Luka Culiberg
SPEAKING A 
COMMON LANGUAGE:
On the Unity in the Human 
Sciences and the Question of 
School History Curricula*
“ At first sight the hum an sciences - at least to anyone who has played 
however small a part in their development - are striking; not fo r their 
unity, which is difficult to formulate and to promote, but fo r their 
longstanding, confirmed, fundamental, indeed almost structural 
diversity.”
Fernand Braudel
“We know only a single science, the science o f history.”
Karl M arx
I would like to express my gratitude to the Japan Foundation for funding my research while I was 
writing this paper. I am also grateful to all the colleagues participating in this workshop for inviting 
me to cooperate in this interesting project and for all the comments and discussions which were of 
great benefit during my research and writing process.

1. INTRODUCTION
W hen I was invited to participate in the workshop on A Comparative Analysis 
o f Textbooks fo r History in Japan and Slovenia, I was at first unsure as to what 
my contribution could be in this project. Unlike my distinguished colleagues, 
who were not only professional historians, but some of whom also had first-hand 
experience in writing high school history textbooks, I have had no professional 
training in historiography and no experience with history textbooks.
Coming from the field of social theory, I therefore first considered analyzing 
selected history textbooks from the perspective of their treatment of the ideological 
notions that constitute m odern identities - primarily the notions of nation and 
language, and the role of the school as a state institution within the context of the 
m odern nation-state. However, I have come to realize during the course of our 
workshops and through extremely fruitful debates with other participants that my 
arguments were often somewhat insufficient and more often than not intuitive 
rather than based on solid research and theoretical formulation. My interests lie 
mostly in the epistemology of the humanities, and I have been researching for 
the last few years (mostly in the case of Japan) the history of academic attitudes 
towards these concepts, which are primarily framed and reproduced through the 
scholarly discourse of academic establishments, particularly within such disciplines 
as historiography, linguistics, sociology, ethnology etc. So, I eventually realized 
I needed to turn m y attention also to the problem of these academic discourses 
which are being reproduced through the system of m odern compulsory education.
In the course of our meetings in Ljubljana and Tokyo over the past two years I 
first set out to examine a few selected high school history textbooks published in 
Slovenia since independence in 1991, and to analyze how exactly they approach 
the question concerning the history o f a nation, as well as the question of language, 
as one of the m ain determ ining factors in the process of constructing national 
identities. Based on these examples the rest of this paper deals with the question 
of history as a school subject and the role of school systems in general, as well as 
with the role of the hum an and social sciences, where said ideological discourses
- spread throughout the education system - are actually being produced.
Approaching the question of history textbooks from this angle made things 
easier for m e because even though most of my colleagues were in fact practicing 
historians, they nevertheless shared m any of m y views regarding ideological 
narratives in historiography Saying this, however, in no way implies that I would 
like to m inim ize the burden of my responsibility for the ideas I propose in this 
paper. O n the contrary, I am sure m any of the arguments put forward here will 
probably still invite disagreement from my colleagues, as was at times the case 
during our exciting debates. But even though our discussions sometimes got

lively at the expense of agreement, they were still never “a dialogue of the deaf” 
as debates between historians and social theorists in general have been described 
by Peter Burke,1 referring to the essay by Fernand Braudel.2
2. DEFINING THE PROBLEM OF HISTORY
The view that history as a school subject, as well as historiography as an 
academic discipline, both abound in ideological discourses was, as I have said, 
to some extent shared by my colleagues participating in the workshop. In fact, 
one of the objectives of the workshop, as I understood it, was precisely a critical 
evaluation of these discourses in order to propose reforms to the current school 
history curricula and education. I have to thank on this occasion dr. Peter Vodo­
pivec who kindly referred m e to the proceedings from the 33rd General Meeting 
of the Association of Historical Societies of Slovenia that took place in Kranj, 
Slovenia between the 19th and 21s t of October 2006, and published under the 
title The Mythical and the Stereotypical in Slovene Perception o f History (2008). 
This was a valuable source of inform ation for me, unaware as I was of the 
critical voices within the discipline of historiography and history education in 
Slovenia. In his contribution to the proceedings dr. Vodopivec confirm ed my 
initially only intuitive suspicions about the epistemological struggles within 
historiography and the difficulties in defining its proper object of research. Under 
the title The Vicious Circle o f National History Vodopivec describes the genesis of 
national historiographies since the m id-19th century in Europe and the gradual 
development of its m ethodologies and concepts.3
According to Vodopivec, in 19th century historiography the nation appeared 
as a ‘historical being par excellencea sort of collective historical hero, and the 
m ain task of historians, being supposed to record ‘what really happened’ , became 
narrating the history of the nation, considered to be the central subject of 
historical development.4 Historiography thus established itself as an academic
1 “Even today, some historians still regard sociologists as people who state the obvious in a barbarous 
and abstract jargon, lack any sense of place and time, squeeze individuals without mercy into rigid 
categories, and, to cap it all, describe these activities as ‘ scientific’ . Sociologists, for their part, have 
traditionally viewed historians as amateurish, myopic fact-collectors without system, m ethod or 
theory, the imprecision of their ‘ data base’ matched only by their incapacity to analyze it.” Peter 
Burke, History and Social Theory (2nd ed.), Cambridge: Polity, 2005, pp. 2-3.
2 Fernand Braudel, “History and Sociology” , in Fernand Braudel, On History (S. Matthews, Trans). 
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980, pp. 64-82.
3 Peter Vodopivec, “Začarani krog nacionalne zgodovine” [“The Vicious Circle of National History”], 
in Mitja Ferenc, & Branka Petkovšek (eds.), Mitsko in stereotipno v slovenskem pogledu na zgodovino 
[The Mythical and the Stereotypical in Slovene Perception o f History], Ljubljana: Zveza zgodovinskih 
društev Slovenije, 2008, pp. 49-59.
4 Ibid, p. 50.

discipline within the specific historical context of the changing social realities 
and the emergence of the new nation-state based identities on a par with other 
disciplines such as linguistics, ethnology and literary studies as well as the 
social sciences. In addition, the essential technical procedures and canons of 
relevance by which historians still operate today were also established at that 
time.5 It is true that in the afterm ath of the First World War the Annales school 
founded in France by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre initiated new approaches 
to historiographical research, and produced m any of the famous names of 20th 
century historiography like Fernand Braudel, Georges Duby or Jacques Le 
Goff, but there was nevertheless a lot of resistance to its new epistemology, and 
although French historiography since the establishment of the Annales journal 
had slowly em barked on an im portant m ethodological and conceptual reform 
in the historiographical research before and long after the Second W orld War, 
positivist orientations of national historiography inherited from the 19th century 
have nevertheless rem ained dom inant.6
The fact that the phenom ena of nation and nation-state became the central 
subjects of historical development as well as the central objects of historiographical 
research which, in the words of Vodopivec, became “a discipline that was supposed 
to affirm and clarify national characteristics and ancient national and state 
traditions” ,7 shows that historiography was, from its outset, an ideological endeavor, 
in the sense that it did not construct its epistemological framework by producing 
its scientific object of research through theoretical practice, but, on the contrary, 
was itself the product of an ideological concept in whose service it played the role 
of consolidating the unity of the state and of forming as well as perpetuating values 
and feelings of belonging. Nations were constructing their own histories which, 
regardless of the accuracy of the past events’ they were based on, were necessarily 
constructed through the process of ‘inventing tradition, and the main mechanism 
of achieving this construction of national identity was historiography.
These ‘ myths’ of nations were of course not exclusively the product of national 
historiographies but, as Vodopivec notes, also of disciplines such as ethnology 
(national culture), literary studies (national literature) and linguistics (national 
language), and were co-created and disseminated particularly effectively by literary 
artists and political activists as well as writers of school textbooks, where ‘ national 
history’ was being didactically and patriotically simplified for school purposes. 
Typically these myths centered around a few standard topoi such as the myth 
about autochthonous peoples and territories (‘ the cradle of the nation), the myth
5 Willie Thompson, W hat Happened to History? London: Pluto Press, 2000.
6 Vodopivec, “Začarani krog nacionalne zgodovine” , p. 50.
7 Ibid, p. 50.

of the golden age of early independence, the myth of a nations suffering under the 
oppression of foreigners and enemies, the myth of the chosen nation, etc.8
According to Štih,9 the task of prom oting the idea of one indivisible and 
unchangeable nation with a hom ogenous and straightforward image of conti­
nuous history justifying the existence of said nation as an eternal concept was 
thus entrusted to the field of humanities in the 19th century - from philosophy to 
archaeology and ethnography and particularly to historiography. The com bination 
of rom antic political philosophy and historiography on one side and comparative 
linguistics on the other has also given birth to the conception that language is an 
objective criterion which can be used to identify a nation.1 0
We m ust therefore first ask ourselves how m uch historiography has succeeded 
(or even tried) to theoretically reconsider its own foundations upon w hich it 
was built as an ideological discipline serving the nascent idea of nation in the 
process of emerging nation-states in Europe during the 19th century? According 
to Vodopivec, the ideas about the Slovene nation as a historical collective subject 
have not been completely renounced even by historians themselves.1 1 Still, 
Vodopivec concludes with the rem ark that Slovene historiography has in the last 
decades considerably widened its research area and its view on the Slovene past 
by opening itself to social-historical, anthropological, dem ographic and cultural- 
historical topics that were traditionally ignored in historiographical research.1 2 
That is certainly the case, but the fact remains that no m atter how much 
historiography has tried to redefine the concept of nation as its explicandum, the 
latter nevertheless still remains an explicans for the discipline of historiography 
itself, or as Štih puts it, “outside nations and their frameworks we can hardly even 
conceive of history. European history in our conceptions thus still figures more 
as a sum of respective national histories than as an integral history or rather as 
a history that used to be structured in different ways than national histories.”1 3
2.1. Historiography as a ‘Scientific’ Discipline
Historiography is one of the oldest hum an practices, but as an academic 
discipline it has appeared relatively late; more precisely, it has appeared at a 
specific historical m om ent - along with the birth of nations and nation-states.
8 Ibid, p. 53.
9 Peter Štih, “Miti in stereotipi v podobi starejše slovenske nacionalne zgodovine” [“Myths and 
stereotypes pertaining to older Slovene national history”], in Mitja Ferenc, & Branka Petkovšek 
(eds.), Mitsko in stereotipno v slovenskem pogledu na zgodovino [The Mythical and the Stereotypical in 
Slovene Perception o f History], Ljubljana: Zveza zgodovinskih društev Slovenije, 2008, pp. 25-47.
10 Ibid, p. 28.
11 Vodopivec, “Začarani krog nacionalne zgodovine” , p. 58.
12 Ibid, p. 59.
13 Štih, “Miti in stereotipi v podobi starejše slovenske nacionalne zgodovine” , p. 29.

Medieval universities generally had four faculties: theology, medicine, law 
and philosophy. In the 19th century, after the shift of the scientific paradigm that 
began in the times of Descartes and Galilei was completed, the philosophical 
faculty divided into two parts1 4 , where one part covered the so-called ‘ sciences’ 
and the other the ‘hum anities’ . Based on this separation the m odern university 
was born, with full-time, paid professors “who are grouped together not merely in 
‘ faculties’ but in ‘ departm ents’ or ‘ chairs’ within these faculties, each departm ent 
asserting that it is the locus of a particular ‘ discipline’ . ”1 5
The new ‘ scientific’ paradigm also initiated a complete revolution in the 
methods of historical research during the 19th century. This revolution is usually 
associated with the historian Leopold von Ranke who rose in protest against the 
‘ moralizing history’ with his firm insistence that the task of a historian is to only 
narrate ‘how it actually was’ (wie es eigentlich gewesen) - an insistence which faced 
an incredibly good response from the next generations of Germ an, British and 
even French historians who have faithfully followed this cult of historical ‘ facts’ .1 6 
In his famous book W hat is History? C arr writes that this ‘ fetishism of facts’ , typical 
of 19th century historiography, was legitimized by a fetishism of documents. Carr 
suggested that in spite of the almost religious attitude of historians toward such 
docum ents, these docum ents do not m ean anything until the historian studies 
and explains them .1 7 As Munslow put it, ‘ facts’ are literally meaningless in their 
unprocessed state of a simple evidential statem ent and history is about the process 
of translating evidence into facts.1 8
W ith the change of method also came the change of the object of history. The 
background of Ranke’ s revolution in historiography was not a simple rejection 
of the so-called social history that was popular before his time, but the switch in 
perspective concerning the object of history. His history now focused on the state:1 9 
In the first place, it was in this period that European governments were coming 
to view history as a means o f promoting national unity, as a means o f education for 
citizenship, or, as a less sympathetic observer might have p u t it, a means o f nationa­
ls The final strict division between philosophy and science only occurred sometime in the late 18th 
century and as Wallerstein notes, at that time “Immanuel Kant still found it perfectly appropriate 
to lecture on astronomy and poetry as well as on metaphysics. ... Knowledge was still considered 
a unitary field.” “It was those defending empirical science’ who insisted upon this divorce. They 
said that the only route to ‘ truth’ was theorizing based on induction from empirical observations. 
... They insisted that metaphysical deduction was speculation and had no ‘ truth’-value. They thus 
refused to think of themselves as ‘ philosophers’ ” (Immanuel Wallerstein, World-System Analysis: An 
Introduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004, p. 2.)
15 Ibid., p. 3.
16 Eduard H. Carr, What is History? (2nd ed.). Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001 [1961], p. 3.
17 Ibid., p. 10.
18 Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History. London 8c New York: Routledge, 1997, p. 7.
19 Burke, History and Social Theory, p. 5.

list propaganda. In times when the new states o f Germany and Italy, and older states 
such as France and Spain, were still divided by their regional traditions, the teaching 
o f national history in schools and universities encouraged political integration. The 
kind o f history fo r which governments were prepared to pay was, naturally enough, 
the history o f the state.
The decision behind what was to be the object of historical research was thus 
not theoretically produced, but ideologically given, or, as Wallerstein notes, the fact 
that “they were relying on written docum ents from the past already biased what 
they could possibly study, since the docum ents in archives were written largely by 
persons linked to political structures - diplomats, civil servants, political leaders.” 
Moreover, through this m ethod historians were also limited regionally; namely, 
they were studying areas that were covered by these documents. “In practice, 
historians in the nineteenth century tended therefore to study first of all their 
own country and secondarily other countries which were considered ‘ historical 
nations’ , which seemed to m ean nations with a history that could be docum ented 
in archives.”2 0 Thus the history of nation-states became the story of the past 
events within the area covered or coveted by the contem porary state. This was 
of course a completely arbitrary choice, but it was useful for the strengthening of 
nationalist sentim ents and therefore supported by political powers.2 1
The shift was thus m ade in the understanding of history w riting from 
earlier histories or ‘ chronicles’ to the use of the official records of governments. 
Historians turned their attention to the state archives with new sophisticated 
techniques for assessing the reliability of the docum ents, and argued “that their 
own histories were therefore m ore objective and m ore ‘ scientific’ than those of 
their predecessors.”2 2 As Wallerstein notes, “despite this more ‘ scientific’ bent, the 
new historians did not choose to be located in the faculty of science, but rather 
in the faculty of humanities. This m ight seem strange, since these historians 
were rejecting the philosophers because of their speculative assertions.” They 
were of course empiricists, so it could have been expected that they would feel 
sympathy for the natural sciences, however, they were at the same tim e by and 
large suspicious of any kind of large-scale generalizations or of formulating 
hypotheses.2 3 Thus historiography inevitably ended up sharing the schizophrenic 
fate of other social sciences and hum anities as victims of the new ‘ scientific’ 
paradigm - searching their own epistemological identity in the never successful 
pursuit of natural science paradigm.
20 Wallerstein, World-System Analysis, p. 5.
21 Ibid., p. 6.
22 Burke, History and Social Theory, pp. 5-6.
23 Wallerstein, World-System Analysis, p. 5.

But before I proceed with the discussion of the question of school history 
education and the problems of the epistemology of historiography and of the 
social sciences and hum anities in general, let us take a look at some concrete 
examples of the textual analysis of history textbooks, published in Slovenia in the 
late 1990s, focusing on the treatm ent of the nation and language as well as other 
examples o f ‘ objective’ historical ‘facts’ and ‘ events’ as ‘ they actually happened’ . I 
will take a look at two history textbooks for the 1s t and 3rd grade of high schools, 
published in the late 1990s. The bolds are in the original while the underlined 
parts are all stressed by me.
3. HISTORY TEXTBOOKS IN SLOVENIA
The textbook History 1: Textbook fo r the First Year o f Gymnasium opens with 
a chapter on history titled simply H is to ry and its first subtitle reads H isto ry as a 
d iscip lin e .2 4
Interestingly, before embarking on the long odyssey of history itself, the textbook 
first provides the students with an explanation about history. In this metahistorical 
chapter it begins by explaining that in the past, as well as nowadays, the notions 
of history and story often get confused. It then presents two excerpts, first a poem 
about the battle at Sisak in 1593, followed by an excerpt from the historical narrative 
of the same battle. The following explanation clarifies how the story of a nobleman 
from Carniola (part of today’ s Slovenia), Adam Ravbar, who distinguished himself 
in the fighting against the Turks at Sisak (todays Croatia), was preserved in the first 
example in the form of a poem through oral tradition, while in the second example 
the historian has written only what actually happened and what can be proven with 
the help o f historical sources.2 5 This is why this second text belongs to historiography 
as a discipline scientifically researched by historians.
In order to explain to the students what history is, the textbook thus m ore or 
less quotes verbatim what Leopold von Ranke had written back in 1824. It further 
explains historiographical m ethodology as follows:
How do we fin d out what happened in the past?
A Historian will, like any researcher, try to reconstruct the events and 
will, naturally, interrogate his “ witnesses” . Historians “ witnesses” are 
the historical sources. ...In historical sources historians look for data or 
historical facts that narrate about the human past. 2 6
24 Vilma Brodnik, Robert Jernejčič, Zoran Radonjič, Tjaša Urankar-Dornik, Zgodovina 1: učbenik za 
prvi letnik gimnazije [History 1: Textbook for the First Year o f Gymnasium]. Ljubljana: DZS, 1997, p.
12.
25 Ibid, p. 13.
26 Ibid, p. 16.

The chapter ends with a com m ent stating that concerning recent events 
historians can hardly write about them without bias, because they have inevitably 
formed em otional attitudes towards them; and that history writing can also be 
influenced by political decisions in certain countries.2 7
3.1. The treatment of nation and language in history textbooks
The textbook History 1 is in large part dedicated to the Greek and Roman 
histories, but when it comes to treating the territory of todays Republic of 
Slovenia, the concept of the Slovene lands is applied even in the context of the 
Age of Antiquity and the Early M iddle Ages:
O u r Lan d s in the Rom an P erio d 2 8
The chapter begins with the following subtitle:
Rom an occupation o f Slovene te rrito ry
The textbook of course does not imply that Romans took these lands from 
Slovenes, but the diction of the titles goes as follows:
- The adm inistrative d iv isio n o f Slovene lands under the Rom ans
- The R o m an izatio n and co lo n iza tio n o f Slovene te rrito ry
- Rom an m aterial and sp iritu a l culture in Slovenia
- Late A n tiq u ity in Slovenia
None of the subtitles fails to include the adjective Slovene in them.
This shows that the choice of the object of the historical narrative is based 
on the territorial concept of the m odern political entity called the Republic of 
Slovenia. However, when it comes to the period of Slavic migrations to these 
territories, all of a sudden the territorial concept is replaced by the linguistic 
and political one, namely, the narrative introduces a new subject - the ‘Slavic 
people - and continues with the story of the first know n instances of Slavic state 
formation, the tribal alliance under king Samo and later the Duchy of Carantania 
(Karantanija), neither of which were centered in todays Slovene territory. The 
following pages2 9 narrate the history of Carantania, its characteristics, political 
organization and so on, without any explicit justification, but sure enough 
with the implicit supposition that this is somehow connected to the history of 
Slovenia. The nam e ‘Slovenes’ is not m entioned in the m ain narrative where it 
strictly talks about the Slavs or the Carantanians and about Slavonic languages, 
with one notable exception when it comes to the question of language. W hen 
it mentions the Freising Manuscripts from the 10th or the beginning of the 11th
27 Ibid, p. 19.
28 Ibid, p. 197.
29 Ibid, p. 246-252.

century, it states that these preserved Slavonic texts are the oldest docum ent of 
m issionary activity among the Slovenes, and it describes them as texts written in 
the Old Slovene language, used to spread C hristian faith among the Carantanians, 
thus explicitly connecting the Carantanians to the Slovenes.3 0 This ‘ slip-up’ is not 
surprising if we keep in m ind that it is exactly the idea of linguistic continuity 
upon which the historical narrative of the Slovene nation is built. Due to the 
absence of an independent Slovene nation-state until 1991 in m ost of the cases of 
Slovene history the phrase Slovene lands is thus used instead.
The textbook History 3: Textbook fo r the Third Year o f Gymnasium3 1 covers 
the history of the 19th century up to the First World War, and subsequently deals 
with the golden age’ of the rise of nationalism.
For the period of nascent nations and the emergence of national identities 
the term national rebirth is used, implying that the always existing nations were 
only reborn in that period. (All the bolds are in the original text, the underscores 
are mine.)
Slovenes in the Pre-M arch Period:
The fundam ental characteristic o f the decades during which the Austrian 
Empire was not involved in any international armed conflicts was that the 
Slovenes have again, after a millennium, lived under a common ruler.3 2
The textbook leaves no doubt as to the ‘ millenarian history of the Slovenes, 
who, until the nineteenth century, were forcefully, or through some other reason, 
divided am ong different lands. The perspective of the textbook is teleological, 
the final desirable (and indeed natural) goal of history being the unification of all 
Slovenes in a single and independent nation-state. Moreover, the ideological role 
of humanists, I am analyzing in this paper, is explicitly highlighted here exactly 
in the sense I have postulated it to be, but w ithout the connotation I am inferring 
from it, of course:
Therefore the poets and writers, linguists, ethnologists and historians 
were at the same time also the national initiators.3 3
On the issue of the Illyrian movement - a com peting ideology to nationalism 
trying to unite all the South Slavic peoples into one single nation - the textbook 
brings forth the following points:
The idea o f Illyrism fo u n d a few ardent supporters am ong the Slovenes, 
who were politically divided, and were subjected, particularly in the north, 
to strong Germanization.
30 Ibid, p. 251.
31 Stane Granda & Franc Rozman, Zgodovina 3: učbenik za tretji letnik gimnazije [History 3: Textbook 
for the Third Year o f Gymnasium], Ljubljana: DZS, 1999.
32 Ibid., p. 33.
33 Ibid., p. 33.

Books intended fo r the common people were still to be printed in the Slovene 
language, while higher literature was supposed to be written in the Illyrian 
language, an artificial language, with Slovene and Croatian elements and 
a common writing system.
The acceptance after 1848 o f the Slovene language by the Austrian 
authorities as the common language o f all Slovenes meant more or less the 
final defeat o f Illyrism. As a political and linguistic movement Illyrism 
kept resurging up until the beginning o f the twentieth century, but it has 
never again posed a threat to independent Slovene cultural development,3 4
The above examples of Slovene high school history textbooks demonstrate 
first their explicit adherence to the Rankean belief in the empiricist approach to 
writing history as it actually happened, and second, that following this objective 
approach they inevitably end up narrating a mythological history of the nation. 
The m antra about the objective’ history also eliminates the possibility of students 
questioning not only the factual ‘ truthfulness’ of what is w ritten in the textbook, 
but also the selection o f what is and what is not included, why certain ‘facts’ or 
docum ents are selected and others omitted. In other words, the narrative of 
history as it actually happened obscures the fact that there is also m eaning to 
what actually is not there, and that we have to be just as conscious about the 
phenom enon Andrej Bekeš calls the conspicuous absence.3 5 Let us take a look at 
some examples.
The traditional view of Slovene history, apart from deriving its statehood 
from the medieval state of C arantania and im agined linguistic continuity, also 
frames its identity on the centuries-long antagonism between G erm anic and 
Slavic peoples and the centuries-long oppression of the latter by the former. So, 
how does a history textbook cover the ancient events without any bias and only 
bringing the ‘ actual facts’ from historical documents:
The G erm an ic and Sla v ic Peoples before the G reat M igration.
The chapter on the emergence and m igration of the Slavic and Germanic 
peoples is introduced through the ancient docum ents. First the textbook offers a 
description of the Germ anic peoples taken from Tacitus’ Germania:
“ It is known that Germans don’ t live in the cities and don’ t like congested 
places...”
“ For building they only use raw materials, and don’ t care much fo r beauty 
and aesthetics...”
34 Ibid., p. 36.
35 Andrej Bekeš, “Conspicuous Absence: National Language in Japanese History Textbooks” , in Inter 
Faculty, 2, 2011, pp. 11-25.

“When they don’ t wage wars, they are bored. They spend their free timp 
sleeping and eating...”. 3 6
This description is followed by the description of the Slavic peoples:3 7
“These tribes, the Slavs or the Antes, are not ruled by one person, but have 
always lived in a democratic society: therefore in their community all public 
affairs, favorable or not, are discussed in public forum s.. (Procopius of 
Caesarea)
Or:
“The Slavic peoples do not treat prisoners the same way as other peoples 
treat their slaves. They do not keep them indefinitely, but rather give them 
the following choice: they can return home in exchange fo r a ransom, or 
they can become slaves before they set themselves free and become friends.” 
(Strategikon of Maurice)
A simple analysis like this one clearly demonstrates that it is through the 
neutral’ and objective’ quotation of sources (historical m aterial par excellence) 
that the image of Germ ans as more barbaric and less civilized than their Slavic 
counterparts is being prom oted in the text.
The nation-state centered narrative as described above is of course in no way a 
Slovene or even European particularity. For the purpose of this workshop, Andrej 
Bekeš did a survey of Japanese history textbooks from a similar perspective and 
with similar results. The narratives about the Japanese nation and the Japanese 
language are similarly not being treated historically, but rather as a natural, self- 
evident premise around which the narrative of Japanese history is constructed, 
even though, as Am ino points out, first of all there can be no talk o f ‘ Japan before 
the nam e Nihon first appeared somewhere in the 7th century. Besides, the name 
Nihon or Nippon was neither a territorial nam e nor a nam e of a tribe or of a royal 
dynasty but a designation for a country from the perspective of the Tang dynasty, 
and was m ore or less synonymous with the rule of the tennö dynasty at the time.3 8 
Apart from its ambiguous m eaning as well as its unclear reading, the nam e that 
designated Japan in the seventh or the eighth century also designated something 
completely different from what we call Japan today.
The situation with the national language was again comparable to one in 
Europe, where language had to be standardized as a device that helped consolidate
36 Brodnik, Jernejčič, Radonjič, Urankar-Dornik, Zgodovina 1, p. 204-205.
37 Ibid., p. 207.
38 Yoshihiko Amino, Nihonron no shiza: Rettö no shakai to kokka [Perspectives o f the Theory o f Japan: 
Society and State in the Archipelago]. Tokyo: Shôgakukan, 1990, p. 9.

and create the feeling of com m on identity. As Yasuda argues, the path to the 
conception of kokugo (national language) led m ore or less in the direction of the 
two vectors of ‘ spoken language com m unity’ and ‘written language com m unity’ . 
The spoken language of course represented the idea of a com m on linguistic 
community, but such language did not exist. Spoken languages varied in all 
respects from regional variations to class variations. There was no single spoken 
‘Japanese’ . O n the other hand, the written language was limited to a small class 
of literate people, but had no regional variations. And though nobody spoke that 
language, it had its history. By converging these two vectors, the differences of 
class and region were overcome, and the new spoken language became kokugo - a 
national language shared by all the nationals and with its im agined uninterrupted 
history since at least the poetic compilation of Manyöshü in the 9th century.3 9
In Japan, history textbook production is completely controlled by the 
government officials at the M inistry of Education, which has one of the most 
centralized formal systems of control over education, usually resulting in the 
self-censorship of writers and publishers, who literally follow every word of 
‘ recom m endation by the M inistry in order to get their textbooks approved.4 0 
Some writers and teachers have taken it upon themselves to fight a battle of 
windmills with the M inistry in the form of num erous lawsuits, like the notorious 
Ienaga Saburö, but to little avail. It is the M inistry that is the arbiter of history in 
Japan.4 1 As Bukh has shown, the m ain subject of controversy in Japan’ s history 
textbooks debate remains the question of Japan’ s role before and during the 
Pacific War, m easured in degrees of victimization and victimhood. Bukh argues 
that “the narrative of Japanese victim hood creates a distinction between the state 
and the nation and emphasizes the heavy cost of the state’ s m isadventures and 
policies for the people of Japan. As such, the victim hood of the Japanese people 
serves not only as a ‘ foundational myth’ of postwar Japan’ s pacifist identity but 
also creates a highly critical view of the state and its militaristic policies.”4 2 Based 
on this ‘ separation myth’ in which the Japanese people (nation) play the role of 
the victim of the Japanese state, “the Japanese people’ s suffering is m uch more 
central in the textbooks than are depictions of the pain inflicted by Japan on other 
nations.”4 3
39 Toshiaki Yasuda, “ Tagengo shakai” to iu gensö [“ Multilinguistic Society” as an Illusion], Tokyo: 
Sangensha, 2011, pp. 79-93.
40 Christopher Barnard, Language, Ideology, and Japanese History Textbooks. London & New York: 
RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, p. 12.
41 Ibid., p. 14.
42 Alexander Bukh, “Japans History Textbooks Revisited” , Asian Survey (Academic Journal), 47, vol. 5, 
2007, p. 691.
43 Ibid., p. 695.

4. HISTORY AS A SCHOOL SUBJECT
Based on the above discussion and analysis of textbook examples, it can be 
established that the empiricist, positivist Rankean historiography remains the 
dom inant paradigm in historiography because it is best suited to provide the 
image of a non-problematic, docum ent based objective historical ‘ truth’ . M odern 
history textbooks claim to be politically neutral and scientifically objective. I 
argue, however, that ‘ neutrality’ and objectivity’ are in fact ideological concepts 
concealing a deep-rooted structure of a ‘ scientific’ paradigm that is preventing 
the exercise of a theoretical practice in the field of the humanities.
Naturally, historiography is not the same thing as writing history textbooks. 
However, if we argue for the difference between the two in the sense of considering 
the first a theoretical pursuit of knowledge and the other serving a different 
purpose (for example, consolidating the state by instilling national awareness 
and educating good citizens) then we are willingly subscribing to the premise 
that school functions as an ideological state apparatus par excellence as Louis 
Althusser has defined it.4 4 The school system in general and the subject of history 
in particular represent the prim ary polygon of ideological m anipulation and are 
therefore prim e mechanisms for reproducing a dom inant ideology. Therefore, if 
we are not willing to subscribe (at least openly) to such a conception of school, 
but profess it to be an institution that prom otes ‘independent thinking’ , then we 
m ust reform it completely.
4.1 The ‘objectivity’ of knowledge in historiography
The creation of the m odern education system was instrum ental in the con­
struction of nation-states. The role the textbooks play is the role of education 
which is in the service of sustaining and reproducing the current ruling 
ideology.4 5 Education, m onopolized by the m odern school system, plays the 
role of integrating the social structure which, in m odern perspective, m eans a 
sovereign nation-state.
44 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” , in: Lenin and Philosophy and Other 
Essays. London: NLB, 1971, pp. 121-173.
45 Ideology as a theoretical concept defines meaning by postulating social construction of meaning 
through discourse. Meaning is therefore never neutral’ , because the social reality is based in power 
relations, and is never ‘ fixed’ , because it is always being renegotiated through power struggles. 
Ideology can thus be defined as m eaning in the sense of a distorted image of the real conditions which 
construct people’ s relations. The distortion of the m eaning comes from the fact that since meaning 
is constructed within power relations, ideological m eaning is always in the service of justifying the 
existing power relations.

We have little reason to doubt Althussers analysis of ideological state appa­
ratuses among which school plays an im portant role. The role of the educational 
state apparatus is the reproduction of knowledge. However, ‘knowledge’ is not 
simply a ‘ neutral’ or ‘ true’ awareness of some ontological ‘ truth’ , but is rather a 
‘ view’ of the world, i.e. a conception based on power relations that are at work 
within a particular social formation. As Althusser put it:4 6
The mechanisms which produce this vital result for the capitalist regime 
are naturally covered up and concealed by a universally reigning ideology 
o f the School, universally reigning because it is one o f the essential form s of 
the ruling bourgeois ideology: an ideology which represents the School as a 
neutral environment purged o f ideology...
O f course school is not the only ‘ culprit’ in this reproduction of ‘knowledge’ 
of the ruling ideology. Most of this teaching is done also w ithin the family, in the 
church, in the army, in textbooks, in films, etc., but no other state apparatus has, 
as Althusser points out, the obligatory audience of the totality of the children, 
eight hours a day for five or six days a week.4 7
I will get back to the problem o f‘knowledge’ , but let me return at this point to 
the question of history. The Rankean concept of historiography that is supposed 
to be ‘ non-ideological’ and to only narrate things as they actually happened had 
other implications.4 8 It was Hegel’ s philosophy that grasped the understanding
46 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” , p. 148.
47 Ibid.
48 If ‘ biased’ historiography is constantly pressed to explain and justify its bias, ‘ objective’ historiography 
on the other hand simply plays the card that what it narrates has actually happened and thus avoids the 
need to explain its supposedly absent bias. As Lord Acton (quoted in the Introduction to the revised 
English translation of Ranke’ s book) said, Ranke decided “ to repress the poet, the patriot, the religious 
or political partisan, to sustain no cause, to banish himself from his books, to write nothing that could 
gratify his own feelings, or disclose his own private convictions.” (Leopold von Ranke, History of the 
Latin and Teutonic Nations (1494-1514). (G. R. translation), London: George Bell & Sons, 1909, p. xii.) 
This statement perfectly sums up the credo of empiricist ideology, namely, once you declare your own 
banishment from the books and sustain no cause, you can proceed by writing ’ objective’ history as Ranke 
does on the following pages where he discusses the history of Latin and Teutonic nations. This history 
had produced ‘ six great nations’ , three where the Latin element predominated (French, Spanish and 
Italian) and three where the Teutonic element predominated (German, English and Scandinavian) 
and though they were almost always at war among themselves, they formed a unity of the spirit and 
progressive development (Ibid., p. 2): “They successfully resisted the influence of foreign races. Among 
those nations which besides them had taken part in the migration of peoples, it was chiefly the Arabs, 
Hungarians, and Slavs who threatened to disturb, if not to destroy them. But the Arabs were averted by 
the complete incompatibility o f their religion; the Hungarians were beaten back within their own borders; 
and the neighboring Slavs were at last annihilated or subjected.” (Ibid., p. 3.) Such is thus a history as it 
actually happened with the author repressing the patriot in himself and sustaining no cause. Besides, 
this ‘ neutrality’ should also be understood through the fact that Ranke was “a paid agent of the Prussian 
government, secretly commissioned in the 1830s to use his growing academic prestige to publish 
attacks upon radicals and democrats.” (Thompson, What happened to history?, p. 4.)

that history was not a chapter of accidents “but a developmental process with a 
powerful, complex and intricate logic to it and one moreover that was driven by 
struggle and conflict.”4 9 Ranke, on the other hand, had different ideas:5 0
His conception represented a polar opposite to that o f Hegel, fo r behind the 
rather disingenuous claim to have no philosophy and to be purely concerned 
with narrative and explanation stood a rigid belief that states and societies 
were justified by the mere fact o f their existence; they represented whatever 
happened to be right fo r their time (here Ranke and Hegel were in 
accord) - but the historian scorned the notion o f any process o f dialectical 
development. All eras and all (traditional) institutions were equally valid in 
the sight o f God.
Such a conservative stance carries im portant political implications, including 
the endorsem ent of state institutions and opposition to any kind of reform, which 
still applies today in countries based on liberal democracy, where the institutions 
of liberal dem ocratic system (and indeed the capitalist m ode of production itself) 
are not supposed to be questioned or criticized in history textbooks.
W hat needs to be stressed is that this kind of historiography does not necessarily 
bear in itself a nationalist agenda in the strict sense of the term. The nation is not the 
‘ villain in this story. Rather it is the whole conceptual framework, supported by this 
specific ‘ scientific’ paradigm which can be inhabited by any kind of ideology, that 
is being questioned here. Ranke himself, in fact, as opposed to historians like Sybel 
and Treitschke, was not a nationalist in the m odern sense of the term, but, according 
to Thompson, as “a servant of the Prussian Monarchy in the 1830s he was indeed 
in political opposition to the German nationalism which was at that time one of 
the monarchy’ s principal enemies.”5 1 The point is that this kind o f‘ objectivity’ bases 
its explanations on the ideological background provided by the current dominant 
ideological environment (whatever it is) that it seeks to explain. It is also a fact 
that, since Ranke, historiography has proliferated far beyond its original political 
focus to include such areas as economic history, social history, cultural history, etc. 
However, as Thompson notes, all, “so far as they had any pretensions to be serious 
or scientific, however, were constrained, whatever else they m ight disagree about, 
to subscribe to the basic Rankean methodology.”5 2
O ur focus should therefore turn to the premise of historically objective ‘truth’ 
and the belief in objective ‘ facts’ , disinterested historians, and objectivity’ in 
historiography itself.
49 Thompson, What happened to history?, p. 3.
50 Ibid., p. 4.
51 Ibid., p. 10.
52 Ibid., p. 11.

4.2 The problem of ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’
Rather than continuing to write history as it actually happened, we should - 
accepting the premise that ‘knowledge’ and ‘ truth’ are discursive in their nature and 
firmly related to power structures - instead investigate “how societies interpret, 
imagine, create, control, regulate and dispose of knowledge, especially through the 
claims of disciplines to truth, authority and certainty.”5 3
The production of ‘ knowledge’ as a fundamentally institutional category 
was one of the main interests of Foucault’ s work and he approached the question 
specifically within the field of history as a discipline. His main point, according to 
Duchêne, was that historical narrative should not be limited to the perspective of 
a linear succession of events, but should rather consider how historical notions are 
constituted as institutional objects. Thus madness, for example, does not exist in itself, 
but is a historical notion and “any description of the history of madness should have 
the primary aim of explaining how it becomes important within a given institution.”5 4 
The point Duchêne makes is that hum an sciences are possible by a frame of 
knowledge that they themselves set up by which they create their own discourse 
of the order of truth. It has also been emphasized by Foucault, for example in his 
Histoire de la sexualité, “that a diversity of places for the production of knowledge 
exists and that, behind the production of knowledge, the obvious workings 
of power can be seen. No knowledge can occur w ithout power. Knowledge is 
the manifest result of power, and power is omnipresent, thus undercutting the 
idea that power issues are only situated in the sphere of politics.” Basically, says 
Duchêne, “the knowledge that is produced is never neutral: it is biased. Knowledge 
is conditioned by a series of interpretations of facts according to constraints and 
to a particular ideological framework.”5 5
Thompson points out that the “principal targets of Foucault s critique were what 
may be term ed the applied social sciences of the epoch of m odernity - medicine, 
penology, criminology, psychology and psychiatry - and it m ust be conceded 
that all of them have m urky pasts and have been complicit to greater or lesser 
degrees with the malign operations of authoritarian power holders.”5 6 According 
to Thompson, the same point can doubtless be m ade about historiography.
For example, G. R. Elton is aware of the problem of the concept o f ‘ truth’ 
which arises from the attem pt to make history seem a science, comparable in 
purpose and m ethod to the natural sciences:5 7
53 Munslow, Deconstruting history, p. 125.
54 Alexandre Duchêne, Ideologies Across Nations: The Construction o f Linguistic Minorities at the United 
Nations. Berlin & New York: M outon de Gruyter, 2008, pp. 24-25.
55 Ibid., p. 25.
56 Thompson, W hat happened to history?, p. 151.
57 Geoffrey R. Elton, The Practice o f History (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002 [1967], p. 47.

The natural sciences have, it would seem, virtually abandoned the concepts 
o f truth and falsehood; phenomena once regarded as objectively true are 
now seen to be only a statistical abstraction from random variables, and 
the accusing finger o f the uncertainty principle further insists that, since 
observation alters a phenomenon, nothing is capable o f being studied 
except after it is changed from the state in which it was meant to have been 
investigated.
However, in spite of believing that it was the practicing scientists who finally 
perm itted philosophers to release themselves from the notion of ‘ truth, Elton 
nevertheless remains deeply within the confines of the ruling paradigm. In his 
opinion the lost conception of truth has not stopped scientists from continuing 
their efforts to investigate and understand nature; it has only somehow reduced 
their positivist pride as the sole possessor of truth. Since, on the other hand, 
historians have always been inclined to doubt the value, even the possibility, of 
their studies, he believes that they now require not this new humility, but some 
return to the assurance of the nineteenth century that the w ork they are doing 
deals w ith reality. Thus, instead of capitalizing on the findings in natural sciences 
and abandoning the notion o f ‘ truth’ altogether, Elton takes the backward course 
and declares with reaffirmed certainty that “the study of history, then, amounts 
to a search for the truth.”5 8 His misconception, however, stems from the fact that 
he fails to grasp the difference between a simple past5 9 on one side, and history on 
the other, which he clearly demonstrates by attacking C arr’ s distinction between 
fact about the past and fa ct o f history: “This is really an extraordinary way of 
looking at history; worse, it is an extraordinarily arrogant attitude both towards 
the past and to the place of the historian studying it.”6 0 W hat is extraordinary, in 
my view, is this naively simplistic understanding of the ‘ facts’:6 1
However, the event can be known, and that is all that is required to make 
it a fact o f history’ . Interpretation, or general acceptance o f a thesis, has 
nothing whatsoever to do with its independent existence. The point matters 
so much because Mr. Carr, and others who like him think that history 
is what historians write, not what happened, come dangerously close
58 Ibid., p. 46.
59 As Braudel puts it, at first sight the past seems to consist in a mass of diverse facts (a fire, a railway 
crash, the price of wheat, a crime, a theatrical production, a flood), “some of which catch the eye, 
and some of which are dim and repeat themselves indefinitely. ... But this mass does not make up 
all of reality, all the depth of history on which scientific thought is free to work.” (Fernand Braudel, 
“History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée” , in Fernand Braudel, On History (S. Matthews, 
Trans). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press., 1980, p. 28.)
60 Elton, The practice o f history, p. 50.
61 Ibid., p. 51.

to suggesting either that it does not much matter what one says because 
(interpretation being everything) there are always several reasonably 
convincing interpretations o f any given set o f events, or that history is 
altogether unknowable, being merely what happens to be said by a given 
historian at a given moment.
4.3 The problem of ‘scientific’ truth
W ithout reconsidering the problem of ‘ science in general we will hardly be 
able to make any steps forward. Paul Veyne tried to define history w ithin the 
classical division of, on the one hand, the nomological sciences, which have as 
their goal to establish laws or types, and on the other, the ideographical sciences, 
dealing with the individual. We have already seen that making ‘ an event’ or 
‘ an individual’ an object of history is problematic in itself, however, describing 
hum an sciences and historiography in particular as ‘ideographic’ is again an 
attempt to explain their epistemological nature in relation to natural sciences that 
are apparently ‘ nomological’ . The problem is that such explanations are unable to 
break out of the epistemological box which is fram ed by the ideology upon which 
the whole concept o f‘ science’ resides. The ‘ scientific’ premise, stem m ing from the 
scholarship of the Renaissance and Enlightenm ent based on the revolutionary 
paradigm switch of Galilean physics, paved the path that led to the birth of social 
sciences - the disciplines that were supposed to study hum anity or hum an societies 
in a ‘ scientific’ way (as opposed to philosophy and the humanities), and produced 
a division between the natural sciences and the humanities. In the context of this 
paradigm the so-called social sciences have appeared, constantly m easuring their 
success next to the so-called natural sciences in their methodology, by either 
apologizing and hiding behind ‘idiographic’ explanations, or im itating ‘ scientific’ 
m ethods of measuring, calculating etc. But they never break away from the 
paradigm. The specter of ‘ scientism’ haunts the hum anities and social sciences 
which remain constantly on the defensive:6 2
It is not absolutely impossible a priori fo r the historian to imitate the physicist 
and to extract from a hum an fact an invariable, which, being abstract, is 
eternal and will be valid in all future concrete cases, as the law o f Galileo is 
valid fo r every future fall o f a body.
The trium ph of the ‘ scientific’ paradigm was thus another reason for the 
return to political history in the nineteenth century, by forcing historians to
62 Paul Veyne, Writing History: Essay on Epistemology. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984, 
p. 10.

reflect on their own m ethods which have established historiography as an 
academic discipline.
Along with the orientation towards the political ‘ scientific’ history also came 
the rejection of the then emerging discipline of sociology. Thus W ilhelm Dilthey, 
for example, argued that the sociology of August Comte and Herbert Spencer 
was pseudo-scientific because it offered causal explanations. He proposed a 
“distinction between the sciences, in which the aim is to explain from outside 
(erklären), and the humanities, including history, in which the aim is to understand 
from w ithin (verstehen)!'6 3
Nineteenth and early twentieth century social theory was not necessarily 
ignorant of history, if we just think of sociological classics like Vilfredo Pareto, 
Emile Durkheim or Max Weber - authors discussing classical Athens, Sparta 
and Rome as well as taking examples from the history of Italy in the M iddle 
Ages, or writing books on the trading companies in the M iddle Ages and the 
agrarian history of Ancient Rome.6 4 The point of disagreement was not their lack 
of knowledge of history, but rather their epistemological differences.
Later on the social sciences indeed started to move away from history and 
more towards a pure’ theory on the model of mathematics; the economists 
and sociologists began collecting data from contemporary society, while social 
anthropologists discovered the value o f‘ fieldwork’ .6 5 The social sciences thus turned 
away from the past, basing their social analyses on responses to questionnaires and 
interviews, making survey research the backbone of sociology, which regarded the 
past as irrelevant to an understanding of hum an action in the present.6 6
However, at around the same tim e social sciences were losing interest in the 
past, a m ore theoretically oriented historiography was emerging, m ost notably 
with the school that gathered around Annales. Thus Fernand Braudel him self was 
convinced that history and sociology should be particularly close, because the 
practitioners of both disciplines try to see hum an experience as a whole.6 7
My point is that such disciplinary division, which was m ostly the result of 
ideologicalconditionsandnotoftheoreticalpractice,isthereforecounterproductive 
for any kind of theoretical breakthrough in the field of the humanities. There 
has surely always existed a certain connection between historians and social 
theorists during the twentieth century, but what I really argue for is not another 
sort of interdisciplinary project, but rather the convergence of disciplines. It is
63 Burke, History and social theory, p. 7.
64 Ibid., pp. 9-10.
65 Ibid., p. 11.
66 Ibid., p. 12.
67 “I have already w ritten,... that sociology and history m ade up one single intellectual adventure, not 
two different sides of the same cloth but the very stuff of that cloth itself, the entire substance of its 
yarn.” (Braudel, “History and sociology” , p. 69.)

not enough to further divide into evermore specialized sub-disciplines, because 
the concept of discipline itself is anti-theoretical. Terms like social history or 
‘historical sociology (along w ith other terms, such as historical anthropology, 
economic history, etc.) have come into use, but instead of producing a unified 
theoretical field, they just further obscure and compartmentalize narrow areas 
of investigation, not to m ention the problem of ‘border disputes’ that arise from 
these divisions. Besides, calling historical research that incorporates social theory 
historical sociology, gives the impression that sociology as a discipline is in any 
way less problematic than historiography, disregarding the ideological nature of 
sociology itself.
As the famous historian Georges Duby put it, it goes w ithout saying that 
social history m ust be grounded in an analysis of m aterial structures.6 8 Instead 
of fragm enting our field of research into ever smaller sub-disciplines and 
inventing new terms, such as social history or historical sociology, we should 
rather unify the field of theoretical pursuit, basing it methodologically on a 
m aterialist conception of history. As Peter Burke puts it, we are “living in an age 
of blurred lines and open intellectual frontiers, an age which is at once exciting 
and confusing. References to M ikhail Bakhtin, to Pierre Bourdieu, to Fernand 
Braudel, to N orbert Elias, to Michel Foucault, to Clifford Geertz, can be found 
in the work of archaeologists, geographers and literary critics, as well as in that 
of sociologists and historians.”6 9 Historiography should not limit itself to simply 
examining what ‘ really happened’ , but should attem pt to explain how historical 
events and situations emerge and are constructed. We should be examining the 
ways in which knowledge is constructed and trying to see how this knowledge 
functions w ithin the relations of power. Historiography should not only narrate 
what actually happened, but should aspire to also understand why som ething 
happened, instead of som ething else, etc.
If we understand that ‘knowledge’ and ‘ truth’ are constructed through 
discourses based in power relations, and that discourses are therefore by their 
definition material as well as historical, what we should do, in my opinion, is 
defend and actively prom ote theoretical historiography based on the material 
conception of history. After all, the discovery of the system of concepts (and 
therefore of the scientific theory) w hich opens up to scientific knowledge w hat can 
be called the ‘ C ontinent of History’ , is, in the words of Althusser, simply one of 
the three great scientific discoveries of the whole of hum an history. Before Marx, 
says Althusser, two continents’ of comparable im portance had been opened up’
68 Georges Duby, “Ideologies in Social History” , in J. Le Goff, & P. Nora (eds.), Constructing the Past (D. 
Denby, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 151.
69 Burke, History and social theory, p. 19.

to scientific knowledge: the C ontinent of M athematics by the Greeks in the fifth 
century B.C., and the C ontinent of Physics by Galileo:7 0
In particular, the specialists who work in the domains o f the ‘ Human 
Sciences’ and o f the Social Sciences (a smaller domain), i.e. economists, 
historians, sociologists, social psychologists, psychologists, historians o f art 
and literature, o f religious and other ideologies - and even linguists and 
psycho-analysts, all these specialists ought to know that they cannot produce 
truly scientific knowledges in their specializations unless they recognize 
the indispensability o f the theory M arx founded. For it is, in principle, the 
theory which ‘ opens up’ to scientific knowledge the ‘ continent’ in which they 
work, in which they have so fa r only produced a few preliminary knowledges 
(linguistics, psycho-analysis) or a few elements or rudiments o f knowledge 
(the occasional chapter o f history, sociology and economics) or illusions 
pure and simple, illegitimately called knowledges.
Disregarding theory in writing history textbooks (and teaching history in 
school) leads not to, as has been pointed out tim e and again in the course of this 
paper, an objective or ‘ true historical narrative, but to a narrative that reproduces 
dom inant ideological conceptions of the epoch. Teaching the following 
generations history thus becomes an im portant part of the process by which the 
officially recognized narratives of the nation are passed on down to succeeding 
generations, and by which these generations define themselves with reference to 
the nation state.
The underlying ideology of history textbooks is basically the idea o f‘ progress’ 
and it is this ideology of progress that comes to drive the historical narrative 
forward, while at the same tim e helps to avoid explaining causation, as Loewen 
has pointed out. The narrative rests upon the teleological understanding of 
history, inevitably leading up to national unity, the natural result of historical 
struggles, while the main aim of history education is instilling in students this 
idea of nation and national identity.7 1 Barnard also quotes Anyon’ s analysis of 
17 U nited States history textbooks, focusing on economic and labor history 
from the American Civil War to the Second W orld War. Her findings reveal that 
“the socialist movement at the turn of the century is either not mentioned, or 
downplayed or disparaged; and labor history is almost totally ignored, together 
with class conflict and social struggle, while the story of successful capitalists 
is used as an object lesson for workers: if you work hard and save money, you
70 Louis Althusser, “Preface to Capital volume one” , in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: 
NLB, 1971, p. 72.
71 Quoted in: Barnard, Language, Ideology, and Japanese History Textbooks, p. 18.

too can become rich.”7 2 This ideology of the ‘ Am erican Dream’ is a nice example 
of how ideology functions as an inverted form (in the sense of the inverted 
consciousness of social agents in the capitalist social formation), where the reality 
of class antagonism and the enorm ous and ever-growing gap between the ‘haves’ 
and ‘have-nots’ presents itself through an inverted form o f ‘haves’ and ‘ soon-to- 
haves’ as one conservative right-wing politician formulated this recently.
5. CONCLUSION
The aim in this paper was to argue and dem onstrate that the language of the 
high school history textbooks w ithin the paradigm of ‘ scientific’ and ‘ objective’ 
scholarship presents a naturalized discourse that seems to be the logical and 
m ore or less the only way of talking about historical events in question, b ut when 
we approach such discourse from the perspective of theoretical historiography, 
it becomes obvious how these discourses actually arise in a specific historical 
context, inevitably conditioned by the power relations of the society that produces 
them and that they are therefore far from being ‘ neutral’ or ‘ objective’ , but instead 
prom ote an ideology that is in the service of various group or class interests.
Thus, according to Štih, “the large burden of responsibility for the fact that 
mythological history still abounds in schools as well as in public space in general 
lies with historians themselves.”7 3 No m atter how school history has broadened
72 Ibid., p. 19.
73 Štih, “Miti in stereotipi v podobi starejše slovenske nacionalne zgodovine” , p. 27.
The lack of an epistemological break that would establish humanities in general and historiography 
in particular as theoretical practices is clearly observable also in the conference proceedings I have 
m entioned at the beginning of the paper, which, though being an attempt to overcome the ‘ mythical 
and stereotypical in the Slovene perception of history’ (i.e. a theoretical attempt), nevertheless feature 
papers which go as far as to completely forget the Rankean ‘ as it actually happened’ methodology and 
rather profess their deeply personal convictions regarding the Yugoslav socialist regime - a divisive 
issue in contem porary Slovene historiography. For example, the proceedings features on one side 
interesting contributions by Božo Repe (Božo Repe, “M it in resničnost komunizma” [“The Myth 
and the Reality of Communism”], in Ferenc & Petkovšek (eds.), Mitsko in stereotipno v slovenskem 
pogledu na zgodovino [The Mythical and the Stereotypical in Slovene Perception o f History], Ljubljana: 
Zveza zgodovinskih društev Slovenije, 2008, pp. 285-301) where he analyses the principal reasons for 
the re-evaluation of recent history by examining the attitudes towards communism among Slovenes 
since the end of the First World War, and by Aleš Gabrič who in his paper (Aleš Gabrič, “Opozicija ali 
nasprotovanje novim oblastem v letu 1945” [“Opposition or Contradiction to the New Government 
of 1945”], in Ferenc & Petkovšek (eds.), Mitsko in stereotipno v slovenskem pogledu na zgodovino, 
pp. 303-312) examines the stereotypes about the support of and opposition to the new authorities 
after the war. He interestingly shows that neither of the stereotypical discourses (the first about the 
Com munist government being wholeheartedly supported by the people, which was spread by the 
Communists after the war, the second stating that it was only the terror of the Com m unist secret 
police that extinguished the strong oppositional will of the people, which is being voiced mostly by 
the right-wing critics since the downfall of the Com munist regime) has been substantiated by an 
analysis of the actual situation.

its treatm ent of historical material, it nevertheless remains firmly situated within 
the narrative whose horizon is defined through the concept of the nation. At the 
congress of historians, m entioned in the beginning of this paper, the opening 
address was given by the M inister for Education and Sport, dr. M ilan Zver, with 
a short speech titled Myths and Stereotypes in Classrooms,7 4
The m inister noted as particularly im portant the energetic involvement 
of historiography in the process of introducing fresh findings into the school 
curricula for history, civic education as well as other social science disciplines. 
He proceeded with the premise that in our fast changing world of the 2 1s t century 
the answers to the questions of the past are often also guidelines for our lives in 
the present and in the future, and that historiography with its findings plays an 
irreplaceable role in aspiring for the strengthening of the values of a democratic 
society, hum an rights and freedoms. He defined ‘knowledge’ as the theoretical 
and scientific understanding of the world and the society we live in, as opposed 
to ideological indoctrinations that serve the purpose of state regimes. He left no 
doubt as to what he m eant by stating that:7 5
... in the past centuries, especially in the 19th and the 20th centuries, the 
historical profession often served the needs o f daily politics. By legitimizing 
the state’ s affairs and through the nurturing o f loyal citizens it has justified
Yet, in spite of such examples of quality historiography, the proceedings introduce papers which 
in extreme cases do not even attempt to pose as objective historical research, but rather get their 
message across in the form of emphatic and passionate sermons closely aligned with specific political 
agendas. Thus Tamara Griesser-Pečar (Tamara Griesser-Pečar, “»Reakcionarna suha veja na živem 
narodovem telesu ...« (Boris Kidrič). Rdeča legenda o kolaboraciji” [““ A Reactionary D ry Branch on 
the Living Body of O ur Nation ...” (Boris Kidrič). The Red Legend about Collaboration”], in Ferenc 
& Petkovšek (eds.), Mitsko in stereotipno v slovenskem pogledu na zgodovino, pp. 361-369) in many 
instances stresses exactly the opposite of what has been shown by Repe and Gabrič, even stating that 
“ In Slovenia the Communist Party that took power created the myth o f collaboration. An only slightly 
modified interpretation o f historiography, compared to that dictated by the Communist Party, is still 
being defended by a group o f historians to this day.” (Ibid., 362). Even more radical, the paper by Jože 
Dežman (Jože Dežman, “Sistem ohranjanja in razvijanja revolucionarnih izročil - religijski temelj in 
režimski zgodovinski falzifikat titoizma” [“The system of m aintaining and developing revolutionary 
traditions of the past - the religious basis and the regime’ s historic falsification of Titoism”], in Ferenc
& Petkovšek (eds.), Mitsko in stereotipno v slovenskem pogledu na zgodovino, pp. 347-359) abounds 
with rhetoric not short of biblical, with paragraphs such as “ The blood that flooded across Slovenia can 
be compared to the Great Flood. After this bloody deluge the Party gods, following the Bolshevik recipe, 
began creating a new world. In the name o f brotherhood, unity and equality a caste distinction between 
the living and the dead has reigned." ( Ibid., p. 352), or “ We can be grateful to Fate to have so fortunately 
escaped from the Balkans cauldron, but on the other hand we can remind ourselves each day at a time, 
how non-moderately and how infinitely we are scarred by the traumatic marks o f the past.” (Ibid., p. 
359). Discussions about the traum atic scars of our nation, or Griesser-Pečar’ s quotes about traces of 
dictatorship being rooted deeply in our subconscious can perhaps be topics of folk psychology, but 
hardly of serious historiography.
74 Milan Zver, “Miti in stereotipi v učilnicah” [“Myths and stereotypes in classrooms”], in Ferenc & 
Petkovšek (eds.), Mitsko in stereotipno v slovenskem pogledu na zgodovino, pp. 5-7.
75 Ibid., pp. 5-6.

violent wars, brutal conquests, genocides, barbarisms and large-scale and 
daily violations o f human rights and liberties. History textbooks, especially 
in totalitarian regimes, have strongly influenced the perception o f history as 
an unchangeable and solid system. The school version o f history has often 
been presented as the absolutely accurate and unquestionable image o f 
things past, while only the most glorious moments o f respective nations and 
historical figures o f merit were accentuated.
The m inister even goes so far as to state that through its careful selectivity 
historiography has been “prom oting nationalistic sentiments, consolidating the 
feelings of racial, religious and cultural supremacy, prejudices and stereotypes 
and even hatred and violence toward the others.”7 6
Judging by the above statements, the m inister actually stood for a radical 
reform of the school system that would introduce into school curricula historical 
research based on theoretical findings, rather than teach a history that is basing 
its explanations in the current cultural framework rooted in the current social 
formation. In other words, based on the above statements no doubt was left that 
he stands for a science, w hether hum an, social or natural, that is not conditioned 
by the ideological conceptual fram ework rooted in the current relations o f power, 
but is rather attem pting a theoretical breakthrough in understanding hum an 
relations and the mechanisms behind them.
The slip from these theoretical aspirations back into the realm of ideology 
comes a few lines lower, where the m inister further specifies the above stated 
ideas about historical understanding. At this point he declares that history plays 
an extremely im portant role in school, because7 7
... in spite o f the new sources o f knowledge (by that I mean particularly 
the media and the world wide web) the history curriculum is among those 
factors that most powerfully construct historical conscience and historical 
memory. ... After the ground breaking events since 1989 onwards, school 
history curricula in all European states, and particularly in the states with 
democratic transitions, are witnessing extensive changes. ...In the school 
curricula o f the European states the ratio o f national history is visibly 
growing. In Slovenia also we are facing a reform o f the school curricula and 
teaching guidelines that should consolidate the history curriculum as one of 
the most important factors o f form ing identity, democratic values as well as 
human rights and freedom s....
76 Ibid., p. 6.
77 Ibid., p. 6, underscores mine.

The scientific history, from the perspective of a m odern politician, cannot, 
after all, but stand for ‘ the growing ratio of national history’ in the service of 
‘ form ing the identity, dem ocratic values, as well as hum an rights and freedoms’ . 
From the point of view of the politics, the ‘not being in the service o f the politics’ 
therefore simply stands for ‘ actively discrediting a certain political and economic 
system (com m unism )’ by labeling it as ideological, while at the same tim e actively 
preventing historiography from identifying as ideological another political and 
economic system (capitalism with liberal democracy), upon which current state 
legitimation is built, together with its ideological conception of the homogenous 
monolingual nation-state. The insistence on ‘ scientific’ and ‘ objective’ history 
is thus nothing else but a Rankean legacy of ideological historiography par 
excellence. Although Ranke “strenuously repudiated any idea of writing history 
in the service of what we would now term contem porary ideology, that is exactly 
what he was doing himself, in the conviction that a true account ‘like it was’ 
would validate the rightfulness of the traditional institutions under examination 
and, by association, also those prevailing in his own time.”7 8
W hat we should be doing, therefore, is not further divide the humanities 
and social sciences into ever narrower micro-disciplines, but rather attem pt to 
understand history as the com m on ground upon which we can continue to build 
the theoretical structure of the hum an sciences. As Braudel once said, “all the 
hum an sciences are interested in one and the same landscape: that of the past, 
present, and future actions of man.”7 9 We should aspire for a science of history 
that would unite the field of the hum an sciences, instead of the traditional kind 
of history, which, to quote Braudel8 0
... dominates our teaching and will continue to dominate it fo r a long while 
yet, because o f an inertia which still exists though we may rail against it, 
because o f the support o f aged scholars, and because o f the institutions 
which open their embracing arms to us when we ourselves cease to be 
dangerous revolutionaries and become good bourgeois - fo r there is a 
terrible bourgeoisie o f the intellect.
Since this paper was mostly about history, it is appropriate to end it with 
the thought of this great historian. Braudel suggested that the wise path in our 
theoretical pursuit would be for us to lower our usual customs duties altogether:8 1
78 Thompson, W hat happened to history, p. 5.
79 Fernand Braudel, “Unity and Diversity in the Human Sciences” , in Braudel, On History (S. Matthews, 
Trans., pp. 55-63). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1980, p. 55.
80 Ibid., p. 57.
81 Ibid., p. 59.

The free circulation o f ideas and techniques would be encouraged by such 
a move, and though they would certainly be modified in passing from one 
human science to another, they would also at least begin to sketch out the 
makings o f a common language. One great step would be if certain words 
might have virtually the same resonance and meaning from one small 
territory to another.
As for school history, we should at least make the effort and accept the ‘ risk’ 
of teaching theory instead of ‘knowledge’ , which simply reproduces the relations 
of power through ideological narratives. Some m ight say that teaching theory 
instead o f‘knowledge’ could be threatening to the existing social order. But we are 
not voicing similar objections concerning the unpredictability of natural science 
research, be it in the field of nuclear power or genetic research, all of which are 
potentially far m ore threatening to the hum an existence than the findings of the 
hum an sciences that m ight uncover certain contradictions in our beliefs of who 
we are, where we come from and how we are entering into our hum an relations.
Galilei had to renounce his theoretical findings in face of church dogmas 
and there continues to be strong opposition around the world to Darwin’ s 
theory of evolution. Should we not, therefore, insist on history curricula that are 
based on theoretical historiography, narrating the longue durée of the material 
history of hum an relations and their historical outcomes, instead of reproducing 
the ‘knowledge’ of l’ histoire événementielle of our nation-states, while silently 
m urm uring to ourselves: Eppur si muove?