Goodness where to start. Joel, I do appreciate the fact that you expressed your opinions on here, but I think you're forgetting that you, as a product of your time and experience, are a product of your context. I don't necessarily blame you for objecting to Gaddis, but you're a political science major so it becomes something personal. Gaddis has an excellent point in that we need to transcend our own context to gain a foothold on real objective synthesis of what has happened in the past. I wouldn't say he discredits former schools of historical thought in any sense. If you look back at history and understand that its development is a synthesis of subjective views into an objective past, then each prior school is representative of one of those standpoints. We found in class that we all have problems with certain schools for certain reasons, and I think most of us can agree that the sysnthesis of many of them best create a view of the past that we can agree on. There is no discounting of a view of history. Every view has partial truth, otherwise it would have no substance. But we want, Gaddis wants, the whole truth; if you discount one, you lose the whole.

Also, I think it's very important to consider the fact that we are reading this book with a background of individual context and experience. We interpret subjectively, and those interpretations (like schools of history) contain partial truth; but they are far from the wh0ole truth. If you have a background in a field that Gaddis happens to...put down, so to say, it becomes a personal issue that clouds your judgment of what your reading. Just s in history, we need to transcend that context, those biases in order to gain an objective account of what he is trying to say. This should hold true for ALL social sciences as well.

Historical processes are not at all consistent in their individuality. But they are consistent in that they are important parts of an overall process; the progression of history. But in their individuality, and our interpretations of them, once again, they are not the whole. The goal of the historian is to avoid being influenced by his own biases and predispositions (his own present, if you will). Whether or not we do this we can see by our own problems with past schools of historical thought. He's really not an idiot; he's a human being.

History itself has no weakenesses. How can it? It is what exists and what occurs. We are the ones with the weakness, and Gaddis makes it clear that Historians have been trying to deal with their own subjectivity for a long time. Just because other social scientists are just now beginning to understand that they are too objects in subjectivity (they have biases and predispositions) doesn't mean that history is better or worse or that historians or better or worse.

Hard science, on the other hand, works within a world of set rules and processes. These set rules and processes make their realm purely objective. They avoid all of the influence of the scientist as a protuct of his own context. Whether or not a hard scientist is prejudice doesn't mean that it will affect his experiement. They can make judgments prior to experience and be assured that they will indeed happen. That is the goal of the historian and it always has been; to avoid contaminating the experiment.

Finally, understand that Gaddis too is a human being. He has his own predispositions and biases, but the important part is that he (as a historian) recognizes that those predispositions and biases affect the way we view history as the objective past. Thus, just because you recognize his bias in his book, that doesn't mean the reader's bias has a right to oppose it. That's not our job. Instead, we need to look past the bias, realize the bias itself is not truth, and find the real truth in what he's trying to say and what of our own experience expresses personal knowledge of that truth.

And yes, I have a bias. I liked the book. It's a philosophy book at heart, and I, of course, have a bias. But I'm not going to say that he's right in talking down other social sciences or talking up history or any other kinds od subjective judgement that we might interpret or misinterpret for that matter. That's not my job. It's like missing the cake because you don't like the icing.