Abstract: It goes without saying that I took the greatest interest in reading the essays devoted to my work in the South Central Review,' and I am very grateful to the editors for having organized this forum. I will abstain from commenting here on those articles, the majority, which are favorable to the positions I take. Happily (not necessarily for me, but in the interest of opening the debate), not all the essays are favorable; Larry J. Reynolds, in particular, assumes a critical stance in his.2 I would like to comment on it briefly, in order to the nature of our disagreement. I use the verb specify because I have the impression that, in large part, Reynolds does not understand the meaning of my arguments and that at least some of our views are closer than he thinks (but I have only myself to blame for my lack of clarity). The first misunderstanding concerns the moral judgments the historian brings to bear upon the events he analyzes. I observe, firstly, that these judgments are omnipresent, and secondly, that they generally tend to express sympathy either with the heroes or the victims of the events under study. I go on to argue that in making these judgments, the historian himself is not performing a moral act (he contents himself with defending his own interests, and there is nothing intrinsically moral about giving moral lessons to others); and I add that, even were he to do just the opposite, namely to systematically attack his own kind-the group with which he identifies-he still would not necessarily be acting morally. So what I recommend by way of a conclusion is that the historian forego any systematic attribution of the labels good and evil to
Publication Year: 1999
Publication Date: 1999-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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