The Ethics of History

Leading thinkers from philosophy and intellectual history explore the moral dimension of the work of historians and the enterprise of history; What is implied by ""The Ethics of History""? The authors of this volume, internationally renowned philosophers and intellectual historians, come together to address this question, in all its novelty and ambiguity, and to develop multiple and varied perspectives on the place and nature of ethics in the philosophy, enterprise, and practice of history. Is the whole historical process - largely consisting as it does of the actions and suffering of persons and groups - subject to ethical constraint? And what of the ways in which historians present their subject matter? the contributors ask. Are these methods subject to moral scrutiny? Should - or do - historians bring moral judgment to bear on the past actions they study and report? Although they approach these issues from different directions, and in distinctive ways, the contributors agree in their critique of the correspondence theory of history; in their acceptance of an unbridgeable gap between the past and the historian's present account.