[In the following review, Tilly asserts that Novick's central argument in That Noble Dream is problematic, due to several methodological shortcomings.]

Coolly skeptical about the possibility of historical objectivity and wittily contemptuous of the ways that aspirants to historical objectivity have articulated their claims, Peter Novick traces what he sees as the rise, fall, second rise, and second fall of the idea in American history [in That Noble Dream.] He finds little reason to hope for future reliability. While sociologists might at first feel impelled to rub their hands at a rival discipline's discomfiture, Novick's inquiry matters crucially to sociologists, who have long supposed that they could rake up historical facts from historians' fields in order to incorporate them into sociological analyses, and who have more recently aspired to introduce reliable social-scientific methods into historical practice. If Novick is right, neither enterprise has much chance of success.

Novick builds his case by examining the careers, private papers, major writings, and obiter dicta of scores of historians—chiefly historians of the United States—from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the 1980s. Nineteenth-century American historians, Novick argues, returned from their heady German sojourns bearing colossal misconceptions of Leopold von Ranke's historiographical ideas, tearing them from their idealistic roots and fashioning them into straightforward positivism: History, for them, should identify and array indisputable facts and, in true Baconian induction, draw from them scientific truths just as powerful as those produced by Newtonian physicists and Darwinian biologists.

The profession's organizers, in Novick's account, considered themselves builders of a Science as they sought to create American universities on the beloved German model and, not incidentally, to enhance their own prestige through claims of objectivity. University-based Herbert Baxter Adams and his Johns Hopkins student J. Franklin Jameson looked with dismay or condescension at the partisanship and rhetoric of such great amateurs as George Bancroft and John Lothrop Motley. The ploy worked: objectivist orthodoxy prevailed, Novick holds, until somewhere after World War I, when the relativisms associated with Charles Beard and his allies began to produce sharp divisions among historians. Up to that time, professionalizing historians even gained the esteem and material comfort they sought. The 1930s ended all that. A second, shorter, and more disastrous cycle of objectivism's rise and fall began when historians started blaming relativism for fascism and for the West's weakness at the start of World War II; the second illusion exploded more spectacularly than before in Cold War mobilization and then in 1960s activism.

That Noble Dream offers both less and more than it promises. Less, in that Novick repeatedly compromises in detail the argument he offers in general. Although historians do the great bulk of their work in the form of monographs, the writings that Novick analyzes are almost all syntheses or programmatic statements, which are especially open to the Zeitgeist effects he is at pains to document. Timing, furthermore, repeatedly goes awry; Carl Becker's History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, published in 1909 in the midst of what is supposed to be the first triumph of objectivism, serves Novick as a prime specimen of the relativist history that is supposed to have come into its own after World War I. Novick simply does not show that workaday history followed the two cycles of his major argument.

As Novick's own sprightly narrative shows, furthermore, gifted amateurs and partisans never disappeared from American historiography; compared with sociology, history professionalized slowly, hesitantly, and incompletely. (Indeed, he does not hesitate to offer Woodrow Wilson, on page 65, as an example of the subservient orthodoxy promoted by history's professionalization, only to quote Wilson's criticism of scientific history on page 71.) Even today, most American historians hanker for mass audiences and public forums. Purported sea changes turn out to be eddies and swells.

Novick's book also delivers more than it promises. It makes a recurrent, shocking point of the racism and anti-Semitism of historians who claimed objectivity for their writings. It traces the famous phrase “history from the bottom up” back to a letter of March 1923 from Frederick Jackson Turner to Carl Blegen. It contains thoughtful, well-documented accounts of such episodes as historians' service to wartime antifascism and postwar anticommunism, the irruption of New Left historians into professional decorum, and the recent controversy over historical testimony in the EEOC's sex discrimination case against Sears, Roebuck, and Co.—not overly relevant to the main theme, but fascinating in their own right. The book offers, among other things, tidbits concerning the political careers of such well-known recent historians as H. Stuart Hughes, Herbert Gutman, Carl Schorske, Thomas Cochran, Richard Hofstadter, and Lee Benson. It describes the means by which Henry Turner, Gerald Feldman, and a few others drove leftist German historian David Abraham out of the profession during the 1980s. Its stories will nourish the conversation of many a faculty lunch.

What has Novick shown? That American historians have commonly adopted presuppositions from their political settings; that the fundamental questions historians reward each other for attempting to answer bear on enduring moral and political issues, such as the origins of the Civil War and the place of equality in American history; that critics frequently complain of their opponents' political biases while vaunting their own impartiality; that authors justify their works by asserting relevance to current political and moral issues; that prefaces and conclusions to historical monographs frequently feature large and vulnerable claims; that all these difficulties multiply in historical syntheses and programmatic statements. The simultaneous pursuit of authority, validity, relevance, and fame inevitably involves historians in contradictions and oscillations.

So what else is new? That Noble Dream provides no coherent explanation of these characteristics, no convincing account of their variations, and no careful examination of their implications for the very possibility of cumulative, reliable historical knowledge. The lengthy final survey of consonances between today's relativist currents in literature, anthropology, philosophy, and history makes many useful connections, but in no way establishes the disintegration of an earlier consensus; that consensus never existed. Novick's own relativism eventually undermines his ability to frame and document a compelling analysis of history's changes.

To be sure, my discussion has borrowed excessively from Novick's own method, leaping from point to point without establishing the balance of evidence systematically. Perhaps my justification should come from Novick's admission that

I tried to count and failed. Some time ago I spent the better part of two years coding the evaluative language used in thousands of historians' book reviews, punching IBM cards, and attempting to correlate the language used with dozens of other variables having to do with historians' generation, field, status, etc. It was a total waste of time, producing nothing intelligible and permanently dampening my enthusiasm for introducing quantitative rigor into intellectual history.

(p. 8)

Novick's inductive positivism at that unhappy stage of his career clearly exceeded any enthusiasm of his objects of study, not to mention violating the advice any experienced quantitative analyst would give him. But it does confirm a principle on which all the objectivists I know would agree: that without both a preliminary theory and procedures that can, in principle, falsify the theory, no one advances toward reliable knowledge.