Her enchantment with this marvelous cornucopia of book titles, however, might not long survive an encounter with the prose lodged between the books’ covers. What would she make of the following passage, for example, from the introduction of Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (1997), a work broadly representative of the kind of “cultural history” that has come to prominence in the 1990s?

“Selves — neither unitary nor fully self-knowing — are thus made by completely constituted, often mutually contradictory, experiences, some of which are known and expressed linguistically, some musically, some visually, and some in no known discursive framework.”

This is history? she might think, wondering if perhaps she had missed important developments in the study of the human sciences that had rendered her own limited vocabulary inadequate. And anyway, wasn’t this book about furniture? If she reads on, our out-of-date history fan will be told that “discourse does not merely reflect or represent realities or persons — it also constitutes them,” and that, “in certain conjunctures, objects are likewise both constitutive and representative.” By this point, enchantment with the book’s promising title will have given way to befuddlement, and perhaps to hostile disdain. What do “discursive frameworks” and object “conjunctures” have to do with the study of the past?

What Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction did to the study of literature in the 1980s, the inexorable rise of “cultural studies” — the trendy new cross-disciplinary field that dissolves traditional notions of historic fact in an acid bath of theory — now threatens to do to the discipline of history. This is the premise of Keith Windschuttle’s The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past. Windschuttle’s book aims to defend “traditional,” that is to say factually based, history against an onslaught of fashionable academic theories (structuralism and poststructuralism, cultural relativism, postmodernism, etc.) each of which denies, in its way, that objective “truth” or “knowledge” about the past can possibly be determined. Taken together, these theories in Windschuttle’s view threaten the core goal of the historical discipline as first bequeathed to us by Herodotus: “to record the truth about the past.”

Windschuttle wants to rally historians to the defense of the discipline but he’s swimming against the tide. His book takes pains to praise recent work by academic historians whose solid empirical research and measured conclusions do honor to their discipline, but he argues that such historians are an embattled, dwindling minority. His pessimism is well founded: The triumph of cultural studies not just in history but in the wider human sciences has been clear for all to see. One need only consult the course manual of any prestigious university to see that degrees are now being offered in vaguely defined subjects like “textual studies,” “women’s studies,” “peace studies,” “media studies” and so on. Poststructuralist texts by Derrida and Michel Foucault are assigned in nearly every academic department outside of the “hard” sciences (yes, even in accounting, as Windschuttle pointed out to this reviewer’s amazement).

Whether avowedly “structuralist,” “poststructuralist,” “postmodernist” or “new historicist,” humanities professors and their students have been dancing to the same tune for some time now, analyzing social “texts” (everything, from underwear to political ideology, is an alien text to be deciphered) to reveal the way human actions and literature are supposedly dominated by the omnipresent structures of language, ideology and culture. Proponents of the new cultural studies openly proclaim their hostility to traditional history, which aims merely to record past events and aspires toward an ideal of objectivity. Historians’ claim to be objective in their evaluation of source matter is now widely seen as a naive pretension peculiar to the culture of Western rationalism, and is derided as old-fashioned “positivism.”

One might think that historians, being the guardians of the oldest social science, would resist the encroachment onto their turf by the upstart cultural studies movement, but a brief glance at the jargon-encrusted monographs coming out of history departments over the past decade makes it clear that little resistance has been offered. More historians every year, it seems, have adopted the belief that, as Windschuttle puts it, “the study of the past is best done by approaching social practices and relations through textual analysis.” Not, that is, by combing the archives for empirical data in order to reconstruct a factual, narrative history of people, places and events, but by wandering through recondite mazes of theory, in which all claims to objective truth are regarded as manifestations of coercive power. Make no mistake: It is now considered reactionary in many universities to claim that historical knowledge is, or should be, constructed on the bedrock of objective fact.

Silencing the Truth
The tepid response Windschuttle’s book has so far generated among academic historians is revealing. Although “The Killing of History” was reviewed favorably in conservative publications like the Weekly Standard, the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal, it has been dismissed or ignored in both the mainstream liberal press and in intellectual journals. In the American Historical Review, the official journal of the American Historical Association, Windschuttle’s goal of affirming “the autonomy of the historical discipline” by “rallying around the flag of objectivity” was dismissed as “born-again empiricism.” Employing just the kind of theoretical jargon denounced in “The Killing of History,” the AHR reviewer accused Windschuttle of constructing “an insufficiently differentiated ‘other’ in a night in which all cows are vaches folles.” Translated into English, this means the AHR thinks Windschuttle is insufficiently appreciative of the rich diversity of theories currently being used by historians.

This view was seconded by the Los Angeles Times Book Review, which devoted all of four paragraphs to Windschuttle (four more than did the New York Times Book Review). The reviewer, a prominent professor of American history, proposed that the growing popularity of “contemporary cultural and linguistic theories,” far from representing a potentially terminal crisis for the historical profession, as Windschuttle believed, was in fact evidence that “contemporary historiography ... is more wide-ranging, inclusive, sophisticated and diverse in its approaches and methodologies than ever before.” Because relatively few academics read the Wall Street Journal or the Weekly Standard, the dismissal of Windschuttle’s book in AHR and the L.A. Times and, even more crucially, the failure of the New York Review of Books to review it — effectively killed its chances among professional historians, its target audience.

This is unfortunate, for “The Killing of History” is a tour de force. Whereas recent critics of academic “radicalism” such as Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball and Dinesh D’Souza focused their attention on the broad political context of contemporary academic practice, Windschuttle homes in on postmodern theories themselves, and methodically explains how they distort specific accounts of actual historical events. He shows how structuralist assumptions shaped books about the European conquest of America published on the quincentennial of Columbus’ voyage; how poststructuralism has distorted histories of mental asylums, medicine and penal policy in Europe by Foucault and his admirers; and how a doctrinaire cultural relativism has been used to mangle historical understanding about the death of Captain Cook in Hawaii. In his discussion of these and several other historical case studies, Windschuttle performs what he calls “road tests” of recent theoretical models to see how they handle “the rougher terrain of actual historical subject matter” — and also how such models withstand “competition over the same ground from those empirical jalopies that the new crew wants to consign to the junk yard.”

Not surprisingly, Windschuttle finds that the “empirical jalopies” are the only ones to make it across the finish line. In his first case study, we are presented with a fancy theoretical account of Cortés’ conquest of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in 1521. The essay, “Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty: Cortes and the Conquest of Mexico” by Inga Clendinnen, was published in New World Encounters, edited by new historicist Stephen Greenblatt. Clendinnen uses structuralist analysis — in which static, predetermined cultural differences become a template into which all historical actions are squeezed — to differentiate between Spanish and Indian cultural attitudes toward warfare. Aztec religious ideals, she argues, inhibited unrestrained killing on the battlefield. Indian warriors frowned on ambush or on killing from a distance (arrows and darts were fired only “to weaken and draw blood, not to pierce fatally”), preferring face-to-face combat between equal opponents, which led ideally to capture and the proper ritual sacrifice of opponents. Spaniards, by contrast, preferred ambushes and missile attacks because they allowed warriors to kill with low risk to themselves. Thus the improbable conquest of a city of 200,000 people by a force of 500 Spaniards is explained as the result of a noble warrior’s code practiced by the defeated. “Had Indians been as uninhibited as Spaniards in their killing,” Clendinnen concludes, “the small Spanish group ... would have been whittled away.”

The trouble with this structuralist account of the conquest of Mexico, Windschuttle explains, is that it ignores the mundane political, technical and military facts, which ironically can be found in Clendinnen’s own essay. Because the capital city of Tenochtitlan, a “murderously cruel and authoritarian imperial power,” was resented and despised by the neighboring tribes from whom human tribute was exacted, the Spanish had little trouble recruiting allies to overcome their numerical disadvantage.

The Aztecs’ ineffectiveness on the battlefield in fact reflected incapacity more than inhibition. Indian warriors were fighting with Stone Age weapons not sharp enough to pierce warriors to the heart, weapons so ineffectual that the Spaniards removed their armor in favor of quilted cotton. In fact, when Indians captured Spaniards alive, they forced their prisoners to demonstrate the use of European weapons such as the crossbow, and then immediately fired the weapons at advancing Spaniards, without, it must be said, stopping to reconcile this form of killing with any cultural ideals. The Aztecs had no tactical experience with the siege warfare unleashed upon them by Europeans who had been conducting sieges for more than 2,000 years, and they had no answer to European firearms and cannon.

It is empirical details like these, Windschuttle shows, that bring history to life, rendering absurd structuralist explanations of fluid events that picture historical actors as imprisoned inside an unchanging, all-encompassing cultural system.

Rethinking Reactionary Colonialists
Windschuttle notes that behind these new histories lurks a revisionist impulse that prevents historians from taking the facts at face value. In many of these theories, the native cultures invariably end up being valorized over the bad imperialist white men. One of the reasons historians don’t criticize these new trends is that they’re afraid of being painted as reactionary colonialists. But Windschuttle shows just how superficial such sympathies for oppressed peoples are. He points out that despite these historians’ sympathy for the imperial culture of Tenochtitlan, they have done little to resurrect the views of their conquered neighbors. The interest of cultural studies theorists in the conquest of the Americas, Windschuttle argues, “derives only in small part from any real sympathy they might have for the natives and far more from their fervor to adopt a politically correct stance against their own society.”

A reckless disregard of facts also distorts the “histories” of Michel Foucault. The works of Foucault, a radical French theorist obsessed with the supposed cultural repression inherent in modern “bourgeois” society, have become de rigeur over the past 20 years or so, required reading for both undergraduate and graduate students in the humanities. Inspired by Foucault’s famous declaration that “theory ... is practice,” seemingly an entire generation of academics has come of age believing that by reading Foucault’s books, and talking about them at conferences and cafes, they were committing radical political acts. Unfortunately for Foucault’s admirers, his theories, when exposed to the historical record, implode into rubble.

In Madness and Civilization, the work that made Foucault’s reputation, the theory runs as follows. In the “classical age” of Western reason, circa 1650-1789, a rational, “bourgeois” civilization was constructed in opposition to “madness,” by a process Foucault calls “the great confinement,” in which the unemployed, the poor, the criminal and the insane were locked up in workhouses, charitable institutions, prisons and, especially, asylums. In this way, Foucault argues, a morally authoritarian “work ethic” was enforced on the West, which stifled individual freedom and bred bland “bourgeois” conformity.

As in his later works on the development of clinical medicine and the modern penal system, Foucault’s main concern in Madness and Civilization is to show that nefarious power relations dominate the institutions that govern the modern world. By defining “madness” in opposition to Western reason, asylums enforce community norms of behavior. In its focus on individual patients, instead of on diseases, modern clinical medicine separates people into the healthy and the sick (“The Birth of the Clinic”). In its use of strict timetables, standardized architecture and institutional uniforms, the modern prison, like industrial factories and military barracks, exerts control over individuals’ use of time and space (“Discipline and Punish”). In all three books, Foucault aims to demonstrate the connection between knowledge and power. (He prefers, in fact, not to separate the terms at all, and usually speaks of “knowledge/power”). Respectively, then, modern psychiatry exerts tyranny over our minds, clinical medicine exerts tyranny over our bodies and the prison model of social surveillance exerts tyranny over our actions.

Now, these are pretty nifty theories, and they have held great appeal for many self-loathing bourgeois undergraduates wishing to rebel against conformist bourgeois parents. But as Windschuttle shows, the history is shaky, at best. Europe did, for example, experience a “great confinement,” although not during Foucault’s classical age of reason. Between 1650 and 1789, in fact, the total number of subjects confined to asylums in Foucault’s native France grew in near proportion to overall population growth, from 2,000 to about 5,000. From 1815 to 1914, by contrast, the number of asylum inmates grew 20-fold, to more than 100,000. A similar mass confinement took shape in 19th century England as well.

In both cases, Windschuttle argues, the asylum movement was born of political idealism, out of a nascent democratic politics. It was animated not by the desire of tyrannical psychiatrists to exclude the mentally ill from bourgeois society, but by democratic reformers who believed the condition of insanity to be temporary and therapeutically treatable. Of course, these somewhat naive hopes were never perfectly realized. Mental patients have often been misdiagnosed or maltreated, and most of those confined have never been fully “healed.” But the modern impulse to view insanity as an unfortunate condition under which fellow humans are suffering through no fault of their own, which Foucault decries, is in fact far more humane than was medieval treatment of village idiots and madmen, for example, who were often accorded the same status as domestic animals or exposed to humiliating public ridicule. Foucault’s theory of the victimization of nonconformists by way of modern reason, Windschuttle demonstrates, is patronizing to the insane, insulting to the modern psychiatric profession and historical nonsense.

Up with Foucault, Down with Absolutes
Foucault’s legacy, Windschuttle believes, may be most apparent in the character of contemporary academic debate. Each of Foucault’s major works asserted that different eras and cultures have different systems of thought — he has called these variously “epistemes” and “discursive formations” — which are incompatible with one another. The upshot of this assertion is that what is “true” is only true within a certain society. There are no universal standards that can measure the truth of a proposition in every culture, there are no universal values, no single human nature. (This emphatic denial of universals is what differentiates poststructuralism from structuralism, which posited that there are standard rules of language and culture that determine behavior in all societies).

Foucault himself, it is true, implicitly renounced cultural relativism in the last years of his life when he took up the cause of gay rights — without universal standards, human “rights” talk was impossible. But Foucault’s admirers still embrace his earlier relativism, which provides easy refuge in any academic exchange. Just as Marxists once “refuted” opponents by identifying their class position so as to expose purported ideological bias in their arguments, so “Foucaldians,” in Windschuttle’s view, now ensure that in any historical debate, “any question about the facts of a statement is ignored and the focus is directed to the way what is said reflects the prevailing ‘discursive formation.’“ Thus history discussion seminars increasingly consist less of “talk about real issues” than of an endless cycle of “talk about talk.”

As evidence of this decline in the standards of debate, Windschuttle offers up the recent public brawl between Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere over the death of Captain Cook. Although both are anthropologists, their argument has serious implications for historians. Briefly, Sahlins’ structuralist explanation of the events leading to Cook’s death runs as follows. Although Cook was initially welcomed by natives as their returned god Lono upon arriving in Hawaii in January 1779 during a festival celebrated in Lono’s honor, his return to the island in February to repair a broken mast coincided with a different period in the cultural calendar, when the warlike god Ku usurped Lono’s authority. Cook’s bad cultural timing, Sahlins argues, necessitated his sacrificial death, so that his godly powers could be usurped by the Hawaiian warrior chief, Kalani’opu’u.

This structuralist determinism, Obeyesekere counters, is nonsense. The historical evidence available suggests only that the Hawaiians, possessed of “practical rationality” like all peoples, welcomed Cook as a chief, most likely to enlist his aid in the incessant warfare waged with chiefs on other Hawaiian islands. In fact, Cook, during his successful first visit, was forced to genuflect in a temple before an icon of the war god Ku, something a god could not possibly do. More importantly, Cook was a foreigner who didn’t know the natives’ language and knew nothing of their religion — behavior surely untypical of Hawaiian gods. And he was killed for very prosaic reasons: After Cook took the native chief hostage in retaliation for the theft of his ship’s cutter, the Hawaiians surrounded Cook’s men and killed them when they tried to escape. No theory, structuralist or otherwise, is needed to explain this.

Sahlins’ subsequent response to Obeyesekere, Windschuttle demonstrates, provides a textbook demonstration of the Foucauldian method of intellectual debate. The attempt to ascribe “practical rationality” to the Hawaiians, Sahlins writes in his recent book How Natives Think (1995), proves that Obeyesekere, although a Sri Lankan, is a captive of Western concepts. “Rationality” is, in Sahlins’ view, a cultural construct, an ideology he labels “commonsense bourgeois realism.” To prove his point, Sahlins invokes a famous passage from Foucault’s “The Order of Things,” frequently cited by academics, that described a strange taxonomy to be found in “a certain Chinese encyclopedia,” in which animals are described as “(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens,” and on and on. Because this classification system makes no sense to us, Sahlins argues, “it must mean that objectivity itself is a variable social value.” Because the cultural system of the Hawaiians lacked such “objectivity,” Cook must indeed have been killed as “Lono,” however improbable that seems in the face of a common-sensical interpretation of the evidence. “Different cultures,” Sahlins concludes, “different rationalities.”

Sahlins’ argument for cultural relativism, like his explanation of the death of Captain Cook, collapses when exposed to empirical reality. In fact, Foucault’s “Chinese encyclopedia” does not exist — it was invented as a playful thought experiment by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. “There is no evidence,” Windschuttle writes, “that any Chinese person has ever thought about animals in this way.” Amazingly, Foucault himself admitted this, openly citing Borges as his source. But Sahlins, like most academics who deploy Foucault’s Chinese encyclopedia, does not mention Borges; he is using it as evidence about the supposed mental world of non-Western cultures. “That a piece of fiction can seriously be deployed to make a case in history or anthropology,” Windschuttle declares, “indicates how low debate has sunk in the postmodern era.”

Relativist mantras about “cultural diversity” are not only intellectually untenable, they are a denial of history. “For the past ten thousand years at least,” Windschuttle points out, “indigenous cultures on every continent have been subject to a process of change that has varied from merger and absorption into other cultures to complete obliteration by a conquering power.” Cultural relativists wish to overturn this seemingly unstoppable historical trend. What they are really pining for, according to Windschuttle, is a “return to tribalism.” By rejecting “rationality” as a tainted construct of Western reason, that is, relativists are abandoning history altogether: They would have us return to the mythical tall tales all human cultures once used to reinforce their self-image before Herodotus and Thucydides set out to find the truth about the past. If the relativist project were brought to its absurd conclusion, Windschuttle believes, advocates of cultural “diversity” would have us reject all that the Western historical tradition has learned over the past several millenniums and return to “differentiating between human beings on the basis of genealogical blood lines, in other words, on racial grounds.”

Although most proponents of cultural studies would argue that their theories emphasize that cultures are human-made constructs, not effects of biological difference, Windschuttle has hit upon a deeply troubling aspect of the new historical relativism. If every culture must be interpreted according to its own values, is there any place for ethical judgement of another culture? Given this conundrum, it hardly seems like an accident that two heroes of the cultural studies movement, Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man, were associated with the Nazis.

Might historians yet compose laudatory odes to Adolf Hitler, champion of a gloriously anti-rational, anti-Western culture? If this seems far-fetched, we would do well to remember that a number of paeans were in fact composed earlier this decade to indigenous American cultures that brutally dismembered innocent human subjects in ritual sacrifice and then ate them. As Windschuttle reminds us, when the Spanish conquistadors entered Tenochtitlan in 1519, they encountered piles of human skulls not unlike those uncovered in Nazi death camps. One Spaniard, Bernard Diaz del Castillo, remarked that the skulls were “so regularly arranged that one might count them, and I estimated them at more than one hundred thousand.” If historians cannot evaluate the actions of various cultures according to standards of rational judgment, Windschuttle declares, then we may as well throw up our arms and accept the cultures of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia as “equal but different.”

Why History Matters
Is history really dead? Of course not — not yet, anyway. There are many energetic historians, both inside and outside the academy, who continue to do real empirical research and write readable books about real people. Windschuttle might have devoted more space in his book to celebrating the positive contributions to historical knowledge being made today by his fellow “born-again empiricists.” He might also have chosen more challenging targets in his critique of the cultural studies crowd. Robert Darnton, for example, is a talented French Enlightenment historian who has greatly influenced the current trend toward “cultural history.” Darnton is more scrupulous in his scholarship than Foucault, less polemical, and also a much better writer. But his use of structuralist theory to “read” the culture of Old Regime France raises no less troubling questions about historical practice than does Foucault’s poststructuralism.

If Windschuttle’s survey of contemporary historical practice is incomplete, however, his diagnosis of the current malaise in the historical profession is sharp and well worth attention. The attempt by postmodernists to reduce all history to competing narratives told by different cultural groups, Windschuttle argues compellingly, is “not only a theoretical delusion but ... politically inept.” For, he argues, “to eliminate the narrative of what really happened irrespective of whether [historical actors] were aware of it or not ... would deprive us all, no matter what culture we inhabit, of genuine knowledge of our past.” Just as so-called “Western” science and technology have long been open to the world’s exploitation, so, too, should the tradition of impartial historical investigation bequeathed to us by Herodotus be available to everyone. Not by proclaiming “different cultures, different rationalities,” but rather by giving us a chance to face “the truth of both our separate and our common histories,” can historians truly fulfill their calling in helping people “learn to live with one another.” If we allow history to die, we will lose this precious resource. Keith Windschuttle deserves high praise for opening our eyes to the danger.