Evans effectively defends the work of historians who seek to find the truth, even as he acknowledges some helpful ideas in postmodernist history. Menduga dalamnya lautan Kebenaran dengan kail panjang sejengkal - aku kira, begitulah sumpah bagi manusia-manusia yang menghabiskan sisa hidupnya menyiasat perihal Kemanusiaan. I think I can show that his whole conception and defence of history takes place within a familiar, traditional paradigm of which he remains unaware.

Evans’ supposed caricaturing of the postmodern movement seems to be an attempt to continuously warn against the dangers of taking postmodernism to absurd extremes.Evans’ concern is for the hyper-relativists such as Joyce Appleby and Keith Jenkins and he rarely if ever mentions thinkers such as Michel Foucault or Roland Barthes . In fact, there are clear parallels between these seemingly modern phenomena and the postmodernism assertion that “no one can know anything beyond their own bodily identity” . Kansteiner goes on to state that the fundamental problem with the book is Evans’ failure to convincingly prove his main point, that recourse to the historical record is sufficient to settle disputes and makes it possible to discriminate between false and faithful historical assertions. So when Patrick Joyce tells us that social history is dead, and Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth declares that time is a fictional construct, and Roland Barthes announces that all the world's a text, and Frank Ankersmit swears that we can never know anything at all about the past so we might as well confine ourselves to studying other historians, and Keith Jenkins proclaims that all history is just naked ideology designed to get historians power and money in big university institutions run by the bourgeoisie, I will look humbly at the past and say despite them all: it really happened, and we really can, if we are very scrupulous and careful and self-critical, find out how it did, and reach some tenable conclusions about what it all meant. Most of all, he asks us to consider the dangerous divide created by all the in-fighting: society against the individual and vice versa, hyper-relativism and deconstructionism eating away at years and years of marvellous social history (itself a major victory of the second half of 20th century over old elitist political history.

He states himself that the book is “not an attempt to tackle the complex epistemologies of modern French philosophy head-on” . Taken to excess, postmodernist history can end up being not merely nothing but a mix subjectivity and wishful thinking, it can also open the door to some very serious dangers indeed.I would have given this three stars, because it is very complex at times and Evans' argument isn't quite as clearly put as I would have liked (largely because I struggle with the whole concept of Postmodernism, and he doesn't really explain it well). Bernard Crick, 'The truth, the whole truth - and nothing but', The Independent Saturday Magazine, 20 September 1997, p. Evans’ In Defence of History is an attack on the influence of postmodernism on the practice of history. Having said this, Evans places Carr’s thinking in a wider scope by noting that Carr rejected the idea that historians could interpret history however they wished, but that simply getting facts right was “mere antiquarianism” . It may seem that investigation into the past ought to be a straightforward business, but history has been subject to a crisis of self-definition over a considerable period of time.

Evans ascribes to him a hyper-relativist position that, according to Rick Roderick,* is mere "popular mythology", a (coarse) distortion of Derrida rather than Derrida himself. This epilogue makes painfully clear how difficult and delicate it remains to define and clearly articulate concepts and views in the study of history.Historical interpretation has evolved 'through contact with the real historical world', a contact said to be 'indirect, because the real historical world has disappeared'; but hey, no worries, for the documents 'which the real world of the past has left behind . Ini membolehkan Evans menumpukan perhatian kepada persoalan metodologikal dan teknikal sekaligus mengelak persoalan-persoalan yang melibatkan bentuk-bentuk pertentangan yang berskala kosmik. If revisionist historians have their way then present and future generations will suffer, for people will not get the truth and will not be able to learn from it. And as for (2) my guess would be that is exactly what Collini said it was: a series of coarsely distorted rebuttals of coarsely distorted ideas, and that it does not engage in a serious argument with postmodernism.