135 of 146 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I was sorry to see it end., April 8, 1999
This review is from: The KILLING OF HISTORY (Hardcover)
I am a college professor of the social sciences and have watched as "critical theory" has crept into the academy with alarm. I loved The Killing of History and stayed up at night reading it, and I strongly recommend it. Windschuttle focuses on the issues of the debate between old-school historians and post-modernists, although he does point out that the latter group tends to use a supercilious, derisively dismissive tone as their response when opposed (see the review below which refers to the author as a "hack," uses phrases like "so-called 'intellectuals'," and a snub about "if you subscribe to the Reader's Digest then this book is for you" as a perfect example of what he is talking about]. The specific examples he gives about the history of Mexico and Australia make this an interesting read in that vein as well.
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88 of 95 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
VERY GOOD POLEMICS: SOUND REASONING, July 31, 2002
If you ever wonder who killed truth and the whole nature of empirical history, even empirical science, Windshuttle has the answer and it is unequivocally the fault of the Post-Modernists.
If you ever wondered who exactly the PoMo crowd is, then Windshuttle will do his best to teach you, though he admits, even with the post-modern crowd, the hardest thing is arriving at a definition that everyone agrees upon: overly abstruse, opaque in their turgid writing style PoMo literary critics and social theorists have been creeping into the Queen of the Social Sciences --- History --- since Nietszche and Foucault.
Here in crisp, clean and logical style, Windshuttle makes a powerful polemic, wiping the slate clean and reclaiming traditional narrative, empirical history from literary critics and social theorists.
Some of the books highlights for me were:
1) The PoMo use of the the arguments of Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos, to reach a conclusion that purports, because science is relative then so is knowledge. Since these people are my heros I was very surprised to learn that their ideas could be used in a fashion they never intended. Windshuttle puts their ideas in their proper perspective.
2) That vast proliferation of any university course that has the word "studies" appended after it has always caused me concern; I have run into a lot of people, some from good universities, that have no idea about even simple ideas of science, morality and elementary history. But who lack elementary thinking skills (such as how to reason from a first premise, how to detect a fallacy or even understand the simple elements of science). In almost all of these cases, many of these people have graduated in one of the hodge-podge disciplines that seem to be proliferating in Universities --- disciplines that do not teach thoroughgoing knowledge in any discipline and therefore, more often than not, turn out graduates who have no credible thinking skills.
3) The fallacy of Great Theory History. Windshuttle reminds us by critiquing the Fukuyama "End of History" idea, that the goal of history is to make accurate descriptive statements about events in the past. That subscribing a single prime mover or explanation for diverse historical events --- whether they are the discourses of Marx and his economic determinism or the grand social theories of Victor Davis Hanson "Carnage & Culture" or Jared Daimond, "Guns, Germs and Steel" --- are merely poor attempts to pound history in the shape historians wants.
And that is one of the most stimulating and problematic elements of this book: I think that Windshuttle has as much problem with some people in his own discipline as he may have with others in the lighter "disciplines" of social theory.
Also, although I sympathise with Windshuttle and wince at the low number of people graduating from traditional historical disciplines and share his chagrin at the rise of Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, (and yes even Canadian Studies), I do not think that we are in danger of losing the "unappreciated" discipline or History. If I may use Canada as an example, in this least patriotic of societies, Canadians remain largely ignorant of their own history, moreover the ideas of the PoMoists fit in well with the state ideology of Multiculturalism (laudable but flawed). Recently however Canada has had an explosion of interest in her own history --- military and political, and history from the ground up (history of minorities and their contribution to the country) --- all of this has been at the cost of PoMo interpretations of the world, now seen as logically bankrupt. All of this research is traditional narrative research.
Also one look in any bookstore in either the US, Australia, the UK or Canada will yeild very few volumes of history written with a structuralist / post-modern slant, they are almost all traditional empirical narratives (and no one buys the books of literary critics).
So although the debate between social theorists, literary critics and traditional empirical history may continue in the academic world it is certainly not much of an issue to the reading public, who continue to demand narratives based upon the old fashioned method of looking at empirical data in the form of records, sifting through known facts and documents, and then adjusting conclusions and narratives to objectively fit the facts -- and making sure that we are aware of our biases and deal with them honestly. Such is the proper role of history and as such it is alive and well.
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58 of 61 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Important Book For History Teachers & Their Students, May 21, 1998
Keith Windschuttle's book The Killing of History is a brilliant response to the often monumentally silly social crusading that modern academia works so hard to pawn off as "scholarship" and "history". Windschuttle reveals Relativism and Deconstructionism for the arrogant, self serving pernicious evils that they are. He adroitly skewers the more well known purveyors of Deconstructionist History and persuasively relegates the work of the darlings of the Post-modern, (Focault, Derrida, Popper and so on), to its proper place in the lower regions of the ash-heap of bad ideas. Windschuttle's book is foremost a brilliant defense of the truth of the past. It is also a scathing indictment of the increasingly fashionable practice of passing off convenient fictions as legitimate forms of "history". Partents, teachers of History, and their students are facing a concerted effort by Relativists to destroy history as a coherent intellectual discipline by collapsing the distinction between fact and fiction. Given the historical truth of the first half of this century one cannot deny that the stakes in this particular game are incredibly high. To deny the truth of History is to ultimately doom our progeny to re-learn the most terrible lessons of the past and to make meaningless the sacrifices of literally millions who lost everthing for the sake of our future. Windschuttle writes that "The study of history is essentially a search for the truth. ... A work that does not aim at truth may be many things but not a work of history." Amen and bravo!
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