The KILLING OF HISTORY by Keith Windschuttle (PDF)

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Seeks to prove that history is being perverted by literary and social theorists who believe that the past can only be perceived through our individual cultural interests, and attempts to separate fact from fiction to preserve the truth of events.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Amazon.com Review Australian scholar Keith Windschuttle is one of the fieriest participants in the debate about the practice of history. In The Killing of History he decries the growth of so-called cultural studies in place of the old-fashioned facts-and-chronologies approach. Windschuttle’s passion sometimes carries him a bit too far, but he lands many solid punches, such as when he takes on the heavily published French scholar Michel de Certeau, who has called writing a tool of the power elite. “For someone who thinks writing is a form of oppression,” Windschuttle twits, “he has done a lot of writing.” Elsewhere Windschuttle attacks efforts to explain away such matters as human sacrifice among the Aztecs, saying that to accept such behavior is akin to “accepting the cultures of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia as equal but different.” From Library Journal Australian author and lecturer in history, social science, and media, Windschuttle presents an articulate, acerbic, sustained but balanced attack on postmodernist theory and its influence on the practice of history. After a survey of the major tenets of postmodern theory with its radical relativism, the author examines a series of case studies where the practice has been applied, such as Cortes’s conquest of Mexico, movie versions of Mutiny on the Bounty, and the Hawaiian system of signs in the interpretation of Captain Cook’s existence. He also includes a long chapter on Foucault. Showing the inconsistencies, errors, contradictions, and illogic that resulted from the postmodernist approach, he ultimately argues that the relativism and rejection of empirical research by such theorists produces a tribalism that disarms the marginalized groups it proposes to liberate. While oriented toward Australian intellectual circles, this book is readily accessible and deserves a wide audience.?Thomas L. Cooksey, Armstrong State Coll., Savannah, Ga.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews 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, L‚vi-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, Cortes, 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 litt‚rateurs. — Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Review Its problem is that it concentrates on scholars who are mostly peripheral to the discipline of history and does not accurately represent contemporary historiography, which is more wide-ranging, inclusive, sophisticated and diverse in its approaches and methodologies than ever before. — Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Lawrence W. Levine Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Confusion?? It is a wonderful book. The question makes no sense.

⭐If I could give this six stars I would. The author through careful argument and many examples eviscerates the pretensions of postmodern relativistic thought. He shows that it is not only self-refuting, but by definition hypocrisy in action. All relativism is self-refuting (as in, all truth is relative) because truth and absolute objective moral standards exist (I would argue only because God exists). Even in our understanding and knowledge of history. Windschuttle’s views are, lamentably, in the minority among Western intellectuals, but he has truth on his side, and truth in the end will always win out.

⭐If you want to know the philosophical and political basis of the left’s ongoing assault on truth, reason and history, this is the book for you. It is very well written and provides all the details that leftist academia and media do not want you to know.

⭐Book explains why US schools and universities have produced a generation the most historically ignorant people on the planet.What little history is taught is distorted by mind-numbing post-modernist relativist ideology.

⭐A scathing attack on the trend towards postmodern historic narrative. The first part of the book details comparative accounts of Cortez’s invasion of Mexico and the collapse of the Mexicana empire, then the religious meta narratives imposed on the voyages of Cook to Hawaii and Australia, and Wallis and then Bligh to Fiji. The latter part of the book attacks the approaches of Foucault, Marx, Hegel, Heidegger, Lakatos, Ferabend, Hayden White, Fukayama and Edward Said.I found the most enjoyable sections of the book were those where Windshuttle looks at concrete history: Cortez, Cook and Bligh. Here Windshuttle illustrates the value of the historiographer as guide to the merits of competing theories. His critique of Foucault rests on his lack of footnotes, a lack of breadth in his data and a tendency to ignore facts which don’t meet his theory of unseen forces. Less satisfying was criticism of Kuhn and Popper’s successors, Lakatos and Feyerabend. His breakdown of White’s mapping of historical narrative writing modes as grid of literary and political styles was useful – I’ve read some of White’s work; his criticism here amounts to the observation that the categorization is both forced superficial.Fukayama’s take on the “end of history”, that Western techno-capitalism had prevailed over its rivals and that everything that follows would simply be a refinement, now seems premature. Windshuttle traces the genealogy of the idea back to Hegel who believed that he had witnessed the end of history when he viewed Napoleon at Jenna, interpreting that the ultimate purpose of history as the diffusion of universalist principles. Further he credits Fukuyama for wresting the teleological purpose of history from the left, both new and old, who presumed that the ultimate end was the triumph of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie. He also notes that about 5 years earlier, a similarly titled book Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End? by Lutz Niethammer came out which took the opposite approach. Niethammer subjects, are two Communists, Alexander Kojeve and Walter Benjamin, and 6 German fascists, Heidegger, Junger, Gehlen, Schmidt, de Jounal and Hendrik de Man), for whom the end of history simply meant the discrediting of their social ideals. History would continue but not along the lines that the had hoped for.Good history has a timeless appeal. Windshuttle’s arguments for objective empiricism over fictive interpretation of events and are well made. The former is more true to events whereas the moral relativism of the latter misleads towards politicized agendas.

⭐Keith Windschuttle takes a number of modern fads in history, most descended from literary theory, and attempts to show how incoherent and damaging they are to the discipline of history. Windschuttle takes on semiotics, structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, relativism, and so on. He does this primarily by attacking the faulty research of these practitioners, their illogical conclusions, then he tries to trounce their philosophical underpinnings.All in all, he does a fine job, though the relativists and postmodernists he attacks will state that the “logic” he uses is provincial and Western, thus, not to be trusted. I have to deal with such ideas all the time in pursuing my Ph.D. in history. People like Foucault and Said are worshiped mainly because they attack the establishment, which means anything Western, Christian, conservative, or capitalist (four things which define me). Windschuttle makes many arguments against these people, which I will not go into here.To allay fears that this is not, as many on Amazon claim, just a “right-wing” screed or hit piece, he attacks one of the beloved figures in “right-wing” historiography: Fukuyama. Why? Fukuyama used Marx’s beloved Hegel to attack Marx, but Windschuttle hates any grand over-arching theory, Hegel included, even when supportive of the West.A problem, though, Windschuttle does not acknowledge that these theorists, however odious, do bring something to the table. Postmodernists and structuralists do make the valid point that everybody, no matter how hard they try, is biased. It is only when they use this point to attack everything that they hate that it becomes silly. It is when they attack the historical heroes of the past, say Washington, turning him from a demi-god to nothing but pure evil. It is when they, as an example J. B. Harley, “cartographic postmodernist,” goes about highlighting the motes in other eyes and ignoring the beams in his own. (Ah, how oppressive and culturally biased of me, so typically Western, to allude to the Gospels!) But Windschuttle too does not offer any philosophy in exchange for the ones he attacks, and seems to intimate that an objective, factual history is possible. While I think, in some ways, it can be possible, he offers no philosophical reasoning behind it.Thus, four stars. Still, I believe that this is an important book, and should be assigned in historical methods courses alongside books by the like of Keith Jenkins, and others.

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