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2 - History and Historiography since 1945

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2014

By
Kevin Passmore
Edited by
Roger E. Backhouse  and
Philippe Fontaine
Kevin Passmore
Affiliation:
Cardif University
Roger E. Backhouse
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
Philippe Fontaine
Affiliation:
Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan
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Summary

Historians are as inclined as ever to divide the past into great ages: traditional, premodern, modern, postmodern, colonial, postcolonial, global, feudal, capitalist, et cetera. Historiographers have been particularly attracted to these watersheds. They may claim that inexorable external forces, such as modernization or globalization, break down old certainties and necessitate a new way of writing history appropriate to new times. The shift from social to political history after 1945 and then the cultural turn of the 1990s were both presented in that way. Historiographers may also evoke heroic precursors, great historians, and theoreticians, men and women who possessed privileged insight not only into historical method, but into the very movement of history. The work of these canonical scholars possesses quasi-biblical status, and it must be elucidated and commented upon. Historians sometimes forget to historicize when their own discipline is at stake. A major contention of this essay is that while periodization is unavoidable, one must not reify periods or mistake chronological categorization for explanation.

It would be unfair to charge historians with ignorance of the problems of these ways of writing history. In 1947, Sir Maurice Powicke wittily dismissed teleologies thus:

To track down every nerve in the body politic and locate each impulse, as though they carried some secret message, is as futile as to read the rivulets that compose the upmost reaches of the Thames as a foresight of the wharves and shipping in the spacious estuary.

(Powicke 1947, p. 340, cited in Bentley 2005, p. 113)

Keywords

political historyWest GermanyMarxismcultural historyhistoriographylinguistic theory
Type
Chapter
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A Historiography of the Modern Social Sciences , pp. 29 - 61
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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