Of course, I agree about the impossibility of being objective. On the other hand, what does it mean left wing, right wing historians? To be left-wing in the 1830s indeed meant a pretty different thing than being French marxist historian in 1968 :-) I am sure that even during the communism, you could find in Poland the works of the 19th-century French and British historians of the French revolution. And I just cannot see how for ex. Soboul, Michelet, Taine, Carlyle, Jaures, Aulard or even intellectuals like Tocqueville or Constant etc. can be easily separated to right-wing anti-revolutionary and left-wig pro-revolutionary, and read as such in order to create an equidistant image..BTW, even if you think of Przybyszewska, a communist. What did she have in common with the official Polish communist historiography of the 1970s? Anyway, I think that we are trained to see and mistrust the Marxist interpretation, but we may be much less sensitive to the nationalist "naturalizations" or an economicist view of human beings, shared paradoxically by Marxism and the contemporary neoliberal historiography.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2009-06-06 07:19 pm (UTC)On the other hand, what does it mean left wing, right wing historians? To be left-wing in the 1830s indeed meant a pretty different thing than being French marxist historian in 1968 :-) I am sure that even during the communism, you could find in Poland the works of the 19th-century French and British historians of the French revolution. And I just cannot see how for ex. Soboul, Michelet, Taine, Carlyle, Jaures, Aulard or even intellectuals like Tocqueville or Constant etc. can be easily separated to right-wing anti-revolutionary and left-wig pro-revolutionary, and read as such in order to create an equidistant image..BTW, even if you think of Przybyszewska, a communist. What did she have in common with the official Polish communist historiography of the 1970s? Anyway, I think that we are trained to see and mistrust the Marxist interpretation, but we may be much less sensitive to the nationalist "naturalizations" or an economicist view of human beings, shared paradoxically by Marxism and the contemporary neoliberal historiography.