ABSTRACT
Since the late 1980s, heated debates about the nature of historical knowledge have at times unsettled our profession. As in every controversy, this is in part a conflict about reputations and material resources, situated in the context of an ever more specialised, differentiated and ultimately also fragmented academic discipline. On the surface, however, the issue is presented as a conflict about the ‘truth’ historians can expect to establish about the past. In the United States and in Great Britain (less so actually on the European continent, where different and more diverse intellectual traditions come into play), it is labelled as the opposition between postmodernism and its critics. Proponents of the former declare their interest as being to liberate the engagement with the past from what they call ‘empiricist’ notions of knowledge and truth, i.e. the notion that the truth can be easily established through a focus on the empirical facts without any further theoretical or conceptual ado.1 Advocates of the latter rush to the ‘defence of history’ as they understand it. They refer to the seemingly both pivotal and eternal ‘rules of verification’ which have been come down to us unscathed from the 1820s, when they were first laid down by the German historian Leopold von Ranke. These saviours of history have no doubt that the postmodernists are ‘simply . . . unrealistic’, and that their assertions are ‘self-evidently’ wrong.2
