Jenkins Keith - Re-thinking history

Far and away the best introduction to the state of the question currently available.

Hayden White, University of California at Santa Cruz

It is a model of concise argument and poses fundamental questions concerning the nature of historiography in a post modernist world.

Alan White, University of East London

An excellent introduction to historical method.

Kevin Harrison, Mancat School

A valuable, concise introduction to the influence of post-modernism on history.

M. Thomson, Sheffield University

A challenging book which makes accessible recent developments in the philosophy of history.

David Dean, Goldsmith College, University of London

An excellent introductory text to the field, a very manageable and accessible work written in an attractively informal style.

C. M. Williams, University of Wales

Keith Jenkins Rethinking History is a startlingly clear and thoughtprovoking introduction to current central debates in history and historiography. It is accessible to history students, students in subjects that draw on historical past and to the general reader. Already, a classic text book.

Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway, University of London

Keith

Jenkins

Re-thinking History

With a new preface and conversation with the
author by Alun Munslow

First published 1991
by Routledge

First published in Routledge Classics 2003
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.

1991 Keith Jenkins

Preface to Routledge Classics edition and In Conversation: Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow 2003 Alun Munslow

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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ISBN 0-203-42686-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-43977-5 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN: 0-415-30443-1 (pbk)(Print Edition)

For Sue Morgan with much love

PREFACE TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION BY
ALUN MUNSLOW

IN CONVERSATION: KEITH JENKINS AND ALUN
MUNSLOW

Every discipline, I suppose, is, as Nietzsche saw most clearly, constituted by what it forbids its practitioners to do. Every discipline is made up of a set of restrictions on thought and imagination, and none is more hedged about with taboos than professional historiography so much so that the so-called historical method consists of little more than the injunction to get the story straight (without any notion of what the relation of story to fact might be) and to avoid both conceptual overdetermination and imaginative excess (i.e., enthusiasm) at any price.

Yet the price paid is a considerable one. It has resulted in the repression of the conceptual apparatus (without which atomic facts cannot be aggregated into complex macrostructures and constituted as objects of discursive representation in a historical narrative) and the remission of the poetic moment in historical writing to the interior of the discourse (where it functions as an unacknowledged and therefore uncriticizable content of the historical narrative).

Those historians who draw a firm line between history and philosophy of history fail to recognise that every historical discourse contains within it a full-blown, if only implicit, philosophy of history. The principal difference between history and philosophy of history is that the latter brings the conceptual apparatus by which the facts are ordered in the discourse to the surface of the text, while history proper (as it is called) buries it in the interior of the narrative, where it serves as a hidden or implicit shaping device.

Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse, pp. 1267

Every discipline, I suppose, is, as Nietzsche saw most clearly, constituted by what it forbids its practitioners to do. Every discipline is made up of a set of restrictions on thought and imagination, and none is more hedged about with taboos than professional historiography so much so that the so-called historical method consists of little more than the injunction to get the story straight (without any notion of what the relation of story to fact might be) and to avoid both conceptual overdetermination and imaginative excess (i.e., enthusiasm) at any price.

Yet the price paid is a considerable one. It has resulted in the repression of the conceptual apparatus (without which atomic facts cannot be aggregated into complex macrostructures and constituted as objects of discursive representation in a historical narrative) and the remission of the poetic moment in historical writing to the interior of the discourse (where it functions as an unacknowledged and therefore uncriticizable content of the historical narrative).

Those historians who draw a firm line between history and philosophy of history fail to recognise that every historical discourse contains within it a full-blown, if only implicit, philosophy of history. The principal difference between history and philosophy of history is that the latter brings the conceptual apparatus by which the facts are ordered in the discourse to the surface of the text, while history proper (as it is called) buries it in the interior of the narrative, where it serves as a hidden or implicit shaping device.

Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse, pp. 1267

Everything, everybody and every book have a history. What Keith Jenkins' book Re-Thinking History, published in 1991, made us all aware of is that such histories are, indeed, just that. They are only histories. This means we would do well to recognise and remember that the histories we assign to things and people are composed, created, constituted, constructed and always situated literatures. And, what is more, they carry within them their author's philosophy or take on the world present, past and future. Such is the importance and influence of this book, especially among the younger generation of history students, that it now seems quaintly old fashioned to bother to point out that history is not the same as the past. By the same token that as a form of knowledge history is plainly and palpably a narrative representation.

That history is not some kind of mirror of past reality (and not because it is distorted by the bees in the bonnet of the historian, or their poor inference, or the poverty of their sources) seems a pretty obvious thing to say these days. This, the essential historicist message of Re-Thinking History has, of course, itself a history. Keith Jenkins admits his indebtedness at the outset with the lengthy quotation from the American philosopher of history Hayden White. What White is pointing to is what Keith Jenkins views as the doubtful belief still shared by a great many historians that we can know