Descent Into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History

I had to read this tome in a historiography seminar in grad school and, I must admit, it was difficult going. This was mainly due to the fact that I (and the rest of the participants) was totally unfamiliar with the argument under discussion - the struggle for the meaning of history that was then raging in academe. It had never occurred to us that the poststructuralist critique had leapt the boundry from literary criticism to the social sciences and history. I distinctly remember the baffled remarks of my fellow students when trying to wade into the language and mindset of the new discourse. I had no idea beforehand that I was not only a marxist historian, but a throwback to the von Rankian stoneage to boot. We all thought poststructuralism just another attempt by academics to find a faculty nich by specializing their field and creating another specialist language that only they (and others of like mind) could comprehend. Palmer deflated a lot of that hot air, educated those of us who thought we were pretty well educated to begin with, and along the way makde a pretty good case for the tried and true. Yes, history is an imperfect medium. Has been since the time of Herodatus. Yes, historians have agendas and axes to grind, they have ever since Thucydides. Hey, nothing new here, except the threat of the new discourse in attempting to reduce all historical writing to the level of fiction.

This book is above all a defence of Historical Materialism and of the marxist methodology - with a emphasis on classes and concrete class interests - in the writing of History, as opposed to the Structuralist analysis centered on self-sufficient discursive cathegories. It's issue-ordered, with Marxist and Structuralist methodologies contrasted on a issue-to-issue analysis,namely as applied to research on political history, class history, gender, race, and so on. The analysis is cogent and polemical. However, there is something amiss. The emergence of a discourse-based historiograph must be explained by a marxist as something dependent on a concrete and clear-cut class interest, and the author does not explain in whose interest this type of historiograph has developed - which is much more than to merely asess and explain its un-Marxist ccharacter. Anyway, it's a work of reference for all interested in the analysis of methodological issues in the Social Sciences in general, and History in particular.