Stephen Tonsor on The History Primer

The History Primer By J. H. Hexter Basic, 297 pp., $10 The great merit of J. H. Hexter’s The History Primer is that it is right. It is nearly right enough to be Right, even though Professor Hexter interrupts his narrative with a long anti-McCarthy tirade (Senator Joseph, that is) just to demonstrate that his heart dwells among the pristine purities of the liberal position. But these are the dogdays of liberalism and the fourteen-year locusts are singing their last songs. One threnody-like chirp in a book of 297 closely argued pages does not seem excessive.

Hexter’s work has been a long time coming. Historians in the recent past have generally either evaded or succumbed to the theoretical formulations of the analytic philosophers and the neopositivists as they apply to the so-called social sciences. And in this, historians behaved no differently than other disciplines in the humanities. In the course of the nineteenth century history displaced theology as the queen of the sciences. Indeed, even in the natural sciences, process and development were looked upon as more fruitful conceptions than cause and prediction. It is precisely for this reason that the biological sciences came to the fore in the course of the nineteenth century.

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Stephen J. Tonsor

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The History Primer By J. H. Hexter Basic, 297 pp., $10 The great merit of J. H. Hexter’s The History Primer is that it is right. It is nearly right enough to be Right, even though Professor Hexter interrupts his narrative with a long anti-McCarthy tirade (Senator Joseph, that is) just to demonstrate that his heart dwells among the pristine purities of the liberal position. But these are the dogdays of liberalism and the fourteen-year locusts are singing their last songs. One threnody-like chirp in a book of 297 closely argued pages does not seem excessive.

Hexter’s work has been a long time coming. Historians in the recent past have generally either evaded or succumbed to the theoretical formulations of the analytic philosophers and the neopositivists as they apply to the so-called social sciences. And in this, historians behaved no differently than other disciplines in the humanities. In the course of the nineteenth century history displaced theology as the queen of the sciences. Indeed, even in the natural sciences, process and development were looked upon as more fruitful conceptions than cause and prediction. It is precisely for this reason that the biological sciences came to the fore in the course of the nineteenth century.