ABSTRACT
There may never have been unanimous support for Thomas Carlyle’s claim that history – as ‘the letter of Instructions, which the old generations write and posthumously transmit to the new’ – ‘recommends itself as the most profitable of all studies’;2 but as his contemporary Ranke suggests in the quotation above, nobody has seriously doubted that history can, in one way or another, prove useful. As we noted in relation to Richard Cobb, it’s hard to do anything for no reason at all; and even Geoffrey Elton, for all his belief in doing history ‘for its own sake’, concluded that ‘any thoughtful historian must at times ask himself whether he has a purpose beyond his own satisfaction’.3 And while, as we’ll see in Chapter 4, historians have sometimes been manipulated, have sometimes had their own hidden agendas, and have sometimes inadvertently achieved more (and other) than they themselves intended, many have tried to answer Elton’s question and have been quite open in acknowledging what their history is for. It’s some of these openly professed purposes that we’ll consider in this chapter.
