ABSTRACT
History can be authoritative only through representing the "the Past", through standing in for it. Hence, the following analysis of history's and historians' authority: to see why historical knowledge, secured by its self-determined authority, can be persuasive, even though its actual intellectual hold on the world is insecure, and its own results provisional. Knowledge about ideas, conceptualizations, information, strategies, and capacities, is produced and disseminated by disciplines. The constitution of academic disciplines determines the academic standpoint. Academic disciplines are integrated into a capitalist socio-economic system that transforms society into a vast machine, an enormous apparatus. Analysing the social and cognitive authority of history, therefore, involves: describing the constitution of academic disciplines; defining the academic standpoint; and elucidating the technics of sense-production. In purely socio-economic terms the financial resources of the research-funding institutions, the universities' dependence on state and private investment in their research projects.
