ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the empathizing historian’s “authority” understood in several slightly different but closely related ways. It considers the authority that the empathizing historian exercises over and relinquishes to the people of the past, particularly in comparison with historians who occupy more or less exclusively the external observational position. Put another way, it considers the empathizing historian’s autonomy, or, perhaps better, sovereignty in relation to the past. The chapter also considers the authority of empathically derived historical reconstructions and interpretations, their validity, the evidentiary- or truth-value of empathically derived claims about the past. And, finally, the chapter considers the authority of the empathizing historian as author, as re-presenter and interpreter of the past, as writer of history, including his or her empathic responsibility to the reader. In considering the authority of the empathizing historian in these various forms, the chapter argues that the past has considerably more autonomy and exerts considerably more authority over historians than they have traditionally been wont to acknowledge. Indeed, to maintain their sense of autonomy and the illusion that their authority, indeed their power, over the past is more or less complete, some historians apparently would rather face the charge that historical knowledge is self-projection than recognize how powerfully the past affects what they know and understand, what they write, and even who they are.
