Historisk tidskrift 123:2 • 2003
Innehåll (Contents) 2003:2
Uppsatser (Articles)
Att skriva historiska synteser – en liten moralism
Yvonne Hirdman
Fulltext (pdf)
Summary
Writing Historical Syntheses – A Story with a Moral
In today’s world, there is a growing demand for explanations.
This is the result of a combination of the explosion of the media
and secularism. Interest for history creates a growing market.
Those who deliver historical syntheses with grand theories are
usually not historians, and I argue that maybe the reason for
this is built into the scholarly tradition of the discipline.
To analyse, not to synthesise, has been the hallmark of the academic
discipline of history. The result is that the way history is
served to most people in popular history books (the case of Herman
Lindqvist) or in movies or TV, is modelled after the logic of
the media: stories of good and evil and of conspiracy, and with
a self-evident masculine perspective.
The article points to the
example of the lack of scholarly control in the contemporary
Swedish history of the Folkhem. Here, we have two major images,
the bright story of Progress and the dark story of oppression
hidden behind the reforms.
If the first one is connected to the
victorious Labour Movement, the second one is connected to the
opposite political agenda, though hidden behind the theoretical
pretensions of what is labelled as Post-modernism. In the construction
of both the bright and the dark story, however, historians have
been taken advantage of, mainly because of the lack of a master
narrative.
The tasks of historians then, must be not only to
deliver reliable facts and analysis, but to compete on the market
of historical explanations, i.e. to write syntheses. In order
to do so, we have to bring theory back in – not as a matter of
positions, namedropping, or style, but as tools to understand
this confusing world.
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