On the Killing of History
Windschuttle, Keith. The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past. New York: Free Press, 2000. pp. 372. Paperback.
Despite some of the bombast in the title and littered throughout the text, I do think that Windschuttle is broadly correct. Although far from “killing” history and “murdering our past,” literary and social theory has taken on a life of its own in the historical profession. These theories are absolutely important in critiquing faulty methodology and introducing new ways of approaching issues, but I think that far too many historians look to theory and criticism in its own right and attempt to pigeonhole their ideas into conforming to these theories. The opposite should be the case—evidence needs to be used in order to construct theory, which may or may not be suitable for different historical studies.
Windschuttle is a bit too conservative for my taste in the way he sees the historical profession—he finds that it might be best to fully jettison post-structuralism, post-modernism, hermeneutics, poetics, and so on, ignoring the reasons why these were applied to the historical profession in the first place. That being said, there is a far more cautious and measured criticism to make of historians in the past few decades that can be made, and Windschuttle points at this before going too far. It’s worth reading, but not necessarily worth accepting his conclusions wholesale.