INTRODUCTION

The title of this collection is derived from Friedrich Nietzsche's essay "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life."^[1] The central argument of this passionate work, judiciously qualified, reflects my own deepest convictions about the value of historical scholarship. Nietzsche opened his essay with a quotation from Goethe: "I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity." This meant to him that a vital historiography must serve the "life and action" of society. There is, Nietzsche argued, a "natural relationship of an age, a culture, a nation with its history—evoked by hunger, regulated by the extent of its need," but "always and only for the ends of life and thus also under the domination and supreme direction of these ends."^[2] History, in this view, much like water and electricity, is a public utility.^[3]

This means in the first place that history is not the private preserve of professional historians, just as divinity, law, and medicine do not "belong" to clergymen, lawyers, and physicians. Like other professional groups, historians are properly the servants of a public that needs historical perspective to understand itself and its values, and perhaps also to acknowledge its limitations and its guilt. Historians have an obligation, I believe, to meet public needs of this kind.

This view of the relation between historiography and society largely explains the sort of history to which I have devoted most of my career,^[4] although the way in which I have described my work has changed somewhat over the years. As a graduate student and during the earlier years of my professorial career, I thought of myself as an intellectual historian. Gradually, however, the idealism underlying this notion gave way to a growing historicism, and I began to recognize that the con-

ception of "intellect" was itself a historical artifact stemming primarily from the hellenic strain in Western culture: a mental construct, indeed, that, far from serving its needs, had been often exploited to justify dominance over society. I began instead, therefore, to call myself a cultural historian, understanding "culture," somewhat as anthropologists do, less as a set of beliefs and values than as the collective strategies by which societies organize and make sense of their experience.^[5] Culture in this sense is a mechanism for the management of existential anxiety; it serves deeper needs than the "ideas" to which I had first been attracted.^[6]

Because it challenges the privileged status of "high" culture, this understanding of culture has sometimes been taken to justify the tendency of some recent historians to ignore the culture of elites in favor of popular culture. This seems to me, however, a non sequitur; the conception is equally applicable to every level of culture.^[7] Even the "distinction" supposedly conferred on dominant social groups by their "higher" culture functions in somewhat the same way as other cultural constructions. It relieves the anxiety of elites by giving them much the same orientation and sense of identity that popular culture supplies to those lower on the social scale.^[8] I make this point because my own continued attention to elite culture may appear somewhat old-fashioned at a time when so much of what seems most fresh and exciting' in historical writing deals with popular culture. Part of the reason for my persistence along so well-trodden a path is that elite culture has the advantage, while it serves many of the same functions, of being, for obvious reasons, far more fully documented than the culture of "ordinary" people. Elites not only kept and preserved records of themselves, but they were also in a position to articulate more fully, and often more sensitively, the general concerns of their times.

A cultural history based on this larger understanding of the function of culture seems to me singularly "usable." Just as every individual human being has been shaped (if not exclusively) by the experiences constituting his personal history, so a society can be described as the complex sum of its collective experience, that is, of its history; and the cultural formations with which it responds to this experience are the measure of its impact. On the other hand, it has seemed to me that some areas of culture are more instructive for self-understanding than others. The most informative for me has been religion, including theology but also, and even more profoundly, spirituality, because it transcends intellectuality. Religious symbolism and practice seem to me to concentrate and integrate singularly well what a society is finally "about." So, of course, do various secular substitutes for religion, though, I suspect, less compre-

hensively. This consideration, too, explains the emphasis of many of these essays.

I need hardly point out that this approach to the writing of history does not claim to be "scientific"; indeed it is probably incompatible with the impulse to convert history into a science. For it also seems to me that the frequent, though I think always in the long run unsuccessful, efforts of some historians to enhance the prestige of what they do by claiming for it the status of a science threatens its social function; this too was part of Nietzsche's message. Indeed such efforts may also endanger respect for historical explanation; the tendency most recently of some among the Annalistes , for example, to minimize in the name of scientific objectivity the significance of identifiable human actors and discrete events in history^[9] is all too likely, however paradoxically, to open the way for nonhistorical modes of explanation. Since the beginning of recorded time, after all, human beings have looked to history to provide explanations for events; and if historians decline this task, others will be found all too willing to undertake it. As Hans Blumenberg has observed,

The consolation we derive from giving precedence to conditions over events is based only on the hypothesis that conditions are the result of the actions of an indeterminate large number of people instead of just a few whom we can name. But it is just as natural to suppose that history then becomes a process in nature, a sequence of waves, a glacial drift, a tectonic fault movement, a flood, or an alluvial deposit. Here . . . science works against elementary needs and therewith in a way that favors susceptibility to remythicization.^[10]

The reduction of history to a science also endangers its social function in another way. Scientists are, for the most part, notoriously indifferent to the communicability of their results except to professional peers. But history, in its origins a rhetorical art, edifies a wider public only insofar as it combines, as the old formula puts it, instruction with delight. Most historians, beginning with Herodotus and Thucydides, have always known this.^[11] It should also be emphasized that history performs its function not abstractly and, so to speak, intransitively, but on behalf of particular societies, to whose needs and capacities it must be adapted. This too recalls us to its rhetorical origins; a socially effective historiography must be shaped by that central virtue of the rhetorical tradition, decorum , that is, attention to the needs and capacities of its audience.

The essays in this volume, however, concern European history and

were written by an American in the first instance for an American audience. This raises the question how the European past can be "used" by Americans. The answer touches, of course, on the complex and changing relation of American to European culture and the ambivalence of a nation of immigrants, mostly until recently of European descent, toward a world they have, at least physically, left behind. The extended colonial experience of earlier Americans had tended to identify them with European culture, primarily English, even when they thought of themselves as starting afresh in a "new" world. But a successful rebellion against English rule stimulated a sense of difference from, and sometimes superiority to, Europe; and eventually new waves of immigrants, coming from every part of Europe and often bringing with them far less cultural baggage than those who came earlier, diffused and further complicated the connection with Europe.

Against this background American historians of Europe, it seems to me, have, roughly speaking, "used" the European past in two rather different ways. One, motivated partly by a search for roots on the part of second- and third-generation Americans, partly by the discovery of what presented itself as a richer and more exotic culture than the United States had developed, has been the intensive study of one or another European national history. This tends to be accompanied by as close a personal identification as possible with the chosen nation as a kind of adopted patria . American historians who have taken this route tend to identify themselves with the historiographical community of the society on which they work. Its leading historians become their mentors; its questions become their questions; they follow its methods; and its approval represents, for them, the highest possible accolade. This attitude toward Europe has resulted in a distinguished body of American scholarship. It has enlarged the American understanding both of the possibilities of the human condition, always one of the most valuable uses of historical study, and of the deeply rooted complexities of the world Americans inhabit.

Though I have great respect for this way of doing European history, it is not my way. I have deliberately chosen not to concentrate on the history of any particular European nation, somewhat in the self-consciously American spirit of the young Henry James as stated in a letter to his friend Thomas Perry in 1867. "To be an American," James declared, "is an excellent preparation for culture. . . . It seems to me that we are ahead of the European races in the fact that more than either of them [sic ], we can deal freely with forms of civilization not our own, can pick and choose and assimilate and in short (aesthetically etc.) claim

our property wherever we find it."^[12] In the same slightly greedy way, though with the excuse that Americans now need to examine and correlate many areas of European culture, I have deliberately moved from place to place and have exploited local episodes, as far as possible, to illuminate not local situations but issues of European and finally also of American resonance.^[13]

This approach, though not always appreciated by historians in Europe, can at the very least complement and compensate for the narrowness of a historiography confined to particular nation-states. I am pleased to associate myself on this matter with Robert R. Palmer, who approached "the democratic revolution" of the later eighteenth century as a European rather than simply a French phenomenon. The relevant scholarship, Palmer observed, had been conducted "in national isolation, compartmentalized by barriers of language or the particular histories of governments and states." The result, he concluded, was that, "whereas all acknowledge a wider reality, few know much about it."^[14] My own original area of interest, the Renaissance, has suffered similarly. Although Jacob Burckhardt had been concerned with the significance of the Renaissance in Italy for the whole of Europe, as a result of the recent growth of national and local specialization the period of the Renaissance has been more and more frequently treated in merely national and local terms, and efforts to generalize about it tend increasingly to be viewed with distrust.^[15] It is less and less likely to be interpreted as a major episode in Western culture, the common property of all the heirs and beneficiaries of that culture.

In addition to their concern with larger perspectives of this kind, the sorts of problems with which these essays deal also call for unusual chronological range. Here above all, perhaps, cultural history differs from social history, at least as recently practiced, with its preference for relatively static structural description and, in contrast, its tendency to discern radical discontinuity between the modern age and all that has gone before. From this standpoint, it has recently been maintained, almost everything prior to the end of the eighteenth century has irretrievably disappeared. All but the relatively recent past, to cite the title of an influential book, is a "world we have lost."^[16]

I am in no position to speculate about the durability of this judgment for social history. But gross discontinuities of the kind it implies seem to me generally implausible in cultural history, in which change is usually very slow. The ability of cultural formations to adapt to even the most drastic mutations in other realms constantly surprises us, though this may be chiefly a reflection of our naivete about such matters. The result

is that a historian of European culture, even of its contemporary manifestations, cannot afford to ignore the fact that its roots extend back at least as far as biblical and classical antiquity.

This is true in spite of the tendency of some modern intellectuals to believe, like many social historians, that, as Alan Megill has put it, we are now "under the reign of discontinuity":^[17] that, in short, to be "modern" means, among other things, to recognize the irrelevance of the past. This sense of a break with the past, particularly on the part of alienated intellectuals, is not, however, to be confused with discontinuity itself; indeed, as a repetition of similar attitudes, for example among Renaissance humanists, it reflects, in a radical form, one possible attitude to the past perhaps unique to Western culture.^[18]

In addition, whereas a historiography of discontinuity can largely dispense with narrative history, the continuities between past and present can only be demonstrated by narrative. Narrative is also implied by the idea of history as a public utility: the need for it can only be satisfied by stories about the past. Indeed even the possibility of general interest in those relatively static moments in the past on which historians have recently tended to focus has largely depended on the place of such moments within a familiar narrative. This is the case with most of the essays in the present collection.^[19] Their significance depends on a sense of the deep continuities between past and present.

I have always believed that to think historically means to locate every historical datum, whether person, artifact, event, or process, in the largest possible context of significance. I do not regard this aim as discredited because it was also Ranke's,^[20] though I may differ from Ranke on the capacity of even the greatest historians to achieve this goal. I owe at once this slightly old-fashioned Rankeian aspiration, my need to qualify it, and even some part of my interest in the larger patterns of European history to the fact that I was introduced to the systematic study of history by Harvard's famous (to some, perhaps, now infamous)^[21] History 1, first as a naive and insecure freshman from the Middle West, and then for three years as a graduate student teaching discussion sections in the course. Some of the criticism directed at the course, however deficient in historical perspective, is justified. But History 1 had at least one solid virtue. It constantly required reflection about the larger significance of its content; students learned from it to think about the broader importance of everything they were required to learn and to build up larger and larger generalizations about European history as well as about its various national components. The implicit motto of the course, as I experienced it, was "Always connect." The conviction that this is the

ultimate responsibility of a historian has never left me; and it underlies, however imperfectly I may have carried it out, all my scholarship.

On the other hand, History 1 was also blatantly whiggish. It was tacitly and uncritically elitist in a way that suited the old Harvard;^[22] it emphasized politics, neglecting if not ignoring social and cultural history; and it still assumed as inevitable and desirable, even in 1940, the extension of Western values, Western democracy, and Western science over the non-Western world. I suspect that this optimistic and partly prophetic vision of world history is still more widely shared by historians than many of them would care to admit; criticisms of History 1 for its elitism, sexism, and ethnocentricity seem to me to require, at least in principle, only relatively minor adjustments of the old whig vision. Indeed I am inclined to see the elimination of these sins as a logical extension of that vision which leaves its essential features intact.

My own departure from whiggism is more radical. It is based on a rejection of what was, nevertheless, one of the most genial elements in the scheme: its confidence, also Rankeian, in the ultimate harmony of the major strands in Western culture.^[23] History 1, in spite or because of its conventional bias toward the attitudes of the Enlightenment, left me with the impression that the biblical and the classical strands in Western culture—the former rather selectively understood—had collaborated naturally and relatively easily in the creation of modern civilization. The generation of my teachers, many of them European refugees,^[24] was especially concerned to reaffirm this double foundation of the civilized values of the West as it confronted the barbaric dictatorships of right and left.

I learned a great deal from these teachers: from Paul Kristeller to identify Renaissance humanism with a program of educational reform and to be skeptical, though without his belief in their compatibility, of the conventional antithesis between humanism and Scholasticism; from Douglas Bush and Werner Jaeger that lovers of the classics and even of Greek philosophy were often serious Christians; from Hans Baron, somewhat later, that Renaissance humanism was by no means simply the academic movement that it was conventionally represented to be but was often engaged with the most vital issues of Renaissance life and thought. It is doubtless also significant, though this did not occur to me at the time, that my doctoral dissertation dealt, in Guillaume Postel, with an egregious harmonizer of sixteenth-century France.^[25]

But for the most part, and from an even earlier time in my intellectual development, I was concerned less with the harmonies than with the tensions and contradictions in Western culture. This was primarily be-

cause, as a child of second-generation Dutch Calvinist immigrants who were trying to assimilate the high culture of early-twentieth-century America, these tensions posed problems for me; I was troubled, for example, about the compatibility of an "inalienable right" to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" with Christianity. But long before I decided to become a historian, it occurred to me that much of the confusion I discerned in myself might be reduced if I knew where the various pieces of intellectual baggage I carried about had come from. I could then sort them out according to their origins, and this would presumably help me to decide to which I was genuinely committed and which I could comfortably discard. History from this standpoint, I thought, might serve, like psychoanalysis at another level, to liberate the conscious mind from the inconvenient legacies of the collective past, first of all for myself but in the classroom for others.

My habit of thinking about the European cultural past in terms of its polarities found expression as early as my undergraduate honors thesis at Harvard. It was entitled "The Conflict between Humanism and Orthodoxy in Milton." Later I would understand the tensions in Western culture rather differently, but my interest in identifying such problems has persisted. My doctoral dissertation may have been a temporary deviation from this concern, but even as a deviation it was only partial. The frantic effort of Postel to unify all thought as the foundation for the unification of the human race, as I see now, was indirect testimony to its actual polarities; and I took his syncretism as an intellectual achievement in the same spirit as the syncretism of Finnegans Wake , which I was trying to decipher at about the same time.

I did not read Nietzsche until much later, but on this matter, too, he articulated and deepened my sense of the rich confusions latent in Western culture. "Historical knowledge," Nietzsche wrote, "streams in unceasingly from inexhaustible wells, the strange and incoherent forces its way forward, memory opens all its gates and yet is not open wide enough, nature struggles to receive, arrange and honor these strange guests, but they themselves are in conflict with one another and it seems necessary to constrain and control them if one is not oneself to perish in their conflict."^[26] As I entered the world of scholarship on my own, I increasingly saw that my task as a historian would be to try to sort out the major elements in the heterogeneous bundle of impulses that constitute Western culture and lay bare its contrarieties. The relief of the anxiety engendered by cultural conflict also figured more and more centrally in my project. A historian, as it seemed to me might, by exposing contradictions arising out of the eclecticism of Western culture, contribute to

conscious and informed choice. The first group of essays in this volume is particularly concerned to do this.

In Jack Hexter's redolent language, then, I became a "splitter," though chiefly in the sense that I was bisecting a larger lump into two not inconsiderable parts corresponding to the biblical and classical strains in Western culture.^[27] There was, of course, nothing original about this. I was only following, in a less combative spirit, Tertullian, who had opposed Jerusalem to Athens; Matthew Arnold, who with contrary intent had opposed hellenism to Hebraism; and a host of lesser figures. Somewhat more my own, perhaps, was the awareness that, in the end, I was dealing not with concrete historical movements, whatever terminology I might choose, but with ideal types that, in their abstract purity, could not be identified fully even with the Jewish and Christian Scriptures on the one hand or with the classical corpus on the other. Both Greek philosophy and the Bible turned out to be, in this sense, impure, mixtures of impulses emerging out of concrete cultural environments that were, in both cases, far more heterogeneous and complex than is often supposed. Ideal types helped me, nevertheless, to think about other historical antitheses: notably rhetoric and philosophy, both originating in the classical world of thought, as the sources of contrary educational ideals; the confrontation between the humanities and the sciences; and, a bit more concretely, the two bundles of contrasting attitudes I eventually associated with Augustinianism and Stoicism.^[28] I am not sure that such ideal types make in any general sense for a usable past, but they have made the past more usable for me.

The orientation of Western culture to two poles between which it might be seen to fluctuate also opened up for me a general way of understanding cultural change, about which anthropologists, usually more concerned with structures than with processes, were not very helpful. I found the help I needed, however, in the cyclical conceptions of two of the most profound students of historical change in the Western tradition: Augustine of Hippo and Niccolò Machiavelli.

Augustine, in his basic distinction between the civitas terrena (or, in some versions, the civitas diaboli ) and the civitas dei , also distinguished two kinds of change, the contrast between which has exercised metahistorians ever since. For the heavenly city, since it is guided by God to its appointed end beyond time, change is linear and progressive; as Augustine wrote, "If the soul goes from misery to happiness, nevermore to return, then there is some new state of affairs in time." The wicked, on the other hand, "will walk in a circle . . . because the way of false doctrine goes round in circles."^[29] So the earthly lives of individuals,

who are born, sin, suffer, and die, can be seen endlessly to repeat the same hopeless round. The secular careers of organized groups of human beings are also cyclical, and in much the same way; states, and more conspicuously great empires, rise, the more grand the greater their ascent, and then plunge to their ruin; the wheel comes full circle. All of this is the stuff with which secular historians deal.^[30]

Machiavelli, drawing on Polybius, described more fully the cycle through which governments move in a passage that is also suggestive for cultural history. Government, in this scheme, is necessary to deal with disorder and insecurity; and the first kings, chosen by their peoples as best suited for the task, did this effectively. But as the original disorder that had evoked kingship was forgotten and monarchy became hereditary, kingship deteriorated into tyranny and order collapsed. The people of a state that had fallen into this condition then chose to be ruled by aristocrats; but, the reason for the establishment of this form of government likewise forgotten, aristocracy degenerated into oligarchy, and again disorder ensued. Finally the people turned to democracy; but this too eventually declined, through licence, into anarchy. Nothing was left, then—nothing could ever be done—but to begin the whole cycle over again. "This," Machiavelli concluded, "is the circle in which all states revolve."^[31]

He deplored this, and much of his thought was directed to devising a political constitution that would reduce, as far as possible, the instability of the cycle and the disorders it was likely to bring. The inspiration of this reflection is thus finally the anxiety implicit in the unknowability of the future; the unknown is frightening, not in itself—it is only an abstraction—but because behind it lurk nameless, infinite, and infinitely destructive possibilities. Machiavelli's balanced constitution was ultimately a device to hold anxiety at bay by containing every potentially dangerous political force. But Machiavelli's view of human nature compelled him to recognize that, though the playing out of the cycle could be delayed, the cycle could never be ended.

The anxiety that propels the Machiavellian political cycle from stage to stage supplied me with an unexpected insight into the dynamics of cultural history. If Western culture is characterized not by its harmonies but by its fundamental, historically engendered antinomies, the history of Western culture may be conceived as a series of efforts, none successful for long, to constrain and control its internal conflicts. In this context, a culture can be understood as the psychological equivalent of a constitution;^[32] cultural systems, by ordering human behavior through customs and rules, reduce anxiety by regulating human activity and making it predictable.

My interest in the relation between anxiety and culture was first stimulated by Huizinga's Waning of the Middle Ages ,^[33] and it occupies a prominent place in these essays.^[34] But only in the course of working on my Calvin book did I realize that an overarticulated culture such as Huizinga described can be a cause of as well as a response to anxiety. There are, as I came to see, not one but two kinds of cultural anxiety: to use Calvin's terrifying metaphors, the anxiety of the abyss, the result of an underarticulated culture (or, to put it more positively, of an excess of freedom), and the anxiety of the labyrinth, the result of excessive and suffocating cultural constraints. Thus, as Machiavelli so clearly saw, an excess of disorder brings on a reaction toward control; but the inconveniences that result tend inevitably to precipitate a countermovement. So, by a somewhat circuitous route, I have wound up once again not so much with an original insight as with the familiar observation that the pendulum of cultural history swings from freedom to regulation and back again. The wicked, the weak, the unfortunate, that is to say humanity in history, truly seem to walk in circles.

The youthful confusion which impelled me to study history was a particular instance of what Leon Festinger has called "cognitive dissonance."^[35] Until I began to consider it more generally, I assumed this to be an acutely uncomfortable condition. But in actuality, as I now believe, the minds of most of us are a tangle of confusions of which, far from being terrified, human beings are for the most part unaware. Indeed, even when we become conscious of our confusions, we usually manage, once past the idealistic expectations of youth, to live with them in relative comfort. Nietzsche noticed this too. "Habituation to such a disorderly, stormy and conflict-ridden [mental] household," he observed, "gradually becomes a second nature." Only sometimes can the "Indigestible stones" of a man's knowledge, like the protests of an overloaded stomach, "be heard rumbling about inside him."^[36]

Particular circumstances, therefore, must be invoked to explain those historical moments when this chronic condition turns into acute discomfort. Such a moment constitutes a cultural crisis , a word from the Greek literally signifying a crossroads where two ways converge and separate again, so that a a traveler is compelled to make a decision. This literal meaning suggests the particular value of a "crisis" for the historian; it enables him to observe in action conflicting forces hitherto at work invisibly, below the surface of human affairs.^[37]

That the Renaissance was such a crisis, indeed that it was, as I continue to believe, the crisis par excellence of European cultural history, explains the enduring importance of the Renaissance to which the title of my second group of essays refers. I have chosen to do most of my work in

this conventional borderland between the medieval and modern chapters of European history because of its critical significance. I do not think that it has been displaced from this position by any later episode. Here, through the philological researches of Renaissance humanists, themselves driven by a crisis of values and a sense of social and political crisis, the contradictions in the mixture of values and attitudes that constitute Western culture came closer to consciousness than ever before, indeed than in most times since. Study of the Renaissance, therefore, allows us to watch several generations of European thinkers, generally unsystematic but often eloquent, usually interesting, and sometimes profound, wrestling with problems that are with us yet; hence the durability of the Renaissance.

My reliance on ideal types in these essays comes about as close to a "methodology" as I have managed to develop. I must confess, in fact, that the notion of method in historical scholarship has always made me uncomfortable. This may explain why the essays on history and historians in the third section of this collection have little to say about the methods of historians and are chiefly concerned with the ideas and attitudes underlying their work.

I am also reluctant to characterize as a "method" my own close reading of texts. I do assume that no historian can, passively or otherwise, "mirror" the past, and that a historian who works with texts must actively tease out from them whatever meanings they can be made to yield. As Francis Bacon remarked of the secrets of nature, so too there are secrets in texts that "reveal themselves more readily under the vexations of art than when they go their own way."^[38] I have also been less concerned with the objective content of a text than with the reconstruction from it of the former mentis of its author, with those aspects of himself and his world that he unwittingly reveals, with his tacit assumptions and values. What is required to reveal such matters is a sensitive and empathic reading not only of the lines of a text but, so to speak, between them; what is left unsaid is often more important that what is explicit. I have also found figurative language particularly helpful; it frequently conveys what is too profoundly believed to be consciously expressed. In addition, the tone of what is said, however problematic, can sometimes reveal more than its content; tone can even contradict content. My purpose, in every case, has been to discover the function of ideas in the case of any thinker, and above all whether they help to control or to liberate his experience.

This way of reading can hardly be described as a technique, nor can it be reduced to rules. Yet I believe that it has often made it possible for me to probe, to put the terminology of Erik Erikson to a use rather

different from his, the most "sensitive zones" of human concern.^[39] I mean by this the fundamental assumptions, usually implicit rather than explicit, that inform a whole body of thought. For me two sorts of conceptions of this kind have been most revealing. The first is a thinker's conception of the human personality, the second his notion of what it means to "know" something: his basic anthropological and epistemological orientation.

The last section of this book consists of essays in what I have called "applied history," in which my identification of the anthropological and epistemological foundations of Western culture often figures. These pieces were mostly responses to requests for historical perspective on some matter of general interest. They are not the kind of writing a historian would do in the course of what he might think of as his own work but rather examples of how to make the resources of historical scholarship available for a particular public use. I could not have written them had I not been first of all a historian. They also reflect my conviction that a historian performing generally as a man of letters, as historians usually did before they were overcome by the compulsion to specialize, may still contribute to the discussion of large issues of concern to others. They may also be examples of what "learning from history" might mean after the demise of philosophy of history, including its whig version. In the end, however, the past becomes publicly usable only insofar as a historian can communicate it, and this means that he must be not merely a scholar but above all, even in his scholarly communication, a teacher, able to communicate what he knows to others, with a teacher's sense of responsibility to teach what is harsh and unpalatable as well as what pleases. This explains my coda. It is ironical that I was called on to write this piece, which has not hitherto been published, as a duty incumbent on my presidency of the American Historical Association, a dignity to which my performance as a teacher had been only marginally relevant. It seems much to the point now as I look once again at these essays.