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I note the process of Professor Gunning's reply. The process
involves taking items in succession and interpreting or redefining them so
that they serve a particular issue in the discourse. This is one element
in the historian's craft. [Should I say art?] What modern, or, in some
instances, postmodern, historiographers do is note the variety of such
elements and their effect on the issue of history [memory, recollection].
In the postmodern period, in consequence of the past and present
multiplication of such elements, given the multitude of past and present
cultures [mindsets, information environments, epistemes] of which we are
now aware, history has become the history of historiography.
Turning this to the question of Whig history [Both words are
adequately defined in most dictionaries.], and specifically the
Whigishness of some historians of economics: that history selected its
methods of recollection with a view to creating the future, not to
recreating the past. It was ethically active, in the first instance, and
scientific, only in the second. There is, of course, nothing wrong with
that. Indeed it is laudable. Its just that it should be recognized for
what it is.
There is much more to be said on this matter, and a great variety
of things about which much more is to be said; but I refer the receivers
of this message, again, to Hutton's HISTORY AS AN ART OF MEMORY. Its not
that Hutton has anything to say specifically to historians of economics,
or that I think his is the last word, [or that he has given us a well
constructed and well written book], but he does open up alternative
approaches to history, and thereby he casts light on what one might make
of Whigishness in economic history, or any other style, point of view,
procedure, or bias in the writing of history.
Merry Christmas.
Robin Neill
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