[In the following review, Degler praises That Noble Dream as “brilliant,” noting that Novick's central argument is presented with “force, understanding, and subtlety.”]

Do historians in the United States care about “the objectivity question”? Peter Novick does not think they do, but that is precisely why he has written this book [That Noble Dream] “to provoke my fellow historians” (he is a historian of France at the University of Chicago) “to greater self-consciousness of our work; to offer those outside the historical profession a greater understanding of what we're up to.” His way of achieving this goal is a brilliant, if closely argued, wide-ranging history of the transformations in the concept of objectivity in the profession from its founding in the 1880s to the present.

Do not be misled. This is no dry-as-dust professional history. The book is witty, engaged, elegantly written, and sometimes mildly titillating, as when the author quotes at length from the private papers of well-known historians, some of them still living, who reveal not only their views on history, but their foibles, their prejudices, ethnic and otherwise, and sometimes their politics. As the use of such sources suggests, this is admittedly elitist and impressionistic history, rather than being quantitative or systematic in method. (Novick tried to quantify his numerous sources, but found that approach led him nowhere.) The breadth and depth of his research in published and unpublished sources are admirable.

The form of the book is largely chronological, guiding the reader from the early days, when historians saw themselves as scientists of past human actions—making “bricks,” as J. Franklin Jameson put it to Henry Adams, that would eventually be used to construct the edifice that was the actual past. Novick's story is the decline, revival, and persistence of the founding ideal of the profession: Leopold von Ranke's “how it actually was.”

Within this narrative, Novick clearly and persuasively documents the questions that led to the relativism of Carl L. Becker and Charles A. Beard. (The title of the book comes from Beard's devastating answer to Theodore Clark Smith's criticism of Beard's relativism.) Although Novick recognizes the scholarly questioning of formalism before World War I, he identifies the war as the catalyst for erosion of faith in the Rankean ideal. Among other things, the secret treaties and the dubious activities of erstwhile “objective” historians on both sides during the was spawned disillusion and doubts about the ideal Long after the war, the dispute between historians Bernadotte E. Schmitt and Sidney Fay over the origins of the war only multiplied the questions. For, as Schmitt himself remarked later, he and Fay had drawn on the same sources and documents, yet “came up with quite different interpretations. … Is there something wrong with our methods of historical study and training?”

If there are heroes in this coolly critical book, they are Becker and Beard. Novick confesses at the outset that he does not think “that the idea of historical objectivity is true or false, right or wrong”; it is essentially meaningless. Yet he does not ignore the philosophical limits in Beard's and Becker's relativism any more than he ridicules the positions of those who believed they were working toward a true and final history. His aim is to understand, to reveal the meaning and implications of the historical debates and controversies he treats. Carefully, he notes that despite what Becker and Beard were charged with believing, neither was a skeptic who denied the existence or the knowability of truth. Their relativism was no more than a denial of a timeless and universal history and the assertion that all history “would be ‘relative’ to the historian's time, place, values, and purposes.” Indicative of Novick's intention to uncover internal sources of historians' philosophical beliefs is his observation that for the energetic, publicly active Beard, relativism served to justify activism; for the mild-mannered, skeptical Becker, it offered protection from unwanted calls for public participation.

In Novick's reading, the efforts of Beard and Becker were only the personal side of circumstances undermining belief in objectivity between the two world wars. Their sapping activities were reinforced by unsettling developments within the profession, such as the loss of influence over history in the schools with the rise of social studies and the replacement of professionals in the writing of history for the public by amateurs like Frederick Lewis Allen, Claude G. Bowers, and James Truslow Adams. The amateurs books sold in the thousands; John D. Hicks's Populist Revolt (1931) required seventeen years to reach total sales of fifteen hundred copies.

Novick quite properly puts the relativists' challenge to objectivity in a broader intellectual context. The cultural relativism of Boasian anthropology, the legal realism of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the new awareness of the indeterminacy in physics, and a fresh interest in the pragmatism of Charles S. Peirce and William James all pressed in the same direction. (As late as 1910, J. Franklin Jameson, the doyen of the profession, could write privately that he would have nothing to do with pragmatism “until I can remember from one day to the next what it is.”)

The two world wars do more in Novick's story than simply frame the years in which objectivity came under broad attack. The wars themselves were catalysts: the first raising the issue; the second reviving a belief that perhaps, after all, history could resist sliding into the fearsome abyss of relativism. Thus when, soon after the war, Beard pressed his relativism upon the profession in the famous Social Science Research Council Bulletin No. 54, most historians would have little to do with the idea, despite the doubts raised in the twenties and thirties. The self-confidence and optimism that victory had bestowed upon nation and profession alike were reinforced during the Cold War. A new belief in the power and value of history came close to obliterating any doubts about the possibility of its being objective. One president of the American Historical Association in 1962 carried the flag of self-confidence to new heights when he warned his colleagues that “a great people's culture … begins to decay when it commences to examine itself.”

Yet it was just that kind of self-examination, Novick reminds us, that caused the objectivity question to flare forth again in the late 1960s, when a “substantial and systematically ‘oppositional’” historiography came into being for the first time. The eruption of black, ethnic, women's, and public history put an end, at least for the foreseeable future, to the dream of a unitary history. Here Novick's brilliance shines. He describes crisply and sensitively the emergence of these new subfields even as he exposes their weaknesses and excesses. He is less deeply informed on the rise of public history than on the others, but given his outsider status in discussing Americanist developments, those pages are indeed impressive.

Himself a historian of radical provenance, Novick is also adept in appreciating the power, unraveling the complexities, and admitting the confusions in radical history. “How many epicycles could one introduce into the Marxist taxonomy of class identity,” he asks at one point, “before it collapsed into Ptolemaic overload?”

Are there no flaws? Some. His interpretations of the literature or of professional controversies are sometimes off center or just wrong. For example, he misreads Rosalind Rosenberg's motives in his discussion of the Sears case; he overemphasizes the belief in objective history in the minds of those who drove David Abraham out of the profession. (Novick tells us that he was Abraham's graduate teacher.) He also fails to recognize that there might be quite sound reasons some historians during the 1950s were anticommunist. But these and some other misreadings—including that of my own view of objectivity—do not threaten the validity of his story. His implicit case, constructed with force, understanding, and subtlety, is simply that historians have generally not been interested in analyzing what they do, but they ought to be. And if they did, they would probably be relativists, as Novick seems to be, and as I am.