The New Nature of History

Knowledge, Evidence, Language

Arthur Marwick, Open University

Preface

When I was studying at Edinburgh University in the mid-fifties, no explicit attention was paid to the questions of 'What is history, and why and how do you do it?' As a kind of ineffectual dietary supplement, all too typical of the attitudes of those days, we were given, quite separately from the main curriculum, a short course of lectures entitled 'History: its Nature and Methods' by a then professor of philosophy, who had written a book, Introduction to the Philosophy of History. I remember, at the age 19 getting into heated debate with the professor as I argued that what he was saying bore no relationship to our actual experiences of studying history (ever since, I have felt that philosophers, because of their a priori attitudes, their rigid conventions, and their specialist language, as well as their lack of practical experience, have the greatest difficulty in understanding what historians actually do). In the sixties, after interludes at Oxford and. Aberdeen, and during which I also spent a year in me United States, I was back at Edinburgh as a history lecturer. In common, I don't doubt, with many other colleagues I gave considerable attention to the nature of primary sources, the different types of secondary sources, and the writing of precise, directly expressed history essays; but the general orthodoxy at the time remained that one learned what history was, and how to do it, by actually doing it. A much repeated notion was that history was a 'messy' subject, and so could not be systematised.

Towards the end of the decade, we began, with Geoffrey Best as the senior and proactive member, to develop a first-year history course which aimed to be explicit about historians' methods and assumptions. But in practice, it seemed to me, we didn't really get down to introducing students to the range of different types of primary sources most historians use and to the problems inherent in them (Engels's The Condition of the English Working Class stimulated debate–but not about the nature of historical sources). The other problem was the lack of suitable textbooks. Historians had not thought very deeply about their own practices, and so grasped eagerly, and somewhat thoughtlessly, at whatever books seemed to do the job for them. R. G. Collingwood (a philosopher and archaeologist was said to be brilliant, this being proved by the fact that you couldn't always follow what he was saying, and so everybody referred, and deferred, to his The Idea of History. E. H. Carr was recognised as being very witty, and the Penguin edition of his What is History? As being a bargain, though in fact this was a book which sold almost entirely on the basis of its (misleading) title alone. Pieter Geyl's Napoleon for and Against was said to be a shrewd exposure of the impossibility of there being any certainty in historical writing; the book, actually, was naïve drivel (see Chapter 2). Introduction to the Philosophy of History by W. H. Walsh at least had the merit of being easy to understand but had nothing on the basic activities of the historian. Marc Bloch's The Historian's Craft (an incomplete and misleading translation of the French title, as I explain in Chapter 4) was, and is, brilliant but, for the tragic reason that as a French Resistance hero he had been tortured and shot by the Germans, unfinished; it is also rather sophisticated for first-year students. Geoffrey Elton was then only just beginning to publish his magnificent exposures of the nonsense spouted by philosophers (including Collingwood) and Marxists, particularly Carr; unfortunately, Elton insisted on the primacy of political history, unhelpful to these of us who wished to demonstrate that social history was not just an important pursuit but a very rigorous one.

There were, I felt, important things which needed saying that were not featured in any of the existing books; above all, I felt that one could systematise the practices and purposes of the historian and that one should set these out at the beginning of a history syllabus, rather than let them 'emerge' over several years of study. So at the age of 32, having already published four books (one of them, at least, being not at all bad–it is indeed still in print), I embarked on the writing of what I modestly called An Introduction to History. It was while discussing this project with my agent Michael Sissons, that I mentioned the course I had endured as a student, 'History: Its Nature and Methods', whose deficiencies I now proposed to remedy; Michael, who believes that no book should ever be called 'An Introduction' to anything, seized on the phrase 'History: Its Nature...' and so the book in progress got its title: The Nature of History.

At that very juncture, I was appointed the first professor of History at the newly established Open University. My overwhelming motivation in seeking this job was that it would give me the opportunity to teach history in the way I thought it should be taught: I began writing the 'Introduction to History' which, in a series of revised versions, has appeared in successive Open University foundation or first-level Arts courses ever since. Prior to the delivery to students of the first Open University courses in 1971, The Nature of History hit the bookshops in l970. I was now 34.

The aims of the book were clear and, I think, fairly satisfactorily achieved. But there was a great deal of naïvety and cumbersome writing. In the second edition of 1980 I failed to address these problems thoroughly enough. The book remained an entirely positive one, enthusiastically expounding 'the social necessity' for history, as I put it. I was still unaware of the attacks on professional history being mounted by its postmodernist critics. For the third edition of 1989 I did come close to rewriting the entire book, expanding what I have always regarded as its most important part, 'The Historian at Work', from one chapter to two. For the first time I introduced Foucault–courteously and without engaging in any angry polemics.

As attacks on the intelligence, and sometimes even the integrity, of historians have mounted I have felt bound, as explained in Chapter 1 of this book, to take up the more aggressive stance evident in a couple of articles I published during the 1990s. Since others have commented on this 'aggressiveness' or 'intemperance' (often using less genteel epithets!), I want to make a couple of clarifications here:

(1) In the late 1980s I deliberately set out to learn more about postmodernist theory, and when commissioned by the Social History Society to organise a conference on 'The Arts, Literature and Society' I made a special point of inviting two distinguished pioneers in the application of discourse theory to literature and art, professors John Barrell and Marcia Pointon, to give papers. It is no reflection on these two highly respected academics that I came to the conclusion that, fascinating as their approaches were, they really had nothing to offer to historical study.

(2) When, in the autumn of 1993, I gave a public performance at the Open University (no notes, but slides of various paintings and the duet 'O soave fanciulla' from La Bohème) with the 'intemperate' title 'Metahistory is Bunk, History is Essential', I took care to arrange a seminar for the next day in which the following leading 'metahistorians' were invited, to criticise my lecture: Hayden White, Ludmilla Jordanova, John Tosh, and Stuart Hall. The subsequent published debate between myself and Hayden White, first in the Times Higher Education Supplement and then, more substantially, in the Journal of Contemporary History (January and April 1995) was entirely arranged, and, indeed, insisted on by me. I am always eager to have weaknesses in my arguments pointed out to me, and I have never felt any need to have the last word. One should not, in my view, impose one's own assumptions on students, without giving them a proper opportunity to consider the opposition case. Perhaps I can add that I found Hayden White a delightfully civilised person and a wonderful drinking companion. I believe in uncompromising intellectual debate, and have never ever considered that intellectual disagreement must entail personal antagonism.

Anyway, I have totally recast and rewritten the book, giving it a new coherence and a new dynamic thrust deriving from the three words of the subtitle, 'Knowledge', 'Evidence', 'Language'. I stress knowledge first because historians do not, as too many of my colleagues keep mindlessly repeating 'reconstruct' or even 'represent' the past. What historians do is produce knowledge about the past. Once that fundamental point is grasped all kinds of misconceptions fall away. History, the production of bodies of knowledge about the past, is, like the sciences, a collective enterprise. In this book, I criticise what I call the auteur theory of history, the theory that historians, or at least a select few of them (the rest, the assumption usually seems to be, can be ignored), should be treated as individual literary figures, akin to best-selling novelists.

The second fundamental relating to history is that it must be seen to be based on evidence (hence the apparatus of footnotes and bibliographies) and not on mere speculation, or a priori theorising, since history is a collective enterprise, some of that evidence will be found in the works of other historians (the secondary sources). But in the last analysis, the production of new historical knowledge (as this book, will demonstrate over and over again) depends on highly skilled and difficult work among the primary sources. The more ignorant among history's critics like to use sneering phrases like 'the cult of the archive'. There is no cult of the archive, just the fundamental fact that without work in the archives, which can often be grindingly boring, the supply of new history would simply terminate.

Problems of language are encountered by historians both during their researches in the primary sources and in writing up these researches in their articles and books. The difficulties, obscurities, and, ambiguities contained within the language of the primary sources first addressed by the érudits (erudite scholars) of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who developed the technical–or ancillary–skills in deciphering the 'codes' different types of documents were written in, their formal qualities, their handwriting and so on, these ancillary skills being known as philology and palaeography. Only those who have actually laboured in the archives–and this excludes practically all of those who prattle on about the 'linguistic turn'–can understand the nature of these problems. Primary sources are filled, with technical terms which have to be construed with the utmost care. Analysing the language and format of a primary source in order to squeeze the last drop of information out of it is a fundamental skill of the historian on which no advice is required from postmodernist theorists. When it comes to writing history, pains (literally!) have to be taken to write precisely and explicitly, avoiding the temptation to reach for ready-made metaphors and cliches, working overtime to get the words and phrases absolutely right, being conscious always of the ambiguities inherent in such words as 'state', 'liberal', 'class', 'culture', 'cultural', not to mention 'ideology', 'discourse', and 'narrative', and the vagueness of such phrases as 'public opinion' or 'the middle-class vote'.

In my original plans for The New Nature of History I envisaged cutting the two historiographical (that is, concerning the history of history, from Thucydides to the present) chapters to one. However, it has become clear through the national benchmarking and learning outcomes exercises that there is a strong feeling within the historical profession that those who study history should have knowledge of such past historical writers as Thucydides, Voltaire, Ranke, Namier, Braudel, and so on. What I have done is to reduce the length of the first of these chapters (now Chapter 3, not 2) and of the main part of the second (now Chapter 4), while adding a great deal of new material on the most renowned historians writing at the beginning of the new century, More important, I have restructured both chapters in order to concentrate on one composite theme: What questions arise whenever anyone attempts to write history? What positive solutions have past historians come up with, and what inadequate ones? What have been their 'errors' and misconceptions? Overall, in what ways, through setbacks as well as advances, has the discipline of history become more effective, more sophisticated, more able to cope with an ever-widening domain of topics and problems?

It is a contention of this book that historical controversies (that is, debates among historians) do serve the vital function of eventual increases in historical knowledge–few would today accept A. J. P. Taylor's views on the origins of the Second World War, but he did perform a useful service in forcing re-examination of the orthodoxies of his time. In the old book there was a whole chapter on historical controversies, But there are now masses of excellent books and pamphlets on major historical controversies, and keeping up with all the latest work in the major areas of controversy is nearly impossible for one individual. In any case, I am anxious not to put too much emphasis on historical debates, which are sometimes tainted with self-glorification and the sheer joy of battle. Thus, I have dropped that chapter, incorporating brief discussions of historical controversies elsewhere. To me, as already remarked, the most important part of the book was always that discussing–as the other books never do–the actual activities of the working historian, including that vital distinction, which I first introduced in 1970, between the 'witting testimony' and the 'unwitting testimony' of the primary sources. As a result of my further reflections on these matters, the two relevant Chapters (5 and 6) have been extended. Elsewhere, and particularly in the old Chapters 1, 4 and 7, there was much which now stems of little importance, or even interest, and that has been cut ('junk cuts', you might say, if in a light-hearted mood). Even in the 1989 edition many sentences and phrases were sloppy and lacking in that precision all historians should aim at. I believe I have done a little better this time. 'Revise, revise, revise', that is the lesson for all who would write history, whether students, general readers, or professionals: not to achieve literary or rhetorical effect, but to achieve the essential exactness, and to avoid any 'slippage' of meaning.

In my case against the metaphysical critics of what historians do, and don't do, one of my strongest points is that they themselves have little or no experience of producing research-based history. It is only proper, therefore, that I should make brief reference to my own experience as a writer and a teacher of history. Almost all of my published work has concerned the late twentieth century: my The Sixties was based on extensive archive research in four countries. For my book on Class I worked in archives relating to the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s in France and America, as well as Britain. My work on Beauty in History, however, entailed analysing French and Italian printed sources from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and using nineteenth-century American archive materials. In my earliest research I worked in a range of British archives, with reference first to the Independent Labour Party, and then principally to the domestic experience of the two world wars. Production of Open University television programmes has involved me in retracing the research of Professor Michael Thompson in the major archives relating to English landed society in the nineteenth century, in the study of seventeenth-century manuscript materials relating to the family (with the expert guidance of my colleague Professor Rosemary O'Day), and of documents relating to the French Revolution in the National Archives in Paris and two different local archives in Nantes (guided expertly by Professors William Doyle and Colin Jones). I have certainly experienced many times the sense of shock and revelation referred to by one of today's most illustrious historians, Robert Darnton, as one encounters the attitudes and mental set of a past society very different from our own. I know only too well that documents in the archives do not regularly present 'facts' or 'narratives', and how complex is the task of extracting relevant information from them. I have long had a specialist interest in non-traditional sources–the artifacts of high culture as well as popular culture–and I have a long record of using visuals in my books as genuine primary sources to be explicated not simply as ornamentation.

The standard platitude of history's critics is that it is 'in crisis', this being part of an alleged greater crisis in capitalism or 'bourgeois society'. 'Crisis, What Crisis?' is the subtitle of my concluding chapter. Actually, history has never been more popular amongst students and general readers. History's achievements in explaining the origins of the French Revolution, the precise role of Adolf Hitler in the most horrible events of the twentieth century, the religious beliefs of the Ancient Greeks, continue to expand. What the growing number of readers and students want, of course, is not the metaphysical nonsense of the postmodernists, but to find out (as far as is humanly possible) what actually happened. It is the purpose of this book to show how historians (as far as is humanly possible) try to meet that demand.

Two minor points with regard to the presentation of this book. It has been structured so that, ideally, it should be read through from start to finish: each chapter, I believe, follows logically from the previous one and leads logically into the next. However, I fully appreciate that certain chapters, particularly for students, may be of greater relevance than others. In order, therefore, that the chapters can be used as self-standing statements on their particular topics, there is a certain amount of repetition of key points (to avoid the necessity for referring back). Secondly, though there is a great deal about scholarly apparatus in this book (and detailed directions in Appendix C), I have, in a book which is pedagogic rather than scholarly in intention, kept my own endnotes to a minimum: where the essential information is already contained in my main text, I have not repeated it in an endnote.

Back in the late sixties a book of this sort was a very hazardous enterprise (no publisher would take it an the basis of the synopsis, which itself attracted much supercilious comment) and it was only when it was completed that the original version of this book was accepted for publication: I therefore remain deeply grateful for the support and advice I received at that time from Lord Alan Bullock and Owen Dudley Edwards. The rewritten version, appearing as the third edition of the old book in 1989, was commented on most constructively by my two colleagues Professors Clive Emsley and Tony Lentin. This completely new book has had the immense benefit of the critical comments of a new colleague, Dr Ole Grell. I also wish to thank Debbie Williams for deploying her considerable secretarial and managerial skills in seeing this complex new book through from first draft to finalised version, tracking down titles and publication dates along the way.

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