History and Morality

Reviews / Votes

Bloxham's book is a call for nuance and self-awareness, arguing that moral judgement is not only important, but is actually inescapable. What matters is how we deploy it - and that we are conscious of doing so. * Jonathan Waterlow, H/Sz/Kult * It is all too rare that a scholarly book - the product of decades of research and careful thought - emerges at precisely the moment when it is most needed ... Masterfully spanning multiple academic disciplines, Bloxham takes us back to the very foundations of Western thinking, charting the development of our conceptions of core values like 'truth', 'justice', 'responsibility', and 'guilt' ... History and Morality will be immensely useful not only for a generation of historians wary of making value judgements about the past, but also for a new generation who, in their drive to bring morality back into the picture, are sometimes too hasty to appreciate the importance of context and the pitfalls of anachronism. * Jonathan Waterlow, H-Soz-Kult * The historian's narratives, both as empirical work and as the work of dreamers and poets, contribute in special and very consequential ways to the constitution of societies and of the human family, as well as to self-constitution in the ordinary ways that are common to all persons... Historiography - Bloxham's "History" - is thus useful, a force in the world, but founded on the intellectual exploration of our situation with others and ourselves that we call morality. * Bennett Gilbert, Portland State University * Not since the days of Cambridge don Herbert Butterfield has an Anglophone historian so interestingly taken up the history of his own discipline and the problem of historical judgment the way that Donald Bloxham does in these twin volumes ... Bloxham should be praised * Samuel Moyn, Intellectual History Review * These works of outstanding scholarship are of value to anyone curious to consider the uses and pitfalls of history in a present forever parasitic on the past. * Alexandre Leskanich, TLS * Bloxham['s] digressions and byways are often as rich as the main thread of the argument...History and Morality ought to achieve wide readership. * Professor Daniel Woolf, Queen's University, Reviews in History *