IS HISTORY DEAD? | PAGE 1, 2, 3, 4
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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.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Native cultures good, imperialist white men bad -- or you're a reactionary colonialist