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Revisionism in the Twentieth Century:A Bankrupt Concept or PermanentPractice?Evi Gkotzaridis aa European University Institute, Dept. of History and Civilization ,Villa Schifanoia Via Boccaccio 121, I-50133 Florence, Italy E-mail:Published online: 27 Sep 2008.
To cite this article: Evi Gkotzaridis (2008) Revisionism in the Twentieth Century: A BankruptConcept or Permanent Practice?, The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 13:6, 725-741, DOI:10.1080/10848770802358112
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The European Legacy, Vol. 13, No. 6, pp. 725–741, 2008
Revisionism in the Twentieth Century: A Bankrupt
Concept or Permanent Practice?
EVI GKOTZARIDIS
ABSTRACT Written in the wake of a critical incident which the author considers worrying and yet characteristic
of the times we live in, this article contends that the conflation heretofore evident between critical historical
thinking (revisionism) and negationism is ultimately harmful to the historical discipline since it can serve the
interests of the deniers and indirectly grant an argument to radical postmodernists who demote history to a
loosely constructed form of personal fiction. On the other hand, it also eschews the belief in historical scholarship
as an immiscible category demarcated by impenetrable boundaries, which is habitually associated with empirical
positivism. Furthermore, it argues strongly for the introduction of a diachronic perspective in the study of
revisionism not only to show the steady process of professionalization of the discipline but to disclose an often
neglected or denied aspect: its contribution to the evolution of philosophical thought.
INTRODUCTION
Since the days I decided to do a doctorate in Irish history my main area of research has
revolved around the concept of revisionism. I think I would surprise no one if I say that
revisionism is one of the most elusive and chameleon-like concepts of the twentieth
century. The connections it suggests and the responses it elicits are almost always
negative, so the researcher soon realizes with some unease that it can be a waste of time to
hammer home that scientific interest in a given subject does not equal identification with
it. When the distinction between the object of research and the enquiring entity,
normally a basic tenet of social science, appears to be lost on several prominent historians,
one is even more struck by the gravity of the situation and unsure whether to throw in
the towel, as we say, or to persevere.
Hence I could not help feeling a little offended when a distinguished Cambridge
professor declined my invitation to a conference at the European University Institute on
the grounds that he thought it made Holocaust denial respectable. I tried to resolve the
misunderstanding but the Professor was adamant if not a little dismissive. Apparently my
unforgivable mistake was to hold on to a word, revisionism, which has been hijacked by
the international sect that denies the existence of the gas chambers and more generally the
genocide of the European Jews. I must say that I was thrown aback by his intransigence
European University Institute, Dept. of History and Civilization, Villa Schifanoia Via Boccaccio 121, I-50133 Florence,
Italy. Email: [email protected]
ISSN 1084-8770 print/ISSN 1470-1316 online/08/060725–17 � 2008 International Society for the Study of European Ideas
DOI: 10.1080/10848770802358112
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but not because I thought he had no serious reasons for being highly cautious. The reason
I was baffled was because I had just been hit by the realization that I was no longer in
Ireland, where the word, in the mouths of its critics, is synonymous with conspiracy with
neo-colonialism and counter-revolution, but on the Continent.
Henceforth I would have to contend with that other puzzling and unpleasant aspect
of the problem; by which I mean how a concept with a long history, so merged with the
Cold War fault lines of the twentieth century, had become so bankrupt by the start of the
twenty-first century, that even historians who––I used to believe––must be less tempted
by the lures of the zeitgeist, chose to disown it. Thus I decided to persevere, judging that
the polysemous and ambiguous character of the word, including the distrust it aroused
were all strong reasons for embarking on a serious scholarly analysis.
A MAP OF RECENT MANIFESTATIONS OF REVISIONISM
I prefer my original heading: Mapping out Revisionism in Recent Manifestations
When one prompts the question ‘what is revisionism?’ one is likely to invite two
equally unsatisfactory responses. At one end, one will hear the casual remark that it is ‘‘the
bread and butter’’ of historical scholarship for the discovery of new data is a vital aspect
without which the claim of the discipline to have founded a valuable science could not be
defended. At the other end, one will hear the opinionated retort that it is a fallacious
rendition of the past, tailored to revamp and boost the most reactionary ideologies.
For the Greek historian George Margaritis revisionism is a ‘‘colossal cultural and political
derailment,’’1 or for the Irish critic Desmond Fennell it is ‘‘both in its ultimate thrust, and
as a matter of objective fact, the historiography of the counter-revolution.’’2 The
confusion has anything but receded since Holocaust deniers have hijacked the term and
succeeded in contaminating language by playing and cashing in on the fault lines of a
mode of representation of history. The results of my work so far push me to depart from
both positions, for the first is too naıve, devoid of any theoretical intuition, and the other
too Machiavellian or Manichaean.
In the past, revisionism has assumed various forms, some seemed unequivocally
positive, others more questionable, and others still, wholly harmful. Thus, there are
readjustments of the empirical and interpretative canon which appear more threatening
than others. In this category, enter usually the re-interpretations of Ernst Nolte in
Germany and Renzo de Felice in Italy.3 These signal a significant ethical and political
turnaround and dislocate drastically an already tested international frame of analysis.
Jurgen Habermas has branded them ‘‘the apologetic tendencies in historiography’’
because their aim is to ‘‘liquidate the war damage.’’4 However things get more
complicated when some re-interpretations are not inspired by some intention
of normalization of the past, as was obvious in Germany during the Historikerstreit in
1986-87, and yet they are no less experienced by people as threats to their collective
identity. In this later category enter the re-interpretations of Claudio Pavone and Emilio
Gentile in Italy, Robert Paxton and Henry Rousso in France, Sheila Fitzpatrick for the
Soviet Union, or Stathis Kalyvas and Nikos Marantzidis in Greece.5
The singularity of these interpretations resides in the fact that they reach beyond the
frontiers of historiography to affect the very ways in which a nation relates to its past,
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defines its identity in the present and shapes its expectations of the future. Beyond
a dominant interpretation, they challenge the core of a shared historical consciousness and
a collective responsibility about the past. They clash with what Paloma Aguilar Fernandez
has called ‘‘dominant memory’’ which coincides with the memory of the war victors and
is the one that is endorsed and spread by the media and through state-sponsored
education.6 They are always concerned with fundamental events such as the French
Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Irish Rebellion of Easter 1916, the
collaborationist Vichy regime, the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 or the Greek Civil War.
Now, to complicate things even further, there are questionable, politically-motivated
re-interpretations, like that of De Felice, which in some of its segments has succeeded in
making breakthroughs in the profession and opened new research paths. These segments
are the recognition of the ‘‘revolutionary’’ dimension of Italian fascism in its early phase, of
its modernizing character or even the ‘‘consensus’’ obtained inside Italian society during
Mussolini’s war in Ethiopia. Another revisionist advance is apparent in the change of status
of the totalitarian comparison. Right after the Second World War, it was blasphemous to
suggest that Communism and Nazism, which had just sealed their antagonism by the blood
of millions of people, could be subsumed under the single category of ‘‘totalitarianism.’’
The first to break the taboo was the philosopher and political scientist Hannah
Arendt in a landmark book entitled The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951,
which set her instantly apart as an intellectual who in the words of Tony Judt, ‘‘refused to
acknowledge academic norms and conventional categories of explanation.’’7 In the 1960s
and 1970s, at the height of the Cold War, the heretical idea is taken up again by two
historians of very different political and intellectual backgrounds, the French Francois
Furet and the German Ernst Nolte. One is a man of the Left, who distanced himself
from the Communist Party after the 1956 Soviet Repression of the Hungarian
Revolution and who, in the words of his old colleague Mona Ozouf, ‘‘worried about
man’s imperviousness to historical experience.’’ The other is by his own admission a neo-
liberal in his politics and an intense nationalist who wants to restore in his people a sense
of pride in German history.
Yet both Furet and Nolte agreed that a structural comparison of totalitarian regimes
based on ideal types had little to offer. They opted instead for an analysis which insisted on
the history of their ambivalent relationship; a relationship made at once of emulation and
hostility.8 However, the common ground between them has sometimes been exaggerated,
notably by Stephane Courtois in the French preface he wrote to Nolte’s book, The
European Civil War in 2000. Furet saw in French Jacobinism the embryo of a totalitarian
regime and argued for a continuity between 1789, 1793, and 1917, whereas Nolte sees the
Russian Revolution as something wholly novel reaching a new quality of violence and
assigns to it the key role in the start of the totalitarian age. This meant that, although Furet
was ready to acknowledge that Nazism and Communism were interdependent, he never
endorsed Nolte’s dangerous idea of the causal and reactive character of Nazism.
Indeed Nolte suggested that the Nazis feared that Soviet terror would soon be
inflicted on Germans, and that the Final Solution was a sort of pre-emptive defence. Here
the Gulag precedes Auschwitz in the strong sense; it is the original blueprint from which
the Final Solution derived, against which the Third Reich reacted with madness. Instead,
Furet insisted that Nazism had a cultural ‘‘endogenous’’ core, a ‘‘prehistory,’’ as it were,
independent of Communism, existing already under the Republic of Weimar or even
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before the war of 1914. He was prepared to defend the utility of comparison but not one
that collapsed the autonomous features present in each regime. What is sure is that with
the breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1989, which swept away the left-right division,
the totalitarian comparison in its broad lines is now largely adopted. It is so even in
Germany where the memory of Auschwitz used to work as a strong deterrent to such
methodological experiments. What the disagreement between Furet and Nolte tells us is
that, contrary to an age-old perception, heuristic concepts do not have necessarily an
a priori political or normative colour and that revisionism at its best can raise very delicate
questions about the Left without necessarily falling into the trap of whitewashing
the Right.
REVISIONISM: EARLY PHILOSOPHICAL AND POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS
However, the typology I have just sketched leaves out another crucial dimension of
revisionism which a scholar too focused on purely historiographical matters can overlook.
I will call it the politico-philosophical standpoint of revisionism for lack of another word.
Moreover, I think this dimension is best illustrated when one adopts a wide historical
compass and ponders over larger intellectual and political developments. My argument is
that revisionism is a critical, logical, and scientific procedure. It corresponds to a heightened
consciousness; the faltering yet steadily balancing exercise of creating the conditions for a
degree of reflexivity in Western historiography. This does not however make it simply
the habitual exercise of readjustment of the scientific canon in the light of new empirical
data or theoretical equipment. These dimensions can be present and often are, but by
themselves they are not sufficient to render a historical interpretation ‘‘revisionist’’ in the
strong sense. This is an aspect of the problem that was pointed out by the sovietologist
Sheila Fitzpatrick in a recent contribution when she explained that the 1970s revision of
the Stalinist era thrived despite the total absence of reliable data before the opening of
classified Soviet archives at the end of the 1980s. She insisted that ‘‘the impulse to
challenge often preceded both archival access and discoveries.’’9 Instead, my feeling is that
revisionism corresponds to a moment when historians are abnormally conscious of the
implications and consequences of what they do and go so far as to use their craft with the
intensity of activism to produce significant shifts in collective mentalities.
That said, in no way does my inclination render me blind to what I think is its grey
area. Indeed, it is also my belief that revisionism with the radical re-opening of vistas it
affords is intrinsically liminal and unpredictable. It is also full of booby traps that one is
better off being aware of than not, if the final objective is to produce valid and internally
coherent statements in keeping with the ideal we call truth. At any rate, this liminal space,
which is also a threshold where ambiguity and openness dominate, is of course dangerous,
as there can coexist constructive and fertile critique and its opposite, the negation of
critique and the lapse into various forms of nihilism, of which Holocaust denial is only the
most extreme form.
Put differently, revisionism is an ‘‘open ended’’ process which predisposes one to
work in relative terms, to envisage the destabilization of hegemonic, unilateral and
Manichaean outlooks, and that is exactly what makes the apprehension of any
tendentious and manipulative discourse so difficult. Pierre Vidal-Naquet understood that
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well when he wrote: ‘‘A historian, by definition, works in relative terms . . . . The word
itself has nothing shocking about it for a historian: he instinctively adopts the adjective as
his own.’’10 Which way the scales will tip is very much a function of the degree of self-
reflexivity the historian possesses and of how unyielding he proves to the weight of
outside pressures. How erratic this grey place can be, is well captured by the former
Communist Party’s foreign affairs specialist Boris Ponomaryov, who when reacting to
political dissent inside the Eastern Bloc explained that revisionism is ‘‘a trend in the
working class movement that, to the benefit of the bourgeoisie, seeks to debase, to
emasculate, and to destroy Marxism by means of revision, that is, by way of
re-examination, distortion and negation of its basic tenets.’’11
What his remark reveals is first the fear of fragmentation, or said differently, the fear
that by questioning the rationality of the means of the Class struggle, one will also end up
questioning the very finality of the Class struggle. His remark reveals also the fear of
internal critique; the intuition of how much more lasting damage can a critique, coming
from inside the Eastern Bloc, cause to the official ideology. This fear was already present
during the Bernsteindebatte which exploded at the end of the nineteenth century inside
German social democracy and spread instantly to the whole of the international socialist
movement. Hence Rosa Luxemburg saw in Edward Bernstein’s blasphemous questioning
of the two fundamental tenets of Marxism—historical materialism and the class struggle—
not a different ‘‘method of struggle’’ or ‘‘set of tactics’’ but a cunning attempt to empty
out the whole raison d’etre of Marxism.
The only difference, not a small one, mind you, was that the Bernstein controversy
remained essentially a theoretical debate among highbrow intellectuals. Indeed, no one
thought of expelling Bernstein from the SPD even though his revisions did carry political
conclusions aiming at harmonizing the theory with the practice of a secure, numerically
strong party, which had given up revolutionary struggle and was moving towards a
reformist policy. Whereas Eastern revisionism buoyed up by Nikita Krustschev ‘‘secret
speech’’ against Stalin’s crimes in February 1956 and soon after shocked out of its wits by
the bloody suppression of the Polish and Hungarian protests six months later, was political
in a much more threatening manner. It was so because since the dispute inside the SPD,
Communism had come to power in one country, and the regime there had to answer for
gulags, engineered famines, show trials, and much else that was done in the name of the
Communist cause.
Another origin which typifies the grey area of revisionism is the Dreyfus affair,
between 1896 and 1899, which threw French society into the gravest political and moral
crisis of the Third Republic and revealed deep political and ideological cleavages. This
judicial scandal and its sequels are important for us in two respects. In this affair we see
outlining itself with great force the conflict between positive and negative revisionism in
the domain that is of prime interest for us, historiography. The first modern ‘‘revisionists’’
were, in France, the advocates of a judicial ‘‘revision’’ of the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, the
Jewish captain unfairly accused of espionage on behalf of the Germans. Ironically enough,
the word was soon seized by their adversaries and became associated with their own
enterprise of systematic falsification of the truth. By 1905 Joseph Reinach had
championed the cause of the Captain in a first two-volume history of the case. In
1905 Henri Dutrait-Croyon published, with a preface by Charles Maurras, a ‘‘revision’’
of this book, which soon became a bible for that anti-Semitic section of French public
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opinion convinced of the culpability of Dreyfus.12 What was remarkable about this
so-called revision is that it presented all the paraphernalia of scholarship with full
referencing apparatus, displays of erudition and arguments which when considered alone
were not inaccurate. Pierre Vidal-Naquet saw this reversal of the word as being
‘‘symptomatic’’ and opined that this subtle blend of scientificity and facticity remain today
the hallmarks of contemporary ‘‘revisionism.’’
But the Affair symbolizes also a pivotal moment which helped enshrine in the
professional consciousness and the deontological practice of the intellectual the defence of
disinterested and absolute values like truth, reason, justice or even social and intellectual
freedom. Julien Benda, a magnificent chronicler, who once confessed how deep a mark
the Affair had left on his mind, wrote a famous book in 1927 entitled ‘‘The Treason of
the Intellectuals’’ in which he condemned the generalizing tendency of his own guild to
commit blindly to race, nation, class, and party.13 Later some revisionist historians took
their cues perhaps more from Benda than they did from Ranke, for like Benda, they
became the spokesmen of universal values often with a passion reminiscent of political
activism, and here I’m referring to men like A. J. P. Taylor or Harry Elmer Barnes.
Both events, the Bernsteindebatte and the Dreyfus Affair, are of abiding significance;
both hide treasures of insights, since they show that power and science are at best
inescapable communicating vessels and at worst accomplices in which science is more
often than not an ancillary and a casualty. Moreover, the Dreyfus Affair illustrates a
phenomenon of contamination of discourses and concepts which, with the improvement
of the means of communication (internet) in the last quarter of the twentieth century,
was able to attain a degree of refinement and thus deception no doubt unforeseen before.
In such climate as we find today, the challenge and the responsibility facing historians is
no small job, and so ultimately I do not hold grudges against the famous professor of
Cambridge. I know that his apprehensions are perfectly justified. Only I do not agree
with his tactic because by washing his hands of the word ‘‘revisionism,’’ by not
questioning the propriety of the deniers’ use of the term, he allows them to win the battle
of denomination, and unwittingly cedes them a territory they should never have
trespassed in the first place. Indeed, there is a huge difference between mimicking the
rhetoric of science and doing science, no matter how ‘‘impure’’ the end result turns out
to be, and historians should never lose an opportunity to repulse dishonest
encroachments, be they of a denominational or discursive type. If they do not, they
will become accomplices in the undermining of the scientific foundations of their own
profession. What is essential to remember for our purposes here is that Rosa Luxemburg’s
fears about fragmentation and internal critique outlived the disagreements inside German
Social Democracy and formed a familiar backdrop to many historiographic battles of
the future.
REVISIONISM MAKES ITS APPEARANCE INSIDE HISTORIOGRAPHY
The first battle takes place in the 1920s in America. Sidney Bradshaw Fay, Carl Becker,
Charles Beard, and Harry Elmer Barnes throw a bombshell in the American historical
establishment when they cast doubt on the German guilt verdict of the Versailles Treaty.
In their minds there is no doubt that responsibility for the Great War is divided among all
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the great powers. The German and Austrian diplomatic documents they have sifted
through say so. Often, when they are attacked they say they speak in the name of
objectivity yet the latter is perhaps seriously tested by their declared mission to prove the
fallacy of Article 231. They also say they speak in the name of world peace and believe
that only a relaxation of the punitive clauses in the Treaty can spare humanity another
disastrous war. They have baptized themselves ‘‘revisionists’’ because they are calling for a
revision of Article 231. Beard and Barnes are also convinced that Woodrow Wilson and
later Franklin Roosevelt have dragged America into two European conflicts because they
wanted to divert people’s attention from the deteriorating economic and social situation
at home. Their historiographical output on the war origins has thus an urgent practical
end and is in fact enmeshed in the pragmatics of rival official discourses, for whether they
care to admit it or not, it helps to rehabilitate the Germans. The American revisionists
write regularly in a German periodical called Die Kriegsschuldfrage, founded by Alfred von
Wegerer, which is devoted entirely to the task of expunging the war-guilt clause.14 Here
we see again the grey area of revisionism—two revisionisms which, at least superficially,
seem inspired by opposed philosophical and political values, collude. And yet, whatever
their shackles, the work of those historians remained scholarly in some fundamental ways,
for all of them were immersed in and argued from the evidence.
Not all German historians rejected the Allied verdict reached at Versailles. In 1961
Fritz Fischer published a book called Germany’s Aims in the First World War,15 which
threw another bombshell this time in the German historical establishment. In it he went
against the consensus that had dominated German historiography in the 1950s and
articulated the idea––backed up with diplomatic and economic records—that Germany
had continuously striven for world power in the form of a lebensraum in Central Europe
and a colonial empire for many decades before 1914. Moreover, he fanned the flames of a
long-smouldering debate when he conveyed convincing evidence that, after the
assassination of Archduke Frantz Ferdinand, Berlin had begun to exert mounting pressure
on Austria to invade Serbia.
Most conservative historians, loyal to the revisionist tradition, branded Fischer’s
book an unpatriotic piece as it sapped their collective effort to present a sanitized version
of the German past. Gerhard Ritter became their spokesman and dismissed the book as
‘‘a renewal of the indictment of Versailles.’’16 The Adenauer government, which had
spent more than a decade trying to make Germany acceptable to the Atlantic
Community, was also deeply annoyed. The controversy over Fischer’s book shows
vividly how difficult it is to push forward interpretations that are at odds with the general
agendas of the political and historical establishments at a given time.
The next historiographical battle took place again in America and opposed the
Wisconsin revisionist school, headed by William Appleman Williams, to the orthodox
historians, best represented by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. In 1959 Williams published
his controversial The Tragedy of American diplomacy,17 in which he argued that
turn-of-the-century American imperialism was no departure from traditional national
policy but rather consistent with early-nineteenth-century frontier expansion and
early-twentieth-century domination of Latin America. By the 1950s this policy had
grown into a full-blown drive for global hegemony. He was not afraid of summoning up
heretical ideas coming from the enemy, and thus his thinking was deeply steeped in
Marxist-Leninist theory of economic determinism, especially that part which referred to
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imperialism as being the highest stage of capitalism. Hence, contrary to the nationalistic
historians, who were satisfied with believing that America’s foreign policy had always been
inspired by noble ideals like democracy, protection from tyranny and containment of
totalitarianism, Williams insisted that it was rooted in the long-standing drive of American
capitalism to conquer world markets and resources. America’s decision to step into the
vacuum left behind by British and French spheres of influence from the Middle East to
Africa and Asia, and the operation of the Marshall Plan for economic recovery of Western
Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, seemed to confirm Williams’ thesis. As America got bogged
down in Vietnam and public opinion became more and more divided, sceptical and finally
angry, the revisionist position also represented by such different historians as Lloyd
Gardner, Walter LaFeber, and the more radical ones, Gar Alperowitz and Gabriel Kolko18
(more a post-revisionist) became also more ‘‘presentist.’’
This meant that the question over the rationality of American intervention in
Vietnam became extended to the larger issue of the genesis and responsibilities of the
Cold War. Until the 1960s the Cold War was defined by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. as ‘‘the
brave and essential response of free men to communist aggression,’’19 and this definition
had gone undisputed by the majority of the profession. But if fewer and fewer
intellectuals accepted that America’s vital interests were at stake in Southeast Asia, was it
not logical and reasonable to ask if the same was true of Eastern Europe in the 1940s?
If now many could concede that China had a legitimate interest in the regimes on her
borders, might not this also have been the case with the USSR earlier on? This in fact
summed up the core of the revisionist position, which stated that at the end of World
War 2, the Russians were more concerned with security and reconstruction than with
expansion, and it was America’s failure to accept the inevitability of a Soviet sphere of
influence in Eastern Europe, because it feared a loss of markets, that had prevented the
creation of a postwar modus vivendi. Williams was no abettor of totalitarian repression and
spared no energy to criticize harshly the Soviet brutal invasion of Hungary in 1956.
That said, he was no less convinced that the Bay of Pigs invasion into Cuba decided by
the Kennedy Administration was morally equivalent to the former. Thus America was no
paragon of virtue. His critics reduced his revisionism to pro-communist sympathies.
However, one would be closer to the mark if one said that Williams felt the urgency
of fighting at home what the Frankfurt School sociologist Herbert Marcuse called
‘‘one-dimensional man’’: the quintessential creation of advanced, industrial societies,
compliant, unaware of his own alienation, incapable of thinking dialectically and
questioning his own society.20
The rejection of a Manichaean conception of human affairs and the importance laid
on internal critique are also central themes in A. J. P. Taylor’s controversial The Origins of
The Second World War,21 published in 1961, the same year that Fritz Fischer and two years
before Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem: Report on the Banality of Evil,22 were
raising serious questions about the mistakes committed by their own tribe. Like a
conscientious historian engaged in the philological evaluation of historical documents,
Taylor came to the conclusion that the evidence compiled for the Trials of war-criminals
in Nuremberg was dangerous material to use because ‘‘the documents were chosen not
only to demonstrate the war guilt of the men on trial, but to conceal that of the
prosecuting Powers.’’ He added: ‘‘Of course the documents are genuine. But they are
‘loaded’; and anyone who relies on them finds it almost impossible to escape from the
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load with which they are charged.’’23 Implicit here is the suggestion that the Nuremberg
briefs were geared to help a lawyer make a case and thus carried a high degree of
selectiveness. If a historian wanted to avoid being manipulated by the ideological
intentions clotting around the Trial, he should consider its verdicts as specific moments in
history and as such susceptible to become also objects of history.
The book caused quite a stir because Taylor’s portrayal of Hitler clashed with the
historiographical consensus shaped by the Nuremberg Thesis. This thesis held that Hitler
had wanted the war, had planned in detail for war and had begun the war; in this he was
supported by his fellow Nazis, but not by the German people, who were largely innocent
bystanders, if not victims themselves, of the regime and its policies. Instead, Taylor argued
that Hitler had strategic goals but no predetermined master plan as to how and when he
would reach those goals. Lacking a precise timetable, Hitler took opportunities as they
arose––and the French and British Governments gave him those opportunities. Hitler had
the support of the German people in overthrowing the Versailles Treaty and invading
Poland. In a nutshell, in undoubtedly provocative fashion, Taylor demolished the image
of Hitler as absolute mastermind and overseer of a blueprint for world conquest, not out
of hidden pro-Nazi sympathies as his critics alleged, but simply in order to apportion
blame more widely, to the German people and to the European statesmen, who had
committed major blunders, notably by thinking initially that they could appease him by
turning a blind eye to some of his territorial violations.
REVISIONISM: INTERREGNUM BETWEEN HISTORICISM AND META-HISTORICISM?
Now, what strikes the intellectual historian here is that there are common
methodological intuitions running through all those instances of revisionism on the
basis of which one may deduce the embryo of a new epistemology. All those historians
are engaged, and here I am paraphrasing Francois Furet, in the task of defining the
conditions needed to bring about a cooling off of the objects ‘‘First World War,’’
‘‘Second World War,’’ or ‘‘Cold War,’’ while the assumptions, feelings and emotions
born from these events are still searing memories. All of them work on the premise that
this cooling off should not be passively expected just by the passing of time, but that the
responsibility of the historian is to help people see those assumptions, feelings, emotions
from a different perspective and thus put them into perspective. They are also trying to
modify how as historians they relate to their topic, thereby making less spontaneous and
less constraining their identification with the political actors, their genuflection in front of
the winners or their slighting of the losers.24
Contrary to Leon Trotsky, who consigned all those who backed the wrong horse
in the dustheap of Official history, the revisionists begin to sense as Reinhart Koselleck
put it, that ‘‘in the long term, the historical gains in knowledge come from the
vanquished.’’25 This means that all of them are involved in an exercise to establish an
emotional and intellectual distance from the dominant ideologies that have prevailed or,
to use Jean-Francois Lyotard’s phrase, they express their incredulity about grand
narratives. Hence they do not hesitate to point at the mistakes, hypocrisies and guilt of the
winners, which of course awakens the suspicion of those who not always unjustifiably
fear a levelling out of historic responsibilities. This pushes Taylor to stress the political
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character of the Nuremberg tribunal, for if any of the four Powers who set it up ‘‘had
been running the affair alone, it would have thrown the mud more widely. The Western
Powers would have brought in the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Soviet Union would have
retaliated with the Munich conference.’’ For these reasons, ‘‘the only possible course was
to assume the sole guilt of Germany in advance.’’26
Moreover, for some of them, like Barnes and Taylor, the quest for ‘‘truth’’ is
absolute in the sense that it cannot in any circumstance be subordinated to temporal
ideologies. This means that so long as truth and an ideal of social and political justice
coincide, the marriage runs smoothly. But if by misfortune, revisionism hits upon
information which shows that this ideal of justice has compromised itself by violence or
mendacity and defiled the very principles of human rights it purports to defend, the
marriage breaks up, because the historian will refuse to silence those embarrassing facts to
protect the interests of this ideal. By the same token, if evidence is discovered which
directly or indirectly bolsters the cause of a national foe, the historian will still feel obliged
to release it in the public domain, regardless of its immediate moral and political
implications and irrespective of its likely consequences. Taylor once declared: ‘‘There is
only one profound responsibility on the historian, which is to do his best for historical
truth. If he discovered things which were catastrophic for his political beliefs he would
still put it in his books. He has no responsibility whatsoever to fiddle the past in order to
benefit some cause that he happens to believe in.’’27
Professional ethics are here observed almost in a fashion reminiscent of Immanuel
Kant’s conception of truth, because historical truth is deemed a categorical imperative.
But the paradox is that some revisionisms in the past supplied gangplanks to denial or
whitewashing tactics, because they overlooked or else licensed instrumentalist uses of
their hypotheses out of the conviction that they were defending the superior ideal of
historical truth or even world peace. Indeed, how watertight new hypotheses and
discoveries are to instrumentalist encroachments and abuses is a question that revisionists
and more generally historians have failed to address in the past. Furthermore, for the
revisionist, doing history is cultivating an anti-establishment stance and is a trait it shares
with postmodernism. Hence both Taylor and Barnes were suspicious and flippant of
official historians, whom they called Court Historians; that is, of experts paid by
governmental agencies to produce conclusions in keeping with the line of the Foreign
Office or editing official historical documents subject to the censorship of a departmental
chief. In 1961 Taylor wrote: ‘‘The academic historians of the West may assert their
scholarly independence even when they are employed by a government department; but
they are as much ‘engaged’ as though they wore the handsome uniforms designed for
German professors by Dr. Goebbels.’’28
What one ought to remember is that revisionism flourished on the ruins of two
World Wars at a time when the ‘‘crisis’’ of European values echoed the ‘‘crisis’’ of the
historical discipline, then a burning issue inside the international academic community.
For its advocates revisionism was thus conceived as a cure. Because they had witnessed
large-scale incidence of trahison des clercs during the world wars, this minority sought to
refashion a discipline mired in complicities with power by changing the canon of
selection of the sources, experimenting with new conceptual schemes, toying with
innovative ways of redefining the status of history, campaigning for the release of all
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official documents under State custody and, more generally, by imposing more stringent
scientific standards.
Moreover, from 1945 onwards, on a superficial level, everything happens as if the
focus of ‘‘revisionism’’ shifts from the obsessive question of the German Shuldfrage (guilt
question), whose resonance somewhat subsides, to the more philosophically troubling
question of the suffering inflicted on mankind by the excesses of nationalism in general.
It was thus just a matter of time before each national historiography began registering
this critical distance from the grand narrative of the nation-state, and revisionism stopped
being only the affair of a small minority of historians. Hence the ‘‘new history’’
spearheaded in America in the 1920s saw equivalent efforts in Ireland in 1938 when
T. W. Moody and R. D. Edwards submerged their own political, ideological, and
temperamental differences to create the new Irish Historical Studies school to serve the
cause of reconciliation in their divided Ireland. In England, historians like R. H. Tawney
in London, Herbert Butterfield in Cambridge, and A. F. Pollard, the founding editor of
History, were also engaged in an effort to establish a ‘‘new history’’ with the objective of
buttressing the integrity of a problematic discipline.
This effort to strengthen the epistemological foundations of the discipline is what
drives some revisionists to go beyond Rankean empiricism and contribute their share to
the philosophy of history. Carl Becker and Charles Beard were slowly abandoning
objectivist positivism and laying down the theoretical foundations for what would come
to be designated as ‘‘historical relativism.’’29 Charles Beard conceived of a theory of
relativism called ‘‘realistic dialectics,’’ which posed a critical challenge both to subjectivist
relativism and positivism.30 In fact Beard was the only American historian of his
generation who had immersed himself in the debates occasioned by the crisis of German
historicism and had retrieved from it a warning of how relativism, which assumed both a
cognitive and ethical form in Germany, can lead knowledge into a deadlock.31
In 1965, the Irish revisionist Conor Cruise O’Brien had predicted that the liberation
of the Communist world from their crude forms of lying will have to proceed from
within, but he hastened to add that the liberation of the Western world from its subtler
and perhaps deadlier forms of lying will also have to proceed from within.32 I think it is
no exaggeration to say that all the historians whose work I have described above, were
working on the basis of the very same intuition. This is also why in its initial phase
revisionism is not tantamount to methodological innovation. It is no ex-nihilo creation. Its
impulse is not to jettison a methodological matrix or a historiographical tradition in order
to join or even found another one. Rather, not unlike Derrida’s undecidable or pharmakon,
this thing which could spell simultaneously poisoning and cure, it stands stubbornly on
the threshold, thereby being at once inside and outside the tradition and thus effecting
a destabilizing passage through it. It does so by pointing out its contradictions,
miscalculations and omissions, often through the use of irony.
This is the case of Francois Furet when he took issue with the French Marxists over
their interpretation of the French Revolution as embodying a total break with the past.
If Furet chooses to direct his epistemological animus against the Marxists it is because he
thinks that this school in particular should have known better than to adopt uncritically
empiricist historicism, given that Marx himself was always skeptical of its heuristic claims.
After all, one of Marx’s famous pronouncements was that ‘‘men who make history do not
know the history they are making,’’ and to forget their powerlessness they ‘‘simply
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rationalize their role through mental representations.’’ The failure of the Marxists to
subject those mental representations to critical evaluation or their naıve identification
with Jacobinism when they portrayed 1789 as a ‘‘natural occurrence in the history of the
oppressed’’ struck Furet as a major methodological contradiction. For habitually in their
observation of economic and social conditions, they proved capable of structural long-
term analysis and conceptual finesse. Yet in their observation of political events, they did
not apply the same method and thus fell into a positivist, narrative mode, of which the
main drawback was that it could never fathom the enormous upheaval that was the
invention of democratic language in the realm of culture. Furet cut to the bone when
with irony he asked: ‘‘One wonders . . . whether it is not a paradoxical performance for
an allegedly Marxist historiography to take its bearings from the prevailing ideological
consciousness of the period it sets out to explain.’’33
The same technique of destabilization from within a specific genre can be observed
in Fritz Fischer’s account of the origins of World War 1. Methodologically his book was
no departure from German historicism, since it was a narrative focused on political events
with no appeals to explicit theory. But it succeeded nonetheless in turning historicism
against itself as it were, by subverting with the use of traditional tools its implicit political
commitments—its conservative and nationalistic worldview. In so doing he also breached
its unquestioned dominance by showing the next generation of German scholars,
represented by Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jurgen Kocka, that historicism was no
impregnable edifice, thus freeing them mentally to explore the usefulness of social science
in laying the foundations of a new historiographical paradigm.34
Finally, revisionism is a practice that does not shun from pondering over what
Thomas Kuhn called ‘‘anomalies’’ in the dominant paradigms.35 It is in fact very alert to
these. Contrary to the deniers, who display an almost pathological desire to track their
theory under the upheavals of history by deleting all facts which contradict it, revisionists
refuse to shove ‘‘irregular facts’’ into the available conceptual boxes, and when these crop
up they tend to overthrow not simply the current theory, but the entire worldview in
which it exists, and all of the assumptions that come with it. Hence Williams came to the
conclusion that Truman’s doctrine of Containment was founded on flimsy assumptions
that newly released archives invalidated. Indeed, it was freshly uncovered that Stalin,
whose alleged promotion of armed insurgency in Greece had served as justification for
Containment, had in fact forsaken Greek revolutionaries by denying them material
support in their civil war of 1946–47.36 This was the sort of anomaly which in Williams’
reasoning showed that Stalin’s territorial ambitions were limited to an Eastern sphere of
influence and that his postwar posture had been essentially defensive. From this discovery,
Williams also drew larger conclusions: mainly that had the American leaders genuinely
negotiated with him on other financial issues, and not tried to isolate him economically
and politically, the pressure would have eased. For him, Containment was a practical
failure and a moral catastrophe, either the equivalent of shooting oneself in the foot or
jeopardizing world peace for the well-being of American capitalism.
The detection of anomalies also informs the work of Robert O. Paxton, which
revolutionized understanding of the functioning of the Petain regime, albeit––like that of
Fischer––with an empirical method.37 The pathway that led him to debunk the
mythology of Vichy as a puppet state obliged to obey Hitler’s orders or as a shield
protecting the French from more aggressive German territorial ambitions, was the
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realization that the French official archives were to remain closed for 50 years. Then his
collateral work on the French Army during the dark years revealed to him glaring
discrepancies between the French version and the German version of events, which
convinced him to shift his focus on the German archives and thus uncover the extent of
the proactive character of French official Collaboration.38
Furthermore, contrary to its own allegation, revisionism is not satisfied with just
recounting things as they really were, to use Leopold von Ranke’s dictum. It is not afraid
to raise embarrassing questions of a political and moral character. Many of its
representatives tend to reject action based on what Max Weber called the ‘‘ethics of
conviction,’’ and advocate the ‘‘ethics of responsibility.’’39 But more precisely perhaps,
they understand that the relationship between these two oppositions has been historically
complex or ambiguous. Hannah Arendt has shown that the sense of responsibility of the
Jewish Councils of Elders who chose to collaborate with the Nazis out of a belief that in
this way they would save at least some lives, miscarried because they estimated wrongly
the consequences of their choice.40 In a similar way, Gar Alperovitz has questioned the
so-called sense of responsibility of Harry Truman when he justified the use of the atomic
bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the grounds that he tried to save American lives by
shortening the war with Japan.41
Finally, the last matter worthy of attention is that the criticisms raised against
revisionism have not changed at all through the twentieth century, the only difference
being that now revisionism is conflated or lumped together with postmodernism. In the
Irish debate, like in the Greek one, the words revisionism and postmodernism are used almost
interchangeably and equally denounced as latter-day manifestations of relativism, both
cognitive and ethical. This relativism is supposedly used with calculation to either protect
the current political status quo by arguing that historical events and processes are too
complex and ultimately unknowable, thereby discouraging collective action in the future,
or to tone down or even turn around historical responsibilities.
The Greek sociologist Athanassios Alexiou described revisionist argumentation as
‘‘a fragmentary contemplation of historical reality,’’ which derives from ‘‘the radical
hermeneutics of structuralism, the ‘end of the great narratives’ of postmodernism, the
‘end of social classes’, and the ‘end of history’.’’ According to him, these new approaches
‘‘weaken the causal relation between things and replace it by a multi-causal explanation
in which everything can be deemed true or valid.’’42An Irish critic claimed that the
revisionist tendency to linger on the sectarian undercurrents in Irish nationalism hid
hypocrisy, because ‘‘presumably the same type of critic, confronted with Nazi crimes in
the Germany of the 1930s, would have been quick to opine that the Third Reich was not
without its Jewish bigots.’’43 In the 1950s in America, Charles Beard’s and Carl Becker’s
relativism was already seen as advancing the cause of totalitarianism, first in its Nazi and
then in its Soviet embodiments. The personal form of the attack was even more vicious
because these historians, in their commitment to criticize their own side, were seen as
‘‘demobilizing’’ the minds of youth and weakening the political and moral foundations
for American involvement in the European conflict at the most critical moment.
This ‘‘affiliation’’ between revisionism and postmodernism is intriguing and in my
opinion deserves further exploration, this time on a transnational scale. Among the
scholars who have alluded to this, we find Deborah Lipstadt who contended that
postmodernism had proved a fertile ground on which Holocaust denial, the last mutant of
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relativism, had flourished in America.44 We also find Jurgen Habermas who, as a trained
philosopher, did so no doubt in a more rigorous fashion when he reflected on the
Historikerstreit.45 In my book I decided also to test this supposed kinship in an Irish
context.46 I applied postmodernism in the loosest possible sense, to describe the
emergence of a self-reflexive mood in the Western world to which Ireland—because of
the political mistakes and contradictions in its own nationalist tradition—proved also
responsive, especially after the Northern Irish Troubles broke out in 1968. I came to the
conclusion that there were interesting overlaps in sensibility or spirit but also important
differences in epistemology. If I were to clarify my position I would say that Irish
revisionism remains closer to the project of structuralism of the 1950s and 1960s than it is
to postmodernism, especially in its American analytical tradition represented by Richard
Rorty and Hayden White.47 In fact, no Irish revisionist would have espoused the eclectic
subjectivism of those who demote historiography to a form of fiction. Besides, such
demotion would have wrong-footed the Irish revisionists of the 1980s who wrote history
in the shadow of the Troubles with the hidden hope that it could contribute something
positive to the transformation both of Nationalist and Unionist mentalities. Even
nowadays they continue to work on the assumption that, despite all its inadequacies,
history is still a scientific exercise.
TOWARDS A RECONSIDERATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP OF HISTORY
AND PHILOSOPHY?
To come back to my central argument: revisionism, in its legitimate form, presents over
time some recognizable attributes. These are the internal critique, the anti-establishment
posture, the determination to break from dominant ideologies, the decision to free the
minds from the hypnotic grip of myth and propaganda to further reconciliation, and
the conviction that in this resides history’s loftiest calling, the meticulous attention to
anomalies, the rejection of Manichaeism, the effort to bridge the gap between theory and
practice, and the effort to strengthen the scientific bases of historical knowledge, notably
by squeezing out the worst inroads of hindsight and teleology. Furthermore, the fears of
fragmentation and relativism predate by a long stretch the arrival of postmodernism and
have indeed deep-rooted antecedents in Western culture. This suggests that it is an
aberration to use ‘‘revisionism’’ to designate Holocaust denial. Whoever perpetuates this
confusion either by ideological calculation, intellectual lethargy, or political-correctness,
is ceding denial a major weapon in my opinion. Moreover, those recognizable attributes
of revisionism––and here one may judge me ignorant or provocative or both––are not
that different from those we habitually ascribe to postmodernism in its broadest
acceptation.
I do not wish to underestimate, let alone, collapse, the differences between them.
The awareness of a crisis in the values of the Enlightenment cuts deeper in
postmodernism than revisionism. It pushes postmodernism to counteract the excess
it witnessed in the tremendous cruelty of the violence of the twentieth century with an
equal degree of excess, which translates in the apocalyptic assertion of the need to discard
the Western heritage completely. Such a postulate inevitably carries more radical
implications for the realms of epistemology and politics, even driving some of its
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representatives like Lyotard to countenance a new nihilism. Thus, revisionism, especially
in its early expression, is not cognisant of the problems arising from the coercive power of
language, of how understanding is hemmed in by deceptively innocuous decisions, such
as categorisation or naming, the way history has been since it has imbibed the critical turn.
All the same, revisionism reveals the embryo of a new sensibility which in some of its
aspects is redolent of later intellectual developments. It rejects the totalizing reflex which
subsumes all historical phenomena under one single cause or irons out all their
complexity by rehearsing the parameters of one single scholastic paradigm.
It is thus wary of monist explanations and in the field of diplomatic history to which
Barnes, Taylor, and Appleman Williams belonged, it channelled its analysis into notions
such as the arbitrariness of decision-making due to engrained ideological biases,
misunderstanding the enemy’s intentions, and the interdependence of national and
foreign policy. Revisionism does not quite reject the essentialist concepts such as truth,
reason, or progress. It still clings to the belief that there is a reality out there which exists
independent of, beneath or beyond, language and ideology, and in that sense it remains a
child of the Enlightenment. Harry Elmer Barnes, its most sulphurous spokesman, was
convinced that Truth incarnate spoke through him. Still, in the meditations of Beard and
of Becker in the 1930s, one sees unmistakable indications of a full-blown attack on the
tenets and language of historical objectivity. More generally, revisionism is tied to
relativism, since it is prepared to include in its estimations defeated versions of the events
and is open to the notion that some exaggerations lurk in the official version that
prevailed, and that some ascertainable information may be retrieved from the version that
was defeated. Revisionism, like post-structuralism—although one cannot positively
affirm that either of them manages to eschew teleology, a posteriori judgments, and
tautology—are both acutely conscious of those hurdles and are critical of academic
endeavours that integrate such operations.
If we define postmodernism narrowly as corresponding to the scepticism that sets in
after the civil rights and students movements of 1968 and is identified with the
continental French school personified by Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and
Jacques Derrida, we cannot but conclude, after my panoptical outline of revisionism, that
the so-called epistemological break, often implicit in the concept of postmodernism, is
either an illusion or at least exaggerated. That is why instead of seeing 1968 as the start of
a radically new intellectual era, I see it as the moment of exacerbation of all the doubts
that had traversed the twentieth century, as the implications of what happened during
World War II began to sink in. In fact, I would argue that revisionism in its early
manifestations was equally drawn to the idea of epistemological break and all its efforts
were geared towards this end, however futile those may appear now to younger scholars
who are acquainted with the psychic, linguistic, temporal and institutional-cum
ideological obstacles congesting pure scientific experience in the social sciences, and
who now come to the matter of history with a different set of questions altogether.
My reconfiguration may carry consequences about our assumptions on the nature of
the relationship between history and philosophy in the past. In the 1980s, with the assault
mounted against history by thinkers such as Frank Ankersmit and Keith Jenkins,48 who
did a lot to vulgarize both in a positive and negative way the postmodernist ideas, the
notion that philosophy exerted a mounting pressure on historiography to diversify its
objects of enquiry and redouble attention to its methods, gained credence. This placing of
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philosophy in the role of the trendsetter and history in that of the refractory ‘‘old man’’ is
comparable to a boulder one cannot dislodge. And yet no one has deemed it worth
asking if here we are not in the snares of retrospection, and if revisionism—fecund,
factious and unabated since at least the 1920s—did not prove an engine of
methodological renewal for historiography as well as a formidable catalyst of change
for Western philosophy.
NOTES
1. George Margaritis, ‘‘The Greek Civil War and Its History: The Commemorative Year 1999,’’Archiotaxio 2 (2000): 137–43.
2. Desmond Fennell, ‘‘Against Revisionism,’’ in Interpreting Irish History, ed. Ciaran Brady(Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1994), 183, 187.
3. Ernst Nolte, La guerre civile europeenne, 1917–1945, Preface Stephane Courtois (Paris: Editionsdes Syrtes, 2000); Renzo de Felice, Rosso e Nero (Milano: Baldini & Castoldi, 1995), orBorden W. Painter, ‘‘Renzo de Felice and the Historiography of Italian Fascism,’’ AmericanHistorical Review 95 (1990): 391–405.
4. Jurgen Habermas, Historikerstreit (Munchen: Piper, 1987), 62–76.5. Claudio Pavone, Une Guerra civile: Saggio Storico sulla moralita nella Resistenza (Torino: Bollati
Boringhieri, 1990); Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Harvard, MA:Harvard University Press, 1997); Robert Paxton, La France de Vichy 1940–1944 (Paris: Seuil,1997); Eric Conan and Henry Rousso, Vichy: Un passe qui ne passe pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1996),235–55; Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press,1994); Stathis Kalyvas, ‘‘Red Terror: Leftist Violence during the Occupation,’’ in After the WarWas Over, ed. Mark Mazower (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 142–81;Nikos Marantzidis, ‘‘Nees Taseis sti Meleti tou Emfiliou Polemou,’’ Ta Nea (20 March 2004).
6. Paloma Aguilar Fernandez, Mnimi ke lithi tou Ispanikou Emfyliou: Dimokratia, Diktatoria keDiacheirisi tou Parelthontos (Irakleio: Panepistimiales Ekdoseis Kritis, 2005), 17.
7. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new ed. (New York: Harvest Books, 1973).8. Francois Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 161.9. Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘‘Revisionism in Soviet History,’’ History and Theory, Theme Issue 46
(2007): 89.10. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Les assassins de la memoire (Paris: Decouverte, 1987; Seuil, 1995).11. Roger Scruton, A Dictionary of Political Thought (London: Pan Books, 1982), 405.12. Henri Dutrait-Croyon, Joseph Reinach Historien: Revision de l’histoire de l’affaire Dreyfus (Paris:
A. Savaete, 1905).13. Julien Benda, La trahison des clercs (Paris: Grasset, 1975).14. Selig Adler, ‘‘The War-Guilt Question and American Disillusionment, 1918–1928,’’ Journal of
Modern History 23.1 (1951): 7.15. Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1968).16. Frederick A. Hale, ‘‘Fritz Fischer and the Historiography of World War One,’’ History Teacher
9.2 (1976): 15.17. William Appleman Williams, ‘‘The Tragedy of American Diplomacy: Twenty Five Years After
(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988).18. Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995); Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War (New York: RandomHouse, 1968).
19. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., ‘‘Origins of the Cold War,’’ Foreign Affairs 46 (1967): 23.20. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
(Boston: Beacon, 1964).
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21. A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (London: Penguin, 1991).22. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin,
2006).23. Taylor, Origins of the Second World War, 36.24. Francois Furet, Penser la Revolution francaise (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 27.25. Reinhart Koselleck, L’experience de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 239.26. Taylor, Origins of the Second World War, 36.27. Arthur Goddard, ed., Harry Elmer Barnes, Learned Crusader (Colorado: Ralph Myles, 1968),
241.28. Harry Elmer Barnes, A History of Historical Writing (New York: Dover, 1962), 290, 397.29. Carl L. Becker, ‘‘Everyman His Own Historian,’’ American Historical Review 37 (1932): 221–
36; Charles A. Beard, ‘‘Written History as an Act of Faith,’’ American Historical Review 39(1934): 219–31.
30. Clyde W. Barrow, More than a Historian: The Political and Economic Thought of Charles A. Beard(New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2000), 57.
31. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 158.
32. Conor Cruise O’Brien, Writers and Politics (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965), xx–xxii.33. Furet, Penser la Revolution francaise, 91.34. Allan Megill, ‘‘Jorn Rusen’s Theory of Historiography between Modernism and Rhetoric of
Enquiry,’’ History and Theory 23.1 (1994): 44.35. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1970).36. Edgar O’Ballance, The Greek Civil War, 1944–1949 (London: Faber, 1966), or George D.
Kousoulas, Revolution and Defeat: The Story of the Greek Communist Party (London: OxfordUniversity Press, 1965).
37. Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: RandomHouse, 1972).
38. Olivier Wieviorka, ‘‘Rediscovering Vichy France: Paxton’s Revision,’’ Talk given at aconference on revisionism on 9–10 November 2006 at the European University Institute,Florence, organized by the author.
39. Max Weber, Le Savant et le Politique (Paris: la Decouverte, 2003), 188–93.40. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 117–18.41. Gar Alperovitz, ‘‘Hiroshima after 60 Years: The Debate Continues,’’ Common Dreams
(3 August 2005).42. Athanassios Alexiou, ‘‘Opposition to Revisionism,’’ Ta Nea (31 July–1 August 2004).43. Daltun O Ceallaigh, Reconsiderations of Irish History and Culture (Dublin: Leirmheas, 1994), 15.44. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1999), 271.45. Jurgen Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate
(Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1989).46. Evi Gkotzaridis, Trials of Irish History: Genesis and Evolution of a Reappraisal (London:
Routledge, 2006).47. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989); Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).
48. Frank Rudolf Ankersmit, The Reality Effect in the Writing of History: The Dynamics ofHistoriographical Topology (Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche, 1989); Keith Jenkins, WhyHistory? Ethics and Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1999).
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