In Defence of History

Product Information

A highly stimulating book, recommended for anyone who is unconvinced by the Brave New world of postmodernism. In a genre over-populated by blinkered (not to say ignorant)and choleric conservative enemies of some ill-defined "postmodernism", Evans' book stands out as a balanced and thoughtful look at what History as a discipline is and should be. And as for (2) my guess would be that is exactly what Collini said it was: a series of coarsely distorted rebuttals of coarsely distorted ideas, and that it does not engage in a serious argument with postmodernism. Kehadiran ‘scientific method’ pada era moden pula tidak menggugat relevansinya malah hadir sebagai penguat di dalam aspek pembentukan hipotesis, pengungkapan soalan, dan penggunaan hasil ujikaji (statistik, arkeologi dll).

It becomes rapidly clear, however, that the author’s primary intention is to respond to the formidable challenge to history as a discipline presented by now well known postmodern criticism.Evans understands 'logocentric' to mean a feature of people who imagined 'they were rational beings engaged in a process of discovery' (p. If Evans' procedure in dealing with texts, source material and key questions is what historians mean by scholarly humility they will be disappointed to find that it is not widely imitated outside their own discipline. His book The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914, volume 7 of the Penguin History of Europe, was published in 2016. and Sir Geoffrey Elton, among others, and he mentions Collingwood only in passing and not in a flattering way.

In 2000 he was the principal expert witness in the David Irving Holocaust Denial libel trial at the High Court in London, subsequently the subject of the film Denial. Postmodernism and relativism (of which postmodernism is the current incarnation) collapse in a performative contradiction when it’s insights are pushed to their logical conclusions. Taken out of this context the book suffers from its lack of engagement with some of the most important thinkers in the wider postmodernist field and fails to fully lower the disciplinary drawbridge.Despite the changes and challenges to historical approaches, Evans does not despair of finding truth in history but rather defends the process (as noted in the title). This all represents something of a retreat for the historical profession, or perhaps a planned withdrawal, from the territory occupied by the more ambitious historians of the past. The most serious new movement in these four decades is the advent of post-modernism, which has gone so far as to deny the possibility of writing history at all (on the grounds that the past is a construct of the present).

Makna di sebalik sejarah segalanya adalah ciptaan dan rekayasa manusia: mentalite, ideologie, paradigm. Ethics and Postmodernity (London, 1999), Chapter 4, 'On Richard Evans', and elsewhere in the same book. Historical interpretation has evolved 'through contact with the real historical world', a contact said to be 'indirect, because the real historical world has disappeared'; but hey, no worries, for the documents 'which the real world of the past has left behind . He points out the contributions of different "schools" of historians, including the relativists, postmodernists, and deconstructionists, while at the same time noting the limitations of each and sometimes mocking those who go too far with their ideas. What people have been through is not a story that can be read in different ways according to one’s mood, or played with to prove a theoretical point.Penulisan sejarah merujuk kepada teks-teks silam yang bahasanya takkan mampu kita fahami dengan sebenar-benar faham.