ABSTRACT
Conservative reconstructionist historians do not accept empiricism as only one of several competing modes of knowing the past. They reject all other methods of historical interpretation, especially those that smack of an ideology of which they disapprove, e.g. Marxism, cultural materialism, Hegelianism, bourgeois liberalism, or whatever. Historians in the mainstreams prefer to view history as primarily a practice – the craft of history (Poster 1982: 120; Goldstein 1994; Dean 1994). It is perceived as a technique of non-ideological discovery (Megill 1979: 451). What is challenged by the deconstructive historical consciousness is this belief that historical investigation can offer a peculiarly empiricist historical litmus test of knowledge, emphasising instead the belief that the past is only ever accessible to us as a textual representation – ‘the past’ translated into ‘history’. From a deconstructive perspective on the significance of language and narrative structure, I will now address each of the four questions in turn.
