Charles Maier: The Question of Meaning

I’m really excited about starting my history PhD. I’m sure the misery and loneliness of grad school will hit me eventually but not yet. One of the professors who I hope to learn a lot from is Charles S. Maier, a professor of modern European history. I knew him from the introduction to a book on the historiography of the Nanjing Massacre and a book called The Unmasterable Past on the German historiographical debate of the 1980s called the Historikerstreit.

Since I’m meeting him soon I have been reading up on his other stuff. In an opening essay in an old 1978 book called The Origins of the Cold War and Contemporary Europe he writes about the debate between “revisionist” left leaning historians who have been motivated by the horrors of the US involvement in Vietnam to reexamine the US role in the origins of the Cold War and more traditional historians. While I don’t like a few of his terms that much, he actually has a much more balanced approach than the use of that word might imply.

He concedes several points to the “revisionist” scholarship even as he critiques it, but more importantly, I think that his article, which might otherwise be considered quite outdated in its portrayal of the field now, can be used with almost exactly the same terms to describe one of the central points of contention between “empirical” or “positivist” or “traditional” history on the one hand, and more theoretically framed, self-reflective, but perhaps more ideologically charged history that might be said to descend from the very group of scholars he is talking about here. Here is how he frames the two approaches in the case of Cold War historians of the late 1970s:

For those who stress history as bureaucratic process, all questions of historical responsibility can appear ambiguous and even irrelevant. Foreign policy emerges as the result of a competition for fiefs within governmental empires. Bureaucratic emphases can produce a neo-Rankean acquiescence in the use of power that is no less deterministic than the revisionist tendency to make all policies exploitive in a liberal capitalist order. But what is perhaps most significant about these alternative causal models is that they are addressed to different questions. The non-revisionists are asking how policies are formed and assume that this also covers the question why. The revisionists see the two questions as different and are interested in the why. And by “why?” revisionists are asking what the meaning of policies is in terms of values imposed from outside the historical narrative. The revisionists charge that the historian must pose this question of meaning consciously or he will pose it unconsciously and accept the values that help to uphold a given social system. History, they suggest, must serve the oppressors or the oppressed, if not by intent then by default. The historian who wishes to avoid this iron polarity can reply that social systems rarely divide their members into clear-cut oppressors and oppressed. He can also insist that even when one despairs of absolute objectivity there are criteria for minimizing subjectivity. On the other hand, he must also take care that the history of policy making not become so focused on organizational processes that the idea of social choice and responsibility is precluded.¹

When Professor Maier quotes the “revisionists” as claiming, “The historian must pose this question of meaning consciously or he will pose it unconsciously and accept the values that help to uphold a given social system,” I think he has really struck on one of the central points here which is just as much an issue today. I would also go so far as saying that not only “traditional” history but also the field of Political Science in American universities today apply when he says, “The non-revisionists are asking how policies are formed and assume that this also covers the question why.”

What I’m getting here at is that one more obvious element of the clash between the kind of history which, in my understanding, has dominated the field for some time now, and the theoretical crisis that many find it in today, is not that there is an iron polarity between necessarily serving oppressors or the oppressed. However, I do think there is a growing consensus around the idea that there isn’t a way to just skip the “question of meaning” all together. This is something, I think Professor Maier hints at in the last line of the quote and one he goes into more detail in his work on German historians debating the historical relevance of the Holocaust.

Having said that, however, I still feel a lot of resistance in Professor Maier’s work and concerns expressed about the “totalalizing” dangers of history grounded in a theoretical framework. He displays this in the case of 1970s “revisionists” when he shows how they essentially quashed all inconvenient facts or diversity in the records in favor of a self-coherent system of explanation. However, he also describes the German historiographical debate about the Holocaust as one which is exploring the question of whether it is “just history” or something more. I believe this implies that there is a difference between, “History as a descriptive project” and “History as a normative project,” or if you like, “History as a science, or data collection” versus “History as narrative or as a moral guide.” One, if possible, strips history of its relevance. The other, if desirable, would seem to strip it of its integrity.

I am just getting started with all this, so I won’t venture any solid conclusions yet. However, before I have even walked through the door of my required class on historical theory, I cannot help feeling that not “consciously” taking a position on the “question of meaning” in history is, as the scholars Professor Maier described suggest, indeed assuming a “default” position. That is, part of the deep reflection going on within the field of history today comes from the realization that we cannot simply opt out of the “politics” of history in the noble pursuit of minimizing subjectivity.

I do feel we need to think seriously about positioning ourselves and understanding what our own stance on the “question of meaning” is when we work as historians. I like a quote from Gramsci that I found in a book published in that same year of 1978, Said’s Orientalism:

The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.²

1. Maier, Charles S. ed. The Origins of the Cold War and Contemporary Europe (New York: New Viewpoints, 1978), p. 23.
2. Gramsci quoted in Said, Edward W. Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), p. 25.