ABSTRACT
So one American historian in the middle of this century boasted of his own immersion in historical texts, coupled with total isolation from contemporary concerns. He had carefully read the Elizabethan Poor Law and Calvin’s theological works, but had only ‘rather haphazard notions’ about such present concerns as the Social Security Act and existentialist writings. With these priorities, he claimed, he could avoid ‘the passions, prejudices, assumptions and prepossessions, the events, crises and tensions of the present dominating [his] view of the past’. The past, that is, was to be carefully fenced off to prevent any intrusions from the present (let alone the future), for the historian’s perception of its essential nature could only be distorted by any such chronological trespassing. And with a similar attempt to retain an ‘innocent eye’, Herbert Butterfield too makes a virtue of a chronological cordon sanitaire, reemphasising the need to keep one’s account of the past untainted by considerations of the present: for ‘the study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history…. It is the essence of what we mean by the word “unhistorical”’.8
