What Makes a Good Historian?

Abstract

Abstract Basing his analysis on the insights of Sir Keith Hancock, Wight discusses three ways in which historical works can have “more durable merits than that of being up to date.” These merits are “attachment, justice, and span.” Attachment, “the opposite of detachment,” does not call for “impartiality or objectivity” but for “getting close to people, getting inside situations.” By understanding in depth the viewpoint of each principal party, the historian may achieve “the virtue of justice or fairness, to redress the balance between different attachments” and avoid “partisanship.” The virtue of span provides “an awareness of background” with “proper perspective” for related objects of study. Hancock’s principles complement Wight’s proposed concepts of historical imagination, architecture, and reflection. By imagination he means “to enter the past, to understand it, to re-enact it,” regarding what people thought as well as concrete physical details. By architecture he refers to discovering and communicating an intelligible pattern in events. By reflection he has in mind “the historian’s function as interpreter,” whether the “fundamental beliefs” about theory and philosophy are explicit or implicit and thus “concealed.” Wight concluded that “the greatest history ever written,” the account of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, “whether designedly or not, is a concealed tragic drama.”

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