An important task of the present-day historian is to articulate the presuppositions that have formed and contributed to their interpretation of past events. The postmodern age has rightly informed the critical mind that bias and prejudice are always present in empirical investigation and as such, it is vitally important to evaluate the intrusion that such presuppositions have upon the work of the historian. In "Marxism, Christianity, and Bias in the Study of Southern Slave Society," Eugene Genovese evaluates the crisis of method precipitated by postmodernism and then, evaluates his own work in light of the solution he offers to that crisis.
Throughout his essay, Genovese evaluates the current crisis to the possibility of historical knowledge and offers an alternative method to modernism and post-modernism upon which the historian can advance his work. One of the interesting preliminary points that Genovese makes in his essay is that while objectivity is indeed an illusion, postmodernism "quickly passes into nihilism” and offers only "flagrant mendacity as a Higher Law" (6). Genovese, therefore, rejects both the presumption of objectivity as well as the irrationality of postmodernism. As an alternative, he argues that the study of history should involve a process of empirical investigation that tests and challenges the presuppositions, or preunderstanding, of the student. Genovese further argues that a worldview must be internally and externally consistent and that should it falter on these grounds, it should be altered or even rejected. The task of the historian then is not simply to recover the discernible facts of history but also to contribute to the development and formation of a person’s worldview by testing presuppositions through empirical investigation of historical events. Furthermore, the historian must be honest in recognizing the implications that their scholarly work might have upon their world. Though the work is borne out of certain presuppositions, the honest historian should not allow it be subordinate to them.
Approaching his work from this standpoint, Genovese illustrates how his empirical investigations of southern slave society have challenged his own presuppositions as an atheist, historical materialist and Marxist as well as the presuppositions of a Christian worldview. Genovese notes that he viewed religion "as no more than a corrosive ideology at the service of ruling classes" (8). And, it is with this presupposition that he entered the task of evaluating slave life in his book Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. In his empirical investigations, however, he discovered that religion exerted a powerful and positive force in the lives of the slaves:
For while much went into the making of the heroic black struggle for survival under extreme adversity, nothing loomed so large as the religious faith of the slaves. The very religion that their masters sought to impose on them in the interest of social control carried an extraordinarily powerful message of liberation in this world as well as the next (8).
In response to this discovery, Genovese acknowledges being forced to face a serious weakness in Marxist thought, namely that of religion and its relationship to society (13). Neither his own worldview nor other historical, sociological and psychological theories could adequately account for the enormous affect the slaves’ spiritual experience had in their struggle for freedom. In similar fashion, Genovese argues that his investigation raises a serious challenge to "Christians to clarify their theology" (12). He points out three significant issues raised by his studies with respect to the Christian faith: (1) the spiritual bankruptcy of theological liberalism that would deny that Jesus is anything other than God, Christ and redeemer, (2) the inability of Christians to formulate an antislavery theology, and (3) the general failure of religious historians who "separate the religion of the elite from the religion of the common people" and ignore the importance of theology (11). Genovese argues that these challenges to worldview, whether his own or the Christian’s, and the necessary self-evaluation that it demands is one of the purposes behind the historian’s task. For, while recognizing that objectivity is an illusion, the presuppositions of an investigation should still be subject to the evidence revealed through that investigation:
The current game of denying the very possibility of objective truth or of the necessity to approximate it as closely as possible thus reveals itself as contempt for the people—for the allegedly oppressed—who apparently are incapable of facing the unpleasantness and evidence of their own failings and who aspire to nothing better than to do unto others the horrors that have been done unto them (6).
Willingness, therefore, to subject oneself and one’s views to the evidence allows the historian to refine their worldview and engage in further study from a more informed standpoint. In this way, history, and other disciplines like it, pursue objective truth, testing it through (subjective) empirical investigation and thereby, contributing to an improved worldview that can stand with the evidence.
In coming to terms with the implications of his own work then, Genovese has demonstrated a way beyond the impasse created by the postmodernist attack on objective truth. Empirical investigation cannot proceed from objectivity, as postmodernists have so ably pointed out, but it can pursue it. In fact, it is to that pursuit that humans have been driven to undertake empirical investigation. By studying history, nature, religion or any other aspect of our universe, humans are seeking knowledge and truth. If the investigator is willing to face the implications that their studies necessitate, the task continues to be a viable one. This commitment to honesty and integrity is the means by which the historian can successfully contribute something of value to areas he studies. It is also the reason that Genovese has contributed so much of value to the study of southern slave society, Marxism and not least of all, Christianity.
Disclaimer: This article was originally written and submitted Sept. 28, 2000 for an undergraduate course in History. Genovese was a formative influence on my historical thinking, thanks to one of my professors, Richard Vaudry, and I still agree in large part with Genovese and this critique. That said, in my years since writing this critique, I have developed a much greater appreciation for the postmodern agenda and some of its leading thinkers.
Genovese and Historical Knowledge
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