Summary
Title: The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past
Author: Keith Windschuttle
Publisher: Free Press
ISBN: 1893554120
Pro:
• Covers all major theoretical movements
• Gives detailed expamples to demonstrate errors
• Explains how historical knowledge is acquired
Con:
• None
Description:
• Covers the nature how post-modernism is used in field of history
• Explains why post-modern theories fail to do a good job of explaining or interpreting history
• Provides examples and extended arguments
Book Review
For some, positive answers to the above questions are driven by adherence to social and literary theories in which interpretation and subjectivity are considered positive methods of research. Objectivity is both impossible and undesirable. Others, schooled in tradtional methods of historiography, reject such theses as not only ridiculous, but dangerous. Keith Windschuttle’s book supports their position and offers an extended argument not simply for the proper ways to do history, but also why many modern theories of history must be rejected as irrational and unreasonable.
As to the former, Windschuttle writes in his preface:
- “For most of the last 2400 years, the essence of history has continued to be that it should try to tell the truth, to describe as best as possible what really happened. Over this time, of course, many historians have been exposed as mistaken, opinionated and often completely wrong, but their critics have usually felt obliged to show they were wrong about real things, that their claims about the past were different from the things that actually happened. In other words, the critics still operated on the assumption that the truth was in the historian’s grasp.”
As to the latter, he also writes:
- “Today, these assumptions are widely rejected, even among some people employed as historians themselves. In the 1990s, the newly dominant theorists within the humanities and social sciences assert that it is impossible to tell the truth about the past or to use history to produce knowledge in any objective sense at all. They claim that we can only see the past through the perspective of our own culture and, hence, what we see in history are our own interests and concerns reflected back at us. The central point upon which history was founded no longer holds: there is no fundamental distinction any more between history and myth.”
Windschuttle tackles the second issue first, describing this world of theory in all its variety. He takes the reader on a trip through all the different ideas contending for dominance in the humanities and which have been affecting the way people do history: cultural studies, semiotics, structuralism, deconstruction, Foucault, poststructuralism, relativism, post-modernism, hermeneutics, and more.
In each case he follows the same path by first offering an account of some historical event from the perspective of the theory at hand, and then demonstrating the deficiencies of that account by using the work of traditional methods. What is important is that he takes some pains to describe the rival accounts fully and fairly, and his rebuttals are not designed to vilify or demonize.
Does this have any meaning outside arcane and obscure academic debates? Absolutely, argues Windschuttle, and particularly for liberal politics. In his final chapter, The Return of Tribalism, he shows how relativistic theories are closely linked with the political demands that only members of a particular “tribe” be allowed to have authority in the governance of their affairs. This is a major cause of bloodshed today:
- “It has produced the charnal house politics of Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, the Sudan, Central Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans. Postmodernism and cultural relativism are complicit in this, both in their insistence on the integrity of all tribal cultures, no matter what practices or values they perpetuate, and in their denunciation of all imperial cultures.”
Windschuttle does not argue that relativist theories in the social sciences are the cause of the violence, but they end up being complicit: their adoption their relativism prevents liberals and leftists from producing an adequate response and critique of violence. Narrow,tribal claims and relativism can do nothing here. The only values which can help us are univeralistic ones based upon human rights which belong to everyone, not simply to members of a particular group.
