On whatever scale your looking
at an appreciation of "phenomenology" (as in the ideas of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty
& Bataille) is an ideal grounding for studying history (or any of the social
sciences) as it forces you to reflect on the often unconscious ways in which our
perceptions, judgements & emotions are structured & give rise, as they
so often do, to multiple subjective vantage points, while we are all, ostensibly
at least, staring 'objectively' at the same thing.
We were given a module on this many moons ago as anthropology students to filter out our "ethnocentric" bias when studying & inter-acting with indigenous cultures and if you can manage to connect the dots between the often abstract/esoteric terminology and palpable real-world events it can be a powerful tool for cutting a swathe through much nonsense. "Common-sense" while laudable, can only take you so far I think.
Stuff like this needs to be hammered into every one's skull.
Now, a basic note on terminology; "revisionist" refers to that tendency within Irish academia to expunge traditional "nationalist" and/or "unionist" historical writing (more commonly the former) of its emotive context and perspectival biases. Briefly, it has been charged (most notably by Brendan Bradshaw) of de-emphasising the colonial dimension of Ireland's past, minimising the struggle and daily hardships of a politically disinherited majority & focusing overly on high end administrative Crown politics.
At its best it throws up occasionally enlightening studies (e.g.Tree of Liberty - Kevin Whelan) at its worst; a bloodless perversion of reality where the majority of the population have only a walk-on role (e.g. Ireland in the Age of Imperialism - R. B. McDowell). Each era has its own specific controversies and EVERY historian & commentator, irrespective of qualifying statements to the contrary, is implicated in some fashion or other in promoting an agenda, however subtly it may be disguised (including myself of course).
With the polarised perspectives provided by nationalist or unionist voices the battle-lines are clearly drawn. Revisionism is concerned rather with the veneer of impartial 'objective scholarship' which by definition shouldn't 'take sides' and affects to transcend partisan lines but which is nevertheless implicated in promoting, in far subtler fashion, its own agenda. Take R.F. Foster's Modern Ireland for instance, a book that has come under fire on several fronts; (a) is calling 17th c. Marian devotion an 'idolatrous superstition' when attempting to write an 'impartial' history of a country torn apart by the counter-reformation a useful way to proceed? or (b) calling the drop of wheat prices after the Napoleonic wars the single most important economic event in 19th c. Ireland (the Famine?!?) or (c) referring to widespread sectarianism within Gaelic League circles thereby equating language revivalism with a pre-modern atavistic mind-set? - For the normal lay reader unversed in these stratagems and the debates surrounding them such observations are accepted matter of fact as the faithful recording of "what has happened" - guidance is actually required because Irish history is a veritable minefield of polarised and contested viewpoints not all of which nestle in the place you'd expect to find them.
There's a great discussion of this very issue (i.e. the "Debate") in the Preface to the latest edition of Christine Kineally's This Great Calamity. After a long examination of the pros and cons, where she weighs up much of the published literature on the Great Hunger, meditating on such matters as the correct 'tone' or authorial voice to adopt, she informs us that her own work may best be regarded as "post-revisionist". Why? While respecting the obvious need to produce quality "objective" academic work she still wished to retain the right to express critical 'anger' when the occasion demanded.
The 18th C. is a particularly sorry example of this type of scholarship in action; bloodless high-end administrative history (McDowell, Connolly, O' Brien etc.) while the majority of the population are rendered nigh invisible as the Ascendency 'Protestant nationalists' chink glasses & congratulate themselves on yet another victory for 'Irish' trade.
Molyneaux, Swift & the Undertakers, Grattan & Flood receive the lion's portion of the analysis while the downtrodden Catholic rural peasantry through Penal code exclusions targeting the land from under them & forcing them into solitary crop dependency are being commissioned straight into a 19th century holocaust. The narrative is 'boring' (one of revisionism's equally lamentable by-products) because its fundamentally untrue; the principle sites of contest have been erased in favour of an analysis of the dominant culture - Éamonn O' Ciardha, Jim Smyth & Ian McBride have all addressed this gaping vacuum in 18th c. studies in differing ways recently - but there's still an enormous amount left to do.
I'm so used to reading the stable of writers on the Irish Independent's revisionist drip-fund (Cruise O' Brien, Myers, Harris, Dudley-Edwards etc.. [to which we can now add former Taoiseach, John Bruton]) castigating the leaders of 1916 and imputing widespread sectarianism within the ranks of the IRA during the War of Independence (a-la the flawed research of the vastly over-rated Peter Hart) while bemoaning the lack of formal recognition of Ireland's fallen during the Great War - their memories smothered as they argue in the "mythologies of nationalist martyrology" - that it is instructive to view the enormous gathering at the Phoenix Park cenotaph in 1930 (complete with fliuttering Union Jacks) for the Remembrance Day anniversary.
Day Of Remembrance Aka Ireland - British Pathé
And I ask myself likewise is there a counter-myth being peddled here with respect to Ireland having ignored the contributions of its ex-servicemen? At least to the extent that it is has often been claimed (by the above) ...? As an aside, I also bemoan the fact that Ireland has only two serious broadsheets ... giving such disproportionate influence to this rancid un-representative anti-1916 bile that in "Middle Ireland" their viewpoint is rapidly becoming the "New Orthodoxy".
The ante was ramped up on this type of anti-Republican revisionism when the Troubles broke out in order to cut the hydra at its base - its history written with a wholly biased contemporary lens as bad as any prior distortions provided by "nationalist hagiographers/mythologisers" and is in danger entirely of becoming its negative mirror-image. It was already there being hatched in the History Dept. of Trinity in the 30's and 40's via Moody & Dudley-Edwards & percolated outwards rapidly in the 70's courtesy of Cruise O Brien in the popular domain - Hart has simply taken the process a step further. Of course he knew there was a market and a ready-made daily (the Independent) to publicise his views & that they will be 'controversially lucrative'; - every writer looks for an "angle" - the larger picture is that historical scholarship is being guided by contemporary issues, the perceived fragility of the Peace Process and the need to undercut present-day Republicanism. Some may rejoice and say 'so what' if it provides that need in the present, I personally find the disingenuousness galling - its just bad history; end of.
Brendan Bradshaw has spear-headed much of the criticism of the worst tendencies of the revisionist school and with that in mind I'll leave him here with the last word;
"I believe that Irish historiography took a wrong turn in the 1930s. At that point, it assimilated a view of history as a science, with the historian akin to the natural scientist peering down his microscope at a range of data about the natural world, simply viewing it in a detached way. It was a perception of history that was very strongly established in England at this time and also in the United States of America. In Ireland it began with three young historians, all very able people at the time, Robin Dudley Edwards, T.W. Moody and David Quinn, being trained in the Institute of Historical Research in London. On their return to Ireland, they attempted to establish the practice of history here on the same basis. Part of this tradition was the notion of ‘revisionism’; that history up to that point had been going along a wrong track and that the whole record needed to be re-written in a detached, objective way.
The result was the de-bunking not only of the history which had been written up to then, in its distortions, but the de-bunking of the reality behind it. And so you got this very austere scholarly approach to the Irish historical record, draining it of its emotional and moral content. This creates a very flat sort of history which you get, for example, in Dudley Edwards’ Church and State in Tudor Ireland and in the articles of David Quinn and T.W. Moody. It is concerned with the administrative nuts and bolts and with the records of institutions told in a very dry sort of way. That tradition increasingly came to dominate Irish history writing and Irish history teaching in the universities in the ‘40s and into the ‘50s. It was the tradition that I experienced when I went to UCD in the 1960s.
You got this de-bunking of great heroic figures and the famine was played down, for example. In the late ‘60s, a number of things exacerbated the mood of revisionism, and its cynical approach to Irish history. First of all came the 50th anniversary celebration of the 1916 Rising. At that point, it hit the Irish intelligentsia how disillusioning the experience of political freedom had been. Added to the mood of disillusionment about what had been achieved was the more flourishing secular liberalism of the ‘60s which had the effect of melting the attachment to a sense of tradition. And then the final thing was the recrudescence of violence in the North. After the eulogistic and euphoric times of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, a mood of shock set in as the IRA took up the cause of nationalism and you got these horrendous atrocities. Consequently there has been the feeling that the Irish had been fed a nationalist myth which has stoked the fires of militant nationalism and that the best antidote was an increasingly strident anti-nationalism.
This feeling was expressed by a whole series of writers. You get it cautiously in the deep pessimism of F.S.L. Lyons’ last book, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, and then represented much more stridently and unapologetically by a younger generation – Roy Foster, David Fitzpatrick, Ronan Fanning. They began to write in a very militant, aggressive, anti-traditionalist style."
We were given a module on this many moons ago as anthropology students to filter out our "ethnocentric" bias when studying & inter-acting with indigenous cultures and if you can manage to connect the dots between the often abstract/esoteric terminology and palpable real-world events it can be a powerful tool for cutting a swathe through much nonsense. "Common-sense" while laudable, can only take you so far I think.
Stuff like this needs to be hammered into every one's skull.
Now, a basic note on terminology; "revisionist" refers to that tendency within Irish academia to expunge traditional "nationalist" and/or "unionist" historical writing (more commonly the former) of its emotive context and perspectival biases. Briefly, it has been charged (most notably by Brendan Bradshaw) of de-emphasising the colonial dimension of Ireland's past, minimising the struggle and daily hardships of a politically disinherited majority & focusing overly on high end administrative Crown politics.
At its best it throws up occasionally enlightening studies (e.g.Tree of Liberty - Kevin Whelan) at its worst; a bloodless perversion of reality where the majority of the population have only a walk-on role (e.g. Ireland in the Age of Imperialism - R. B. McDowell). Each era has its own specific controversies and EVERY historian & commentator, irrespective of qualifying statements to the contrary, is implicated in some fashion or other in promoting an agenda, however subtly it may be disguised (including myself of course).
With the polarised perspectives provided by nationalist or unionist voices the battle-lines are clearly drawn. Revisionism is concerned rather with the veneer of impartial 'objective scholarship' which by definition shouldn't 'take sides' and affects to transcend partisan lines but which is nevertheless implicated in promoting, in far subtler fashion, its own agenda. Take R.F. Foster's Modern Ireland for instance, a book that has come under fire on several fronts; (a) is calling 17th c. Marian devotion an 'idolatrous superstition' when attempting to write an 'impartial' history of a country torn apart by the counter-reformation a useful way to proceed? or (b) calling the drop of wheat prices after the Napoleonic wars the single most important economic event in 19th c. Ireland (the Famine?!?) or (c) referring to widespread sectarianism within Gaelic League circles thereby equating language revivalism with a pre-modern atavistic mind-set? - For the normal lay reader unversed in these stratagems and the debates surrounding them such observations are accepted matter of fact as the faithful recording of "what has happened" - guidance is actually required because Irish history is a veritable minefield of polarised and contested viewpoints not all of which nestle in the place you'd expect to find them.
There's a great discussion of this very issue (i.e. the "Debate") in the Preface to the latest edition of Christine Kineally's This Great Calamity. After a long examination of the pros and cons, where she weighs up much of the published literature on the Great Hunger, meditating on such matters as the correct 'tone' or authorial voice to adopt, she informs us that her own work may best be regarded as "post-revisionist". Why? While respecting the obvious need to produce quality "objective" academic work she still wished to retain the right to express critical 'anger' when the occasion demanded.
The 18th C. is a particularly sorry example of this type of scholarship in action; bloodless high-end administrative history (McDowell, Connolly, O' Brien etc.) while the majority of the population are rendered nigh invisible as the Ascendency 'Protestant nationalists' chink glasses & congratulate themselves on yet another victory for 'Irish' trade.
Molyneaux, Swift & the Undertakers, Grattan & Flood receive the lion's portion of the analysis while the downtrodden Catholic rural peasantry through Penal code exclusions targeting the land from under them & forcing them into solitary crop dependency are being commissioned straight into a 19th century holocaust. The narrative is 'boring' (one of revisionism's equally lamentable by-products) because its fundamentally untrue; the principle sites of contest have been erased in favour of an analysis of the dominant culture - Éamonn O' Ciardha, Jim Smyth & Ian McBride have all addressed this gaping vacuum in 18th c. studies in differing ways recently - but there's still an enormous amount left to do.
I'm so used to reading the stable of writers on the Irish Independent's revisionist drip-fund (Cruise O' Brien, Myers, Harris, Dudley-Edwards etc.. [to which we can now add former Taoiseach, John Bruton]) castigating the leaders of 1916 and imputing widespread sectarianism within the ranks of the IRA during the War of Independence (a-la the flawed research of the vastly over-rated Peter Hart) while bemoaning the lack of formal recognition of Ireland's fallen during the Great War - their memories smothered as they argue in the "mythologies of nationalist martyrology" - that it is instructive to view the enormous gathering at the Phoenix Park cenotaph in 1930 (complete with fliuttering Union Jacks) for the Remembrance Day anniversary.
Day Of Remembrance Aka Ireland - British Pathé
And I ask myself likewise is there a counter-myth being peddled here with respect to Ireland having ignored the contributions of its ex-servicemen? At least to the extent that it is has often been claimed (by the above) ...? As an aside, I also bemoan the fact that Ireland has only two serious broadsheets ... giving such disproportionate influence to this rancid un-representative anti-1916 bile that in "Middle Ireland" their viewpoint is rapidly becoming the "New Orthodoxy".
The ante was ramped up on this type of anti-Republican revisionism when the Troubles broke out in order to cut the hydra at its base - its history written with a wholly biased contemporary lens as bad as any prior distortions provided by "nationalist hagiographers/mythologisers" and is in danger entirely of becoming its negative mirror-image. It was already there being hatched in the History Dept. of Trinity in the 30's and 40's via Moody & Dudley-Edwards & percolated outwards rapidly in the 70's courtesy of Cruise O Brien in the popular domain - Hart has simply taken the process a step further. Of course he knew there was a market and a ready-made daily (the Independent) to publicise his views & that they will be 'controversially lucrative'; - every writer looks for an "angle" - the larger picture is that historical scholarship is being guided by contemporary issues, the perceived fragility of the Peace Process and the need to undercut present-day Republicanism. Some may rejoice and say 'so what' if it provides that need in the present, I personally find the disingenuousness galling - its just bad history; end of.
Brendan Bradshaw has spear-headed much of the criticism of the worst tendencies of the revisionist school and with that in mind I'll leave him here with the last word;
"I believe that Irish historiography took a wrong turn in the 1930s. At that point, it assimilated a view of history as a science, with the historian akin to the natural scientist peering down his microscope at a range of data about the natural world, simply viewing it in a detached way. It was a perception of history that was very strongly established in England at this time and also in the United States of America. In Ireland it began with three young historians, all very able people at the time, Robin Dudley Edwards, T.W. Moody and David Quinn, being trained in the Institute of Historical Research in London. On their return to Ireland, they attempted to establish the practice of history here on the same basis. Part of this tradition was the notion of ‘revisionism’; that history up to that point had been going along a wrong track and that the whole record needed to be re-written in a detached, objective way.
The result was the de-bunking not only of the history which had been written up to then, in its distortions, but the de-bunking of the reality behind it. And so you got this very austere scholarly approach to the Irish historical record, draining it of its emotional and moral content. This creates a very flat sort of history which you get, for example, in Dudley Edwards’ Church and State in Tudor Ireland and in the articles of David Quinn and T.W. Moody. It is concerned with the administrative nuts and bolts and with the records of institutions told in a very dry sort of way. That tradition increasingly came to dominate Irish history writing and Irish history teaching in the universities in the ‘40s and into the ‘50s. It was the tradition that I experienced when I went to UCD in the 1960s.
You got this de-bunking of great heroic figures and the famine was played down, for example. In the late ‘60s, a number of things exacerbated the mood of revisionism, and its cynical approach to Irish history. First of all came the 50th anniversary celebration of the 1916 Rising. At that point, it hit the Irish intelligentsia how disillusioning the experience of political freedom had been. Added to the mood of disillusionment about what had been achieved was the more flourishing secular liberalism of the ‘60s which had the effect of melting the attachment to a sense of tradition. And then the final thing was the recrudescence of violence in the North. After the eulogistic and euphoric times of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, a mood of shock set in as the IRA took up the cause of nationalism and you got these horrendous atrocities. Consequently there has been the feeling that the Irish had been fed a nationalist myth which has stoked the fires of militant nationalism and that the best antidote was an increasingly strident anti-nationalism.
This feeling was expressed by a whole series of writers. You get it cautiously in the deep pessimism of F.S.L. Lyons’ last book, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, and then represented much more stridently and unapologetically by a younger generation – Roy Foster, David Fitzpatrick, Ronan Fanning. They began to write in a very militant, aggressive, anti-traditionalist style."
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