Developments in Modern Historiography

Collections of essays surveying the historical discipline at the end of the 1970s heralded the new approached being developed, approaches that promised a rich diversity and cosmopolitan pluralism in the face of the uncertainty of historical reality. The essayists in this successor volume, surveying the work of the 1980s, finds that these new approaches have not brought satisfactory results, and argues that traditional practices, reassessed and properly understood, constitute the true scientific grounding of the discipline. Objective reality is obtainable, the historian's subjectivity can be understood rationally, historical sources and causal strategies can be managed objectively. In brief, a truthful account of the past is possible, but it must be both objective and subjective.