For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire.
—George Orwell, 1940
It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way.
—Karl Marx, in a letter to Engels, 1857
I shall doubtless look back on the second half of 1996 as my period Down Under. Last summer, rummaging through a pile of books destined for the used bookstore, I chanced upon The Killing of History by the Australian historian Keith Windschuttle.1 This devastating anatomy of what has gone wrong in the teaching and writing of history is a masterpiece of scholarly polemic. Moving relentlessly through the sundry intellectual and political corruptions that have disfigured contemporary academic historiography, Mr. Windschuttle makes good on the promise of his dramatic subtitle and explains, in riveting detail, “How a Discipline Is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists.” One of my chief debts
