The Future of History

Of the 36 books Lukacs (The Legacy of the Second World War) has written, this is his sixth on the conduct of his chosen profession. In his late eighties, he is not sanguine about current trends. He opposes current faculty hiring practices (the "perpetuation of mediocrity"); is skeptical of fads like psychohistory and "quanto-history"; multiculturalism, though worthy in the abstract, can lead "not to a deepening but a shallowing of [the historian's] craft." What, he asks, is the future of research with computers? Will young people continue to read, much less read critically? What is the longtime effect of diluting the teaching of high school history? Lukacs has long been a self-proclaimed "reactionary" in a field increasingly driven, in his view, by methodological fads and liberalism. Resolutely old-fashioned, he views history as art, not science, and champions the consideration of ideas over strictly material causes. Some of his fears are real, some seem less so, but Lukacs's views deserve hearing as the reflections of a lifelong professional in the elusive discipline of history.