According
to Keith Windschuttle, an Australian history professor, the latter half
of the twentieth century saw a sustained assault on the very concept of
objective history. This attack came from many quarters, from German
philosophers to French literary critics to Anglo-American scientists.
Windschuttle's objective is to defend the discipline of history against
those relativists who consider the writing of history to exclusively be a
function of ideology. He explicitly places his work in the tradition
of such classics as Alan Bloom's
The Closing of the American Mind.
Unfortunately, while Windschuttle takes the reader on an
excellent tour through the various alleyways of postmodernism, he is
less successful at actually defending his profession. In particular,
the book suffers from a scattershot approach, addressing historical
problems involving settings as varied as the European penal system, the
Aztec empire at the time of Cortez, and Hawaii at the time of Cook. Of
course, the critics he opposes have written on all of these and more,
but given that the author is clearly most comfortable discussing the
historiography of Australia and Oceania, it might have been better to
narrow his focus. Worse, he paints with a broad brush, lumping together
various thinkers in ways that do not do justice to some of them - he is
particularly unfair to Martin Heidegger and Karl Popper.
While I am sympathetic to Windschuttle's critique of
postmodernism, his execution here is not equal to his ambition. A book
with a narrower focus in both historical subjects and philosophical
opponents would have served his cause better.
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