Keith Windschuttle - Political Evolution

Political Evolution

An adherent of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s, Windschuttle later moved to the right. This process is first evident in his 1984 book The Media, which took inspiration the empirical perspective of the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson, especially his The Poverty of Theory, to make a highly critical review of the Marxist theories of Louis Althusser and Stuart Hall. While the first edition attacked "the political program of the New Right" and set out a case for both favouring "government restrictions and regulation" and condemning "private enterprise and free markets", the third edition four years later (1988) took a different view:

"Overall, the major economic reforms of the last five years, the deregulation of the finance sector, and the imposition of wage restraint through the social contract of The Accord, have worked to expand employment and internationalize the Australian economy in more positive ways than I thought possible at the time".

In The Killing of History, Windschuttle defended the practices and methods of traditional empirical history against postmodernism, and praised historians such as Henry Reynolds, but he now argues that some of those he praised for their empirically-grounded work fail to adhere to the principle. In the same book, Windschuttle maintains that historians on both sides of the political spectrum have misrepresented and distorted history to further their respective political causes or ideological positions.

In The Fabrication of Aboriginal History and other recent writings on Australian Aboriginal history, Windschuttle criticises historians who, he claims, have extensively misrepresented and fabricated historical evidence to support a political agenda. He argues that Aboriginal rights, including land rights and the need for reparations for past abuses of Aboriginal people, have been adopted as a left-wing 'cause' and that those he perceives as left-wing historians distort the historical record to support that cause For Windschuttle, the task of the historian is to provide readers with an empirical history as close to the objective truth as possible, based on an analysis of documentary, or preferably eye-witness, evidence. He questions the value of oral history. His "view is that Aboriginal oral history, when uncorroborated by original documents, is completely unreliable, just like the oral history of white people". A historian has no responsibility for the political implications of an objective, empirical history. One's political beliefs should not influence one's evaluation of archival evidence.

For some of his critics, "historians don't just interpret the evidence: they compose stories about these meanings, or in the words of Hayden White, they "emplot" the past. This is itself a cultural process".

Windschuttle's recent research disputes the idea that the colonial settlers of Australia committed genocide against the Indigenous Australians. He also disputes the widespread view that there was a campaign of guerrilla warfare against British settlement. Extensive debate on his work has come to be called the History Wars. He dismisses assertions, which he imputes to the current generation of academic historians, that there was any resemblance between racial attitudes in Australia and those of South Africa under apartheid and Germany under the Nazis. He has been a frequent contributor to conservative magazines, such as Quadrant in Australia, of which he became editor in 2007, and The New Criterion in the United States.