Quote:
Originally Posted by G1911
My only real objection to Caro's work is the selfish one that he is 86 and we still need the final volume 5, 40 years after the first one came out.
I got my undergraduate and masters degrees in History (don't do that kids, pick STEM or business) in the early 2010's. Objectivity was treated with near-universal open contempt as an old-fashioned Germanic idea; the post-modern notion that objectivity is impossible to achieve (probably true in the literal sense) and thus is silly to aim for was taught to and preached by the students instead. The role of the Historian, as it was taught, was to shape moral opinion and to advance the correct interpretations of the past, that always coincidentally suit certain agendas and worldviews. Got myself into a fair bit of social trouble for declining to accept that the historian as propagandist is the proper way, and that one should withhold moral judgement and simply stick to the facts, the what, and the questions of the why things happened.
I will go flagellate myself now for again drifting with human conversation off the strict OP.
|
Yes but even when you're sticking to facts, value judgments invariably come into play on which ones you deem important, how and in what sequence you portray them, and so forth. And once you hit they why questions, I don't see how one can do that fully objectively.