Historisk Tidskrift. Utgiven av Svenska historiska föreningen
  Hem Aktuellt  Tidigare nummer Bli Medlem  Annonsera Om Historisk Tidskrift  För skribenter  Föreningen In English
 

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.