History not myth

Eric Hobsbawm argues strongly in defence of the discipline of history in today's Guardian:

The major immediate political danger to historiography today is "anti-universalism" or "my truth is as valid as yours, whatever the evidence". This appeals to various forms of identity group history, for which the central issue of history is not what happened, but how it concerns the members of a particular group. What is important to this kind of history is not rational explanation but "meaning", not what happened but what members of a collective group defining itself against outsiders - religious, ethnic, national, by gender, or lifestyle - feel about it....


It is time to re-establish the coalition of those who believe in history as a rational inquiry into the course of human transformations, against those who distort history for political purposes - and more generally, against relativists and postmodernists who deny this possibility. Since some of the latter see themselves as being on the left, this may split historians in politically unexpected ways

This debate is highly relevant to us in Wales, where the disciplines of the discoveries in Welsh history in the '70s and '80s appear to have been lost, and nationalist history has retreated to myth, as I argued last week.

We also see the march of the post-modernists in Wales, keen to argue that Wales was colonised by England or was an internal colony. Dai Smith has an important review of Stephen Knight's A Hundred Years of Fiction in the current New Welsh Review where he revisits this old debate about 'internal colonialism', pointing out Knight's analysis does not stand historical scrutiny. There seems to be a spate of middle-class academics and writers parading the myth of colonialism at the moment. We even get the occasional one from England who clearly believes they have some guilt to apologise for. It's a bizarre neurosis.

(c) Leighton Andrews 2005. Material from this blog may be freely used, if attributed to www.leightonandrews.blogspot.com