From Traditions to Histories: Back from the Brink

[Editor’s Note: Today’s post is authored by William Fine, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown – emeritus. It responds to a forum in the January 2011 issue of Historically Speaking titled “From Histories to Traditions: A New Paradigm of Pluralism in the Study of the Past.” The lead-off piece is authored by Christopher Shannon, with three responses from Daniel Wickberg, Mark Weiner, and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, as well as a final reply from Shannon. This particular forum is part of an ongoing HS series dedicated to “questioning the assumptions of academic history.” The topic was first mentioned at USIH about three weeks ago. Enjoy!]

————————————————-

In “From Histories to Traditions,” Christopher Shannon raises important issues about the discipline of history and where it’s going. But it’s difficult to see exactly what he’s proposing, which generates some uncertainty and perhaps uneasiness in his interlocutors. He calls for a pluralism broader and deeper than “liberal” history, but “tradition-based history” evokes fears of orthodoxy. Does his pluralist paradigm imply a postmodern relativism, or might it presage some new catechism?

To complicate matters, while calling for a shift “from histories to traditions,” Shannon draws upon Alasdair MacIntyre to characterize liberal history as already a “tradition,” though denying itself as such. Like the “liberal modernity” to which it’s inextricably bound, it’s unwilling “to confront its true nature.” While it sees itself using abstracted, value-neutral analytic practices and procedures to generate impersonal, value-free knowledge, the reality for Shannon is that history rests on mostly unexamined philosophical assumptions and moral values. Indeed, it’s a holistic culture or moral community that both requires and produces particular kinds of persons deeply committed to it.

Shannon distinguishes his new pluralist paradigm from liberal history, though he admits difficulty in describing it, and indeed it’s a somewhat murky concept. Because liberal history is now seen as a tradition, rather than a set of detachable, neutral analytical practices, it engages with other traditions on a deep epistemological, moral and existential level. As he puts it, a plurality of traditions “highlight[s] the substantive and incommensurable pretheoretical frameworks” used in historical study, which “put[s] historical debate on the proper footing,” which is to say, the “study of history across traditions… becomes something like interfaith dialogue.”

History seems to lead a double life: the liberal history “tradition” specifically, and history as a pluralistic space, a site at which diverse traditions, including liberal history, challenge one another. The latter implies not only rules of engagement, but a language that can mediate incommensurables, building on commonalities while respecting differences, fostering challenge without divisive conflict, moderating the interplay of traditions, etc. But this sounds like the old pretense of liberal rules abstracted from any cultural base. Or, if they do constitute a sort of super-tradition, at what point does it come up for critical examination? The question is, what becomes of history when it’s conceived as a faith, or as a site modeled on religious dialogue? Is this a post-secular post, a great leap backward, or some weird hybrid?

If reason cannot be divorced from faith, as Shannon contends, one has to ask, whose faith? Yet some sort of answer seems to be assumed, since the “new model of professional pluralism would distinguish itself from its liberal predecessor by an explicit commitment to the pursuit of Truth — that is, a truth beyond that which is empirically verifiable.” Pluralism may have its limits, even though Shannon assures us no “grid of catechism” is to be imposed. At one point, though, responding to the concern his paradigm might imply a Babel of views, he reassures us that a “truly traditional Muslim perspective” could be excluded. Maybe “Truth” just can’t be a plural.

The range of possible outcomes seems clear: utter incommunicability, conflict and fragmentation, a restricted pluralism, Truth wedded to faith, or the continuation of something much like “liberal history,” perhaps with ghettoized subfields. In any case, ours is a time when many see conventional history as shallow or thin, formalistic, detached from real life and public issues, fragmented, inauthentic. One is reminded of Christopher Lasch’s depiction of the late Victorian restlessness of the new intellectuals; or, indeed, the concluding paragraph of Max Weber’s essay “Science as a Vocation,” still the best articulation of issues of objectivity and neutrality. In this sort of milieu, tradition has great appeal — as do similarly capacious and integrating concepts such as revolution and epochal breaks and turns. This is due in part to its totalizing or holistic character, its insistence on the inseparability, on the non-abstractable character of things — the shallow and the deep, means and ends, technique and culture, everyday life and ultimate meaning, minutiae and fundamentals, practices and their original forms, facts and interpretive frameworks, how we’re living and who we are. It provides at once the reassurance of a meaningful whole, an invitation to explore non-obvious, deep and distant connections, and an urgent raison d’etre for critical thinking.

In this holistic approach to the discipline, all facets and levels are seen tightly bound, sometimes in ways that appear quite deterministic. Neither Talcott Parsons nor Louis Althusser could do much better. The behavior of professional historians is sociologically bound to their socialization as particular kinds of persons, and an identitarian mechanism ensures that “who they are” explains their approach to history. [In Walter Benn Michaels’ terms, this is identity politics with a vengeance, as issues of truth become matters of “who we are,” history becomes tradition, and science turns into faith.] Analytical and research practices are meaningfully, even logically, bound to underlying values and epistemological preconceptions; and a sort of historiographic determinism explains that liberal historians invariably celebrate the progress of choice, freedom and agency. Finally, a political determination guarantees that liberal history mirrors and helps reproduce liberal modernity.

Shannon’s totalizing view of the discipline gives his piece a something-for-everyone character. To Daniel Wickberg, it supports the view that history, for reasons more “practical and ideological…than intellectual,” diversified its topics instead of facing up to the philosophical challenge of the linguistic turn, clinging to “the modernist certitude of fact.” Like Shannon, he criticizes Gabrielle Spiegel’s effort to historicize postmodernism as [in fact?] politically motivated epistemic avoidance. For Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Shannon raises important questions about the “underlying assumptions and dominating practices” of history, including its empty careerist model of identity and “interpretive exhaustion.” Thus liberal history gears directly into the “meaningless” freedom-without-purpose of modern therapeutic society, which can prompt an escape from freedom into some new bondage. But she seems less concerned finally that “Catholic history” would threaten the discipline as a whole than that it would be absorbed into a “totalizing pluralism” in which fundamental debates have been replaced by each historian’s freedom to choose whatever perspective “works for her” and doesn’t “interfere with her lifestyle,” to use the clichés.

Mark Weiner believes Shannon’s arguments can provide a “quickening agent” for liberal ends, challenging historians to articulate their core values, find out who they are, and incorporate the interpretive and stylistic approaches of a wider diversity of traditions, including non-western. Here is an improved liberalism that recalls and updates Raymond Williams’ sense of culture as a critique of bourgeois society. At the same time¸ even as they criticize liberal history, none of the articles question the market model of history as a profession, rendering it a microcosm of liberal modernity. This may both assume and give away too much, foreclosing possibilities for critical thinking.

Of the possible outcomes, continuation of something approximating “liberal history” appears most likely, short of utter societal collapse. Over the last hundred years, history has faced challenges that strike at the foundations, which it has dealt with or sidestepped in one way or another, wobbling but coming back to some version of the “myth of objectivity,” to the artificiality of specialized attention. For better or worse, there are powerful mechanisms that tend to maintain the secularized professionalism of modern disciplines, including a periodic re-negotiation of boundaries and an only occasional focus on moral, political, epistemological issues with which they’re not well equipped to deal. Which isn’t to argue they shouldn’t make an effort. These mechanisms of course include the translation of epistemological challenges into historical topics, which both Shannon and Wickberg criticize. Along with this, as Novick describes, specialized journals like History and Theory can proliferate in all directions, allowing, in this case, epistemological issues “too hot to handle” to be “formally ghettoized as an esoteric concern.” Who now reads History and Theory?

These are part of the persistent and dominant tendency, which is to generate until-further-notice agreements to deal primarily with questions that can be answered to some level of felt adequacy, using recognized disciplinary procedures of rational analysis and conventions for deciding what constitutes evidence. For all its limitations, there is something to be said for this, just as there is for scientists giving most of their time and attention as scientists to the study of natural processes, rather than pondering the ultimate meaning of creation — unless like the old natural philosophers they can manage both at once. There are good reasons to talk about science as a tradition, perhaps analogous in some respects to faith. But that’s a long way from re-framing it as an interfaith dialogue, between, say, evolution and intelligent design — and the distance is not reduced by our yearning for “meaning.”

Paradoxically, to argue that history become authentic by conducting itself as a tradition may turn it into something radically different from what it’s been, which is perhaps the point. It both promises and asks too much, taking accountability and the hope of authenticity to the point of absurdity. We shouldn’t overly burden ourselves, as if everything in the world depended on what we think and say. [But of course all of this begs the question.] There’s a slippery slide of perception, as the discipline moves from a fiction of autonomy, to a synecdoche of the whole, to being seen as foundational, as if the global really could be remade locally. I can’t but recall my sad experience in “radical” American Studies in the late 60s and early 70s: first it was a site from which to launch an American revolution, then imperceptibly [to us] became a project to revolutionize the field of American Studies, and, finally, pretty routine academic politics. Passion, commitment and a fierce urgency were undiminished throughout. This is the sort of thing helps account for the otherwise bizarre turn famously described by Todd Gitlin, in which efforts to transform society turned into struggles to control the English Department.