By: Keith Windschuttle, read in 2020

36 "...the summaries of the theories provided above should be enough to indicate that there are three common qualities that all, or nearly all, of them share which make them jointly culpable. First, they reject those aspects of the scientific method of the Enlightenment that were based on observation and inductive argument. They consequently reject works of history that are based on the same principles. Second, they all hold a relativist view of the concepts of truth and knowledge. Most deny that we can know anything with certainty, and believe that different cultures create their own truths. Third, most deny the ability of human beings to gain any direct contact with or access to reality." This is a blistering indictment of the revisionists. Although I agree completely with the "culpability", I nonetheless personally agree with each of the three. To resolve the seeming contradiction, I suggest considering each of them on a spectrum of scale. So, observation and induction work at the scale of our perception, but they fail at the Planck scale, or at the Big Bang scale. Similarly, there are obvious truths and knowledge at the scale of our daily activities, but as we approach the "theoretical abyss", as led by Patrick Grim, truth and knowledge evaporate. And reality itself is equally elusive in the extreme, but the reality of our daily experience is solid enough to function. We still use Newton in spite of Einstein.
129 "...contemporary literary analysis provides an attractive, new, fast track to academic prominence. Tackling the major issues of human experience no longer requires the hard work of steeping yourself in the writings of all those practitioners of your discipline who have gone before you, and then putting in the even harder slog of doing your own original research. Instead, all you need do is take a small selection of the more prominent and familiar authors, label them in terms used by the currently fashionable theoretical guru, add some linguistic speculations about the textuality of everything, and then wait for the self-same guru or his acolytes to recognise your genius and lavish you with hyperbole."
130 "Unless all this changes dramatically, the retirement dinners given to the current generation of traditional historians, now mostly middle-aged and older, will represent the funeral of their discipline."
144 "In debates with their opponents, especially if the opponent is a 'positivist' or a 'piecemeal empiricist', they hold what they believe is an unassailable position by focusing on who is speaking rather than on what is being said. They use the genealogical method to absolve themselves from the need to examine the content of any statement. All they see the need to do is examine the conditions of its production--not 'is it true?' but 'who made the statement and for what reasons?'. This is a tactic that is well known in Marxist circles where, to refute a speaker, one simply identifies his class position and ignores what he actually says. If someone can be labelled 'bourgeois' everything this person says will simply reflect the ideology of that class." Very familiar tactic.
248 "Today's theorists have substituted French theory for Christian texts but are seeking to break down the disciplines in exactly the same way. They are the most determined advocates for the reorganisation of existing academic fields into multidisciplinary studies...their aim is not to merge but to subsume all existing fields in the study of human life under the one central megadiscipline of Cultural Studies. Such a move should be seen for what it is, not a synthesising of intellectual streams but an undermining of the disciplinary traditions that have formed the generative power of western knowledge for more than two thousand years."
254 "...once some of a book of history is discovered to be fabricated, the reader can never be sure that it is not all made up." My sentiments exactly.
308 "As the history of the past millennium clearly demonstrates, imperialism has taken many forms. It has imposed horrors and it has eliminated horrors. Different imperial powers have had different records in these matters and the behaviour of any one imperial power--whether it be English, French, American, Russian, Chinese, Ottoman, Khmer or Mogul--has varied dramatically at different periods of time."
319 "In this kind of debate, instead of addressing the evidence and reason deployed by your opponent, the tactic is simply to identify his political position and then rest your case as though enough has been said. This is not only an unsatisfactory way to assess historians but is the antithesis of any kind of respectable intellectual activity." This characterizes not only postmodernist "historians" but the Left in general.