The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past

by Keith Windschuttle

Overview

A huge success in hardcover, The Killing of History argues that history today is in the clutches of literary and social theorists who have little respect for or training in the discipline. He believes that they deny the existence of truth and substitute radically chic theorizing for real knowledge about the past. The result is revolutionary and unprecedented: contemporary historians are increasingly obscuring the facts on which truth about the past is built. In The Killing of History, Windschuttle offers a devastating expose of these developments. This fascinating narrative leads us into a series of case histories that demonstrate how radical theory has attempted to replace the learning of traditional history with its own political agenda.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781893554122
Publisher:	Encounter Books
Publication date:	02/01/2000
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	298
Product dimensions:	5.68(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.11(d)
Lexile:	1460L (what's this?)

Editorial Reviews

From Herodotus and Thucycdies down to the present day, historians strive to record the truth about the past. But historiography today is in the clutches of literary and social theorists who have little respect for the scholarly disciplines of historians and deny the existence of objective truth while substituting radically chic theorizing for documentable knowledge about the past. The Killing Of History: How Literary Critics And Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past is a badly needed, long overdue expose of what has been happening in academia and the popular culture for the past several decades with the replacement of traditional history with politically oriented historical revisionism as illustrated by the European discovery of American and the Spanish conquest of Mexico; the British discovery and exploration of the Pacific islands; the foundation of European settlement in Australia (including British exploration, the convict system and relations with the Aborigines); the history of mental asylums and penal policy in Europe; the expansion of the aristocracy of Western Europe in the Middle Ages; the Battle of Quebec in 1759; and the fall of Communism in 1989. The Killing Of History should be required reading for every student, teacher, and writer of history.

A historian's counterattack against fashionably radical Theory, which originated in comparative literature and cultural studies departments and invaded the study of history.

After lecturing in history and sociology at several Australian colleges and universities, Windschuttle has found that old- fashioned empiricism, objectivity, and humanism don't mix with new- fangled structuralism and postmodernism, or with European philosophy, e.g., works by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, and Derrida. With an eye to Alan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind (and Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals), he has put together his own screed against the "new" history, which denies the possibility of historical truth, from New Historicism and Postcolonialism to semiotics and hermeneutics, with some examples of misinterpretations of Australian history, Columbus, Cortés, and captains Bligh and Cook. An avowed empiricist, Windschuttle passionately and methodically defends history as a true science rather than a branch of literary criticism or revolutionary sociology. But his writing is not as accessible or pointed as he might hope. His common-sense arguments against cultural relativism and radical skepticism frequently grade into the commonplace, the stuff of college seminar debates over Karl Popper's principle of falsifiability vs. Thomas Kuhn's paradigm shift. The Killing of History is best when debating the facts of history rather than theoretical differences. Citing works by fellow ordinary historians like Ganath Obeyesekere on Hawaii and Inga Clendinnen on the Aztecs, Windschuttle glosses over how Tzvetan Todorov misreads Montezuma's mindset, how Paul Carter mangles Australian history, and how Marshall Sahlins turns Captain Cook's death in Hawaii into a structuralist fantasy of ceremonial sacrifices.

An academic jeremiad against theory over practice, out to separate history as written by Gibbon or E.P. Thomson from historiography repackaged by littérateurs.

Kirkus Reviews