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lowest level [some 64.4 percent of the total] on record [in 1995], well
behind other humanities fields."
While undergraduate whims and job market fluctuations have practi–
cal implications for history faculties, they are hardly the most reliable or
significant indicators of status and prestige of the discipline in the intel–
lectual community. Outstanding and outspoken in that world at the time,
and highly influential for the last three decades have been various schools
of European theorists bearing such names as postmodernists, poststruc–
turalists, and deconstructionists. They often wrote a rather strange and
baffling prose, so obscure as likely to appear to some profound, even
if
inconsistent and self-contradictory at times. Prominent among the leaders
were the French theorists Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Hayden
White, an American, might be called a disciple. I refer to them collective–
ly as the "postmodernists."
In so far as the postmodernists dealt with history, and they all did to
some extent, they took a negative and dismissive position, almost an anti–
history position. Relativists all, they found no place for truth or objective
knowledge, but everything relative to the persons or the time or the cul–
ture professing them. Since there were no "actual" events, "real"
characters, or "objective" truth, history was not something learned or dis–
covered but something made and invented.
It
belongs with such categories
as fiction, parable, and propaganda, and can claim no more authenticity
than fiction. History for them reflects the time written, not the time writ–
ten about. For the postmodernists the terms "positivist" and "objectivist"
become pejorative epithets.
The Australian historian Keith Windschutde, who has written a spirited
defense of the discipline and an attack upon the postmodernists and their fol–
lowers, entides his book The
Killing
if
History.
It is his view that
"if
historians
allow themselves to be prodded all the way to this theoretical abyss, they
will
be rendering themselves and their discipline extinct." He does point out that
the influence of French intellectuals, particularly Foucault, Derrida, and
Jacques Lacan, have suffered recent embarrassment and decline of influence
in part at least because of revelations about one of their masters, Martin
Heidegger. Documents came to light revealing Heidegger to have been a Nazi
informer against his academic colleagues in the 1930s, a member and strong
supporter of the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945, and an anti-Semite who pri–
vately deplored the fall of the Nazi regime until his death in 1976. Among
other embarrassments of the sort was the case of Paul de Man. Mter he had
migrated to the United States and later became a professor at Yale it was dis–
covered that, during the German occupation of Belgium, de Man had been
a Nazi collaborator who denounced Jewish "pollution" of culture and
demanded the deportation of all Jews from Europe.
