Historians and moral evaluations

History and Theory

Volumn 43, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 3-30

  Vann, Richard T ^a  

^a WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 60950215555     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2004.00295.x     Document Type: Review

References (40)

1. I have found three exceptions: besides the work of Piovani, these are William Dray, "History and Value Judgments," Encyclopedia of Philosophy IV (1967), 26-30
2. and Adrian Oldfield, "Moral Judgments in History," History and Theory 20 (1981), 260-277. It is a melancholy but unsurprising fact that no historian has cited either of these two articles
3. François Bédarida, "The Historian's Craft, Historicity, and Ethics," in Historians and Social Values, ed. Joep Leersen and Ann Rigney (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2000), 69
4. Lord Acton, "Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History," reprinted in Essays in the Liberal Interpretation of History, ed. William H. McNeill (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 351
5. Herbert Butterfield, "The Christian and Historical Study," in History and Human Relations (London: Collins, 1951), 154-155
6. Wright, "History as a Moral Science," 2
7. Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft, transi. Peter Putnam (Manchester, Eng.: Manchester University Press, 1954), 139
8. Henry Steele Commager, The Search for a Usable Past, and Other Essays in Historiography (New York: Knopf, 1967), 300-322
9. Bloch, The Historian's Craft, 140
10. Geoffrey Barraclough, "History, Morals, and Politics," International Affairs 34 (1958), 6-7
11. George Kitson Clark, The Critical Historian (London: Heinemann, 1967), 208
12. Bernard W. Sheehan, "The Problem of Moral Judgments in History," South Atlantic Quarterly 84:1 (1985), 37
13. Commager, The Search for a Usable Past, 305
14. Isaiah Berlin, Historical Inevitability (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 6. This seventy-nine-page book, replete with sentences over a hundred words long and with continual reformulations of the same few points, is described as the first Auguste Comte Memorial Trust Lecture delivered at the London School of Economics; but even so rapid a talker as Berlin can scarcely have uttered the whole text within the confines of a single evening
15. Eckart Schremmer, "Value-Judgement and Measurement in Quantitative History," Studio Historiae Oeconomicae 15 (1980), 73, 78
16. Dray, "History and Value Judgments," 27
17. On this see Hayden White, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality" in The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)
18. Bédarida, "The Historian's Craft," 75
19. J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (London: Secker and Warburg, 2003), 20
20. Kitson Clark, The Critical Historian, 207
21. Sheehan, "Problem of Moral Judgments," 49
22. Wolfgang Mommsen, "Moral Commitment and Scholarly Detachment: The Social Function of the Historian," in Historians and Social Values, ed. Leersen and Rigney, 46-47
23. Bloch, The Historian's Craft, 139. One should bear in mind that Bloch was deprived of any chance to revise this (unfinished) manuscript, and had he done so he might have thought better of some of the things that he says in it
24. Lord Acton, "Inaugural Lecture," 351
25. The most famous upholder of this view is Aristotle; for a modern introduction, consult Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1981)
26. Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (London: Michael Joseph, 1979), 4
27. For the help given by the German major see Hallie, Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1967)
28. Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten [1785], translated by H. J. Paton as The Moral Law: Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (London: Union Hyman, 1948), especially 63-68
29. C. V. Wedgwood, "The Sense of the Past," in Truth and Opinion: Historical Essays (London: Collins, 1960), 37
30. See Arthur Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1965)
31. Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962)
32. Michael Zimmerman, An Essay on Moral Responsibility (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1988), note 19
33. W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 203
34. William Hickling Prescott, Conquest of Mexico, Preface and I, 425, quoted in Commager, 301
35. Butterfield, "Moral Judgments in History," 123-125
36. Cf. Garcin, the hero in Sartre's No Exit, whose self-image is maintained despite the consistent cowardice shown in his actions
37. Oldfield, "Moral Judgments in History," 61. This is also a point made by Butterfield
38. Butterfield, "Moral Judgments in History," 120
39. Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Oxford University Press, 1972) still has something to teach us
40. William Butler Yeats, "The Second Corning."