such uses of history as I have here described examples of the “partisanship” deplored by Christopher Lasch? Are they departures from a desired “objectivity”? Certainly they show partisanship; I am partisan on behalf of certain values—a more egalitarian distribution of the national wealth, opposition to military intervention whose purpose seems to be the aggrandizement of governmental power and corporate profits at the expense of poorer peoples of the world. I don’t believe that these values interfere with an honest recounting of the past. As I suggest in this book, holding certain fundamental values does not require that historians find certain desirable answers in exploring the past, it just turns their attention to certain useful questions. It precludes rummaging in the past for any data that are vaguely “interesting”—it focuses our research on matters that have critical value for human affairs.
Scientists do not simply collect data at random. Charles Darwin put it this way in a letter he wrote in 1861: “About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorize; and I well remember someone saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!”12
The myth of “objectivity” among historians has been more exhaustively investigated since I discussed the issue in this book, especially in the volume by Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. Novick punctures again and again the pretenses of historians to “objectivity,” the claim that they have no purpose beyond recapturing the past “as it really was.” (That famous phrase of the German historian Leopold von Ranke, “wie es eigentlich gewesen” has been misinterpreted, Novick says, and points out that von Ranke was far from “objective,” as in his statement: “God dwells, lives, and can be known in all of history.”)
For instance, the eminent Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, in “The Faith of a Historian,” published around 1940, said he did not aim to instruct the present but “to simply explain the event exactly as it happened.” Yet, in the same essay, he criticizes the post-World War I historians for creating disillusionment with war, saying they “rendered the generation of youth which came to maturity around 1940 spiritually unprepared for the war they had to fight.… Historians… are the ones who should have pointed out that war does accomplish something, that war is better than servitude.”13
Peter Novick, after years of intensive exploration of the issue, concludes: “it seems to me 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.”14 I trust that my comments on the writing of history and my historical essays themselves in the pages to follow, while remaining indifferent to the question of “objectivity,” will be both interesting and useful.
Notes
1. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 11.
2. New York Review of Books, March 8, 1973. Lasch mistakenly read my emphasis on conflict in history as a criticism of Richard Hofstadter’s “consensus” approach (in his book The American Political Tradition) to the American past. In fact, I agreed totally with the existence of a consensus between the competing dominant groups in our society, but insisted that outside that consensus there was an opposition not given proper attention by historians.
3. New York Times, April 2, 1982.
4. Boston Globe, May 24, 1984.
5. New York Times, March 26, 1981.
6. New York Times, November 12, 1987.
7. New York Times, March 22, 1989.
8. See Robert V. Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence (New York: Quadrangle, 1970).
9. Ibid.
10. Washington Post, October 30, 1988.
11. Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions (New York: Norton, 1983).
12. F. Darwin and A. C. Seward, eds., More Letters of Charles Darwin, 2 vols. (London, 1903), vol. 1, p. 195; quoted in M. I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York: Penguin, 1983), p. 65.
13. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 315–16.
14. Novick, p. 6.
Introduction to the First Edition
Sometime in 1968, newspapers recorded the death of America’s leading entrepreneur of political buttons. He had always worn his own button which said: “I don’t care who wins. My business is buttons.”
The historian, by habit, is a passive reporter, studying the combatants of yesterday, while those of today clash outside his window. His preferences are usually private. His business is history.
He may ask philosophical questions about the past: do we find certain sequential patterns in history? or are historical events unique, disorderly? But he rarely sees himself as helpful in changing the pattern or affecting the disorder. He may believe that people through history have been caught in the grip of extrahuman forces. Or he may see them as free agents shaping the world. But whether they are free or not, he himself is bound—by professional commitment—to tally but not to vote, to touch but not to feel. Or to feel, but not to act. At most, to act after hours, but not through his writing, in his job as a historian.
Out of this sense of the situation comes the question which underlies this book: in a world where children are still not safe from starvation or bombs, should not the historian thrust himself and his writing into history, on behalf of goals in which he deeply believes? Are we historians not humans first, and scholars because of that?
Recall Rousseau’s accusation: “We have physicists, geometricians, chemists, astronomers, poets, musicians and painters in plenty, but we have no longer a citizen among us.” Since the eighteenth century, that list of specialists has grown, to include sociologists, political scientists, psychologists, historians. The scholars multiply diligently, but with little passion. The passion I speak of is the urgent desire for a better world. I will contend that it should overcome those professional rules which call, impossibly and callously, for neutrality.
My
