LAUSR

History has long been a contested domain. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the very purpose of history was challenged by idealist philosopher-historians such as Thomas Carlyle, Friedrich Nietzsche and Benedetto Croce. In his On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Nietzsche (1874, pp. 25-26), for example, declared that “history” only serves useful purpose when it abandons its emphasis on factual veracity so as inspire action in “the present”, turning itself into “a purely artistic picture”. In a similar vein, Croce (1915/ 1921, pp. 73, 91) – who acted as inspiration for the late Hayden White – advised his readers that, “facts do not exist” and that, “The past does not live otherwise in the present”. Until the 1970s, however, such idealist critiques were confined to the margins. Instead, most historians shared the view that societies were shaped by lived experience, and that it was the job of the historian to understand those experiences. As the Marxist historian, E.P. Thompson (1978, p. iii), expressed it, “Experience walks in without knocking at the door, and announces deaths, crises of subsistence, trench warfare ... In the face of such general experiences old conceptual systems may crumble and new problematics insist upon their presence.” Admittedly, there was much disputation as to how past experiences can be ascertained and interpreted. On one extreme stood “positivists” such as G.R. Elton who held to the “skeptical empiricism” of David Hume (1748 / 1902, p. 36), a philosopher-historian who argued that, “From causes which appear similar we expect similar effects. This is the sum of all our experimental conclusions.” At the other end of the spectrum were those who believed that social structures and economics constrained human choices, a circumstance that allowed the historian to postulate historical laws with some certainty, Karl Marx (1852 / 1951: 225) famously declaring,