Gertrude Himmelfarb - Historiography

Historiography

Himmelfarb is a leading defender of traditional historical methods and practices. Her book The New History and the Old (published in 1987 and revised and expanded in 2004) is a critique of the varieties of "new history" that have sought to displace the old: quantitative history that presumes to be more "scientific" than conventional history but relies on partial and dubious data; Marxist history derived from economic assumptions and class models that leave little room for the ideas and beliefs of contemporaries or the actual protagonists and events of history; psychoanalytic history dependent on theories and speculations that violate the accepted criteria of historical evidence; analytic history that reduces history to a series of isolated "moments" with no overriding narrative structure; social history, "history from the bottom," that denigrates the role of politics, nationality, and individuals (the "great men" of history); and, most recently, postmodernist history, which denies even the ideal of objectivity, viewing all of history as a "social construct" on the part of the historian.

Himmelfarb criticized A.J.P. Taylor for seeking to “demoralize” history in his 1961 book The Origins of the Second World War, and for refusing to recognize "moral facts" about interwar Europe. Himmelfarb maintained that Taylor was wrong to treat Hitler as a "normal" German leader playing by the traditional rules of diplomacy in The Origins of the Second World War instead of being a "world-historical" figure like Napoleon.

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