On What is History From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White by Keith Jenkins

P2 “I feel that Carr and Elton are no longer good enough embodiments and/or guides to the more reflexive debates on ‘what is history’ currently taking place, so that they should now be effectively abandoned in favour of more relevant and generous exponents as to what is going on, exponents from whose number I have chosen to look at just two: Rorty and White.

P17 For historians, of course, never acces the past as such (epistemological problem), so that the problems formulated along the traditional lines of ‘how can hiostorians truly/accurately know the past?’ or ‘if historians cannot access the ‘real past’, then how can we have checks on historians’ accounts that are ‘real’ checks as opposed to be ‘just interpretations’?’ are beside the point. For what is at issue in historiography – and indeed what can only ever be at issue – is what can be derived and constructed from the historicised record or archive. It is the historicised nature of the records/archives that historians access which must be stressed here. For such records and archives, as Bennett explains, only too clearly highly volatile and mutable products of complex historical processes in that, apart from the ocnisderable amount of organised labour (librarians, archivists, archeologists, curators) which goes into their productions (preserving, cataloguing, indexing, weeding out) , the composition and potential of such traces and records vary considerably in terms of their time witness, says Bennett, the influence of feminist historiography in expanding the range of what now counts as the historical record.

P20-21 Since its invention by Herodotus, traditional historiography has predominantly featured th ebelief that history consists of congeries of lived stories, individual and collective, and that the principal task of the historian is to discover these stories and retell in them in a narrative form, the truth/accuracy of which would reside in the degree of correspondence of the story told to the story lived. However, says White, the point to be made here is that, unfortunately for this traditional view, it has recently been realised that people in the past did not actually live stories either individually (at the level of real life stories) or collectively (at the level of metanarratives which give purpose and meaning to the past, i.e. marxist or whig history)… To see the content of the past as if it were a series of stories (of great men, of wars and treaties, the rise of labour, the emancipation of women, of our island, the ultimate victory of the proletariat) is therefore a piece of fiction, caused by mistaking the narrative form in which historians construct and communicate their knowledge of the past as actually being the past’s own…. There are no stories in the past to correspond to…. This point is reinforced a little differently by Ankersmit. For him, the history text consists of many individual statements. Most of these claim to give an accurate description of some state of affiars in the past. Historians formulate these statements on the basis of the sources they work on in archives, etc., and it is these sources when used as evidence that will decide the truth or falsity of the statements in question. But – and this is Ankersmit’s argument – because they sources available to most historians will enable them to write many more true statements than are actually to be found in their texts, then out of all the statements the historian could have made, the ones actually made are carefully selected, distributed and weighted, the result being that a certain picture of the past is fabricated. You can always get another rpicture, you can always get another context.

Digression: Indeed, there is a marxist narrative of history, just as there is a whig one, though it does not have predictive ability so I fail to see it as a valid look at the entire history of mankind.

P43 Carr is seen as a radical sceptic and relativist, and Elton simply as the truth-seeker and objectivist.

­The Oxford Shorter English Dictionary defines a fact as ‘a datum of experience distinct from conclusions” Subject separate from object.

P4-5 “The historian must not get these things (i.e. hastings being fought in 1066) wrong. But when points of this kind are aised, I am reminded of Housman’s remark that ‘accuracy is a duty, not a virtue’. To praise a historian for his accuracy is like praising an architect for using well seasoned timber or properly mixed concrete in his building. It is a necessary condition of his work, but not his essential function.

History, like politics, is an art.

Carr quotes Voltaire who says much the same: If you have nothing to tell us, except that one barbarian succeeded another on the banks of the Oxus and Jaxartes, what is that to us?