Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Objectivity and the historian: Beyond the fried egg testIs objectivity bad for a historian?I am asking for a friend.Whereas once objectivity might have been considered the historian's superpower-an enviable ability to rise above the fray and see all sides of the mountain (more on this mountain later)-it now seems that it might be a malady.The postmodernists, of course, have long diagnosed objectivity as a self-serving delusion or sleight of hand with which we bolster ourselves and seduce our readers.1 But could it be worse than that?In an age where employees are urged to 'Speak Your Truth', and the Harvard Business Review advises us to bring 'our whole, authentic self to work', is the suppression of self that objectivity might be thought to entail the reason why so many of my colleagues seem unhappy? 2 Are we engaged in a collective act of ascetic self-harm in which our individual perspectives are sacrificed in pursuit of a chimaera?The trouble, if trouble it is, is usually traced to Leopold von Ranke, the so-called 'father' of modern historical scholarship.3 The ambition he set in the preface to his History of the Latin and Teutonic Peoples (1824), to empirically establish 'as things really were' ('wie es eigentlich gewesen'), through a wide-ranging examination of primary source materials, has provided the profession with its enduring rationale.On one hand, it was a claim of demurring modesty: Ranke was not interested in 'judging the past', and he eschewed the 18th-century ambition-epitomised in Voltaire-of learning 'lessons' from history. 4 On the other, it was a vaulting ambition, which demanded historians 'extinguish' their own personality in order to 'immerse themselves in the epoch and assess it in a manner appropriate for that time'.5 It is tempting to say that the objective of being objective haunted historians thereafter, but it is more accurate to say that an aspiration for, and a sense of justification in, the notion of objectivity was imbibed and internalised but less frequently theorised by the profession.It was no doubt comforting to think of one's trade as an empirical science (the translation of Ranke's Wissenschaft did a lot of heavy lifting in the Anglophone world), and most historians assumed that they were, or ought to be, objective, but it would be a mistake to assume that
Source: Critical Quarterly
DOI: 10.1111/criq.12824
Author: David Stack
Institution: University of Reading
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,900
OpenAlex ID: W4409601633