[In the following review, Elton describes That Noble Dream as a “fascinating book” that provides a “splendid story” of the history of academic historical scholarship in the United States.]

Nowhere do historians go in for so much self-examination as they do in America: it is a part of American culture to examine the self. The same conglomeration of habits also accounts for American historians' exceptional willingness to listen to self-appointed guides, some of them sane but more of them not evidently so. The profession therefore lends itself well to the sort of analysis that Peter Novick has undertaken in [That Noble Dream,] this fascinating, if rather overlong book. (Excessive length in books is another American habit.)

This passion for commitment, however, this accumulation of fretful worries and serious night thoughts, has made a splendid story. Novick has chosen the recurrent desire of American historians to provide an objective account of the past, in the face of contemptuous complaints that such a thing is impossible, to structure his description of a century of learned endeavors. That is the noble dream of his title, a dream which again and again, just when it looked likely to turn into a waking experience of reality, turned into a nightmare. He opens the story in the late nineteenth century, when a first generation of American historians aspiring to professional status learned their trade in Germany, returning full of Leopold von Ranke and the cult of the objective study of the past. Their preoccupation with the search for a pure truth then suffered two setbacks. The “progressive” historians (James Robinson and Company) demanded that the historian subordinate everything to providing a social service to his time, and World War I demonstrated that even the much-admired champions of the unprejudiced study of the past, on both sides of the divide, were only too willing to discard their principles in the service of nationalist propaganda. The noble dream was gone for a time, to be replaced by the long ascendancy of relativist views propagated elegantly by Carl Becker and thumpingly by Charles Beard: it became axiomatic that the historian always writes under the direction of his own day and his own personality. The moral certainties of World War II enabled scholars to return to a more positivist stance, and in the 1950s they labored under the sign of a somewhat anodyne “consensus.” This collapsed crashingly in the upheavals of the sixties. Between them, rebellion against authority and the passionate search for new prophets among the practitioners of various social sciences produced the present state of rudderless confusion or at least multiplicity of tactics. Novick, wisely refraining from turning prophet, leaves things there, though he seems to regret a state of affairs which strikes me as healthily devoid of assertive authority.

Along the way we meet many seductive byways as well as moments of high comedy. Novick has found some fairly amazing cases of brutal anti-Semitism, usually among eminent scholars willing to adopt Karl Lueger's principle of claiming the right to decide who is a Jew. The fortunes of black Americans have meandered around since the days of Social Darwinism, with its certainty that there are inferior races, through the separatist days of Black Studies, to the peace created by the present conviction that skin color has nothing to do with intellectual equipment and that history equally attends to the fortunes and labors of everybody. (John Hope Franklin emerges as the one man who throughout adhered to the only right principles.) And then there came feminist history, about which it may be best for a mere male to say nothing. We get a very frank account of David Abraham's battle with Henry Turner and Gerald Feldman, a battle from which none of the combatants emerges with his honor untarnished. Novick has searched both public prints and private archives, unearthing many remarkable statements of bigotry as well as long-suffering, and much of the book is strikingly funny. If the noble dream of objectivity at times disappears behind the billowing smoke of the battlefields, it always returns in time to give the story continuity and coherence. At the end, it does so by evidently having ceased to be the central aspiration: if Novick is right, American historians have now given up even the ambition to tell it wie es eigentlich gewesen.

But is this so? Of necessity, only a minority of the thousands of scholars who have studied history in the United States make their appearance here, and the sample is biased by two built-in conditions: it consists of people who have involved themselves publicly in these debates about methods and ends; and it is virtually confined to historians of the United States, that is to say, scholars who have never concerned themselves with any aspect of the past more than 200 years distant from their own day. Indeed, in the main debates—about, for instance, Reconstruction, the causes of World War I, or the nature of the New Deal—they dealt with matters which impinged directly on their own times. Novick himself is a student of fairly recent French history, a fact which assists the predominance in these pages of modernists' thinking about issues close to their own lives. Among the many nonhistorians parading as influential thinkers Americans again predominate, with Frenchmen looming across the Atlantic; English historians who have tried to think about the nature of history escape unmentioned. (Novick does cite a curious trio of writers from England—Imre Lakatos, a conservative social thinker, Terry Eagleton, a Marxist literary critic, and Mary Hesse, a philosopher of science—none of them at all influential among English historians.) Moreover, economic history proper, not to mention cliometrics, puts in hardly any appearance. The whole analysis applies much more to modernists and to social historians than to Americans involved in medieval or early modern history, or engaged in the less fashionable aspects of the game.

Yet the much-despised demand that the past be studied for its own sake makes much better sense for people who need to consider times more distant from their own experience—who have to think more historically. In any case, American historians regularly seem to misunderstand that demand. They have from the first to the present been subjected to pressure to do service to their own society, a pressure made only more severe by the absurd passion for supposed relevance brought up by the 1960s. Studying the past for its own sake does not mean forgetting the present or overlooking the fact that historians are human beings equipped with personal experiences and preferences which render the noble dream of total objectivity an unattainable ideal. It does mean trying to understand the past from within itself and not by the standards and fashions of one's own day; it does mean respecting the past and its people ahead of oneself and one's own concerns. Hayden White, for instance, and too many feminist historians have never grasped this last point. It is in these duties that so many present-day historians, not only in the United States but more regularly there, have gone astray, under the influence of two somewhat pernicious misunderstandings.

The first of these imposes a moralizing duty on the historian: he is instructed to assist in one way or another his contemporaries' desire to be thought just, socially involved, and morally improving. Unless, it is held, he gives a leg up to the conventional virtues of his day he is not doing his social duty. But his real duty is to the past: he must make that past and its inhabitants comprehensible to the present rather than use that past and those people in order to offer to the present day consolation or exhortation. The other error, again very flourishing among Americans, arises from the conviction that other people's generalizing theories should guide the historian's posing of questions and offering of answers. This review cannot fully explore the consequences of these two aberrations. But is it not remarkable that the claims of so many dubious prophets obtain deference from historians needlessly troubled by the well-established fact that their own proper concerns do not yield great general schemes to interpret, and perhaps to forecast, the human experience? Thus, to take two wildly different examples, Marx and Foucault continue to command adherence in a great many quarters when even they, like many such, have time and again been convicted of merely abusing historical evidence by employing it selectively and inaccurately to underpin what can only be called lies. History should be skeptical of theorizers and should not submit to mere human dictate: it is here that its proper “service to society” lies.

The first professionals of the nineteenth century very often, for understandable reasons, gave an impression of childlike simplicity. The idea of total objectivity was a product of immaturity and inexperience, though it did provide a measure of self-confidence and a suitable start to the enterprise. The harmless impossibility of knowing all the truth emerged quite naturally from the conflicts of understanding which are an essential concomitant of advancing historical comprehension. Unfortunately, too many of the scholars discussed in this excellent book seem to have advanced from childhood only into adolescence—into that condition which thirsts for universal theories and will fit the past into them. Procrustes marks no improvement on Herodotus. Has not the time come to grow up? The claims of the people of the past to be understood in their own right must come before the claims of the operator to promote his own self. And the proliferating gurus of the day call for critics, not for disciples.