1. In doing this I do not want to polarise history into ‘conventional’ and ‘unconventional’ just as, for example, there is no pure subjectivism or pure objectivism. I am not, therefore, going to suggest there is a single authentic way for historians to think about or practice in their engagement with the time before now. And, of course, even historians who generally agree on‘the basics’ all do history somewhat differently. But what I am going to suggest is that there is a radical kind of history that rethinks conventional approaches at the epistemic level. A substantial start in this direction has been made over many years now in the work of Keith Jenkins and others. This flux-ive state has been around for a long time now and is well understood. See for example Keith Jenkins, ‘“Nobody Does it Better”: Radical History and Hayden White’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, vol. 12, no. 1 (2008) 59–74. See also William Gallois’ treatment of time in history, which begins appropriately enough with the question of epistemology in Time, Religion and History (Harlow, 2007), pp. 1–36, passim. For an extremely sensitive and well-argued response to the postmodern JenkinsMunslow position see that provided in
2. Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, The Future of Class in History: What is Left of the Social? (Ann Arbor, MI, 2007).
3. See, for example, the analysis of the philosopher Charles Taylor who stakes out the central epistemic claim for history–he refers to it as a society–that historical understanding is inherently historical. In other words, without history there can be no philosophy, life, understanding and so on. See Charles Taylor ‘Philosophy and its history’ in Richard Rorty, J.B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (eds), Philosophy in History: Essays in the Historiography ofPhilosophy (Cambridge, 1991 [1984]), pp. 17–30.
4. For a more recent examination of deconstruction in historical thinking and practice see Ethan Kleinberg, ‘Haunting History: Deconstruction and the Spirit of Revision’, History and Theory, vol. 46, no. 4 (2007), pp. 113–43.
5. Like ‘epistemological’ the adjective ‘epistemic’ is derived from the Greek term for knowledge. Anything described as ‘epistemic’ has some connection to knowledge and/or its justification. Thus, in epistemic terms conventional historians are metaphysical realists. Thus, they believe (a) the past world once existed and was comprised of an immovable aggregate of mind-independent existents, (b) there is a single true (or most likely) description/narrative/story of it to be ‘found’ and (c) historical truth corresponds to it. See Hilary Putnam, Pragmatism and Realism, ed. by James Conant and Ursula M. Zeglen (London and New York, 2002), pp. 89–90. I appreciate that this argument is occasionally hedged with the apparent acceptance of history as a narrative construction, that the story does not unproblematically emerge from the data, that the historian always has presuppositions, that the positivist notion of the separation of history and literature is in need of modification, that ideology does exist in history, that the distinction between fact and fiction is not always straightforward and that there is such a thing as the historical imagination and there are perspectives. This is the view of realist philosopher of history George Iggers. But in a debate with Hayden White Iggers argues that White’s insistence that every historical account, assuming it does not make up what happened in the past, possesses equal truth value must be wrong. In effect Iggers denies that everything he has conceded to White adds up to accepting that the logico-deductive in history is always tempered by the tropologicalfigurative. For myself I tend to support what I think is White’s argument that measures of truth and falsity in historical accounts as a whole–that history is a piece of writing–needs to be addressed rather than just totting up the factual data and in effect ignoring the truth constituting nature of literary representation. See Georg Iggers on this in his debate with Hayden White some ten years ago ‘Historiography Between Scholarship and Poetry: Reflections on Hayden White’s Approach to Historiography’, RethinkingHistory. The Journal of Theory and Practice, vol. 4, no. 3 (2000), pp. 374–90 and