Review

Author(s): John Higham

Review by: John Higham
Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 62, No. 2 (Jun., 1990), pp. 353-356
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1881259
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Book Reviews

That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical

Profession. By Peter Novick.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Pp. xii + 648. $49.50 (cloth); $15.95

(paper).

The title of Peter Novick's big, compelling book comes from a bleak address that

Theodore Clarke Smith delivered to the American Historical Association in 1934.

Responding to sledgehammer attacks that progressive scholars were making on "the

ideal of the effort for objective truth," Smith suggested gloomily that the way things

were going this "noble dream' -the basic creed of the historical profession-might

in the coming decades be irretrievably lost. While making no such prediction himself,

Novick nonetheless casts his monumental story of change and challenge as a pattern of

decline. From about 1910 to the present the ideal of objectivity has undergone

increasing attenuation and seems now to rest on hollow foundations, or none at all.

This is to note immediately a major difference between Novick's narrative and my

own telling of the same story in part 2 of History (1965).' Novick employs almost the

same periodization that I used: first, the founding of a historical profession in the

United States and the articulation of its central norm ("Objectivity Enthroned"); then

the development in the interwar years of a relativist movement that put the older

scientific school on the defensive ("Objectivity Besieged"); third, an effort in the

1940s and 1950s to integrate relativist insights into a more flexible orthodoxy

("Objectivity Reconstructed"); and finally, moving beyond my time frame, the

widespread discrediting of any unifying ideal in the midst of confusion, fragmentation,

and uncertainty ("Objectivity in Crisis"). While Novick and I agree on innumerable

particulars, he sees my interpretation of the first three stages as Whiggish and

celebratory. Whiggish it was-excessively though understandably so. From the

vantage point of the early 1960s, when the study of history was prospering at every

level, the story of an evolving professional creed fell persuasively into a pattern of

thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Adding a fourth stage, especially as Novick defines

it, throws what came before in a different light. From the disarray of the 1980s, the

preceding stage is easily read as an unmitigated failure, a temporary co-optation rather

than a fusion, and the resulting four-stage pattern becomes a sequence of deepening

disintegration. We have here an instance of a limit-insuperable though not absolute-

that the historical process sets on the truths of historical inquiry.

The methods of the two books as well as the time of their composition contribute to

the contrasts between them. Novick writes the history of a "question," that is, a

dispute which is best understood by standing outside the arena to observe how

contestants deal with one another in rephrasing a given proposition and by restating

their many answers. I wrote the history of a belief, so I wanted to get inside the

' John Higham with Leonard Krieger and Felix Gilbert, Historv (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,

1965). A second edition in 1983, bringing up to date the story of substantive scholarship in

American history, left unchanged a midsection of the book which treated Novick's subject-the

underlying rationale of the profession.

Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author.

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354 Book Reviews

principal players to grasp empathically how each of them felt and perceived a

problematic situation. Novick seeks distance; I sought identification. His approach

reveals complexities of strategy and maneuver that often escaped me. Mine offered a

more sympathetic view of ambiguities within various perspectives and of linkages and

continuities between rivals and successors.

Consider, for example, how the two books depict the first generation of professional

historians. In writing mine, I had discovered to my surprise how much the early

professionals had in common with the leading amateur historians of the late nineteenth

century, both in theory and in practice. In contrast to previous historiographers I

stressed the professionals' typical acknowledgment of the unattainability of complete

objectivity along with their resolute belief in moving toward it and their enthusiastic

enlistment in the broad late nineteenth-century movement to strengthen tradition and

authority in American high culture. Novick, on the other hand, begins not with the

cultural aspirations of the early professionals but with a highly restrictive definition of

what he calls "the original and continuing objectivist creed" (p. 2). In it he includes

the propositions that truth is unitary, that facts are independent of interpretations, and

that the "meaning" of events never changes regardless of shifts in attributed

significance. From these desiccated absolutes Novick can move easily into the

American professionals' intellectual shortcomings, namely, their naive understanding

of science and their misunderstanding of the German academic model they adopted.

Later he notes in passing what I featured, just as I had noted (though perhaps more

prominently) the professional egoism he dwells upon.

Where Novick's disenchanted eye is most penetrating is in his numerous chapters on

the political ideologies professional historians have espoused. The special ideological

service of the first generation was to the deepening of national unity, healing the

wounds of the Civil War and overcoming the rampant localism and sectionalism of

earlier historical writing. What Novick calls a "deliberate negotiation of a mutually

acceptable version of the sectional conflict" (p. 74) came about partly through the

low-keyed, unemotional tone that the ethic of objectivity mandated and partly through

northern scholars' acquiescence in southern views on race relations. The ideological

homogeneity that the American historical community thereby attained, Novick

believes, was essential in establishing objectivity as its accepted norm.

The progressive scholars of the early twentieth century who began to question

objectivist convictions remained much too confident of the progress of scientific

knowledge to push their questions very far. For many, especially among the

progressive avant-garde, World War I shattered that confidence. The nationalistic zeal

that the war excited first plunged them back into the hyperbolic language they had

collectively repudiated and then, in the disillusioned aftermath of the war, left them

perplexed and deeply disturbed over the betrayal of their vaunted objectivity. Fierce

scholarly quarrels ensued in the interwar years, particularly over the "war guilt

question" and over the causes and consequences of the American Civil War, all of

which dramatized the breakdown of an ideological consensus and formed the

immediate context of the relativist movement of the 1930s.

Novick provides discriminating, impressively knowledgeable chapters on redefini-

tions of science and on new philosophical and social scientific ideas that also impinged

on the objectivity question. Nevertheless, ideology remains the center of attention as

he turns to the reassertion of a qualified objectivity after World War II. Relativism,

Novick tells us, became a prime target in the ideological mobilization against

"totalitarianism." The defense of the West called on one hand for reassertion of

underlying ideals and supposedly universal human values and on the other hand for

pride in disinterested scientific inquiry. Consequently, historians followed a middle-

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Book Reviews 355

of-the-road course. They claimed a partial autonomy for ideas while forswearing

ideological crusades and denying that the past is best handled as a weapon. There is

much truth in Novick's assessment, although labeling such a nonactivist position as

"ideological mobilization" seems distorting. Fascinated as he is with conflict, Novick

almost completely overlooks the enormous fear of conflict that the atom bomb

introduced into the postwar world. For many historians, including myself, the retreat

from aggressive relativism sprang not from mobilization but from demobilization, that

is, from alarm at the danger ideological fanaticism posed to everyone.

The eruption of sharp dissension in the 1960s did not immediately bring the

objectivity question to the fore. In contrast to the 1920s, when an ideological rift

spread downward from the leaders of the profession, carrying with it an explicit

epistemological challenge, the upheaval of the sixties came from below, chiefly from

rebellious students. Unencumbered with philosophical baggage, the young radicals

spoke in the name of objective truth, which they thought they could discern better than

established scholars because they had no vested interests to protect. The new crisis for

historical objectivity arose because different groups in the profession no longer agreed

on a common agenda and no longer wanted to talk to one another. As the noise level

escalated, comity collapsed, and with it went the sense that a diversified community

of scholars can resolve arguments by rational means. Novick's discussion of this

turning point is a graphic, sympathetic narrative of the rise of a new left in the

historical profession, its early scholarly initiatives, and its rapid fragmentation into

warring factions.

Gradually historians became aware of new forms of relativist theory, beginning

with Thomas Kuhn's concept of the paradigm and extending through movements in

literary criticism that repudiate detenninate meanings, texts, and authors. As Novick

suggests, this diffuse epistemological pluralism or subjectivism has undoubtedly

confirmed and perpetuated the crisis in historical theory. But why, if there is a crisis,

does hardly anyone seem to care? Why have the ideas agitating other disciplines not

aroused among historians a new, urgent debate like that of the 1930s and 1940s?

Novick gives us no answer, except to say that sensibilities and interests have become

too disparate; the historical profession no longer constitutes a community of

discourse.

I do not think that will do. Thomas Haskell has noted "our obstinate tendency to

continue striving for objective knowledge . . . even in the face of our own

skepticism." This striving still constitutes the great community of historians, whose

commitment to justifying beliefs "by reference to realities that extend beyond

language and communal solidarity is a wholesome discipline and a deeply human

practice, the value of which is quite independent of the likelihood that it will ever yield

incontrovertible Truth."2 That center still holds, and the multilayered honesty of

Novick's disillusioned book is an unintended testimonial to it.

In concentrating on the argument of the book, I have given a most inadequate sense

of its range, depth, and richness. The bibliography lists sixty manuscript collections.

Novick has also drawn heavily on books, reviews, and speeches through which major

historiographical controversies and minor professional scandals were fought out.

Many readers will find the garrulous footnotes as fascinating as the text. Quite a few

of us will encounter unauthorized quotes from our letters, preserving youthful postures

and private effusions never intended for posterity. Is there not an irony here? Novick's

2 Thomas L. Haskell, "The Curious Persistence of Rights Talk in the 'Age of Interpretation,'

Journal of American History 74 (December 1987): 996, 101 1.

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356 Book Reviews

extended critique of the delusions of historians relies on the strength among them of

a communal code that rightly bars assertion of their private rights against a pursuit of

truth.

JOHN HIGHAM

Johns Hopkins University

Gender and the Politics of History. By Joan Wallach Scott.

New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Pp. x + 242. $29.00.

This collection of essays by Joan Scott contributes an eagerly awaited perspective to

discussions in historiography and the philosophy of history. It is less a report of the

results of a particular historical research inquiry than a book about one historian's

rethinking of what the enterprise of writing history amounts to, what its object is, and

what it means to her to be a professional historian. She attempts to step outside the

discipline to scrutinize its presuppositions and its methods. "History," as Scott puts it,

"is as much the object of analytic attention as it is a method of analysis" (p. 3). From

this perspective alone, it is an important book.

Yet the essays in Gender and the Politics of History can also be read as intellectual

autobiography, a personal report on a continuing odyssey, in the course of which the

author has already confronted many temptations, many perils, and has now encoun-

tered the siren songs of post-structuralist theory. Scott has grappled with their

seductive power in a salutory manner and has arrived on yet another shore, with her

critical powers enriched and with a riper, more complex vision of the historian's task.

Her introduction (and the ensuing montage of essays) offers a thoughtful analysis of

the ways in which a critical theoretical perspective can further our understanding of the

historical project.

Like many historians of her generation, Joan Scott arrived at the study of power and

its politics through social history, particularly by way of labor history with its

hegemonic Marxist insistence on the primacy of class and of production. In the course

of her work, she encountered feminist theory, with its challenging concept of gender,

the social construction of the sexes, or as Scott rephrases it (in Foucauldian terms)

"knowledge about sexual difference" and its social organization (p. 2). Research in

women's history has since revealed gender as a concept of extraordinary potential for

illuminating our understanding of the human past. In attempting to rethink the question

of how to prioritize class and sex or gender, Scott found herself wrestling with the

notion of power and with the structure of knowledge itself. At this point, "in search

of a more radical epistemology," the author embarked on a fateful encounter with

post-structuralist theory, particularly the concepts of Foucault and Derrida.

Rather than privileging gender at the expense of class, which would be the

instinctively feminist solution to the confrontation of these two analytical categories,

Scott has opted for what she perceives as an overarching approach, one that seeks to

span several such categories whereby domination/subordination relationships have

been established in the historical past. Her conceptions of power and causality remain

insistently multiple. She thus sidesteps the challenge of prioritizing one category above

the others, thereby retaining her allegiance to the explanatory power of class even as

she critiques its hegemonic sweep and its blindness to gender issues. It becomes

apparent as the book proceeds, however, that Scott is extremely reluctant to grant

gender any explanatory primacy over class. She never confronts the explosive issues

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