[In the following review, Kedar praises That Noble Dream as an excellent work of intellectual history, noting the volume's “extraordinary range of scholarship.”]

For Peter Novick, telling the story of the “noble dream” of historical objectivity [in That Noble Dream] was like “nailing jelly to the wall” (1). With much erudition and humor, Novick has achieved an impressive account that keeps a great deal of this fuzzy stuff in place. In this long, dense, and massively documented book, Novick traces the paths of the idea of objectivity in history within the American historical profession from its foundation in the 1880s until the present. He substantiates his multicausal argument that “the evolution of historians' attitudes on the objectivity question has always been closely tied to changing social, political, cultural, and professional contexts” (628) with an extraordinary range of scholarship. In the first of the four chronological sections, Novick traces the rise of the historical profession between the end of the nineteenth century and the First World War, and the simultaneous creation of the myth of objectivity in history. The new profession distanced itself from the lay, amateur historians and the idea of “history as literature.” Instead, it opted to model history according to a Baconian image of science, and enthroned Ranke as a mythical founding figure. Representing “the actual facts” became the key term in defining progress in historical scholarship as a neutral, autonomous, and cumulative discovery of the past. The authority to promulgate this past rested exclusively within a rising, homogeneous, middle-class profession which told a “conservative evolutionary” story about the English germs of the American institutions and traced how “freedom [was] realized and stabilized through the achievement of national solidarity” (72). In the second section, covering the interwar period, Novick argues that although historical relativism did not dominate the profession, several factors weakened objectivist orthodoxy. New approaches in neighboring academic fields, such as the general theory of relativity, pragmatism, legal realism, and cultural relativism; the involvement of many historians in the production of war propaganda; the decline in status and output of historical production; the dependence upon private patrons; the split between divergent political affiliations; and the emergence for the first time of sweeping opposing historical interpretations all undermined the belief in the objectivity of the collective enterprise. Part Three, encompassing the years from World War II to the Vietnam War, is the story of the reconstruction of a new objectivist synthesis. As relativism was blamed for enabling the rise of totalitarian societies, various intellectual disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, and law, were busy reconstructing objectivity. Karl Popper's epistemology heavily influenced the profession. Although historians' belief that the collective work would finally converge in one single truth was weakened, there was a sense that the boundaries of controversies would continually narrow. The experience of historians, employed as intelligence analysts during the war, convinced many that objectivity and involvement were compatible. The profession experienced an increase in power, status, and confidence. New emphasis on the history of the “Atlantic community” (termed by an ironic observer, “NATO history”) replaced prewar concerns with the “uniqueness of America.” Novick asserts that the acknowledgement of the moral superiority of the West became the key to a consensual history, just as the acknowledgment of black inferiority served this function during the formative era of the profession (453). In the last and longest section, “Objectivity in Crisis,” Novick brings us to the present period of uncertainty. The experience of the Vietnam War led many historians to doubt any truth. Everywhere, postmodernist attacks upon objective norms were biting deep. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions immensely influenced the profession; Foucault emphasized the relation between knowledge, power, and discipline; philosophers envisaged the possibility of multiple truths; Derrida and Fish undermined the assumptions of the determinacy of meaning. Geertz and other anthropologists emphasized the relative and “constructed” nature of reality. The Critical Legal Studies movement challenged the depiction of law as a science. Simultaneously, the profession sensed a decline in power, status, and salary. Attempts to recreate common criteria, based on the “community of the competent,” could not succeed in a profession increasingly fragmentized into diverse communities sharing little common language. Black, feminist, and public historians introduced strong particularistic currents. The insistence of some historians that history should abandon its scientific aspirations and become a branch of literature was, in a way, a reemergence of preprofessional concepts. These developments, Novick concludes, “constituted a sweeping challenge to the objectivist program of the founding fathers of the historical profession. Ideological disarray replaced the consensus on which ideas of objectivity had always depended so heavily” (573). Ironically, as Novick tells the story of the demise of the dream of objectivity in history, he simultaneously demonstrates how excellent intellectual history can be written after the collapse of the dream.