What Makes a Good Historian?

The pursuit of ideological history always ends with the installation of a new elite, a new ruling class, a new set of exploiters. Instead, historians should practice good history and humane learning, avoid the temptations of ideology and “relevance,” and defend the universities.

In 1969, the American Historical Association broke down into hostile wings, one establishment and liberal and the other radical and socialist. At the annual meeting, tempers raged as the radicals led by the outspoken activist historian Staughton Lynd attempted to remake the AHA into a vanguard for radical politics in opposition to the Vietnam War. The attempt failed, and Lynd’s most vociferous critic was the Marxist historian Eugene Genovese, who saw in Lynd the prostitution of history and the discrediting of socialist critiques of liberal society. His “On Being a Socialist and a Historian,” included in Genovese’s In Red and Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History (1969) explored the dividing line between good and bad historians (or in Genovese’s mind, good and bad socialist historians) and remains a useful commentary on the historian’s craft. Title aside, there are lessons for conservative historians to be learned in Genovese’s observations.

Genovese believed that Lynd’s activist history, where scholarship became the handmaiden of 1960s social justice activism, distorted the historian’s vocation and discredited the socialist cause. This was especially unfortunate, he believed, because the tenor of the 1960s led people to question American social and political institutions. Socialism would never have a better opportunity. Thus, Genovese set out to separate bad from good historians, those who hindered or helped the cause, devastatingly using Lynd as a foil. Bad historians surrendered the past to current ideologies and argued for “relevance,” ran down the idea of “objectivity” in considering the past, gave license to a new generation of corrupt elites and nihilists, attacked academic freedom in the university, and lived in an ideological fantasy world.

Lynd surrendered history to ideology, wrote Genovese, by being selective in sources, ignoring or cherry-picking evidence, and plucking people and events out of context to serve contemporary political needs. This was not to say history was (or could be) entirely devoid of politics. History is inevitably “political intervention” of some sort and the historian’s calling is a political responsibility, a calling that contributes to the type of society he wants to create. Historians always have “a philosophy and a program,” a narrative and a path they follow, and we cannot completely absent ourselves from our times and circumstances. We are not aloof philosopher-kings.

We know that a socialist movement capable of winning mass support in the United States must have a philosophy that can reconcile individual liberty with democratic rule, humane learning with mass education, political freedom with social order—a movement that can rest its reconciliation on a defense of the admirable and the solid in the experience of our nation and of Western civilization, not the least of which is precisely the achievement of a rationalist and critical tradition.

But Lynd and the radical historians believed that since total objectivity was impossible, the pursuit of objectivity was fruitless and therefore historical endeavor was relegated to one method among others for political power. The impossibility of objectivity becomes license to interpret the past in ways favorable to socialism, and “ideological history” or “partisan history” is born.

This is bad history. We can never be completely objective in our historical inquiries—we live in the world, after all—but “the inevitability of ideological bias does not free us from the responsibility to struggle for maximum objectivity.” We should not surrender to bias because fully objective analysis is beyond our reach. Historians have a moral responsibility, not just to the cause they seek to promote, but to what the sources say, even if they complicate or contradict their understanding. “Being a full-time historian is full-time work.” Only “ruling classes and the waves of nihilists” create and benefit from ideological histories:

The study of history can rarely be put to direct political use; the ideologically motivated creation of a desired past can be, but only by rulers and exploiters … In each case the demand for ideological history, for “class truth,” for “partisanship in science,” has ended in the service of a new elite, a new oppressor. Nowhere have the people ever benefited from the efforts of those intellectuals who have beneficently lied to them, ostensibly for their own good and in order to provide with the beliefs necessary to shore up their courage and sustain them in battle. Historians who do not respect historical truth, who sneer at objectivity and fear disorienting the masses by laying bare the complexity, contradiction, and tragedy that define all human experience, can end only by serving the ruling class they think they are opposing or, at best, some new and exploitative elite waiting to ride the waves of revolutionary change.

The pursuit of ideological history always ends with the installation of a new elite, a new ruling class, a new set of exploiters.

For Genovese, too many historians excused their activism and “applied history” under the guise of “relevance,” that their work must be relevant to “immediate politics” and that historical inquiry was useless unless “directly related to the struggle against the latest atrocities.” Genovese notes that many Left intellectuals questioned the relevance of studying, for example, medieval France in the midst of 1960s mayhem – who cares about King Louis IX in a time of urgent social movements and civil unrest? None of it pertained to “the cause.” Professors and students blinkered by protests and sit-ins cannot see clearly:

[The historian] must tell us, as best he can, how particular human beings solved and did not solve particular problems, adjusted and did not adjust to momentous changes, made and failed to make better lives for themselves and their children, honored and dishonored God and their community. He must present some chapter of the infinite grandeur of the human spirit – a grandeur no less for the inescapable frailty and evil that must forever go into the making of everything human … Chaucer and St. Thomas Aquinas have for centuries imparted to humanity pleasure, wisdom, and evidence of man’s effort to master his world. Their work tells us, among other things, much about the ways in which art and philosophy have enriched humanity and revealed some of its essential qualities. A student who cannot grasp his simple fact merely provides evidence of the extent to which he has become a victim of the barbarism that his politics ostensibly challenge.

Calls for relevance in historical or philosophical study demonstrate a cramped vision of humane learning and a lack of historical imagination. Those who complain of relevance are the real barbarians.

The attack on relevance brought out the greatest bitterness in Genovese’s attack. Essentially, socialist historians talked a good game but kept a safe distance. A real dedication to relevance meant leaving the university altogether: “Few of our declared revolutionaries believe their own cant. If they did believe it, they would quit the campuses for full-time political work. But it is so much easier to proclaim, as one Ivy League professor did, that we should all support the Weathermen and still continue to teach, live, and collect checks from a privileged sanctuary known as tenure.” Genovese introduced the witty example of the political welder in attacking “relevance,” ideological history, and the insistence that meaningful historical work must be directed toward contemporary social problems. We do not ask the politically-engaged welders to stop welding in the face of awful events, why should we ask historians to do the same? “If someone were to ask the most politically dedicated and revolutionary welder how he could possibly keep welding while children were being napalmed in Vietnam, the man would probably answer with a blank stare. Only intellectuals are subjected to these ravages and, of course, only by other intellectuals. Welders normally have more sense than to torment each other with such stupidity.” Unlike welders, ideological historians lack that sense.

Ideological historians obsessed with direct relevance to current problems lived in a fairy land tortured by feverish dreams “of a grand denouement that features the overthrow of the American state by an invincible army of acid-heads and suburbanites.” Genovese thought there was something juvenile about these historians, that they were an unserious “cult of permanent adolescence.” Socialist historians should therefore condemn these “nihilist doctrines” of relevance and a fungible past easily molded for ideological needs. “No intellectual effort, no matter how modest, small, or removed from day-to-day politics, is irrelevant.” The study of the human past enriches our understanding on what it means to be human.

These people and their argument constitute part of the sickness of our times, not part of the cure. If, as radicals assert, the bourgeois social order has grown corrupt, and if the reduction of humane learning to the status of a plaything is one of the measures of the depth of that corruption, then those historians who preach relevance and consider it hypocritical to do business-as-usual are nothing more than the advance guard of the corruption itself. The defense of humane learning being one front in the war against decadence, those who undermine it further are, whatever their protestations, in the service of the enemy. The business-as-usual of which they so stridently complain happens to be the business of life.

Genovese died in 2012. One wonders how he would have interpreted the shift from socialist radicals condemning historical and philosophical study as irrelevant to 1960s exigencies to some contemporary conservatives condemning those same studies in preference to STEM, business, and the needs of a technocratic society.

Genovese believed the best place for historical scholarship and debates over the past was the American university. Many on the Left protested against government and corporate infiltration of the university, illustrated by funding, Pentagon contracts, recruiting, and even curriculum. This motivated students like Mario Savio and the “Free Speech Movement” to attack the postwar university’s system of “processing” students like they were a product on an assembly line and preparing them for employment in the modern American “machine.” By the late 1960s, however, the new threat to academic freedom came from socialist radicals and their calls for greater curricular relevance and historical study. The rise of ideological history in the university threatened a new kind of “totalitarian education” in “relevant” studies and “moral terror” campaigns to inject radical politics into the classroom and academic professional organizations, all enforced by “the profession’s nihilist goon squad.”

The danger does not arise from the reaction such behavior invariably generates, for all action, good or bad, is likely to generate a reaction. It arises, rather, from the necessity for socialists to make the cause of intellectual freedom and diversity their own – and therefore to defend the universities and professional associations as places of contention – or else condemn themselves to the repudiation of everything in the Western tradition necessary to distinguish socialism from some new collectivist totalitarian nightmare.

Instead, socialist historians should work to depoliticize the American university and defend these institutions as “places of contention.” Socialist “theory and perspective” will not gain adherents or advance knowledge under a regime of imposition and intimidation but will only advance through conversation with “our honest opponents,” both liberal and conservative.

The triumph of ideology in the university betrayed the attitude of too many socialist intellectuals that anyone who opposed their doctrine was an idiot. “Socialists have generally been arrogant about their ostensibly superior intellectual qualities,” Genovese observed. “There is hardly a publication of the Old Left or the New that does not take it for granted that we are simply smarter than our enemies, closer to the truth, more honest, and in a word, morally and intellectually superior. Hence, the embarrassment.” Socialists have been exclusionary and elitist, and they think they are smarter than anyone else. Their scholarly work demonstrates otherwise: “How strange that people who claim for themselves moral and intellectual superiority and a more scientific viewpoint than others possess do not do work anywhere near as good.” Historians of all political stripes meet the challenges of the time, not by condescension, but by their “creative work as intellectuals” in the contentious arena of colleges and universities.

Eugene Genovese, or the “Godfather” as many in the profession affectionately called him, was a seminal historian of the American South for decades, and his Roll Jordan, Roll (1974) remains a landmark study in American slavery historiography. He was also a brilliant evocative writer. I well recall my graduate school mentor telling us, “Only Genovese could make collard greens and possum sound so good.” He then shifted from Marxist to Traditionalist in the 1990s, legendarily defending the conservative virtues of the Old South, and reconnected to the Roman Catholicism of his Brooklyn youth. Stripped of socialist language, “On Being a Socialist and a Historian” could easily be retitled “On Being a Conservative and a Historian,” as its admonitions apply to those of conservative inclinations too: Practice good history and humane learning. Avoid the temptations of ideology and “relevance.” Defend the universities.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

The featured image is “Clio, muse of history” (between 1617 and 1634) by Johannes Moreelse, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.