The Historians' Dilemma

Against a backdrop of routine dishonesty from America's leaders, it seems like academic navel gazing to discuss “the ethical crisis in history.” Recent corporate corruption —Enron and the rest—certainly dwarfs our poor power to add or detract. Indeed, the scandals in the Catholic Church over sexually abusive priests make us seem by comparison like, well, choirboys and -girls. Then there was the last presidential election, an ethical breakdown that would have made Richard Daley (the elder) blush. And of course since the election we have been subjected not just to lies—the phantom weapons of mass destruction, the absurd linking of Saddam Hussein with Al-Qaeda—but to an ongoing degradation of democratic political discourse. And these are the easy ones. We have not gotten to the ethics of corporate executives' salaries, new tax laws that will surely bankrupt the nation, money-soaked elections that drown democracy, a prison system that makes China look like the human rights poster child, a so-called Patriot Act that shreds our Bill of Rights, etc., etc., etc. Historians' ethical dilemmas are small by comparison. But they are not unrelated to these larger crises

Absurdism · Democracy · Dilemma · Language change · Literature · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Prison · Sociology · Universal suffrage · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law

• Who speaks for history

  Patrick Finney•Rethinking History•2005

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