The Pursuit of History by Tosh John

Author:Tosh, John
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

In classical mythology Clio was the muse who inspired historians, just as other muses inspired poets and musicians, etc. When Clio is invoked today, the implication is that history is one of the literary arts and should be judged by aesthetic standards. (akg-images, London)

Set out in this way, it may be that none of the qualities or skills required of the historian seems particularly demanding. But it is rare to find all of them combined in sufficient measure in the same person. Very few historians are equally endowed in the technical, intellectual, imaginative and stylistic spheres, and despite the immense expansion of professional scholarship in recent decades, the number of fully satisfying historical works in any branch of study remains small. At the same time, the varied nature of the historian’s equipment serves to reiterate another point – that history is essentially a hybrid discipline, combining the technical and analytical procedures of a science with the imaginative and stylistic qualities of an art.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59)

Alexis de Tocqueville was a French lawyer, historian and social commentator. His 1835 study of Democracy in America argued that although Americans enjoyed greater liberty than Europeans, their liberty led to oppression of the poor by the materialistic rich on a much greater scale than was to be found in the monarchies of Europe. De Tocqueville was a staunch libertarian and opponent of the centralizing tendencies of bureaucratic government; he was Foreign Minister in the short-lived second French Republic (1849–52) but refused to serve under the autocratic government of Louis Napoleon (Emperor Napoleon III from 1852). His classic study of The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution argued that the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire that followed it merely continued the oppressive, centralizing tendencies of the Bourbon regime. He also taught that an oppressive regime is at its most vulnerable precisely at the moment when it begins to reform itself.

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