Historiography and Postmodernism

My point of departure this article is the present-day overproduction our discipline. We are all familiar with the fact that any imaginable area of historiography, within any specialty, an overwhelming number of books and articles is produced annually, making a comprehensive view of them all impossible. This is true even of the separate topics within one and the same specialty. Let me illustrate this with an example from political theory, a field with which I am fairly familiar. Anyone who some twenty years ago wanted to go into Hobbes's political philosophy needed only two important commentaries on Hobbes: the studies written by Watkins and Warrender. Of course, there were more even then but after reading these two books one was pretty well in the picture. However, anyone who 1989 has the courage to try to say anything significant about Hobbes will first have to read his way through a pile of twenty to twenty-five studies which are as carefully written as they are extensive; I will spare you an enumeration of them. Moreover, these studies are usually of such high quality that one certainly cannot afford to leave them unread. There are two aspects to the unintended result of this overproduction. In the first place, the discussion of Hobbes tends to take on the nature of a discussion of the interpretation of Hobbes, rather than of his work itself. The work itself sometimes seems to be little more than the almost forgotten reason for the war of interpretations going on today. In the second place, because of its evident multiinterpretability, Hobbes's original text gradually lost its capacity to function as arbiter the historical debate. Owing to all the interpretations, the text itself became vague, a watercolor which the lines flow into one another. This meant that the naive faith the text itself being able to offer a solution to our interpretation problems became just as absurd as the faith a signpost attached to a weathervane. The paradoxical result of all this is that the text itself no longer has any authority an interpretation and that we even feel compelled to advise our students not to read Leviathan independently; they are better off first trying to hack a path through the jungle of interpretation. To put it a nutshell, we no longer have any texts, any past, but just interpretations of them. When I read the reviews and notices announcing new books the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, or the professional journals which are increasing number at an alarming rate, I do not doubt that things are very much the same other areas of historiography. The situation