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REPUBLICANS OF LETTERS, MEMORY POLITICIANS, GLOBAL COLONIALISTS: HISTORIANS IN RECENT HISTORIES OF HISTORIOGRAPHY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 August 2012
Abstract
Writing the history of historiography is a tricky business. There is no unbiased way of doing it, and it can serve different goals that at best complement and at worst contradict each other. The genre can seem both suitable to promote one's own academic agenda and to reflect upon one's own ideological constraints, epistemological presumptions, and social aspirations. This article analyses the motivations and methods of recent authors in the field, and it does so principally by focusing on the roles they attribute to historians past and present. To enable comparisons, the article includes works with a national, European and global framework, on early modern and late modern historiography, by intellectual, cultural and post-colonialist historians. A general conclusion will be that while most publications use the genre to pursue academic interests with epistemic arguments, only few try to exploit its potential for critical self-reflexion. As a consequence, they tend to be of limited credibility and originality when it comes to describing historiography's functions and historians' roles. This article does not treat their lack of critical commitment as an isolated phenomenon in a historiographical sub-field, but as a symptom of a larger problem within academic scholarship today. There are, however, exceptions to the rule, and this article will also try to work out their particular strengths.
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- Historiographical Reviews
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012
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