Hexter wrote:
The image of the historian, not as a passive channel for information which pours freely through him from the record of the past, but as the worker at the pump handle of the record supplying the energy which forces that supine apparatus to yield the actuality of the past, requires us to give further thought to the historian’s part in the production of history. What is this ‘energy’, indispensable to any historical work, that the historian supplies? Clearly it is not muscle power, as a literal application of the analogy of the pump would require. It is something other than that, but what is it? Once we pose that question we pin ourselves to the problem of a second record — a record that is individual, unique to each historian and partly private and personal.
[The] whole pattern of training of historians suggests that the only part of his second record of serious use to a writer of history is what he has learned, taken notes on, and remembers from his earlier reading in the record of the past and from lectures and books by other historians. This implies that there is nothing else in the second record that is worthy of his attention or reflection, and that he need have nothing else in it. Fairly frequently in recent years this parochial view of the second record has been challenged; but the challenge has come from a group which would only extend the boundaries of the parish somewhat and then all the more strongly enforce on historians an explicit rule against trespass beyond the new limits.
The new bounds though more generous are also more sharply defined, and ventures by historians into the second record outside the prescribed limits might come under the disapproving scrutiny of a sharp- and beady-eyed Big Brother. Big Brother in this case is the generalizing and/or quantifying social (or behavioural) scientist.
The tale of the ambivalent and sometimes slightly hysterical attitude of historians during the past seventy-five years to what has been going on in sociology, anthropology, political science, linguistics, and psychology would be worth telling provided it was told by a historian with a sound sense of the ridiculous. By now, however, the returns are in, in the simplest and most empirical sense. In each one of the fields of investigation mentioned, and in economics, scholars who identify themselves with that particular field have written works that some historians have found useful in connection with their own studies. And that really leaves historians no serious option but to admit that some of what goes on in the social and behavioural sciences is of concern to historians (although this is not true of everything that goes on in these sciences, and with respect to any particular historian's investigations many of these sciences may provide no enlightenment at all). The experience of many historians with the social sciences has considerably and on the whole desirably extended their view of what they might properly draw on from their second record to apply to the record of the past. Instead of restricting them to just so much as they learned by reading the works of other historians, it opened up to them what they had learned by reading in the social sciences, and rather firmly implied that they would do well to take active measures to stock some knowledge of the social sciences in their second records for possible future use.
As far as it goes, this is all to the good. Having conceded so much, it would be well for historians to take heed. They need to be a little cautious about this particular set of Greeks bearing these particular gifts. The reason for this caution lies in the intellectual habits and general strategies of the social sciences. Because they have more fully committed themselves to being scientists and nothing else, they have also become more concerned than historians to determine whether their methods approximate the tests of rigour, precision, and testability that the natural scientists impose or appear to impose on themselves. To meet these tests they have ruled large tracts of the second record out of bounds by establishing rigid criteria of ‘adequate explanation’. By defining what they mean by ‘knowing’ both exactly and somewhat narrowly, they have become both aware of and somewhat inhospitable to conceptions and claims with respect to knowing and explaining more open than their own. After associating with them, historians learn in very short order that many of their own habits of thought are off-limits for social scientists. They also are made conscious that, protests to the contrary notwithstanding, their inexplicit assumptions have led historians to range more freely through their second records than the social scientists deem proper or even tolerable. The contempt of the social scientists for the ‘impressionistic’ language and loose conceptual wanderings of historians should help alert the latter to their own vagrancy.
Indeed with more and more historians becoming knowledgeable about the social sciences and consequently aware of how far the historians' actual way with the second record diverges from the standards made explicit by social scientists for themselves, it is not at all unlikely that the historical discipline is headed for a crisis over method. The day may not be far off when a considerable group of historians will demand that the entire profession face up to the deviance of its ways. They may challenge it either to give up its illicit procedures and adopt the conceptions of knowing, explaining, and testing acceptable among social scientists, or to give up the claim that by such procedures they can or ever have advanced human understanding of the past. Forewarned of this possibility, indeed of this danger, of being brought up against an either-or dilemma, with manifold temptations to the sort of mutual anathemization and internecine warfare that have recently afflicted several of the social sciences and philosophy, historians may do well to be prepared to surrender or to defend their peculiar way of using the second record to elicit history from the record of the past. Already their contact with social scientists should have alerted them to the fact that the ways they actually use it have committed them to a conception of knowledge and the routes to it not acceptable to the disciplines in their neighbourhood.
What then is the actual situation ? How do historians make use of the second record in ways likely to put them in the bad graces of the intellectually more ascetic social scientists? What intellectual sins do historians casually and amiably commit that the purer scientists are likely to find either shocking or degrading? Historians can hardly decide whether to take the pledge or to continue to wallow in their customary vices until they make out clearly what those vices are.
During the past fifteen years I have spent what may have been an inordinate amount of time on historical investigation and writing that had as its focus one rather small book, Utopia, by Thomas More. Leaving aside judgements as to my wisdom in putting in so much time on that particular enterprise (a matter on which I have had serious doubts), historians would deem the attempt to explicate a book as a significant record of the past an activity appropriate to a member of their profession.
An examination of what I wrote about Thomas More as a result of my excursions into my own second record reveals a curious and significant fact. In nothing that I put into print is there so much as a hint about its relation to those excursions. The range of experience I draw on so heavily gets no credit line at all. This is not to be construed as reluctance on my part to admit to relying on my way of using my second record; to do just that, both to recommend and to defend such reliance, is precisely my purpose in this chapter. What the lack of overt reference to my private and personal experience in the examined instance implies and is intended to imply is that my personal experience is not viable evidence about anyone or to anyone but me. However fully persuaded I may be of the actual similarity of More's anxiety and mine about our families, about his perception of the dimensions of sin and mine, I cannot argue that my experience proves anything about his, because of course it does not.
J. H. Hexter, The History Primer, Basic Books and The Penguin Press, 1971 [pp. 102, 113, 114-117, 131]