Intellectual Historians and the Content of the Form

Abstract

The reasons for the strange death — or decline — of causality in history are various, resting in part on reactions to the illegitimate importing of natural-scientific methods in the 1950s and 60s and in part on a longstanding ‘empirical’ attachment to evidence, chronology, facts, events, description, objectivity and narrative.¹ Above all, the marginalization of causal explanation in theories of history has been connected to a series of oft-decried but rarely completed ‘turns’ — linguistic, semiotic, symbolic, cultural, post-colonial — in specific historical sub-disciplines during the last two decades or so.² The concomitant disputes have been acrimonious, with Patrick Joyce accusing his antagonist Lawrence Stone of issuing ‘a war cry’ and ‘pre-emptive strike on “postmodernism”’ in 1991, after the latter had blamed three ‘threats’ from linguistics, cultural and symbolic anthropology, and ‘new historicism’ for provoking ‘a crisis of self-confidence’ within the discipline of history. Generally, the different positions have been cast as a defence of — or attack on — the ability of historians to describe the world beyond texts and to use evidence to prove or disprove a case, rather than implying a direct assault on causality.³ ‘Derrida has concentrated his fire upon the realist assumptions embedded in the Western conviction that words could repeat reality’, wrote the intellectual historian Joyce Appleby in 1998: ‘Despite the overt commitment to rationality, writings in the Western tradition, he has said, can always be found undermining these categories [of dichotomy] because they were not, in actuality, opposites that explained the world but elements within a hermeneutic system’.⁴