ABSTRACT
In my early years at school and university in the 1940s and early 1950s I was, as far as I remember, largely ignorant of the fact – if it is a fact – that history is supposed to have a purpose, possibly a function, social, economic, political, psychological, even philosophical, to be of use that is, to be as Beverley Southgate puts it in his excellent and all-embracing study of the subject, What is history for? (2005) – for something. At school (Stockport Grammar School), of course, I was aware that history is supposed to be for something – for the passing of exams. But at (Manchester) university – again as far as I remember – the question was never raised. It was, I suppose, just taken for granted: that in studying the English Civil War or the history of Europe in the nineteenth century, for instance, one was somehow equipping oneself the better to understand the world, or at least that part of the world in which we happened to be living. I suppose one was also somehow learning to ‘do’ history, which in effect meant writing about some aspect of the subject in a precise and comprehensible manner; an attitude which I am obliged to admit I carried with me for many years, when, some time later (in the 1960s), I began seriously to ‘write’ history, or histories, as distinct from merely reading it, or them. It was, therefore, only many years later (in the late 1990s) when, driven by an occasional and somewhat haphazard interest in the so-called philosophy of history, I began to read around the subject, that I began
to learn something about what history is ‘for’; though I am not sure that I ever learnt quite what my history was ‘for’, if, indeed, it was actually ‘for’ anything.
