Why History?

WHY HISTORY?

By Haim Marantz

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The Montréal Review, June 2025

A debate sparked by former Education Minister Rabbi Shlomo Ben-Zion Piron's declaration to remove history from the list of subjects in which Israeli pupils must pass an exam to receive a Bagrut certificate has led me to consider the importance of studying history, and the role it plays in our lives — the lives of those of us who are not professional historians. Thinking about these questions has led me to think about other questions that are more concerned with the study of history itself – not only in primary and secondary schools, but also in universities. And it soon became clear to me that many historians and most graduates who majored in the study of history at university are very ignorant about the history of history. But this is something I will get to later in my essay. I shall begin by pointing to the centrality of history in our lives, as we humans, whatever we are, are without exception, historical creatures.

The human being has been described as an essentially historical being, and it certainly is the case that for many reasons he or she necessarily needs to form some conception of his or her past. Without such a conception he or she cannot attain a proper conscious understanding of himself or herself, and so cannot be fully human. It might be supposed that a human being could live in the present and face forward constantly to the future, as perhaps an animal does; such a person would be affected by his or her past experiences and vicissitudes, and would retain memories of some of them, but would not be inclined at any point to relate to the person he or she used to be, for he or she would not be in possession of the concept of being who they in fact specifically are. There may be human beings who are approximate to this condition (to lose the ability to separate past from present is among the miseries of old age), but they are the exception rather than the rule. And this is as it should be. The present, after all, is not a contentless point but a transition point between past and future; to grasp it for what it is we have to consider it in relation to what precedes and what follows. The power to perceive things is bound up with the power to remember what they were like and to anticipate what they will be. If this is true of perception of external reality, it is not less true of the perception of ourselves.

What holds in this respect for individual consciousness holds also, and perhaps more importantly, for the shared consciousness of identifiable groups or communities. The sense of identity a community possesses is clearly dependent on those who comprise it having a sentiment of belonging to a continuing communal life, something which is impossible without a largely agreed hope for the community’s future. A community does not live just in the present; it is an entity which persists through time and embraces diverse phases. In Hegelian terminology, it is not a “bare particular”, but a “concrete universal”. Those who constitute the community will, unless conditions are quite abnormal, think of themselves as carrying on from predecessors and handing over to successors; they will see their enterprise as developing out of the past and developing into the future. And in so far as they do so, they will need to entertain beliefs about the past, at least so far as it concerns their community. They will not be able to turn their backs on it altogether, even though in special circumstances, such as those of violent revolution, they may think of themselves as doing just that.

I have said so far that awareness of self, whether at the personal or at the collective level, involves a conception of and/or beliefs about the past. Need it be an accurate conception, or one which its author thinks of as accurate? Need the beliefs in question be consciously presented as true? To me it seems clear that there is a sense in which they need not. For the purposes I have identified, it might be enough if some such conception were formed, or some such belief entertained even if what was being affirmed or entertained as a fact turned out to be false. Or, if this is putting it too strongly and affirmation of some sort is needed, it does not have to be based on a conscious separation of fact from fiction. I can get hold of my present self, in some degree at least, provided I have some idea of what I used to be; the idea might, as it happened, be in large part a product of imagination, without ceasing to perform this elementary function. Of course, it will not do for me simply to make up an account of myself in the past with full consciousness that it is false or merely fictitious; deception cannot go that far without grave consequences of many kinds. But if I move on to a primitive level, as most people did in unsophisticated times and many still do in contemporary unsophisticated societies. I may not even be consciously aware of the distinction between the real and the imaginary, as regards this specific issue. The picture I have of myself, and my exploits may strike an outside commentator as full of fabrications and falsehood, without the notion that this might be so having entered my head. For practical purposes I get by with what amounts to a myth about myself, though to put it in this way is at this stage in this essay unclear, as I have not yet distinguished the difference between myth and history.

The idea of an individual human being going around with a conception of himself or herself in the past which is primarily the product of imagination sounds bizarre to many modern ears: such an individual, we all feel, would be quickly disabused of his or her merely fancied beliefs and/or by the criticism of others. The idea of a society or community, a relatively isolated tribe, for instance, or a nation rising to power, being in this position does seem far less strange. In the modern world communities impinge upon, and indeed merge into, one another, in a way which makes it hard for individual of any one of them to stay at the merely imaginative level in their conception of its past: the myths of any one group will always be subject to challenge, if only because its members are aware of the conflicting beliefs of members of other groups. But it is important to recognize that the conditions of modern civilized life, where skepticism and intercommunication are the order of the day, are hardly typical of human society over time. We do not have to go very far back in time, or very far afield in space, to come across communities whose conception of the past is formed quite uncritically. Such communities in fact nourish themselves on myths, the formation and dissemination of which play an important part in their continuing life. But this wording should not be taken to imply that in cases like this a conscious fraud is being perpetrated on members of the community by people who are perfectly aware that what they are claiming and teaching is false. Those who composed or recited the Norse sagas or the Homeric poems neither asked themselves nor were asked by others whether what they sang was literally true. Indeed, it is doubtful if they had any real grasp of the concept of the past as it historically was, as opposed to how they imagined it to be.

If what I have been saying is correct, human beings’ original conception of the past, whether at the personal or the collective level, was mythical and imaginative in character. Now it has become clear, particularly in the last two hundred plus years, that myths, so far from being the product of idle imagining and hence possessing no more than a childish charm, fulfill a most important function in the societies which foster them. They give expression to attitudes, fundamental beliefs and hopes; they connect prominently at once with the intellectual and the emotional life of the community. The idea that it is possible to remove Greek myths from ancient Greek life and leave it fundamentally unchanged is as naïve as the idea that it is possible to remove Greek art or religion with the same general result. But if this is so, the question at once arises, what happens when men get beyond the stage of myth and pass on to that of history. Does the fact that they are now preoccupied not just with the past but with the truth about the past mean that from now on their allegiance will be only to the intellect? If so, are they to forego entirely the emotional satisfaction and emotional sense of their own identity which myth afforded to earlier generations? Or is it the case that even the “scientific” history of modern times has non-scientific aspects which few of its practitioners are ready to acknowledge, aspects which give it an importance far beyond anything it would have if it were merely the product of disinterested curiosity?

Let me approach this problem by recalling a well-known distinction drawn by the historian and political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, between what he called a “practical” and a truly “historical” attitude to the past. According to Oakeshott, the commonest attitude to the past among human beings is a practical one: They view it as something which relates to, and has bearing on, their present condition and hopes. The practical past is, typically, my past, or the past considered as being of concern to the group or groups to which I belong. The practical past is not something about which men and women are, in general, neutral: on the contrary, the thought of it fills them with pride or shame or indignation. But though this approach to the past is both common and highly important, it is not that of the true historian, if Oakeshott is to be believed. The historian begins from the premise that what is done is done, and so sees his or her task as being to investigate the past for its own sake. The historical past accordingly is sharply separate from the practical past. It has nothing to do with the present hopes or fears of human beings, since it existed entirely apart from them. And it demands to be investigated as it was without any question of its relevance for us now. Oakeshott argued that history proper came into existence only when men and women grasped the idea of a truly independent past and saw the necessity to examine it without fear or favor. It is not, however, his view that everything today which passes for history, or even everything which passes for academic or professional history, embodies the true historical attitude: there are elements of practical thinking betrayed in the language used in the work of most, if not all, of those who call themselves historians. No doubt that is why, in his essay “The Activity of Being an Historian”, Oakeshott writes throughout of the characteristics of “history” and “the historian” in quotation marks. “History”, as he describes it, is not so much an actuality as an ideal.

I think that Oakeshott is generally quite correct in drawing this distinction and in insisting that each historian’s first duty is to examine available evidence about the past and to attempt to describe it as he or she believes it actually was. Historians must begin by separating out what is true and what is false in men’s and women’s conceptions of past times; they clearly cannot proceed on the assumption that they can believe what they like about it. In judging whether the findings of historians are acceptable we must not ask in the first place if they are relevant or interesting or inspiring, or such as we might like, or might fear, to be true; we must ask in the first place if they are true. The question is; however, how far does this platitude take us. Does accepting it mean that true history can interest people only, as it were, by accident? Does it mean that, insofar as he or she adopts the proper historical attitude, that each historian must view his or her results with total indifference, except as examples of the successful deployment of his or her historical skills? Oakeshott’s own admission that few, if any, practitioners of history have so far managed to live up to what he takes to be the historical ideal may well make us wary about going that far. And reflection on history as a going concern suggests that historians are drawn to the study of the past by very many different motives. Concern for the truth must occupy a special position in their thoughts, but it need not be the only factor to weigh with them.

For many people (though not, I think, for many professional students of the subject) history means the works of major historians. In considering what history is and what function it may properly be said to perform, we can accordingly ask with perfect propriety what it turns out to be when handled by such people. Take Livy, Macaulay and the Jewish historians Marx and Margolis as examples. Livy wrote a history of Rome which presents it as a success story culminating in the blessings of the Principate of Augustus; Macaulay wrote a history of Britain whose main theme is the triumph of a certain sort of liberalism, the liberalism of the group of Whigs to which Macaulay himself belonged; then again, Marx and Margolis wrote a history of the Jews which ends in triumph of the birth of Reform Judaism. None viewed the past as something which existed in total independence of the present; for all of them the past was very much alive, as the necessary background to the present. Again, Livy, Macaulay, and Marx and Margolis felt the need to take account of past happenings and to set out the story of their community’s vicissitudes as part of an ongoing movement in which he participated, in Livy’s case the anti-republican movement of the Caesars, in Macaulay’s the cause of liberalism in its Whig version; and in Marx’ and Margolis’ case Judaism’s adaption to the modern world. But does this mean that we must dismiss these authors as propagandists rather than true historians? The truth is that none of them was engaged in a publicity campaign on behalf of clients any more than a poet who writes of the beauties of his native land. Each of them felt intensely about his subjects; and each of them is attracted to history because it throws light on events taking place in the present. But though all had their shortcomings as scientific historians, especially Livy, it must still be said that none was willing simply to ignore evidence or to twist it without scruple to suit his own cause. None could properly be accused of being indifferent to the claims of truth.

If we ask whether Livy, Macaulay and Marx and Margolis had a conception of the past which was “practical” or “historical”, the answer must be that in all cases it was both. Like other great literary historians, they all had got beyond the stage of mere mythmaking and knew that their first duty was not to propagate falsehoods; to that extent they were aware of the difference between the true historical past and the mythical past. But that did not prevent them from caring enormously about what they believed to be true; it did not stop the past as they saw it mattering to them and having a profound effect on their own contemporary practical activities. Unlike Oakeshott’s “historian”, they did not take themselves to be spectators of all time and all existence whose attitudes to the events and persons with which they were concerned was one of sublime indifference. They were ready to judge as well as to narrate and explain, to commit themselves to what they sincerely believed to be the value and significance of what came about. But they did this, or thought they did it, based on what they believed to be true. If they advanced a case, it was as a lawyer does when he or she argues that a verdict is appropriate because it is supported by the known facts.

It seems to me clear that history, as it was written by Livy, Macaulay and Marx and Margolis fulfils at least some of the wider purposes which were fulfilled by myth in the days before history existed. It offers a distinct and intelligible conception of the past which can direct, or at least facilitate, action; It helps those who read it to attain self-knowledge or, failing that, an enhanced conception of self; it ministers to the emotions as well as the intellect. But to say that it is like myth in these respects is not, of course, to identify it with myth, or even to imply that it contains mythical elements. History and myth are fundamentally different. Myth belongs to a level of consciousness at which there is not a clear awareness of the distinction between reality and illusion; history takes its start only when this distinction is made as regards what happened in the past. The first duty of the historian is to separate the false from the true. But this is a task of which the mythmaker, in the sense in which I am using the term here, has simply no conception.

The case I have been putting forward is not, of course, meant to apply only to Livy, Macaulay and Marx and Margolis: attention to the history of history suggests that work of the type analyzed is altogether more common than many academic historians would like us to think. Until the middle of the nineteenth century or thereabouts no one so much as thought of an alternative. It was universally assumed that an historian would choose his subject because of its relevance to the present and that his final product, though not failing to satisfy the demands of historical scholarship, would simultaneously serve a wider purpose, connecting with the life of the community as a whole or of some important group inside it. The great historians of the eighteenth century, the age in which historical works first began to have a wider circulation, were certainly not narrow in their conception of their subject, nor were their successors in the early nineteenth century. Voltaire in his “Age of Louis XIV”, Hume in his “History of Great Britain”, Grote in his “History of Greece”, Mommsen in his “History of Rome” all had wider purposes in mind than to discover the truth about the past for its own sake. In each case their activity as historians was continuous with their activity as commentators on the contemporary scene; they would all have thought of their results as not only interesting in themselves, but also valuable for their further uses. And this attitude was undoubtedly shared by their readers who, if they no longer hoped, as had previous generations, to derive direct instructions from history, nevertheless saw the whole enterprise of learning about and taking account of the past as of major practical concern. They read history, as they read works of literature, not just for its own interest, but also as a means of finding out about themselves.

In many respects this situation persists even today: the educated public generally values history because it finds it instructive, and much history is written in the spirit of the great literary historians of the past (it is history of this kind which makes the subject so attractive to publishers). But the reputation of writers like Hume and Macaulay, to say nothing of Voltaire, among professional historians is far from high. To many modern academic historians these authors are only half historians, both because their command of historical techniques is deficient and because their basic attitude to their subject is so impure. They lived before the age of scientific history, and just because of that their writings do not deserve to be treated seriously as history.

What exactly is scientific history? So far as I understand it, it is two quite different things, one entirely acceptable; the other much less so. The first, it is that historians use the full resources of modern scholarship to undertake their primary task of finding out what happened in the past. The extent to which these resources have increased in the last three and a half centuries is, of course, remarkable. Originally historians based their accounts of past events on nothing more than personal testimony and oral tradition; later they learnt to use records of various kinds to supplement and correct these. A great step forward was taken in the seventeenth century when the invention of “diplomatic” made it easier to date literary evidence and to distinguish what was genuine from what was forged. Next came the extension of the field of historical evidence, first to inscriptions and coins and then to archaeological data. Inscriptions were first systematically collected in the mid-nineteenth century; archaeology became a major adjunct of history about a hundred years ago. The modern historian is at an advantage over his or her predecessors in having an immense range of source material, much of it published, reported, or systematically catalogued. The founding of specialized institutes and the institution of an ever-increasing number of learned journals, most of them dealing with particular areas of history, have made this work much easier. He or she is also helped by being able to call on an increasing range of ancillary studies – statistics to help draw reliable general conclusions from surviving records, physics and chemistry to aid in dating archaeological “finds”, computer studies to sort out problems in literary history, and so on.

Anyone who undertakes a piece of historical work today will be expected to proceed scientifically at least to the extent that he or she makes full use, where they are appropriate, of the resources I have just listed. Whatever his or her wider interest in his or her historical studies, he or she needs to begin by answering questions of a broadly factual kind, and for this he or she needs to locate and exploit evidence. Historians have developed increasingly sophisticated methods of doing this, and no one who hopes for success in the field of history can afford to neglect these. To be scientific in this sense is today a necessary condition for achieving worthwhile historical results.

Some historians may be inclined to question this on the ground that they are not conscious of thinking in what they take to be a scientific way: their method of proceeding is personal and intuitive rather than according to objectively prescribed canons. But of course, there is plenty of room for personal insight in the thinking of natural scientists too. The question here, in fact, is not about thinking as consciously carried on by the historian or scientist, but about the principles which govern their thinking, whether they are conscious of them or not. My argument is simply that a modern historian can be scientific as some of his or her less fortunate predecessors could not, in that he or she has at his or her disposal a series of well-tested and intellectually devised techniques for the solution of his or her problems. They may not enable him or her to do everything he or she wants to do, but they are not to be despised on that account. An individual can be skilled in the use of historical techniques without being a great historian, just as an individual can be skilled in the use of the techniques of natural science without being a great scientist. On this point, at any rate, there is no difference between history and the sciences generally.

But is this to endorse all the claims made on behalf of scientific history? Those who argued at the beginning of the previous century that history had become, or was on the point of becoming, “a science, not less and not more”, to use J. B. Bury’s famous phrase, certainly laid stress on the development by historians of agreed and successful methods for arriving at historical truth. But they did not stop at this point. They wanted to make out that history was or could become more scientific in a number of further respects. I shall now list and briefly comment on these.

First, they said that the attitude of the historian to his or her subject matter must resemble that of the scientist’s to his or her subject in that both must be ready to subordinate themselves to the facts. History in its pre-scientific stage merged all too readily into propaganda or special pleading; history in its modern form was (or should be) governed by the rule that the historian’s first duty is to tell the truth, whether he or she likes that truth or not.

Next, they argued, as a corollary of this, that historians must be impartial observers rather than committed partisans. Their job began and ended with the discovery and communication of the truth, or as much of the truth as they could come by. It was no part of their duties to advance or defend a cause, not in consequence must they express approval or disapproval of anything that happened in the past. The making of value judgments was as foreign to the thinking of the scientific historian as it was to that of any other kind of scientist.

Thirdly, they held that there was something fundamentally wrong in the popular historical practice of taking up subjects for investigation according to their supposed relevance to the historian’s own times. To treat the past thus in relation to the present was to fail to take it seriously as worth knowing about for its own sake. The idea that some periods are of their nature more interesting than others was a relic of pre-scientific historical thought; it went along with the belief that we engage in historical enquires because of their utility. The truth is rather that historical knowledge is to be valued for itself, just as is pure scientific knowledge. Accordingly, everything in the past must be seen as worthy of the historian’s scrutiny; as the German historian Ranke put it, “all periods are equally dear to God”.

If these points could be taken separately (and we must remember that those who put them forward thought of them as internally connected), the first could be accepted without difficulty, for it is surely not a matter of controversy that an historian’s first allegiance is to truth. The writing of history presents its exponents with a series of intellectual problems, which must be solved satisfactorily if anything is to be accomplished at all. To solve such problems, the historian needs to think about his subject matter in a disinterested way; to let his or her feelings influence his or her thinking about it is to risk arriving at conclusions which are totally unreliable. Supporters of scientific history were quite correct to insist on these familiar truths. But is arguable that they were not entirely unfamiliar to historians of previous generations. Traditional history had many faults; it was marred by partisanship, inadequate scholarship, lack of sustained imagination, undue surrender to merely literary or rhetorical considerations. It does not follow, however, that those who practiced it were simply ignorant of what they had to do as historians, or simply indifferent to truth. The differences in this respect between the great literary historians of the past and their modern professional successors are at most differences in degree.

What is the connection between saying that historians must approach their problems in a disinterested way and saying they must be impartial observers rather than committed partisans? At first sight they look like two different sides of a single coin, but it is easy to show that they are not. There is nothing to prevent a man or a woman being disinterested in his or her approach to the facts and at the same time totally committed in his or her objectives; a detective or a military commander would be relevant examples. A detective hopes to use his or her knowledge for a purpose, namely, to bring criminals to justice, and, presumably, most honest detectives have this purpose firmly at heart. A military commander has victory over his or her opponents as his or her aim; it would be a strange general who proclaimed himself or herself neutral or indifferent on this issue. But commitment here does not exclude in either case examining the facts of the situation by the best means available, with no other immediate object than to discover precisely what they are. Without such an examination being carried through successfully neither party could hope to achieve its goal.

History differs from both detection and strategy in that historical results can be used for a variety of purposes and to support or attack a multiplicity of different causes. Again, historical knowledge need not be used for any further purpose but can simply be valued for its own sake. But when scientific historians argued that it must only be valued, on pain of confusing history with propaganda, they were clearly mistaken. An historian who has an axe to grind because he or she is also a religious apologist, for example, or say a radical critic of the pretensions of “advanced thinkers” in the past, is always liable to make mistakes about what happened because he or she has a strong interest in believing that the facts were of a certain kind. But there is nothing that will necessarily make him or her make such mistakes. If he or she is able enough, he or she will draw a sharp distinction between the two quite different activities of arriving at the knowledge of what happened and of using that knowledge for some further purpose. He or she has to engage in each activity but must nevertheless take them one at a time. If he or she does this, the fact that what he or she finally writes is shot through with value judgments will no more invalidate his or her examination of what was the case than the fact that a judge ends up by passing sentence means that he or she cannot have been impartial in investigating whether the accused committed the crime.

I conclude that the second claim made on behalf of scientific history above is one which cannot be upheld. There is a sense in which every historian has got to be impartial, but this demand does not carry with it the consequence that he or she transforms himself or herself into an intellectual eunuch indifferent to the attractive and repulsive alike. And once this is agreed, the third claim falls to the ground as well. There was in any case something odd about the idea that interest and relevance to the present should not be taken into consideration in deciding on topics for historical investigation: were historians supposed to take up subjects simply because they had not yet been worked on? If so, even academic historians do not seem disposed to accept the advice (think of the comparative slump in medieval history and the boom in contemporary history). The claim that no historical period is more intrinsically interesting than another can be accepted, for what seems foreign and remote to one generation may well take on significance for another. But that of course does not mean that we are precluded from investigating what we think to be important now. It unfortunately needs to be repeated in this connection that it is one thing to begin by making a judgment of value about what is worth investigating, and another thing to conduct one’s research in a biased and prejudiced manner. That I think it worthwhile or very much want to solve some problem does not necessarily entail that I cannot tackle it rationally. It is simply not true that the choice of a subject which corresponds to his or her interests or stirs his or her emotions carries with it forfeiture by the historian of his or her proper professional status.

The advantages of scientific over less sophisticated forms of history are not to be despised. The trained historian of modern times is, in general, both more enterprising and more meticulous than were his predecessors in assembling evidence for the past; he or she is also more acute and critical in interpreting it. He or she is less liable to jump to conclusions based on the mistaken idea that men and women must have thought then as they think now, nor will he or she be misled by surface resemblances, such as the use of identical expressions, as some earlier historians were. Scientific history has immensely improved our awareness of the historical sense of human beings; thanks to it today we –historians and non-historians -- are aware, to a far greater degree than previously, of the sheer amount of difference between the past and the present, something of which men and women had little conception before the late eighteenth century. But we can acknowledge these gains without having to agree that history is “a science, not less and not more”. It is a science, but it can be more than a science. We may even say that it must be more than a science, if history is to fulfill a significant role as part of the life of the community.

I have tried earlier in this essay to indicate how myth is essential to the continuing life of a primitive society. In conditions where history proper is unknown, myth provides men with a picture of their past, a picture they need in order to gain proper consciousness of themselves. I have also argued that the great literary historians of the past fulfilled much the same function, in so far as they saw their task as being to take account of the past and make it meaningful to the present. In so doing they met a genuine and important social demand. Now this demand has not simply disappeared with the transition from literary to scientific history: we still need, both as individuals and/or as members of groups, to gain a clear idea of the past in order to facilitate action in the present. The wider functions which were discharged by traditional history remain to be discharged. And it must be said that if anyone is equipped to take them on, it is the properly trained professional historian. He or she is presumed to able to say what the past was really like, because he or she is presumed to possess the means of discovering the truth about the past. Certainly, if we compare him or her with other possible candidates for the job –journalists or sociologists, for example – there can be no doubt of his or her superior qualifications for it.

What if a professional historian refuses to accept this task? He or she may say that he or she sees himself or herself as a researcher, not an advocate, or again that he or she can offer no clear picture of the past, since the past is multifarious, with no discernible order of its own. My answer to the first disclaimer is that no historian need participate in the writing of history in the broader sense of the term if that is not to his or her taste; he or she can, if he or she so chooses, devote himself or herself exclusively to the technical problems of historical scholarship. But equally, he or she should be ready to allow that those historians who go beyond mere scholarship and present historical results in a committed form are not by that fact showing themselves untrue to their profession. I suspect that many working historians would like to think of themselves as concerned with more than the solution of a number of intriguing technical puzzles; and one object of my present discussion is to claim that they can do so with a clear conscience. But will not any commitment always involve simplification and hence distortion of the true course of events? To this I can only reply that I see no reason why it should. It is, of course, always possible to describe situations and states of affairs in fresh terms; no description of a set of past happenings or a set of past conditions can ever be final, if only because history, as the English Marxist historian E. H. Carr pointed out, is the product of a constant interplay between past and present. But this admission need not involve the conclusion that, when we look at the past from a particular point of view, say, that of Western intellectuals in the early twenty first century, we can discern no genuine order in it. The course of historical events is full of processes of many kinds, and it is part of the work of the historian, in the larger sense of the term, to point them out to the rest of us.

I think that the nervousness many historians feel when asked to accept arguments of this sort springs from their own failure to think clearly about the nature of their subject. But another more surprising factor also comes into it, namely, the neglect and even the ignorance that many professional historians display of the history of history. We all know that mathematicians and natural scientists attach only peripheral importance to the history of their different disciplines: for most of them getting on with their subject is one thing, knowing about its past quite another. That historians should take up a similar attitude, is hardly to be expected. But the fact is that there are comparatively few modern students of history who know or even care much about the steps by which history has become the complex thing it is today. Most academic historians I know are content to take history as a going concern about which they can enter with little or no examination of its antecedents. They assume here, with some of the theorists whose work I have mentioned, that a major revolution occurred in history in the relatively recent past, one result of which is that it—the discipline of history--- has been transformed out of all recognition. Because of this revolution, scientific and pre-scientific history have about as much to do with one another as have chemistry and alchemy; just as the modern chemist need know nothing about the alchemists, so the modern scientific historian need take no interest in his pre-scientific predecessors. I am inclined to think that this account is itself grossly unhistorical: the transition from literary to scientific history was altogether more gradual than the tale I have just told suggests, and the continuities between what history was and what it has become are altogether more striking. The whole idea that historical truth is to be pursued for its own sake might be seen as the product of a certain historical era; it went along with other things of its kind, like the doctrine of art for art’s sake and the notion that is was possible to completely understand a literary work simply by reading it without knowing anything about its author and the historical context in which he or she wrote it, that was propagated by those intellectuals who published in Scrutiny in the era between the two world wars. In my view it could be, and it should be, thought of now as more of an historical curiosity than anything else. But whether this is true or not, the account of history which goes with it should not be uncritically accepted. If historians would only consider carefully what history was and what purposes it served, they might well change their minds about its nature and functions today. And if our Minister of Education will also do so, he may be led to change his mind about whether all pupils who want a bagrut should be required to pass an exam in history.1

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Haim Marantz taught for many years in the Department of Philosophy at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, Israel. He has worked and written extensively (and continues to do so) in the area of Political Thought.

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1 I have been led to think about these problems during the three years during which I supervised Mrs. Batya Bahat in writing a doctoral thesis about why it is justified that history is, and should continue to be, an integral part of the school curriculum for all primary and secondary school pupils. This is the text of the opening address I delivered to a conference of teachers of Jewish History in October 2013. Minister Piron was present but refused to reply to my lecture.

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