Students examine postmodernism and the linguistic turn in historiography, the arguments of Hayden White, Michel Foucault and Keith Jenkins, and the empiricist reaction against them

What this dot point is asking

This dot point asks you to explain the most radical challenge in modern historiography: the postmodern argument that historical writing cannot give straightforward, objective access to the past because it is shaped by language, narrative and power. The label for this challenge is the linguistic turn. You must be able to set out three positions, Hayden White on narrative, Michel Foucault on power and discourse, and Keith Jenkins on history as discourse, and then explain the angry empiricist reaction they provoked. The dot point rewards students who can take the postmodern case seriously as an argument rather than dismissing it, and who can then judge how far it goes.

The answer

The linguistic turn is the shift, from the 1970s, toward seeing language not as a transparent medium that simply describes reality but as something that shapes and constitutes our knowledge. Applied to history, it raises an unsettling question: if historical writing is made of language and narrative, how can it claim to represent a past that is gone and accessible only through texts? Postmodern historiography presses this question to the point of asking whether the distinction between history and fiction can be sustained at all. It is the radical end of the objectivity debate.

Hayden White and emplotment

Hayden White, in Metahistory, argued that historians do not find stories in the past; they impose them. The same set of facts can be emplotted, shaped into a narrative structure, as tragedy, comedy, romance or satire, and the choice of form is a literary and even ideological decision that the evidence does not dictate. The meaning of a history, on this view, comes as much from its narrative form as from the facts it contains. White did not deny that the past happened, but he denied that its meaning is simply read off the evidence; meaning is made in the writing.

Foucault on power and discourse

Michel Foucault approached the past as a study of discourse and power. In works such as Discipline and Punish and Madness and Civilization, he argued that what a society accepts as truth, including historical truth, is produced by relations of power and structures of knowledge, not discovered neutrally. Categories we treat as natural, the madman, the criminal, the normal, have histories and serve power. For Foucault the historian's task is to expose how knowledge and power constitute each other, which makes the claim to neutral, objective history itself an exercise of power.

Jenkins and the sceptical edge

Keith Jenkins pushed the case furthest. In Re-thinking History he argued bluntly that history is a discourse about the past, not the past itself, and that the past and history are different things: the past has gone, and history is the always-provisional, perspective-laden construction historians make of it. On this view claims to objectivity are illusions, and every history serves someone's present purposes.

The empiricist reaction

The challenge provoked fierce resistance. Richard Evans, in In Defence of History, conceded that historians select and narrate but insisted that evidence still genuinely constrains what can be truthfully said, so that not all interpretations are equal and some are simply false. Geoffrey Elton treated postmodernism as a threat to the discipline, and Keith Windschuttle, in The Killing of History, argued that relativism, if taken seriously, would make Holocaust denial as legitimate as any other reading, which he treated as a reductio that refutes it. The Holocaust became the standard test case: its denial is not an interpretation but a falsehood the evidence refutes.

Using this in an answer

The strong move is to present the postmodern argument at full strength, White's emplotment, Foucault's power, Jenkins's discourse, then weigh it against the empiricist reply rather than picking a side glibly. Most defensible historians absorb the insight, that narrative and perspective shape every history, while resisting the conclusion that evidence does not constrain truth. Use the Holocaust test case to show where you draw the line. Demonstrating that you can hold the radical challenge and its limits in tension is exactly the higher-order judgement the exam prizes.