I arrived in New York a day early (the conference begins tomorrow) in order to spend some hours with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s Papers at the New York Public Library. I came across a letter written to Schlesinger from John Patrick Diggins, dated February 27, 1995, regarding the National History Standards controversy. I will quote at length without commentary:
"The critique of great civilizations and great men is part of a general critique of intellectual history and the history of ideas… And here is one of the great ironies. The [Standards] regard intellectual history as ‘elitist’ and ‘chauvinist’ because by definition it has dealt with rather towering figures. But at least when one does intellectual history one must defer to those thinkers who are our superiors, must get straight what they thought and believed. In the [Standards], however, the historian is almost free to impose his or her thoughts on workers, slaves, and other subalterns of the past who have no voice of their own... ‘Those who cannot represent themselves, must be represented,’ so said Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Ok, fair enough. The historian can claim to speak for workers and others who left no record to articulate their own thoughts. But it turns out that this so-called ‘history from the bottom up’ is really history from the top down in that it is present-day scholars who now claim to speak for the silent dead. This is elitism with arrogance."
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