That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession (Ideas in Context, Series Number 13)

Peter Novick's That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession is book of tendencies. Examining the writings of many notable historians is shown to reveal a rich story about the trends of their thought. It is a work of historiography tracing the development of the American historical profession, identifying the professional norms of their practice, and presenting a series of arguments about the profession's aspirations and anxieties over the "Objectivity Question". The details of the objectivity question are slippery like the ungraspable facts it seeks as answers. According to Novick, objectivity is not a single idea, but "a sprawling collection of assumptions, attitudes, aspirations, and antipathies" (Novick 1). In other words, objectivity is a collection of conflictions. Paradoxically, these conflicts run deep enough to even contradict its conflicted nature. For instance, the basic components commonly associated with historical objectivity are nailed down by Novick as a "commitment to the reality of the past, and to truth as correspondence to that reality; a sharp separation between the knower and the known, between fact and value, and, above all, between history and fiction" (1-2). Certainly a historian is holding ideals like this in his mind when he claims to strive for objectivity. The return of American historians from Germany in the nineteenth century brought new meaning to objectivity and the way historians thought about their profession. Objectivity was the common ideal American historians held above all others. Novick also argues the consensus gave rise to norms of professionalism and courtesy in the academic discipline. Yet the early agreement was founded on a misconception. Or it was a misrepresentation according to Novick, as "Ranke's epistemology was "naturalized" into an English empiricist idiom. His "wie es eigentlich gewesen" was read as meaning that truth was accurate representation - the merest common sense in the English-speaking world, but a view not held in Germany since Kant" (31). The American historical conception of objectivity was simply not what their idealized leader Leopold Von Ranke had meant. The irony of historical objectivity based on a misunderstanding is hard not to chuckle at, and it did not bode well for the consensus on the quest for certainty. The profession's attitude regarding the objectivity question has been constantly vacillating since the consensus first broke under Becker and Beard's relativist critique as World War I ignited Europe. Novick nails this bigger-picture point home most obviously in the four-part structure of his book; Part One deals with the creation of the objectivist norms in the profession; Part Two describes the breakdown of the norms and historians' faith in objectivity; Part 3 chronicles the attempts to reestablish objectivity during World War II and the Cold War; and Part Four is the ongoing decline of objectivity starting in the 60s. This

When a professor assigned Peter Novick's "That Noble Dream" as one of the last readings in one of my seminars, I blanched. Who, I inwardly groaned, would force students to read a book this huge in the waning weeks of the semester, a time when the heavy weight of tests, papers, and grading exams rests on your shoulders? "Look at the size of that font! How in the heck are we supposed to get through that thing in a week?" wailed a fellow sufferer, echoing what we all thought as we blearily thumbed through the book. Initial skimming seemed to confirm that this would be one of those scholarly books that take years off your life even as you promptly forget what you read a mere five minutes ago. Now, I've done some power reading during my tenure as an undergraduate and graduate student; I once cruised through Herodotus in two days and Thucycdides in even less time. You learn to accept things like this in the unnatural world of the academy. With lengthy papers due at the same time I opened this book, I decided to power stuff this one. Even now I can hear the knowing snickers of graduate students across the nation who may be reading this review, seminar hardened souls amused to no end that I actually assumed I had to READ the book. I can hear the chorus: just skim through it over the course of a few hours, learn the main argument, take a few notes, and nod sagely in class.Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the end of Novick's treatment of the noble profession: I rapidly discovered that this book is brilliant; a veritable cathedral of razor sharp analysis, amazing use of primary source material, and all written with one eye firmly planted on the bigger picture. What human being is capable of this Gibbonesque treatment of the American historical profession? Apparently a University of Chicago professor with a whole lot of time on his hands, a man whose primary field of research has little to do with American history. Well, Gibbon's inspiration for his enormous masterwork came from a visit to the ruins of Rome, so why not an equally impressive history from someone working outside his field? A comprehensive summary of the book is an exercise in futility here, but I think I should take a stab at it since I am studying history and often must summarize scads of material into a few precious paragraphs. My review will be inferior anyway compared to the extremely insightful essay found below on this very page.Novick begins with an examination of the German methodologies of history---an appropriate starting point because Americans wishing to study the past on an advanced level in the nineteenth century needed to go to school in Europe---in an attempt to discover how the first generation of professional American historians approached their craft. To be sure, amateur historians like Parkman, Prescott, and Adams wrote narrative histories on such huge topics as North America, Mexico, and the early governments of the United States. But in an age where scientific m

In this book, Novick says that he finds the idea of historical objectivity "essentially confused", that many of the philosophical assumptions behind it are "logically and sociologically naive", and that the whole concept "promotes an unreal and misleading invidious distinction between, on the one hand, historical accounts `distorted' by ideological assumptions and purposes; on the other, history free of these taints." (p. 6) But _That Noble Dream_ does not contain detailed philosophical or logical arguments aimed at supporting these claims; as Novick says in his introduction, "this isn't that sort of book" (p. 6). The sort of book it is is a detailed account of how various persons in the American historical profession over the last century or so have viewed "historical objectivity".I think that just about everyone who reads this book will come away with a feeling that "objectivity" is, at the very least, problematic--much more problematic than many critics of "subjective" historians seem to believe. Someone seeking a philosophical critique of "objectivity" can probably find what he's looking for in the many sources mentioned in Novick's footnotes. I started reading this book with a little trepidation, because someone had mentioned to me that Novick has radical political views, but his political biases really aren't apparent for most of the book. About 4/5 of the way through, however, (when he's worked his way up to the time of McCarthyism, Reaganomics, etc.) you can tell that he's beginning to talk about things he has deep feelings about. In the preface, Novick had said that he felt that sticking "[sic]"s all over in quotations when it was clear what the author meant was "mean-spirited" (p. xii), and the book is remarkably free of "[sic]"s. But Novick does use "[sic]" in some rather curious places (i.e., where there is no mistake in spelling, grammar, or usage) when the person he's quoting is expressing conservative views. (See pp. 450, 463.) Novick also laments how, in the 80s, Reaganomics "deliberately redistribute[d] income from the poorest to the richest segments of society." (p. 466) Well, that's one way to look at it. Another would be that the government decided not to confiscate as much of the rich segment's money as it had been doing. Or maybe Novick wasn't talking about Reaganomics at all; maybe he was referring to state lotteries!

"That Noble Dream" is Peter Novick's magisterial history of the American historical profession and its alternating romance and dissaffection with "objective" historical scholarship from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s. The German historical profession with its domineering Herr Professor and impressive array of analytical "techniques," Mr. Novick tells us, provided the initial model for American historiography. In Leopold von Ranke, young American scholars found a paragon of "wissenschaftlich" (interpreted as scientific) empirical scholarship. (Oddly, Ranke was neither a strict empiricist nor particularly scientific in his approach to writing history.) Transferred to the other side of the Atlantic, a mythical interpretation of German historiography served to legitimate an inductive, empirical approach to history that puported to uncover the past "wie es eigentlich gewesen" -- the way it actually was. Eschewing both hypothesis and epistemological speculation, American historians enthroned "objectivity" as the goal of their infant profession. Mr. Novick explains that the ideal of objectivity was reinforced by an ideologically homogenous group of professional historians who used objectivity as the yardstick for career advancement and as a "prophylactic against conflict" within their ranks. Among other convictions, it was firmly believed that objective scholarship would serve to protect American students from the evils and distortions of propaganda. It was not long before a reaction developed against these pseudo-Rankean "data gatherers," as they pejoratively came to be known. In the years before the Great War, the new progressive historians (notably Beard and Becker) questioned the idea of cold, indisputable facts and thereby planted the seeds that later would grow into the antithesis of objective scholarship, namely relativism. The new historians were denoted, somewhat unkindly, as "presentists," because of their use of history for the purpose of progressive reform. With the entry of the United States into the the first World War, objectivity was unceremoniously displaced by propaganda, as America's historians were expected to display a sufficiently patriotic fervor. The profession of the interwar years witnessed the rise of cultural and cognitive relativism in the wake of the new scientific ontology. The quest for certainty and absolutes gave way to the "pragmatic tradition," which saw truths as multiple and perspectival. Becker and Beard, together with their loyal vassals, derided the old-school, inductive approach, which claimed that "facts spoke for themselves." But World War II initiated a renewed courtship between the profession and its first love. With the rest of American society, historians turned "toward affirmation and the search for certainty." A considerable dosage of moral rearmament, it was believed, would be required to counter the fascist threat, and historians, like others, queued up to the podium in order to