In no branch of history has the challenge of postmodernism and deconstruction been felt more keenly than in the history of ideas. Here the goal has been to interpret past texts; the intentions of the author, as revealed in those texts, set limits to possible interpretations even where they do not mandate a single one. Deconstructionists such as Jacques Derrida assert that the intentions of the author can never be known and would be irrelevant even if they could be. All that an interpreter has is the text—thus, Michel Foucault, drawing upon the work of literary critic Roland Barthes, declared the “death” of the author. No single meaning can be assigned to the text, because what it does not say may be more significant than what it does. Even what it does say cannot be reduced to a stable meaning, because of the intrinsic opacity and slipperiness of language. (Most words in ordinary usage have several different definitions; there is no way to use them so as to totally exclude all traces of the other meanings. Puns, of which Derrida was fond, illustrate these “surplus” meanings.)
The subversiveness of such views for the traditional practice of the history of ideas is obvious. Derrida’s advocates presented his ideas as liberating and as allowing critics to exercise the same creativity as imaginative writers. The apparent concession to total relativism, however, has seemed too high, not least because it renders the deconstructionist position vulnerable to the paradox of relativism (if the deconstructionist is right that there are no stable meanings, then there is no stable meaning to the assertion that there are no stable meanings, in which case the deconstructionist position cannot even be formulated). Derrida occasionally complained of being misread. But the deconstructionist position is not absurd, nor can it be refuted by saying that few historians have accepted it. Military history
Soldiers in battle were the theme of the earliest Greek epic and the earliest histories. It has not lost its interest for modern readers and writers. The focus of academic military history, however, has changed as markedly as the nature of modern warfare has changed. The campaigns of the American Civil War, with their chesslike maneuvering and great set-piece battles, continue to fascinate, but attrition and pounding by superior force assumed an ever-greater role in 20th-century military strategy, despite yielding few brilliant generals or individual heroes. On the other hand, World War I was the first European war to be fought by literate armies, and the soldiers in that conflagration created not only a great literature but also a mass of material about their experiences. In The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), Paul Fussell made full use of these documents to produce an account of life in the trenches. Although the literary output of soldiers in World War II was much less significant, the American writer Studs Terkel, using techniques of oral history, managed to compile in The Good War (1984) a comparable panorama of its participants, including those on the home front. Perhaps the leading exponent of military history as the social history of war is John Keegan, whose work ranges from the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 to the wars of the 21st century. Political history
For many people, and for many years, “history” simply meant political history. A large proportion of published works by historians was devoted to political history as late as the 1970s, but even before that time historians had begun to examine other topics. Although E.A. Freeman’s slogan “History is past politics” no longer rings true, it is safe to say that political history will continue to be a prominent part of historical writing and will challenge the subtlety, worldly wisdom, and narrative powers of historians as long as history is written.
The primary goal of political history in the immediate postwar years was to supplement (or, in the minds of some, to supplant) the historian’s traditional reliance on narrative with a scientific or quantitative approach; inevitably, this endeavour came to be called “new political history.” It was to be, as William Aydelotte put it, “a sedate, hesitant, circumspect, little behavioral revolution” in American historical practice. The postwar United States furnished some innovative young historians who combined an interest in political history with a program for making it more scientific. Among the most systematic of these scholars was Lee Benson, author of an influential work that applied quantitative techniques to the study of Jacksonian democracy. “By 1984,” he predicted in 1966,
a significant proportion of American historians will have accepted … two basic propositions: (1) past human behavior can be studied scientifically; (2) the main business of historians is to participate in the overall scholarly enterprise of discovering and developing general laws of human behavior.
Wherever possible, all statements in historical works should be formulated so precisely as to be “verifiable.” Implicitly but vaguely quantitative terms (e.g., most or significant proportion) should be replaced by numerical expressions.
Quantitative data to support such ambitions were available for elections. Using what he found in New York state, Benson succeeded in showing that party affiliation was largely determined by ethnic and cultural loyalties and remained surprisingly immune to the issues raised by party platforms or political speeches.
The University of Iowa was another hotbed of quantitative approaches, and electoral statistics of Iowa and other Midwestern states soon joined those of New York. The new political historians also established an archive of national election data at the University of Michigan, which they hoped to use to prepare a truly comprehensive electoral history.
Less-ambitious quantitative projects focused on parliamentary bodies. Lewis Namier (1888–1960), probably the greatest English historian of his generation, undertook the biographical study of members of Parliament. Namier borrowed the prosopographic technique of Ronald Syme, a historian of ancient Rome, which involved tracing the family connections, sources of income and influence, and offices held by a defined group of the political elite. This approach was most useful for the study of oligarchic regimes and hence was especially suitable for the Roman Senate and mid-18th-century British parliaments. The main effect of such work was to de-emphasize the impact of political ideologies and to assert the importance of kinship and personal relations in deliberative assemblies.
More directly quantitative was the work of Aydelotte, who investigated the conventional claim that the English Corn Laws (protective tariffs on grain imports) were abolished because members of Parliament who represented manufacturing districts wanted the cheapest-possible food for their workers (allowing the lowest-possible wages). As plausible as this view was, significant correlations frequently failed to appear.
The new political historians carried the quantitative program into the stronghold of traditional historiography. Terms such as impressionistic, anecdotal, and narrative acquired dismissive connotations. More-traditional historians were admonished for excessive reliance on literary evidence (i.e., anything that could not be quantified).