Whither History? Reflections on the Comparison between Historians and Scientists

Abstract

Whither history? Increasingly, those who concern themselves with this question have concluded that it is impossible to come up with an answer. Methods, approaches, and purposes have multiplied so rapidly over the past forty years that anyone who looks at the historical enterprise as a whole is likely to deny that it has any discernable shape or mission. Neither research nor writing appear to be guided by common principles or aims. As a result, both the subject matter itself and the forms of analysis through which it is explored — the very contours of the past as well as the ways used to describe it — evaporate before our eyes. To quote a critic of a much earlier scholar who sought to unify his discipline, Galileo Galilei (and the analogy, as we shall see, is by no means inapt), the efforts “dissolve into so much alchemical smoke.”¹