Is historical knowledge neutral or positioned?

(Can historians be objective?)

Richard Rorty wrote that during the Enlightenment the physical

scientist was adopted as a model of the intellectual. Science – with
Isaac Newton as its ideal practitioner – was prized because it
seemingly provided objective access to the workings of Nature.
When history still aspired to be a scientific form of enquiry,
historians believed that they had a professional duty to write about
the past using a similarly objective method. In order for them to be
able to think like this, they had to make an important theoretical
assumption. They had to believe that there was a complete
separation between themselves and what they were studying. If
these things were held to be separate from each other, then the
conditions at least existed in which a historian might look at the past
as a kind of impartial observer. In other words, if the past existed as
an object that was whole, intact and independent of the historian’s
organising thoughts, then a historian could at least attempt to
describe that past more or less on its own terms. Ideally, historians
were expected to make every effort to ensure that their knowledge
(their writing) corresponded with the reality of this past. Writing
history according to this model was like an exercise in accurate
transcription or mimesis. Of course, the model relied on historians
acting in good faith. They had to be trusted to describe the past as it
appeared to them after they had examined the available evidence
(the sources), even if the results turned out to be different from
what they had expected, or hoped to find. But this was not regarded
as an insurmountable problem. Historians were expected to be able
to switch off their internal commentaries about how they liked to
see the world during their working hours. It was a matter of
professional pride that they seemingly knew how to prevent their
own present-day values and preferences from contaminating their
research and writing about the past. Moreover, they believed they
had a method for excluding unreliable witnesses or sources from
intruding into their histories. This apparent detachment was what
separated professional historians from amateurs, advocates,
propagandists, publicists and other people who, it was assumed,
manipulated their accounts of the past for their own ends. Historians
were expected to tell the ‘truth’ about the past. More than anything
else, it was historians’ claim to objectivity that guaranteed the high
cultural standing of their work.

The ‘objectivity question’ has therefore been central to how

historians regarded their subject. It had emotional and moral
implications, as well as philosophical ones. Some historians held on
to the ideal of objectivity because it promised to guarantee their
knowledge-claims, to put some things beyond dispute. It was an
attractive working concept for those who cherished certainties. It
enabled them to believe that they could establish ‘the facts’ about
the past, and then to regard those facts as being true in and of
themselves. To believe in the possibility of objective knowledge, in
other words, was to imagine an intellectual world that offered
something more solid than the here-and-now contingencies of
human culture. It was to believe that there was a difference between
knowledge and opinion. Most important of all, it counteracted the
sceptics, from Friedrich Nietzsche onwards, who argued that all
historians’ claims about the past have always been positioned,
partial and value laden.

Another way of seeing what is at stake here is to pose the objectivity

question in different ways. Do historical accounts correspond with
narratives contained in the past itself that can be recovered and
retold? Or do historians ultimately decide how they want to fit their
research materials together, what kinds of stories they want to tell,
and how they prefer to explain change over time? Can any historical
account transcend the culture in which it was conceived and
produced, or must it always stand in some kind of relation to it?
What kind of ‘truth’ do historians pursue? As Martin Bunzl wrote,
what is at stake here is ‘whether there is a fact of the matter in
matters historical, not just whether we can know it’. Because of this,
the objectivity question in history has generated an extensive
literature of its own. The historians, philosophers and theorists who
constitute the field not only disagree about the answer to the
question, they also disagree about what the question really means. Is
it primarily one that asks about the existence of a past that is
separate from the ways that we think and write about it? (We call
this an ontological question – about ‘being’.) Or is it primarily one
that asks whether we can research and write about the past in ways
that are unaffected by the contingencies of our own time and place?
(We call this an epistemological question – about ‘knowing’.) Peter
Novick’s That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the
American Historical Profession (1988) is a useful starting point here.
Novick offered a general definition of how historians have
traditionally understood objectivity in their field:

The assumptions on which it [their understanding] rests include a

commitment to the reality of the past, and to truth as
correspondence to that reality; a sharp separation between knower
and known, between fact and value, and, above all, between history
and fiction. Historical facts are seen as prior to and independent of
interpretation: the value of an interpretation is judged by how well it
accounts for the facts; if contradicted by the facts, it must be
abandoned. Truth is one, not perspectival. Whatever patterns exist
in history are ‘found’, not ‘made’. Though successive generations of
historians might, as their perspectives shifted, attribute different
significance to events in the past, the meaning of those events was
unchanging.

We should make it clear that Novick himself did not share these
assumptions. He gave this summary at the start of That Noble Dream
because he wanted to use the rest of the book to show that the idea
of historical objectivity was so confused that it was, in effect,
redundant. Novick was neither ‘for’ nor ‘against’ objectivity. His
argument was, rather, that present-day historians would be better
served by abandoning the concept as a guiding aspiration in their
work. ‘It seems to me that to say of a work of history that it is or isn’t
objective is to make an empty observation; to say something neither
interesting nor useful’, he wrote. David Harlan put it more starkly: ‘a
full-fledged theory of objectivity is about as useful to a historian as
antlers would be to a duck’. As Novick, Harlan and others have
shown, historical objectivity was a concept that was itself bounded
by time and culture. It arguably made sense as an ideal in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the historical
profession itself was a largely homogenous community: bourgeois,
white, ‘western’ and predominantly male. These scholars could at
least agree about what, for them, constituted ‘proper’ history, what
were legitimate sources and how they should write their accounts. It
was this homogeneity that enabled Lord Acton to tell contributors to
the Cambridge Modern History in 1898 that they should work with
such impartiality ‘that nobody can tell, without examining the list of
authors, where the Bishop of Oxford laid down the pen, and whether
Fairbairn or Gasquet, Liebermann or Harrison took it up’. But the
profession’s narrow social base – and thereafter its shared
understandings of what historians should study – broke apart from
the 1960s onwards. Academic historians collectively became more
diversified in terms of their gender, ethnic and social class identities.
The number of subjects that they wrote about, and the perspectives
that historians brought to their writing, proliferated – ‘history from
below’, ‘black’ history, feminist history, postcolonial history, non-
Eurocentric history and more besides. And with this proliferation of
research interests, the notion that all historians should share a kind
of neutral or ‘centrist’ space when they worked no longer made
sense. Of course there were (and still are) female historians who
defined themselves as ‘historians who happened to be female’, just
as they were (and are) black historians who defined themselves as
‘historians who happened to be black’. But there were also those
who defined themselves as specifically feminist or black historians
with their own agendas to pursue on behalf of the collectives that
were so central to their sense of self. In their eyes, Lord Acton’s
‘impartiality’ was no more than an attempt to pass off his own
particular western, andro-centric values, agenda and world-view as
universal.

As well as fragmenting the history profession’s social composition,

the 1960s also saw the development of the thinking we associate
with postmodernism. As we have seen, postmodernism challenged
long-held intellectual orthodoxies across all disciplines, not just
history. This included the sciences from which historians in the
nineteenth century had derived their ideals of objectivity in the first
place. In 1962 Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
argued against the long-held assumption that scientists were
impartial observers of the natural world. According to Kuhn, the
condition that made a scientific claim true rested on its acceptance
by leading practitioners within the relevant scientific community.
Scientific knowledge, in other words, was a form of social or
institutionalised knowledge, not the accurate reflection of an
objective world. Of course, these practitioners (scientists) would
have agreed protocols for testing the validity of any scientific claim.
Only when they were satisfied on this score would they accept that
the arguments that were used to justify a particular claim were true.
In that sense, truth was more than simply a question of the weight of
prevailing opinion. But ultimately, what underwrote scientific truths
were communal protocols – rules of play, shared discourses, agreed
vocabularies, common professional initiation – that were local and
historical, not natural and timeless.

Kuhn’s point is a useful one for historians to bear in mind – certainly

in relation to how history is taught and assessed in higher education.
Although we personally agree with Peter Novick’s argument that
‘objectivity’ is no longer a useful concept for historians to apply to
their work, we accept that in practice the term continues to be
widely used. As such, we suggest here that objectivity should best be
understood as something that refers to the protocols for writing
history or as inter-subjective agreement. This is different from using
the term to refer to the ideal of viewing the past from a neutral or
‘God’s-eye’ position – the historian’s view as the ‘view from
nowhere’. In our opinion, history is always written from a particular
perspective, and it always serves a particular agenda – personal,
professional, political, aesthetic, religious, moral or some other. This
is not meant as a criticism. We simply want to recognise that, in
choosing to write about one subject over another, a historian has
already taken up a position. Moreover, the postmodern ‘linguistic
turn’ has made us aware of how the ways in which we use language
constitute or shape our knowledge of the world. Language is not
something that we use straightforwardly to reflect knowledge that is
already ‘out there’. Historians use words – concepts, descriptive
categories, figures of speech – to give shape, substance and
boundaries to the very thing that they take as their point of enquiry.
Discourses, as Michel Foucault said in The Archaeology of
Knowledge, are practices that systematically construct the objects of
which they speak. In this way, the idea that there can be a clean
separation between the knower and the known breaks down.
‘Historical knowledge’ is something that is constructed by historians
primarily in the act (and indeed performance) of writing, not
something that is intrinsic to the past itself, waiting to be recovered.
But – and this is where Thomas Kuhn’s ideas are useful – that
construction of knowledge by historians is always done according to
the agreed rules of the profession. So, when tutors instruct history
students to write about the past ‘objectively’, we can see this as
another way for them to say that their students should work with the
kind of scholarly ‘honesty’ or ‘integrity’ following the Historical
Method as one of the core protocols expected of all historians.

[The following points are mentioned for clarification of the term

The Historical Method]

The Historical Method

The ‘rules’ for writing history are socially determined and contingent.
This means that they are not eternally fixed but could be subject to
change. In fact, many of the postmodern histories do not physically
frame their texts as histories and are not written using the
‘impersonal’ voice. This suggests that adherence to these rules does
not need to be comprehensive, but rather that it is sufficient for one
to adhere to a majority of them. In practice there is a degree of
flexibility. The rules or practices for writing history contained under
the term ‘the historical method’ can be described as the following:

• the use of standard models for the ascription of cause, effect and
contingency

• the use of generally accepted or recognised interpretative models

• critical appraisal of primary and archival sources, which includes an

assessment of the reliability and authenticity of the documents

• the physical framing of the work as history through the

employment of a critical apparatus including acknowledgements,
explanatory introduction, footnotes, bibliographical references,
appendices, and indexes

• invocations of authority such as the identification of the narratorial

voice with the known author and the attribution of information to
cited sources

• intra-and inter-textual coherence – that is, internal coherence

within the work and coherence or agreement between the work and
other sources

• inclusiveness, that is, the work should explain coherently all the
evidence available

• the acquisition of substantiating and countervailing evidence

• the establishment of facts from this evidence

• a decontextualized tone and the use of expository prose – the

incorporation of the facts into a narrative in an objective,
disinterested manner
• an explicit explanatory purpose or function

• the diachronic situation of the narrative within the discourse of

history through citations of other accepted histories

• if controversial interpretative models are to be used, or established

facts are to be challenged, a coherent explanation/defence of this
should be provided.