Coda: after the modernists

Summary

There is a ‘One in History’ as a One in Nature, but it is not shown to the man whose idea of science is confined to making his inventory or ticketing compartments of his cabinet …

William Stubbs (1877)

All we know is that fifty years hence men will wonder how we could have been so lacking in imagination; and – if they have compassion – will say that in part our blindness can be historically explained.

Herbert Butterfield (1944)

Such are the turns of the wheel of historiography … But when it comes to saying why, things get much more complicated …

David Landes (1972)

The modernists are always with us, if by the term one intends those who anticipate the limits of the current discipline and rattle its bars. Even in the narrower sense deployed in this book, there is no single collection of unchanging attributes in which to make ‘modernism’ crystalline because it never became so solid an entity as this might imply. Rather, it presented an historical language that underwent subtle modifications – naively realist in its earlier days, more complicated in its later moments of quantification and model-building. It survives today in the unspoken assumptions that lie behind much formal training in historical work or in the broad ‘common-sense’ position that many historians will always take about the possibility of ‘reconstructing’ the past and acquiring historical truth.