Settling old scores

1. Beverly Southgate and Clarity

2. Hayden White

Beverly Southgate and Clarity

          Beverly Southgate, Reader in the History of Ideas at the University of Hertfordshire, has written extensively on history and on postmodernism as a postmodernist sympathiser and in-depth populariser, if one might use that description. In this essay I wish to examine – though not exhaustively - one of his books intended for history students, History: What and Why? to see whether postmodernism fares any better than usual when it is written with a modicum of clarity.

I

          Southgate’s Preface commences straightforwardly enough: ‘What is history? and why study it anyway?’ Good enough questions. Now for some answers!

          As far as the philosophical issue of truth is concerned, the debate has been running since antiquity, and is essentially between those who see it as an absolute, fixed once and for all and independent of any observer, and those for whom it is relative, with its meaning, like that of everything else, dependent upon perceptions of individuals at different times and places. For historians claiming to seek and even find the truth about the past, this theoretical debate has obvious importance. [1]

Or rather, for some introductory obfuscation. The first thing we are presented with is a false dichotomy. It is quite likely that nearly all historians will tend to see the truth of the fact of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 as ‘fixed once and for all’, but there is for them no sharp dichotomy between acknowledgement of this fact and their awareness of differing interpretations of it – differing down the generations and amongst various schools of specialist medievalist thought on the matter. Moreover, such phenomena of the past are perceived to remain in place even when their significance for us - not to speak of some of their details - alters according to the revelation of further evidence relating to the same incident, and to further commentary on that evidence. It is unlikely that an academic consensus will ever form around the belief that the Norman Conquest never happened or is at best a conjecture. What might well alter is whatever significance or meaning is attached to it from the vantage points of oncoming generations of history writers and readers – apart from picturisations of it shifting with the addition of recently-discovered evidence or the dispelling of old legends about it (such as the one about King Harold being shot in the eye, which, so far as I understand, derives from a misperception of one small section of the Bayeux Tapestry).

          In other words, historical truth is both fixed and relative: fixed according to happening and relative according to subsequent interpretations of what happened, and it is unlikely that most practising historians have ever believed otherwise. Though I am willing to grant Dr Southgate an obdurate minority in this department. Nor is this to assume that historians do not regard their own interpretations as the only right ones (they would hardly put them forward otherwise); in any case they are forced into discourse with others in their specialism whose interpretations differ either greatly or slightly from their own, sometimes to the point of being required to modify their views; so they have – and have had - at the very least to acknowledge interpretative differences amongst themselves, however willingly or grudgingly. This tension between the fixed points in history and the relativity of interpretation of the fixed is what makes history fun and frustrating: to research, to write, to debate, to teach and to learn. My late Great-Aunt Ella certainly lived, but she was a character of many facets (‘a mass of contradictions’, as the cliché goes), and no two of my relatives agree exactly on whether she was a Good Old Thing or a Bad Old Thing, or something in between. Aunt Ella’s very existence, however, her fixedness in the past along with all she said and did in the past, is indisputable, even though we may disagree over her nature and of course she is herself, paradoxically enough, no longer around to confirm that she once did live. What goes for Aunt Ella goes for Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, the Norman Conquest, the Russian Revolutions, the Second World War and Harold Wilson’s devaluation of the pound.  Some of us did well by Aunt Ella; others did poorly. Some did well or poorly by these other phenomena. This might colour views and even highly specialised interpretations to some extent. Rarely, however, there is a shift to ontological implications, and sometimes what was alleged to have happened did not happen, as is subsequently ascertained. (No one ever did see that Indian rope trick.) But to extrapolate from these rare ontological shifts a theory of history taken as a whole is somewhat drastic and intellectually dubious.

          Southgate goes on to mention a proclivity to validate history by an appropriation of ‘scientific’ methods: ‘by retaining “objectivity”, it has been claimed, we can ascertain the “facts”, and so report the “truth”’. [2]  But Southgate is after bigger game:

          The problem now is that that idealised model of the subject has been undermined. The status of even the great intellectual exemplar, science itself, has undergone revision, with challenges directed at its very foundations, and even such seemingly basic concepts as ‘facts’, ‘reality’, and ‘objectivity’, no longer seeming as unproblematic as they sometimes did. In late twentieth-century science it seems that relativism rules.[3]

It is true that sciences undergo considerable changes over the course of time since scientific reasoning is inductive and scientific findings are universally regarded (at least by scientists) as provisional, pending new and sometimes upsetting hypotheses, further experimental investigation and new evidence that may throw a different light on previous ‘relative’ certainties.

          At the same time, science and scientific method are not simply overthrown in the wake of new discoveries – and I am allowing for some difficulties in determining once and for all just what scientific ‘method’ is: philosophically speaking it is not very tidy, because inter alia it is not aprioristic.  Southgate’s ‘idealised model’ is a crude rendition of what actually goes on inside science, residing more in the minds of philosophers of science than in the minds of scientists themselves. As any director of space missions at NASA will tell you, Newtonian gravitational theory works perfectly well when it comes to doing the maths involved in sending unmanned space vehicles around the solar system. Newton has been neither falsified nor superseded by Einstein in the practical application of theory and mathematics to the launching and control of space probes around the other planets and moons of our sun because none of the factors involved, whether they be planets or man-made instruments, approaches the speed of light. It is not a matter of all of the ‘objectivity’ of physical science having to be entirely re-evaluated because Einstein’s theory is more applicable than Newton’s to our understanding of deep space and truly ‘astronomical’ distances as well as the ultimate if finite velocity. Any more than that Einstein has been ‘dethroned’ by advances in quantum physics. The universe both large and seemingly infinitely small requires if anything even more rigorous maths, more abstruse theories and ever-larger equipment if we are to grasp understanding of even a small portion of it.  The term ‘relativity’ is misleading in this context. Einstein certainly did not use it to suggest that one physical theory is as right or as wrong as another. Complex objectivity – even when it involves approaches to variegated phenomena in the material world that cannot (yet) be theoretically reconciled with one another - does not rule out ‘objectivity’. It would, on the contrary, appear to call for its more intense application. For many years biologists accepted a basic distinction to be made between reptiles and mammals as being that reptiles lay eggs while mammals give birth to their young alive. The discoveries that the North American garter snake gives birth to its young alive while the Australian duck-billed platypus lays eggs upset this neat distinction but they do not necessitate reducing the entire distinction between reptiles and mammals to a ‘social construction of reality’. It is simply not true that ‘in late twentieth-century science it seems that relativism rules’, whatever the apparent failure of the different branches of physics to come up with a ‘unified field theory’. As John Tosh says in another context, ‘pluralism does not necessarily mean relativism’. [4]

          The Preface ends, appropriately enough, with a declaration of the book’s agenda:

It aims at a critical moment for the [historical] discipline: (1) to encourage readers to assess history from an interdisciplinary perspective; (2) to provoke discussion about the nature and purpose of historical study, and (3) to provide some historical context for that discussion. [5]

Point (2) is certainly a laudable intention, and one whose success in fulfilment is attested to by this very essay of mine. Point (1) hints, it seems to me, at the possibility of substituting ‘postmodernism’ for ‘interdisciplinary perspective’, since postmodernism is nothing if not invasive of – if also unproductive in - all forms of study. I might rather prefer a book that turned the proposition around: to encourage readers to access the ‘interdisciplinary perspective’ from the viewpoint of history. As for Point (3) – well, we shall see.

II

          In Chapter One, the Introduction, Southgate offers some not very convincing reasons for embracing postmodernism as a general world-view – including the view on history. We learn that following the spectacular successes of seventeenth-century science in appearing to reveal the ‘immutable laws of nature’ those writing in other fields found inspiration from this science for their own efforts – linguisticians, philosophers, geographers, historians. And it is implied here that these various studies have come up against their own limitations by being so inspired. No doubt they did. As Dr Southgate himself says frequently in this Introduction, ‘there is nothing new’ here: that is, in the now widespread understanding that 17^th-century science was mechanistically materialist and that in as much as the mechanistic quality has rubbed off on such disciplines as, say, psychology, it has met with dubious results. As Engels writes of a specific limitation of the materialist philosophy contemporaneous with pioneering seventeenth-century science, this lay

…in its inability to comprehend the world as a process, as matter undergoing uninterrupted historical development. This accorded with the state of natural science of that time, and with the metaphysical, that is, anti-dialectical manner of philosophising connected with it. Nature, so much was known, was in eternal motion. But according to the ideas of that time, this motion turned just as eternally in a circle and therefore never moved from the spot; it produced the same results over and over again. This conception was at that time inevitable. The Kantian theory of the origin of the solar system had only been put forward and was still regarded merely as an oddity.[6]

But these things in themselves have provided no reason to reject all materialism or scientific method in its variations - in favour of an essentially anti-science subjective idealism whose latest expositor in a long philosophical line is the postmodernist. In his highly selective potted history of science, Southgate appears entirely to overlook developments both in materialist thinking and in scientific practice and discovery subsequent to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 

Terry Eagleton is cited for the impact of Derrida and others on literary theory. And so it seems that ‘contemporary linguistic theoreticians have come to view the “representational” standpoint as “naïve”; and the consequent redefinition of the central concepts noted by Eagleton inevitably has important implications, not only for theories of literature, but also for all language-based disciplines, including history’. [7]  We shall consider the impact on history another time. Whether ‘linguistic theoreticians’ have been helpful in imparting to readers and students an understanding of actual literary works and their germination over and above what has been previously offered in literary criticism may be doubted in some degree by those who have attended Eng. Lit. courses suffused in postmodernist discourse. As in poststructuralist and postmodernist studies in cinema and in drama, comparatively little emerges that might usefully instruct a reader to be appreciative in his or her reading or indeed a budding film artist in learning how to write, act in and direct films. But certainly a lot of theory has been generated in all these artistic fields – or I should say alongside them, as, with possible exceptions, few artistic exponents within them venture into ‘linguistic theory’. This theory is indeed useful to know for those who are studying linguistic theory. My encounter with it suggests that it will be all but incomprehensible except to specialists and students in the field. [8]

Since the arena for the spread of postmodernist theory is ‘all language-based disciplines’, one wonders if any possible ‘discipline’ can be left out of its embrace. Where is any discipline without language? Here is one of those sleights of hand that postmodernist writers are so fond of – you have to be quick to spot how the magic trick works. We might safely assume that all subject disciplines employ language – though of course a good deal of this language in some of them is mathematics. Indeed, it could be said that all collective human activity employs the use of language, or nothing would ever get done. But precisely how does this make all such disciplines (and all human activity) ‘language-based’? 

By writing of ‘language-based disciplines’ Southgate is already assuming a postmodernist stance on disciplines before showing us how postmodernism comes to be validated.  By writing of ‘language-based disciplines’ and thus confusing the ordinary use of language in pursuit of any discipline with a particular discipline’s specific concern for or devotion to language, Southgate has already assumed a priori the language-based existence of us all – that is, out of thin air.  Thus making an assumption he has yet to prove.  Hey presto!

Plumbing involves linguistic interaction between plumber and plumber’s mate, or plumber and client, or plumber and the water company or materials supplier, and perhaps also in the reading of instruction manuals. Does this communicative interaction make plumbing, as a trade rather vital to our urban existence, ‘language-based’, or is it plumbing-based – that is, based on the need and demand for clean water supply, proper drainage and sewerage, and on the skill to supply these things? Plumbing based but – as in all other collective human activity – requiring essential linguistic interactions?

It is possible (though disputable) that ‘linguistic theory’ is of especial application to literary study; its applicability to the centrality of plumbing might be harder to justify. Yet there is nothing in plumbing that necessarily distinguishes it from all of the ‘disciplines’ Southgate indicates, especially since his coining of the term ‘language-based disciplines’ implies that all disciplines (and why not include sanitary engineering?) are the legitimate arena for the intrusion of postmodernist (‘interdisciplinary’) discourse.

There is an amusing section in this Introduction on the subject of maps. ‘Maps have long been considered to be “objective” representations of the physical world. But they now appear as something more complicated’ – that is, that they are not ‘objective’ or absolute in any sense. [9]

Now, in my schooldays the classroom walls were adorned with Mercator’s projection of the map of the world. For various reasons it proved impossible for Mercator to project equally-spaced latitude and longitude of the curved earth on a flat piece of paper; thus what appeared was a gross distortion: continents of the Northern Hemisphere appeared impossibly huge in comparison to continents of the Southern Hemisphere. (Greenland was gargantuan.) And so generations of schoolchildren were warned by their teachers – as I was - not to take Mercator too literally. Newer types of projection on flat surfaces have endeavoured to supersede Mercator in showing the relative sizes of northern and southern continents more accurately by pictorialising the earth’s curvature – but we never believed Mercator showed it ‘as it is’ in the first place. We have known for at least a very long time and even as children that all maps have their various limitations – and their specialised uses.

For, as with any literary description or pictorial representation of the external world, a map has to be drawn from a certain viewpoint, from a single chosen position; and the choice of that position is significant. It reveals in short what map-makers think is important, for it enables them to include and exclude, and to express relationships between places and spaces according to their own (often unstated) criteria. [10]

I amused myself while reading this passage by imagining an old sea captain reading it and perhaps recalling that he would have been somewhat put out if his ship had gone down with all hands lost because the charts were inaccurate as to the position of rocks along the coast. What the hypothetically artistically-inclined cartographer thought was ‘important’ (that is, for ‘unstated’ reasons) would not cut much ice with the sea captain. Totally ‘objective’ accuracy in charting is vital to shipping; and both sea captains and cartographers (in the pioneering days they were often one and the same) would know this even if Dr Southgate does not.

          Nor does Dr Southgate appear aware that maps have specialised uses. Go through any comprehensive atlas and you will find ‘language maps’ of the world, ‘religion maps’, maps indicating different types of climate, regional human populations, and so on. Some world maps show only a blank blue to indicate the oceans; others will depict the detailed topographies of the ocean floors. It makes sense to provide separate maps for separate purposes of information. Southgate makes great play with the ‘Eurocentric’ maps of the nineteenth century that showed the African interior an indistinguishably blank mass, a ‘dark continent’ of (implied) ‘disorder and savagery’ [11] – the maps in question revealing little more than the racist attitudes of the mapmakers. This is surely nonsense. European maps of nineteenth-century Africa contained large blank spaces because the areas in question had not yet been charted by European explorers, and those who already knew the areas – the indigenous peoples - were not in the business of making maps for Europeans. Such was the European lust for more and more information about the world (in an age when new knowledge was money, as it remains) that the first cartographer to bring out the most detailed and up-to-date map of Africa would be the one to cash in. Why else were intrepid but also information-gathering Victorian explorers such as Dr Livingstone so lauded in their lifetimes?  The blankness of spaces in old maps of the African or other relatively unexplored continents had more to do with lack of basic information than ‘Eurocentric representation’.  The blankness was to be regretted and hopefully to be dealt with shortly, not celebrated as the upholding of racial superiority and hegemony.

          This is not to deny that maps have also their political and ideological uses, implicit in the design of some of them. For example the selfsame classroom maps of my schooldays were covered in blobs of pink to represent the British Commonwealth and Empire: taken together these blobs stood out impressively from the dull colours of the other nations in a depiction of Great Britain as a mighty power. (Never mind that by my time the largest of these pink-shaded areas had become independently self-governing long since.)  Perhaps I can cosy up to postmodernists momentarily by suggesting that in some sense the British Empire was, essentially, a map. There is no need to assume that all entities do not have something bogus about them. But this and other examples of ‘politically-inspired’ mapmaking offer only a feeble reason for assuming that all maps by definition are mere ‘social constructions of reality’, and not also indicative of an accuracy of specialised depiction because of a pressing need for one. Indeed, to assume that all maps serve a political purpose in one way or another only obscures the difference between maps that set out ideological concepts like British imperial glory and maps that have more strictly instrumental purposes, and so blunts our critical apparatus when approaching maps in general. Maps are but one of many abstract and semi-abstract means we have for comprehending the reality of our world. Without these varieties of ‘shorthand’ (including, for example, the compass, not to speak of algebra and trigonometry) we would be lost and our ships would go down, but that does not mean that but for the grace of God and postmodernists we therefore take maps as being literal depictions. If we did that, the use of maps as means of abstraction would be incomprehensible to us – as indeed an impressionist portrait of Lawrence of Arabia was incomprehensible to Lowell Thomas’s Bedouins.  As Dr Southgate might say, the matter is a little too ‘complicated’ merely to bring in maps in order to show us how we solipsistically arrange the world we live in. Accurate but necessarily simplified reference to the physical reality of that world is their whole point, to those who consult them.

III

          Towards the end of a following chapter reviewing the ancient origins and traditional views taken of history, Dr Southgate cites John Tosh (in the latter’s Pursuit of History) to the effect that within the areas of the history of their purview that they find significant, historians can ensure that they are as true as they can be to the reality of the past. To my mind, a fairly innocuous sentiment. To which Southgate’s response is:

There is still an assumption here of some ideal ‘reality of the past’, to which historians, working ‘properly’ within their ‘critical method’, have due access; and it is presumably by reference to that that they both ‘make allowances’ for the conscious and unconscious distortions of other historians, and also ensure that their own accounts are ‘as true as they can be’.         [12]

The insertion of the word ‘ideal’ in the sentence dealing with ‘the reality of the past’ indicates that Southgate believes Tosh typically assumes the truth of a metaphysical entity called ‘the reality of the past’. That is, while making it fairly clear that he himself will have no truck with such an entity. It is not, however, yet clear where Southgate himself stands on the subject of the past. Was there a past? Or did we all spring into life the day before yesterday?  Well then, let us grant that everybody including Dr Southgate accepts the existence of some kind of past, if one is going to put it that way. Where does that leave us? Presumably, at least from the postmodernist historians’ point of view, with the idea that the past is inaccessible to our probing for knowledge – probing that can only yield up ammunition for our already extant and language-bound prejudices. This means there was a past, but we can never ‘truly’ know it. We can never know it in the way in which we can never really know what is going on all around us in the present – assuming, that is, anything beyond or beneath (to make metaphorical use of spatial terms) the mere surface appearances that we observe in our daily lives is ‘going on’ at all. A very good reason for acceptance and quiescence. If you feel you don’t know anything about anything you are hardly in a position to protest or take up arms against this or that ‘imaginary’ phenomenon. That is why all of science is suspect, not because science is dogmatic but because its development outside of bourgeois linguistic ideology has inherently revolutionary implications, and because science assumes the study of processes that cannot necessarily be directly experienced or beheld by the naked eye. There is a saying of Heraclitus – a favourite of Marx’s, by the way - to the effect that science would be unnecessary if processes simply were appearances. On that account we have come some distance from the natural philosophy of Aristotle, whose various hypotheses were all too heavily dependent upon his incomparable powers as an observer of appearances.

          It is, I suspect, Dr Southgate who has an ‘idealised’ view of the past – as that which is inherently ineffable and unknowable, like everything presently experienced. Back to Kant and the thing-in-itself, it seems, for idealism is the ineluctable pathway of the present-day ontologically unconcerned.  At the same time, in his chapter on the origins of the theory of history going back to antiquity, Southgate plucks his own ‘true reality’ from the past to sustain his overall argumentation. In other words, he writes like any historian (in this case, of ideas) whose naïve faith a la Tosh in recapturing at least some ‘reality’ from the past the up-front Southgate otherwise finds epistemologically impossible of fulfilment. And he utilises all the usual scholarly apparatus of citation references and bibliography as if these aspects of historical practice were absolved from a condemnation of traditional history writing, not to speak of the apparent illusion of ‘objective’ scholarship in general. My point is: if you think history is a fiction, why bother to cite references? Why not write it as fiction? Some historians have flirted with this, to the point where there is some crossover between novelised history and historical fiction, perhaps a postmodernist self-fulfilled prophecy.  I write history (or historiography) as an essayist, so to some extent I am a good deal nearer to utilising postmodernism in practice than is Dr Southgate, some of whose chapters or portions thereof are straightforward narrative history of the kind whose unqualified acceptance by us he attempts at the same time to throw into doubt. 

IV

          Of interest to the present author is Southgate’s treatment in his Chapter 4 of Karl Marx (1818-83), citing as one of Marx’s intellectual antecedents Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59) ‘Well before Marx, in the early eighteenth century’. [13] His citation of Macaulay is from 1828 when Marx was ten. Perhaps this will be corrected in future editions – that is, if ascertaining historical fact is possible. ‘Marxism may now, by the late twentieth century, seem little more than an irrelevant corpse; but no historically conscious thinker can avoid confronting the revolutionary and lasting challenge which Karl Marx…made to traditional views of history.’ Southgate will make no attempt here ‘to examine Marxism in any detail’; the purpose is simply to include Marxism amongst a bunch of ‘isms’ (feminism, postcolonialism) that challenge ‘the conventional model of  “history”…’ [14]

          Allowing for the injunction of brevity that he has placed upon himself, Southgate is not all that much more accurate about what Marx did and wrote than he is about Macaulay’s chronology, though he writes plausibly enough:

Marx deliberately set out to replace conventional or ‘bourgeois’ history with his own, and that replacement was to be effected for an explicitly ‘ideological’ purpose: his revised account of the past was presented as underpinning for a political programme for the future. The function of philosophy, Marx believed, was not simply to interpret the world, but actually to change it; and in his practical ambitions for the future, a key role was to be played by his theories of past history. He knew well that, for future change to be encouraged, some understanding had to be given that people’s own situation was not static, but a part of an on-going historical process; and, like other historians, he interpreted that process in such a way that his own desired outcome would seem to be natural and necessary. [15]

Southgate here alludes to the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach (1845): ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it.’ I do not see here any pronouncement on the proper function of philosophy as being to change the world. Rather, the import is that the philosophers are beside the point. I leave it to readers to determine for themselves whether or not Marx is implying the entire supersession of philosophy as a social endeavour: I am myself inclined to believe he is. But Marx is evidently not always saying what Southgate imputes to him.

          Southgate certainly gives Marx more living-space than his fellow postmodernist Alun Munslow, whose generally biased reference work, The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies, offers an entry neither on Marx nor on Marxism, an omission seemingly so glaring as to appear to verge on the partisan. [16]

          Glaring omission or otherwise it may, however, be curiously fitting that Marx is left out of Munslow’s Companion, whether or not for reasons Munslow himself would allow.

          Did Marx set out to replace conventional or “bourgeois” historical study with his own?  Let me quote a bit more from Southgate:

[…] Marx’s own emphasis on ‘the development of material production’ as the crucial element of historical change, was particularly important, since it implied that that change did not come about purely by chance: rather, it resulted from the operation of certain observable laws. And those laws were economic. For the social and political structure of society at any given time was determined by its economic structure; and that had to do with production, with ‘labour’, and with the way humans first subsisted and later earned their livings. [17]

The ‘laws’ indicated here, though not cited with any reference by Southgate, are no doubt taken from Marx’s 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, viz.:

At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression for the same thing – with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters. Then occurs a period of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.[18]

Thus it seems according to Southgate that Marx’s ‘own emphasis on “the development of material production” as the crucial element of historical change’ constitutes the replacement of ‘conventional or “bourgeois” history with his own’.

          Much hinges on what Southgate means by a ‘conventional’ or ‘bourgeois’ characterisation of the past. If it is taken in its classic definition by Ranke as ‘what actually happened’, then in no sense does Marx gainsay such a concept of history by creating his ‘own’ history. Marx’s ‘materialist conception’ certainly defies what he considers to be bourgeois practices of mystification in pursuit of historical truth, but Marx challenges these practices on the grounds of inaccuracy of representation due to ideological reasons. His purpose is to base his reading of human development – at any rate the capitalist phase of it - on more scientific grounds by relating it to the fundamental materiality of human existence on earth, itself an extension, in a special social-cultural form, of natural history. The materialist emphasis is (more or less) original in terms of the thought of his day: to combat an idealist reading of history with a materialist one. For example, men’s lives are not in the first instance guided by a ‘spirit of the age’, because – on the contrary - invocations of such ‘spirits’ are conceived ex post facto from the experience of contemporary and explicable material conditions. Yet Marxist historiography certainly allows for a reflexive impact of ideas back on to actions. It is, after all, Marx who maintains that ideas themselves can be ‘a material force’ in given circumstances.

But this is not enough to corral Marx into a general onslaught against the possibility of achieving a verification of truths about the past. Marx has had an immense impact on economic and social historical studies. An entire school of Marxist historians in Britain exemplified this influence in the middle decades of the twentieth century, and this school is by no means without its younger and up and coming adherents. Precisely because he has imposed no theory of history per se upon them, except in as much as he demands a focus upon human material existence and its relationships in all its facets in all epochs, with a more specific emphasis on capital in the capitalist epoch, and in as much as Marx’s whole perspective is revolutionary and anti-capitalist, Marx has helped to stimulate historians (including non-Marxist ones) towards further empirical (not empiricist) historical researches with differences of style and analysis amongst them. There are perhaps almost as many controversies of interpretation amongst Marxist historians as there are differences between Marxist/materialist and non-Marxist historians. I would go so far as to say that his impact specifically on historians could not be theoretical in any thoroughgoingly philosophical sense if he was to influence them at all, in all their variety. No philosopher of history as such, with his or her ‘theory of history’, has had anything like the same impact on working historians as has Marx.[19]

Marx did not, in other words, overturn the whole ‘bourgeois’ project of the grasp of the truth of the past. On the contrary, he continued and supplemented it by influencing others into taking it in new directions, with new given emphases – such as (most vividly in The Communist Manifesto) bringing in the uncongenial class war that he would maintain pervades class-bound and dominated societies in almost every epoch at least after the advent of agriculturally-based cultures. Since class war is based upon competitive material appropriation of social surplus product, its conceptualisation is all of a piece with the concept of the essential materiality of human existence upon the earth, the extension and mediation of the natural history of animal needs and dependence into and within human social-cultural society after the latter has reached a decisive stage beyond hunter-gathering that is capable of producing a long-term, preserved material surplus wealth.

Once he and Engels in early works such as The Holy Family and The German Ideology had overturned the idealism and mystification of previous approaches to history, they were not much interested thereafter in the philosophy or theory of history as such, since to their lights all such theorising tended to the idealist. And on these grounds of sheer neglect might not rate an entry in Munslow. The mature Marx confines his general historical remarks – if such they are - to a single Preface in an otherwise (as it turned out) mainly unread book. He did not enlarge upon them in any subsequent sustained fashion. And carried on devoting what remained of his life’s work to exposing the ‘iron laws’ of capital, not of ‘history’ per se. His own somewhat limited practice as an historian, notably in such short works as The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which Engels singled out in a recommendation to those who wished to examine Marx’s historical method in action, shows him to have integrated personalities and politics with social, cultural and economic phenomena around given events following the 1848 revolution in France which he seeks to interpret. Today it reads something like a lengthy, in-depth piece of investigative and polemical journalism depicting fairly recent happenings. Thus it sustains an integrated approach, but there are neither idealist, economistic nor postmodernistic biases or implications in it. Marx’s greatest historiographical successor in this regard so far is Leon Davidovich Trotsky, whose My Life, 1905 and History of the Russian Revolution (which, though much lengthier than Eighteenth Brumaire, also have a journalistic zest) range across the entire life of political and social Russia in the revolutionary periods, fully integrating the impact of individual personalities with mass movements and economic and politically strategic developments. Neither in theory nor in practice do Marx and his historian exemplars depart from Southgate’s ‘conventional’ practices. Their aim is to expose the underlying processes of history integrating them with surface events and personalities. And that means that they are just as much in pursuit of ‘historical reality and truth’ as are any other historians, although – it might be maintained – dialectically better equipped to do so than many.

Nor did Marx’s history attempt to replace ‘bourgeois’ history to effect ‘an explicitly “ideological” purpose’: the quotes around ‘ideological’ suggest this was his conscious intention, but Marx consistently maintained the view that ideology, whilst reflecting the truth of its environment with fidelity, remains false consciousness of that environment: false, that is, because it does not grasp the underlying material realities and relationships of it and instead seeks to obscure them in the pursuit of ruling-class domination in any society in which one class dominates over others. Many today (as many have done before) may deem Marx’s writing ‘ideological’ in essence and in intent: he himself did not – quite the contrary. Southgate is reading into Marx’s intentions subsequent ideas held about Marx that he did not hold of himself.

          Nor, pace Southgate, does Marx say anywhere that ‘the social and political structure of society at any given time was determined by its economic structure’, as any close reading of the 1859 Preface, for example, will show. Life is rather more complicated than that – as Engels in his late letters went to some pains to say when arguing against the dogmatic economism of some of Marxism’s erstwhile followers in the 1890s. The ‘economic determinism’ of Marx is a myth and a shibboleth.

          ‘Production’, for Marx, is a rich concept. It is used by him and by Engels to refer to the production and re-production of real human life. This is necessarily material, but what is ‘material’? Does it not also include matters of biology and of consciousness: of cognition and language, of belief, of art, magic, science, law and so on? Have we not found – and not simply from reading the 1859 Preface - that the political, legal and social stabilisation of societies tends to be a pre-condition for their further economic development and consolidation, a development that is threatened when these societies become destabilised perhaps beyond repair or reform? [20] Is theory-making not also ‘production’, or a branch of it? We are so used to thinking of ‘production’ as merely a category within economics (and Marx does so also to the extent that his principal subject matter, capital, more and more absorbs human productive activity for the purposes of profit accumulation) that we forget the word’s specifically Marxist origin as meaning the totality of specifically human social being and survival from earliest times. In Southgate’s somewhat garbled account of half-truths, crucial nuances invariably suffer. But then, if there is no such thing as historical truth it may perhaps be inconsistent to write as if there were.

V

          Getting to the root of Southgate’s discussion on feminism is this passage:

Language, then, inevitably expresses one specific viewpoint on the world (our own), and it thereby necessarily excludes alternative possibilities. If we spoke and wrote another language, we might experience the world quite differently. And the same applies to history, or our experience of the past.

          That point is central to feminist critiques of historiography, for it is argued that our whole history – our whole past and our account of that past – is written in a language that derives from and in turn underpins an essentially ‘patriarchal’ structure. That is, men and male attitudes have long been dominant in western societies, so that those attitudes perceived as being ‘male’ have been deliberately fostered, with corresponding values transmitted through our very language. History, then, has come to be written, not only with a certain emphasis, but in a language or ‘discourse’ that confirms that emphasis. So, it is claimed, historians are all trapped, often unconsciously, within a linguistically confirmed conceptual and chronological framework that minimises the value of the ‘female’.

Further on in the text, Dr Southgate follows up his apparently highly sympathetic portrayal of feminism with a quotation from Hélène Cixous, which concludes with: ‘…What would become…of the great philosophical systems, of world order in general, if the rock upon which they founded their church were to crumble?’ [21]

          Possibly a quibble with the last sentence in the first paragraph quoted: ‘If we spoke and wrote another language, we might experience the world quite differently.’ Why not put this the other way round, and say: ‘If we experienced the world quite differently, we might speak and write another language’?  Surely Southgate has it the wrong way round. We might make a start by considering the origins of England and of France. Behind the differences between their respective languages lie two whole cultures and histories, not to speak of geographies and associated phenomena (including literature, indeed) from a long time back. The origins of the differences are not wholly linguistic, and even if the linguistic is the means by which the differences are formulated and conveyed, that simply begs the question as to what lies behind the linguistic differences. English and French – and the differences between them - did not simply appear out of the blue or on utterly formal foundations.  To argue on other grounds, I am not convinced that those whose own language and background and residence are English but who happen also to write and/or speak French fluently, necessarily come to experience the world subjectively in any very significantly different way from those other English who lack the facility – apart perhaps from being able to enter more freely into the totality of French culture with the added breadth of experience that this offers. But even that is not an invariable follow-on. It is quite possible that an English-born, English-resident French speaker could retain all the insular snobberies and xenophobia for which the English are perhaps unjustly notorious. It is, of course, a possibility that the world order would become a good deal more stable if we all spoke Russian and/or Mandarin Chinese as our second/third languages, but I would not bet good money on it. During the Cold War, for example, many Russians in and out of the MVD/KGB, Intourist and the Soviet diplomatic service were trained to a high degree of proficiency in American English, even down to its demotic forms; this did not have, nor was it intended to have, a generally peaceable and non-competitive effect reversing Cold War politics and intrigue. Apart from anything else Communist interrogatory proficiency in American English was instrumental in the so-called ‘brainwashing’ of certain American POWs during the Korean War.

          But on to the main point, that is, on feminism.

          The principal object of feminism is nothing less than the liberation of women from male domination in all, most or many of its manifestations. Reaching this objective may take a number of forms. It may take the form of a female ‘chauvinism’ that excludes the validity of men altogether. Or, it may take the form of combating sexism and the prejudicial emphasis on gender – that is, to show that such differences as exist amongst people should not be put down essentially to their inherent biological-gender characteristics because such differences as arise are mainly socially engendered (and engendered by men, with the aid of female Fifth Columnists – even and especially female Daily Mail columnists). Yet again, another variety of feminism may take no more than the form of the advocating of equal rights and non-discrimination for the sexes – political, and/or social and economic - allowing for gender differences such as they are, and as perhaps best left undefined. The last of these seems to have been the enduring and fruitful legacy of modern feminism since the nineteen seventies, (indeed it is central to liberalism at least from the time and example of John Stuart Mill), because it is the feminist form that probably most men and women – at any rate in Western culture – can accept without seeing it as a violation of ancient religious or other taboos. Interestingly, though, the continuing and chronic problem of unequal pay for women, because of its immediate if not long-term negative consequences for capitalist profits if wage and salary equality becomes pervasive, has not yet been successfully solved by feminism or even, perhaps, adequately stressed and addressed. It is part of a larger conundrum to do with capitalism keeping wages down generally – as well as undermining ‘the social wage’, something that particularly affects working-class women – whilst being dependent for growth upon an effective demand that comes only with increased mass purchasing power.[22] On the issue of unequal pay for women we see one aspect of feminism that opens out into a wider class and economics perspective.

          Feminists are certainly correct, in my view anyhow, to assume that the reclamation of history for women is vitally important to whichever perspective within the cause that they follow, and it is scandalously true that half the human race has traditionally been neglected in much of the history we have been taught except as tokens, though prodigious amends are continually being made for this, spearheaded by women historians. I am particularly impressed by comparatively recent researches on the women of the whole epoch of the Middle Ages which have immeasurably enriched and even transformed medieval studies taken as a whole.

          However, all this points to reclamation of history in the name of the truth of the reality of the past. If nothing in the past can be claimed for truth, then there is no point to reclamation. Why bother investigating the lives and consciousness of the women of the past with prodigious and detailed and well-annotated research if the whole concept and activity of verification is ‘patriarchal’ and thus to be done away with?

          The same might be said by extension about postcolonialism and gay or queer studies. The history of African slavery has been revaluated from the perspective of the black Africans who were enslaved, and/or that of their descendents. This has got Western white politicians apologising to African nations for the ‘blot’ of slavery in the past, though falling somewhat short of cancelling present-day African indebtedness. Important studies have appeared on homosexuality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, a long-taboo subject matter. Surely all of this is for the good of historical studies in general. But what is the point of reclaiming these histories if – when rendered – they are in their turn subjected to a ‘postmodernist’ levelling in deconstruction within discourse? What does that do either for feminist, postcolonial or queer histories? That is, as playing vital roles in the liberation and indeed identification of these previously repressed and suppressed groups, not to speak of repression of their consciousness? Historians working in these fields do not so far appear to question the very possibility of achieving historical verification and truth – else, why are they so engaged?

          Dr Southgate believes that there is ‘an important sense, then, in which feminism is contributing to the de-stabilisation of historical study’. This is summed up in a slightly earlier passage that shows how it could be done, whilst also inserting something like a subliminal TV commercial for the linguistic approach:

          One way out of this self-serving circularity [history written by self-serving men to reinforce male values and aspirations] is to change our language, to modify it in such a way that it encapsulates and expresses female rather than male values and aspirations. Priority could then be given, not to such ‘masculine’ virtues as rationality and order, but to previously repressed ‘feminine’ qualities, sometimes expressed in poetry, mysticism, magic, and madness.[23]

It is as well that Dr Southgate puts quotes around ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ in this context, since the import seems dangerously near to reinforcing the very hoary old sexist prejudices that feminists have fought against so long and so hard. For such a prescription might well serve to ramify masculine prejudices as to a view of women as intuitive rather than educated or logical. Women in this perspective are essentially childlike, even silly creatures (given easily to hysterics, or ‘madness’) who, if not already running the covens of Wicca, have to be appealed to by the magical and mystical means to which they respond the best, perhaps because their brains are smaller than men’s. No point in their trying to grasp matters of logic and rationality that only men are capable of understanding. It seems all rather Victorian to me and is undoubtedly sexist in import because it appears to enshrine time-honoured masculine and feminine qualities set in stone, and as precisely those qualities that, when enumerated, appear to support the crudest sexism. No wonder we see ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ put in quotes here: a certain embarrassing literalism as to pronouncements on the possibly ‘true’ natures of the two genders is thus narrowly avoided. I am not sure Dr Southgate is altogether the feminist’s best friend, when one reads the fine print. As for Cixous’s crumbling of the great philosophical systems and of the world order in general, it would seem that if this is to be viewed from the perspective of male-female antagonism and the postmodernist onslaught on ‘objective truth’, it cannot do the feminist cause much good, since it undermines the feminine claim to truth as surely as it does the masculine.  Then nobody rules!  That is, except the postmodernist linguistic guru, whose imperialist claim on all consciousness is revealed in full splendour after the dust settles! If viewed from a politically radical class angle, on the other hand, one social and political consequence of this ‘crumbling’ might well be a substantial enhancing of women’s empowerment. 

          As for bringing poetry and intuition to the study and writing of history, there is nothing inherently wrong with this, even if some (male or female) historians might object. History comes in all shapes and sizes – heavily and strictly factual, weighted with statistics, or little more than compiled documents and chronicles; narrative undramatic or fairly dramatic whatever the case may be; or impressionist, emotive, colourfully descriptive and so on. The point is that it does not absolutely require a female historian to supply the intuition, the impressionism, the emotional and the descriptive, etc. I have read deeply intuitive and somewhat emotional male historians, as well as female economic historians of a forensic hard-headedness and an extremely dry way with a statistic or indeed with whole appendices of statistics. I don’t much see what the gender of the historian has to do with it, necessarily.

VI

          Dr Southgate winds up with a final chapter, ‘What and Why? The future of history’, in which postmodernism’s relevance to history is advanced in four sections.

          The first section is ‘Questioning chronology: past, present and future’, taking as its epigraph TS Eliot’s famous lines in ‘Burnt Norton’ referring to the interrelating and merging of times present, times past and times future. Aristotle, our first philosopher of history, is the culprit who in characteristic matter-of-fact fashion got us on the wrong track by positing a strict separation between past, present and future.

          But the idea that an historian of, say, the Elizabethan Poor Law can do his or her job properly whilst being deliberately ignorant of modern legislation on social security is a delusion. We each of us view the past from our ineluctable position in the present and with reference to the future, and indeed it is this present position which – as in the case of the Poor Law historian – may enrich his or her account of the antecedents of modern social security. Southgate criticises Herbert Butterfield for the latter’s strongly held condemnation of Whiggish history for approaching the past in the light of the Whiggish triumphal present. And he cites Ernst Mayr who notes that the treatment of the history of biological science ‘justifies, indeed necessitates, the neglect of certain temporary developments in biology that left no impact on the subsequent history of ideas’. [24]  As revealed in a number of other quotations, we must say that ‘Without some sense of the present and future, our grasp on the past becomes too tenuous,’ and – in response to John Forrester’s claim that the past dissolves in the present, with the future not specified by the fixity of the past - ‘That challenge to traditional chronological distinctions, with the implied opening up of future possibilities, constitutes one ingredient of the postmodern predicament in historical study’.

          It seems that it might also constitute ‘one ingredient’ in the historical materialist approach to history. For historical materialists, an understanding of the past is important for revolutionary praxis in the present, if not entirely encompassed in a gung-ho spirit of emphasising ‘up the workers!’ at every turn in the writing of historical texts. I would say that a grasp of the objectivity of historical processes – in other words, the making of a truth claim on aspects of our past – is what follows from historical materialist praxis, but not from the practice of postmodernism. Postmodernists and historical materialists agree on the general fruitfulness of upsetting people’s complacency fed by conventional or ‘Aristotelian’ rigidities on past, present and future, but that is about as far as the mutuality goes.

          As a history student long ago I ran up against the abjuration of various tutors and textbook writers on not reading into the thoughts and actions of people in the past that which may pre-occupy us now. Such is not ‘sound scholarship’, which is to describe and detail what was said and done in the past without overly suggestive allusions to future happenings and thoughts which in ontological terms could not have impinged on that past. Such is the sin of teleology. The victory of England in 1588 over the Spanish Armada has no direct, specific bearing on the rise of the English bourgeoisie but seems to do so in the light of that bourgeois triumph two-hundred-odd years’ later, hence its elevation to mythic status. Yet there is a sense in which the future appears to dominate the past, especially if whatever scheme is in mind has been successful – rare indeed for most of the grand designs of history. Bismarck was probably the most consistently successful world statesman who has ever lived, at least till his downfall in 1890. One is forced to read of his victorious military campaigns on behalf of Prussia in the 1860s – waged against Denmark, against Austria, ultimately in 1870 against France - in the light of what happened in their culmination: the proclamation of a German Empire in 1871. It is difficult to avoid an idea of a will to power in this sequence, of the inescapable pull of a ‘national destiny’, even if the nature of that ‘destiny’ was not necessarily in accord with Bismarck’s ingrained Prussian/Protestant conservatism. Similarly, by 1917 a great Russian Revolution seems in retrospect to have been the pull of the future against all that struggled against its realisation up to that year.

As against all this, the history pedagogue has recourse to two tools of insight: the first is the ‘Cleopatra’s Nose’ approach, which lies in the detailed examination of events and phenomena – perhaps on a day-by-day basis – and that shows us something fancifully though temptingly analogous to the apparent chaos of the quantum world as opposed to the majestic ordering and rotation of the planets and stars. A moment-by-moment account of Napoleon Bonaparte’s misgivings, collywobbles and fainting-fit prior to his Eighteenth Brumaire seizure of power suggests that, what with the possibility of anything going wrong here or there, this otherwise fateful coup d’etat might not have been brought off. The Bolshevik Revolution might not have occurred – at any rate when it did in November 1917 - if Lenin had not reached the Finland Station at a timely moment in April 1917, courtesy of the Germans, and begun to dissuade his Bolshevik comrades of their adhesion to ‘Menshevik’ ideas and a delaying policy. The other tutor-ish ploy lies in emphasising the ambiguity of the so-called ‘call of destiny’ – that is, examining a longer-term outcome of any given process. Thus Napoleon the ‘man of destiny’ was defeated at Waterloo in 1815 with his ‘destiny’ somewhat ignominiously terminated at St Helena. Bismarck’s new Germany henceforth faced the consequences of having become a major central European power sat in the middle between East and West that was fated necessarily to destabilise the balance of power between them and to fight two world wars both on two fronts – and was defeated and almost destroyed in both. The Bolshevik Revolution had played itself out by the 1980s and - seventy-four years’ on from 1917 – the Soviet experiment, as it were, had collapsed. Students of history may be unduly tempted by the Macbeth syndrome: Macbeth makes himself believe in the call of destiny to kingship as prophesied by the Weird Sisters but neglects to grasp that their prophecies also cover his subsequent downfall. So much for ‘destiny’, the pedagogue might inform us: leave things for long enough and no such teleological pattern of triumph is ultimately sustainable. (Or, ‘in the long run we are all dead,’ so goes the memorable Keynes epigram.)

It is ironic that Butterfield’s critical Whig Interpretation of History was published in 1931, the year of the great financial crisis in Europe and the election of a National Government in Britain, while in the United States the Great Depression was underway: a Depression that might have had no end but for the timely intervention of World War Two. The biggest criticism of teleological Whiggery and its bourgeois triumph lay all about: knowingly or not, Butterfield had chosen his moment well and his critique hit home. A despairing bourgeois liberal historian of the period, the historian of modern Europe HAL Fisher, opined that he, for one, discerned no pattern or process, let alone progress, in history at all.

This kind of despair is useful for empirically minded historical scholars. They can consign ‘grand narratives’ to the dustbin (as Lyotard was to do thirty-odd years’ after Fisher, presumably thinking he had laid down an original diktat) and then cheerfully get on with their work of sifting and tabulating evidence. They still go on thinking that there is an identifiable ‘past’ from which evidence may be gathered but they are no longer lumbered – if they felt they ever were - with the responsibility of characterising it in any very grand or theoretical fashion. The only problem remaining for them lies in establishing the periodisation for their particular study when comes time to publish. What is the start-year and what is the end-year, and why any specific ones? If there is no meaning to anything it is difficult to establish a beginning and an end point of any non-arbitrary significance. Yet any historical study has to have boundaries of some sort or it would simply go on and on, from further and further back to further and further forward. There is something basically unsatisfactory and arbitrary yet also vague about most periodisations, but regarding periodisations, as the saying goes: can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em. Now let us ask Dr Southgate to return us more pointedly to our theme:

Our choices of starting-point, though, do seriously affect our subsequent interpretations. For just as we choose our standpoint from which to perceive our world or our historical data, so too we choose the chronological parameters or boundaries of our narrative, in order to construct a meaningful account of what has happened. And in that construction, the present and the future will play an important part. Our perception and our story of the past will depend both upon our present position and upon our vision of the future. [25]

It is difficult to quarrel with the concept that history as written is largely constructed in the fashion Southgate describes here. Yet here again we have the postmodernist sleight-of-hand trick wrapped up inside the apparently otherwise indubitably commonsense statement. It lies in the last sentence. ‘Our perception and our story of the past will depend both upon our present position and upon our vision of the future.’ Well, yes, to some extent, perhaps to a greater or lesser extent. For what we choose to tell historically does not depend wholly upon our present situation and our vision of the future – that is, in a broadly psychological or ideological sense. After all, we have to have something to tell, and unlike novelists historians cannot make it up out of their heads. They are not that creative, or they might be doing something else.  Much of the stimulus for the telling will lie in where the particular study has been left before the historian in question has got hold of it. For example, supposing much depends on locating a piece of evidence that so far has not been found and identified? An historian may be goaded into furthering the research by the calculable hope of a holy-grail type of discovery that will fit the pieces together. This is ‘present situation’ and ‘vision of the future’ if you like, but very narrowly so. The ‘future’ vision in this case being the anticipation of tenure or the achievement of a professorship, perhaps, if the historian successfully completes a task that had been seen as incomplete before, not to speak of a sedately professional satisfaction derived from the achievement – perhaps given expression in cracking open a bottle of modestly-priced wine. Small beer (or wine) compared to the vast ontological delusion which is supposed to characterise all historical endeavour. It seems that it is postmodernists who think in ‘grand narrative’ terms rather than most jobbing historians.

          Perhaps I shall indulge in a little linguistic turning of my own. A problem with the English language, which otherwise – as foreigners complain – usually has almost too many nouns or synonyms for the same thing, is that English uses only the word ‘history’ to cover too many things.  English does not have one word that signifies the writing of history and another signifying history itself. And perhaps there ought to be a third term to distinguish the historical academic discipline as an institutional arrangement, usually found occupying buildings and employing staff within either an Arts or a Social Sciences faculty, depending on the university. And perhaps a fourth term that is more synonymous with ‘destiny’ or past achievement leading to later glory, as in: ‘this nation’s history is what made it great’. So when one discusses ‘history’ one has to qualify the term interminably one way or another to make one’s reference clear. Parallel with this minor linguistic confusion is a common inability to distinguish between ‘history’ and what specifically goes on over long stretches of time in the human past – that is, in terms of phenomena, processes and developments of various kinds. People are often inclined to impart to ‘history’ that which lies within a continuum we call ‘history’. The young Marx and Engels made this reification fairly clear:

          Just as, for the earlier teleological thinkers, plants existed only in order to be eaten by animals, and animals only in order to be eaten by man, so history exists only to satisfy the need for consuming theoretical nourishment, for demonstration. Man exists so that history shall exist, and history exists so that truth can be revealed. In this critically debased form there is repeated the old speculative wisdom, according to which man and history exist so that truth can become conscious of itself.

          History thus becomes, like truth, a separate entity, a metaphysical subject of which the real human individuals are only mere representatives. That is why the ‘Critical School’ makes use of such expressions as ‘History is not mocked; history has made the greatest efforts; history has been active; what is history’s purpose?; history gives us the final proof; history reveals truths,’ etc.

And in another somewhat more vociferous passage:

History does nothing; it ‘does not possess immense riches’, it ‘does not fight battles’. It is men, real, living men, who do all this, who possess things and fight battles. It is not ‘history’ which uses men as a means of achieving – as if it were an individual person – its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends. [26]

It is perhaps no wonder that Marx and Engels did not get beyond a ‘materialist conception of history’ as a methodological tool. That is, no wonder that they developed neither a theory nor a philosophy of ‘history’ per se. Though frequently reified into a thing, as it were, there is no such entity to theorise or philosophise about. That is, beyond stating that ‘history’ as such does not exist. Is there then much purpose in philosophising beyond such a starting point?  I wonder why HAL Fisher despaired at all, when he realised that ‘history’, for him, had no meaning. Is it because otherwise he would naturally have identified ‘history’ as having a meaning and purpose of its own (perhaps to do with bourgeois triumphalism, if only it had not seemed so very triumphant by the nineteen-thirties)?

          The closest Marx comes to using the term in a sweeping sense is when in the Preface he describes the socialism that is to arise after a period of social revolution indicating that ‘the prehistory of human society comes to an end’. By this is implied (in the usage ‘of’) a concrete totality of the actions of human beings within a time continuum. We have ‘history’ and we have ‘history of…’ As I suggested, English has no means of distinguishing the two concepts by the simple expedient of two different nouns. Earlier in this chapter, when I wrote of, say, reclaiming the history of black African slaves, it was a shorthand for the reclamation of the totality of actions done by and to black African slaves over a lengthy period of time in the past.

          Most historians write the ‘history of…’, not ‘history’. Few of my acquaintance are willing to proffer grand disquisitions on history itself, usually on the modest grounds of ignorance of those many aspects of historical study they know little about on a professional level.  For this reason – that is, their unwillingness to venture into the realms of historical theory - historians have tended to be somewhat looked down upon by philosophers and others in the more theoretical reaches of social science. Each historian pursues a specialist object from the past: his or her life’s work may well be grounded in it. The question ‘What is history?’ holds very little meaning for – I suggest – most of them. It is too vague because the entity as such does not exist, or can ‘exist’ only as a metaphysical entity beloved of philosophers, Hegelian or otherwise. On this point I suggest that most historians, without in any sense considering themselves Marxists, will be inclined to agree with the Marx and Engels view put forward above. Thereafter, of course, their various agendas may reach the parting of the ways from the agenda of historical materialist praxis.

          What is the meaning of yesterday? By that, I am asking: what does your literal ‘yesterday’, the period you spent between sun up and sundown previous to the interval of night that was followed by today actually mean? We often speak of having had ‘a good day’ or ‘a bad day’ or ‘a red-letter day’ when things went incredibly well. This, again, is shorthand. Even if some of us accept the theory of biorhythms, we don’t really believe that the day itself, apart from its diurnal nature, has its own character, its own meaning, performing its own actions or imparting meaning to the actions going on within its time span between sunrise and sunset. What we mean by characterising a day as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or ‘productive’ and so on is an indication of the weather pertaining that day, or of the actions we engaged in during our waking hours or the experiences we encountered or the people we met or the accident we had or what we heard on the news within (say) a twelve-hour period identified by the name of a day of the week and a number on the calendar. There is no meaning to the day qua day. Even Christmas Day would hardly be much without decorated trees, carol services and – for the religious – celebrating the birth of the Christ Child, giving and receiving gifts, hours in the heat of the kitchen, quarrelling with our in-laws, seeing the Monarch on TV and complaining about the repeats, drinking too much and getting stuffed to the point of torpor on turkey and bread sauce.

          Perhaps that puts over how we mainly characterise ‘history’, which otherwise is just one big Yesterday, and nothing else. In this sense there is no ‘meaning’ to history because there cannot be. Thus it must be, on the other hand, that theorising about ‘history’ will reach the heights of the most sophistical of theological constructions.

          In other words, ‘history’ is only a shorthand term for what has been done here and what has been done there, what has germinated, what has happened, what has befallen, what has followed. Identifying and following the processes, it becomes possible then to examine the various phenomena both synchronically and diachronically. Historical study lies in discovering and examining the phenomena – that is, whichever phenomena are of especial concern to the pursuer – yet also there is more than the ‘historical’ way of doing so. 

          Dr Southgate concludes his book with a great deal of emphasis on what history does, or rather, what it can do, for you and for me and for everybody else. He writes of its ‘potential to unshackle minds from the constraints of the present’, that ‘it offers alternative perceptions of what has been in the past and so of what might be in the future’. An important role for history ‘is simply to liberate its students from chronological constraints’, ‘to expose us to other possibilities, to enable us to distance ourselves from our immediate present, and to view ourselves in a wider perspective; for we may then be made aware of alternative options for the future. The past and present and future are then once again seen as indissolubly interconnected, and our preferred options for the future can determine our apprehension of the past…history might then enable us to make the sort of world we think we want.’ [27]

          But ‘history’ does nothing.

          To assume, to the contrary, that ‘history’ does a good many things and might be capable of doing a great many more is to become mired in idealist reification. And if the emphasis lies on using or manipulating the past, not as a continuum for objective past reality as found in past phenomena that may be identified, but as for writing whatever stories we wish to spin in the frank acknowledgement that there is no ‘true’ story about what happened in the past in any case, then it is quite likely that we will lose all intellectual bearings whatever.

Extremists may speculate about the desirability of living with a past that is recognised as meaningless, but on both personal and public levels any attempt actually to do that seems doomed to result in failure, or insanity. It seems to be simply impossible to accept meaninglessness with equanimity. …The interpretation [of historical data] may tell us more about ourselves than about any ‘objective’ reality, but at least we will have avoided simply accepting a convention from the past, and will have made our own conscious and deliberate decision…The past has to be re-constituted, or even literally re-membered. And this is undertaken, not as a theoretical game, but in furtherance of a practical programme.

But if most of what I learn in my researches is about myself and not about what I am researching, is this not a cause for some despair? And how much is our ability to make our own conscious decisions impaired by living in a hall of mirrors? At any rate it is not necessary to ‘live with a past that is recognised as meaningless’ if one refuses to reify ‘history’ as Dr Southgate apparently reifies it. One may seize meaning from any number of events and phenomena of the past and, without jettisoning scholarship and accuracy and a respect for ‘objective’ truth, indeed on the contrary adhering to the admittedly philosophically untidy standards of scientific observation and analysis, find in that meaning a reason for the cause, whatever that cause may be, that we champion in the present for the future.

          But now, once more, comes the postmodernist commercial:

Through an examination of the past, we can be helped to see how we became what we currently are. For past ideas of social class, femininity, masculinity, dominance, and subjection, and innumerable other factors, have all contributed to our make-up, to the way that we are perceived by others and by ourselves. If we wish to change those present perceptions and actually to reconstitute ourselves for the future, then we shall need to re-interpret, re-perceive the past, as leading rather to our new ideal. [28]

The ‘past idea’ of ‘social class’ (as if class and socio-economic struggle were no longer around in present-day societies) can, in other words, be removed for the sake of ‘changing our perceptions’ of ourselves and others. And the way to do this is to ‘re-interpret, re-perceive’ the past. Presumably this means doctoring such data as we have from the past in order to airbrush out the ‘class conflict’ bit of it so that we may emerge without being shackled any longer by such a thing as class consciousness. In one way or another, as Dr Southgate concludes in the last sentence of his book: ‘history can thereby help to determine the future that we want’. [29]  But since, I repeat ad nauseam, history does nothing, it seems Dr Southgate has a far grander ‘grand narrative’ in mind for history taken as a whole than even such relatively extravagant historians of civilisation as Arnold J. Toynbee once put forward. It is certainly not something that interests or concerns, I strongly suspect, the majority of the working historians at whose trade Southgate has aimed his various insinuations, that is, because of their persistence in believing in their various ‘myths’.

          But what if actual class conflict persists or, as appears to be happening in our twenty-first century, intensifies? What if rich nations get ever richer and poor nations ever poorer? What if we are passing the point of no return on environmental catastrophe? What if we cannot ‘reconstitute’ ourselves, however much we might like to, away from consciousness of these continuing deadly processes no matter how much of the more uncongenial past we seek to airbrush out?

          That Dr Southgate’s message is somewhat incoherent does not stop it being potentially effective in terms of influencing minds. Minds have been influenced by incoherence before now. That this conclusion reeks of idealist, even solipsistic reasoning should not distract us from the fact that its ultimate purpose seems to be to induce a new variety of intellectual and moral quiescence, fit for the rigours of a new century in which exploitation may be enabled to intensify to an ever greater degree through the approval of the exploited – that is, with the help of those young intellectuals who are tutored by Dr Southgate among others.

          The book is much too upbeat in conclusion to qualify as quite the most ‘postmodern’ text there could be, and in that sense is strangely disappointing. One would have liked a little more on the uselessness of grasping hold of anything except language in a ceaseless relativity of being. There are, after all, it turns out, apparently objective ‘goals’ to strive for, even if ‘objective truth’ by dint of being grasped in a rational manner has been ruled out as patriarchal etc. Achieving these ‘goals’ necessitates consigning the ‘past idea’ of ‘social class’ to the dustbin, so that we may in some manner or other come to empower ourselves (we shall certainly empower somebody). Perhaps Dr Southgate is right after all, if miracles can happen.

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[1] Beverly Southgate, History: What and Why? Ancient, modern and postmodern perspectives (London: Routledge, 1997) ix

[2] Ibid. x

[3] Ibid. x

[4] John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: aims, methods and new directions in the study of modern history (Harlow: Pearson, 2000) 3^rd edition 131. 

[5] Southgate op. cit. xi

[6] Friedrich Engels, ‘Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy’, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Selected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1991) 573

[7] Southgate op. cit. 5. Dr Southgate omits to mention that Prof. Eagleton has some highly critical things pre-1996 to say about postmodernism in other writings.

[8] It should be said that this apparent artistic antipathy to ‘theory’ has not always been so. Surrealism, to take only one example, was with a number of its leading artists and writers such as Dali and Breton imbued with an absorption in psychoanalytic theory, just as Impressionists (so-called) had found ramifications for their approach to representation from theories of optics.  Those who teach in drama colleges and direct in theatres continue to treat Stanislavskian theory as sacrosanct (from my personal observation, many an actor has a well-thumbed My Life in Art on the bookshelf) – as opposed to the fairly widespread indifference to today’s postmodernist ‘performance theory’. There is no inherent reason why artists of any kind should eschew theory when theory is useful to them in the making and performance of their respective arts.

[9] Ibid. 5

[10] Ibid. 6

[11] Ibid. 6

[12] Ibid. 27

[13] Ibid. 91

[14] Ibid. 88. Surely Marxism could have been pictured as either a relevant corpse – perhaps like the bearing of Aristotelian natural philosophy on the subsequent development of science - or as a living body of thought (it does seem to keep going) that is deemed irrelevant by many? Are we to be spared no indignity?

[15] Ibid. 88-89

[16] Alun Munslow, The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies (London: Routledge, 2000)

[17] Southgate op. cit.  89

[18] Karl Marx, 1859 Preface, transl. TB Bottomore, TB Bottomore & Maximilien Rubel (eds.) Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1969) 67-68. It remains a matter of controversy, even among some Marxists, whether Marx is here describing the relationship of capitalism to socialism, or is offering a brief shorthand account of the whole of recorded human history. Marx’s own extensive critiques – including the very book of which this is the Preface (and prefaces generally summarise the findings of the text at hand) - are concerned primarily if not exclusively with capitalism, and therefore to some degree also with pre-capitalist feudalism. 

[19] Others writing on history have made their impact on historians: to bring to mind only, say, Herbert Butterfield, EH Carr, Geoffrey Elton, Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel. But these were essentially historians rather than philosophers of history. There is a case for Michael Oakeshott, though the influence has so far not yet been as pervasive as Marx’s. Another exception in our day may be Michel Foucault, though despite his wide influence on contemporary historians it is difficult to determine just what Foucault was. (Perhaps one has to say the same of Marx!)

[20] Historical (anti-‘Marxist’) revisionists of the 1980s and 1990s make some play with the fact that the French Revolution upset and retarded capitalist development in France for a generation or more. That is, arguing on these grounds that it could not therefore have been a ‘capitalist’ revolution. (Somewhat in danger of judging an intention by an effect.) In fact, as these revisionists are well aware, France was already an advancing capitalist nation by 18^th-century standards prior to the Revolution. The economic disruption caused by the destabilising effects of revolution and war on 1790s France illustrates precisely what Marx intimates in his 1859 Preface: that is, the consequence of a revolution born of a disjuncture between economic developments and political and social relations – a disjuncture leading to ‘a period of social revolution’.

[21] Southgate op. cit. 98, 99

[22] A problem temporarily re solved, at the time of writing, by the growth in financial services finessing and facilitating consumer and household debt running into the trillions of pounds and dollars.

[23] Ibid. 99

[24] Ibid. 110-111

[25] Ibid. 114

[26] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family (1845), transl. TB Bottomore, from Bottomore & Rubel op. cit. 73-74; 78

[27] Southgate op. cit. 134-135

[28] Ibid. 136

[29] Ibid. 137

*  *  *  *  *  

Trying on the Emperor’s Old New Clothes: Hayden White and Intellectual Abdication: A Comment

The older, Rankean historicism was relativistic insofar as it believed that understanding of a historical phenomenon required that the historian view it “in its own terms” or “for itself alone”. Here “objectivity” meant getting outside the historian’s own epoch and culture, viewing the world from its perspective, and reproducing the way the world appeared to the actors in the drama that he was recounting. The newer, absolutist branch of historicism – that of Hegel, Marx, Spengler et alia, those “scientistic” historicists castigated by Popper – claimed to transcend relativism by the importation of scientific theories into historical analysis, use of a technical terminology, and disclosure of the laws that governed the historical process over all times and places. So, too, the more modern, social-scientifically oriented historians claimed to transcend relativism by their use of rigorous method and their avoidance of the “impressionistic” techniques of their more conventional narrativist counterparts. But if my hypothesis is correct, there can be no such thing as a nonrelativistic representation of historical reality, inasmuch as every account of the past is mediated by the language mode in which the historian casts his original description of the historical field prior to any analysis, explanation, or interpretation he may offer of it.

-         Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) pp. 116-117 [added emphasis].

The portion of this passage which I have italicised amounts to “absolutist historicism”, since it is the absolutist proclamation of a principle of relativism. “There can be no such thing”, etc. The phrase following the “inasmuch” is a non sequitur. It does not follow, in other words, that because “every account of the past is mediated by the language mode in which the historian casts his original description…prior to any analysis” etc. that there can be no such thing as a nonrelativist representation. 

It is problematical and possibly dubious whether one could argue that the Rankean method is “relativistic” just because it seeks to enter into the thinking of the past. To seek to grasp how people thought and acted in eras before our own is a scientific approach towards understanding those eras. If I seek to re-imagine and re-create medieval thought in the process of writing a medieval history (a somewhat vital procedure, I would have thought, since differences between medieval thought and our own are central to any discussion from our perspective on the Middle Ages) this does not mean that I myself regard medieval values and ideas as just as good as any others or just as instrumental in plausibly gaining access to knowledge of reality. I do not use medieval methods and attitudes to search out medieval attitudes and methods, any more than did Ranke.

The passage on Hegel, Marx and Spengler (three writers with very different attitudes from one another on the nature of history) is loose, to say the least. White is not averse to flinging a fair bit of his own terminology about when describing them and their successors: (“absolutist branch of historicism”, “narrativist counterparts”, “nonrelativist representation of historical reality,” “language mode”). White is content to follow Popper in the latter’s weakest propositions without examining any of them critically. Thus Spengler is considered “scientistic”. Although Spengler certainly drew biological analogies in his discussion of civilisations and thought civilisations to exhibit the growth and the decay of vitality of a kind similar to that of organisms, he is not widely regarded as a writer who introduced scientific method to the study of history, and these allusions to biology might well be better taken as tropes in White’s sense.  It is perhaps most appropriate to look upon Decline of the West as a prose epic – that is, a work with an epic vision - suffused in an eclectic moralism and in poetical-metaphorical turns of phrase. It can still be read with profit in the sense of being a visionary work and as a document of the early 20^th century in the aftermath of the German defeat in World War I. But Spengler is inaptly (ineptly?) chosen by White for a discussion centred on the history discipline, inapt because Spengler has never held much sway over historians who denigrated him from the start and have never much altered their views. Spengler – because he is essentially a poetic visionary and moralist – appealed much more to poets, novelists and dramatists both in his day and thereafter. (For example posthumously Spengler was an important influence at one time on William S. Burroughs in the latter’s implicit and explicit critiques of Western society.)  Spengler is a contemporaneous non-fiction counterpart of Thomas Mann, the novelist of the epic tragedy of European bourgeois decline. He was never considered by the historical profession taken as a whole as introducing “scientific method” to the study of history, in the sense of the careful and objective weighing up of evidence according to theoretical hypotheses.  Any such “science” as Spengler might have been thought to introduce was always considered negligible and dubious. So far as I am aware, this view has never changed. And with regard to the present discussion, it is the impact of Spengler on the profession which is the moot point.

White is careful to delineate “historicists” rather than “historians” when naming the three. Since later in the passage he refers to the “more modern, social-scientifically oriented historians” in connection with the earlier three, it is difficult to work out whether White’s passage is on “historicism” (probably meant as a philosophical approach to history) or on the practice of actual historians. There is no necessary connection between the two. Hegel and Spengler in particular have certainly wielded great influence in their respective times, but it would be stretching things to say that this influence was much felt on the practice of history in the Anglo-Saxon world, at any rate. And it was the practice of Ranke (not necessarily the romantic and nationalist beliefs sustaining it) that was probably more influential than any other on 19^th-century historians taken as a whole. We cannot surely be discussing Hegel, Spengler and even Marx as historical practitioners per se, and in terms of their influence on other historians in this light. White has been criticised elsewhere for citing rather few actual historians in his writings on history – and those mainly of a 19^th-century positivist school not much in fashion amongst contemporary historians for many years. Even in this passage he cites “more modern, social-scientifically oriented historians” without managing to name any.

Of the three, Spengler might, however, lay the best claim to being an historian since his thought is far too eclectic for him to be considered “philosophical” - at any rate to qualify him for membership within the mainstream of philosophy per se. Hegel was not a historian so much as a philosopher who used his view of history necessarily to corroborate a dialectical system and in the process contributed to the philosophy of history as well. I doubt if any reader - historian or student or layperson - has ever read Hegel’s Philosophy of History in search of a working historical knowledge of, say, ancient Greece and Rome, let alone ancient China or India. The writings on history in the work of Hegel, growing out of his historicist logic of process, describe by concrete reference the progress of the Absolute Idea which will reach its fruition and culmination in the greatness of the Prussian state. White in referring to Hegel as some sort of historian – albeit “historicist” - who contributed to the common practice of writing history (a highly dubious proposition in itself) is misleading in the sense of turning his own argument about historians essentially on examples who are not historians – that is, in the sense of having carried out any original research in the gathering and interpreting of historical evidence – something that even Herodotus and Thucydides long ago attempted or insisted they had attempted in their own way to do, which is precisely why we consider the two Greeks to have been the joint fathers of history, as opposed to those who composed heroic epics. Had they not each insisted on the veracity of their stories because they themselves had sought out evidence for them, we today would look upon them both as no more than great storytellers. Thucydides, indeed, considered his predecessor Herodotus deficient in this matter, and so referred to him as more the “father of lies” than the “father of history”. So they were both self-described historians - that is, however suspect or tainted their evidence might have been by modern standards of evidence gathering and corroboration. Both Hegel and Spengler in their different ways derive or justify the truth of their respective studies of history either by a form of philosophical-logical discussion or a semi-poetic, rhetorical and in Spengler’s case even a passionate, emotive appeal. They do not, as have historians since long before the time of Ranke, sought to justify their work principally on grounds of the evidence either actually or apparently gathered to support it, but principally on the grounds of their arguments and philosophies, decked out as they are by historical reference. This would seem to me to be the prima facie case for a loose but enduring definition of historians in general (that is, in marking them off from other kinds of writer) – we can then go on to argue over to what extent historians over the past two thousand years have actually drawn from evidence or whether a strictly empirical attitude with or without compelling logical argument on its behalf is the “best” way of - not simply thinking about history - but writing it. But that is another argument altogether, and the hauling in of Hegel and of Spengler does nothing to forward enlightening discussion on this continuing controversy.

          Whether or not Marx was a “historicist” is something to be considered below, but there would certainly be slim justification for introducing him here pre-eminently as a historian, if that is the import of White’s passage. It is true that he wrote detailed accounts of events occurring in France virtually at the time they occurred, or only shortly after, and in which he was himself involved to some extent in the political sense, though exiled abroad. The 18^th Brumaire and Civil War in France are as close to strictly “historical” writing as Marx ever got, and historians have not found them particularly “scientistic” or theory-laden, as it were, whatever their political bias. Yet even they seem to be more like in-depth, analytical journalism, such as is practiced by investigative (and radical!) journalists today – as indeed were his and Engels’ various pieces for the New York Tribune and other newspapers of the time, on the American Civil War and other contemporary subjects. Engels did rather more “distant” historical analysis, with The Peasant War in Germany and other writings, than did Marx himself.

There is perpetual confusion as to Marx’s approach to history, something that he did not much help to dissipate, that is, if he was ever aware that such a confusion might arise. On the one hand, he seems to put forward a distinct theory of all history, or so it appears to some readers from the singular and slim evidence of the 1859 Preface. On the other hand, we see (if we read the book that the Preface was a preface of) that what Marx was engaged on was a detailed and intricate study of capital, that which he and Engels considered the dominant historical force of their time. Because his dialectical approach to capitalism eschewed ahistorical model-building, that much beloved of the econometric writers of our time, that is, because it is by definition static and non-dialectical, Marx places the development of the capital power relation in society within the context of history and, especially in Capital I, draws from recent examples within history to corroborate his own findings and structural analyses. Nor did he have much use for those who simply extrapolated from “the facts” of outward appearances to adduce either history or theory. As he wrote on a number of occasions, inspired by a saying of Heraclitus, science would be unnecessary if outward appearances corresponded to inner processes of development. To get to the latter one requires “the power of abstraction”, which is a perfectly sound scientific methodology, pioneered by Galileo, Newton and Clerk-Maxwell and used in mathematical applications and in countless computer-enhanced studies long after Marx’s time. Marx was analysing a synchronic/diachronic historico-structural phenomenon, not a sequence of events. He certainly believed depth analysis of such a phenomenon would aid us in understanding the events (“outward appearances”), and that is a proposition most analysts of any kind, notably of the Stock Market, would be loath to gainsay. But he did not apply this particular analysis to the whole of history, and so did not supply an all-encompassing “scientistic” theory of history. Indeed he expressed contempt for any such “super-historical” theories, scornfully so in 1877. I suggest that the sketch of history outlined in the 1859 Preface is in fact a coded means of getting round the Prussian censor by a generalisation of what Marx was essentially concerned with:  a transition into, and later out of, the dominance of the capital relation.

Hayden White has fallen into the conventional bourgeois view of Marx as having propounded a “scientistic” view of history taken as a whole. But evidence for this is not to be found in Marx’s writings. Historical materialism taken as a whole is as empirical an approach to history in general as any other; more so to the extent that it removes the study of history from metaphysically derived comprehensive paradigms, in stating its grounding in the materialism of man-in-nature. In other words, history, the study of mankind on the earth, is an aspect of natural history, the history of the earth. Class struggle within advanced cultures is an indication of the pressure of natural needs on human beings that are present everywhere and at all times, as materially situated human “thinking” animals within necessarily exploitative social cultures. Historical materialists might be described by antagonists with a plausibility agreeable to their followers as “absolutists” in suggesting that the alternatives to a materialist historical approach must inevitably be metaphysically derived; even the one-damned-thing-after-another approach is metaphysical in insisting that the scheme of things is ultimately worked out at random: it is itself an abstract proposition. It would be possible to locate White himself within a disquisition on the metaphysics of an all-pervading language use.

All of these are various forms of idealism, and it is historical idealism that is the adversary of historical materialism. Kolakowski is therefore quite mistaken in suggesting that historical materialism is perhaps – or probably - no more than trivially true. One thing is certain: the critics cannot have it both ways! Only by intellectual contortions can they tack towards a “trivially true” critique after having realised that historical materialism does not embody a metaphysic but is anti-metaphysical at its roots, which leaves them with little to criticise without falling back on the opposite contention that historical materialism is anyhow only a trivially commonsense means of approaching history. We fail to grasp Marx’s true import as a thinker when we fail to grasp just how pervasive metaphysics is, in historical study as elsewhere, no less so in our own times than previously - in forms it was not once upon a time concerned to obscure.

All this forms Marx’s legacy in regard to historical study, but simply to refer to Marx as a particular type of historian is to miss the point about that legacy. Marx’s study of capital is the intellectual appropriation and grasp of a totalising mechanism that transforms concrete history. Capital is the basis for historical materialism because capital is itself the totality as every process and transaction (even in terms of relations with nature) becomes, over time, commodified – intensively so in our own time. Capital accumulation is the determinist factor, not the Marxist analysis of it. Indeed only such an analysis can help lead the way out of cAContinuing to be in thrall to this determinism. The totality is the concrete and dynamic phenomenon, not the metaphysical construct. In any other sense, “history” is not only a vapid but also a metaphysical concept. In these terms can historical materialism be viewed as an empirical approach to history, because it simply has no pre-conceived metaphysical construction for the whole of it. In studying history, therefore, we must apply ourselves to the evidence rigorously (as Engels was constantly beseeching Marxists to do, and which Marxist historians have more or less always done) and analyse strictly from what we find, viewed in the light of the most intense intellectual ratiocination. The closest Marx and Engels got to a theoretical approach to the whole of history was their characterisation of “the materialist conception of history” as adumbrated in the unfinished German Ideology and referred to in the 1859 Preface, though in the latter Marx is careful to describe this as his “guiding thread” rather than as a theory – what one might call, perhaps, an hypothesis only. But this early “philosophical” approach was eschewed (though its lessons not forgotten) by the two in favour of more detailed, empirical work, which they came to realise was the only alternative to the grand philosophical analysis that they were in the process of giving up, in their “settling of accounts” with historico-philosophical accounts in general. This empirical approach necessarily led Marx to identify phenomena – that is, a specific phenomenon - within history rather than narrativise the whole of history as such. The “grand narratives” much berated by postmodernists must be sought elsewhere. Marxists and others follow the Marxian legacy best in their pursuit of history by identifying dialectical-historical concrete, totalising phenomena rather than by mapping out a whole “materialist metaphysic” of history, as is the tendency of the epigones.  Popular expositions of historical materialism are prone to this tendency.

We then come to the “more modern, social-scientifically oriented historians”, unnamed. These “claimed to transcend relativism by their use of rigorous method and their avoidance of the ‘impressionistic’ techniques of their more conventional narrativist counterparts”.  But if White’s hypothesis is correct, this highly varied assortment of historians cannot surmount relativism because they are – in effect – imprisoned in the very language they use from doing so, a language use that pre-dates “any analysis, explanation or interpretation” that may be offered.

          White seems to think that “language” is all that these historians use. Economic historians, of course, have recourse to statistics also, which they derive from all manner of sources and stack up in all kinds of ways, by means of graphs, charts, pies and so on. They also have recourse to econometric models that are expressed in the language of algebra. And certain texts will rely quite a lot on illustrative material taken from (say) old books, drawings and sketches, not to speak of photographs, as well as film and audio sources. Not to speak of historians who have drawn upon archaeological artefacts. Certain historians do rely on a “language mode” but it may not be their own: that is, if it is verbally derived from interviews utilised in oral history.  If historians were mere grand essayists (in the 18^th-century manner, perhaps) none of this non-literary material would be considered as anything other than extraneous to history, but the merest glance into any advanced textbook will show that it is intrinsic, not extraneous. 

          It is true that certain historians have a narrative flair and an eye for the drama of their subject matter. But for every one of these there is at least another whose history is of what one might call the driest, an accumulation of detailed evidence in vast profusion: the kind of historical text one tends to “consult” rather than read cover-to-cover with anything like avidity. I would like to see what White makes of detailed descriptions of early modern land tenure in southern England, for example, or an econometric analysis of the Great Depression. It is quite possible that a “language mode” of some kind is getting in the way, but in this instance not of the expression of historical evidence but of any ordinary reader’s enjoyment and assimilation of it. There is the type of economic historical writing that is tortuous because the writer would vastly prefer to present his material in elegant and clear equations rather than in prose: prose as the conveyor of quantifying statistical analysis can in some hands become clumsy, interminable and in some instances self-contradictory: one can almost sense the writer following the figures as he writes – and the result, in prose, is scarcely coherent. Far from the language mode being in control of the process, it is quite clear in these instances that the grip of the language mode is slipping. Yes, there are very great problems with language in historical presentation, but they are to do with the delivery of insights and evidence to make meaningful sentences. But to equate the meaningful with the poetic, the subjective and the relativist is to consign meaning and the need for it to the fictitious altogether. What is proposed equates to a closed circle (or negative feedback) of our own voices rebounding on ourselves.

If White had looked into his Popper further, he might have discovered the theory of unfalsifiability, which tells us that a theory lies within science if it can be falsified. If it cannot be falsified, then although it may be an interesting theory, it is not science. Which means that it is either a matter of belief, or of taste, or of speculative interest but with little foundation in material reality. The postmodernist disquisition on “the language mode” in White’s terminology, or “the linguistic turn” in Rorty’s is unfalsifiable. There is no means by which any of White’s contentions may be disproven or falsified. Not even this entire article can do the trick, because it can always be argued that I am in thrall to “the language mode” in which I have phrased my arguments. I can appear to refute things, and I can even claim the whole postmodernist stance is based on a deeply rooted logical contradiction; this does not matter because all I am doing is spouting rhetoric with appropriate tropes. This leaves the postmodernists immune, themselves, to the charge of spouting rhetoric because – they could easily claim – “rhetoric” is all there is anyhow. This is the Sophist outlook that so concerned Socrates/Plato to refute, but like them it partakes of the selfsame idealism. That is because it seeks to dress up the evident Sophistry of “everything is words” in the fancy clothes of a philosophical relativism. But, as already intimated, if relativism is the ultimate absolute, we have reached the final contradiction in the whole contention. I shall put Lukacs forward to cast this in the historical dimension, that is, of the intertwining of the thought process at work with that of concrete history of bourgeois development:

In other words, intellectual genesis must be identical in principle with historical genesis. We have followed the course of the history of ideas which, as bourgeois thought has developed, has tended more and more to wrench these two principles apart. We were able to show that as a result of this duality in method, reality disintegrates into a multitude of irrational facts and over these a network of purely formal ‘laws’ emptied of content is then cast. And by devising an ‘epistemology’ that can go beyond the abstract form of the immediately given world (and its conceivability) the structure is made permanent and acquires a justification – not inconsistently – as being the necessary ‘precondition of the possibility’ of this world view. But unable to turn this ‘critical’ movement in the direction of a true creation of the object – in this case of the thinking subject – and indeed by taking the very opposite direction, this ‘critical’ attempt to bring the analysis of reality to its logical conclusion ends by returning to the same immediacy that faces the ordinary man of bourgeois society in his everyday life. It has been conceptualised, but only immediately. [1]

Lukacs’ description of bourgeois thought processes as entering a degeneration because of the historical situation of the bourgeoisie is perfectly captured by postmodernism, if we characterise it, in the manner of Fredric Jameson, as an expression of “late capitalism”. The system has nowhere to go but towards its own enfolding in social and planetary catastrophe. The intellectual cupboard is bare, yet intellectuals feast on a future like everybody else.  It becomes increasingly impossible – as the intellectuals are the first to spot (Lukacs got there in 1923) - to link up the creation to the creative subject since the latter’s embodiment in the bourgeois ascendancy leads to no future that is anything other than spiralling downwards in all manner of ways. Businessmen may still reap opportunities from this even at such a late hour, but for intellectuals there is not much to grasp hold of. One must give credit to those who, like Hayden White, have made the best of the situation intellectually speaking (and may well have derived affluent careers from the process) but the fact that White has been given such credence as he has received throughout the academic world, and considering that I am moved to make such refutation as I have just delivered, whatever its merit or lack of, suggests that the rot has well and truly set in.

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[1] Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics [1923] transl. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1971) 155. Emphasis in the original.