![]() Nowhere is this disciplining process more apparent than in the review and publication process of the American Historical Association’s flagship journal. The disciplined are rewarded by the guild while the innovators are punished. By “new territories’ we mean alternative epistemological inquiries, orientations, or starting points, not new themes or topics. ![]() I.5 History, as a field, encourages a system of discipline or punish. Those whose positions appear to be cutting-edge but hedge their bets and organize their thought around common convention are rewarded, while those who strike out for new territories are condemned. Here the tautology is exposed: empiricist methodology enables the rule of this realism while this realism guarantees the success of empiricist methodology. I.4 Lying behind this fetishism of method is an unquestioned allegiance to “ontological realism.” Central to this epistemology is a commitment to empirical data that serves as a false floor to hold up the assertion that past events are objectively available for discovery, description, and interpretation. In contrast, training in theory lays bare the logic, pitfalls, and advantages behind the choice of any one path. I.3 The current obsession with “methodology” is premised on this “workman like” approach the odos or path to historical knowledge is assumed to be singular and those who stray from it are considered lost. This methodological emphasis narrows the disciplinary path of history, blinding researchers and readers to other possible routes to the past. This guild mentality fosters an ethos of specialized “experts,” workmen who instrumentally employ their “expertise” as proof of membership and performance of status. Historians typically write for other professional historians, paying special attention to the disciplinary norms and gatekeepers upon which career advancement depends. The field tends to produce scholars rather than thinkers, and regards scholars in technocratic terms. immediately observable, preferably archival, evidence) as embodying the real and containing the truth of social relations, it evaluates scholarship based on whether this empiricist method has been capably employed. I.2 Actually existing academic history promotes a disciplinary essentialism founded upon a methodological fetishism. Treating reified appearances (i.e. Academic history remains dedicated to this method of gathering facts in order to produce interpretations by referring them to supposedly given contexts and organizing them into chronological narratives. I.1 Academic history has never managed to transcend its eighteenth century origins as an empiricist enterprise. By this we mean not David Hume’s earlier skeptical approach but the scientistic method intrinsically linked to positivism, which Horkheimer called “modern empiricism” that was later adopted across the human sciences. To sanctify our mission and to commend us With these theses on Theory and History we invite you Ill-equip us for the critical thought we soĭesperately need, even to analyze those repositories Our observations, when limited to description, Told by victors and moralists, signifyingĪnd sources of injustice remain mystified, Without Theory, History is naught but tales, Theory has been dishonored in your house,įetishism of archives, dictates of discipline,Įnforcement of orthodoxy, and impotent story-telling. Now is the time to utter true things, for “we know how to speak false things that seem true,īut we know when we will, to utter true things.” Sing Clio, daughter of Zeus, Theory’s rage Prologue: Dedicated to Clio, Muse of History
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