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Strout argues that in discarding the somewhat naive ideal of scientific
history, these two men "fatally undermined the historian's confidence
that he can tell the historical truth about the past"; and that they
"failed to make clear just what new responsibilities the historian as–
sumes when he no longer pretends to be a scientist." They "tended to
reduce the historical imagination to a mere weapon in present strug–
gles." In trying "to prevent the naive assimilation of history by science
they overdramatized the differences, and in so doing they promoted a
misunderstanding of both disciplines."
Still, after Beard and Becker had done their work, no well-informed,
reflective American historian could espouse the scientific ideal with
the old forthright simplicity and naivete. This Mr. Strout does not
deny; he admires the intellectual courage of his subjects and he ap–
proaches their work with impeccable fairness. I share his reservations
about the profundity of Beard and Becker as philosophers. I am not
so familiar with the work of Becker in this area, but Beard's writings
on the problem of historical knowledge have long since struck me
as muddled.
Fortunately the pioneering work of criticism undertaken by Beard
and Becker did not need to be done inordinately well to be inordinately
useful. But the same cannot be said about the task Mr. Strout has set
for himself. Since there is already a fairly large literature of counter–
attack against the relativism of Beard and Becker, to
be
a pioneer on
this front is no longer possible. Mr. Strout has written more lucidly and
in a more equable temper than some of his predecessors, but I fail to
see that he has been able either to add very much to previous argument
or to set down a major synthesis of opposing views. His criticisms and
his resolutions of the problem are offered chiefly at the level of com–
mon sense. For a working historian, this is not an unsatisfactory thing
to do, but it can hardly yield a book that is more than a readable re–
statement of some of the issues.
Mr. Strout's position, so far as it can be condensed for the purposes
of a brief review, is that "if the historian is time-locked in a prison of
his own climate of opinion, he cannot give a historical account of the
outside world." In this prison, the historian is in no position to discern
the limitations and failures of past historians caught in their own time–
locked situations. In short, Mr. Strout opens up, as other critics of rela–
tivism have done, a dizzying vista of infinitely regressive subjectivism.
Earlier critics have also insisted that in order to make firm statements
about the limitations of any other historian's perspective one must pre–
sumably rest upon a fundament from which some firm statements can
