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Novick, Peter. That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

In this elegantly written, wide-ranging study, Peter Novick explores the ways that American historians have constructed, modified, defended, and challenged the idea of objectivity since the establishment of professional historical practice over one hundred years ago. Objectivity, in Novick’s telling, lies at the heart of the professional historical venture: it was the rock on which the profession was founded and it has been the ideal by which historians have defined themselves and judged the work of their peers. He argues accordingly that "anyone interested in what professional historians are up to–what they think they are doing, or ought to be doing, when they write history–might well begin by considering ‘the objectivity question’" (1). Yet Novick believes that most American historians have failed to devote sufficient attention to the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of their work. Analyzing the philosophical reflections of American historians, he apologizes, is somewhat akin to "a sportswriter reporting on their performances in the annual history department softball game" (15)–it accentuates what historians do worst. But the invitation to self-examination, however discomfiting it may prove, is essential to Novick’s mission, which is to provoke American historians to greater self-consciousness about the nature of our work, and to offer outsiders a better understanding of what we do when we write history, and how we conceive of the histories we create.

In his introduction, Novick defines objectivity as "a sprawling collection of assumptions, attitudes, aspirations, and antipathies" resting upon "a commitment to the reality of the past, and to truth as correspondence to that reality" (1). The knower is distinct from the known, fact is distinct from value, and history is distinct from fiction. Patterns in history are "found" and not "made." He continues that "the objective historian’s role is that of a neutral, or disinterested, judge; it must never degenerate into that of advocate or, even worse, propagandist" (2). But if Novick is comfortable providing a set definition of this most contested concept, he puts aside readers’ demands to know where he himself stands on the issue, conceding only, in the interests of "full disclosure," that he does not think that the idea of historical objectivity is true or false, right or wrong, but "essentially confused," and, in many respects, "psychologically and sociologically naïve" (6). Having made this declaration, Novick devotes the ensuing six hundred pages not to a theoretical discussion of how the ideal of objectivity might help or hurt historical practice–for this is "not that sort of book"–but to an analysis of the role objectivity has played in lending order and meaning to the American historical profession. Drawing on Emile Durkheim, Novick characterizes objectivity as a functional "myth" that has provided indispensable integration and stability to that social organization known as academic history. Leaning on Claude Lévi-Strauss, he argues further that objectivity has served to help historians overcome–or, at least, minimize or mask–the inherent contradiction between singular historical events and multiple historical interpretations.

These two themes inform the central theses of his book. In the first place, ideas about objectivity have been central to the development of the American historical profession for the reasons suggested above. The ways historians have responded to and made use of these ideas, however, have shifted continuously over time because of ongoing internal discussion, on the one hand, and important external factors, on the other. A committed adherent to the "‘overdetermination’ of all activity, including thought" (p. 9), Novick argues that the relative acceptance of objectivity among historians has undulated along with concomitant developments in three key areas: debates in other disciplines, including the humanities and sciences; world political events and the national political climate; and the state of the historical profession itself.

Novick organizes his massive work chronologically, employing a four-part periodization. Each section focuses on a major rupture in historians’ epistemological and ontological thought and contains chapters exploring the various factors–intellectual, political, and professional–that contributed to the shift. The first section, "Objectivity Enthroned," describes the founding of the American historical profession and covers the years from 1884, when the American Historical Association was formed, to the onset of the First World War. Novick begins with a wonderful discussion of the lessons–some of them quite misguided–that early professional American historians’ took home from their experiences in German universities. Whereas Germans conceived of eine Wissenshaft as a "discipline" or an "organized body of knowledge," Americans tended to equate the term with the English word, "science," incorporating all of the Baconian ideals of factual, empirical, theory-free investigation–although Baconian practice, too, was often significantly misinterpreted during a time when science held cult-like prominence among lay audiences in the United States. Having shown how Americans imported a rigidly scientific vision of Rankean historical methodology, Novick then delves into a discussion of the symbiotic relationship between the posture of objectivity and the process of professionalization then underway in the American academy. As a project, professionalization sought to exclude amateur historians in order to give insiders increased power and prestige. To accomplish this goal, however, professional historians required a firm basis of authority and clear rules about professional technique. Objectivity delivered on both counts, providing not only the guise of authority but an acceptable reward system, a tangible sense of steady, communal progress, and a decrease in the chance of ideological controversy–all of which proved essential to the stability of the early profession. And for the first two decades, the profession indeed remained relatively stable. Amid a sea of populist revolt, labor upheaval, and mass immigration, elite historians inhabited a quiet island of ideological homogeneity. Whether they studied the American Revolution or the Civil War, American historians resisted sectionalism and Anglo-American hostility in an effort to reach convergent historical interpretations. Optimistic about their profession and unanimous in their allegiance to overarching theories like scientific racism, these early professionals believed they could contribute to the eventual establishment of a singular, yet collectively produced, historical truth.

The First World War eroded that consensus. In Part II, "Objectivity Besieged," Novick details the various factors that contributed to the crisis. In the first place, "the war posed a fundamental and sweeping challenge to the profession’s posture of disinterested objectivity; to its pride in the distinction between the tendentious, superpatriotic, and propagandistic historical writing of benighted amateurs, and the austere detachment and evenhandedness of the professional" (111). As historians on both sides of the conflict produced dubious scholarship in the interest of wartime agendas, many lost faith in the ideal of collective progress that grounded their understanding of objectivity. Fierce scholarly squabbles only intensified after the armistice. Europeanists argued over the origins of the Great War and debated the implications of war guilt. Among Americanists, the origins of the Civil War came up for heated revision, as did the meanings of Reconstruction. At the same time, the once confident march of professionalism stalled in its tracks. Not only did professional historians’ status fail to rise, in several respects it actually declined. Many complained that it was impossible to maintain a middle-class life on a limited professorial income. In public schools, professional historians lost ground in the battle to control curriculum. And among the reading public, amateur historians like Frederick Lewis Allen remained far more popular than academic practitioners like John D. Hicks’s, whose Populist Revolt took seventeen years to sell fifteen hundred copies. The faltering step of professionalism, combined with the failed dream of historical consensus, opened the door to increased relativist challenges. Echoing similar rumblings in the physical sciences, cultural anthropology, and jurisprudence, historians like Charles Beard and Carl Becker began to suggest that historical practice was inherently ideological, and that historians might have a responsibility to descend from the ivory tower in order to contribute to real social needs.

Part III, "Objectivity Reconstructed," deals with the period following the Second World War, when faith in objectivity rebounded. Ideological mobilization during the war produced widespread belief in a sharply dichotomized world, ultimately evolving into a Cold War struggle in defense of the "Free World" against Nazi, and later Soviet, totalitarianism. According to Novick, this cultural turn resulted in an unrelenting attack on expressions of moral and cognitive relativism. On the one hand, "the attack on moral relativism was part of an effort to rearm the West spiritually" for the battle ahead, while "the attack on cognitive relativism aimed at making a clear distinction between the scholarship and science of the Free World and the debased practices of its enemies" (282). The results for historical practice included a climate of caution and self-censorship, a spirited defense of the West (institutionalized in "Western Civilization" courses), and a rejuvenated optimism about singular truth and historiographical consensus. While the reputations of Becker and Beard declined, historians like Richard Hoftstadter promoted a new, "counterprogressive" tendency which disparaged the New Historians for their naïve reformism. In the place of conflict, Hoftstadter and others pointed to "the defense of freedom as the thread that wove American history together" (333). This new consensus coincided with the improved fortunes of the historical profession itself. Although professional historians failed to win the favor of lay audiences, or regain influence over secondary education, they reconciled themselves to these defeats, finding consolation in the increased autonomy enjoyed by hiring committees and the soaring quantity and quality of historical production. The original symbiosis between objectivity and professionalism appeared to have made a comeback.

The respite did not last long. In his final section, "Objectivity in Crisis," Novick treats the factors that, in his view, may have signaled the final death knell for the historical profession’s foundational myth. "During the decade of the sixties," Novick writes, "the political culture lurched sharply left, then right; consensus was replaced first by polarization, then by fragmentation; affirmation, by negativity, confusion, apathy, and uncertainty" (415). In what are some of the book’s most engaging, even heart-rending, passages, Novick recounts the appearance, for the first time, of oppositional historiographical tendencies, first among New Left scholars, and later among historians of women and African Americans. Novick suggests that "particularist" historians like these found it impossible to reconcile dual commitments to objectivity, on the one hand, and their individual constituencies, on the other. The resulting tension contributed to "a resigned perspectivalism, and abandonment of hope for convergence on unitary truth" (467). Again, Novick skillfully matches developments within the historical community with similar trends in other disciplines. His discussion of Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions emphasizes the crucial influence of scientific developments on historians’ self-understanding, showing how post-empiricist thought impacted both groups. Similarly, his discussion of postmodern currents among literary theorists, legal scholars, and philosophers shows how assaults on received norms of objectivity undercut historians’ ability to distinguish confidently between fact and value, theory and observation. Finally, Novick ties philosophical debates to real shifts in the state of the historical profession itself. By the 1980s, he argues, intellectual polarization coincided with intense fragmentation among historical sub-disciplines. As specialties multiplied exponentially, historians found that their "sensibilities were too diverse to be gathered together under any ecumenical tent" (628). Despite scattered efforts to revive objectivity in the interests of staking out an epistemological "vital center," historians discovered that no "king" ruled over their domain. Instead, "every man did that which was right in his own eyes" (628).

From the beginning of the first section to the final sentences of the last, Novick’s argumentation is extremely lucid, logical, and well organized. Yet the whole of his book amounts to much more than the sum of its parts. Through each chapter, Novick relates countless stories that convey the excitement–and frustration–inherent to the quest for historical knowledge, all the while placing individual experiences within their proper social and political contexts. His ability to deliver these stories in such vivid detail derives in large part from his expert use of the sources at his disposal. In researching his work, Novick consulted over sixty manuscript collections, surveying the ideas of hundreds of American historians. His attention to published reviews, articles, books, and speeches brings to life the many historiographical controversies and professional scandals that have played themselves out over the past century. At the same time, his attention to unpublished letters reveals the personal foibles and hidden biases of individual historians who never intended their confidential expressions to be made public. The result of Novick’s methodological approach, which is to hunt down and then integrate the theoretical statements of well-known historians, is necessarily elitist and impressionistic, rather than comprehensive, quantitative or systematic. But Novick is honest about these pitfalls in introducing his work, and they hardly detract from his provocative final product.

That Noble Dream can be situated in two historiographical streams. As a disciplinary history, it follows as a kind of response to John Higham’s History: Professional Scholarship in America, published in 1965.[1] Novick expresses respect and admiration for Higham’s work, which has long been a standard in the field, but he points out that his own approach is much less an affirmation of the historical profession, and much less consistently cheerful. Where Higham seeks identification with his subject, Novick reveres detachment. Where Higham employs a celebratory tone, Novick remains critical. Novick’s stance is made possible, he argues, by his dual status as both insider and outsider. An esteemed professor at the University of Chicago, he no doubt speaks with insight about his profession. But as a Europeanist writing about a field dominated by specialists on the United States, he also enjoys a certain degree of impartial marginality.

As a work of intellectual history, That Noble Dream follows Quentin Skinner by placing its subject--the "objectivity question"--in an explicit intellectual, social, and political context. In a seminal 1969 article entitled "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," Skinner stresses the superiority of contextualism over text-only approaches which reify intellectual ideas into an artificial and anachronistic "great chain of being."[2] Context is imperative not simply because it averts anachronism, Skinner argues, but because it gives historians a grasp of what selected texts were intended to mean, as well as how those meaning were intended to be taken. By casting his net over such a wide array of disciplines and political trends, Novick delivers amply on Skinner’s demand. Identifying himself as both an "internalist" and an "externalist," Novick strives to consider developments both within the historical profession and outside of it. And, as a simultaneous "cognitivist" and "noncognitivist," he likewise pays attention to both the substance of individual texts and the psychological, sociological, political factors which influence their character. The challenge of this approach, of course, is to accurately assess the relative casual importance of a wide range of influences. Novick is not always precise on this count, but the exhaustiveness of his method is impressive nonetheless.

Does Novick share Skinner’s faith in the historian’s ability to produce truthful, objectivist history? Despite his reluctance to elaborate upon his position, the downward trajectory of his book’s overall narrative suggests that he does not. The validity of this interpretation has been very much on the minds of historians who have reviewed Novick’s book. Many, like James T. Kloppenberg, judge Novick to be far too pessimistic. Writing in the pages of the American Historical Review, Kloppenberg accuses Novick of disregarding contemporary efforts to chart a course beyond the current impasse between frustrated objectivism and wild hyperrelativism. Contrary to Novick, Kloppenberg insists that "beyond the noble dream of scientific objectivity and the nightmare of complete relativism lies the terrain of pragmatic truth, which provides us with hypotheses, provisional syntheses, imaginative but warranted interpretations, which then provide the basis for continuing inquiry and experimentation." [3] Amplifying Kloppenberg, Thomas Haskell--himself a historian of professional social science--takes issue with Novick’s apparent conflation of "objectivity" with "neutrality."[4] Haskell argues that much of Novick’s book reads like a wide-eyed exposé, clamoring that "in spite of all their high-minded public rhetoric about the importance of ‘being objective,’ historians have bristled with likes and dislikes and have often conceived of their work as a means of striking a blow for what they liked, be it reunification of North and South in the founding generation, or racial integration in a later one."[5] But external commitments do not betray a lack of objectivity, which, in Haskell’s view, values detachment only as an "indispensable prelude or preparation for the achievement of higher levels of understanding."[6] Haskell goes on to remark that, despite his apparent impatience for the "essentially confused" character of objectivity, Novick displays all the hallmarks of an objective scholar, patiently bracketing his own perspective long enough to enter into the thinking of others. When faced with the admonition that their efforts to represent the past are bound to fail, Haskell concludes, historians should do as Novick does, and not as he says.

The issue of practice is also raised by Linda Gordon, a specialist in women’s history at New York University. Participating in a forum on That Noble Dream that was sponsored by the American Historical Review, Gordon perceptively notes that while Novick focuses on the theoretical formulations of historians reflecting upon their own work, and on their attention to "the objectivity question" as an abstract concept, he might have gained even deeper insight by evaluating the tangible form taken by the works these historians produced. She suggests that closer attention to the practice of history–the actual experience of entering the archives and "listening" to the sources–might bring us closer to an understanding of what objectivity really means to the historical profession.[7]

Under the clever title, "My Correct Views on Everything," Peter Novick responds to historians who have voiced criticisms of his work within the American Historical Review forum and elsewhere. Against the allegation, made by James Kloppenberg, David Hollinger, Richard Evans, and others[8], that he offers an "apocalyptic" characterization of the recent fragmentation of the historical profession, Novick insists that he in no way laments the current state of affairs. Indeed, he suggests that the lack of a "reigning king" offers up many rich possibilities for creative historical investigation, and praises the American historical profession for being "the most ideologically open, and least exclusionary, of any such body in the world."[9] Against the accusation that he offers no exit from the impasse of objectivity versus relativism, Novick slyly retorts that "just as in matters religious, nonbelievers feel that they can along without "god," so we who are called relativists believe we can get along without "objectivity." In fact, Novick goes so far as to state that "the historical scholarship that so-called relativists write is indistinguishable from that of their brothers and sisters who, in some sense or other, continue to ‘strive for objectivity.’"[10] Writing off the practical concerns of Gordon and Haskell, Novick insists that the "objectivity question" is in no sense a methodological issue--having to do with research techniques--and is only very ambiguously an epistemological one--having to do with the grounds of knowledge. Rather, he avers, the objectivity question is fundamentally a debate about ontology, or essences: the need to define "who we are" and "what we’re doing" when we write history.

Novick’s dismissal of methodological concerns strikes me as evasive. Although he suggests otherwise, I would argue that historians have taken the objectivity question seriously precisely because of the way it bears upon the exigencies of our daily work: how we form theses, uncover facts, interpret documents, and construct historical narratives. Within the historical profession, scholars are constantly looking over one another’s shoulders in order to evaluate our collective practices, and our standards of evaluation are based in large part on our understanding of what it means to be "objective." Questions of practice are therefore integral to the debate on objectivity. Had Novick acknowledged the importance this relationship, he might have been able to provide greater nuance to certain areas of his argument. For example, his treatment of the David Abraham affair, in which attempts to convey "the continued power of the empiricist-objectivist alliance," glides over many of the methodological issues that formed the crux of the debate, distorting the case into a mere battle over ideology. Similarly, attention to the "final products" of historians on various sides of the objectivity debate could have enriched Novick’s analysis of the many historiographical trends that weave throughout his book. His discussion of women’s historians, for instance, focuses primarily on the sharp polarization caused by the infamous Sears case, and thus downplays the diversity of opinion and approach within that group. Attention to the actual works produced by these scholars could have worked against such oversimplification.

These criticisms aside, however, Peter Novick has created an extremely valuable work of history. His willingness to employ multiple approaches--cognitive and noncognitive, internalist and externalist--bespeaks a commendable ambitiousness, and it allows him to provide an astoundingly rich portrait of the community of professional American historians as it has evolved over the last one hundred years. Although Novick has certainly succeeded in provoking his colleagues to greater self-consciousness about the nature of their work, his book should also be appreciated as fine social and cultural history of the American historical profession itself. As David Hollinger has pointed out, That Noble Dream is ideal reading for beginning graduate students. "Stories that used to be handed down from generation to generation in the faculty lounge and at semester-end parties for graduate students are now the stuff of footnotes based on multi-archival research." Titillating gossip aside, however, Novick’s book delivers invaluable lessons in the broad historiographical trends that should inform the analysis and approaches of each new generation of scholars. For this reason, among many others, That Noble Dream deserves close attention and ample praise.

1. John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (Annapolis: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965).
2. Quentin Skinner, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," History and Theory 8 (1969): 3-53.
3. James T. Kloppenberg, "Objectivity and Historicism: A Century of American Historical Writing," American Historical Review 94 (October 1989): 1030.
4. Thomas L. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977).
5. Haskell, "Objectivity is Not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream," History and Theory 29 (1990), 137.
Ibid, 134.
6. Linda Gordon, "Comments on That Noble Dream," American Historical Review 94 (June 1991): 683-87.
7. Richard Evans, In Defense of History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999); David Hollinger, "Postmodernist Theory and Wissenschaftliche Practice," American Historical Review 94 (June 1991): 688-92; Kloppenberg, Ibid.
8. Novick, "My Correct Views on Everything," American Historical Review 94 (June 1991): 703.
9. Ibid, 699.
10. Hollinger, 689.