Week Four

Something I found interesting about the reading selections for this week is that both works had somewhat sweeping theses that were supposed to apply on the national level, and yet the vast majority of the evidence presented in both was drawn from a single location--Chicago in the Reagan book, University of Texas - Austin in the Rossinow book.

The jump from a single location to conclusions about the entire nation seems less problematic in the Reagan book. Chicago was a huge and diverse city and while practices surely varied somewhat from city to city, it stretched the bounds of credibility to suggest that Chicago was some crazy anomaly in which abortion was viewed and treated totally differently than in all other places--and indeed Reagan presents some limited evidence that it was not in the form of letters from people in other cities claiming that things were much the same for them. Granted, what applies to cities likely does not apply to rural areas, but Reagan acknowledges this and doesn't claim that her conclusions are fully applicable to those areas.

In the Rossinow book, by contrast, this methodology seems very problematic. By Rossinow's own admission, UT - Austin was a progressive oasis in the midst of right-wing Texas, and I can see no reason to assume that what holds for that school would hold for the New Left elsewhere. Rossinow convincingly demonstrates that UTA differed greatly from the stereotype of SDS based on the SDS chapters in NYC and Chicago and Berkeley and so on (the 'northern rim' of the country), and less convincingly demonstrates that a number of other schools had New Left cultures more like Austin than NYC, but he falls well short of fully defending his thesis that this alternative culture was really the dominant one for most members of the New Left. Actually, based on the first two chapters (and a quick flip through of the others), I would say that he has written a fine (if somewhat repetitive) book that defends a somewhat different thesis from the one he claims to defend. And in fact, after a few initial overstatements of his thesis, he doesn't really seem to even be trying to demonstrate anything more than that there was an alternative culture in the New Left that differs from the one we typically think of.

I should note that I had objections to Rossinow's thesis from the beginning, as I happen to know quite a few veterans of the original SDS (and other New Left groups like SNCC) who tell a different story from Rossinow--and not all of them were in big northern cities. The story of the left as I've always heard (and experienced) it is that, at least during the post-World War II era and likely long before, there have always been two radically different cultures existing side by side in a somewhat awkward truce: one grounded in a long and intellectual tradition going back to Marx and the First International and usually oriented toward labor, the other a very counter-cultural, freespirited group who often identify as anarchists. The former tend to be exasperated by the latter, and the latter tend to think the former are outdated and overly academic. Undoubtedly, geographical location is a major factor in the numbers of people by which each of these traditions is represented, but it's a mistake (and one that Rossinow seems to make) not to recognize that members of both groups are usually present on any given campus and in any given city, and thus that looking for one single historical narrative to explain "New Left culture" is a project bound to fail because there are at least two very different cultures in any given left movement.

Third Week

Before commenting on the "Statement on Standards" as per instructions, I quickly want to note a way in which Historians in Trouble ties into a theme from the previous week/text, namely the construction of reality by language. It occurred to me during our class discussion about the way that certain of the accused in the book--namely Fox-Genovese and Thernstrom--spun their cases as examples of standing up to the left, as opposed to serious violations of ethical and professional standards, that this is a great example of a change in language totally changing the 'reality' of the past. And that's all I really wanted to say about that.

As for the "Statement on Standards," I didn't find the text particularly interesting. Meaning, it reads exactly as you would expect it to read and doesn't say anything we don't all already know. Sure, you can use it to indict many of the accused in the Wiener book: for example, Weinstein clearly acted in violation of the standard that "historians favor free, open, equal, and nondiscriminatory access to archival...collections wherever possible," and the Statement's claim that "the plagiarist's standard defense--that he or she was misled by hastily taken and imperfect notes--is plausible only in the context of a wider tolerance of shoddy work" is applicable to several of Wiener's case studies. But we didn't need the Statement to tell us these things. The real question is, what is the function of the Statement? Given that it's basically a formalized version of fundamental principles all historians are already aware of, what do we gain by approving this formal document?

The obvious answer would be that a governing body can refer to the statement when judging cases of supposed fraud or plagiarism (or whatever), but as there is no longer a body empowered to take action against violations of the standards, this function is questionable. It's also doubtful that anyone really expects university administrators who actually do have this power to make reference to the document. It seems to me like the Statement really just exists to make us all feel better about ourselves and our profession.

That said, there is one claim in the document that I found interesting: "the real penalty for plagiarism is the abhorrence of the community of scholars." Is this an accurate description of reality? Do the folks who've got away with plagiarism or fraud really suffer from a permanently damaged reputation within the field? This isn't a rhetorical question, as I'm genuinely curious about the fates of some of the individuals whose faults are described in the book. What do Pearson's colleagues at Franklin and Marshall think of him? Has his relationship with the rest of his department suffered? What about that asshole Feldman who tried to prevent David Abraham from getting a job--does he suffer from working in a community of historians who all think he's a shithead, or is life basically the same for him as it always was?

Second Week

So I totally forgot about writing a blog post last week (I don't have internet at home so I have to plan time at the library). So this post is for last week's readings/discussion, and my third week post will follow soon.

I want to comment, as some other folks did, on the question of language making reality. I have a second major in philosophy (I like history better!) and have spent a good deal of time on post-structuralist (or postmodernist) thought, and this idea has always been one of my favorite things about the post-structuralists, especially Foucault and Derrida. Essentially, I agree with the thesis that 'reality' is constructed, or at least constrained, by language. I consider the only meaningful uses of the words 'truth' and 'reality' to be in reference to sentient (not necessarily human) experience--which is not to say that nothing would exist without that experience, only that we can't meaningfully talk or think about what it means for something to exist outside of experience. Foucault, who despite his criticisms of the possibility of doing history is in many ways an historian himself, deals with this in a really interesting way in writing the history of ideas (for example in his book The Order of Things) where, instead of treating intellectual history as a neutral battlefield for rational arguments and events which evolve over time, he writes history as consisting of a series of epochs in which the "conditions of the possibility of knowledge" (essentially, the language and, hence, the intellectual frameworks that are available to humans) differ in ways that constrain all areas of human thought in particular ways. Our own time is no exception, although Foucault's histories all conveniently end before his own lifetime.

It's interesting, and maybe a little bit scary, to think about how this applies to history. The Iggers book describes several epochs of thought in historical scholarship, each with its own ideas about the proper methods, subjects, and styles of writing appropriate to history. Like Foucault, Iggers is much more careful about making sweeping claims about our own time, but if all other periods of historical writing (and human intellectual history generally) can be describes in terms of constraining frameworks, why not ours? It's the conceit of every generation to believe at least implicitly that all previous generations had fatal flaws but we, at last, have a roughly complete and accurate view of things. Post-structuralism has gone a long way toward forcing us to give up this conceit, but it certainly hasn't purged the tendency for all of us as individuals to look at things this way.

The upshot is that our writings are not more 'objective' or 'true' than any of the older works that we're eager to find fatal flaws in. The question becomes: if not to discover objective truth, what is the purpose of doing history?