Why history must take a stance
‘‘It is impossible to remove judgments from historical accounts. Historians need to recognise this, take responsibility for their judgments, and judge consistently
In 2013, as preparations to commemorate the First World War centenary picked up pace, Max Hastings trained his sights on the UK government. The popular historian chastised politicians for their reticence on “the virtue of Britain’s cause, or the blame that chiefly attaches to Germany for the catastrophe that overtook Europe”. The government “calls this a ‘non-judgmental’ approach,” Hastings declared. “The rest of us might call it a cop-out.”
Not all historians would have agreed with Hastings’ scathing verdict on the government’s quest for neutrality. In fact, many abhor attributing blame in their work. The famous French historian Marc Bloch declared that “the historian’s sole duty is to understand”, not “pass judgment”. Judgment was akin to a chemist preposterously separating “the bad gases, like chlorine, from the good ones like oxygen”.
More recently, Richard J Evans wrote: “The historian’s job is to explain; it is for others to judge.” As with philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s ban on treating the past as “a field in which we exercise our moral and political opinions, like whippets in a meadow on a Sunday afternoon”, moral judgments seem to have the bad odour of advocacy or propaganda.
In my recent book, , I lay out a different position. My argument is that, where it matters, it is impossible to remove judgments from historical accounts. Historians need to
