Michael Oakeshott, On History, (Oxford, 1983). Zagorin, in an article in History and Theory (1), launched a wholesale attack on the postmodern critique of history, in particular that represented by the articles contained in The Postmodern History Reader (2), a collection of articles recently edited by Jenkins. But it seems to me that certain of his basic points are now beyond challenge (though many historians and others will no doubt continue to challenge them). So you may ask what Jenkins offers once he has torn down the common understanding of historiography. Or, no more than the fact that we speak our own language prevents us from communicating with someone else. They have always been aware, or should have been aware, that historians are human beings, potentially incompetent, biased, fallible and subjective; that the significance of facts is not embodied within the facts; that sources need to be contextualised; that languages and the vocabulary of documents require careful translation and critical decoding; and that any correspondence between historical sources and a lived past is at best tenuous. So how do historians make their work secure? positioned, constructed in someone’s interest. Does it have to be “all-or-nothing” or can we reframe the discussion around “degree” of “plausibility” instead? 3). If you want to explore this tantalising subject, where do you start? Given how many such reified projections there have been, he adds critically, one might have expected them to have been seen for what they patently are, mere expressions of human desire. How, for instance, is the by now conventional linguistic scepticism – that we can never know anything for certain because the language we use for knowing never can convey or contain stable meaning – relevant to historical studies? Jenkins is a professor of history at the University of Chichester who is known for his advocating of a postmodern historiography. And I hope we’d all learn significant things…. As such most historians have already taken full account of them (O’Brien, Himmelfarb). Jenkins does not consider in Refiguring History David Carr’s argument that the world is experienced in narrative form. They want testable hypothesis that result in some form of “objective” knowledge. That historical investigation, theoretically informed and subject to a collective, professional judgement, might yet enable the properly qualified historian to discover something about the past (Fulbrook, Elton, O’Brien). This does not mean each man is right, nor does it mean the epistemology they possess is fiction. Robert Anchor, Review of Why History, History and Theory, 40, 1, (2001), 104-116. That said, it seems that Jenkins departs from epistemological arrogrance to epistemological nihilism. As for the new histories thus produced, they will be useful, even emanciatory, contributing as they almost certainly will to a radical, ‘disobedient’, counter-hegemonic politics, of the sort that Jenkins, apparently depressed by the failure of the Modernist experiment known as the ‘Enlightenment Project’, deems most desirable (Jenkins, 2003, pp. We, the inhabitants of this new, postmodern world, now no longer need history to ‘place ourselves’ in present time, think about the future and articulate identities and programmes appropriate to a reflexive, emancipatory politics, ‘without foundations’ (Jenkins, 1999, p. 202). Product pricing will be adjusted to match the corresponding currency. On the R, then, I’d grant that a lot of critics would resist playing along, but I also think they’d be pleasantly surprised at the possible outcomes of the exercise. Which ones? Offline Computer – Download Bookshelf software to your desktop so you can view your eBooks with or without Internet access. The relationship between epistemology and ontology is that epistemology nears perfection as it aggregates the subjective epistemological norm. But not, one would suppose, to his self-appointment as one of the leading sceptical, relativistic and ‘disobedient’ philosophers of history of his generation. J. Appleby, Hunt L. and Jacob M., Telling the Truth about History, (New York, 1994). Any contemporary consensus can only be arrived at when one dominant voice or set of voices silences others, either by means of overt power or covert incorporation. We shall never know, that is to say (speaking now of history), what History/history ‘really is’. (London, 2002). (p. 5) History and “the past” are not one and the same since the past has happened, but history is a present interpretation of some of the events of the past. Keith Jenkins (Ed. It was no doubt this last qualification that eventually led to his appointment as a lecturer in history at Chichester. That the postmodern critique (commonly associated with Jenkins) must be inconsequential as it has made little or no impact on the way historians write history (Cannadine, Zagorin). Histories, that is to say, are invariably fabricated, without any real foundations beyond the textual. Nevertheless, we (no doubt half-baked) philosophical few have much to thank Jenkins for, not least his persistent and almost always well argued reminders of just how fallible history really is. Religious Studies Instructor at TMI Episcopal (San Antonio, TX). History - Theory, Method & Historiography. Bernard Waites, ‘In Defence of Historical Realism: A Further Response to Keith Jenkins’, Rethinking History, 15, 3 (2011), 319-334. In Rethinking History (1991), a remarkable bestseller, much translated, Jenkins argues compellingly that the conventional view of academic history – that it enjoys the benefits of a uniquely effective epistemology and methodology which enables it to discover from historical facts, properly established, some sort of historical truth, a truth, moreover that can be conveyed to a willing audience by way of historical narrative …