Utopian dreamings
Grand theory and the historical impact of the radical intellectual
Keith Windschuttle
Paper to Boston University Conversazione: Responsibility and Historical Inevitability
November 30, 2001

In 1985 Cambridge University Press published a book called The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences. It was a collection of essays edited by the professor of politics Quentin Skinner designed to celebrate an iconoclastic group of theories about human society. Several of these theories were not new, the editor noted. Some, like those of Marx, Nietzsche and their derivatives, had their origins in the nineteenth century. By the 1950s and 1960s, he said, they had been rejected by the prevailing academic opinion in most English-speaking countries and 'consigned to the dustbin of history'. However, in the 1970s and 1980s, new theorists breathed life into them once more and they re-emerged to 'restructure' the humanities and social sciences. Although in 1985, Skinner writes, they had not yet toppled the main enemy -- which he describes as 'piecemeal empirical research' -- they were nonetheless well on the way:

During the past generation, Utopian social philosophies have once again been practised as well as preached; Marxism has revived and flourished in an almost bewildering variety of forms; psychoanalysis has gained a new theoretical orientation with the work of Lacan and his followers; Habermas and other members of the Frankfurt School have continued to reflect on the parallels between the theories of Marx and Freud; the Women's Movement has added a whole range of previously neglected insights and arguments; and amidst all this turmoil the empiricist and positivist citadels of English-speaking social philosophy have been threatened and undermined by successive waves of hermeneuticists, structuralists, post-empiricists, deconstructionists and other invading hordes. [1]

This passage by Skinner was particularly prophetic. Most of the intellectual movements he identified have since been extraordinarily successful, while the English empiricism that he so derided has become increasingly unfashionable. In academia today, to publicly declare yourself an empiricist is to provoke many knowing winks and nudges.

The 'Grand Theory' of Skinner's title would have been more accurately labelled 'Continental Philosophy' because the book is mostly about the ideas of the German philosophers, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Gadamer, and their post-war French revivalists, Derrida, Lacan and Foucault. It is a book about the so-called 'linguisic turn' in the humanities, which has had such an impact on the English-speaking academic world in the past two decades.

But 'The Return of Grand Theory', it must be admitted, is a great title in terms of book marketing, because the Western intellectual class has long nurtured a deep-seated desire for grand theory. Over the past two hundred years, Western intellectual life has become increasingly secular. But because human beings, deep down, are religious animals, the decline of traditional religion among the intellectual class has been compensated by a growing demand among that same class for grand theory.

Although they are secular, most grand theories share two characteristics with religion, especially Christianity. They are determinist and they are teleological. This is why they are invariably theories of history. They claim there are great forces that are moving society in a certain direction, from the past to the future, and towards a certain end. This end is the perfect society, utopia. Moreover, there are no individuals who have the ability to change this direction. The Caesars and Napoleons of the world are puny figures before the force of history. The people who have ostensible power in society, the presidents and the generals, succeed only if they go with the historical flow.

This is an especially attractive belief for intellectuals, because it elevates their kind above all others. The great figure of any age is the one who writes its grand theory, that is, the person who can best interpret the direction in which history is moving. This person has the eternal appeal and celebrity of the prophet. As long as there is a demand for prophecy, we will have grand theorists and radical intellectuals.

Now, much of this is familiar territory to anyone with knowledge of the two most notorious grand theorists of the modern era, Hegel and Marx. The collapse of the Soviet Union, of course, totally discredited the world view of Marxism. However, we have by no means seen the last of grand theory. Today, I want to illustrate this by examining two more recent contenders for this title. Both of them have had a widespread influence on how we conceive the discipline of history. I will then look at a third historian who, in my view, demolishes everything they stand for.

The first historian to offer a widely accepted alternative grand theory to Marxism was the French Nietzschean theorist, Michel Foucault. 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.' [2]

In 1966, Foucault had attracted a great deal of academic attention to his book The Order of Things by coining the phrase 'the death of man'. [3] 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 at least 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. [4] 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 exuded 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'. [5]

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 sciences which sided with authority. [6]

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. In The Order of Things, 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 does not discuss the coming age 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 have started with Foucault because I believe him to be 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 preferred the compound term 'power/knowledge'. [7]

This concept is also central to the second 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. [8] 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. The first is that, although it purported to be an objective, disinterested and rather esoteric field, Oriental Studies functioned to serve political ends. The field 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 instead of assisting Western imperialism in the Orient, they must have made its realisation that much more difficult.

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:

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.

In a number of ways, these activists share common characteristics with the terrorists who struck on September 11. Both groups have similar origins and motivations. While one is secular and the other religious, the sociological background of both the anti-globalisation activists and the jihadists are parallel. Both are movements of the well-educated and the wealthy who claim to speak on behalf of the wretched of the earth. Both kinds of activists are opposed to what they claim is US-style materialism and profiteering. Both have the crippling of US power, and that of its supposed subsidiaries, the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank, as a fundamental goal. While the violence of the anti-globalists has been nowhere near as audacious or murderous as that of the jihadists, theirs is a difference of scale rather than kind.

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 organizations connected by the Internet and mobile phones, it hopes to eventually overcome the larger, centralised structures.

It is very unlikely, of course, that the anti-globalists will achieve any of their political aims in the foreseeable future. They do not have the makings of any kind of large-scale popular movement. Their appeal is likely to be limited to the university campus, and to people of the same age and intellectual persuasion as themselves. For the most part, they are consigned to the politics of frustration, convinced of the virtue of their cause but obsessed by the wickedness of the social system that refuses to implement it. Like the previous versions of themselves, the Russian and German romantic revolutionaries of the nineteenth century and the radical factions of the American, Italian and German New Left of the 1960s, the ultimate recourse of their political position is to the propaganda of the deed: terrorism and assassination, just like their Islamic counterparts.

Now, because this is another movement based on a grand theory of history, one effective way to confront it might be at the level of its grand theory. If this is so, then one of the most effective weapons will be that humble activity, so derided by Quentin Skinner, of piecemeal empirical research.

Empiricism differs from grand theory 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 find 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.

The greatest empirical historian, and in my view the greatest historian ever, was that eighteenth century English gentleman, Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon is well known for the aphorism that 'history…is little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind' [19] but this does not apply to his own work itself. The Decline and Fall contains some of the earliest versions of what later became the specialisations of social history (in his analysis of the character of the barbarian tribes of Germany and Siberia), of economic history (the trade between Rome and China) and of religious history (the social dimensions of Roman paganism, of Christianity and Islam; plus the institutional and theological development of the church). However, in the realm of Gibbon's political history, it remains true that 'crimes, follies and misfortunes' dominate the scene for long periods of time. One of the reasons why Gibbon remains such a good read today is the pace of his story as he narrates the careers of those who ascended to the Emperor's purple robe from what were sometimes very humble origins as common soldiers and peasants. But equality of opportunity was matched by equality of outcome. Rome was plagued for most of its existence by the problem of succession, which was normally accomplished by a civil or military rebellion combined with the assassination of the incumbent emperor.

Gibbon's analysis is sophisticated enough to recognise that a large-scale political system such as the Roman Empire can itself display relative stability while at the same time suffering continuous turbulence at the level of the palace. In the history of great monarchies, he says, the attention of both the writer and reader of history is naturally drawn to the court, the capital and the army, while the millions of obedient subjects pursue their lives in obscurity. In less established systems, such as the early republics of Athens or Sparta, he says the impact of ordinary individuals is much more influential and thus attracts more historical attention. [20] In other words, in opposition to the French Enlightenment's search for general laws of historical causation, Gibbon offers contingent, empirical explanations that nonetheless deal in large-scale, complex generalisations. In some historical circumstances, such as newly formed or emerging polities, the role of individuals such as founding fathers may be profound, (an observation that is certainly true of the history of the United States); in other circumstances, a social system may be so well entrenched that it can survive the worst kind of abuse from apparently powerful political figures. Similarly, once major internal systemic problems have emerged, neither the fortunes nor adversities of politics may be able to stem the tide. For instance, under Justinian, the general Belisarius recaptured Italy from the Goths and Africa from the Vandals. But the economic decline of Rome, coupled with high taxes and the complete loss of martial spirit among the citizens, meant that new armies could not be raised and so the territorial gains could not be held. Under the reign of Justinian, Rome had reached the state of economic and political weakness where, Gibbon says, even if 'all the Barbarian conquerors had been annihilated in the same hour, their total destruction would not have restored the empire of the West.' [21]

Gibbon also argues for the impact upon history of the role of chance and of the influence of unintended consequences. The outcomes of the wars between the various German tribes who contested the territories on the periphery of the empire, Gibbon demonstrates, depended as much on luck and ignorance of the enemy's position as it did on strength of arms and valour. The eventual survival of the Franks in Gaul was due to such accidents and fortune, while the complete extermination of the Gepidae nation was the result of an alliance formed between the Lombard and the Avar kings that was directed more at Rome than at the hapless Gepidae. [22]

Gibbon's great work turned him into a London literary celebrity and he was one of the most popular authors of his day. His writing was both an expression and a reflection of enlightened opinion in late eighteenth century England. Even though he is widely regarded as a figure of the European Enlightenment, we should recognise the great difference between the sceptical Enlightenment of England and Scotland, on the one hand, and the radical Enlightenment of France, on the other. For instance, while the French philosophes saw their king as the barrier to freedom, Gibbon regarded a hereditary monarchy as a precondition for a civilised political system since it solved the problem of arbitrary succession that had caused so much bloodshed in Rome.

His attitude to the savages and barbarians of Siberia and Africa was also the opposite of his French contemporaries. In a long passage, he dissects and demolishes the French Enlightenment's concept of the 'noble savage', the idea that the natural man is virtuous but it is civilisation that makes him corrupt. For Gibbon, this romantic idea is the opposite of the truth, as he demonstrates through several extensive examinations of the bleak and lawless pastoral societies of the Goths, Vandals, Huns, Tartars, Mongols and other nomads of the plains of Siberia and the Ukraine who periodically fought their way across the Danube to wreak havoc on the cultivated lands of the Mediterranean. [23

In other words, Gibbon allows us to draw moral and political lessons from history. It is important to recognise that this can be accomplished without history being politicised, that is, without starting from a political position for which evidence is then sought for support. Empirical history that gives primacy to the independence of its evidence teaches genuine political lessons.

Overall, the intellectual product and legacy of the British sceptical Enlightenment is quite different to that of the French radical Enlightenment. In Gibbon, the spirit of inquiry and the fruits of research confirmed the value of the existing institutions of British society. In France, these tools were deployed in opposition to the same institutions. In England, Gibbon emphasised the responsibility of individuals and celebrated the virtue and courage of statesmen and churchmen, even though he recorded that the natural passions of humanity were likely to leave such qualities in short supply. In France, the philosophes sought to find general laws of society that would render the actions of individuals irrelevant. The intellectual heritage of the British Enlightenment, as exemplified in Gibbon, clearly goes some of the way to explaining the different political histories of the two countries in the ensuing two centuries. Since the eighteenth century, Britain has enjoyed a stable national history marked by a gradual extension of its democracy, while France has been periodically racked by revolution, internal collapse and foreign invasion.

Finally, what the examples of the three historical thinkers discussed here demonstrate is that, in the course of history, ideas about history itself are independent variables. They can contribute sometimes in small part, but sometimes in large part to historical outcomes. In the modern era, the track record of the empiricism of English historiography is largely positive, while that of its rival, the utopianism of Continental grand theory, is almost entirely negative. It is time for the supporters of empiricism to come out and make the virtues of their methodology, and the vices of its main opponent, far better known.

Notes

1. Quentin Skinner (ed.) The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, Cambridge University Press, (1985) Canto edition 1990, pp 5- 6
2. 'Intellectuals and Power: a conversation between Michel Foucault and Giles Deleuze', in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, p 206
3. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, (French edn. 1966) Pantheon Books, Random House, New York, 1973
4. These are not the only meanings he ascribed 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
5. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, Colin Gordon (ed.), Pantheon Books, New York, 1980, pp 81, 84
6. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, pp 81-3
7. Foucault, Power/Knowledge
8. Ulrike Frietag, 'The Critique of Orientalism', in Michael Bentley (ed.), Companion to Historiography, Routledge, London, 1997
9. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, (1978) Penguin Books, London, 1995, p 39
10. 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. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol 1, (ed. David Womersley), Penguin Books, London, 1994, p 102
20. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol 1, p 252
21. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol 2, pp 355-6
22. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol 2, pp 453, 850
23. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol 1, pp 230-51; Vol 2, pp 294-320; Vol 3, pp 441-50, 791-808