History and its Ills

I was cleaning out old files in WordPerfect and came across this one. It had struck me as worthwhile a few years ago so I will simply copy it here. Elton was one of the great historians of the 20th Century. It reflects what I believe about the honest practice of history as a scholarly craft.

In a review by Blair Worden of Sir Geoffrey Elton's Return to Essentials in The New York Review of Books:

Yet beneath the imprudent surface of Elton's book there lives a conviction of fundamental importance. There also lies an anger....No one is better equipped than he to perceives the threat to reason, and to the essential purposes of a university, from those who tell themselves that the past is of our own making and that we are therefore free to make it up as we like, or at least to colonize if for present-day ideological purposes.

Without scholarship there is no history, merely fashion. A quarter of a century ago Elton questioned how long universities would continue to exist as places where fundamental rules of evidence and argument were respected.