In Defence of History

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Ethics and Postmodernity (London, 1999), Chapter 4, 'On Richard Evans', and elsewhere in the same book. Evans is reminding us that treating reality as simply “useful fiction” has serious real-world consequences.

A highly stimulating book, recommended for anyone who is unconvinced by the Brave New world of postmodernism.

The first period is marked by a professionalizing process and the emergence of philology as a means of historical inquiry.

Where Kansteiner sees inconsistency between Evans’ assertion that sources may allow a spectrum of interpretations and his rejection of the idea that contrary interpretations may be equally valid, one may instead see a discursive give and take between a professional and a school of thought that was, and still is, used to discredit his profession. Evans himself was at the time an expert witness in the David Irving trial to establish whether holocaust denial was acceptable. Ranke sebenarnya lebih tepat digambarkan sebagai filologis atau ahli bahasa, dan ini terjelma di dalam penggarisan-penggarisannya terhadap agenda-agenda yang sepatutnya melatari mana-mana perusahaan pengkajian sejarah.in January, 1999; and the German edition, Fakten und Fiktionen: Über die Grundlagen historischer Erkenntnis, translated by Ulrich Speck and published by Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, in October 1998. Evans mounts a brilliant and compellingly effective defence of the historian’s capacity to reach genuine insights about past events.

It is, as Evans makes clear in In Defense of History, toward the goal of knowing this past that so many ways of studying history have borne fruit.The use of archaeology, and the relation of archaeology to the written record are issues which are strangely unmentioned, and an account of this and controversies specific to prehistory would have been valuable. Menurut Ranke, tugas sejarahwan adalah untuk memahami masa silam sebagaimana difahami oleh mereka yang hidup di masa tersebut; dokumen-dokumen atau artifak-artifak yang menjadi sandaran kepada pembangunan teori-teori baru perlu ditentu-sahkan dengan jitu sebelum dimanfaatkan sebagai sumber sejarah. He breaks the development of the historical discipline into periods framed roughly from the rise of Rankean professionalism until World War I, from World War I through the beginning of the Cold War, from the Cold War to the late 60s and from the late 60s to the 80s and the emergence of postmodernism.