In Defence of History

Product Information

In addition, this reply also considers some of the points raised in letters published in The Times Higher Educational Supplement on 19 and 26 September 1997 in reply to my article 'Truth Lost in Vain Views', published in the same periodical on 12 September 1997 (p. Thucydides famously restricted himself to matters within living memory, but he still differed from modern practice by ascribing imaginary speeches to the people he considered to be important, something which is characteristic of ancient and medieval historians. Walaubagaiamanpun sudah agak banyak bahan bacaan historiografi yang sempat aku ladeni, tetapi ini adalah buku pertama yang aku dapati penulisnya begitu berani berhadapan dengan fenomena penyusupan masuk faham-faham pasca-modenisme di dalam bidang penulisan sejarah historiografi. Peter Ghosh, 'Laid Down by Ranke', in London Review of Books, 19 October 1998 (and subsequent correspondence in the LRB).

Makna di sebalik sejarah segalanya adalah ciptaan dan rekayasa manusia: mentalite, ideologie, paradigm. Wulf Kansteiner has argued that Evans produces a caricature of postmodernism because he draws from a limited number of sources and presents the most radical variations as mainstream.And if you come across an argumentative post-modernist at a party, telling you that you don’t know anything, this book will supply you with plenty of arguments to try to convince them otherwise! In fact, I wish that Evans would update the book to reflect his experiences as an expert witness in that trial.

Evans warns against both a “rank indifference” toward the linguistic challenge as well as a “drawing up [of] the disciplinary drawbridge” against new and strange forces. This descent into post-truth can be halted however, by Evans’ reassertion that “today we need to say, again, that there is such a thing as the truth and you can find it out” . Indeed, this has been part of the discipline from its very start, at least to some extent, as the notion of historian as interpreter rather than chronicler was defined by Herodotus and Thucydides, who differed quite considerably as to method. His books have been awarded the Wolfson History Prize and the Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History.in January, 1999; and the German edition, Fakten und Fiktionen: Über die Grundlagen historischer Erkenntnis, translated by Ulrich Speck and published by Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, in October 1998. The young now, even more so, retreat into their over stimulating computer games and televisions and forget about what is real, and about truth altogether.

And if you do come across an argumentative post-modernist at a party telling you that you don’t know anything, you will have plenty of arguments to try to convince them otherwise! Steve Smith, 'Truth in an age of challenge', The Times Higher Educational Supplement, 28 November 1997, p. He tries to be fair, but cannot help but be critical of much postmodernist history; this is quite easy, as many statements by its advocates verge on the ludicrous. All ideas are equally valid, and the only reason to even read a history book is because it helps the reader to understand the historian and his ideological world. It is the 'facts' that are unstable, subject to revision and further interpretation, and even dismissable as illusions on sufficient grounds.These caused new issues, such as the legitimacy or otherwise of secondary sources, or whether or not history is a science - the German term applied to the subject has a wider meaning than its usual English translation. Kerana itu hal tersebut adalah sesuatu yang tidak mampu dielakkan di dalam mana-mana perbahasan sejarah memandangkan satu-satu penulisan sejarah hanya terhasil rentetan kepada kewujudan suatu wacana (eg kebangkitan sains, pembentukan sistem birokrasi moden, kejatuhan rejim-rejim diktator, pertentangan kelas antara gologan pekerja dan kapitalis dll). However postmodernists get upset when they think people have misunderstood the meaning of things they have written. Het gaat de confrontatie aan met met zowel het doorgedreven relativisme van enkele postmoderne denkers, als het verbeten historicisme van conservatievere historici, en vanalles daartussenin. Another dodgy qualifier, I would say: what extent is envisaged by 'to a large extent', and why does this latitude exist at all?