Historians nowadays are typically a timid lot, shrinking the grand story of human action to an anxious little academic discipline in which tenure is purchased with endless volumes calculating such minutiae as the quantity of grain consumed by fifteenth-century Guatemalans.
It seems unnecessary to observe that it wasn’t always this way. In fact, even within living memory, it wasn’t this way. The English publication of The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century reminds us that it was only two years ago that Francois Furet, the leading historian of the French Revolution, died in France at age seventy. And Furet, like his intellectual precursor Alexis de Tocqueville, was someone who took history seriously — using a frank and impartial appraisal of the past to guide how we should live now.
