Eminent historians
Staying at home while Karin goes to work is just terrible. Oh, I have job applications and other writing projects to do. But most of the day, I’m bored out of my brain.
I’ve also been too restless to read much – from print sources, that is. Somehow, the computer screen keeps me glued to it all day.
I’ll mention a few recent readings and then be done.
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My dad linked to this article by Gregory H. Shill in the Atlantic about how U.S. law unjustly favors driving. The article is a condensed version of this much longer paper, also well worth a look.
(There was a time when I wanted to write a philosophical polemic against driving, or at least against law that encourages it, but I doubt I could improve on the work of Prof. Shill.)
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On a totally different subject, the eminent British historian Richard J. Evans has published, in the Guardian, a savage obituary of the eminent British historian Norman Stone.
A student of Stone’s replies here, and the Spectator, while not exactly disagreeing with Evans, defends Stone here.
Long ago, Stone himself published a savage obituary of the eminent British historian E.H. Carr in the London Review of Books. Here is a quotation:
Stone may or may not have been right that a working historian isn’t especially able to tackle the philosophical questions. But I wonder if his own refusal to tackle them was, fundamentally, what divided him from those he criticized and who now criticize him.
I’ve also been too restless to read much – from print sources, that is. Somehow, the computer screen keeps me glued to it all day.
I’ll mention a few recent readings and then be done.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My dad linked to this article by Gregory H. Shill in the Atlantic about how U.S. law unjustly favors driving. The article is a condensed version of this much longer paper, also well worth a look.
(There was a time when I wanted to write a philosophical polemic against driving, or at least against law that encourages it, but I doubt I could improve on the work of Prof. Shill.)
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
On a totally different subject, the eminent British historian Richard J. Evans has published, in the Guardian, a savage obituary of the eminent British historian Norman Stone.
A student of Stone’s replies here, and the Spectator, while not exactly disagreeing with Evans, defends Stone here.
Long ago, Stone himself published a savage obituary of the eminent British historian E.H. Carr in the London Review of Books. Here is a quotation:
In 1961 [Carr] delivered six lectures to [his Cambridge] Faculty on the theme ‘What is History?’: it may count as his most successful book, for there is a keen appetite in schools for this boring subject, and the paperback volume is frequently reprinted. It is probably as much a mistake to ask a working historian to discuss this theme as to ask a painter to give his views on aesthetics. Carr had not much more to offer than a version of Fifties progressivism: history teaches respect for the present, or, better still, the Soviet present. In places, it read like a Marxist 1066 and All That. It does, however, begin well, perhaps even brilliantly.I have a copy of What Is History: it has always vexed me that I don’t know what history is. I also have Evans’s In Defense of History, because I don’t know what history is for.
Stone may or may not have been right that a working historian isn’t especially able to tackle the philosophical questions. But I wonder if his own refusal to tackle them was, fundamentally, what divided him from those he criticized and who now criticize him.