In Defence of History actually argues that history has undergone a welcome renaissance since the 1960s, and defends explicitly and at length in Chapter 6 the broadening of the discipline which has taken place in this period against conservative historians who would like to see it return to its old concentration on the politics of the nation-state. It is hard to believe that Ghosh has read the book properly, or that he is familiar with my other work. In his review, he claims that the book is engaged in a 'polemic against history since 1960', that it defends an 'exaggerated empiricism' based on the 'fetishising of documents' and that I believe that facts and documents 'speak for themselves'. If Nolte misunderstands my notion of objectivity in one way, then Peter Ghosh misunderstands and misrepresents it in a whole variety of ways.

So why, he demands, is no postmodernist willing to say as much? A devastating example of the usefulness of relentless evaluation.Author's response to his critics (5) Book:Ĭriticism 5: The book defends a conservative approach Evans concludes by pointing out that this same argument could be advanced to suggest that the works of Holocaust deniers are just as valid as are those of historians who accept that the Nazis set out to commit genocide. All texts are equally valid, or invalid, they suggest – while insisting that the products of their own school are in fact more ‘true’ than those of their opponents. He is strongly critical both of the relevance and of the adequacy of their arguments, seeking to show that, ultimately, they are guilty of failing to accept the logic of their own position. Evans judges the acceptability of the reasoning advanced by the postmodernists – and finds it badly wanting. While In Defence of History addresses all aspects of historical method, its key focus is on an extensive evaluation of this postmodern thinking.

In this reading, there could be no objective history, merely the study of the texts themselves.

Historians were being forced to face up to postmodern thinking, which argued that, because all texts were the product of biased writers who had incomplete information, none could be privileged above others. Richard Evans wrote In Defence of History at a time when the historian's profession was coming under heavy attack as a result of the ‘cultural turn’ taken by the discipline during the late 1980s and the 1990s.

Richard evans in defence of history