All good historians know that one of the biggest pitfalls to writing good history is taking historical actors at their word. Testimony from the past is bound to be limited by the witness’ particular perspective and colored by their own interests. For example, a dispute of a scientific claim might be said to be motivated by “jealousy” by one party, where another party might claim the other was “narrow-minded”. Reckless historiography simply takes actors at their word without getting the view of the other side.
Historians are thus challenged to adopt an analytically useful posture to find some way to resolve the problem. One possible posture is to parse all the evidence to “get to the bottom of things”. (One sees this a lot in really old-school historiography, especially out of Britain.) Another possible posture is to see the existence of the controversy as an opportunity to examine some broader issue. Following the epistemic imperative, one might dilute actors’ positions, to show that their position was “not universal” or “limited” or “influenced by tacit interests”. A very common posture is a variation of this: to use controversies to triangulate out a detached position by simply acknowledging the existence of disputes: “but their actions were not without controversy”. For some reason, it has become popular to just assume that narrating a controversy in such a way as to invert the actors’ broad claims is useful historiography regardless of the place of the particular controversy in broader history.
One gets the impression from the historiography that the history of science is nothing but conflicting and contested claims—the Great Inversion of “science’s” claim to be the ultimate model of open and collaborative society—a throwback to very particular criticisms of very particular claims of people like Karl Popper and Robert Merton, which were themselves made for very particular reasons. A popular triangulation from the Great Inversion is to use an “on the whole” argument—a sort of resort to statistical regularity without statistical measure. On the whole, science has been good and beneficial, but, yeah, it’s true there have been some overhype, screw-ups, and abuses.
Marxists, traditionally, have taken a strong stand against this kind of “use-abuse” argument, because it implies a fundamental neutrality in science and technology, which they view as inevitably politicized—a line of critique taken up by generations of critical theorists and postmodernists. Marxists and postmodernists have a stake in subverting, or at least deconstructing, the fundamental assumptions that define what constitutes “use” and what constitutes “abuse”. These lines would note that if “most” science is not controversial, it very well might be, or even should be, if the more fundamental political conflicts were made explicit, if subverted insults were given a voice. It is, by the way, this alleged fundamentality of the political nature of science and technology that gave such heat to “technological determinist” insults some decades ago.
Once you get to this point, you sort of reach an impasse, and historical debates tend to follow the line of historical insults. “Technology and management are lined up against the worker!” “If they’re so lined up against workers, why do workers line up for jobs in our factory!?” and what not. We’re back to jealousy and narrow-mindedness, just in new clothes.
Once we hit these points where the historical debates devolve into “Was the Soviet Union trustworthy?” or “Should humans have ever taken up agriculture?”, I’m of the opinion that historians really need to step back and reevaluate what it is they’re doing, and start looking at whatever local issues and “mesoscopic” trends prompted the hand-waving analysis in the first place. This is the point where historical rhetoric starts to conceal underlying more concrete historical ideas, and it is just where the historian needs to take up the initiatve and start characterizing just what those ideas were.
If we’re looking at 18th-century natural philosophy, the insult “speculative” tended to get thrown around a lot, usually by either side of any given debate. In that period, it’s nearly pointless to try and mediate who was speculative and who was not. As Simon Schaffer has pointed out in some detail, accusing someone of invoking “occult” explanations was more common than people actually managing to avoid occult explanations for issues like pneumatology. What’s at play are competing ideas for how not to be speculative, and how not to invoke occult causes, when in fact, everyone did both. Similarly, following the French Revolution, “rationality” and “utopianism” don’t tend to be useful analytical terms. Someone may invoke their “rational” approach to distinguish themselves from someone else’s unsubstantiated claims, but others might, in turn, claim that the so-called rational approach represented a naive utopian rationalism; in other words, that it was the rationalists’ claims that were unsubstantiated. The Great Inversion is pretty much rehash of this earlier round of insult trading.
The historiographical craft constantly struggles to escape from these terms. At once, one does not want to dismiss altogether the possibility that insults had some foundation, but one doesn’t want to take them at face value either. By digging down two or three levels of specificity, one usually can uncover what ideas were really at stake (e.g. different interpretations of “pneumatic” phenomena) beneath the unspecificity of the rhetoric of insults (e.g. occult causes). Charting these specific ideas and problems seems to me the safest way of subverting the influence of historical insults over our craft, without denying the poignancy of historical controversy. Specifically how this is to be done should be an issue of intense discussion.