Man and His Past: The Nature and Role of Historiography

by Serge Gagnon, Margaret Heap (Translator)

Professor Gagnon’s book is a comprehensive survey of the views on historiography held by historians, sociologists, and philosophers in France, Britain, and the United States over the last forty years or more. British and American historians have been most receptive to the relativist thesis which Gagnon espouses, while French historians, with the exception of Lucien Febvre, have not greeted it with much enthusiasm. There has been very little discussion of the sociology of history in Canada, and by illustrating his viewpoint with Canadian, American, and particularly French-Canadian examples, he has brought the issues closer to home. There is an abundance of quotes in this volume from scholars of international reputation—Carr, Croce, Collingwood, Marc Bloch, Beard, Becker, Febvre, Pierre Vilar, Raymond Aron, Henri Marrou, Durkheim, Gurvitch, to name a few. His citations include opponents as well as proponents of historical relativism. As the author ‘Even if it aspires to scientific truth, historical scholarship is the child of its time. When the work of historians is deliberately present-minded, we may say that the dialogue between the present and the past becomes, in a sense, a monologue by the present on the past.

96 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1982

Reviews

[Don · Rating 4 out of 5]

Writing in 1982, Canadian historian Serge Gagnon gave us this succinct outline focused on the sociology of doing history - a subset of the 'sociology of knowledge' - in order to broaden awareness among his Canadian colleagues of the issues and claims addressing this "relativist" approach to the field. I've tried to capture below the upshot of his argument. Gagnon's 65-page text is valuable, accessible, and perhaps, still provocative, to anyone interested in history and the social sciences.

Writing 'history' is fundamentally, inescapably values-based - and, thus, akin to ideology. In our production or use of historical accounts of 'what has been,' we are better informed when aware of and considering the values-frameworks within which the historical actors acted, the values- frameworks within which the historian generated the historical account, and the values-frameworks within which within which the consumer of the historical account absorbs and seeks somehow to use that account. A pure and naive sense of objective, values-free "history" is inevitably equally as ideological, while pretending the opposite.