Can History Ever be Objective?

The question of the relationship between history and objectivity, whether history or a historian can ever be truly objective, is a long, cyclical debate, in which coming to a conclusion is exceedingly difficult. As WH Walsh remarked in his book, Philosophy of History, this is the ‘most important and the most baffling topic in critical philosophy of history’.

In discussing whether history can be objective, it is important to look at a number of areas: Firstly, what the role of a modern historian is; secondly, whether a modern audience actually wants an objective history, and the extent to which reception influences methodology; thirdly, the methods in which a historian can achieve objectivity, and the possibility of those methods preventing them from doing so. In looking at these three fields, it may be possible to try and come to a level of personal conclusion about the place of objectivity in history.

The Role of the Modern Historian

In looking at the role of the historian, and how this role has changed over time, we can begin to conclude whether objectivity should be a priority of a modern historian, whether it should, or should not be, a fundamental part of their craft, and whether it is actually achievable for a modern historian to reach objectivity within this role.

Ultimately, as with this question of objectivity, the role of a historian is open to debate and different interpretations. For every culture, every society, every time period, the role of a historian will be fundamentally different. This is most easily seen in the great ancient historians, Herodotus, Thucydides and Livy. Here, most clearly of all the ancient historians, one can trace the changes in the role of the historian.

Herodotus, known as the Father of History, began to write history with the sole purpose of preservation. As he explains in the preface to his Histories, ‘These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes, in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done’. Herodotus was writing for preservation, he wanted to record what happened, relay the facts and make sure nothing was lost. This seems like the most objective kind of history, the objective relaying of factual events based on evidence; the definition of objectivity. However, if one continues to read, one can immediately see how even this was an endeavour laced with a bias: ‘and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory.’ Herodotus set out to preserve the stories of ‘Greek and Barbarian’ greatness, so that they may be duly praised. Despite his aim seeming objective, backed up with his statement of being ‘obliged to record the things I am told, but I am certainly not required to believe them’, in which he says that he will not let his own bias mar his reproduction of the past, Herodotus was still clearly influenced by the biases of his culture, society and era; a hero culture. History began with the aim of recording events so that future generations would not miss out on hearing about the glory of their predecessors and the events that unfolded in the past. The role of the historian was more like that of a reporter, collating and presenting the events so that they were not lost.

This role seems to have shifted when one looks at the writing of Thucydides, a historian who had actually personally heard Herodotus speak. Thucydides wrote more with the intention to teach, rather than preserve. The role of a historian was now also that of a teacher. As he explains in his History of the Peloponnesian War, he aimed ‘not to write down the first story that came my way’, ’not even to be guided by my own general impressions’, and to give a ‘factual reporting of the events of the war’. Thucydides wanted to remove all romance from the telling of the events, work without the issue of morality, and be a lot more analytical. Some have credited Thucydides with the creation of modern history. Thucydides even addresses the issue of bias, ‘Either I was present myself at the events which I have described or else I heard of them from eye-witnesses whose reports I have checked with as much thoroughness as possible. Not that even so the truth was easy to discover: different eye-witnesses give different accounts of the same events, speaking out of bias towards one side or the other or else from imperfect memories.’ He edited his work so as to remove bias from his retelling of events. But even in Thucydides’ work, a bias can be found. Thucydides wrote with the intention to teach, to inform the reader of events, and how those events should show them how to live, act or think. This led to the editing of events in order to present them in a teachable way. For example, in speeches he recorded, he used the general sense of the words, and expressed them with the words he believed the orator should have used, and words that would best present his ‘teachable moment’ and the lesson he wanted to pass on.

The next great ancient historian was Livy. Livy aimed to combine these two roles, preservation and teaching, with a third: entertainment. Livy wanted to preserve the events in such a way that a reader would both be entertained and taught through them. The role of a historian was now threefold. As he explains in his History of Rome, ‘I am aware that for historians to make extravagant claims is, and always has been, all too common; every writer on history tends to look down his nose at his less cultivated predecessors, happily persuaded that he will better them in point of style, or bring new facts to light. But however that may be, I shall find satisfaction in contributing – not, I hope, ignobly – to the labour of putting on record the story of the greatest nation in the world.’ Livy aimed not to outdo his authorial predecessors, as many had done before, but to add his voice into the chorus of historical writing. Here one can also see Livy’s bias. He was a Roman, writing about his home nation, his home empire, at the time of the empire. He aimed to write about the ‘greatest nation in the world’, thereby showing his bias of the feeling of superiority. He wrote from the position of a member of what he saw as a superior culture and empire, and that bled into his work. He presented each event he recounted as part of a grand story of Roman dominance and superiority.

He also presents what he calls the ‘sinking of the foundations of morality’, showing how his work was one aimed at teaching the reader about the morals he thought, and wider Roman society thought, were right. Livy wanted to recount the events of his nation, entertain the reader as he did, and teach them about the morals and values he thought a person ought to have. Now the role of the historian was all three: reporter, teacher and entertainer.

This is an incredibly difficult role to live up to once one starts to try and balance objectivity alongside it. All three, as has been shown in these ancient historians, leads to having a bias. For a modern historian, the role of a reporter has become less paramount. With social media, news media, blogs and podcasts, the recording of history has almost become an everyday thing. No longer is a historian required to write about what life was like for an ordinary person, a reader can simply scroll back in their timeline, or that of a friend or stranger, and better understand what was happening a few years ago. Unlike the ancient historian, where they may be the only source of the preservation of history, nowadays, everyone is an inadvertent preserver of history.

With the role now being one more of a teacher and an entertainer than a preserver, objectivity is a necessary casualty. In order to teach, the history needs to be presented in such a way as for readers to learn from it. In order to entertain, history needs to be presented in such a way that readers enjoy reading it. These two become biases that are impossible to defeat. The modern historian is forced to edit, decide upon and remove content from their work in order to present them as such. Objectivity is unachievable when the role of a modern historian requires a bias to enact their role. The role of the modern historian, at its core, doesn’t allow for complete objectivity. This leads, immediately, into the second area.

Audience Perception, Reception and its effect on Methodology

Nowadays, the internet, social media and the constant striving for new, exciting, engaging media has shortened the human races’ attention span and has forced all media outlets - news, publishing, writing, TV, film - to shorten and condense their content to make it more digestible, quicker to view and more engaging to the modern audience. As Ty Kiisel explains, ‘Twitter users need to make their point in 140 characters or less, USA Today, Fox News and others have shortened stories to be quickly digested and even media outlets like CNN rely on the pretty faces of their news anchors to keep our attention.’ This has also had a profound effect on the writing and presentation of history. History now has to be quicker to understand, more entertaining and less time consuming. This has become a formidable bias that modern historians, with the possible exception of academics and university professors writing for their peers or their students, have great difficulty defeating. While this may be a cynic’s view of modern historiography, historians, in order to sell books, papers or TV documentaries, have seemingly been forced to surrender any chance of reaching true objectivity to make a living.

As the writing of history has become a profession, the pursuit of true objectivity has become more difficult. The ancient historians were not professional historians, they weren’t paid for their services; it wasn’t their job. History as a profession is a relatively new idea. Ron Bryant explains, ‘The academic historian, trained in a specific field of historical study, appears as a new comer to an old discipline.’ This is not to say that the quality of history has decreased, as quality is dependent on the era in which you live, but is to say that the demands of making a living out of writing history have left no room for the true pursuit of complete objectivity. A modern audience doesn’t want to be presented with cold, hard facts, they want to be engaged, entertained and informed all at the same time. It is a difficult new role to balance, with the pursuit of objectivity becoming a quaternary priority of the modern historian.

Perhaps, indeed, a new role has emerged for the modern historian; that of an ‘invoker’ or ‘conjuror’, one that writes a history that makes the reader feel as if they are there; composes a history that vividly retells the past so as to make it accessible, engaging and compelling. As the reviews on John Guy’s biography of Thomas Becket encapsulate, ‘Wonderfully moving and subtle’, ‘Compelling’, ‘Superb storytelling’, ‘Giving as a tactile, visual feel for early medieval England’ and ‘Vivid and extremely readable’. As Christopher Blake muses, ‘it is still inevitable that what is written must be relative to the tastes, customs and prejudices of the creative moment.’ One may add ‘the values and needs of the time of the historian who writes it’ to this list. Objectivity seems like a feature of history that is no longer of paramount importance. The role of the modern historian and the perception and reception of the modern audience has placed demands on the new, professional, historian that makes the pursuit of true objectivity almost impossible.

From the Removal of Subjectivity to the Introduction of a New Bias

Despite objectivity being a feature of history that may be less demanded than before, even to the point of being refused the modern historian by the wants of the modern world, the pursuit of objectivity is nevertheless still an important part of the crafting of history. Despite the want for quick, readable, understandable history, the modern audience does not want to read a book that is more political, ideological or religious tirade than actual history. Within the atmosphere of limited attention spans and constrained history, modern audiences still demand a level of objectivity that prevents a work becoming a manifesto. This is a difficult scale to balance. In order to present history in the way they want it, the modern historian has to use their editorial subjectivity to meet their demands, whilst keeping their own, personal, subjectivity out of it. The audience demands both subjectivity and objectivity in an inextricable weave.

In order to pursue this formidable balance, the removal of subjectivity and biases are required. When a historian embarks to remove bias from their work, they are inevitably forced to use their own subjectivity to determine what is bias or not. Much like Thucydides used his personal subjectivity to discern which eyewitness testimonies were biased, modern historians are required to do the same. This presents the issue of subjectivity becoming a foundational part of the removal of subjectivity. In order to remove subjectivity, editorial subjectivity is required. Is this not just another kind of bias?

It is important, at this question, to understand what we mean when we say bias and objectivity. Bias is any kind of political, ideological, religious, cultural, societal or original subjectivity that comes into the writing and presentation of history. This may take the form of editorial subjectivity, the way and location in which the history is presented, the era, the wider political situation or the international context of the time. True objectivity, therefore, is the removal of these biases and the presentation of history without the tinge of any kind of influence or angle.

However, as raised just previously, in order to remove these subjective biases, subjectivity is required to be employed! There is very little possibility of subverting these biases without using subjective discernment to do so. Thereby meaning that, in order to remove all biases from a piece of work, a new bias needs to be employed, thereby tinging the work with that, new, bias, and rendering the work not truly objective! It is a cyclical issue that will never reach a conclusion. It is a maddening dilemma that means that objectivity may be an aim that remains as just that, an aim, never an attained or realised goal. To hark back to the words of WH Walsh, it is the most ‘important and baffling’ topic in all of critical historiographical philosophy.

What has also become a major issue now is the increase in religious, political, ideological and cultural views and opinions. For the ancient historians, they tended to write according to the mostly accepted religious beliefs of the culture. The polytheistic religions of both ancient Greece and Rome played large roles in dictating how history was written, presented and discussed. It was that and their view of barbarians that influenced their writing. Nowadays, there are hundreds of ideologies, religious doctrines, world-views and opinions that play a role in the presentation of history; the market has become a lot more saturated, so to speak. It is incredibly fragile to walk upon the glass structures of modern politics and opinion. To agree with one person is to disagree and offend another. To side with one person is to alienate and oppose the other. Writing an objective history has also become a lot more difficult in that respect, too. Historians need to carefully remove their biases without offending or alienating another part of society by their edits and removals. It’s a confounding and dangerous world in which historians now exist, even when we are solely focussed on the past.

At this point, it is difficult to see how objectivity can actually ever be achieved. Seemingly, it cannot. However, it is an aim towards which each historian continually strives. As mentioned before, to find an answer as to whether true objectivity can ever be reached is almost impossible. As history is written by humans, and humans are unavoidably opinionated, it seems like a struggle that shall never really be rewarded.

Modernity calls for objectivity, and yet modernity ultimately forces subjectivity into the work. At risk of sounding like a communist, the globalisation, popularisation and commercialisation of history and historiography has meant that objectivity is something both demanded and refused. The unrealistic expectations of being able to effectively balance the demands of the modern audience with their demand for objectivity has ultimately left the modern historian in a position where they are forced to sacrifice one for the other.

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