i.1Academic history has never managed to transcend its eighteenth-century origins as an empiricist enterprise. By this we mean not David Hume’s earlier skeptical approach but the scientistic method intrinsically linked to positivism, which Horkheimer called “modern empiricism” that was later adopted across the human sciences. Academic history remains dedicated to this method of gathering facts in order to produce interpretations by referring them to supposedly given contexts and organizing them into chronological narratives.
i.2Actually existing academic history promotes a disciplinary essentialism founded upon a methodological fetishism. Treating reified appearances (i.e., immediately observable, preferably archival, evidence) as embodying the real and containing the truth of social relations, it evaluates scholarship based on whether this empiricist method has been capably employed. The field tends to produce scholars rather than thinkers, and regards scholars in technocratic terms. Historians typically write for other professional historians, paying special attention...
