History, Lying, and Moral Responsibility

Scholars' moral responsibility for truth, for the objective content of the results of their investigations, is somewhat neglected problem in Western Englishspeaking critical philosophy of history. Nor has this problem found much theoretical attention in Soviet philosophy of history. At the same time the process of reassessing and rewriting Soviet in the light of glasnost has helped to reveal the magnitude of distortions, lies, and half-truths in Soviet historiography over number of years. The process of rediscovering what actually happened in the past has made (at least for the time being) very fashionable subject in Soviet intellectual life, and has also raised painful moral questions for many older historians who now face tough moral accusations by their colleagues, the general public, and perhaps by their own conscience. An analysis of the moral problems of Soviet historiography also has theoretical value in the Western intellectual context. Stalinist and post-Stalinist historiography represents good extreme model for understanding many ethical choices that appear also in modified and milder form for historians, political scientists, and journalists who work in democratic societies. Stalin's instruction for historians to identify a revolution of slaves as cause of the fall of slave-owning society1 is, of course, in its nature quite different from the American Justice Department's attempts to stop the publishing of The Pentagon Papers,2 but they can both serve as concrete cases for developing general analysis of moral problems that may face students of history. Generally speaking, there are official or unofficial restrictions on the writing of in every society. No society has been entirely successful in implementing the ideas of freedom of expression and objectivity in the of history. So the question is usually one of degree, and in this respect, of course, Western democratic societies (in spite of all their shortcomings) have created better conditions for freedom of expression than have the socialist societies in Eastern Europe. The notion study of history means here not only studies of carried out by traditional historians but also studies of current carried out by political scientists, political journalists, and politicians themselves. In other words

Conscience · Context (archaeology) · Democracy · Economic Justice · Epistemology · Face (sociological concept) · Historiography · Lying · Philosophy of history · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Value (mathematics) · History · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Philosophy · Philosophy, History, and Historiography · War, Ethics, and Justification

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  Open Access•James Oldham•Law and History Review•1994

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