ABSTRACT
It should be clear from the foregoing commentary that I have not attempted to devise a better way of doing history. Instead I have invited speculation on the way a certain kind of history is done. Focusing on various constructions of the mid-Victorian labour experience, I have explored the artifice by which their evidence is constituted and their truth effects produced, thus to suggest that historical practice is present-centred, political, and productive of myths which function to naturalize and validate existing social arrangements, or prevailing power relations. Proceeding from the observation that there are no independent criteria against which competing truth claims can be evaluated, I have argued that all truth is contingent. I have then advanced my discussion as a proposition, the authenticity of which is contingent on the conviction that democracy and hierarchy are incompatible. To illustrate this proposition, I have explored the fluidity of meaning, the relativism of logic and the incommensurability of meaning systems. I have thus endeavoured to illuminate the ambiguity of historical information, the ramifications of selecting certain events and processes for description to the exclusion of others, and the ways in which meaning is generated. In particular, I have taken issue with theories of social identity and the representative figure of historical narrative, describing them as central components in a technology of power which serves to convey the impression that capitalism is just and equitable by excluding its casualties from history.
