15 - The center does not hold

Summary

When the American historical profession was born in the last third of the nineteenth century, various features of the surrounding culture converged to mandate an austere objectivity as the appropriate posture for practitioners of the emerging discipline. In the last third of the twentieth century the wind was blowing from a quite different direction, assaulting the old ideal of objectivity with unprecedented force. A century earlier the forces mandating a posture of objectivity had won a sweeping victory. In the late twentieth century antiobjectivist influences met fierce resistance, producing a level of often angry dispute over “the objectivity question” which, together with developments discussed in the immediately preceding chapters, destroyed the broad professional consensus which had marked the immediate postwar decades.

There were, starting in the 1960s, two quite separate assaults on the idea of objectivity. The first, the Dionysian, was boisterous, flamboyant, and, at least so far as the academic world was concerned, ephemeral. The “counterculture” of drugs and mysticism, with its celebration of a radical subjectivity, hostile to all academic and scientific pretensions to objectivity, was from first to last almost exclusively a student phenomenon—hardly more enduring than goldfish-swallowing. Those who embraced its precepts disappeared from the academy as a matter of principle, following the injunction to “tune in, turn on, and drop out.” A tiny handful of junior faculty members became apostles of the new dispensation: Yale law professor Charles Reich, Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary.