The killing of history
by Keith Windschuttle · first published 1994
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For 2,500 years, since the time of Herodotus and Thucydides, historians have sought to record the truth about the past. Today, however, the discipline is suffering a potentially lethal attach from the rise to prominence of an array of French-inspired literary and social theories, each of which denies that truth and knowledge about the past are possible. These theories claim the central point on which history was founded no longer holds: there is no fundamental distinction between history and myth or between history and fiction. Historians in classrooms from Berkeley to Paris have embraced th
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quote more Foucault's Discipline & Punishment Foucault's style is (possibly deliberately) obtuse, and his knowledge of history dubious at best, per Keith Windschuttle's book The Killing of History: http://www.amazon.com/The-Killing-History-Theorists-Murderin... . It's the question of why we all let this happen without any resistance Because it's easy, because most of the time it doesn't affect…
on “The Criminalization of Everyday Life” ↗…thing to call for speculation for the sake of relevance, and another to bring about a new marriage of history and philosophy. writers like Keith Windschuttle have been discussing these problems since The Killing of History, if not earlier, and Camille Paglia has been discussing them in essays since the 1990s. Finally, the lack of jobs in the humanities has been acting as both a negative IQ test and a conformity test for…
on “The Bonfire of the Humanities” ↗…please This is a hilarious comment, given that Foucault's History of Sexuality contains almost no citations! If you are interested in why Foucault ought to be a laughingstock, see Windshuttle's The Killing of History: https://www.amazon.com/Killing-History-Literary-Theorists-Mu... or the many essays Camille Paglia wrote on him. Her latest book has a reprint of "Review: Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in…
on “Foucault’s work on power” ↗…American Culture: Essays. 1 ed. New York: Vintage, 1992. Falck, Colin. Myth, Truth and Literature: Towards a True Post-modernism. 2 ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Windschuttle, Keith. The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past. 1st Free Press Ed., 1997 ed. New York: Free Press, 1997. Star, Alexander. Quick Studies: The Best of Lingua Franca. 1st ed. Farrar,…
on “How To Deconstruct Almost Anything (1993)” ↗>Foucault's style is (possibly deliberately) obtuse, and his knowledge of history dubious at best, per Keith Windschuttle's book The Killing of History That critique is not even worthy of an answer -- it's basically a conservative "oh, all these new fangled lefty theorists have ruined our field" cry.
on “The Criminalization of Everyday Life” ↗