ABSTRACT
In most societies, in most eras, they have received official countenance only on condition they subscribed to and reinforced the reigning dogmas. The emergence of bourgeois liberal societies in which historians are free to publish what had really happened in the past, at whatever embarrassment to the authorities of the present, to demolish myths rather than create them, is only a few centuries old. Such bourgeois objectivism does not flourish in totalitarian societies, nor is it very helpful to the nation-building lites in the Third World. The freedom of historians to teach, study and publish as their scholarly instincts dictate, and to treat professors intruded by the Crown with the genial tolerance they deserve. It is the result of historical circumstances which historians themselves should understand very well; as they can understand how fragile and fortuitous these circumstances can be. And this is a matter of which no historian can afford to be simply a dispassionate chronicler and analyst.
