Within the margins: the definitions of orthodoxy

Abstract

It is an overstated half-truth that history is always written by the winners. From Thucydides to Clarendon, the great classical histories were as often as not written by losers, by supporters of the losing side concerned to answer the question “What went wrong?” In our own postclassical times, however, losers both conservative and radical have open to them a strategy in which they retreat into the gathering dusk, fit identification tags to the owl of Minerva, and release the bird in the misty air with the self-consoling and often arrogant cry, “History will prove us right!” – a pronouncement which has the advantage that it can never be deprived of its future tense and can never be proved true or false, with the consequence that one can always go on pronouncing it. As students of history – it is safer to speak of that than of literature – we are not concerned to verify predictions, and most of those made in the past will seem to us to have had outcomes that proved them neither true nor false because they were merely different. The heterodox of 1660–1800 would have found our world just as unimaginable as would the orthodox; this is true even of the United States, where the heterodoxies of the English-speaking world between those dates came nearer to being the orthodoxies of a new political culture than they did anywhere else.

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