The Political Role of the Historian
Journal: Contemporary European History
Year: 2023

Debates about history have never been strictly confined to the world of scholarship. They have also been at the centre of political controversies in society. ‘The problem for professional historians’, Eric Hobsbawm once observed, ‘is that their subject has important social and political functions’. 1 ‘This duality’, he noted, ‘is the core of our subject’. This essay offers some reflections on the political role of historians, exploring the relationship between their scholarly work and their invo