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Historisk tidskrift 125:2 • 2005

Innehåll (Contents) 2005:2

Uppsatser (Articles)

Postmodernism, källkritik och historieskrivning

Roddy Nilsson

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Postmodernism, Source Criticism and Historical Research

In general, historians have been mildly hostile to, or uninterested in, the challenges of postmodernism. However, there are some examples of explicit criticism of postmodern ideas, which have been perceived as a threat to historical research.

As a series of new theoretical perspectives and methods have been incorporated into the writing of history, the significance of source criticism has declined. It is unclear to what extent this is a result of postmodern influences. This article argues that the habit of regarding source criticism as a form of common sense knowledge is untenable. Source criticism is not a method to create meaning out of past events and therefore cannot help the historian to create stories of the past. Nevertheless, it does have an important role to play as a technical instrument useful to date events, to expose forgeries in documents and to determine the provenance of artefacts.

The article further argues that the question of historical truth needs to be bracketed off. Most contemporary historians are social constructivists and epistemological relativists of some brand or other. Hence, the claim that the search for truth provides the ultimate legitimacy for historical research ought to be abandoned in favour of an attempt to create meaningful stories of the past. This would not mean that historians would abandon all rules of scholarly practice or embrace an unqualified relativism. However, it would mean that the statements historians make to represent reality can never be regarded as true in a final sense. Such an insight means that historians can never legitimate historical research as the search for, and revelation of, truths about the past. Proper scholarly practice will instead entail the ability to formulate theoretically informed questions and to reflect upon methodological and epistemological perspectives, as well as an awareness of the consequences flowing from the choice of style in which the historian presents her or his story about the past. Last but not least, it would mean a form of history writing where the historian earnestly considers his or her own position.