Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

Truth and freedom
This imposition from above can only be challenged by the reaffirmation,
individual and collective, of Solzhenitsyn’s and Havel’s commitment
to live in truth, and the theoretical and practical impossibility
to separate truth, freedom and pluralism. This can and should happen
at the three levels of historical research, of individual and
collective memory, and of political and ideological self-reflection
and debate.
At each of these levels, there are of course specific limitations.
The critical philosophy of history, or the critique of historical reason
illustrated in particular by Max Weber in Germany and Raymond
Aron in France, has demonstrated the limits of historical objectivity.
The questions the historian asks and the materials he selects are
inevitably influenced by personal values and by the concerns,
priorities and projects of society at the time. But the same critics
have shown that this does not invalidate the rules of scholarly research,
both in terms of intellectual coherence and of scrupulous attention
to evidence. A constant effort to try to put oneself in the
place of the distant actor one studies by reconstructing his view of
himself and of the world, or to practice hypothetical or virtual history
by asking what would have happened without the role of a
given leader or the impact of a given event, can limit the inevitable
subjective residue.
At the level of memory, the basic precondition is awareness that
the testimony of witnesses and the work of the historian are not the
same but must necessarily complement each other. Neither the
personal experience of the actor or of the victim, nor the judgment
of an abstract entity called history or of future historians can be entrusted
with the last word. Here the essential guide is the multiplicity
of equally genuine but deeply contrasting memories that must
be confronted and put in perspective without ever coinciding fully.
The traditional temptation to write history from the point of view of
the victors and the current contrary pressures to write it from the
point of view of the victims must be heard and taken into consideration,
but their respective claims to a monopoly of truth cannot be
accepted.
77 Pierre Hassner