History in the Making

Abstract

This book raises the intriguing question of genre. The history discipline admits a variety – not just academic forms (such as the learned article, the monograph, the edited collection), but also textbooks on the nature of history, student guides to historical skills and types of history, not to mention the theory of history, here dismissed in a sentence (p. xi). History in the Making exemplifies a further genre, the retrospective summation: an eminent, ‘practising historian’ ‘explores some of the themes and problems addressed by historians’ (p. ix) in the last 60 years or so. This prospect raises expectations. In this account of ‘science as a vocation’ would the historian assert the intellectual honesty of, but also the indispensable need for, valuefree science in a society ideologically contaminated?(1) Exemplifying ‘science as personal experience’, would it foster a new kind of responsibility that in the interests of human survival, the precondition of history, could re-orientate technical expertise and disciplinary organization, not least the technical expertise operative in history, itself an information-management technology, now reliant more than ever on information technology?(2)