In 3 sentences: This document discusses critical history and examines the assumptions behind traditional historical analysis. It argues that history as traditionally defined serves to affirm existing power structures. The document advocates redefining history through a critical lens to uncover distortions and silenced voices, and to use historical analysis to better understand oppression and work towards social emancipation and improvement.

1. THE TRUTH IS ELSEWHERE:
CRITICAL HISTORY
Richard C. Box, University of Nebraska at Omaha
Cheryl Simrell King, The Evergreen State College

2. ABSTRACT
This essay will allow the learners to:
 study and understand the deconstruction of the basic
question on how the present is defined in traditional
historical explanation or analysis
 understand the importance of being critical in examining
the assumptions and methods behind historical “data”
 study and examine theoretical approaches to the use of
theory, pointing out examples relevant to public
administration
deconstruction
point out examples
relevant to public
administration
be critical in
examining
assumptions

3. INTRODUCTION
As Berkhofer (1995) states:
 To “rewrite” the present, one must,
necessarily, be critical. The term critical is
used here in two ways:
1. to critically analyze the assumptions and
methods used when relying on historical “data,”
in order to identify what might be missed
(whose stories are silenced) and among others
2. to reveal metanarratives of history as
supporting dominant regimes, hegemonies, and
power structures which will give a short
distance between being critical of traditional
historical explanation and critical theory as a
historical/theoretical structure
“It requires a great deal of power to be able to live and to forget just how much
life and being unjust are one and the same.”
F.W. Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, 1873
 For the last 30 years, the discipline of history has
undergone a radical transformation --- the
positivist, social scientific methods rigorously
adopted during what we in public administration
understand as the Progressive Era have been
interrogated and laid bare.
 Historical methodological approaches, and the
ontological assumptions within, have been
questioned, ironically, historicization has been
adopted as a “new” method in the social sciences
(including public administration).

4. In deconstructing the
basic question of
how the “present” is
defined in traditional
historical
explanation or
analysis…
the epistemological
and ontological
assumptions of
history, as it is
traditionally
defined, must be
examined.

5. DECONSTRUCTING
HISTORY
In traditional historical analysis, as in other social
sciences, as long as one uses established standards of
“rigorous methods” and “argumentative”
presentation, one is practicing good, objective
historical analysis.
Traditional historical
analysis, usually involving
“large scale contours” and
“big patterns” (Ludtke,
1995, p.10) investigates
macrotheory and
macroconcepts.
Methodologies and knowledge in the social sciences are
socially and culturally constituted and not universal and
timeless. Therefore, historically specific rather than
historically universal.
The intellectual critiques
who try to write the
present based upon the
past without
contextualizing the its
linguistic, interpretative,
and rhetorical context is to
write a past/present that
is significantly distorted on
a number of levels.
Once distortions are
exposed, there is no
guarantee that the new
knowledge is accepted as
legitimate and usable.

6. Our perceptions, social relations, and the historical transformation of both take place
within value systems that form our boundaries, our limits, and set the terms of
possible transgressions.
These value systems tend to have the following characteristics (Duby, 1985, p.
154):
1. serve as a globalizing function;
2. serve deforming functions that highlight some things;
3. multiple systems exist at one time and compete with one another;
4. stabilize both systems that guard the privileges of the ruling class and those
inverted (shadow) systems that invert, but reflect, the ruling class systems --- one is
not possible without the other;
5. and serve as visionary --- in cultures that have a history, all ideological systems are
based on a vision of that history.

7. History, as it is traditionally defined, serves as a “system-affirmer.” What
we would like to see is historical analysis that serves as a “system-
refuser.”
the instability,
The shifting
ground on
which we stand
fragmentation,
Michel
Foucault
redefined the
notion of
history to
confront us
with the

8. REDEFINING/REDISCOVERING HISTORY
 While the discipline of history struggles
with how to define itself
methodologically such that distortions
are minimized, ironically, many other
social science and literary disciplines
have embraced historicization as a
“new” methodological tool.
 Both the mainstream and alternative
public administration theory
communities are embracing historical
analysis. This raise the need also to
question the degree to which scholars
are critical of historical method and
whether they approach history from the
standpoint of elements of critical
history.
Early 1990’s
There was an increase of
interest in historical studies
and scholars from various
disciplines turned back to
historical studies.
Early 1980’s
historical unconsciousness
seen and defined as
ineffective, ideological, and
unsophisticated mode of
apprehending the world.

9. Camilla Stivers (1993), one of the first
public administration scholars, who
claimed on the limitations of historical
methods such as the way historical
methods give spotlight only to some
parts of our history while other parts
are cast in shadow.
“As Vavlav Havel has reminded us, the greatest
threat to human freedom is not the classic
dictator but the phenomenon of impersonal
power; power that is rooted in apparently
neutral and objective logic.” – Stivers (1993)

10. RECOVERABLE ELEMENTS
 In order to recover core elements of critical thought that are useful for contemporary public
administration, with particular attention to the value of critical thought in understanding the history of
the field and the broader societal context, we then need to cross the boundaries of theoretical categories
such as critical theory and pragmatism, modernism, and postmodernism.
 This may upset readers who prefer conceptual orderliness, however having useful results than with
internal consistency is the goal. We try to be sensitive to the difficulties raised by eclecticism.
 The section below discusses some primary themes in critical theory, the condition of radical and reformist
thought today, and the purposes of critical scholarly examination of administrative history, with examples
of relevant literature.
Nowadays, critical
theory has only a small
audience in public
administration. This can
be attributed to the
following reasons:
1. partly public administration is an applied professional field;
2. critical theory offers broad narratives about oppression within
capitalist society & the need for emancipation of whole classes of
people, allowing them to realize their full human potential.

11. EMANCIPATION
 Critical theory of the 1920s and 1930s retained the idea that the working class had the
potential to rise up against capitalist exploitation, but in the post-World War II ear it was
clear this potential, if it ever existed, had been lost.
 Not all critical theorists accept the view that critical theory, to be vital and popular in
“postmodern” times, must shed its revolutionary intent.
 Teresa Ebert argues against a that emphasizes “poststructuralist assumptions about linguistic
play, difference, and the priority of discourse” (1996, p. 3)
 “ plurality, multiculturalism, multiplicity, and complexity have frequently been deployed to
silence, suppress, occlude, and marginalize other positions and to suppress a fundamental or
radical diversity; the differences of the social division of labor, of class antagonisms and the
revolutionary struggle to overthrow the existing exploitative social relations.” (1996, p. 43)
 Both revolutionary and incremental varieties of critical theory are challenged by
postmodernism as postmodernists question the critical theory’s apparent view in universal
truth and totalizing visions of emancipations that ignore the local, everyday aspects of life.
(Rosenau, 1992, p. 14)
 On the otherhand, Agger (1992, p. 238) protected critical theory from this challenge by
abandoning strict adherence to dogmatic forms of thought, claiming: “Critical theory is not a
school but the way we choose to oppose inhumanity in different songs of joy.

12. SOCIAL HOPE
 Few people in the developed world think there is much potential for revolutionary change in the
social order in the short term, if ever.
 In this setting, the task becomes understanding what potential for change exists and for what
normative purposes. Thus, to examine how people view their world is a good beginning.
 Raymond Geuss (1981, p. 83) identifies “four quite different initial states of awareness in the
general population about the issues that also concern critical theorists:
Agents are actually
content, but only because
they have been prevented
from developing certain
desires which in the
“normal” course of the
things they would have
developed and which
cannot be satisfied within
the framework of the
present social order.
Agents are suffering
and know what
social institution or
arrangement is the
cause;
Agents know that they
are suffering, but
either don’t know
what the cause is or
have a false theory
about the cause;
Agents are apparently
content, but analysis
of their behavior
shows them to be
suffering from hidden
frustration of which
they are not aware;

13. Many or most people
in developed
countries are fully
integrated into the
dominant capitalist –
consumerist culture
and many in
developing countries
strive to be.
If we cannot always hope for
broad, society-wide
enlightenment and
emancipation, then
“melioration,” as John
Dewey put it, maybe a
reasonable goal, so “that
the specific conditions
which exist at one moment,
be they comparatively bad
or comparatively good, in
any event may be bettered”
(Dewey, in Campbell, 1995, p. 261)
Richard Rorty, a philosopher,
advocated social change to advance
democracy and reduce human
suffering and humiliation.
In the pragmatist mode of focusing on
possible futures instead of social
metanarratives from the past, Rorty
discards the critical theorist’s
concerns about capitalism and
oppressed classes, since these
concerns depend on the “implicit
claim that we can do better than a
market economy, that we know of a
viable option for complex
technologically oriented societies. But
at the moment, at least, we know of
no such option.” (Rorty, 1998a, p. 234).

14. CRITICAL PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
SCHOLARSHIP
 Richard C. Box and Cheryl Simrell King agree to some extent
with the critical theory analysis of society as a set of material
conditions that offer fertile grounds for social change.
 “History is not a unitary fact but it what we make of it today,
and the future is a social construction.”
 Dewey (1995): every form of social life is likely, sooner or later,
to freeze over into something the more imaginative and restless
spirits of the time will see as ‘repressive’ and ‘distorting.’

15. CLIO AT THE CROSSROADS: WRITING
CRITICAL HISTORY
 Berkhofer (1995): the adoption by historians of various disciplines has
“changed some vocabulary and introduced some new subjects & ways of
handling that subject matter” into the discipline of history.
 “While historicization supposedly solves the problems of theory in other
disciplines, these historicizations in turn do not solve the theoretical
problems those disciplines pose for doing history in these postmodern,
poststructuralist times.”
 Teachers/scholars who would teach/write non-standard history in which the
present appears as uneasy resting point rather than a natural result and the
future is less than certain, there exists kindred work of critical historical
understanding.
 Box & King: They both support the claim that it is not possible to “rewrite the
present” without engaging in critical historical interpretation. In Greek Mythology, Clio is the
Muse of History
(Photo from Google)

16. THANK YOU!
ODING L. MA-AMOR
PA 302