Students evaluate debates about objectivity, truth, bias and relativism in history, including empiricist, relativist and postmodern positions

What this dot point is asking

This dot point addresses one of the central debates in Constructing History: can history be objective and tell the truth about the past, or is every history shaped, even determined, by the perspective of its author? It asks you to map the spectrum of positions, from confident empiricism through moderate relativism to radical postmodern scepticism, to attach named historians and philosophers to each, and then to argue a defensible view of your own. This is the most philosophical of the key debates, and the Extension exam frequently turns on it, so you must be able to hold the positions in tension rather than caricaturing any of them.

The answer

At one end of the spectrum stands the empiricist tradition, which holds that the past is real, that evidence constrains interpretation, and that the historian, through disciplined method, can approach an objective and truthful account. Leopold von Ranke is its founder, with his ambition to show the past as it essentially was through critical use of the archive. In the twentieth century Geoffrey Elton defended this position vigorously in The Practice of History, insisting that the historian's job is to recover the intentions and actions of people in the past on the basis of the surviving evidence, and that the discipline has rigorous rules that discipline interpretation. More recently Richard Evans, in In Defence of History, restated a chastened empiricism: historians can never achieve total objectivity, but evidence genuinely limits what can be truthfully said, and some accounts are simply wrong.

The relativist and present-minded position

In the middle of the spectrum sits the position, often called relativist or perspectivist, that all history is written from a standpoint and bears the marks of the historian's own time. E.H. Carr, in What Is History?, argued that facts do not speak for themselves; the historian selects, arranges and interprets them, and the questions asked are shaped by the present. His famous advice was to study the historian before you study the history. The American historian Carl Becker went further with the phrase that every man is his own historian, stressing that the past is reconstructed in the present mind. This position does not deny that the past was real, but it insists that our access to it is always mediated by perspective, selection and the concerns of the age.

The postmodern challenge

At the radical end stands the postmodern or linguistic challenge, which questions whether historical writing can refer to the past at all in any straightforward way. Hayden White, in Metahistory, argued that historians impose narrative forms, tragedy, comedy, romance, satire, on the chaos of the past, so that the meaning of a history comes as much from its literary emplotment as from the evidence. Michel Foucault treated historical knowledge as bound up with power and discourse rather than neutral truth. Keith Jenkins pushed the sceptical case furthest, arguing that history is a discourse about the past, not the past itself, and that claims to objectivity are illusory. This position provoked fierce reaction: Geoffrey Elton called it a threat to the discipline, and Keith Windschuttle, in The Killing of History, attacked postmodern relativism as corrosive of the possibility of historical truth.

Holding a position

The mark of a strong Extension response is not to declare one camp simply right. The most defensible position is usually a critical empiricism that absorbs the relativist insight: the past was real and evidence genuinely constrains what can be said, yet every account is selected, framed and shaped by the historian's perspective and present. Evans's formulation is useful here, that recognising the historian's subjectivity does not collapse into the claim that any account is as good as any other, because evidence still allows us to call some accounts false. The Holocaust is the standard test case: its denial is not a legitimate interpretation but a falsehood the evidence refutes, which shows that radical relativism has limits.

Using this in an answer

When you write, name the position, the historian and the key formulation, then weigh the positions against each other and commit to a defensible synthesis. Set Carr's selecting historian against Elton's disciplining evidence, then bring in White's emplotment and Evans's reply. Demonstrating that you can hold objectivity and perspective in productive tension, rather than choosing a side and ignoring the other, is exactly the higher-order judgement the dot point and the exam reward.