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Like Hume, many contemporary theorists of history promote varieties of radical skepticism about the reality of an external world, the correspondence between our ideas (or language) and such a world, and traditional understandings of the existence of God and Christian revelation. In turn, these postmodernist arguments open up room for modern-day common-sense rebuttals that can serve as a prelude to more explicitly theological responses.

In particular, the deceptively slight book by Alan Spitzer, a historian of French intellectual life, goes a long way toward elucidating what a common-sense defense of the possibility of reliable historical knowledge might look like. Spitzer's Historical Truth and Lies About the Past should be read soberly by all who yearn for contemporary cultural combat, because his critique of prevarication in the Reagan White House is as astringent as his critique of prevarication in defense of the postmodernist Paul de Man.

Spitzer's critical conclusion rests on his success at documenting one particular fact—that, whatever people may say about the possibility of historical knowledge, when they want to argue persuasively about urgent questions in real life, they invariably assume that it is possible to find and use reliable knowledge about the past. Most tellingly, when postmodernist defenders of de Man sought to exonerate him for his anti-Semitic writings during World War II, they instinctively appealed to the historical record as if they "shared assumptions as to relevant evidence, legitimate inference, and coherent logic." Spitzer concedes that no one can validate such standards by appealing to them directly. Yet the need to validate such standards is unnecessary if, when push comes to shove, people cannot act without making use of them.

For both postmodernists and their critics, the Holocaust has been the great spur to this kind of instinctive historical realism. Critics of postmodernism, who usually do not employ theistic arguments, nonetheless find it quite natural to speak of something like universal moral absolutes when addressing the extreme cases of twentieth-century history. For example, Georg Iggers, a veteran observer of modern historiography, provided Ewa Domanska in her book of interviews with an eloquent expression of an ethically based kind of historical realism: "[I]f we dismantle the border between fact and fiction, and equate history with fictions, how can we defend ourselves against the assertion that the Holocaust never happened? As a Jew who barely escaped the Holocaust, I'm very much aware of what this means."

Similarly, Thomas Haskell has probed respectfully—but also relentlessly—the dilemma encountered by Hayden White, the important promoter of a postmodern history. In Haskell's telling phrases,

White is as horrified by the Holocaust as anyone, but he is also unwilling to duck the implications of his own epistemological commitments. Those commitments he has spelled out in Metahistory and other writings, and they define him as a thoroughgoing ironist and antirealist, one for whom the writing of history and the construction of political ideologies necessarily blur into a single enterprise.

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