HISTORY AS MORAL REFLECTION

THE DEGRADATION OF AMERICAN HISTORY. By David Harlan. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1997. Pp. xxxiii, 289.

Harlan loves what he thinks the study of historyespecially intellectual and lit-erary historyused to be. He hates what he thinks its become. What he thinksit used to be is a vehicle for moral reflection. What he thinks its become is thereactionary center of the humanities. In his view, the professionalization ofhistorythe attempt to make it as scientific and objective as it can behas beenresponsible for its demise. He claims that when history is done as it should bedone it is not preoccupied with discovering truth, but with helping people toreinvent themselves. Fortunately, he thinks, there is light on the horizon: Bythe middle of the 1990s it had become abundantly clear that the resurrection ofprofessionalism had failed. But that failure, more than any other single event,created the space in which an older, more traditional kind of historyhistory asa form of moral reflectionnow seems to be reemerging (74). In Harlansvision of the reemergence of this more traditional kind of history, historianshave abandoned their traditional views about the importance of objectivity andwarmly embraced presentism. The purpose of Harlans book is to help usher inthis new dawn.

In Harlans view, in the last several decades the desire for objectivity and theprofessionalization of history have been inextricably linked. So, he arguesagainst the attempts of several prominent historians to defend objectivity as amethodological ideal in historical studies. To explain what the study of historywithout concern for objectivity might be like, he provides several fascinatingsynoptic accounts of the transitions through which important historians and the-orists about history have gone in their work and in their conceptions of it. And heexpresses with refreshing passion and remarkable eloquence his vision of histo-ry as a vehicle for moral reflection. Much of this is to the good, but there areproblems, 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 intel-lectual historians Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock to recover the intentionsof authors and the original meanings of texts. In chapter two, he favorably com-pares 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-

History and Theory 39 (October 2000), 405-416 Wesleyan University 2000 ISSN: 0018-2656

sitions though which Elaine Showalter and Joan Scott have gone in their con-ceptions of their work. In chapter four, he criticizes recent attemptsincludingthose of David Hollinger, James Kloppenberg, Thomas Haskell, and JoyceAppleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacobto defend objectivity as a method-ological ideal in historical studies.

It seems that the point of these four chapters is partly to clear away what Harlantakes to be debris that blocks the path of progress and partly to illustrate what thestudy of history can be once the way has been cleared. But Harlans dismissal ofthe debris tends to be too quick to be convincing and often it is unclear whatmoral he intends us to draw from his constructive illustrations. In chapter three,for instance, he surveys what he takes to be Elaine Showalters intellectual jour-ney from the confident empiricism of A Literature of Their Own [1977], througha time of indecision in the 1980s, to the self-consciously provisional arrangementof predecessors she describes in Sisters Choice [1991]. In Harlans account ofthis journey, Showalter begins by thinking that she is reconstructing a literary tra-dition of women writers and ends by admitting that she is inventing one. He por-trays her as gradually coming to see that there is no way in her own work todetermine the pattern of influences that actually led from one major literary workto another (65). She concluded, he says, that the historian is not a truthteller, buta storyteller (56). Interesting, but what, if anything, is the larger point? Harlansays that Sisters Choice illustrates what history can be when it is written underthe sign of postmodernity (64). But does it really take postmodernism to justifycomparing literary works without claiming that earlier ones influenced later ones?Perhaps, as it sometimes seems, the recounting of Showalters journey is supposedto support the more general moral that intellectual and literary traditions are neverthere 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 intellec-tual traditions in which a better case can be made that the traditions are there tobe discovered? Harlan never addresses this question.

To take another example, in chapter two Harlan sharply criticizes the sort ofinterpretation at which Bercovitch ultimately arrives. As Harlan sees it, inBercovitchs interpretation classic American texts are always made to demon-strate the same monotonous and desolate lesson: how a monolithic American cul-ture has absorbed all challenges and repressed every possibility. But then ratherthan considering the arguments or evidence Bercovitch has provided for his inter-pretation, Harlan instead asks whether Bercovitchs history is the kind of historywe need. Harlans answer is that it is not the kind we need since without explor-ing openings and possibilities, Bercovitchs history merely serves to remind us,if we ever needed reminding, of the crushing weight of the American consen-sus, of its capacity to choke every hope and blast every wish. In short,Bercovitchs history is one of domination, rather than freedom, of acquiescenceand submission rather than opposition and resistance. It should be rejectedbecause Bercovitch sees nothing worth saving in the American past. Is Harlanspoint, 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 dismissobjectivity as a methodological ideal in historical studies. To justify this dismissalhe appeals to fragmentationin the culture at large and also in the discipline ofhistory. His argument involves three claims: first, without either substantive ormethodological consensus among historians, there can be no objectivity in his-torical studies; second, cultural diversity within the profession of history guaran-tees that there will be no consensus of either sort; and, third, a main reason thatcultural diversity guarantees discensus is that historical study is essentially thesearch for meaning and cultural diversity ensures that the past will mean differ-ent things to different people. More specifically, Harlan says that the emergenceof womens history, labor history, African American history, gay history, and sev-eral other new histories has dispersed history into a multitude of discontinu-ous 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 willcontinue to proliferate, perhaps more quickly than before. He concludes that thecontinuing proliferation of new histories and the fragmentation that they willinevitably bring in their wake make hopes for a renewed disciplinary consen-suswhether substantive or methodologicalseem so improbable (82).

In making his case against objectivity as a methodological ideal, Harlan focus-es especially on the defense of objectivity that Haskell gave in his critical reviewof Peter Novicks That Noble Dream.1 As Harlan explains it, Haskells view isthat the traditions and conventions on which historians depend neither havenor need foundations sunk deep into the heart of nature since their rootednessin 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 choosingofnecessityfrom a kaleidoscope of values and beliefs, of trying to assemble a temporarytake on the world from a truly bewildering array of rushing, endlessly mutating culturalfragments. It is possible to identify some of these provisional assemblages as trueor

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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 objec-tivity 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 Haskellactually wrote in the passage cited is, Yet I regard objectivity, properly understood, as a worthy goalfor historians. Novick, on the contrary, says the idea is essentially confused, and the text he has writ-tenwhich, ironically, passes all my tests for objectivity with flying colorsis in the main designedto persuade readers that the ideal of objectivity is all washed up. (Thomas Haskell, Objectivity isNot Neutrality, History and Theory 29 [1990], 130; reprinted in T. Haskell, Objectivity is NotNeutrality: 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 anotherexample, when Harlan states what he says Joan Scott takes gender to mean, he quotes from a pas-sage in which she is discussing the history of the word gender, rather than from a later one in whichshe 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.

deeply rooted in the nature of man, or the human conditionbut not without a high-ly developed sense of irony. For cultural pluralism has become so all pervasive as to bethe 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 foolaround with the past, to assemble its materials in whatever impromptu configurationseems to work at the moment. It is a right Haskell and others have stoutly resisted and willno doubt continue to resist. (87-88)

In addition to appealing to cultural diversity, Harlan shores up his case againstobjectivity by appealing to the historical contingency of methodological conven-tions and to the requirement that historians find meaning in the events they inter-pret. In my view, Harlan is right to highlight the importance of fragmentation,contingency, and meaning, but wrong to suppose that merely gesturing towardthese three suffices to dismiss objectivity as a methodological ideal. I shall returnto 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 thoseaspects of the past that interest us, is what happened, why it happened, and whatit means that it happened. Good historians, on this view, are by training and tal-ent especially competent to answer these questions. In fact, their explaining howthese questions can most plausibly be answered is their distinctive contributionto human knowledge. That is the reasonthe only reasonwhy those of us whoare not historians and are interested in understanding the past pay any attentionto what historians have to say.

On a currently more fashionable view, to which Harlan may subscribe, it is notpossible either to understand the past or to make progress toward understandingit. It follows that historians are not especially competent to understand the pastand so helping others to understand it cannot be their distinctive contribution tohuman knowledge. Harlan does not flat out say this. What he does say, amongother things, is that the proper business of at least literary and intellectual histo-rians is not to recount how historical texts arose or what their authors intended inwriting them, or what their immediate readers understood by them, or even howthe dissemination of the texts or the ideas expressed in them affected subsequentevents. Rather, the proper business of historians is to help their readers to engagewith historical texts in a way that facilitates moral reflection.

It is her [the historians] distinctive and defining responsibility to make ancient textsspeak to the presentspeak to us, to our problems, in our language. She must transformthe dead into conversational partners, asking again and again how the record of theirrelentless 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 butour ability to find the predecessors we needto think with their thoughts, to work throughour own beliefs by working through their beliefs. Only thus does history become a modeof moral reflection. (157)

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

But does Harlan think that facilitating moral reflection should be one of the goalsof the study of history, its main goal, or its only goal? I do not know. One of theproblems that I had with Harlans book is that he does not express his own viewsclearly or defend them carefully. Repeatedly, he simply ignores, rather thananticipates and responds to, predictable questions and objections. The nub of theproblem 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 butthe most conservative historians have now conceded that real empirical knowl-edge about the past is simply not available (141). His chronic reluctance tomention the hard cases for his own views makes it more difficult than it shouldbe 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 useof historical texts as a stimulus for moral refection should become if not the goalof historical study, then at least its main goal, then an obvious question for himis whether it matters whether the view of the past that the historian presents ininterpreting a text accurately depicts what happened, or is even thought by thehistorian or his readers to accurately depict what happened. Wouldnt it be justas mind-expanding if the historians story were acknowledged to be merelyimaginary? Harlan does not say. The answer, in my view, is that an admittedlyimaginary story might be just as mind-expanding as one which is thought toaccurately depict what really happened. But, for almost all of us, it would not bemind-expanding in the same way. And the way in which only a seemingly truehistorical 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 bebetter written than historical studies and, except for their being acknowledged tobe imaginary, to convey more interesting stories.

A few times in his book, it sounds as if Harlans objective is not to turn thestudy of history on its head, but merely to enrich it. For instance, at the end ofchapter one, he says that if recent developments in literary criticism and the phi-losophy of language have indeed undermined our belief in a stable and deter-minable past, denied the possibility of recovering authorial intentions, and chal-lenged the plausibility of historical representation, then contextualist-minded his-torians should stop insisting that every historians first order of business must beto do what now seems undoable. He says that historians generally should con-cede that there is not just one kind of acceptable historical writing, but many. Hecontinues, if such an understanding could win even grudging acceptance fromthe historical profession, then a space might be cleared within which a kind ofintellectual history could be written which is concerned not with dead authors butwith living books, not with returning earlier writers to their historical contexts but

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2. Ironically, Harlans views include the claim that it is pointless to try to figure out an authorsintentions.

with reading historical works in new and unexpected contexts, not with recon-structing the past but with providing the critical medium in which valuable worksfrom 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 criticismand the philosophy of language really do have the consequences he lists, then whyask 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, cur-rently established ways of reading historical texts should not be enriched, butabandoned. He says, for instance:Content is more important than context. Understanding what Lincolns Second InauguralAddress says to us, living at the end of the twentieth century, is more important thanunderstanding 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 hehas 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 askingquestions such as these rhetorically. In my view, these questions deserveanswers. Of course, traditional historians have already answered them, in a vari-ety of ways. Harlan never pauses to consider their answers. But what mainlymakes his rhetorical strategy seem strange to me is that on the face of it using his-torical texts to find out what life was like in the past is not incompatible withusing them as a vehicle for moral reflection. Some would saysome have saidthat using historical texts to find out what life was like in the past is a good wayof using them as vehicles for moral refection.

To mention just one example, Arthur Lovejoy, in Present Standpoints andPast History (1939), perceptively discussed the merits and drawbacks of pres-entism in a way that speaks directly to many of Harlans concerns. Lovejoyclaimed that to study history is always to seek in some degree to get beyond thelimitations and preoccupations of the present, that it thereby demands for suc-cess an effort of self-transcendence, and that this effort of self-transcendence isprimarily what makes the study of history a mind-enlarging, liberalizing, sym-pathy-widening discipline, an enrichment of present experience.4 There is noth-

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3. Elsewhere, Harlan says that the professionalization of historical studies has vigorously repressedthe more inventive ways of reading historical texts that he favors. Currently, he says, it is difficult formost younger historians even to imagine a present-oriented way of writing history: The idea of liftingbooks out of their original contexts, of making them speak directly to the present, has come to seem thevery mark and insignia of amateurism: it is unprofessional; it reeks of Whiggish presentism; it is thedemon of anachronism; and so on. Younger historians are regularly taught to view the past from theangle of those who lived it; anything else, as James Kloppenberg insists, will destroy our understand-ing by imposing meanings different from those that ideas had historically (194). Harlan says that ifwe wish to renew and reinvigorate American history we will have to recapture and restore to full intel-lectual 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 reprint-ed in The Philosophy of History in Our Time, ed. Hans Meyerhoff (New York, 1959), 173-188. Thepassages quoted may be found in Meyerhoff, ed., 180. See also the plethora of relevant suggestionsabout the value of understanding the past on its own terms in The Vital Past: Writings on the Uses ofHistory, ed. Stephen Vaughn (Athens, Ga., 1985).

ing particularly novel in these suggestions. Lovejoys view is now and was at thetime he presented it so commonplace and respected that it is a little embarrass-ing even to rehearse it. For present purposes, its familiarity and prima facie rea-sonableness is just the point. What is the matter with Lovejoys view? Harlandoes not say. Or, to put the question another way, even if we were to assume withHarlan that in the study of history our objective should be to nourish and enlargeour identities, it would not followit obviously would not followthat contentis more important than context. Why, then, are Harlans questions in the remarksquoted rhetorical?

If I had to guess, my guess would be that in Harlans view, using historicaltexts to find out what really happened is not possible since finding out by anymeans what really happened is not possible. What else could license him to askrhetorically what point there could possibly be, except as a stimulus to exploringour own current values and options, in trying to understand what LincolnsSecond Inaugural Address said to Americans living in the middle of the nine-teenth century? For if it actually were possible to find out what Lincolns Addresssaid to nineteenth-century Americans and also why it meant that, rather thansomething closer to what it means to Americans living at the dawn of the twen-ty-first century, presumably that knowledge would contribute to explaining howwe (Americans) came to be the people we are, and that would be a possible pointin trying to understand what Lincolns Address said to nineteenth-centuryAmericans. Not only that, it would be a point that it would seem even Harlanmight be able to respect.

In any case, according to Harlan the point of studying history should not be tofind out what really happened (even if that were possible). The point should beto 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-orientedapproach, but the relevant contexts would be existential rather than historical:all we need to do is find some moral exemplars from the pastpeople whose livesembody 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 shouldbe trying to convince other people (our students, for example) that their take on the worldwould be richer, more interesting, and more ethically pertinent if they added some of ourheroes to their own list of heroes. (95)

Should we worry that Harlans recommendation would license conservatives touse only Bancroft to teach high school students about the AmericanRevolutiona practice that might have considerable appeal to the State Board ofEducation in Kansas?

More radically, according to Harlan the point of doing history should not evenbe to find heroes whose lives overall embody the values we think important.For instance, he relates that the historian Andrew Delbanco criticized HenryLouis Gatess celebration of Frederick Douglasss commitment to the struggleagainst slavery on the grounds that in ignoring less attractive aspects ofDouglasss 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 Douglassbut, in effect, that it doesnt matter whether he got it right:Were such a rounded and final assessment even conceivable (let alone possible), onewould still want to ask, Why should it be the only historically valid assessment? Whyshould it not be just as historically valid for the historian to describe Douglasss thoughtsin such a way that they shine new light on issues and problems we think interesting orimportant? Indeed, how can Douglass continue to live otherwise? Could the selfless dis-interested account Delbanco wants ever amount to more than an assemblage of raw mate-rial for the powerful and pointed accounts that committed historians like Henry LouisGates will continue to write? (150)

In remarks such as these, which occur throughout Harlans book, back-to-backrhetorical questions are used to shore up debatable suggestions.5 In this case, thedebatable suggestions are, first, that objectivity and balance are inconceivableideals, second, that even if they were conceivable, only under-laborers wouldadopt 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 thatcan save usthrows considerations of objectivity and balance to the winds.

Harlans approach to Walt Whitman provides another example of this sameattitude. He concedes that Whitman may have been, as some historians haveclaimed, a bigoted little racist of a man, but claims that even if he was a racist, itshould not matter to us since the only Whitman that should matter to us is theWhitman who emerges from his poems (211). But why would it be wrong forsomeone for whom the Whitman of Song of Myself is a genuine source ofinspiration to care also about understanding Whitman whole? Why would it beirrelevant, if it were true, that a racist could produce a celebration of equality andpsychological well-being as magnificent and moving as Song of Myself? Evenif Harlan were right that the whole point of studying historical texts should be tostimulate moral reflection, it patently would not follow that the only Whitmanthat should matter to us is the one who emerges from his poems. We might be ledto more serious moral reflection by the realization, if it were true, that Whitmanwas a contradiction.

An obvious question that arises for Harlans radically presentist conception ofthe point of studying history is that of whether in doing history, or more narrow-ly in reading a historical text, anything goes. Harlan insists that there are con-straints. However, the only constraint he mentions is that certain texts resist cer-tain readings. It should be clear by now, he says, that the act of reading israrely a matter of a sovereign reader arbitrarily imposing her own values andpreferences on a text that has no more integrity than a lump of clay.

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

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

This happens best, Harlan concludes, when wethe readersenter into con-versation with the text by relating the texts being read to other things thatweve read, weaving them into one or another of the conceptual webs we thinkwith . . . as part of a larger project of trying to place ourselves in time, trying tosee ourselves as the last in a long sequence or tradition, with all the obligationsand responsibilities that working within a tradition entails.

I think this is a perceptive account of the phenomenology of one valuable wayto read historical texts. But if one were in a mood to play devils advocate, onemight wonder why a critic who favored an interpretation of a text that Harlanthinks the text resists should not simply reply that his interpretation is not of thetext as a whole, but of the text minus the passages that are difficult to accommo-date. After all, he might say to Harlan, this is how you yourself propose that wetake the measure of a manFrederick Douglass, for instance. So, why shouldntwe follow the same technique in taking the measure of a text? I have no idea howHarlan would answer this question. In any case, it seems odd to me that in hisentire book his only response to the objection that on his view anything might goare the remarks just quoted. In sum, he insists that there are constraints on whatcounts as an acceptable interpretation, but then shows little interest in explainingwhat they are or in considering whether the one constraint he acknowledges iscompatible 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, thathaving one would be about as useful to them as antlers would be to a duck, andthat the efforts they have made to formulate one have only obscured issues farmore pressing and important (75, 210). Beyond that, he thinks American histo-rians have grown weary of even thinking about objectivity. If they ever gatheredin one place, he says, one would hear a single anguished cry rise up from theassembled multitude: Dear God, please spare us yet another wearisome treatiseon pragmatism and objectivity. But while Harlan may (or may not) be right thathistorians would be better off investing their energy in other projects, even if hewere right about this, it would be another question whether they need objectivi-ty. By analogy, professional golfers may not need a theory about how to puttstraight, and any time they devote to composing such a theory might be betterspent 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 beobjective? 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 beingobjective because as a group they are so culturally diverse. In making this case,Harlan assumes, first, that cultural diversity ensures that in historical studiesthere will never be either substantive or methodological consensus and, second,that without consensus there can be no objectivity. Peter Novick is famous forhaving made similar assumptions. As a broad community of discourse, as acommunity of scholars united by common aims, common standards, and com-mon purposes, Novick famously proclaimed, the discipline of history hasceased to exist. The situation, he concluded darkly, is as described in the lastverse of the Book of Judges: In those days there was no king in Israel; every mandid that which was right in his own eyes.6

But, of course, contrary to Harlan and Novick, every historian does not simplydo what is right in his or her own eyes. In American history, for instance, whichis what both Harlan and Novick primarily had in mind, a good caseat the veryleast, a good prima facie casecan be made that academic historians tend to playby more or less the same rules, regardless of their ideological orientations. Onecan make this case by examining the ways in which historians argue with oneanother over the merits of competing historical interpretations. Happily, there arefairly easy ways to begin this examination. One of the easiest, and also the mostrevealing, is to examine exchanges among American historians such as those thatoccur in the forum discussions in the William and Mary Quarterly. The formatof 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 theauthor replies to the critics. The historians who participate in these exchanges arediverse and their criticisms can be both viscerally expressed and extreme. DavidHackett Fischer, for instance, felt bruised enough by the critics of his AlbionsSeed to quip that although the William and Mary Quarterly called the critique ofhis book a Forum, it is closer to the sort of thing that happened in theColosseum. He was referring especially to two of his criticsVirginia DeJohnAnderson and James Hornwho he said would like to demolish the book.7

Exchanges such as the ones between Fischer and his two harshest critics pre-sent the most difficult challenge to methodological consensus. How difficult isthat challenge? In my view, it is not very difficult. In such exchanges, historiansalmost always acknowledge the point of each others criticisms and respond tothem in relevant ways. That is, they rarely ignore or totally fail to understand thepoint of each others criticisms. Sometimes they accept a criticism outright. Moreoften, they give understandable reasons for denying the data on which a criticismdepends or they attempt to deflect the criticism by providing understandable rea-sons or evidence which they say the critic has ignored, or else they try to under-

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6. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American HistoricalProfession (Cambridge, Eng., 1988), 572. Ive responded at length to Novick-style pessimism inProgress in Historical Studies, History and Theory 37 (1998), 14-39, reprinted in Fay, Pomper, andVann, 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.

mine the claimed seriousness of the criticism by some other strategy that is primafacie rationally responsive to it. What in such exchanges historians rarely do is tointerpret evidence in a way that is patently perverse or argue right past a criticismin a way that leaves readers baffled about what could possibly be accomplishedby such a strategy. Of course, my impressions of these exchanges may not beright. There is not space here to determine whether they are right or even to illus-trate what I have in mind.

If my impressions of these exchanges are right and the exchanges themselvesare representative of how historians rationally assess the merits of competinginterpretations, this suggests that in spite of cultural and ideological diversity inthe profession, there is still quite enough methodological consensus at the levelwhere it counts for historians to assess the merits of competing interpretations onthe basis of mutually shared rules of evidence. But, for present purposes, mypoint is not that American historians share a common methodology, for whetherthey do remains to be seen. Rather, my point has to do with how one determineswhether American historians share a common methodology. Harlan, it seems tome, tries to determine it by gesturing toward cultural diversity. In my view,whether American historians share a common methodology can be determinedonly by an approach that includes a careful analysis of the ways in whichAmerican historians argue with one another over the merits of competing inter-pretations. And that, in turn, can be determined only by having a look at the evi-dence, reasons, and arguments that historians give in disagreements such as theone mentioned between Fischer and his critics. Harlan, in his book, does not evenapproach the question of how historians argue evidentially on behalf of compet-ing interpretations. To me at least, that is what makes what I take to be his hand-waving about the inherently corrosive effects of cultural diversity on theprospects for objectivity in historical studies so utterly unconvincing.

Still remaining, though, is the question of what bearing historical contingencyand the quest for meaning have on the prospects for objectivity in historical stud-ies. Suffice it to say that even if Harlans account of each of these is right as faras it goes, his account is radically incomplete. So far as the connection betweencontingency and objectivity is concerned, he does not, for example, even raise thequestion of whether on the basis of evolutionary considerations there are groundsfor thinking that within limits the procedures that humans employ for trying tofind out what happened in the recent past tend to be fairly reliableor else wewouldnt be here to discuss whether they are reliable! If this point were conced-ed, then the question would arise of the extent to which reasoning in historicalstudies is an extension and refinement of these ordinary procedures. If it wereconceded that to a significant extent reasoning in historical studies is such anextension and refinement, then quite a bit of the sting would be removed fromconcessions to historical contingency.

On the topic of meaning, Harlan says that when it comes to finding meaningin 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 orcapricious, is based on moral and aesthetic values which are subjective. Hesays that in choosing heroes it is not so much a matter of getting it right as itis of intentionally and deliberately participating in one or another historicallyconditioned sensibility or constellation of values and beliefs. He concludes thatwhat we need from American historians is not objective historical accounts,but help in finding the predecessors we need (92-96). In my view, such con-siderations 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 thetopic. In any case, the question remains whether relatively objective historicalaccounts, 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 Harlansremarks, 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 objectiveworth caring about, we do have historical accounts that are close enough to beingobjective to be a great help. But since Harlan does not explore this question, ittoo can wait for another occasion.

RAYMOND MARTIN

University of Maryland

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