'Few Historians think no progress is being made towards truth, but even history's keenest devotees know objectivity is unattainable' (Lowenthal) Discuss.

Traditionalists believe that the past and history are the same thing.  Elton said that ‘for the historian the reality – yes, the truth – of the past exists in materials of various kinds produced by the past…historical evidence is not created by the historian.’ However, Elton fails to recognise the crucial role played by the historian, that he or she cannot be objective. If we accept that history is what is written about the past then we have to realise that the past and history are different things and that history is all about different interpretative readings. Jenkins argues that it would be more appropriate to call what has gone before the present ‘the past’ and what we currently call history ‘historiography’ because historians undergo a constant process of interpretation.  The past has happened and it cannot be brought back. Therefore history is only how historians interpret it when they go to work. Furthermore what the historian reads are only constructs and ideas of past events. Women’s history has only recently been included in the mainstream. Feminists are having to ‘write women back into history’. This also may be the case that many other important groups, classes and people have been omitted from histories despite the possibly crucial role that they may play. The historian is selective in his usage of evidence and selective in the different amounts of attention he gives to different factors. There is nothing to indicate that what the historian has chosen is correct, we cannot know that, so although some historians may be near the truth since we cannot verify this can never know for sure what exactly did happen in the past. Jenkins explains that ‘no history can be literally ‘factual’ or completely ‘found’ or absolutely ‘true’.’

Epistemology refers to the philosophical theories concerning knowledge. It questions and tries to explain how we know anything. History is related to philosophy in terms of what is it possible to know about the past. This is a problem because if it is difficult to know about something that exists, it is going to be even more difficult to say something about the past –something that does not exist. This sort of ‘knowledge is therefore likely to be tentative’, and manufactured by historians who will be operating within a particular social and cultural framework (amongst many other things). Therefore historians who are trying to gain access to the ‘real past’ or the ‘truth’ are mistaken because they can never get there. For historians such as Elton, there is doubt to the fact that we cannot know anything. This is what furthers his efforts to try and attain the truth but they are clearly in vain. Because, as Lowenthal exhibits in the quotation, we cannot achieve objectivity because the historian is always subject to his or her own presuppositions and pressures. If we admit that we cannot really know what happened then we have to question how specific histories were shaped. We have to take into account epistemology because it informs everything that we do.

Jenkins explains how unlike direct memory, which is itself doubtful, history relies on the eyes, ears and voice of somebody else. Therefore we cannot be sure about anything that we use as evidence.  Lowenthal makes the point that this is not detrimental to history because in practice the historian has to adhere to quite a specific methodology where the reader has access to the sources used. However this does not account for the choice of those source, as this is a personal choice. Interpretation is indeed endless and is exhibited in a long running historical debate between A.J.P Taylor and H. Trevor-Roper, about the origins of the Second World War, despite the two men being very competent historians and reading almost exactly the same sources. If we now accept that history is different from the past and that interpretation plays a vastly important role in shaping what history is we also have to recognise that written history risks conflating certain elements of history (rightly or wrongly) and in doing so also risks moving even further away from the truth.  Historians take events and give them meaning through their interpretations. The effect of this is, as Lowenthal explains that ‘histories as known to us appear to be more comprehensible than we have any reason to believe the past was’. Working under these epistemological limitations hinders the historian in his search for the truth as he or she cannot be objective.

The reason we carry on studying history and ‘progressing towards the truth’ is all because of this. Because if it were possible to know exactly what happened then there would be no need for any more history to be written, because there would be no value in new historians writing about the same things about the same subjects again.  So the value in the postmodern analysis is that the ‘epistemological fragility’ of history allows it to be ‘multifarious’. In this sense we are ‘progressing towards the truth’. The intellectual debate that has arisen out of our inability to actually know what happened has, in turn, created progression where we are constantly trying to prove new arguments and theories. Unfortunately the past has gone, we cannot verify any accounts against it and we make our interpretations about history from accounts by other historians. Therefore there is no definitive account of history. Historiography is not an auxiliary discipline but it constitutes history itself.

In the same way that the epistemology of an historian shapes what he or she is writing, the methods that they use can be equally as dubious. History is by not an exact science, it is constantly changing and ‘progressing’ in its study of the past. The fact that historians are still striving for objectivity and truth is rejecting the epistemological argument outright. Elton, on the empirical right, states in The Practice of History that he is searching ‘for the truth’ and he ends the same chapter explaining that the historian undertakes a continuos process of ‘research and reconstruction’ which does not make the historians ‘work unreal or illegitimate’.  He recognises the constraints upon the historian but they do not affect that fact that he is still searching for something that he will never find. Marwick, at the empirical centre, accepts the ‘subjective dimension’ of the historian but for him this is not present in the historians ideological position but in the evidence. For Marwick subjectivity derives from ‘the imperfections of their source materials’. Thus, Marwick explains that the important focus of history should be to develop ‘tight methodological rules’ to combat this and reduce the moral interventions and so forth. For these three historians ‘truth, knowledge and legitimacy derive from tight methodological rules and procedures’. Methods are at least a recognition that historians have to operate within frameworks. However the fact remains that methods are themselves constructs, subject to all the same limitations as the mind or the words of the historian. It would be impossible to know for sure which method would aid the search for the truth the most. There is no denying that the methods would be coherent but the fact remains that because of the limitations upon them we would not actually be progressing in our study of history. But instead we would be creating a history that is moving further away from what the truth may have been.

Historians cannot be objective in their study of history, they are subject to a whole host of constraints and limitations that make written history particularly subjective. However this is not necessarily a problem. There needs to be a recognition that historians are working under limitations instead of the traditionalist viewpoint. The methodologies of Elton, Marwick, Carr and many other historians, that try to suggest that they can eliminate all the presuppositions and ideological ideas that may be present in the historian, cannot work. This is because at every juncture we are inextricably linked to social, political and cultural constraints. Therefore Lowenthal’s claim represents a broad spectrum of opinion. By using the word ‘progressing’ in terms of moving towards some truth, he accepts the fact that we have not yet reached it (and that we never will) but he also is making a comment on the nature of history. That without the debate and the interpretation we would not be progressing at all. Whilst truth is the nirvana of history, if we found the truth there would be no more searching. History is about postmodern historiography, a framework where interpretation is vital and where there is recognition that objectivity and truth are unattainable.  

Bibliography:

Carr, E.H.,         What is History? (London 1987)

Elton, G.R.,         Return to Essentials. Some reflections on the present state of historical study (Cambridge 1991)

Elton, G.R.,         The Practice of History (London 1969)

Jenkins, K.,         On ‘What is History?’: from Carr to Elton and Rorty and White (London 1995)

Jenkins, K.,         Rethinking History (London 1991)

Lowenthal D.,         Possessed by the Past (New York 1996) 

Munslow A.,         Deconstructing History (London 1997)

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