A review by redbecca
In Defense of History by Richard J. Evans
3.0
There are elements to this book that I really liked, and which I found potentially useful for teaching, particularly chapter three, "Historians and their Facts"; chapter five on theories of causality, and the concluding essay on objectivity and its limits. Critics of the book describing the author as an unreconstructed Rankean are missing what makes this a good general book on historical methods.
However, it doesn't work as a teaching text because it's now dated. It would be great to see a new edition. I would like to think that the extreme versions of post-modernism that the book targets have lost their influence, but the book is not so dated as to be irrelevant.
There are some errors. Early on he confuses Einstein's theory of general relativity with an overly generalized paraphrasing of the "observer effect". He also caricatures feminist and multicultural critiques of euro-centrism in history, which shows he doesn't do the kind of justice to original sources that he argues for. His characterization of E.H. Carr's history of the USSR as "Stalinist" is unfortunate, because Carr's historical practice, regardless of his own political preferences, was such that many anti-Stalinist historians rely on his work. Seeing Carr's work despite Carr's own stated politics would have been a point in favor of his overall argument, that a responsible method of handling evidence does produce better history regardless of the historian's own proclivities.
Despite all that, Evans makes very useful critiques and observations about the state of historical writing in the 1990s, such as the degree of specialization & the growing interest in intellectual history at the expense of social history that resulted from the "linguistic turn." His critique of Hayden White and his influence is excellent and still highly relevant, indeed necessary, since it seems like Hayden White is the only historian some literary critics have ever read.
update after 2nd time teaching this book: I've decided the book still works as a teaching text, especially if you can use the afterward to the revised British edition (Granta, 200o) along with some of the reviews to work with students on addressing questions about how to use source material and consider the book as a historical document of the 1990s.
However, it doesn't work as a teaching text because it's now dated. It would be great to see a new edition. I would like to think that the extreme versions of post-modernism that the book targets have lost their influence, but the book is not so dated as to be irrelevant.
There are some errors. Early on he confuses Einstein's theory of general relativity with an overly generalized paraphrasing of the "observer effect". He also caricatures feminist and multicultural critiques of euro-centrism in history, which shows he doesn't do the kind of justice to original sources that he argues for. His characterization of E.H. Carr's history of the USSR as "Stalinist" is unfortunate, because Carr's historical practice, regardless of his own political preferences, was such that many anti-Stalinist historians rely on his work. Seeing Carr's work despite Carr's own stated politics would have been a point in favor of his overall argument, that a responsible method of handling evidence does produce better history regardless of the historian's own proclivities.
Despite all that, Evans makes very useful critiques and observations about the state of historical writing in the 1990s, such as the degree of specialization & the growing interest in intellectual history at the expense of social history that resulted from the "linguistic turn." His critique of Hayden White and his influence is excellent and still highly relevant, indeed necessary, since it seems like Hayden White is the only historian some literary critics have ever read.
update after 2nd time teaching this book: I've decided the book still works as a teaching text, especially if you can use the afterward to the revised British edition (Granta, 200o) along with some of the reviews to work with students on addressing questions about how to use source material and consider the book as a historical document of the 1990s.