On the contrary, they are contested spaces where different ideologies, including the many varieties of post-modernism itself, develop and flourish. Nor does the viability or popularity of a historical interpretation depend on the institutional power of its advocate. On the other hand, EP Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class proved enormously influential, despite the fact that its author's one brief period as a university academic ended in chaos as he led a group of radical students in an occupation of the university administration. History is important because it illuminates the human condition by recreating the thoughts and actions, lives and experiences of other human beings separated from us by time. Historians owe it to the people of the past not to co-opt them in the service of some transient cause, but to try to understand them as they were, to treat them with dignity and circumspection.
Historians have to use their imagination, but it is an imagination tightly bound in a web of facts.
History is nothing if it is not true. But autumn has not yet come to western historiography. All material copyright Prospect 2000. Reproduction by any means is strictly forbidden.