History and Theory 39 (October 2000), 405-416

Wesleyan University 2000 ISSN: 0018-2656

HISTORY AS MORAL REFLECTION

THE DEGRADATION OF AMERICAN HISTORY. By David Harlan. Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1997. Pp. xxxiii, 289.
Harlan loves what he thinks the study of historyespecially intellectual and literary historyused to be. He hates what he thinks its become. What he thinks
it used to be is a vehicle for moral reflection. What he thinks its become is the
reactionary center of the humanities. In his view, the professionalization of
historythe attempt to make it as scientific and objective as it can behas been
responsible for its demise. He claims that when history is done as it should be
done it is not preoccupied with discovering truth, but with helping people to
reinvent themselves. Fortunately, he thinks, there is light on the horizon: By
the middle of the 1990s it had become abundantly clear that the resurrection of
professionalism had failed. But that failure, more than any other single event,
created the space in which an older, more traditional kind of historyhistory as
a form of moral reflectionnow seems to be reemerging (74). In Harlans
vision of the reemergence of this more traditional kind of history, historians
have abandoned their traditional views about the importance of objectivity and
warmly embraced presentism. The purpose of Harlans book is to help usher in
this new dawn.
In Harlans view, in the last several decades the desire for objectivity and the
professionalization of history have been inextricably linked. So, he argues
against the attempts of several prominent historians to defend objectivity as a
methodological ideal in historical studies. To explain what the study of history
without concern for objectivity might be like, he provides several fascinating
synoptic accounts of the transitions through which important historians and theorists about history have gone in their work and in their conceptions of it. And he
expresses with refreshing passion and remarkable eloquence his vision of history as a vehicle for moral reflection. Much of this is to the good, but there are
problems, which I shall get to shortly.
I. OUT WITH THE OLD

In chapter one, Harlan diagnoses what he takes to be the failed attempts of intellectual historians Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock to recover the intentions
of authors and the original meanings of texts. In chapter two, he favorably compares Perry Millers account of Puritan thought with that of Sacvan Bercovitch,
which he says is everywhere read as an extension of Millers original vision,
but is in fact its denial and negation (33). In the third chapter, he describes tran-

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sitions though which Elaine Showalter and Joan Scott have gone in their conceptions of their work. In chapter four, he criticizes recent attemptsincluding
those of David Hollinger, James Kloppenberg, Thomas Haskell, and Joyce
Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacobto defend objectivity as a methodological ideal in historical studies.
It seems that the point of these four chapters is partly to clear away what Harlan
takes to be debris that blocks the path of progress and partly to illustrate what the
study of history can be once the way has been cleared. But Harlans dismissal of
the debris tends to be too quick to be convincing and often it is unclear what
moral he intends us to draw from his constructive illustrations. In chapter three,
for instance, he surveys what he takes to be Elaine Showalters intellectual journey from the confident empiricism of A Literature of Their Own [1977], through
a time of indecision in the 1980s, to the self-consciously provisional arrangement
of predecessors she describes in Sisters Choice [1991]. In Harlans account of
this journey, Showalter begins by thinking that she is reconstructing a literary tradition of women writers and ends by admitting that she is inventing one. He portrays her as gradually coming to see that there is no way in her own work to
determine the pattern of influences that actually led from one major literary work
to another (65). She concluded, he says, that the historian is not a truthteller, but
a storyteller (56). Interesting, but what, if anything, is the larger point? Harlan
says that Sisters Choice illustrates what history can be when it is written under
the sign of postmodernity (64). But does it really take postmodernism to justify
comparing literary works without claiming that earlier ones influenced later ones?
Perhaps, as it sometimes seems, the recounting of Showalters journey is supposed
to support the more general moral that intellectual and literary traditions are never
there to be discovered and so always have to be invented (see, for example, 65).
But if this is what Harlan means to suggest, then what about literary and intellectual traditions in which a better case can be made that the traditions are there to
be discovered? Harlan never addresses this question.
To take another example, in chapter two Harlan sharply criticizes the sort of
interpretation at which Bercovitch ultimately arrives. As Harlan sees it, in
Bercovitchs interpretation classic American texts are always made to demonstrate the same monotonous and desolate lesson: how a monolithic American culture has absorbed all challenges and repressed every possibility. But then rather
than considering the arguments or evidence Bercovitch has provided for his interpretation, Harlan instead asks whether Bercovitchs history is the kind of history
we need. Harlans answer is that it is not the kind we need since without exploring openings and possibilities, Bercovitchs history merely serves to remind us,
if we ever needed reminding, of the crushing weight of the American consensus, of its capacity to choke every hope and blast every wish. In short,
Bercovitchs history is one of domination, rather than freedom, of acquiescence
and submission rather than opposition and resistance. It should be rejected
because Bercovitch sees nothing worth saving in the American past. Is Harlans
point, then, that historical interpretations, to be acceptable, must be edifying?

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In chapter four, Harlans objective at least is refreshingly clear. It is to dismiss

objectivity as a methodological ideal in historical studies. To justify this dismissal
he appeals to fragmentationin the culture at large and also in the discipline of
history. His argument involves three claims: first, without either substantive or
methodological consensus among historians, there can be no objectivity in historical studies; second, cultural diversity within the profession of history guarantees that there will be no consensus of either sort; and, third, a main reason that
cultural diversity guarantees discensus is that historical study is essentially the
search for meaning and cultural diversity ensures that the past will mean different things to different people. More specifically, Harlan says that the emergence
of womens history, labor history, African American history, gay history, and several other new histories has dispersed history into a multitude of discontinuous and unsynchronized histories that can never again be gathered together.
As a consequence, he says, not only new histories, but new subject positions,
vocabularies, epistemologies, and methodologies have proliferated, and will
continue to proliferate, perhaps more quickly than before. He concludes that the
continuing proliferation of new histories and the fragmentation that they will
inevitably bring in their wake make hopes for a renewed disciplinary consensuswhether substantive or methodologicalseem so improbable (82).
In making his case against objectivity as a methodological ideal, Harlan focuses especially on the defense of objectivity that Haskell gave in his critical review
of Peter Novicks That Noble Dream.1 As Harlan explains it, Haskells view is
that the traditions and conventions on which historians depend neither have
nor need foundations sunk deep into the heart of nature since their rootedness
in our history gives them an extra-personal and inter-subjective character (85).
But, says Harlan, because of cultural diversity there is no longer, if there ever was,
any such thing as our history. Haskells suggestion that there is such a thing,
Harlan says, is the rhetoric of an age that has itself become part of the past:
Life in the wealthy democratic West has become a matter of incessantly choosingof
necessityfrom a kaleidoscope of values and beliefs, of trying to assemble a temporary
take on the world from a truly bewildering array of rushing, endlessly mutating cultural
fragments. It is possible to identify some of these provisional assemblages as trueor
1. Harlan can be careless in expressing others views. For instance, he writes that Hollinger,
Kloppenberg, and Haskell took themselves to be confronting the virtual demise of the ideal of objectivity in our own time and that as Haskell put it, the ideal of objectivity is all washed up (76).
But, of course, Haskell never did put it that way, and he wouldnt have put it that way. What Haskell
actually wrote in the passage cited is, Yet I regard objectivity, properly understood, as a worthy goal
for historians. Novick, on the contrary, says the idea is essentially confused, and the text he has writtenwhich, ironically, passes all my tests for objectivity with flying colorsis in the main designed
to persuade readers that the ideal of objectivity is all washed up. (Thomas Haskell, Objectivity is
Not Neutrality, History and Theory 29 [1990], 130; reprinted in T. Haskell, Objectivity is Not
Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History [Baltimore, 1998], 147, and in History and Theory:
Contemporary Readings, ed. B. Fay, P. Pomper, and R. Vann [Oxford, 1998], 300). To cite another
example, when Harlan states what he says Joan Scott takes gender to mean, he quotes from a passage in which she is discussing the history of the word gender, rather than from a later one in which
she provides her own rather different definition of gender. Compare Harlan, 70, with Joan Scott,
Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), 28-29, 42.

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deeply rooted in the nature of man, or the human conditionbut not without a highly developed sense of irony. For cultural pluralism has become so all pervasive as to be
the only true ism of our time. What is at issue now, at the end of the twentieth century,
is not so much the truth of any particular description of the past as the right to fool
around with the past, to assemble its materials in whatever impromptu configuration
seems to work at the moment. It is a right Haskell and others have stoutly resisted and will
no doubt continue to resist. (87-88)

In addition to appealing to cultural diversity, Harlan shores up his case against

objectivity by appealing to the historical contingency of methodological conventions and to the requirement that historians find meaning in the events they interpret. In my view, Harlan is right to highlight the importance of fragmentation,
contingency, and meaning, but wrong to suppose that merely gesturing toward
these three suffices to dismiss objectivity as a methodological ideal. I shall return
to this issue.
II. IN WITH THE NEW

On an old-fashioned view to which I and perhaps some others still subscribe,

what most of us mainly want to know from historians, with respect to those
aspects of the past that interest us, is what happened, why it happened, and what
it means that it happened. Good historians, on this view, are by training and talent especially competent to answer these questions. In fact, their explaining how
these questions can most plausibly be answered is their distinctive contribution
to human knowledge. That is the reasonthe only reasonwhy those of us who
are not historians and are interested in understanding the past pay any attention
to what historians have to say.
On a currently more fashionable view, to which Harlan may subscribe, it is not
possible either to understand the past or to make progress toward understanding
it. It follows that historians are not especially competent to understand the past
and so helping others to understand it cannot be their distinctive contribution to
human knowledge. Harlan does not flat out say this. What he does say, among
other things, is that the proper business of at least literary and intellectual historians is not to recount how historical texts arose or what their authors intended in
writing them, or what their immediate readers understood by them, or even how
the dissemination of the texts or the ideas expressed in them affected subsequent
events. Rather, the proper business of historians is to help their readers to engage
with historical texts in a way that facilitates moral reflection.
It is her [the historians] distinctive and defining responsibility to make ancient texts
speak to the presentspeak to us, to our problems, in our language. She must transform
the dead into conversational partners, asking again and again how the record of their
relentless pressing can help us see ourselves as we need to see ourselves. . . . (52)
What is at issue in American history, however, is not our ability to know the past but
our ability to find the predecessors we needto think with their thoughts, to work through
our own beliefs by working through their beliefs. Only thus does history become a mode
of moral reflection. (157)

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. . . if we think of history as a conversation with the dead about what we should value
and how we should live, then Oakeshott is undoubtedly right: There is no truth to be
discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought. (206)

But does Harlan think that facilitating moral reflection should be one of the goals
of the study of history, its main goal, or its only goal? I do not know. One of the
problems that I had with Harlans book is that he does not express his own views
clearly or defend them carefully. Repeatedly, he simply ignores, rather than
anticipates and responds to, predictable questions and objections. The nub of the
problem seems to be that his own views appear to him as obvious. For instance,
at one point he assures us, without argument or further explanation, that all but
the most conservative historians have now conceded that real empirical knowledge about the past is simply not available (141). His chronic reluctance to
mention the hard cases for his own views makes it more difficult than it should
be to figure out what his views are.2 Too often one is left having to guess.
Guessing then, if Harlans recommendation isas it seems to bethat the use
of historical texts as a stimulus for moral refection should become if not the goal
of historical study, then at least its main goal, then an obvious question for him
is whether it matters whether the view of the past that the historian presents in
interpreting a text accurately depicts what happened, or is even thought by the
historian or his readers to accurately depict what happened. Wouldnt it be just
as mind-expanding if the historians story were acknowledged to be merely
imaginary? Harlan does not say. The answer, in my view, is that an admittedly
imaginary story might be just as mind-expanding as one which is thought to
accurately depict what really happened. But, for almost all of us, it would not be
mind-expanding in the same way. And the way in which only a seemingly true
historical account can be mind-expanding is something that many of us value.
That is why we value historical studies in addition to novels, which tend to be
better written than historical studies and, except for their being acknowledged to
be imaginary, to convey more interesting stories.
A few times in his book, it sounds as if Harlans objective is not to turn the
study of history on its head, but merely to enrich it. For instance, at the end of
chapter one, he says that if recent developments in literary criticism and the philosophy of language have indeed undermined our belief in a stable and determinable past, denied the possibility of recovering authorial intentions, and challenged the plausibility of historical representation, then contextualist-minded historians should stop insisting that every historians first order of business must be
to do what now seems undoable. He says that historians generally should concede that there is not just one kind of acceptable historical writing, but many. He
continues, if such an understanding could win even grudging acceptance from
the historical profession, then a space might be cleared within which a kind of
intellectual history could be written which is concerned not with dead authors but
with living books, not with returning earlier writers to their historical contexts but
2. Ironically, Harlans views include the claim that it is pointless to try to figure out an authors
intentions.

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with reading historical works in new and unexpected contexts, not with reconstructing the past but with providing the critical medium in which valuable works
from the past might survive their past . . . in order to tell us about our present
(31). But if, as Harlan clearly believes, recent developments in literary criticism
and the philosophy of language really do have the consequences he lists, then why
ask merely for a place on the platform? Why not ask for the whole platform?3
More often Harlans way of expressing himself suggests that, in his view, currently established ways of reading historical texts should not be enriched, but
abandoned. He says, for instance:
Content is more important than context. Understanding what Lincolns Second Inaugural
Address says to us, living at the end of the twentieth century, is more important than
understanding what it said to Americans living in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Else why should we bother with it? Why should we read Abraham Lincoln if we think he
has nothing important to tell us about what we should value, how we should live? (187;
see also 210)

It is curious, I think, that Harlan thinks he can advance his argument by asking
questions such as these rhetorically. In my view, these questions deserve
answers. Of course, traditional historians have already answered them, in a variety of ways. Harlan never pauses to consider their answers. But what mainly
makes his rhetorical strategy seem strange to me is that on the face of it using historical texts to find out what life was like in the past is not incompatible with
using them as a vehicle for moral reflection. Some would saysome have said
that using historical texts to find out what life was like in the past is a good way
of using them as vehicles for moral refection.
To mention just one example, Arthur Lovejoy, in Present Standpoints and
Past History (1939), perceptively discussed the merits and drawbacks of presentism in a way that speaks directly to many of Harlans concerns. Lovejoy
claimed that to study history is always to seek in some degree to get beyond the
limitations and preoccupations of the present, that it thereby demands for success an effort of self-transcendence, and that this effort of self-transcendence is
primarily what makes the study of history a mind-enlarging, liberalizing, sympathy-widening discipline, an enrichment of present experience.4 There is noth3. Elsewhere, Harlan says that the professionalization of historical studies has vigorously repressed
the more inventive ways of reading historical texts that he favors. Currently, he says, it is difficult for
most younger historians even to imagine a present-oriented way of writing history: The idea of lifting
books out of their original contexts, of making them speak directly to the present, has come to seem the
very mark and insignia of amateurism: it is unprofessional; it reeks of Whiggish presentism; it is the
demon of anachronism; and so on. Younger historians are regularly taught to view the past from the
angle of those who lived it; anything else, as James Kloppenberg insists, will destroy our understanding by imposing meanings different from those that ideas had historically (194). Harlan says that if
we wish to renew and reinvigorate American history we will have to recapture and restore to full intellectual legitimacy precisely what the process of professionalization has delegitimated and repressed.
Remarks such as these can suggest that Harlans goal is merely to enrich historical studies.
4. Lovejoys essay appeared originally in Journal of Philosophy 36 (1939), 477-489, and is reprinted in The Philosophy of History in Our Time, ed. Hans Meyerhoff (New York, 1959), 173-188. The
passages quoted may be found in Meyerhoff, ed., 180. See also the plethora of relevant suggestions
about the value of understanding the past on its own terms in The Vital Past: Writings on the Uses of
History, ed. Stephen Vaughn (Athens, Ga., 1985).

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ing particularly novel in these suggestions. Lovejoys view is now and was at the
time he presented it so commonplace and respected that it is a little embarrassing even to rehearse it. For present purposes, its familiarity and prima facie reasonableness is just the point. What is the matter with Lovejoys view? Harlan
does not say. Or, to put the question another way, even if we were to assume with
Harlan that in the study of history our objective should be to nourish and enlarge
our identities, it would not followit obviously would not followthat content
is more important than context. Why, then, are Harlans questions in the remarks
quoted rhetorical?
If I had to guess, my guess would be that in Harlans view, using historical
texts to find out what really happened is not possible since finding out by any
means what really happened is not possible. What else could license him to ask
rhetorically what point there could possibly be, except as a stimulus to exploring
our own current values and options, in trying to understand what Lincolns
Second Inaugural Address said to Americans living in the middle of the nineteenth century? For if it actually were possible to find out what Lincolns Address
said to nineteenth-century Americans and also why it meant that, rather than
something closer to what it means to Americans living at the dawn of the twenty-first century, presumably that knowledge would contribute to explaining how
we (Americans) came to be the people we are, and that would be a possible point
in trying to understand what Lincolns Address said to nineteenth-century
Americans. Not only that, it would be a point that it would seem even Harlan
might be able to respect.
In any case, according to Harlan the point of studying history should not be to
find out what really happened (even if that were possible). The point should be
to converse with the dead about what we should value and how we should live.
Attending to context would still have a place in this radically present-oriented
approach, but the relevant contexts would be existential rather than historical:
all we need to do is find some moral exemplars from the pastpeople whose lives
embody the values we think important. Instead of striving for detachment and objectivity,
for the most complete, least idiosyncratic, view that humans are capable of, we should
be trying to convince other people (our students, for example) that their take on the world
would be richer, more interesting, and more ethically pertinent if they added some of our
heroes to their own list of heroes. (95)

Should we worry that Harlans recommendation would license conservatives to

use only Bancroft to teach high school students about the American
Revolutiona practice that might have considerable appeal to the State Board of
Education in Kansas?
More radically, according to Harlan the point of doing history should not even
be to find heroes whose lives overall embody the values we think important.
For instance, he relates that the historian Andrew Delbanco criticized Henry
Louis Gatess celebration of Frederick Douglasss commitment to the struggle
against slavery on the grounds that in ignoring less attractive aspects of
Douglasss thought, Gatess portrait of Douglass is skewed. In defending Gates

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against this criticism, Harlan argues not that Gates got it right about Douglass
but, in effect, that it doesnt matter whether he got it right:
Were such a rounded and final assessment even conceivable (let alone possible), one
would still want to ask, Why should it be the only historically valid assessment? Why
should it not be just as historically valid for the historian to describe Douglasss thoughts
in such a way that they shine new light on issues and problems we think interesting or
important? Indeed, how can Douglass continue to live otherwise? Could the selfless disinterested account Delbanco wants ever amount to more than an assemblage of raw material for the powerful and pointed accounts that committed historians like Henry Louis
Gates will continue to write? (150)

In remarks such as these, which occur throughout Harlans book, back-to-back

rhetorical questions are used to shore up debatable suggestions.5 In this case, the
debatable suggestions are, first, that objectivity and balance are inconceivable
ideals, second, that even if they were conceivable, only under-laborers would
adopt them and, third, that even if it were sometimes appropriate to adopt them,
it could be appropriate only as a prolegomenon since real historythe kind that
can save usthrows considerations of objectivity and balance to the winds.
Harlans approach to Walt Whitman provides another example of this same
attitude. He concedes that Whitman may have been, as some historians have
claimed, a bigoted little racist of a man, but claims that even if he was a racist, it
should not matter to us since the only Whitman that should matter to us is the
Whitman who emerges from his poems (211). But why would it be wrong for
someone for whom the Whitman of Song of Myself is a genuine source of
inspiration to care also about understanding Whitman whole? Why would it be
irrelevant, if it were true, that a racist could produce a celebration of equality and
psychological well-being as magnificent and moving as Song of Myself? Even
if Harlan were right that the whole point of studying historical texts should be to
stimulate moral reflection, it patently would not follow that the only Whitman
that should matter to us is the one who emerges from his poems. We might be led
to more serious moral reflection by the realization, if it were true, that Whitman
was a contradiction.
An obvious question that arises for Harlans radically presentist conception of
the point of studying history is that of whether in doing history, or more narrowly in reading a historical text, anything goes. Harlan insists that there are constraints. However, the only constraint he mentions is that certain texts resist certain readings. It should be clear by now, he says, that the act of reading is
rarely a matter of a sovereign reader arbitrarily imposing her own values and
preferences on a text that has no more integrity than a lump of clay.

5. Compare, for instance, the remarks just quoted with these: Why should we tell our students to
read the New England Puritans if we ourselves suspect that they had no moral vision worth passing
on, if we think their sermons and books and poems have nothing of value to impart? Why should we
teach them about American Puritanism if we think the Puritan tradition has no redemptive power, if
it hath no relish of salvation in it? (52). In fairness to Harlan, it should be remembered that he
devotes an entire chapter to showing that objectivity is an impossible ideal.

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The readings that an alert, reflective, and resourceful historian comes up with may not be
what the author intended, but neither will they be what the reader intended. . . . What we
need are historians who are alive and responsive to the unruly play of their primary materials, to the multiple possibilities and drifting implications that characterize the richest and
most rewarding textsespecially when read in our present rather than theirs. (193)

This happens best, Harlan concludes, when wethe readersenter into conversation with the text by relating the texts being read to other things that
weve read, weaving them into one or another of the conceptual webs we think
with . . . as part of a larger project of trying to place ourselves in time, trying to
see ourselves as the last in a long sequence or tradition, with all the obligations
and responsibilities that working within a tradition entails.
I think this is a perceptive account of the phenomenology of one valuable way
to read historical texts. But if one were in a mood to play devils advocate, one
might wonder why a critic who favored an interpretation of a text that Harlan
thinks the text resists should not simply reply that his interpretation is not of the
text as a whole, but of the text minus the passages that are difficult to accommodate. After all, he might say to Harlan, this is how you yourself propose that we
take the measure of a manFrederick Douglass, for instance. So, why shouldnt
we follow the same technique in taking the measure of a text? I have no idea how
Harlan would answer this question. In any case, it seems odd to me that in his
entire book his only response to the objection that on his view anything might go
are the remarks just quoted. In sum, he insists that there are constraints on what
counts as an acceptable interpretation, but then shows little interest in explaining
what they are or in considering whether the one constraint he acknowledges is
compatible with other things he wants to say about historical studies. Once again,
we are left to guess what he may have had in mind.
III. BEYOND OBJECTIVITY?

Harlan says that historians do not need a theory of historical objectivity, that
having one would be about as useful to them as antlers would be to a duck, and
that the efforts they have made to formulate one have only obscured issues far
more pressing and important (75, 210). Beyond that, he thinks American historians have grown weary of even thinking about objectivity. If they ever gathered
in one place, he says, one would hear a single anguished cry rise up from the
assembled multitude: Dear God, please spare us yet another wearisome treatise
on pragmatism and objectivity. But while Harlan may (or may not) be right that
historians would be better off investing their energy in other projects, even if he
were right about this, it would be another question whether they need objectivity. By analogy, professional golfers may not need a theory about how to putt
straight, and any time they devote to composing such a theory might be better
spent in other ways (practicing putting?), but they still do need to putt straight.
In Harlans view, do historians need to be objective or at least to aspire to be
objective? His answer is that they do not. And, in any case, Harlan argues that at

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this particular moment in time American historians could never succeed in being
objective because as a group they are so culturally diverse. In making this case,
Harlan assumes, first, that cultural diversity ensures that in historical studies
there will never be either substantive or methodological consensus and, second,
that without consensus there can be no objectivity. Peter Novick is famous for
having made similar assumptions. As a broad community of discourse, as a
community of scholars united by common aims, common standards, and common purposes, Novick famously proclaimed, the discipline of history has
ceased to exist. The situation, he concluded darkly, is as described in the last
verse of the Book of Judges: In those days there was no king in Israel; every man
did that which was right in his own eyes.6
But, of course, contrary to Harlan and Novick, every historian does not simply
do what is right in his or her own eyes. In American history, for instance, which
is what both Harlan and Novick primarily had in mind, a good caseat the very
least, a good prima facie casecan be made that academic historians tend to play
by more or less the same rules, regardless of their ideological orientations. One
can make this case by examining the ways in which historians argue with one
another over the merits of competing historical interpretations. Happily, there are
fairly easy ways to begin this examination. One of the easiest, and also the most
revealing, is to examine exchanges among American historians such as those that
occur in the forum discussions in the William and Mary Quarterly. The format
of these exchanges is that an author begins by giving a precis of his or her book,
then several historians with different points of view criticize the book, then the
author replies to the critics. The historians who participate in these exchanges are
diverse and their criticisms can be both viscerally expressed and extreme. David
Hackett Fischer, for instance, felt bruised enough by the critics of his Albions
Seed to quip that although the William and Mary Quarterly called the critique of
his book a Forum, it is closer to the sort of thing that happened in the
Colosseum. He was referring especially to two of his criticsVirginia DeJohn
Anderson and James Hornwho he said would like to demolish the book.7
Exchanges such as the ones between Fischer and his two harshest critics present the most difficult challenge to methodological consensus. How difficult is
that challenge? In my view, it is not very difficult. In such exchanges, historians
almost always acknowledge the point of each others criticisms and respond to
them in relevant ways. That is, they rarely ignore or totally fail to understand the
point of each others criticisms. Sometimes they accept a criticism outright. More
often, they give understandable reasons for denying the data on which a criticism
depends or they attempt to deflect the criticism by providing understandable reasons or evidence which they say the critic has ignored, or else they try to under6. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical
Profession (Cambridge, Eng., 1988), 572. Ive responded at length to Novick-style pessimism in
Progress in Historical Studies, History and Theory 37 (1998), 14-39, reprinted in Fay, Pomper, and
Vann, eds., History and Theory: Contemporary Readings, 377-403.
7. William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 48 (1991), 223-308. The remarks quoted appear on 260,
262-263.

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415

mine the claimed seriousness of the criticism by some other strategy that is prima
facie rationally responsive to it. What in such exchanges historians rarely do is to
interpret evidence in a way that is patently perverse or argue right past a criticism
in a way that leaves readers baffled about what could possibly be accomplished
by such a strategy. Of course, my impressions of these exchanges may not be
right. There is not space here to determine whether they are right or even to illustrate what I have in mind.
If my impressions of these exchanges are right and the exchanges themselves
are representative of how historians rationally assess the merits of competing
interpretations, this suggests that in spite of cultural and ideological diversity in
the profession, there is still quite enough methodological consensus at the level
where it counts for historians to assess the merits of competing interpretations on
the basis of mutually shared rules of evidence. But, for present purposes, my
point is not that American historians share a common methodology, for whether
they do remains to be seen. Rather, my point has to do with how one determines
whether American historians share a common methodology. Harlan, it seems to
me, tries to determine it by gesturing toward cultural diversity. In my view,
whether American historians share a common methodology can be determined
only by an approach that includes a careful analysis of the ways in which
American historians argue with one another over the merits of competing interpretations. And that, in turn, can be determined only by having a look at the evidence, reasons, and arguments that historians give in disagreements such as the
one mentioned between Fischer and his critics. Harlan, in his book, does not even
approach the question of how historians argue evidentially on behalf of competing interpretations. To me at least, that is what makes what I take to be his handwaving about the inherently corrosive effects of cultural diversity on the
prospects for objectivity in historical studies so utterly unconvincing.
Still remaining, though, is the question of what bearing historical contingency
and the quest for meaning have on the prospects for objectivity in historical studies. Suffice it to say that even if Harlans account of each of these is right as far
as it goes, his account is radically incomplete. So far as the connection between
contingency and objectivity is concerned, he does not, for example, even raise the
question of whether on the basis of evolutionary considerations there are grounds
for thinking that within limits the procedures that humans employ for trying to
find out what happened in the recent past tend to be fairly reliableor else we
wouldnt be here to discuss whether they are reliable! If this point were conceded, then the question would arise of the extent to which reasoning in historical
studies is an extension and refinement of these ordinary procedures. If it were
conceded that to a significant extent reasoning in historical studies is such an
extension and refinement, then quite a bit of the sting would be removed from
concessions to historical contingency.
On the topic of meaning, Harlan says that when it comes to finding meaning
in the study of the past, trying to tell it like it was offers precious little help.
The reason, apparently, is that what is most meaningful in historical studies is

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choosing heroes, and the process of choosing them, while not whimsical or
capricious, is based on moral and aesthetic values which are subjective. He
says that in choosing heroes it is not so much a matter of getting it right as it
is of intentionally and deliberately participating in one or another historically
conditioned sensibility or constellation of values and beliefs. He concludes that
what we need from American historians is not objective historical accounts,
but help in finding the predecessors we need (92-96). In my view, such considerations barely begin to address the topic of meaning in historical studies.
Perhaps Harlan did not intend his remarks to address more than an aspect of the
topic. In any case, the question remains whether relatively objective historical
accounts, if we had them, would be of any help in finding meaning in the past or,
more subjectively, in making the past meaningful. From the tone of Harlans
remarks, probably he would deny that relatively objective historical accounts,
even if we had them, would be of any help. In my view, in a sense of objective
worth caring about, we do have historical accounts that are close enough to being
objective to be a great help. But since Harlan does not explore this question, it
too can wait for another occasion.
RAYMOND MARTIN
University of Maryland