Lkgal history and intellectual history That response, though perhaps understandable, is disappointing. Inability to provide some general justification for what we are doing - blind reliance on methods developed through trial and error by previous generations of historians - is surely not a desirable state of affairs. The remainder of this article proposes an alternative response - a way of coming to grips with the tension between the linguistic turn and our residual sense of the reality of the past. Among its merits is its power to assist legal historians in evaluating and harnessing the four varieties of intellectual history with which mrecent years they have been experimenting. The response begins with the nowfamiliar (even banal) proposition that all history is, to some degree, pcrspectival; the manner in which the historian approaches and interprets the past is influenced by her own concerns and by the concerns of the community and period in which she lives. At any given moment, a particular historical phenomenon may be examined from more than one perspective. The observation is obvious and unhelpful if taken to mean that historians’ political orientations, hopes, and expectations vary. It is less obvious and more fruitful if taken to mean that history (and legal history in particular) is and should be practiced for different purposes. Its intended audiences are various, and its objectives are various. We should not be surprised if the methodology best suited for one purpose is not ideal for another. These reflections point toward what might be described as a pragmatist approach to historical methodologyThe central claim of American pragmatismwas that the truth of a proposition cannot be determined in the abstract; a proposition is true if and only if it is useful - if it facilitates attainment of a particular social end. The claimhere is that the value of an historical methodology cannot be determined in the abstract; its value is to be determined by the extent to which it contributes to a particular social or scholarly project. What then are the projects that historians might seek to advance? What, in short, are the possible purposes of history in general and legal history in parZammito, supra n. 36, 812—14; Lvnn Hunt, “History as Gesture; or. The Scandal of History,” in Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson, eds.. Consequences of Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991): 100 (“Even the most theoretically sophisticated of historians have to admit to intractable problems with grounding their methods. For the most part, we ignore this issue by writing within the confines of conventional types of interpretation and with the conventional tools of the trade.”). Bv appealing to pragmatismfor this basic proposition, I do not mean to invoke the methodologv of “pragmatic hermeneutics” originally developed by James and Dewev and recently dcfended by James Kloppenberg as a viable alternative to the unpromisingalternatives of objectivism and relativism in historical inquiry. See James T. Kloppenberg, “Objectivity and Historicism,” American Historical Revie'ic 94 (1989): 1026-1030. The heart of the latter approach is the proposition that a necessary and sufficient criterion for determining the validity of an historical narrative or explanation is whether it can “survive the scrutiny of the community of professional historians.” Ibid., 1029. That attitude has considerable support among professional historians these days (sec note 91, supra) but does not seem an adequate response to the challenges presented by the new styles of intellectual history. 51
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