Notes The Changing Face of History

Abstract

Over the past five odd decades the face of History as a discipline has undergone amazing transformations. During the 18th, 19th and much of the 20th century, history, much like other science and social science disciplines, was dominated by the Positivist or Marxist paradigm which had posited an objective reality out there amenable to recovery through incremental knowledge of facts which would ultimately reveal the truth. Ranke’s famous dictum captures this paradigm pithily: History tells us as it really happened. The embedded certitude of the existence of a singular, unambiguous Truth and its recovery was premised here, emulating the methods of natural sciences. ‘Scientific History’ was the elevating phrase used by its practitioners. It also had a clearly European provenance.