The Historian’s Responsibility

Abstract

This paper offers some modest proposals as to what can reasonably claimed to be the public responsibility of the professional historian. It criticizes some recent assumptions that history should teach practical lessons - to policymakers or even to citizens - and that it can tell us 'who we are', that is, supply a «usable past» for present-day identities. It proposes instead some more broadly humanistic uses of history - particularly to broaden our sense of what is humanly possible, against some recent assertions by evolutionary psychology and cognate disciplines.