Using Self, Using History . . .

John Demos

The intersection of "self?" and "subject": what a dangerously self-absorbing theme! To be right up-front, I can imagine no way of proceeding with it apart from my own self and my own subjects. Hence the paragraphs to follow will trace a zigzag course of projects undertaken, books written, experiences processed, certainties questioned, doubts denied, intuitions reconsidered, and (I hope) an eventual, if relative, measure of comfort—all framed in highly personal terms. Looking back across forty years of scholarly effort, I see nothing else that looms as large as that framework—or seems more important. But this is one historian's journey only, and a reader's indulgence is needed.	1
It began for me in the 1950s when, as a college undergraduate, I was treated to a variety of classes and seminars on the "philosophy of history." (Why do we hear that term much less nowadays?) Those encounters featured one pair of ideas above all others: the surpassing virtue of "objectivity" and (conversely) the dreaded contamination of "personal bias." The model scholar, I learned over and over again, is one who keeps vigilant guard against every whiff of bias, as and when it may well up inside him. His own self, his individual concerns—indeed, his entire life—must be held apart from his work, since his overriding goal is to reconstruct other people's lives from centuries ago.	2
Well, if that was the lesson of my early years, I think that in all the time since I have been gradually and fitfully (if not always consciously) unlearning it. Actually, I think that at some level I never fully accepted it and even wanted to unlearn it—though I would not, till quite recently, have admitted as much. There is, after all, a certain grandeur in the scholar's traditional pose of self-abnegation. Almost reflexively we salute "that noble dream" (in Peter Novick's phrase): truth outside the self, truth above the self, truth for its own sake irrespective of the self.1 On the other hand—as a little voice began increasingly to whisper to me and in me—one might question the wisdom of investing a whole career in an activity that must be so carefully walled off from one's immediate and ongoing experience.	3
But the actual process of unlearning the old work-apart-from-life lesson was long and tortuous. The 1960s, which included the years of my graduate training, would reset some of its terms and give it a more distinctly political coloration. "Relevance" became, for a time, a contentious buzz word—the question being, should history be made relevant to present-day social and political concerns? A small but vociferous cadre of New Left scholars answered yes and produced a not insignificant body of work to support their case.2 (Studies of working-class history, for example, were often quite openly designed to be relevant.) However, the chorus from the more tradition-minded was loud and authoritative; relevance, they declared, was just bias by another name. And the glory of history would always be its fundamental irrelevance (to every aspect of the current environment).	4
My own connection to this particular ferment was ambivalent. I considered myself to be generally New Left in my opinions and was active that way in campus politics. But I doubted, or flatly rejected, any notion of linkage to my academic work. I could be an activist; I could be a scholar: different modes, maybe even different selves. And never the twain need meet.	. . .