Anassessment of the Postmodern Sceptical Challenge to Empirical

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CHICHESTER An accredited college of the UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON HISTORY Doctor of Philosophy TOWARDS REFLEXIVE PRACTICE: AN ASSESSMENT OF THE POSTMODERN SCEPTICAL CHALLENGE TO EMPIRICAL HISTORIOGRAPHY Peter Frank Brickley October 2004 This thesis has been completed as a requirement for a higher degree of the ' University of Southampton WS2237036 6 111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 2 UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CHICHESTER An accredited college of the UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON ABSTRACT HISTORY Doctor of Philosophy TOWARDS REFLEXIVE PRACTICE: AN ASSESSMENT OF THE POSTMODERN SCEPTICAL CHALLENGE TO EMPIRICAL HISTORIOGRAPHY Peter Frank Brickley This thesis has been completed as a requirement for a higher degree of the University of Southampton This research is concerned with aspects of the long running debate about 'What is History?' It focuses on the recent postmodern sceptical challenge to traditional historiography by Keith Jenkins, Alun Munslow and Beverley Southgate and the rebuttal of that challenge by empirical historians such as Richard Evans, Arthur Marwick and Perez Zagorin. The problem with this controversy is that its grounds are narrow. The exchanges have polarised around a particular postmodern treatment of scepticism, arguing for and against whether present empirical methods are capable of providing adequate explanations of the past. What I hope to contribute to this debate is a broadening of its frame of reference to a more general question of how historians might respond to wider questions about the nature of knowledge in the face of apparent epistemological uncertainty. I am using the concept of 'aporia' to express this sense of ultimate uncertainty about the possibility of true, objective, knowledge. The study takes seriously the scepticism of both positions - empirical as well as postmodem - and it does this in two ways. First, it places contemporary empiricism into an historical context that includes the empiricism of sophists and pyrrhonists of the ancient world, of Hume in the enlightenment, ofComte and J. S. Mill in the nineteenth century and more recently the radical empiricism of American pragmatism. This part of the study concludes that empiricism has long been associated with philosophical scepticism to the extent that it can be regarded as a legitimate and traditional, if sometimes unselfconscious, response to aporia. Thus scepticism can be thought to be integral to this approach to knowledge, not corrosive of it. Attempts by contemporary empirical historians to overcome the postmodem challenge by arguing for objective certainty in history, are therefore unnecessary and inappropriate. Similarly, postmodem critiques of empirical historiography that simply direct attention to the existence of aporia, rather than discuss forms of response to it, demonstrate a weakness in their analysis of empiricism. Second, the study contextualises this controversy within a broader debate about how other groups of historians are currently responding to issues of aporia. It notes how some contemporary Marxist historians, for example Patrick Joyce, are opening a fruitful dialogue with poststructural linguistic theorists, developing interpretative concepts of a cultural kind that are thought to function more flexibly than traditional ones. Overall the research concludes that the negativity of the postmodem critique, which seems to suffuse much discussion of historical theory and methods, is not a necessary outcome of such explorations. A broader view, taking into account how empiricism has functioned in the past, and how it is evolving in branches of the discipline, shows the possibility of more positive, reflexive approaches to scepticism and to the role of interpretation in the making of historical knowledge. 3 List of Contents Title Page Abstract 2 List of Contents 3 Introduction 4 Chapter One: A case for historians to answer? The controversy and the debate 30 Chapter Two: Scepticism and knowledge in pre-modernity 72 Chapter Three: Scepticism and Knowledge in modernity 111 Chapter Four: Bridges within history 148 Conclusion 201 Bibliography 209 4 Introduction Section I This study attempts to clarify certain problems that have arisen in my experience of teaching history at undergraduate and pre-degree level. It derives from the period between the late 1970s and the 1990s - that is from when the' What is history?' debate was still firmly influenced by the Elton Carr exchanges through to the present controversy between postmodern historians such as Keith Jenkins, Alun Munslow and Beverley Southgate, and those representing traditional empirical historiography, such as Richard Evans, Arthur Marwick and Perez Zagorin. The research is concerned with the philosophy of history in the sense that it focuses on what might count as contributing to historians' understanding of history, but it is also historical in that a large part of the work takes the form of a history of ideas. What follows in this introduction is first, an identification of the central question and thesis, second, an indication of the background and assumptions informing the project and finally a sketch of how the argument of the study is supported within the main body of the work. What is aimed for in this research is the identification of common ground between a range of historiographical positions. The intention is to provide a practical contribution for historians, and history teachers, to enable them to make sense of, and work with, the present configuration of ideas about the discipline. However, 'practical' here does not mean pedagogy in the narrow sense of classroom practice, nor is the study about the history or politics of history teaching. Instead, through an examination of the sceptical dimensions of several approaches to historical knowledge, I hope that the work will enable a broader conception of history to be 5 held, than seems possible at present. This is not to try to erase debate by flattening out differences, but to establish a common basis for operational discussions to take place between historians holding different account of the discipline; between, specifically, empirical historians, those working in a Marxist tradition and poststructuralists. In doing this it will be suggested here that what is needed is a broadly constructivist approach to history. But what is not required is another <New History', as Alun Munslow (2003) has argued, in which earlier views are denounced as 'wrong' and rejected in favour of newer ones. Instead of this traditionally combative style. a more naturalist conception of the discipline is envisaged. This is taken here to be one inwhich it is accepted that ideas about how historical knowledge is acquired are no different, at root, from ideas about how humans gain any other form of human knowledge, and that a multiplicity of approaches can coexist, as ideas change and develop over time.' The debate on which this project is focused can be contextualised within a longer on- going concern by historians about what is involved in making sense of the past; a concern that stretches hack into the nineteenth century and beyond. More specifically it is a debate that can be associated with key exchanges between Geoffrey Elton and Edward Carr during the 1960's (Carr: 1964;Elton: 1969). The apparent simplicity, and the enduring influence of that core controversy between Elton and Carr - about whether historical knowledge is made in the present or found in the past - can be thought sometimes, even now nearly forty years later, to have overshadowed the complexity of a larger discussion to which it was related. At different times this broader debate has included approaches to history deriving from empiricism, Marxism, realism, pragmatism, feminism and ethics as well as, more I There is of course more to naturalism than this simple statement, and this will be discussed at length further in the study. 6 recently, those from postmodemism and poststructuralism.' Those categories have inevitably included sub-divisions of standpoint, resulting in a rich and varied debate which continues into the present'. Within such a discourse few historians can be unaware of the emergence in the last seven years or so of a controversy - a sometimes distinctly acrimonious one - led by a group of postmodem historians who have challenged the theoretical perspectives of those adhering to traditional empirical historiography. It is a controversy which in recent years has been carried on in a number of leading British and American history journals" and which has given rise to exchanges of view, typical of which has been that between Richard Evans in defence of History (1997) and Keith Jenkins's Why History (1999). In brief what is at stake here is the extent to which postmodem approaches to knowledge might be considered relevant within accepted practices of academic history and centrally whether historical practice as it has been known until now, can continue to function in conditions described by the challengers as postmodemity . This research centrally engages with the issues raised by this current postmodernlempirical controversy and it does so for several reasons. The first of these - and perhaps the most important - is that the core question about whether traditional history has an adequate epistemology is clearly an important one which 2 It is notoriously difficult to identify essential constituents of postmodern thought and especially so in seeking agreement on similarities and differences between variants such as poststructuralism,

Load more