[In the following review, Higham compares Novick's central argument in That Noble Dream to the thesis of his own book History.]

The title of Peter Novick's big, compelling book [That Noble Dream] comes from a bleak address that Theodore Clarke Smith delivered to the American Historical Association in 1934. Responding to sledgehammer attacks that progressive scholars were making on “the ideal of the effort for objective truth,” Smith suggested gloomily that the way things were going this “noble dream”—the basic creed of the historical profession—might in the coming decades be irretrievably lost. While making no such prediction himself, Novick nonetheless casts his monumental story of change and challenge as a pattern of decline. From about 1910 to the present the ideal of objectivity has undergone increasing attenuation and seems now to rest on hollow foundations, or none at all.

This is to note immediately a major difference between Novick's narrative and my own telling of the same story in part 2 of History (1965).¹ Novick employs almost the same periodization that I used: first, the founding of a historical profession in the United States and the articulation of its central norm (“Objectivity Enthroned”); then the development in the interwar years of a relativist movement that put the older scientific school on the defensive (“Objectivity Besieged”); third, an effort in the 1940s and 1950s to integrate relativist insights into a more flexible orthodoxy (“Objectivity Reconstructed”); and finally, moving beyond my time frame, the widespread discrediting of any unifying ideal in the midst of confusion, fragmentation, and uncertainty (“Objectivity in Crisis”). While Novick and I agree on innumerable particulars, he sees my interpretation of the first three stages as Whiggish and celebratory. Whiggish it was—excessively though understandably so. From the vantage point of the early 1960s, when the study of history was prospering at every level, the story of an evolving professional creed fell persuasively into a pattern of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Adding a fourth stage, especially as Novick defines it, throws what came before in a different light. From the disarray of the 1980s, the preceding stage is easily read as an unmitigated failure, a temporary co-optation rather than a fusion, and the resulting four-stage pattern becomes a sequence of deepening disintegration. We have here an instance of a limit—insuperable though not absolute—that the historical process sets on the truths of historical inquiry.

The methods of the two books as well as the time of their composition contribute to the contrasts between them. Novick writes the history of a “question,” that is, a dispute which is best understood by standing outside the arena to observe how contestants deal with one another in rephrasing a given proposition and by restating their many answers. I wrote the history of a belief, so I wanted to get inside the principal players to grasp empathically how each of them felt and perceived a problematic situation. Novick seeks distance: I sought identification. His approach reveals complexities of strategy and maneuver that often escaped me. Mine offered a more sympathetic view of ambiguities within various perspectives and of linkages and continuities between rivals and successors.

Consider, for example, how the two books depict the first generation of professional historians. In writing mine, I had discovered to my surprise how much the early professionals had in common with the leading amateur historians of the late nineteenth century, both in theory and in practice. In contrast to previous historiographers I stressed the professionals' typical acknowledgment of the unattainability of complete objectivity along with their resolute belief in moving toward it and their enthusiastic enlistment in the broad late nineteenth-century movement to strengthen tradition and authority in American high culture. Novick, on the other hand, begins not with the cultural aspirations of the early professionals but with a highly restrictive definition of what he calls “the original and continuing objectivist creed” (p. 2). In it he includes the propositions that truth is unitary, that facts are independent of interpretations, and that the “meaning” of events never changes regardless of shifts in attributed significance. From these desiccated absolutes Novick can move easily into the American professionals' intellectual shortcomings, namely, their naive understanding of science and their misunderstanding of the German academic model they adopted. Later he notes in passing what I featured, just as I had noted (though perhaps more prominently) the professional egoism he dwells upon.

Where Novick's disenchanted eye is most penetrating is in his numerous chapters on the political ideologies professional historians have espoused. The special ideological service of the first generation was to the deepening of national unity, healing the wounds of the Civil War and overcoming the rampant localism and sectionalism of earlier historical writing. What Novick calls a “deliberate negotiation of a mutually acceptable version of the sectional conflict” (p. 74) came about partly through the low-keyed, unemotional tone that the ethic of objectivity mandated and partly through northern scholars' acquiescence in southern views on race relations. The ideological homogeneity that the American historical community thereby attained, Novick believes, was essential in establishing objectivity as its accepted norm.

The progressive scholars of the early twentieth century who began to question objectivist convictions remained much too confident of the progress of scientific knowledge to push their questions very far. For many, especially among the progressive avant-garde, World War I shattered that confidence. The nationalistic zeal that the war excited first plunged them back into the hyperbolic language they had collectively repudiated and then, in the disillusioned aftermath of the war, left them perplexed and deeply disturbed over the betrayal of their vaunted objectivity. Fierce scholarly quarrels ensued in the interwar years, particularly over the “war guilt question” and over the causes and consequences of the American Civil War, all of which dramatized the breakdown of an ideological consensus and formed the immediate context of the relativist movement of the 1930s.

Novick provides discriminating, impressively knowledgeable chapters on redefinitions of science and on new philosophical and social scientific ideas that also impinged on the objectivity question. Nevertheless, ideology remains the center of attention as he turns to the reassertion of a qualified objectivity after World War II. Relativism, Novick tells us, became a prime target in the ideological mobilization against “totalitarianism.” The defense of the West called on one hand for reassertion of underlying ideals and supposedly universal human values and on the other hand for pride in disinterested scientific inquiry. Consequently, historians followed a middle-of-the-road course. They claimed a partial autonomy for ideas while forswearing ideological crusades and denying that the past is best handled as a weapon. There is much truth in Novick's assessment, although labeling such a nonactivist position as “ideological mobilization” seems distorting. Fascinated as he is with conflict, Novick almost completely overlooks the enormous fear of conflict that the atom bomb introduced into the postwar world. For many historians, including myself, the retreat from aggressive relativism sprang not from mobilization but from demobilization, that is, from alarm at the danger ideological fanaticism posed to everyone.

The eruption of sharp dissension in the 1960s did not immediately bring the objectivity question to the fore. In contrast to the 1920s, when an ideological rift spread downward from the leaders of the profession, carrying with it an explicit epistemological challenge, the upheaval of the sixties came from below, chiefly from rebellious students. Unencumbered with philosophical baggage, the young radicals spoke in the name of objective truth, which they thought they could discern better than established scholars because they had no vested interests to protect. The new crisis for historical objectivity arose because different groups in the profession no longer agreed on a common agenda and no longer wanted to talk to one another. As the noise level escalated, comity collapsed, and with it went the sense that a diversified community of scholars can resolve arguments by rational means. Novick's discussion of this turning point is a graphic, sympathetic narrative of the rise of a new left in the historical profession, its early scholarly initiatives, and its rapid fragmentation into warring factions.

Gradually historians became aware of new forms of relativist theory, beginning with Thomas Kuhn's concept of the paradigm and extending through movements in literary criticism that repudiate determinate meanings, texts, and authors. As Novick suggests, this diffuse epistemological pluralism or subjectivism has undoubtedly confirmed and perpetuated the crisis in historical theory. But why, if there is a crisis, does hardly anyone seem to care? Why have the ideas agitating other disciplines not aroused among historians a new, urgent debate like that of the 1930s and 1940s? Novick gives us no answer, except to say that sensibilities and interests have become too disparate; the historical profession no longer constitutes a community of discourse.

I do not think that will do. Thomas Haskell has noted “our obstinate tendency to continue striving for objective knowledge … even in the face of our own skepticism.” This striving still constitutes the great community of historians, whose commitment to justifying beliefs “by reference to realities that extend beyond language and communal solidarity is a wholesome discipline and a deeply human practice, the value of which is quite independent of the likelihood that it will ever yield incontrovertible Truth.”² That center still holds, and the multilayered honesty of Novick's disillusioned book is an unintended testimonial to it.

In concentrating on the argument of the book, I have given a most inadequate sense of its range, depth, and richness. The bibliography lists sixty manuscript collections. Novick has also drawn heavily on books, reviews, and speeches through which major historiographical controversies and minor professional scandals were fought out. Many readers will find the garrulous footnotes as fascinating as the text. Quite a few of us will encounter unauthorized quotes from our letters, preserving youthful postures and private effusions never intended for posterity. Is there not an irony here? Novick's extended critique of the delusions of historians relies on the strength among them of a communal code that rightly bars assertion of their private rights against a pursuit of truth.

Notes

1. John Higham with Leonard Krieger and Felix Gilbert, History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965). A second edition in 1983, bringing up to date the story of substantive scholarship in American history, left unchanged a midsection of the book which treated Novick's subject—the underlying rationale of the profession.

2. Thomas L. Haskell, “The Curious Persistence of Rights Talk in the ‘Age of Interpretation,’” Journal of American History 74 (December 1987): 996, 1011.