Respect for historiography

Wrote Michael Bentley, “Rarely has a generation had the opportunity of the current cohort of students to rethink what history means. Very heaven is it now to be young, bright and eager to think about the past and what the study of it can yield”. That opportunity has long been there, but many historians continue to be averse to the philosophy or theory of their discipline. They are often impatient with the sceptical things that some theorists of history have said about, for example, the quality of historical knowledge, and alert to what they perceive as the arrogance of those philosophers or other theorists who make judgements about historians' outputs or recommendations for historians' methods. “Some historians,” writes Richard J. Evans, thinking particularly of Elton, “have even disputed the right of non-historians to write about the nature of historical knowledge at all”. Even when written by historians, works of this kind may not fare much better: Langlois and Seignobos wrote of works that deal with historical methodology that “specialists despise them” and that the great majority of such works are “superficial, insipid, unreadable, sometimes ridiculous”. They could not themselves escape objection: Bentley, reporting rather than commenting, refers to “their notorious manual of method” and to “the grotesquely maligned French historian Seignobos, who had co-authored one of the least-loved manuals of historical method in modern times”. Even G. Kitson Clark, himself an author of a manual (in addition to being a historian of Victorian Britain), remarks that “a good many books have been written by historians of varying eminence on the methods of historical research. … you need not read any of them”.