The Ideology of Scholarship : China's New Historiography

IDEOLOGY is, rightly considered, a datum of history. When it becomes the datum of history--he end of the scholar's search as well as his means-the rules of the game change and historical inquiry becomes essentially a political exercise. The historian moves from the classroom to the platform, the natural habitat of the ideologue; historiography moves from an effort to discover what actually was (Ranke's hope) to an effort to confirm what in fact should be. The past, that is, serves the present not by illuminating it but by defining it, by justifying it. This is not an unfamiliar phenomenon. Prussian scholarship served Bismarck as Soviet scholarship, after Pokrovsky, served Stalin and as Chinese scholarship today serves Mao. It is in large the scholarship of nationalism. And nationalism, being a jealous mistress, demands the creation of a particularistic history, a private affair, as it were, between the state and the people. This is all very well in the privacy of the sovereign realm, but it is awkward in the vestibule of the new ecumend. For Marxism too is jealous and demands of her historians universality. To court both cultural uniqueness and universal applicability is a task few historians savour, yet it is one that Chinese writers today are forced to perform. Their frequent incompatibility and the problems raised by attempting to reconcile nationalist sentiment and Marxist-Leninist theory in the writing of history are demonstrated in the controversy over " historicism " (li-shih chu-i) and the "class viewpoint" (chieh-chi kuan-tien) which