As I have already asserted, all this activity kept realism of all kinds in the dock. To attempt any form of realism was to fall into philosophical error, and so the attempt to write history from the hitherto dominant positivist or empiricist point of view was doomed to failure. Once again, postmodernist thought, by analysing everything as text and rhetoric, tended to push hitherto autonomous intellectual disciplines in the direction of literature – history was just another narrative, whose paradigm structures were no better than fictional, and was a slave to its own (often unconsciously used)
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