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COPYRIGHT 2003 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
By Keith Jenkins. New York: Routledge, 1999. 232 pages.
What Happens to History: The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought. Edited by Howard Marchitello. New York: Routledge, 2001. 248 pages.
In a recent article condemning creeping "professionalism" in the historical profession, Lynn Hunt, the immediate past president of the American Historical Association, urged graduate students to put aside concerns about career-building in order to encounter their discipline on a deeper level. The historical endeavor, Hunt argues, invites an explicitly moral engagement with the past: "Have we become so frightened of charges of political correctness or ideological bias that we are embarrassed to admit that historical study has moral meaning?" (Hunt, "Has Professionalism Gone Too Far?" Perspectives 40, no. 2 [2002]: 5). Hunt has hit upon a controversial point. Moral meaning in/from history? Who still talks about that?
Surprisingly enough, postmodernists and other progressive thinkers do. Historian Keith Jenkins and literary scholar Howard Marchitello have given us thought-provoking volumes examining the relationship between history and ethics, as it has unfolded under the influence of postmodernism. But their understanding of ethics and its impact on historical writing is not, I suspect, precisely what Hunt was envisioning. By the conclusion of Why History?, one wonders whether history in its present guise can ever be truly ethical.
As postmodernists, Jenkins and Marchitello both begin with the premise that ethics are humanly constructed and therefore unstable. As one might expect, they steer clear of any notion that ethical systems stem from a deity (although occasionally and perhaps unconsciously they allow postmodernist theorists to fill this gap) or from a transcendent theology. Ethics, in the words of Tzvetan Todorov, who contributed an essay to Marchitello's volume, represent "humanistically" rather than "theologically derived thought" (M, 3).
While postmodernist theory provides guidance for understanding what ethics are not, it does not lead to agreement on what ethics actually are, how they are discerned, and where they intersect with past and present practice. For Marchitello, the process of constructing ethical systems is dialogic, and historical writing plays a central role: "universals emerge dialectically, the result of the very dialogue the historian seeks to initiate and sustain, the dialogue that is placed 'above the preservation of the sacred past'" (M, 3). For Jenkins, ethical thought and action are more elusive and stem primarily from the individual's own singular struggle to discern what is right. In his view, the only ethical position is one that is foundationless and without precedent: "for a decision to be 'ethical'...
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