Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History

Recent challenges to principles of truth and objectivity mark the latest awareness of a tension between thing and knower that goes back to ancient Greece. Historian Thomas L. Haskell argues in this volume that much recent discussion of this tension has been evasive and inadequate. But even conventional approaches to the writing of history, he contends, carry fewer dangers than the pretensions of postmodernism and the delusions of inventive fiction. In this text, he argues for a moderate historicism which acknowledges the force of perspective and reaffirms the pluralistic practices of a liberal democratic society - even while upholding the distinctions between fact and fiction, scholarship and propaganda, right and might. Rather than simply telling stories of events or delivering the historian's familiar "report from the archives", Haskell addresses questions he belives will interest philosophers and literary theorists no less than historians. Terms such as "moral obligation", "convention", "interest" and "formalism" take on new significance as Haskell explores topics ranging from the productivity of slave labour to the cultural concomitants of capitalism, from John Stuart Mill's youthful "mental crisis" to the cognitive preconditions that set the stage for antislavery and other humanitarian reforms after 1750. He traces the surprisingly short history of the word "responsibility" which he finds to be no older than the USA, examines the reasons for the rising authority of professional experts in 19th-century America, and asks whether the epistemological radicalism of recent years carries the power to justify human rights - rights of academic freedom for example, or the right not to be tortured. Written as a critique of the historical profession, the text calls upon historians to think deeply about the nature of historical explanation and to acknowledge more fully the theoretical dimension of their work.