Justifying History Today

Abstract

This chapter tackles rationales for History on their own merits. It assesses for coherence all of the rationales hitherto mentioned in the book, insofar as they still have any currency. Then it makes some suggestions of its own. This work is less sanguine than many about the prospects for History as Emancipation, and more optimistic than many about forms of History as Practical Lesson. History as Method has something going for it but even on its own best ethical terms it needs to be bolstered by concerns related to the content of the past rather than just to procedures for researching and writing History. History as Identity remains arguably the most important of all the substantivist rationales. It is so often at issue even when the identity question is addressed only indirectly via History as Travel, since it is difficult to get away from the matter of how one defines oneself in relation to other, different ways of being and doing. Furthermore, those historians who engage in Emancipatory History à la Foucault would be more effective if they engaged more directly in Identity History, which would mean engaging in straightforwardly normative arguments about right and wrong. Extending the discussion of normativity, the final pages of the book turn to the matter of moral evaluation by the historian, suggesting evaluation is not a category error or an anachronistic residue of the days when History was commonly seen as a fount of Moral Lessons.