The question of how history should be written was one of the central preoccupations of one of twentieth-century Ireland’s best known public intellectuals, Conor Cruise O’Brien. Born in Dublin in 1917, O’Brien was educated at the non-denominational Sandford Park School before going on to study Irish and French at Trinity College, Dublin. Following a supplementary degree in History under the tutelage of R. B. McDowell, O’Brien was recruited in 1943 by T. W. Moody to work towards a Ph.D. thesis on the Irish Parliamentary Party, which he completed alongside his full-time job in the Irish Department of External Affairs. During the 1960s, following an infamous stint as an international civil servant in the Congo, O’Brien earned a worldwide reputation as a public intellectual before winning election to Dáil Éireann as a member of the Labour Party.Footnote 1 After the Troubles erupted in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, O’Brien became the most prominent ‘revisionist’ of the Irish ‘history wars’.Footnote 2 In the 1970s, including a period as a government minister, he engaged in a ‘powerful public campaign of persuasion and propaganda’ against the forces of Irish republicanism.Footnote 3 The revision of nationalist interpretations of Irish history was centrally important to this enterprise. Although he never worked as a professional historian in the sense of being employed by a university history faculty to teach history or engage in historical research, history was a vital component of O’Brien’s self-image as a public intellectual, and his academic training as an historian was a crucial aspect of his cultural authority.
Throughout his career, he devoted significant attention to unpacking the intricate relationship between historians, historiography and contemporary political debate. To describe O’Brien as a philosopher of history would be an overstatement, but it is fair to say that he was exceptionally reflexive about the historian’s craft. The historian Diarmuid Whelan has done much to reveal the richness of O’Brien’s body of work for scholars interested in the development of historical writing in Ireland. In his book, Violent notions, and several journal articles, Whelan concludes that O’Brien’s insistence that historians could not fail to bring their own subjectivity to bear and, therefore, should embrace it and make it central to their writing, ran counter to the discipline’s prevailing notion of itself as a ‘scientific endeavour’. Whelan hazarded that considering the historical debate that accompanied the political conflict in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s onwards, O’Brien ‘no doubt’ would have renounced his early thinking.Footnote 4 However, as will be shown, this was not the case. Through an examination of previously unseen archival material and by interrogating O’Brien’s later published works, this article argues that O’Brien’s ideas about history and historians remained largely unchanged from at least the mid 1950s until the end of his writing career.
This article explores the core elements of O’Brien’s historical thinking, tracing the sources and evolution of his ideas about history through his essays, lectures and books. First, it inspects his formation as a historian of nineteenth-century Ireland, assessing the process by which he came to publish his classic 1957 text Parnell and his party and exploring the critical reception that helped cement O’Brien’s reputation as a person with penetrating insights about Irish history. How O’Brien’s ideas about historiography developed over the course of this process can be seen in his response to the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s 1955 lecture, ‘The activity of being an historian’. Oakeshott’s thought had a profound effect on O’Brien’s own thinking about the role of historians. The article goes on to consider O’Brien’s essay ‘Michelet To-day’, arguing that the concept of ‘history as art’ that he outlined was not as aberrant in the context of mid-twentieth-century historiographical discourse as has been claimed. The final section traces this line of thought through his later works and directly challenges assertions that O’Brien abandoned the position he staked out in these early interventions.
I
O’Brien’s first major piece of historical research was his Ph.D. thesis, ‘The Irish Parliamentary Party, 1880–90’, which he later published with the Clarendon Press in a revised form under the title Parnell and his party. The thesis took over ten years to complete but he was finally awarded his doctorate in late 1954. It seems that he wrote it in fits and starts, as he managed to publish a portion of his research in Irish Historical Studies in 1946 and that deeply-researched article was reproduced with minor alterations as a chapter in the finished book.Footnote 5 O’Brien found researching and writing this ‘historical thing’ emotionally taxing. In a letter to his publisher, Dan Davin, O’Brien described experiencing a ‘sort of claustrophobia’ due to the mental fatigue brought on by the process of writing up his research.Footnote 6 Writing to another literary associate, Hudson Review’s Fred Morgan, O’Brien decried the Ph.D. writing process as being akin to being stranded in a ‘desert, composed of minute particles of historical knowledge’.Footnote 7
O’Brien was one of the first generation of historians to be trained, in Michael Bentley’s term, by the Irish ‘modernist’ historians, such as T. W. Moody and Robert Dudley Edwards, the founders of Irish Historical Studies, who had learned their craft at the Institute of Historical Research in London.Footnote 8 His thesis was an example of historical ‘modernism’, marrying granular analysis of the socio-economic composition of the Irish party at Westminster and lucid exposition of the wider political context in which Parnell and his party operated.Footnote 9 O’Brien’s supervisor, Moody, praised its ‘luminous, incisive, epigrammatic, [and] urbane’ style and congratulated his student for achieving such ‘literary distinction’ without the ‘sacrifice of scholarly technique’.Footnote 10 Like Moody, O’Brien’s external examiner, Edwards, professor of modern Irish history at University College, Dublin, noted the young scholar’s ‘high imaginative and literary gifts’, declaring that O’Brien possessed ‘unusual qualities in construction’, which Edwards claimed far outstripped comparable Ph.D. candidates whom he had examined.Footnote 11 On the other hand, Edwards disagreed with Moody’s assessment of its scholarly achievement. Edwards was ‘perturbed’ at O’Brien’s failure to examine some ‘crucial’ source material.Footnote 12 In a letter to Moody, Edwards recommended that O’Brien withdraw the thesis so that he could ‘make a proper assessment of the sources’.Footnote 13 He wanted O’Brien to investigate the official records of government ministers — namely, the prime minister, the home secretary, the lord lieutenant, the chief secretary and the undersecretary — to see what light they could shed on the early phase of the Parnellite movement. He supposed that such an endeavour would ‘naturally give special reference to the Gladstone papers’.Footnote 14 Although Moody was willing to go along with Edwards’s recommendation, he resisted the suggestion that O’Brien be asked to re-evaluate his findings ‘from a conspectus of all the sources’, which he felt was too broad in its scope and would entail ‘new investigations of indeterminate extent’. Moody thought that this would be an ‘unreasonable demand’.Footnote 15 However, he was prepared to approve the withdrawal of the thesis so that O’Brien could ‘repair the omission of a specific body of material, the Gladstone papers’.Footnote 16
In September 1954 O’Brien travelled to London to consult the Gladstone papers at the British Museum.Footnote 17 According to his ‘Note on supplementary research’, O’Brien inspected the entire body of papers that had been noted in British Museum catalogue of additions to the manuscripts: the Gladstone papers; additional manuscripts 44086-44835 as being related to members of the Irish party and other notable Irish figures, as well as papers regarding Irish affairs and Gladstone’s personal notes of cabinet minutes. While he unearthed some ‘corroborative side lights’, O’Brien claimed he did not find anything that he thought would require him to re-cast his thesis. Therefore, he did not think that the thesis needed to be withdrawn. Despite this, he wrote that he would insert references to the papers ‘as might be useful’ if the thesis was later accepted for publication. His accounts of the 1882 Kilmainham treaty and the 1886 Galway election were two areas that he thought might benefit from ‘slight amplifications’ stemming from the Gladstone papers. In addition to examining the Gladstone papers, O’Brien endeavoured to consult some of the other official papers Edwards had asked him to study. Drawing on his contacts at the Irish embassy in London, O’Brien attempted to access Home Office records that had not yet been deposited with the Public Records Office. However, the Home Office would not permit him to conduct his own investigations, and when he described what he was looking to find, officials reported that they had nothing relevant to his research. O’Brien also returned to the State Papers Office at Dublin Castle to review official papers pertaining to Parnellite politics but failed to uncover any relevant documentation beyond that which he had already seen.Footnote 18
In late 1954, O’Brien had a second oral examination with Moody and Edwards. Although O’Brien had done the extra research he had been asked to do, Edwards still had reservations about the merit of the thesis, as this supplementary research had not been incorporated into the text nor had O’Brien provided details to support his contention that it did not need to be integrated. In his report, Edwards laid out his method for evaluating the results of historical research, a system he gleaned from Felim Ó Briain’s 1943 article on ‘The expansion of Irish Christianity to 1200: part i’. This method involved considering the researcher’s performance of three processes, which he labelled ‘heuristic’, ‘critical’ and ‘synthetic’. The heuristic process involved the ‘systematic investigation of all the sources of importance that can throw light on his subject’, the critical process concerned the ‘critical evaluation of materials to determine what elements are to be eliminated’, and the synthetic process related to a scholar’s capacity to construct a ‘readable synthesis’ based on the ‘preceding operations’.Footnote 19 Edwards determined that O’Brien had failed to meet the required standard in both the ‘heuristic’ and ‘critical’ processes, meaning that no matter how successful his synthesis, it could not make up for the deficiencies in the other areas and was itself undermined by those same flaws. Specifically, Edwards once more raised doubts about the absence of the Gladstone papers and O’Brien’s use of published sources rather than unpublished manuscripts. Edwards argued that O’Brien should have traced publicly available sources back to the original manuscripts to verify their fidelity and accuracy. Thus, Edwards remained unconvinced that the thesis stood as a ‘worthy contribution to knowledge’ (O’Brien’s biographer, D. H. Akenson, has claimed that this judgement derived more from Edwards’ animosity to Moody than from his opinion of the work itself).Footnote 20 Nevertheless, following the second oral examination, he acquiesced in allowing his name to be ‘associated with the recommendation’ of the internal examiner, Moody, that O’Brien be awarded his doctorate.Footnote 21 However, Edwards stated that he did not think the thesis was suitable for publication as things stood.Footnote 22
After the decision to award O’Brien his doctorate was finally taken, Moody wrote to O’Brien with recommendations regarding revisions that he thought were necessary to make the thesis suitable for publication. Moody advised O’Brien to ‘insert appropriate illustrative matter from what you have collected in the Gladstone Papers’, to make a ‘number of relatively unimportant improvements in detail’ and to fix a ‘few omissions’.Footnote 23 In April 1955, while visiting O’Brien at his home in County Dublin, the Clarendon Press’s Dan Davin, who had previously commissioned O’Brien to write a book on Irish literature in English, asked to see the thesis that had taken up so much of O’Brien’s time.Footnote 24 O’Brien forwarded a copy to Oxford with a note stating that although the manuscript was ‘in large part’ made up of ‘work done for the degree of PhD’, he had ‘revised it extensively in the past six months for the purpose of this conversion’.Footnote 25 Not only did O’Brien carry out Moody’s suggested revisions, inserting material from the Gladstone papers into his discussions of the Kilmainham treaty, the Galway election and the ‘union of hearts’, but he also wrote an entirely new introduction for the manuscript, revised some footnotes to include references to the manuscript version of Charles Dilke’s diary, moved certain discursive footnotes into the body of the text, excised the appendices, and made significant alterations to the bibliography.Footnote 26
Shortly after sending Davin the manuscript, O’Brien followed up with a note imploring the editor not to ask Edwards to act as a reviewer. He denounced Edwards as ‘a barbarian and an enemy’ and asserted that he was not among the small ‘number of people who know much about Anglo-Irish politics of the period’.Footnote 27 Prior to O’Brien’s letter, Davin had already received an opinion about the manuscript from Moody, who assured him that the book was ‘a winner’. Moody had wanted O’Brien to publish with Faber and Faber in the ‘Studies in Irish History’ series, but conceded that ‘it [was] better for O’Brien to have the imprint of the Clarendon Press’.Footnote 28 The other historian whose opinion Davin sought was R. C. K. Ensor, author of England, 1870–1914. He chose Ensor because he wanted to have a review from a ‘general historian’ who was well-known to the press when he went before the delegates to plead the manuscript’s case.Footnote 29
When Ensor’s report came in, he recommended publication, although he highlighted some areas of concern. Notably, his concerns were the reverse of those that Edwards had had about the thesis. On one side, Ensor wrote effusively about its scholarly intervention, stating that it was a work of great learning that would undoubtedly become ‘a standard book’ on the topic and that it would be a ‘credit’ to the Clarendon Press to be associated with it. On the other side, Ensor felt it lacked literary panache. As he put it, ‘“dull” is an unkind word’, but O’Brien’s 412-page manuscript deserved the adjective. However, Ensor thought that this dullness — not usually a term associated with O’Brien — was understandable, given that the author’s intention had been to produce an ‘impartial’ and ‘objective’ history to ‘damp down the passions of controversy’ that had dominated previous work in the area. Thus, he judged that O’Brien’s ‘cold, almost indifferent manner may seem requisite’, and he speculated that among a ‘public whose interest in Parnell can be taken for granted’, this sober retelling might be ‘more arresting (because more unusual) than a dramatic one’.Footnote 30
Ensor’s estimation of O’Brien’s scholarship did enough to convince the delegates to ‘green light’ Parnell and his party at a meeting in October 1955 and it appeared on bookshop shelves in spring 1957. Though this was his first historical monograph, Parnell and his party was not O’Brien’s first major publication. In 1952, he had brought out a highly-acclaimed book of literary criticism, Maria Cross, under his pseudonym, ‘Donat O’Donnell’. As Donat O’Donnell, he had developed a significant reputation in the literary world and initially he wished to publish Parnell and his party under this name. However, between the manuscript’s acceptance and its publication, he had a change of heart. In the intervening period, he had acted as the editor for a series of talks entitled ‘The shaping of modern Ireland’ as part of the station’s Thomas Davis Lecture series, a programme intended to bring the latest Irish scholarship to an ‘intelligent non specialist’ public.Footnote 31 In addition to being broadcast on national radio, the Irish Times reprinted the lectures. O’Brien was pleased with the coverage the series was getting in Ireland and decided to capitalise on the publicity he had received as a historian of nineteenth-century Ireland.Footnote 32
Parnell and his party was positively received by critics, earning laudatory notices from some of Britain, Ireland and America’s leading historians.Footnote 33 In his glowing review, A. J. P. Taylor, disproving Ensor’s worries about the book’s literary merit, proclaimed that it was ‘long since a book taught me so much or which I read with such unalloyed enjoyment’.Footnote 34 M. R. D. Foot thought that Parnell and his party was ‘one of the best and most interesting books on the nineteenth century’ he had ever read.Footnote 35 Likewise, F. S. L. Lyons thought the book’s quality so ‘impeccable that it [was] difficult for a reviewer not to fall into what Lytton Strachey once called “a tone of tedious panegyric”’.Footnote 36 T. Desmond Williams deemed it a ‘veritable landmark in the historiography of Ireland’.Footnote 37 Asa Briggs, a specialist on Victorian political history, not only deemed Parnell and his party to be a ‘brilliant contribution to a full understanding of Parnell’, but also reckoned that O’Brien’s book had a contemporary relevance, asserting that it ‘should be required reading for all British politicians’.Footnote 38
While the critical reception was overwhelmingly positive, O’Brien’s grasp of Irish nationalists’ relations with English politicians did draw some negative attention. In the American Historical Review, Galen Broeker noted that O’Brien appeared to be ‘somewhat less at home in English than in Irish political history’.Footnote 39 F. S. L. Lyons agreed that O’Brien’s understanding of British politics was deficient. He highlighted several problems with O’Brien’s source base as well as numerous errors of fact, including the treatment of Gladstone’s infamous letter to John Morley that was printed in the press on 25 November 1890. Echoing Edwards’s earlier criticism, Lyons felt that O’Brien did not make sufficient use of the private papers of leading British liberals.Footnote 40 These views were also expressed by C. H. D. Howard, who claimed that O’Brien had made several noteworthy factual errors of which one was the Gladstone letter. O’Brien replied to both Lyons and Howard’s criticisms in the preface to the 1964 second impression of Parnell and his party. He thanked Lyons for pointing out his mistakes and, thus, allowing him to correct them, but he was far less gracious about Howard’s criticism. O’Brien contended that bar two errors, the most important being the Gladstone letter, the ‘lapses’ identified by Howard were not ‘as far as I can see, lapses at all’.Footnote 41 O’Brien found Howard’s comments particularly galling because ‘the accuracy of the text has been impugned from so authoritative a quarter as the English Historical Review’.Footnote 42 On the question of the book’s treatment of relations between Irish and English politicians, O’Brien conceded the point, but reiterated that his purpose had been to write a book on the internal dynamics of the Irish party, not the relationship between the Irish party and the Liberal or Conservative parties.Footnote 43
In their marketing strategy for Parnell and his party, the Clarendon Press pitched the book as the first ‘impartial’ study of the subject. In turn, reviewers lavished praise on O’Brien for his objectivity and impartiality. The Canadian historian D. J. McDougall commended the book’s ‘exact scholarship, close attention to detail, a good narrative style, and above all, an entire absence of the tedious partisanship that has marred so many books on this, as on most subjects in recent Anglo-Irish history’.Footnote 44 Thomas Bodkin called it a ‘model of scientific research and dispassionate statement’.Footnote 45 For the man of letters Shane Leslie, O’Brien’s ‘anatomy of statistics and scientific pigeon-holing’ brought to mind the great Cambridge historian J. B. Bury, whose ‘shadow’, as Leslie put it, ‘never crossed his paper’.Footnote 46 Denis Gwynn, son of the Irish party M.P. Stephen Gwynn, judged that O’Brien demonstrated ‘the detachment and candour of a true historian’.Footnote 47 The American political scientist James B. Christoph noted the similarities between O’Brien’s methodology and historians in the Namierite school. However, he argued that O’Brien’s work surpassed this school as it was ‘as much concerned with evaluating policy and strategy as with snapping candid and detailed pictures of a political situation’.Footnote 48
Despite all the praise Parnell and his party received for its objectivity and impartiality, the book carried a ‘Preface’ in which O’Brien effectively disavowed the book’s methodology. He dismissed the Namierite portions of the book as a ‘spiritual exercise in objectivity’ and claimed that they revealed little that was ‘either precise or surprising’.Footnote 49 Moody encouraged his doctoral students to adopt some Namierite techniques, and if we look at publications arising from the theses of some of Moody’s other students who were roughly contemporaries of O’Brien, such as F. S. L. Lyons’s The Irish Parliamentary Party, 1890-1910 and David Thornley’s Isaac Butt and home rule, the influence of Namier is clearly visible. Thus, it might be reckoned that O’Brien’s rejection of Namier was tantamount to a rejection of Moody as well. However, as Philip Bull has shown, at an early stage in his doctoral studies, it was Moody who warned O’Brien not to place too much store in Namierite ‘social-economic forces’ and to ‘assign due weight to informal and personal forces’.Footnote 50 Moreover, O’Brien and Moody continued to have a good, if not a close, relationship. Indeed, Moody later recruited O’Brien to write a chapter for The new history of Ireland on ‘Literature and society, 1891-1940’, even arranging financial support for O’Brien to hire his daughter Fedelma as a research assistant, though O’Brien’s chapter did not ultimately appear.Footnote 51
II
In July 1955, two years before the publication of Parnell and his party, O’Brien attended the second Irish Conference of Historians, co-hosted by University College, Dublin and Trinity College, Dublin. The conference, held under the auspices of the Irish Committee of Historical Sciences, attracted around eighty Irish and British historians.Footnote 52 The English political philosopher Michael Oakeshott delivered the keynote lecture, speaking on ‘The activity of being an historian’. Oakeshott’s work in the philosophy of history, particularly his 1933 book, Experience and its modes, formed the philosophical foundation for the first generation of Irish historical revisionists, meaning that he was held in high esteem by major figures in the historical establishment.Footnote 53 O’Brien’s bête noire, Robert Dudley Edwards, was especially committed to Oakeshott’s historical thought and was given to quoting Oakeshott’s slogan that ‘History is what the evidence obliges us to believe’.Footnote 54 The significance of Oakeshott’s ideas about history to the development of O’Brien’s thinking on the subject, however, has hitherto been unexplored by historians.
During the opening session of the conference, Oakeshott delineated four different attitudes towards past events: the contemplative attitude, the practical attitude, the scientific attitude, and the historical attitude. Each of these attitudes constituted a ‘certain way of reading “the present”’ and each was marked by a specific kind of rhetoric. These attitudes and the kinds of statements associated with them led to the construction of several different pasts: the contemplative past, the practical past, the scientific past and the historical past. Though he recognised that the vast bulk of writing by those considered ‘historians’ comprised a mixture of the contemplative and practical pasts, he argued forcefully that in the modern world it was only the last of these — the historical past — that should properly occupy the historian. He did not think modern historians were necessarily superior to their predecessors in their ability to prevent incursions of the practical attitude into their view of events. Nonetheless, he hoped that he might encourage historians to adopt a more historical attitude towards the past. In his peroration he proclaimed:
‘The historian’ adores the past; but the world today has perhaps less place for those who love the past than ever before. Indeed, it is determined not to allow events to remove themselves securely into the past; it is determined to keep them alive as long as possible by a process of artificial respiration. Whatever we imagined to be safely dead and ready to decay into ‘history’, is revived, dressed up in modernity and made to gesticulate again. The past is longer-lived to-day than ever before. The pen of every journalist is dedicated to the task of bringing to life what was dead or dying, and of keeping alive what might be allowed to lie down in peace. But to ‘the historian’ this is a piece of obscene necromancy. He has no love of a living past, replete with messages and instructions; his task is to endow the past with death, for the past he adores is dead. Once it was religion that did not allow the dear, dead ‘historic’ past to appear; now it is politics; but always it has been this practical attitude.Footnote 55
This viewpoint found supporters in Dublin. T. Desmond Williams joined Oakeshott in arguing against the study of the past for the present’s sake. Friends from their time at Peterhouse, Cambridge, Williams and Oakeshott were intellectually aligned. In the late 1940s, they had established and edited the conservative Cambridge Journal. Williams’s paper on ‘The historiography of World War II’ explicitly borrowed Oakeshott’s idea that ‘concern with either the practical or the scientific past is not the function of the historian’ and referenced his phrase ‘the “dead” past’.Footnote 56 While Oakeshott dealt with the topic at high level of abstraction, Williams opted for a more empirical exposition of these ideas. He attacked historians of the recent past, particularly those working on interwar diplomacy such as Lewis Namier, for being motivated by unhistorical interests. As he put it,
Most, if not all, of those scholars have tended to consider that particular section of the past from the viewpoint of present problems, and have rarely been able, and equally rarely willing, to look at it as if it were a “dead” past. Practical, sociological, and political presuppositions have underlain much of the historical analysis of the period, and the historian will also have to ask himself if similar presuppositions have not influenced their selection of the archival material which has become available.Footnote 57
Not all who attended Oakeshott’s lecture were as taken with it as Williams. O’Brien, for one, felt Oakeshott had constructed an image of the activity of the historian that was unrealisable in practice. In the weeks beforehand, he had received a commission from the B.B.C. Third Programme to review a new book, Les aventures de la dialectique, by the French existentialist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.Footnote 58 Merleau-Ponty touched on similar themes to Oakeshott, leading O’Brien to frame his review of Merleau-Ponty’s book around a comparison between his ideas about the historian’s activity and Oakeshott’s. As he put it in a letter to his producer, Joe Weltman, O’Brien was struck by what he considered to be ‘the discrepancy in the quality of the thought’ between the two thinkers. O’Brien, who had long been sceptical about historians’ claims to impartiality, was unconvinced by Oakeshott’s argument.Footnote 59 He judged that the view that the appropriate activity for the historian was the study of ‘the dead past’, meaning a past that did not excite contemporary political passions, was a spurious one.Footnote 60 One of the major reasons O’Brien was so dubious about this claim was that he believed that in the case of Oakeshott, it represented a conservative hermeneutic masquerading as an ostentatiously non-political one.Footnote 61
O’Brien contrasted Oakeshott’s injunction against historians allowing the practical attitude to influence their work with a statement from Merleau-Ponty on the same topic. As he translated Merleau-Ponty:
The historian cannot look at the past without finding a meaning in it, without distinguishing between the important and the merely necessary, between attempts and achievements, preparations and decadence. These vectors which he traces for himself into the past cannot help disfiguring reality, in which everything is equally real. The historian’s activities of their nature cause present interests to crystallise in the structure of the past as the historian describes it.Footnote 62
For O’Brien, Merleau-Ponty’s summation of the historian’s activity, which appeared in his discussion of the work of Max Weber, was more convincing than the view Oakeshott had outlined in Dublin. In Merleau-Ponty’s view, it was impossible to prevent ‘the invasion of the historian into history’, meaning that no matter how hard they might try, the histories written by historians would always be imbued with their own judgments, blind spots and biases. On the other hand, he did not see historiography as a wholly relative enterprise. Merleau-Ponty argued that historians could ‘see to it that, like the Kantian subject, the historical understanding constructs according to certain rules which assure an intersubjective value to its representation of the past’.Footnote 63 Like Merleau-Ponty, O’Brien did not advocate a relativist conception of history. Indeed, he argued strongly against such a position in an unpublished essay, alleging that naked relativism in historiography constituted a ‘prostitution of history’.Footnote 64 O’Brien thought that Merleau-Ponty’s admission that the historian, by the very enterprise of studying the past, cannot fail to ‘disfigur[e] reality’ was a ‘dangerous truth’, but an admirable one.Footnote 65 In his opinion, Merleau-Ponty grasped what O’Brien thought was the central issue of historiography — the historian’s selection of evidence — in a way that Oakeshott did not. For Oakeshott, when the ‘historian’ examined the sources with a ‘specifically “historical” attitude’, the historian’s subjectivity did not figure. In his view, in the historian’s analysis ‘Everything that the evidence reveals or points to is recognised to have its place; nothing is excluded’.Footnote 66 For O’Brien, Oakeshott supplied historians with a sort of moral code, but failed to confront the uncomfortable, possibly dangerous truth, highlighted by Merleau-Ponty (this is possibly unfair to Oakeshott, who conceded that the activity he put forward as the activity of the historian was an aspirational one that was difficult to achieve).Footnote 67
In the ‘Preface’ to Parnell and his Party, which he wrote in August 1956 while stationed at the Irish embassy in Paris, O’Brien positioned himself against Oakeshott, writing: ‘If, as some distinguished historians tell us, the proper theme of history is “the dead past” — a past which can evoke no emotions in our contemporaries — then Parnell’s time is not yet ripe for the historian.’Footnote 68 O’Brien used his ‘Preface’ to dispute this claim. He explained that the emotional upheaval triggered by the ‘Parnell split’, through its ‘angry echoes’, continued to exert a force on contemporary life in Ireland. Moreover, the political questions at the heart of late-nineteenth-century Irish politics, such as Ireland’s place within the British Empire, remained unresolved. O’Brien contended that some would view these as problems that would disqualify the Parnell movement from ‘the proper field of the historian’. Furthermore, when O’Brien conducted the research for the book, he had had the benefit of speaking with some of those who were involved with the Irish Parliamentary Party when it was under Parnell’s leadership, notably Capt. Henry Harrison, who dedicated a great proportion of his life endeavouring to see ‘Parnell vindicated’.Footnote 69 Although discussing events with those who played a part in their making might be ‘upsetting to the impartiality’, they also allowed the historian to learn a great deal more about the events in question. Through these conversations, he stated, ‘one tended to become involved, but one got to know more’.Footnote 70 O’Brien conceded that ‘the nearness of the time and its passions’ demanded that this sort of evidence be treated with great sensitivity. However, ‘detachment’ was not what was required. Instead, he asserted that the situation called for ‘fascinated scepticism’. At first glance, this distinction appears to lack a difference but whereas detachment implies objectivity or aloofness, ‘fascinated scepticism’ hints at the historian’s emotional involvement.Footnote 71
III
The problem of historians’ emotional investments in their work became a key touchstone in O’Brien’s writing on historiography. In his 1959 essay, ‘Michelet to-day: aspects of the French Revolution’, originally published in a short-lived intellectual magazine, nonplus, before being reprinted in Writers and politics (1965), O’Brien grappled with this subject at greater length.Footnote 72 He presented a defence of the historical approach and style of the nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet against criticisms levelled at him by modern academic historians and advocated for the view that history was an art rather than a science. Specifically, he challenged the views of the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl, who had written about Michelet in his book, Debates with historians. O’Brien characterised Geyl’s statements as being representative of the standard viewpoint of modern ‘scientific’ historians regarding historiographical style. Geyl himself positioned his essay as a response to contemporary efforts in France aimed at restoring Michelet’s reputation, which had suffered towards the end of the nineteenth century, as positivism gained ascendancy in historiographical discourse.Footnote 73 His targets included Lucien Febvre, Gérard Walter and Georges Lefébvre, whose Notions d’historiographie moderne proclaimed Michelet France’s greatest national historian.Footnote 74 It should be noted that O’Brien did not really engage with the substantive elements of the Dutchman’s argument about Michelet’s legacy in French historiography. Instead, he utilised certain statements made by Geyl as a foil for his own claims about the greatness of Michelet, his honesty, and his right to be seen as ‘more scientific than most modern scientific historians’.Footnote 75
O’Brien’s starting point was that ‘modern historians’ denounced Michelet because his polemics ‘pervade[d] his historical writings’. Yet, he felt that modern historians were being hypocritical when they criticised this partisanship, as he considered that professional historians were just as prone to Michelet’s supposed vices. However, where Michelet was explicit about where he stood, O’Brien contended that in their scholarly work modern historians concealed their own point of view through the deceptively tame use of language. In his 1869 preface to History of France, Michelet himself had gone so far as to proclaim that the historian ‘who aims to disappear while writing, to not exist, to follow contemporary reports from behind … is not a historian at all’.Footnote 76 Similarly, O’Brien thought that this kind of self-effacement was disingenuous, particularly when historians’ scholarly output was viewed in conjunction with their writing for non-specialist publics. He claimed that academic historians put their ‘opinions, hot and strong … into newspaper articles, radio [and] television’ while keeping their scholarship ‘tightly buttoned [and] ostentatiously unemotional’. O’Brien did not name any individuals, but it is possible that this was another swipe at Oakeshott, whom O’Brien regularly referred to as a historian even though he was more well-known as a political philosopher.Footnote 77 ‘The plain dry style’, O’Brien argued, ‘implies the acceptance of rigorous standards, submission to ascertainable facts, the aspiration of historiography towards the status of an exact science.’ But, behind this rhetorical style, ‘“X” the historian is still “X” the man, often “X” the journalist. His emotions, interests, prejudices are with him as he selects and relates facts, sifts conflicting accounts, [and] attributes degrees of credibility to sources.’Footnote 78 Essentially, O’Brien accused modern historians of hiding behind the rhetoric of objectivity and conducting a covert ideological struggle. Instead of reprimanding Michelet for his outbursts of ‘prejudice and emotion’, ‘readers should surely be grateful’ to Michelet for his transparency.Footnote 79
In the months before O’Brien published ‘Michelet to-day’ he spent time thinking about the American sociologist C. Wright Mills’s new book, The sociological imagination. He reviewed it for the Guardian and referenced Mills’s appendix, ‘On intellectual craftsmanship’, in the Spectator in September 1959, extolling it as a model for ‘workers in the science/art borderland’.Footnote 80 The argument put forward in ‘Michelet to-day’ bears the stamp of The sociological imagination, where Mills argued that the key to doing good social science — historiography included — was openness. He maintained that where value judgments came into the equation, these should be made explicit, contending that the heightened levels of self-awareness displayed would not lead to increased subjectivity but greater objectivity. For Mills, if scholars and publics were aware of the point of view that informed a writer’s choices, they could discuss these issues openly and honestly.Footnote 81 This was the core of O’Brien’s argument when he remarked that Michelet could be viewed as ‘more honest and therefore more scientific than most modern scientific historians’.Footnote 82 Both O’Brien and Mills were operating within a distinctly Weberian framework. In his 1904 essay on objectivity, Max Weber denied the need for scholars to cleanse their work of value judgments to achieve objectivity. Instead, Weber argued that in the interest of objectivity, scholars should ‘keep the readers and themselves sharply aware at every moment of the standards by which they judge reality and from which the value-judgment is derived’. He declared that should writers do this rigorously their judgments were not only not a hindrance but were ‘indeed mandatory’.Footnote 83
It has been claimed that by taking this view, O’Brien’s was an ‘unusual historical approach’ that was openly at variance with the historical discipline’s self-perception as a ‘scientific endeavour’.Footnote 84 Yet, his idea of history was not as ‘unusual’ as it has been supposed. The question of the epistemological status of historiography, specifically whether it is an art or a science, has attracted the attention of countless great thinkers. O’Brien’s decision to plump for history-as-art over history-as-science did not mark him as an outlier so much as position him on one side of a long-standing debate.Footnote 85 However, to speak of taking sides is to muddy the waters, as many thinkers opted to blur the boundaries and assert that history was both a science and an art. For instance, even J. B. Bury — who notoriously declared that history was a ‘science, no less and no more’ — argued against the idea that ‘the presentation of the results of historical research is not an art’.Footnote 86 Even among so-called revisionist historians in Ireland, there was an acceptance that it was naïve to assert the scientific status of history. F. S. L. Lyons, austere a historian as he was, contended that historians should ‘emulate the scientist in his attitude to the evidence’, but recommended that all aspiring historians should be made to read C. V. Wedgwood’s book, Truth and opinion, so that they might learn the ‘art of the historian’ and, therefore, be able to ‘combine readability with scholarship’.Footnote 87 Herbert Butterfield, a key intellectual influence on Irish historians of O’Brien’s generation, devoted an entire chapter in his short but highly significant book, The whig interpretation of history, to ‘The art of the historian’.Footnote 88 While Butterfield’s overarching argument revolved around a rebuke of the tendency of nineteenth-century Whig historians, such as Lord Acton, to judge history from the standpoint of the present, he reasoned that even in the most ‘technical history’, the historian,
may run through the whole gamut of emotions, and there is no reason why he should not meet history in any or all the moods that a man may have in meeting life itself. It is not a sin in a historian to introduce a personal bias that can be recognised and discounted. The sin in historical composition is the organisation of the story in such a way that bias cannot be recognised and the reader is locked along with the writer in what is really a treacherous argument in a circle.Footnote 89
This passage would have fit comfortably within O’Brien’s understanding of the way in which historians should situate themselves within their work.
IV
Diarmuid Whelan has speculated that in retrospect O’Brien would have ‘no doubt repudiate[d] the essay’ (‘Michelet to-day’) because of where it would have positioned him in the ‘revisionist’ controversy in Ireland.Footnote 90 This was an essentially political controversy that revolved around the reinterpretation of Irish history by professionally-trained historians. While historical revisionism in Ireland did not begin with the outbreak of the ‘Troubles’, it became a matter of heated public discussion as the crisis unfolded in the 1970s and 1980s, as historians turned their attention to undermining the nationalist historical narratives that were seen as legitimising the republican armed struggle. Critics of revisionism felt it was disingenuous for historians engaged in this enterprise to claim to be writing ‘value-free history’.Footnote 91 For the anti-revisionist literary critic Seamus Deane, assertions of ‘objectivity’ and being ‘value-free’ were little more than ‘disguises’ concealing a polemical position.Footnote 92 As one of revisionism’s most severe and erudite critics, Brendan Bradshaw, following Butterfield, contended, writing history involved ‘the exercise of personal judgement and, therefore, of subjective assessment, at every stage’, and he asserted that revisionists’ epistemological commitments to a ‘value-free approach’ caused them to deny the subjectivity inherent in their work.Footnote 93 However, revisionism was not as rigidly empiricist, theoretically unsophisticated or as monolithic as Bradshaw and its other critics depicted. O’Brien was one of historical revisionism’s most forceful proponents, but his intellectual interventions, such as States of Ireland, cannot be characterised in the way that Bradshaw represented revisionism in Ireland.Footnote 94 This work displayed O’Brien’s high level of reflexivity regarding his own subjectivity, and it was not based on the intensive archival research deemed characteristic of revisionism. Yet, it is seen as an important landmark in the revisionist controversy. In its scholarly reception, Whelan’s speculation has congealed into something more solid. The literary scholar Aidan O’Malley has gone so far as to claim that O’Brien’s ‘promotion of Michelet’s overtly partial historiography’ was an aspect of his early thought that he came to ‘fundamentally repudiate’ later in his career in light of the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’.Footnote 95 As will become clear however, O’Brien did not disclaim the point of view he propagated in the 1950s in response to his experience of political violence in Ireland. By contrast, at various points in his career, he reiterated and expanded on the arguments he made in ‘Michelet to-day’ and his earlier reflections on history writing.
In ‘Michelet to-day’, O’Brien stated that ‘Class war, religious war, [and] national war all rage in historiography as they have raged in history’. In 1972, in his classic ‘revisionist’ text, States of Ireland, which confronted nationalist historical thinking in Ireland by accepting partition and censuring Irish nationalists’ claims to Northern Ireland, he restated this point, writing that
Most history is tribal history: written that is to say in terms generated by, and acceptable to, a given tribe or nation, or within such a tribe or nation. If you know the language, etc., in which any ‘standard’ history of the origins of the First World War is written you will be able to make predictions, with a small margin of error, about its selection of data, conclusions on controversial points, and general emphasis … Historians, like other people, tend to identify with a community — not necessarily the one into which they were born — and in the case of modern historians this identification is likely to affect, and interact with, the character of their work, their career, their geographical location, and their public. Normally they write within a convention which suggests that these conditions do not exist, or can be ignored.Footnote 96
The tone of the final sentence of this passage suggested that O’Brien by no means accepted the validity of this convention. And, yet, despite this disapproval, he seemed almost to bow down before it when he denied that he wrote States of Ireland as a historian:
The historian may claim — though we may be sceptical about the claim — that the scientific rigour of his work, and the accepted standards by which it will be judged, dispense him from any need to identify his own point of view, or the factors which may have conditioned it.Footnote 97
Due to the significant amount of ‘commentary and interpretation’ contained in the book, O’Brien felt that he could not dispense with the need to tell readers where he stood. Moreover, the fact that he highlighted his scepticism regarding historians’ claims to ‘scientific rigour’ indicated that he had not abandoned his doubts about history as science.Footnote 98
In the 1980s, O’Brien reaffirmed his commitment to the historiographical style he advocated in ‘Michelet to-day’. Invited to participate in a debate on historical objectivity by the Literary & Historical Society at University College, Dublin, O’Brien asserted that the ‘work of the historian is more like that of the craftsman or artist than that of the natural scientist’. Indeed, he declared outright that ‘Scientific history, in the strict sense, is impossible.’ He then went on to explain his views on the activity of the historian, arguing
human beings writing about other human beings. Their feelings are involved as well as their minds. They can have religious or anti-religious prejudices; ideological ones; nationalist ones, and they will vent these from time to time. The great histories of the past did so honestly and frequently. Modern histories do so very discretely. The barest suggestion of a sniff. Personally, I like histories to tell us their prejudices, both because it is often fun, and because it shows us where, in their narrative they are likely to go wrong, what sort of things they are likely to misinterpret or miss, what they exaggerate.Footnote 99
And then, as if to underline the continuity of his thinking on this subject, his notes for the speech indicated that he illustrated this point with ‘the case of Michelet’.Footnote 100
In several publications in the early 1990s, O’Brien yet again devoted space to reflection on historical style and method, drawing on the thought of the historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin and through him on the philosophy of the eighteenth-century Italian thinker Giambattista Vico. It is noteworthy that this development brought him even closer to Michelet, as Michelet was one of Vico’s first intellectual descendants. As Michelet himself put it: ‘Je suis né de Vico.’Footnote 101 First in the New York Review of Books and then in the introduction to his massive tome on Edmund Burke, The great melody, O’Brien commended Berlin’s distillation of Vico’s thought to his readers. On both occasions he quoted a lengthy passage from Berlin’s essay on Vico and cultural history dealing with the role of fantasia, defined by Berlin as ‘imaginative insight’, in the writing of history.Footnote 102
In The great melody, O’Brien launched an attack on academic historiography, which he contended was devoid of fantasia. In a somewhat outdated broadside, O’Brien aimed his ire at Lewis Namier and his subsequent influence over academic historians.Footnote 103 O’Brien charged Namier with purging the historical discipline of fantasia. With The great melody, O’Brien argued that he was bringing fantasia back to history and he let his readers know that he had brought as much ‘imaginative insight’ as he felt was necessary to his construction of the text. O’Brien’s assault on Namierite historiography had a long gestation, with his dislike of Namier’s method of inquiry beginning during his time as a doctoral candidate. His feelings towards Namier deteriorated as his attachment to Burke grew. In the mid-1960s, O’Brien took up a teaching post at New York University where he made Burke a central figure in his teaching and produced an edition Reflections on the Revolution in France as part of Penguin’s new ‘Pelican Political Classics’ series.Footnote 104 As Jim Smyth points out, O’Brien based his condemnation of Namier on the discourtesy of his remarks about Burke and the overall paucity of references to him in Namier’s influential works on eighteenth-century British politics.Footnote 105 Although it went unmentioned in O’Brien’s book, his notes on Burke made during his stint in New York suggest that his views were also shaped by Namier’s ‘The character of Edmund Burke’, his most overtly antagonistic piece on Burke.Footnote 106 O’Brien did not fail to notice that Namier’s dominance had waned significantly since its peak between the 1930s and the 1960s, and yet he still felt that his negative statements about Burke retained a residual power among historians. In History Ireland in 1993, Peter Jupp challenged O’Brien’s assessment of Namierite historiography, pointing out that the asperity of O’Brien’s attack did not square with his own comments on the ‘respectful’ entry in Namier and John Brooke’s The history of parliament.Footnote 107 However, for O’Brien, the ‘damage’ to Burke’s reputation had been done during the height of Namier’s influence and it had not been fully repaired.
Although O’Brien viewed The great melody as his life’s ‘principal achievement’, his contemporaries were divided on its merits.Footnote 108 Indeed, many reviewers recorded feeling a mixture of appreciation for and aversion to different aspects of the work. For instance, Louis M. Cullen wrote that the book was ‘too violent, too long, and too personalised’, but also that certain elements, such as O’Brien’s stress on Burke’s Irishness, meant it had ‘very real merits as a study of Burke’.Footnote 109 The anti-revisionist intellectual Seamus Deane was less generous, dismissing the book as a ‘disturbed attempt to rewrite the story of Burke as a version of the story of Conor Cruise O’Brien’. Deane posited that time would reveal it to be ‘a fascinating document for those interested in O’Brien and somewhat less enthralling for those interested in Burke’.Footnote 110 In stark contrast, the British historian Linda Colley argued that The great melody was ‘the best book about Edmund Burke ever written’ precisely because O’Brien’s personal engagement with the subject matter meant ‘its authenticity penetrates one to the core’.Footnote 111 Numerous admirers pointed to fantasia as the element of the book that raised it above ‘conventional biography’.Footnote 112 For the Straussian political philosopher Harvey C. Mansfield, whose own criticisms of Namier influenced O’Brien, O’Brien’s imaginative approach succeeded in rescuing Burke’s ‘greatness’ from the ‘reductionism’ of the ‘professional historians’.Footnote 113 D. H. Akenson lauded the book’s artistry, comparing O’Brien to ‘one of the great innovative Renaissance composers [who] refused to accept the musical forms as they existed’. Moreover, he defended it as ‘very good history from the technical standpoint’, as O’Brien was faithful to the evidence and clearly signposted the moments at which he deviated into ‘guesses and speculations’.Footnote 114
On the other hand, some of his more critical readers thought that by laying such stress on imaginative insight, O’Brien had allowed himself too much scope for speculation. The conservative Burke scholar Peter J. Stanlis, about whose work O’Brien had written disapprovingly, argued that fantasia as practised by O’Brien rendered The great melody less a work of history and ‘more a fictional fantasy’. In his view, O’Brien’s ‘wildly romantic’ imagination did not benefit from the disciplining effects of sound judgment, good taste, and moral norms, meaning that it had run amok. It is worth noting that in preparing his review Stanlis investigated O’Brien’s back catalogue, unearthing ‘Michelet to-day’ to explicate what he termed O’Brien’s ‘bias against mainstream historians’.Footnote 115 On the left of the political spectrum, E. P. Thompson contended that O’Brien had leaned too heavily on fantasia to construct Burke’s ‘Irish layer’. For Thompson, O’Brien was too eager to fill in Burke’s silences on Ireland and Catholicism with ‘copious inferences and confident hypotheses’.Footnote 116 Similarly, J. G. A. Pocock felt that O’Brien overplayed this Irish dimension to the detriment of his analysis of other significant elements in Burke’s thought — namely, the central importance of Whiggery and the wider political culture of Britain, especially England.Footnote 117 Later scholars have also taken issue with these elements. Burke’s most recent biographer has labelled O’Brien’s approach ‘psychobiographical’ for his efforts to uncover the underlying forces driving Burke’s thought. Burke’s Irish background and his Catholic convert ancestry has certainly not been dismissed as irrelevant, but historians have shied away from placing such significant emphasis on it as the key to understanding Burke’s output as O’Brien did.Footnote 118
Two years later, while he was promoting his new book on Irish history and politics, Ancestral voices, O’Brien gave multiple indications that he continued to hold onto the idea of the historian’s activity that he propounded in ‘Michelet to-day’. In his report of an interview with O’Brien, The Times journalist Martin Ivens reported that
like one of his favourite historians, Michelet, who told his audience exactly where he would have sat had he been a member of the Convention during the French Revolution, he [O’Brien] believes it honest to ‘put the reader under notice that I am not a disembodied spirit’.Footnote 119
At the launch of Ancestral voices in Dublin, O’Brien reiterated this point of view in response to another reporter’s question about whether the book could be considered ‘an objective account of Irish history’. O’Brien answered that ‘a book is written by a person and not a committee’, signalling that he held fast to his views about the importance of historians recognising their own subjectivity as they approach the task of writing history.Footnote 120
Ancestral voices stands as an illustration of how O’Brien deployed ‘imaginative insight’ in his historical writing. In his review, the revisionist historian R. F. Foster, who, based on the caricature of revisionism as a rigidly empiricist enterprise, should have deplored the levels of fantasia on display, stated that he ‘read the historical sections of this book (including those dealing with very recent history) in unstinting admiration’.Footnote 121 By contrast, the anti-revisionist Brendan Bradshaw, who had previously urged historians to engage in ‘purposeful unhistoricity’ in pursuit of a new nationalist historiography, excoriated O’Brien for ‘manipulat[ing] the historical evidence to suit his case’ and ‘grant[ing] his own surmises the status of historical fact in the worst post-modernist manner’.Footnote 122
The most telling example of O’Brien’s use of imaginative insight in the construction of his narrative came during his account of the republican revolutionary leader Patrick Pearse’s formation as an Irish nationalist. O’Brien, drawing heavily on Barry Coldrey’s history of the role of the Christian Brothers in the evolution of Irish nationalism, Faith and fatherland, argued that Pearse’s encounter with the Brothers at school profoundly shaped the contours of his thought. O’Brien found Coldrey’s account of an exchange between Pearse and one of his teachers regarding the importance of sea power particularly suggestive. Asked to read his essay on the subject aloud in front of the class, Pearse uttered the phrase ‘our navy’ when he referred to the British navy. This earned him a sharp reprimand from his teacher, who scolded him and told the class in no uncertain terms that ‘England used its naval power to plunder the rest of the world and Ireland as well’.Footnote 123 After retailing this story, O’Brien speculated that this ‘must have been a searing experience for the young Pearse to be thus rebuked, in the presence of the class, for words he must have heard from his father’s lips’.Footnote 124 In turn, O’Brien’s speculation on this count earned him a good telling-off from his friend, the historian and son of Robert Dudley Edwards, Owen Dudley Edwards, to whom O’Brien had sent the manuscript of Ancestral voices for comment. According to O’Brien, Edwards pointed out that there was no documentary evidence extant that supported the claim that Pearse’s father had ever made this kind of statement to his son. Edwards protested,
No, no. There’s no ‘he must’ about it. ‘He must’ only because you want him to. The Pearses subscribed to Victorian magazines, notably the enjoyable and violently imperialist Little Folks … Since we know he read those bound volumes and we know they contained this guff about our navy, and we know sweet Fanny Adams about what his daddy told him, Little Folks is a much better source than Dad for the navy.Footnote 125
Instead of excising the offending statement, O’Brien decided to insert his exchange with Edwards into his historical narrative, relaying to readers his deliberations on how best to incorporate the revisions. In the draft Edwards received, O’Brien had written, ‘… for a sentence he must have heard from his father’s lips’, and the only concession he made to Edwards’s objections was to replace ‘a sentence’ with ‘words’. He justified this in the following terms:
I believe that the young Pearse not merely heard the phrase ‘our navy’ on his father’s lips - how else could an average Englishman refer to the force in question? - but that he must have heard it with very much the same emotional connotations as attached to it in Little Folks.
It was important for O’Brien’s claim that this was a formative moment for Pearse that the teacher had forced him to ‘repudiate, not merely the world of Little Folks but his own father who inhabited that world and subscribed to it’. For O’Brien, only with the rejection of Pearse’s own father could the intensity of his nationalism be explained.
This passage highlighted the extent to which O’Brien not only employed fantasia in his writing, but also the extent to which he inserted himself into his historical narrative. In this discussion of Pearse, O’Brien elevated imaginative insight above documentary evidence as a means of writing and understanding history. However, by sharing his thought process with his readers, he practised the kind of openness he lauded in ‘Michelet to-day’ thirty-five years earlier. Had he repudiated that early essay, he could not have written Ancestral voices in the manner he did, as it represented history-as-art taken to its extreme conclusion.
V
Scholars have argued that intellectuals must negotiate the tension between scholarly detachment and passionate commitment. In O’Brien’s view, this offers historians and other intellectuals a false dichotomy, limiting the potential of their intellectual productions. As he wrote,
Is an intellectual not human? Does he not have emotions? And if he does, what is to be gained by his concealing them and pretending to be a machine? A historian for example cannot be objective. He is himself part of the historical process; the passions and the interests of the people he is writing about are his too … a modern historian dealing with wars and revolutions which are still vibrating around us, cannot possibly be impartial.Footnote 126
For him, the most important point was that intellectuals needed to be open and honest about their emotional and political investments, making their readers and audiences aware of how these predispositions might have influenced the way they interpreted a subject. As his career developed, O’Brien did not reject the ideas about the activity of the historian that he embraced during the 1950s. By contrast, he frequently reiterated them and expanded on them over the succeeding decades. His preference for the idea of ‘history as art’, for example, culminated in his late attachment to fantasia. O’Brien abjured the label ‘objective historian’, favouring instead to prioritise the idea that historians should be passionately engaged with contemporary public discourse while maintaining the necessary respect for their source material. Shunning the so-called ‘ivory tower’ for the exposure and uncertainty of the public sphere, O’Brien has been credited with bringing historical ‘revisionism’ to the Irish public.Footnote 127 In 1972, at the peak of the Troubles, O’Brien declared that people on both sides of the Irish border possessed ‘a past which has moulded us, and also threatens us’.Footnote 128 In the context of political violence, O’Brien argued that the work of historians had ‘become essential for our mental and political health — and indeed physical health too’.Footnote 129 Contrary to Oakeshott’s view that historians should only concern themselves with the ‘dead past’, O’Brien contended that historians had a responsibility to engage with the past as it manifested in contemporary political conflict.
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