“A fool for peace”

Abstract

Historians have been harshly—and often rightly—accused by their critics for their reluctance, perhaps their disciplinary incapacity, to break free of their forebears’ commitment to mapping a straight road from past to present by excluding those paths not taken; to following in the grand tradition of Hegel and Ranke and writing a history which, often unintentionally, provides an apologia for what is by arguing that it had to be; to marginalizing the unfulfilled but imagined visions of the dreamers, the utopians, the cranks, the holy fools.