But Wilder unwittingly provides the terms for his own critique: "Historians are not expected to ask questions about the conditions of possibility of the historical knowledge that they are producing" (730).
No. And quite properly.
Any intellectual enterprise must emerge from some set of assumptions; questioning those assumptions is a different intellectual enterprise. The minute one begins asking questions about the possibility of historical knowledge, one is no longer acting as a historian, but as something else: a historiographer, a philosopher of history, a theorist.
Besides, one would think a Civver would be pleased that philosophers of history have finally discovered that history proceeds through turns.
Ugh. I swore to myself that I'd leave this dumb topic alone after the last few days. Guess I can't.
That post was not endorsing or denouncing the view in the article about
what history should be. I actually think that the emphasis on systematization for its own sake is flawed and certainly not imperative as Wilder seems to claim. Why should we be asking
annaliste-style Big Questions if those Big Questions don't necessarily have any bearing on reality? (With the usual post-Hayden White caveats about what "reality" in history even is, blah blah blah.) What I was actually commenting on is how horrendously confusing the intellectual developments in history have been over the last three decades.
One area that I
do agree with Wilder on is the need for historians to actually absorb and deal with issues of philosophy of history in more ways than simply slipping them as tools of analysis into the Rankean shed. That misses the point. The linguistic turn fundamentally questioned the assumptions about the foundations of knowledge in the field,
and those questions have never been satisfactorily answered. I mean, that's self-evidently a huge deal.
Practicing history without being aware of the philosophy of history is as bankrupt as having ethical convictions without a coherent ethical framework. Decisions and analysis become arbitrary in virtually every way. You say that intellectual enterprises must arise from shared assumptions, and that's
true - the problem is that there really
aren't many shared assumptions in history these days, except for, irritatingly, the ones that virtually everybody agreed were
wrong back in the 1980s. Questioning false assumptions ought to be one of the
foundational blocks of doing history. Everybody loves to identify gaps in the literature or errors in analysis that leave room for new interpretations. But when those false assumptions are about the practice of history itself, all too many academics don't bother to deal with them. And that's a
humongous problem.
![[pissed]](/images/smilies/pissed.gif "Pissed [pissed]")
