Such an uncritical stance in no way prevents the book from adopting that blunt, Hobbesian, man-of-the-world aggressive tone which in many circles of history-writing seems to pass for machismo (for example, the sarcastic remark that when Patrick Joyce referred to 'the intellectual history of our own times' what he 'really meant was his own ideas', p. Given the topic one might have expected a serious and sustained discussion of Foucault's account of history - we get a paragraph on pp. The book covers various topics, i remember one of my favorites was when the book asks whether history should be treated as a science?

His point, then, is really that one must avoid extremes: either believing that the historian can fully recreate the past as it was with full objectivity, or believing that it is impossible to access the past as an objective reality at all. Antony Easthope has more to say about Evans's treatment of Derrida in his review of In Defence of History. That statement is pretty typical of the tone of the book, a robust, earthy common sense in which the word 'paranoia' would be less likely to appear than 'parakeet'. It gave me a nostalgic feeling for my first year at University studying history and reminded my why I choose to study it. These works serve as the basis of the central dichotomy of the book as well as what Evans considers the central dichotomy of the study of history: empiricism versus relativism .His book The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914, volume 7 of the Penguin History of Europe, was published in 2016. And it allows In Defence of History to begin with statements which appear to accord a relatively high degree of autonomy to the textual activity of history-writing ("texts . It may seem that investigation into the past ought to be a straightforward business, but history has been subject to a crisis of self-definition over a considerable period of time. Atas nama Pencerahan mereka menggantikan penilaian Baik-Jahat dengan kayu ukur baharu: Budaya, Sistem, Masyarakat, Geografi.

The most extreme positions in post-modernist thought, we are told, deny the fundamental reality of the past, and argue that all that matters is the interpretation in the present – with every interpretation being equally valid. Most of all, he asks us to consider the dangerous divide created by all the in-fighting: society against the individual and vice versa, hyper-relativism and deconstructionism eating away at years and years of marvellous social history (itself a major victory of the second half of 20th century over old elitist political history. We are first taken on a tour of what the (European) study of history was thought to mean through time: it is no longer considered “scientific” by most – although Evans is quick to reassure us that it is just different and not worse.Grayling, 'Historical truth put on the line', The Financial Times, Weekend Supplement, 25/26 October 1997, p. In this last he has a particularly strong point, since Evans spends a great deal of time deriding the rise of “jargon” during the dominance of social history writing. This descent into post-truth can be halted however, by Evans’ reassertion that “today we need to say, again, that there is such a thing as the truth and you can find it out” .

Dog’, ‘kalbun’ dan ‘hund’ adalah nama berbeza di dalam bahasa berbeza namun ketiga-tiganya merujuk kepada objek yang sama. The success of this movement led to the assertion that it was the only true history and that all history was social history. Richard Evans book In Defense Of History brilliantly reasons out and destroys most of these absurd postmodernist claims, which really should never have got to the stage of where millions of university students are learning in great detail their theories, as if they actually were correct and have high standing.It’s a thorough and persuasive appraisal of the historical profession and what it can hope to achieve, and it’s an excellent guide to (relatively) contemporary thinking about history. Evans does not range back as far as the Greeks in his discussion of issues in history to day; the question of how a historian should separate truth from fiction and how much interpretation is legitimate may go back that far, but many other issues go back to nineteenth century Germany, when the work of Leopold von Ranke brought into being criteria which have effectively formed the yardsticks of modern historical study. Evans warns against both a “rank indifference” toward the linguistic challenge as well as a “drawing up [of] the disciplinary drawbridge” against new and strange forces.