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Historians at Work
: lnvestigating and Recreating the past
Edited by David Duffy
, Grant Harman
, Keith Swan
HICKS SMITH & SONS
SYDNEY 1973
When the editors of this volume chose me to contribute the chapter on
'Taking a strong stand' they betrayed precisely the kind of bias I
intend to expose. Because I have declared the commitment of my
historical researches to the achievement of a socialist revolution in
Australia the editors decided that this set me apart from other
historians. To defend my explicit commitment would be to play into their
hands. Through an analysis of 'objective' historians propose to show
instead that my approach to history is no different to anyone else's and
that the editors should have asked one of the silent majority to write
this chapter. Of course this would not have been possible as the
distinguishing feature of 'objective' historians is their failure to
realise that they are taking a strong stand in defence of capitalism.
Indeed most historians who read this chapter will say 'But that's not
bias - that's history'.
It is certainly difficult to find a self-confessed' objective' historian.
Thucydides is often held up as a model. What is meant is that he shows
good and bad on both sides although he never departs from his
fundamental support for Athens. Another claimant for the throne of
'objectivity' is Ranke to whom Mr Carr has attributed a most melancholy
responsibility. But Ranke will have none of it. History, he exclaimed
'is not simply an academic subject: the knowledge of the history of
mankind should be a common property of humanity and should above all
benefit our nation'.
Nor does the position change when we examine
contemporaries. In an interview with Hugh Trevor Roper, Ved Mehta asked:
Sometimes you explain away the works of men
like Toynbee and Taylor in terms of their prejudices. Are there any
personal details about you that could throw light on your way of
writing history? Not really, he said.
G. R. Elton is very conscious of the problem
of 'objectivity' and of the difficulty in attaining it. In The
Practice of History he argues that Namier's case 'shows the real
place of bias, of the historian's personality, in the business of
writing history. It enables him to look afresh at the facts of the
past.' For, he says, ‘historians like other people, tend to judge the
world from their own experience and practice'. Nonetheless he maintains
that
The theories . . . concerning Tudor government
which I have proposed and which have met with a good deal of argument
and criticism, came to my mind not (as some of my critics would have
it) because mine was a naturally authoritarian mind looking for virtue
in rulers, but because the evidence called them forth.
Elton's denial that his personality
influenced his analysis is not merely in conflict with his previously
quoted generalisations, it is implicitly contradicted two pages further
on when he says ‘. . . . what we call history is the mess we call life
reduced to some order. . .’ Elton's inability to see the beam in his
own eye is not the most revealing part of his approach to the question
of 'objectivity'. Far more significant is his declaration that
allegations that historians are invariably biased 'are commonplaces,
largely true, which need not be laboured further'.
He does not like to admit
this so he pretends it is old-hat and not worthy of serious
consideration. A neat if
obvious trick!
In his lectures printed under the title Attempting
History Sir Keith Hancock begins boldly by asserting that he
'will never admit . . . the inveterate and irremediable subjectivity of
historical investigation and explanation'. But he is quickly reduced to
admitting that 'objectivity' is to be aimed at rather than achieved. He
also suggests that when historians are frank about their bias it is
alright to be biased.
Arthur Marwick concludes his survey of the issue by accepting
that the historian can never be completely 'objective'.
In a more philosophical vein Gordon Leff attempts to lift the burden
from historians' shoulders by redefining 'objectivity, as a coherently
plausible integration of all the known facts.
But this raises more problems than it solves: 'plausible' is no less
troublesome than 'objective'.
Thus we are presented with a real paradox. No
one appears anxious to take the title of 'objective' for himself yet so
many extol it as their, or their colleagues aim. Or conversely they
claim it for themselves but deny it to friend and foe alike. It might be
that we have joined Alvin Gouldner in his search for the Minotaur of a
value-free sociology which Gouldner concludes only manages to exist at
all precisely because it is half man and half bull.
So it is the quest, rather than the grail,
which calls for explanation. What are the social necessities that demand
a constant reiteration of a goal which everyone agrees is unattainable?
How are we to explain this particular piece of middle-class
millenarianism? Obviously I can do no more than sketch out an answer,
but that answer must be that the disparity between theory and practice
is designed to conceal some very real biases in those practices.
'Objectivity' is simultaneously the barricade behind which the defenders
of the status quo conceal their prejudices, and the
challenge they throw at those who overtly reveal certain, and only some,
preferences. It is a shield and a sword for the comfortable and the cosy.
When historians call for 'objectivity' they are in fact calling for a
species of bias.
My contention is that in their daily practice
of writing and teaching, historians adopt methods of research which are
far from neutral in terms of the society in which they live, and that
these techniques appear neutral only because they in no way challenge
the continued existence of capitalism. The bias of 'objectivity' is not
to be found in the conclusions and declared principles of 'objective'
historians. Their bias rests in their methods and particularly in their
deployment of objectivity as a synonym for 'impartial'. In demonstrating
the strong stand taken by 'objective' historians eight different aspects
will be examined - all too briefly.
1. The bias of
topics
The choice of a topic to research is all too rarely decided by any
conception of what is relevant or important. More likely it will be
determined by some far more mundane consideration such as the
availability of source materials; the research interests of one's head
of department; or in some cases the availability of Foundation grants.
Even the most innocent of these reasons should not pass unexamined as
they all impinge upon the ability of an historian to engage in the 'passioned
pursuit of passionless truth'. Yet leaving these pressures aside there
remains a good deal of scope for the historian to make a choice of which
aspects he will study in depth.
Even when the topic is as narrow as the
Second Reform Bill the historian can write a book about the detailed
parliamentary manoeuvrings through which the legislation was beaten into
its final form or he can produce a vast socio-economic study. on this
question of choosing which causes to study take the point made by
William Dray in his Philosophy of History when he cites
Collingwood on the relativity of causes: 'for any given person, the
cause . . . of a given thing is that one of its conditions which he is
able to produce or prevent'. Dray accepts this for the actors in history
but says that it is of little direct help to the historian who 'cannot
sensibly ask himself how he could, have produced or prevented the
defeat of Napoleon.'
On the contrary, Collingwood's point is of
great importance to the historian who must ask himself what kind of
causes his lifestyle has led him to believe he can influence. Historians
are always in danger of preferring an explanation which gives them the
greatest feeling of vicarious power. When weighing up the causes of the
British Public order Bill of 1936 a historian who spends much of his
time on committees and in clubrooms may value a conversation with the
Prime Minister and diminish the importance of street violence to which
the historian objects in principle and in which he has never
participated. And if he does so prefer who will blame him? Conversations
are rational, sensible and objective causes while the acts of the mob
are by definition irrational, emotional and subjective, not to say
swinish.
The more usual form of bias in the choice of
a topic expresses itself as an omission rather than as a commission.
Frederick Jackson Turner was by no means the last historian to leave the
Negro out of American history while the poorer classes have been given a
bad time by writers who believed that history consisted of 'the
conversation of the people who counted'. Working-class women have been
even lower down the scale: Howard Zinn pointed to the bias involved in
this omission by quoting a 1929 speech of the American congressman
Fiorella LaGuardia:
It is true that Mr Mellon, Mr Ford, Mr
Rosenwald, Mr Schwab, Mr Morgan and a great many others not only
manage to keep their enormous fortunes intact, but increase their
fortunes every year . . . But can any one of them improve on the
financial genius of Mrs Maria Esposito or Mrs Rebecca Epstein or Mrs
Maggie Flynn who is keeping house in a New York tenement raising five
or six children on a weekly envelope of thirty dollars . . .?
Without even commenting on the virtues of a
Mellon or a Ford or a Morgan the historian who devotes space to their
activities without mentioning the activities of the Bronx housewives is
revealing a clear cut bias about who is important. Similarly a
biographer automatically endorses the importance of the individual in
history in contradistinction to a class analysis. In terms of
'objectivity' there is nothing to choose between them, except that in a
capitalist society biography is acceptable because it conforms to the
dominant ideology of individualism.
2. The bias of
language and style
The ability to manipulate language is not the least of the advantages
available to the upholder of the status quo. In the debate over
Vietnam, for instance, the language of the US army became the acceptable
language for academic debate. Thus an academic could speak of
pacification without embarrassment and without the need for footnotes.
But if an opponent of the war used a word like imperialist he was
clearly being emotive and unscholarly, even if he defined his terms. The
swearwords of the establishment quickly become the lingua franca
of academics.
Sometimes words acquire an emotive
connotation which demands that they be dropped. Seton-Watson feels this
way about 'fascist' which he proposes to replace with 'some neutral
jargon phrase like "non-Marxist totalitarian".
Perhaps he will also start calling Belsen a 'selective population
control centre'. But what is most significant is that Seton-Watson is
obviously unaware of the political bias of his neutral jargon. In the
spirit of his species of neutrality Belsen should be referred to as a
racial decontamination unit. This inability to see the bias of
'objectivity' is almost universal and it helps to make it impossible for
the 'objective' historian to see himself as just another ideologue.
Related to the choice of language is the
choice of style. 'There is,' writes Barrington Moore Jnr, 'a strong
tendency to assume that mild-mannered statements in favour of the status
quo are "objective" and that everything else is
"rhetoric".
Peter Geyl agreed with the first part of this and pointed out that
When a man writes
in a quiet and matter-of-fact way, avoids the use of big words, does
not betray any emotion or express any sympathy, letting his
conclusions or opinions appear only in the most moderate terms or even
obliquely - that does not make him objective.
Geyl knew this-from personal experience. His
lectures on Napoleon were impeccable for their display of dispassion but
his audiences knew well enough that they were also about Hitler. In
Holland in l940 and later in Buchenwald, Geyl did not need to shout in
order to be heard; like St Thomas More his silences were eloquent in a
time of obvious crisis.
But what of the reverse situation? Is the man
who speaks in a brash and emotive way, and brazenly asserts his
opinions, necessarily precluded from telling the truth? I would argue
that there is a necessary connection between form and content, that each
must be appropriate to the other if truth is to be approached. There are
a superabundance of subjects where the historian will need to employ a
so-called rhetorical tone simply in order to keep faith with Ranke's
call 'to tell it as it really was'. The past has not always been polite
and if it is to be recaptured it must convey the tenor of its action as
well as the 'facts'- surely tone is as much a fact, as much a part of
the past, as is a statistical table?
For example, if we were to write biographies of Deakin and Hughes in
exactly the same prose style, at least one, and possibly both, would be
presented as other than they were. Fitzhardinge's biography of Hughes is
an excellent example of an entirely inappropriate prose style resulting
in a severe distortion of the subject, while Cyril Pearl's Wild
Men of Sydney (Cheshire, Melbourne) is a model of perfection.
The same rule applies to events.
The same tone of voice cannot accurately tell it ‘how it really was’
at Eureka and at the inauguration of Canberra.
This much might well be accepted by the
'objective' historians. There is a more difficult case for them, namely,
what is the historian who treats a largely unrecognised social problem
to do? Can he afford to be scrupulously genteel? When the historian is
required to speak of a previously inarticulate group he must speak
loudly if he is to be heard. And not just louder but often in a
different tone. Rhetoric, he will find, is not something that can be
avoided because it is not independent of the audience. Rhetoric is any
tone of voice which upsets, which says even implicitly 'This is wrong'
or 'This must not be allowed to continue'.
Whether a historian chooses to employ a
decidedly rhetorical tone of voice will depend upon whom he is
attempting to influence: in other words it will be predicated on his
view of how social change is achieved. It is no more objective to write
a cool article about Aboriginals for Oceania than it is to
write a handbill for passengers waiting at Redfern station. Even if one
does both this merely demonstrates one's commitment to the view that
social change is achieved by a combination of elitist pressure and mass
struggle.
3. The bias of facts
In an obituary for G. P. Gooch, Professor Medlicott wrote that 'As a
scholar he prided himself on a cool liberalism and the ability to allow
the evidence, of which he was always the complete master, to speak for
itself.'
It is indicative of how little influence E. H. Carr has had that this
could appear in the leading British academic historical journal eight
years after his Trevelyan Lectures. I do not wish to say very much about
the bias of the facts: Carr has given an excellent picture of the
day-to-day practice of historians and it would be pointless to cover the
same ground again. Moreover, tr should want to approach the question
from an entirely different angle and this is not the place to raise such
complex issues.
So I will content myself with examining G. R. Elton's attempted reply to
Carr. In The Practice of History Elton confronts the
example which Carr gives of a man being kicked to death in 1850. Elton
proceeds thus:
A man was kicked to death in 1850; that is a
fact, an event which took place and which nothing now can either make
or unmake. It is quite immaterial whether the fact is known to an
historian or used by him in analysing a problem. If the event were
unknowable - if no evidence of it had survived at all - it would
certainly be neither fact about the past nor historical fact - it
would have ceased to exist and that piece of potential history would
never have materialized - but it would still, of course, have
occurred, independent of any historian. However the event can be
known, and that is all that is required to make it a 'fact of
history’.
All of which simply misses Carr's point. We
can see this better by distinguishing, as Carr has done, three levels of
fact.
Firstly, there are all the events which have
ever happened; secondly, there are all the events which have ever
happened and of which there is now some kind of record; thirdly, there
are those events which historians select from the second category in
order to write their history books. Carr calls the third category
'historical facts'. Elton says no; it is the second category which are
'historical facts'. The transference of titles can in no way overcome
the problem which Carr is posing: on what criteria do some facts move
from the second category to the third? On this Elton says nothing and so
his reply is a non-starter.
4. The bias of
sources
In his introduction to the Selected Letters of Hubert Murray (Oxford
University Press, Melbourne, 1971), Francis West tells us that '. . .
history is not the study of the past, of the whole truth of what
happened, nor even of what men and women thought had happened, but only
the study of the surviving evidence of the past' (p.xii). Although this
is accepted by many historians it is unusual for them to recognise how
great is the bias of selectivity. By and large it is the rich and
powerful who leave evidence so that the historian who bases himself
exclusively on the tangible remains, especially if he restricts himself
to literary evidence, is forced to write a history biased towards the
importance of the rulers; this is no less true if he writes a book
attacking the rulers.
Related to the problem of sources is a self-confirming prediction about
the availability of new sources. I think we can fairly argue that those
who say that history cannot be about ordinary people because there is no
evidence about them have never tried to find that evidence. The
discovery of new kinds of evidence has been left to historians who, very
often for politically motivated reasons, have deliberately set out to
find it. Edward Thompson's use of the Home Office Records in his Making
of the English Working Class
(Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1970), is a recent case in point. Thompson's
discoveries are all the more pertinent because they were not a new kind
of evidence; they were the old kind, that is, bits of paper in
government files. R. M. Hartwell would never have found them because he
does not approve of riots; Edward Thompson found them because he wants a
revolution.
Not only do historians find the kind of
evidence they look for, but archivists tend to preserve the kind of
evidence which 'objective' historians seek. The Australian National
Library has copies of the Women's Weekly only for the last
seven years; very few libraries purchase or keep Truth or
other scandal sheets. The vulgar and the abrasive, like women, are not
part of the nation's heritage.
5. The bias of 'the
Past'
Most university history courses stop somewhat short of l97l and even
those which are listed as extending 'to the present' rarely make it. Or
if they do there is a failure to discern the patterns which are the
stuff of undergraduate courses. In the words of Thomas Mann,
. . . history professors do not love history
because it is something that comes to pass, but only because it is
something that has come to pass; . . . they hate a revolution . . .
because they feel it is lawless, incoherent, irrelevant – in a word,
unhistoric . . . For the temper of timelessness, the temper of
eternity . . . is . . . much better suited to the nervous system of a
history professor than are the excesses of the present. The past is
immortalised; that is to say, it is dead; and death is the root of all
godliness and all abiding significance.
And it is worth considering the response of
historians to the contemporary upheaval as a guide to their ability to
understand the past.
When professors can judge the revolutionary
calibre of students by their dress it makes one wonder what they do with
the cavaliers and the roundheads. It is certainly very difficult to
maintain the aura of objectivity in a crisis. J. M. Keynes declared that
'The class war will find me on the side of the bourgeoisie'.
Of course it already had.
Ranke could barely contain his delight when he learnt that the Paris
Commune had been drowned in blood.
It was partly to overcome this attitude that
the journal Past and Present was founded. But this is a
misnomer. There is no 'Present'. By the time you have finished reading
this sentence it will all be in the past. Why then should the past be
divided up into 'Past' and 'Present', and why should only the more
distant past be a suitable subject for historical investigation?
I would like to suggest two contributing
forces. Firstly, the recent past has not been particularly attractive to
the conservative, and he is afraid that the future might be worse. So he
hopes that by skipping over the bits he does not like the future will be
linked to the bits he does like. Secondly, there is a deeper
methodological reason. History is about the past while the present is
left to the social sciences. Why is this? Historians believe that they
deal with change while social scientists deal with static structures and
fixed formations. If history came right up to this very instant it might
have to keep on going. It would become subversive.
6. The bias of 'the
present'
In this section I wish to mention some of the advantages to be gained
from supporting the status quo, by which I do not mean being
against all change. Rather I refer to those historians who accept the
existence of the society in which they live as the limit beyond which
debate never strays. An 'objective' historian is one who operates within
the confines of the existing society and its values. In order to support
a stable system it is not necessary to write openly in its favour. It is
sufficient to write within its assumptions and traditions and thereby
reinforce their validity.
The advantages which are gained by an acceptor of present reality are
manifold. We can see this by examining the problems faced by someone who
rejects some of the conventional wisdom of a society. For example, if an
atheist wishes to write the history of Europe or any part thereof, he is
at once forced to date his material from the birth of someone whom he
may consider to have never existed. This applies between cultures: the
Spaniard who writes Indian history for Spanish audiences need feel no
embarrassment
in assuming that Buddha was not born out of the ear of an elephant. But
let the same historian make a similar remark about the Immaculate
Conception and no quantity of footnotes will save him.
ln Steppenwolf Herman Hesse claimed that 'with the
bourgeoisie the opposite of the formula for the great is true. He who is
not against me is with me.' This goes too far - or not far enough. The
partial opponent, the occasional critic is not destructive of a stable
society;
quite the reverse. Such critics fulfil the socially necessary function of
enabling the society to operate more smoothly by taking note of
complaints and by sustaining the belief that freedom to criticise is an
inviolable right.
This does not apply in periods of crisis when
each and every demand for change is an act of treason. In times of war
historians have rallied to a variety of causes but they do not
automatically become aware that they are being even less objective than
usual. For example in l9l4 the editors of the leading French historical
journal Revue Historique declared that they intended to
avoid biased statements on the origins of the war. In this spirit they
chastised those German historians who had signed a manifesto declaring
Germany innocent of war guilt. So far, so good. But the French editors
went on to conclude that this was unobjective because the war was
'willed by Germany, prepared by her with a truly amazing perseverance
and absence of scruples.' The French historians who wrote this were
plainly unaware of their own breach of objectivity and believed that
they were still maintaining their declared policy of non-partisanship.
Another example of this unconscious
application of double standards occurred in the evidence which Daniel
Boorstin (author of The Genius of American Politics) gave before
the House Committee on un-American Activities in 1953. Boorstin
explained that since resigning from the Communist Party in 1939 he had
expressed his opposition to Communism by attempting 'to discover and
explain to my students in my teaching and in my writing, the unique
virtues of American democracy'.
In other words, his academic
work was politically committed to a defence of the status quo. Yet
he went on to tell the Committee that no active member of the Communist
Party should be allowed to teach in the humanities or social sciences
because his politics would interfere with his scholarship. Once again it
is unlikely that Boorstin was aware that there was any inconsistency in
his actions and beliefs.
One of the neatest tricks in the repertoire
of the 'objective' historian is to describe his presuppositions as a
'point of view' and to use 'bias' to describe everyone else's. We see
this in Sir Keith Hancock's lecture on 'Bias':
People sometimes say that they like history
books to have a bias; but all they mean, I think, is that they like
historians to have a point of view. Between these two things there is
a big difference; we can be open-minded in our points of view, but
bias closes our minds.
Consider the
words which Hancock uses: 'open-minded in our points of view'. Notice
the use of ‘in'. Hancock is perfectly correct although he is not even
faintly aware of what he is admitting. We are all open-minded inside
our points of view - but are we open-minded about our points of
view? There is a world of difference.
7. The bias of
method
Objectivity is often sought in numbers which clearly lack passion whilst
simultaneously guaranteeing precision. It is certainly necessary for
historians to be able to count but there are many things which cannot be
counted. Hartwell has endeavoured to defend capitalism by showing that
the standard of living rose during the industrial revolution in England.
Thompson goes beyond a mere challenge to the calculations; he rightly
asserts that what is in dispute is not simply a standard of living but a
way of life, that is, something which cannot be counted. Counting also
has a tendency to present history as the accumulation of small bits and
thereby denies qualitative changes such as revolutions.
Historians have largely resisted the more
outrageous claims of the calculators and have stuck fast to their
literary narratives. But the commitment to the status quo which is part
and parcel of most quantitative approaches is made clear by the French
social philosopher, Raymond Aron, in his introduction to volume one of Main
Currents of Sociological Thought where he observes that
in most cases, the adoption of American
sociological method and attitude will lead to the adoption of
reformist positions. If you study social organizations in detail, you
will find something to improve everywhere. In order to seek a
revolution – that is, a total upheaval - you must assume an over-all
viewpoint, take up a synthetic method, define the essence of a given
society, and reject that essence.
It would be difficult to invent a more
convincing argument for my position than Aron's analysis of American
sociology: Methods of research, especially the most dehumanized, are not
neutral but are meshed into the ideological requisites of a class
society.
8. The bias of time-scales
One part of the upsurge in universities has been a challenge to the
content of courses. In some subjects this has meant opposing defence
contracts or CIA grants but in a subject like history these obvious
points of attack have been largely lacking. Instead radicals and
revolutionaries who happen to be historians have attacked history
courses on many of the grounds which I have outlined above. None of
these attacks seems to me to be adequate. For example, writing history
from the bottom up could be, and has been done by historians who were
far from revolutionary in their political intentions. Indeed it appears
that each and every demand for a reform of history is precisely that: a
reform; no more and perhaps a good deal less. Certainly the combination
of these demands might produce a revolutionary practice of history, but
only if there was a simultaneous intervention of theory. Yet this
does not reveal the essence of bourgeois history. Before we can establish
a proletarian history we must establish the essentials of bourgeois
history.
One essential of bourgeois history is the
notion of time it employs. Peter Munz has opened the way to the
recognition of this is an article entitled, 'The purity of historical
method: some sceptical reflections on the current enthusiasm for the
history of non-European societies'. Munz's main point is that since
history is predicated on a given unilinear time scale it is totally
inappropriate for studying societies which do not operate on such a time
pattern. If you try to make sense of traditional Indian society by
explaining it within a unilinear time scale you will break Ranke's
command to tell it as it really was: 'The time scheme used, one might
say, is constitutive of a certain kind of history in that it predisposes
one to a certain selectivity.'
This point can be best appreciated by
applying a reverse case. What would we think of a history of twentieth
century Australia which was predicated on a time scale of phases of the
moon, and/or the four seasons? We would feel that our society as a whole
had been seriously misrepresented. Of course, some sections of the
society would come off better than others – farmers for instance.
In presenting this instance I have gone
beyond Munz. If history is inappropriate for some societies may it not
also be inappropriate for some sections of society? Clearly it will not
be of much help in telling us about the world of pre-school children.
Even within the traditional areas of historical research it is possible
that the historical approach distorts reality. Seventeenth century
illiterate agricultural labourers could be a case. Unfortunately the
problem is not as clear cut as this since after 'contact' has been
established the worker or native may well operate on two different time
scales, one public and the other private. In the case of women there may
be as many as four: the historical time scale; the rhythm of
agriculture; the phases of menstruation significantly called periods;
and the recurrence of childbirth. To ignore these various expressions of
time is to distort the lives of most of the world's population.
Conclusion
By and large the historian can be 'objective'. That is, he will operate
within the premises underlying his society. Only in a crisis will he be
forced to declare himself. This constitutes a great set of advantages
over the historian who rejects the very root and branch of his society.
For a revolutionary the status quo is a crisis. I anxiously
prepare for the opportunity to be objective about Australian history.
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