William W. Fisher III individuals more liberty than his initial definition might suggest. But the Structuralist portion of his analysis plainly tilts in the direction of determinism. Much the same must be said of the contextualist method. Indeed, when in the late 1970s, Contextualismwas just beginning to take root in the field of intellectual history, Thomas Haskell warned of this danger. The central tenets of the (then) new method — that ideas have no meaning out of a particular interpretive context and that basic presuppositions control the way we viewreality, not vice versa - reinforces, he contended, “the ‘despairingly deterministic view of the past and the present’ that too many students now hold.” Contextualism may not lead to determinismin any strict philosophic sense, he acknowledged, but it tends to produce accounts of events that have “an air of inevitability” - in which actions are not seen as flowing “fromthe conscious choices of thinking individuals who might have chosen other than they did.” Haskell did not for this reason counsel abandonment of the methodology, but he was plainly troubled bv its erosion of readers’ senses of freedom.To the extent letral his- ^ O torians hope their work conduces to a fuller appreciation of contingenev, they too should pause before pursuing the contextualist line. Fromthis standpoint, the textualist and new historicist approaches fare better. They are equally sensitive to the foreignness of the past, and they are both much more sensitive to gaps and ambiguities in discursive and conceptual systems - the opportunities for authors and actors to rework and even transformthe discursive materials they inherit. Their comparative advantage in this respect is exemplified by the contrast between two studies of fate of the Legal Realist movement in the United States. In a rich book that anticipated many features of the contextualist revolution in intellectual history, Edward Purcell argued that Legal Realism is best understood and explained as one aspect or manifestation of a set of “conceptual assumptions that came to pervade American thc'iught in general and the social sciences in particular during the twenty-year period after the [First World] war.”'-’ Those assumptions, he contended, provided Legal Realism much of its novelty and power, but also led it into a trap. Specifically, the Realists’ commitment to the principle of the relativity of value rendered them vulnerable in the late 1930s to the charge that their ideas were weakening America’s intellectual defenses against Fascism. Their understandable inability to imagine any way out of this bind contributed importantly, Purcell argued, to the deterioration of the movement.'-- Through Textualist lenses, Gary Peller sees the same period differently. 60 Thomas L. Haskell, “Determinist Implications of Intellectual History,” in Higham, \'ezi' Directions, supra n. 6, 134. Edward A. Purcell, Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problemof Value (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1973), xi. Ibid., chap. 9.
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