of History at the University of Sydney went so far as to publish an article which celebrated the influence that poststructuralism had had within the department.

Without realising it, historians have accepted into their midst concepts and practices that have the potential, and certainly the desire, to drive their discipline to extinction. Structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism and their affiliates are bent on undermining the methodology of historical research, on destroying the distinction between history and fiction, and on establishing not only that it is impossible to access the past but that we have no proper grounds for knowing that a past independent of ourselves ever took place.

To use the title The Killing of History , as I have done in my new book, raises the question of just how extensive has been the impact of these ideas. The book focuses primarily on the way that history itself is being re-written. It examines a number of fairly well-known historical topics, from the discovery of America to the fall of Communism, where the new theorists have tried their hand. It compares their efforts to the work of traditional empirical historians who have covered the same issues to show just how constricted are the theorists' interpretations and how much the discipline has to lose should they eventually prevail.

The expansion of liberal arts teaching in the new universities established since 1988 was not matched by any commensurate expansion of history. Instead the new universities appointed any number of departments and appointed dozens of professors to teach cultural studies and communications theory. There have been a handful of appointments in the new institutions to subjects euphemistically labelled “historical studies” but in most cases these have gone to people who are hostile to the methods and approaches of the traditional discipline. Australia is following the lead of America where cultural studies has been the fastest growing academic field in the humanities.

Cultural studies has not simply induced a dramatic redistribution of educational resources, it has produced a remarkable encroachment into the former territory of the historian. There are now a number of prominent literary critics, especially in the USA , who, though they have never trained in the discipline, now publicly identify themselves as historians and call their work history. The American quincentenary in 1992 produced a number of works by these critics about the discovery and exploration of America by Colombus and the Spanish conquistadors. One celebrated book was Marvellous Possessions by Stephen Greenblatt, the founder of a movement called “new historicism” which has since produced a wide range of work on topics from ancient Greece to the twentieth century.

Literary critics who perform textual analysis on the poetry and drama of the past now call their activities “cultural history”, a term used by the American critic Annabel Patterson to describe her recent collection of essays on Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser and Donne. In Australia , John Docker's newly published advocacy for a postmodernist approach to popular culture and architecture is subtitled “a cultural history”.

Within the discipline itself, there have been a significant number of partial and total defections. Simon Schama, Professor of History at Harvard and one of America 's most celebrated historians, wrote into his 1991 book Dead Certainties long passages purporting to be participants' accounts of the 1759 Battle of Quebec. He admitted in an afterword that these passages were “purely imagined fiction”. Greg Dening, the recently retired Professor of History at the University of Melbourne , in 1992 produced a book about the mutiny on the Bounty and the discovery of Tahiti and Hawaii . Titled Mr Bligh's Bad Language , it won widespread acclaim in both the academic and popular press and won the 1993 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for non-fiction. This was despite the fact that the book is an exercise in structuralist theory and, in his discussion of methodology, Dening says he used to teach his students that “any history they make will be fiction” and that written history serves social functions no different to myth, sacrament and ritual.

The decisions of the editors of the principal academic journals in history should also be cause for concern. For instance, the lead article in the October 1994 edition of Australian Historical Studies is by Stephen Garton who acknowledges that his piece is theoretically indebted to the poststructuralist Michel Foucault and the sociologist of science Thomas Kuhn. Foucault said of his own histories, “I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions”. Kuhn is the author who provided the model for Foucault's claim that knowledge is never cumulative and that we invent scientific theories rather than make scientific discoveries. In the less prestigious history journals, cultural studies now run riot. In the 1993 edition of Australian Cultural History , about one third of the articles are written by academics from literary criticism, media theory or cultural studies. This includes one piece complaining about media reporting of the trial of the four “Lesbian vampire killers” of Brisbane who murdered a man in 1989 simply because he was a person of the masculine gender. This is in a publication founded as a journal of history.

Down at the level of day-to-day undergraduate teaching there is a similar story. In 1991 the Department of History at the University of Sydney introduced a compulsory seminar in historical method for all honours students which, in its preamble, informed them that “the work of social philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, literary and feminist theorists have from a variety of directions and with increasing momentum exploded the old concept of history. It is no longer possible to work in isolation from these developments.”

What is perhaps most remarkable is the success this theoretical movement has enjoyed despite what many might have thought would be knockout blows. One of the most damaging was the 1987 revelation that the theorist to which poststructuralism is most indebted, the German existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, had been a financial member of the Nazi party from 1933 to 1945, an anti-Semite, a Nazi informer on academic colleagues in the 1930s, and a person who believed until his death in 1976 that his philosophy confirmed the “inner truth and greatness” of Nazism. The movement has also survived the connections made in 1992 by the German historian, Lutz Niethammer, between postmodernism and Nazism. Niethammer demonstrated how the French postmodernism of Jean Baudrillard and Jean Lyotard is little more than a revival of the “end of history” thesis put forward in Germany in the 1940s and 1950s by a group of ex-Nazis to lament the defeat of the Third Reich.

Part of the reason for the movement's success are the tactics adopted to deal with its critics. There are now a number of works, especially in literary studies, which are highly critical of all it stands for. Replying to a new book similar to mine by Gertrude Himmefarb, Alan Ryan of Princeton University accuses her “arm-waving gestures” of grossly exaggerating the issue. The new theorists, he argues, are a small minority who have no hope of taking over so, surely, a pluralistic academic scene can find room for a small number of people with something new and interesting to say.

However, when they talk among themselves, the proponents of cultural studies have a different agenda. They make it clear that the traditional empiricism of history is something that deserves to be demolished entirely. This is be accomplished partly by discrediting its methodological foundations and partly by breaking down the barriers that now separate the disciplines. As Aram Veeser, an American literary critic who has edited a recent collection of “new historicist” essays has put it:

“New Historicism has given scholars new opportunities to cross the boundaries separating history, anthropology, art, politics, literature and economics. By discarding what they view as monologic and myopic historiography, New Historicists can make a valid claim to have established new ways of studying history, and a new awareness of how history and culture define each other.”

Despite this hype, there is, nonetheless, one real problem about the existing divisions between disciplines. Those historians not familiar with the field of the philosophy of scientific method can find themselves at a loss in the face of those who claim that the leading lights of the latter field have now “established” that truth and knowledge are impossible pursuits. This becomes doubly difficult when prestigious names like Popper and Kuhn are dropped to support this contention and when the historian is assured that it is now “accepted” that not even the natural sciences provide us with certainty.

However, anyone who takes the trouble to examine the past decade's literature on scientific method will find a completely different story. In preparing The Killing of History , I was forced to spend more time and space in this field than I wanted but the effort was worth it. The edifice constructed by Popper, Kuhn and their allies Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend is now visibly crumbling. A number of their prominent former supporters are hastily producing new books and articles to distance themselves from the relativism and scepticism that dominated the field from the 1960s to the 1980s.

In other words, empiricism should no longer be regarded as the discredited methodology of an academic era whose days are numbered. There are no philosophical obstacles to the traditional goals of history, the discovery of truth and the production of knowledge about the human past.

Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How a discipline is being murdered by literary critics and social theorists , Macleay Press, Sydney, 1994. RRP $39.95.