WilliamW. Fisher III City, in which a butcher was convicted of a public nuisance for keeping pigs in the city. In a fashion similar to his handling of Elizabeth Packard, Hartog lovingly explores the ambiguities of the case and the ways in which it both illuminates and is illuminated by multiple themes in American legal and cultural history: controversy over whether social issues of this sort were properly resolved by legislatures or courts; the gradual but contested emergence during the early nineteenth century of a new vision of a city (clean, healthy, bureaucratized, and sharply differentiated fromthe countryside); a clash between an old legal argument that saw in immemorial customa source of justiciable rights and a newer (albeit already unraveling) ideology of egalitarian classical republicanism; and the limited credibility and cultural power of judicial edicts. In neither paper does Hartog acknowledge the extent to which his mode of analysis parallels that of the NewHistoricists - and thus far, no other legal historian has followed his methodological lead. In view of the subtletv and novelty of his arguments, however, it seems likely that more studies of this sort will be appearing soon. 50 III. Most historians who have not themselves been combatants in the methodological wars discussed above but who have observed the battles from a distance have come away with two general reactions: (a) the central lesson of the “linguistic turn” - that full, unmediated, objective access to the past is impossibleis right; but (b) there is such a thing as the past, and not all historical interpretations are equally true to it. Some historians have found the tension between those two reactions debilitating and have concluded, consequently, that contemporary methodological theory not only fails to enhance, but actively threatens the practice of history.^‘^ To avoid paralysis, they insist, we should forget theory and get on with the business of doing history.If we need any guidance in determining howtc^ read and write about the past, we should look not to philosophers, but to the interpretive community of our fellowhistorians. Craft, convention, and peers, not epistemology and hermeneutics, should be our guides.^' Hendrik Hartog, “Pigs and Positivism,” Wisconsin Laze Revieze (1985): 899. **** See, e.g., Cass R. Sunstein, “The Idea of a Useable Past,” Columbia Lazi- Revieu- 95 (1995): 601; Zammito, supra n. 36, 798. See, e.g., James Kloppenberg, “Deconstructive and Hermeneutic Strategies for Intellectual Histors" The Recent Work cif Dominick LaCapra and David Hollinger,” Intellectual History A'etesletter 9 (1987): 7 (contending that “the deconstructive method makes writing history- impossible; ... to insist rigorouslv on universal undecidabilitv would bring all critical exchange to an end”). See, e.g., Stephen Bann, “Toward a Critical Historiography: Recent Work in Philosophy of History,” Philosophy 56 (1981): 365, 370 (discussing G. R. Elton and Donald Davidson). See Lionel Gossman, Tozcards a Rational Historiography, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, v. 79, pt. 3 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1989), 51-67; 88
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