Question: Is there such a thing as historical objectivity?
Niall Ferguson: There isn’t, but there ought to be. That’s to say, that in practice all the historian is doing is taking such past thought as he can retrieve, and trying to order it in some way that is meaningful. Now there cannot be an objective truth at the end of that process, much as the historian wishes he could say, “I found it. Here it is.”
We perform a kind of confidence trick because we write as if we are unveiling truth, and we want our readers to feel that this is indeed what they are seeing, what they’re reading. But of course there is no definitive objective truth on which all historians will one day agree. And no matter how well I write, no matter how persuasively I reconstruct the evidence, it won’t be the last word because of the issue of interpretation and inference. In the end, one is drawing inferences from a one time experiment. The past can’t be recreated. We can’t rerun World War II to see if Hitler really might have won had he acted differently. There’s only one run, and we can only infer as best we can motives from documents which may not themselves be truthful.
And so it’s an extremely delicate process, quite unlike the scientific enterprise which can involve experimentation and verification through the repetition of experiment.
That isn’t what history can do. So it aspires to truth, but it never attains it.
Recorded on: Oct 31 2007
Discuss
Kenneth Johnson on January 26, 2008, 5:09 AM
As a historian, I wholeheartedly agree. Historical objectivity should always be one's goal, but one must be realistic that one can not be completely objective.
Kenneth Johnson on January 26, 2008, 10:09 AM
As a historian, I wholeheartedly agree. Historical objectivity should always be one’s goal, but one must be realistic that one can not be completely objective.
Anna Caprarelli on March 8, 2008, 1:12 AM
History most of the times tell "stories". The most objective "history writer" remains whatsoever attached to narrative laws.
These laws should be used to express the most clearly possible one's thought and research findings. Still History deals with human interests and passions. Complete cold History would be sterile in my point of view. Of course any sound history writing should advise the reader of this inevitable "personal influence" as well as the eternal problem of the "sources influence".
Anna Caprarelli on March 8, 2008, 6:12 AM
History most of the times tell “stories”. The most objective “history writer” remains whatsoever attached to narrative laws.
These laws should be used to express the most clearly possible one’s thought and research findings. Still History deals with human interests and passions. Complete cold History would be sterile in my point of view. Of course any sound history writing should advise the reader of this inevitable “personal influence” as well as the eternal problem of the “sources influence”.
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