TSR Wiki > Study Help > Subjects and Revision > Revision Notes > History > History and Postmodernism: A Marxist Historians Perspective
Précis of Matt Perry’s discussion of postmodernism in history in his book Marxism and History.
In the 1990s postmodernism, after already making its influence in other disciplines from the 1970s onwards, provoked a sense of crisis in history, and one which was especially acute in those fields historically associated with Marxist analysis; labour and social history. In 1993 ‘traditional’ historian Arthur Marwick entered into heated debate with postmodern advocate Hayden White in the journal Contemporary History. Patrick Joyce, possibly the most radical enthusiast for postmodern history, announced the end of social history in the same publication.
Postmodernism‘s arrival in history witnessed the likes of Hayden White and Richard Rorty analyse the work of historians within the methodology of literary criticism and poststructuralists like Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida accused historians of naive realism. The work of Michel Foucault, especially his concept of ‘discourses’, became widely acclaimed and influential among historians open to postmodern ideas. Histories emerged making use of discourse and symbols, there was an emphasis on language and identity, and on the literary and narrative quality of historical explanation.
Postmodernism relates to a collection of intellectual currents, but one without any consensus or coherency. One way of defining postmodernism, in the words of prominent postmodernist Jean-Francois Lyotard, is as an “incredulity towards metanarratives” – in other words, a rejection of explanations or descriptions of the world in formal, holistic or totalising ways. Postmodernism subsumes concepts like ‘poststructuralism’, ‘postmarxism’ and ‘linguistic turn’ and among these ‘poststructuralism’ is very often present. Poststructuralism grew out of a radical break from Ferdinand de Saussure’s widely accepted theory of language, structuralism. Elsewhere Richard Rorty’s ‘linguistic turn’ has been much used as it identified the prominence of language and symbolism in postmodern explanation. Another term in the postmodern options of terminology is ‘postmarxist’, representing anything from modestly sympathetic revisionism to outright hostility to Marxist analysis. Indeed many of the most prominent postmodernists were former Marxists; Lyotard, Foucault and Derrida among them.
Academia, by having an interest in novelty and intellectual fashion, is correspondingly less interested in stable intellectual traditions. Such lack of interest is bolstered where such traditions are of a revolutionary nature, as in the case of Marxism. This force against Marxism has been met with the disillusionment with ‘actually existing’ socialism in Eastern Europe and China, also prominent in the forging of postmodernism. Time and again postmodernists, in their criticism of Marxism, erroneously reduce it to Stalinism. There has also been a trend in reducing social history to Marxism, treating the very idea of social history as if it can only be offered in Marxist terms. This latter process has encouraged historians to avoid involvement in social history under the anxiety that they might be seen as identifying themselves as Marxists. This is despite the fact that social history has been an approach to understanding past societies before Marx was writing, and that there have been many non-Marxist social historians; Marc Bloch, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Keith Thomas among the more prominent names.
There is no consensus among historians on the impact of postmodernism in the discipline of history. Whereas (postmodernist historian) Patrick Joyce sees widespread resistance to its ideas, (traditionalist) Geoffrey Elton saw widespread infiltration. But what postmodernism has done is to hasten the break-up of history as a subject. There has been a growth in emphasis on communication (symbolism and language etc) and a corresponding withdrawal from attempts to understand processes and events within a wider holistic or totalising framework. There has been a tendency to highlight continuities and downplay change or conflict.
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These notes are aimed at history students.
Originally written by Oswy on TSR Forums.
