Reconstruction; Construction; Deconstruction are terms employed by the late British theorist Alun Munslow—I haven’t really seen the distinction being used elsewhere—to designate three distinct epistemological positions that frame the critique elaborated by his narrativist theory of historiography. Depending on into which of the categories a historian falls, their idea of what history is, what the nature of historical knowledge is, and what the historian’s task is, differs; consequently, the product of the historian’s research, the historiographical text (or: narrative), also ends up being different.
I’m pretty certain he first defined these in his 1997 book Deconstructing History, but I don’t own that, so we’ll take a look at his Narrative and History instead (all page numbers given correspond to the book, also all italics within quotes are in Munslow's text). In here, he defines these positions as follows:
Reconstructionism is rooted in two basic beliefs: “First, they [i.e., reconstructionists] reject the idea that there is a choice in thinking about and doing history. Second, they believe history exists outside the here and now, which means it should not be any way subject to the ontological demands and pressures of the present. In other words, it must not be historicist” (10). Furthermore, they adhere to the theory of truth known as justified true belief and employ inference as their primary method of attaining knowledge; “this means that the past can be ‘located’ by well-informed historians who suspend their personal judgements and any personal desire to ‘tell the story’ in ways that deviate from what they read it to be in ‘the sources’” (10). The reconstructionist theory of historical knowledge is strongly rooted in a quite classic idea of scientific objectivity; moreover, Munslow ridicules this position for its “naive realism,” (11) which believes “that the historian’s mind can engage (largely unproblematically) with knowable reality, and that that engagement can be transcribed without too much difficulty onto the page” (11). In sum, a reconstructionist denies the subjectivity inherent in a historians’ work, and defines historical knowledge as “fair and even-handed,” which “depends on the reality of a knowable world that is independent of both our minds and our narrative making. [...] truthful statements are what they are because of how things were in the world.” (11)
We may also describe the reconstructionist take on the historian’s task as “to recognize that the story exists in the action of the human actors, and then to describe it, acknowledging cause and effect. In this way description equals history and history equals the past.” (11) The task of the historian becomes the unearthing of the [T]rue narrative lying in wait within the past, and there is the assumption that the historians writing is capable of being a realist representation of the past.
Constructionism, in Munslow’s view, refers to the more elaborate type of historiography which transcends the actor-based, causal mode of narrative and acknowledges the requirement to interpret the empirical sources by use of “a body of knowledge that is usually referred to as ‘theory’. History is not just empirical – it is also analytical and deploys a priori thinking” (12). What he refers to here are interpretations and forms of argument that employ analytical concepts, methods, and models, typically borrowed from the social sciences in order to produce an understanding of the empirical data (the sources). Furthermore, the constructionist historian is characterized by an awareness that “’. . .aspects of culture, such as words, consciousness, and norms and values, coexist and interact with political economic, social and other structures and processes which come into being . . . out there.” (12, quoted from John Belchem and Neville Kirk, eds. Languages of Labour [Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 1997], pg. 3). It follows that both (!) a conceptual framework and historical evidence become necessary for historical interpretation.
Despite this increased awareness, Munslow criticizes this position, in his view the dominant position taken by contemporary historians, for their position still being grounded in the correspondence theory of truth, which leads to the delusion of being able to “access the story, the pattern of (race, gender, imperialism and class?) structures in (behind and determining) the events of the past” (13). The constructionist historian is “keen to explain not just why individuals did what they did or how they exercised their powers of agency, but how their decisions were influenced by the deeper structures that controlled their lives” (13).
Finally, deconstructionism means that the historian is fully aware of the generation of historical meaning (and thus, historical knowledge) through the historical representation, in other words: the historiographical text. This is reflected in the following key points (cf. 14):
Munslowian deconstructionism rejects the very notion that the past can be knowable "as it really was" (a healthy position, if I may add), and accepts the representationalist nature of the (historiographical) text or discourse. It is, simply put: self-aware of what it is doing. The issue with this position is that it is infinitely more complicated, since a correspondence truth between a linguistic (textual) representation (text) and past reality can not be established per definition, and this has been a subject of attention for philosophers of history and language for a good century by now.
In a sense, Munslow maps 19th and early-20th (Rankean) historiography on reconstructionism, structuralist 20th century historiography on constructionism, and post-structuralist historiography on deconstructionism. In the latter, he is strongly influenced by the narrativism of Hayden White, as well as French post-structuralists such as Paul Ricœur and Roland Barthes. Suffice it to say, Munslow identified as deconstructionist, which he implicitly (in his A History of History quite explicitly) posits as the most reasonable epistemic choice out of the three, since it is more sophisticated and informed by contemporary philosophical debates. He was also quite close to Keith Jenkins, and the two of them can be considered the chief representative theorists of British “postmodernist” history. (Jenkins takes the relativism inevitably to an extreme, but that is a different issue.)
Personally, I am a bit on the fence concerning his choice of terminology, since constructivism is an inherent feature of any and all historiography (see Kuukanen, pg. 37-44), and “deconstruction” is typically associated with the thought of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida: it follows that one should be a bit careful to not take Munslow’s terminology outside of its context, since it actually makes not much sense anywhere else.
[further reading in the next post]