Loading...
Gordon Wood’s Anti-Elitism and the Crisis of the History Discipline
Neem, Johann N.
Neem, Johann N.
Files
Citations
Altmetric:
Abstract
In The Purpose of the Past, Gordon Wood argues that historians must respect the “integrity and the pastness of the past” rather than act as “cultural critics who wish to manipulate the past for the sake of the present.” By treating people in the past as participants in their world and not ours, Wood writes, we can avoid flattening them into archetypes or stereotypes for our own political purposes. In some ways, that claim is his public message: Wood urges historians to approach people in the past in a “comprehensive way, to see them in the context of their time, to describe their blindness and folly with sympathy, to recognize the extent to which they were caught up in circumstances over which they had little control” and to recognize that “they created results they never intended.” Placing people in their time is the only way, Wood believes, to avoid “anachronistic distortion.”
This essay examines how Wood has articulated the purpose of the past in his public writings and why he believes too many contemporary academic historians have violated their professional responsibility and engaged in “anachronistic distortion.” Reading his public writings in The New York Review of Books and other venues, one discovers several themes. First, Wood consistently urges Americans not to deify the Founders: they were elitists who looked down on the people. Second, Wood argues that today’s historians have become, like the Founders, elitists who distrust and even dislike ordinary Americans. Here, he points out an irony: progressive critics of the Founders are more like the Founders than they would like to admit. Third, building on these first two themes, Wood argues that historians’ dismissive attitude to ordinary Americans has led to a crisis in the history discipline. Determined to impose their political agenda on the past—especially on issues of race and gender—historians have not only distorted the past but, in doing so, have abandoned any effort to offer a common story that could help Americans understand — and relate to — their nation. At best, Wood avers, this results in the public’s lack of interest in the work of academic historians; at worst it fosters popular distrust in the discipline. To Wood, then, there is a causal connection between historians’ elitism and the crisis facing the discipline.