Abstract

This paper discusses the historical voice in the history of the human sci ences. I address the question, 'Who speaks?', as a question about disci plinary identities and conventions of writing - identities and conventions which have the appearance of conditions of knowledge, in an area of activity where academic history and the history of science or intellectual history meet. If, as this paper contends, the subject-matter of the history of the human sciences is inherently contestable because of fundamental differences about the subject, man, how is the field to be shaped as if it were a whole? The meta-narratives that once sustained synthetic writing, such as the teleological narratives of the emergence of a modern discipline or of progress towards truth, have lost authority. I ask whether the alternatives rely on 'wilful' authorial rhetoric, the use of the resources of language to sustain a narrative, the defence of which depends on intelligibility and inclusiveness, not detailed correspon dence to a supposedly independent past. If this is the case, an author's theoretical stance will inevitably be more out in the open - the author will have a 'theoretical voice' - than is common in most mainstream history writing. In the light of this, I reflect on my own effort to write a synthetic history of the human sciences