Citizen Scholars: ‘If Democracy Was More Than a Moral Fig Leaf, It Presumed Popular Assent Based on a Degree of Knowledge’
sigmundcarlandalfred.wordpress.com
As the democratic franchise expanded in the 19th century, British historians were eager to offer an informed view of the past to the new electorate. We need similar initiatives today.
History Today, as befits its name, stakes a good deal on the topicality of its subject matter. Introducing the first issue in 1951 the editors, Peter Quennell and Alan Hodge, asserted that historians were better qualified than most to make sense of the massive changes through which contemporaries were living. Regular features in the magazine like ‘History Matters’ and ‘Today’s History’ support that claim. Yet applying historical perspective to current concerns has a lowly place in public debate in Britain today. Countless issues in both domestic and international affairs, from military action in Afghanistan to the presumed debt crisis in the public finances, are considered by voters without benefit of historical perspective. Part of the reason for this shortfall is that historians themselves do not press home the practical claims of their discipline, in the belief that to do so would conflict with their scholarly credentials. Yet there is a serious and longstanding argument to be made that history is a citizen’s resource, essential to social awareness and political choice. Up until the Second World War historians of varying stripe promoted their discipline in this way, with some influence on public opinion. It is an aspect of the history of our discipline that has been neglected in recent accounts.
…. ‘Without at least a little knowledge of history no man can take a rational interest in politics, and no man can form a rational judgment about them without a good deal.’ In a free country, said Seeley, some instruction is needed to ensure that citizens ‘may follow with some intelligence the march of contemporary history’. In a later lecture he remarked: ‘I show you the reigns of George II and George III, not as a mere by-gone period … but as a storehouse of materials by which we are to solve the greatest and most urgent of political problems.’ He had no qualms about rejecting the Rankean ideal of history for its own sake. Seeley stood for a ‘present history’, not ‘a past history’. In this he anticipated the academic champions of contemporary history a hundred years later.