ABSTRACT
Thus, the famous British historian Richard Cobb (1917-1996) expended a great deal of time in French archives gaining a comprehensive knowledge of the ‘empirical data’ that was mediated in his narratives of French history. Like all historians (generally speaking), he was attracted to ‘an approach’ (i.e. his genre choice) which in his case was to reconstruct the past – in his case an approach that stressed the roles and functioning of individuals in the past and as a consequence he tended to reject social science/theory-based generalisations. Similarly, an almost exclusive fidelity to the power of the sources to ‘tell the story’ was the magnificent obsession of G.R. Elton (1921-1994) which he also assumed would enable him to reconstruct the Tudor past as it actually was. However, other historians – perhaps a majority today – prefer to work within the constructionist genre. Examples of constructionist historying would be that of those historians who are openly associated with a variety of social and political theorising. An obvious example is Christopher Hill (1912-2003), a founder of the journal Past and Present, who in his work (from a leftist position) was to use the concept of ‘revolution’ and appropriate social theorising to construct a history for the British social past. Other ‘constructionist’ historians choose to deploy heavy duty social science theorising and high end statistical forms of an analysis that demand manipulating large bodies of data to ‘discover the trends’ from which they can mine the most likely ‘meaning of the past’. Hill is only one example and so obviously does not exhaust the rich complexity of what is the involvement of the vast majority of practitioner historians who today are employed in the creation and perpetuation of the genre of constructionist history. Any historian who deploys ‘theory’ in some way is a constructionist under my definition. However, very much thinner on the ground are historians who in ‘doing history’ reject both the reconstructionist and constructionist epistemic and ontological decisions favouring instead the deconstruction of the assumptions of the other genres. Then, of course there are postist historians who ironically tend not to be historians at all as we shall see.
