Response to Arthur Marwick

Abstract

inaugural lecture, which was originally delivered under the title 'Metahistory is Bunk History is Essential'. I was invited to comment on his lecture at the Open University because, I presume, I had written a book entitled Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, which, apparently, Professor Marwick thought advocated a 'metaphysical' approach to the study of history.1 He seems to have wanted to set up a debate in which he would represent real, genuine, or (what amounts to the same thing in his vocabulary) professional historical research and I would come out as a defender of 'metahistory'. In my commentary on his lecture, I pointed out that the term 'metahistory' could be taken to describe inquiry into the presuppositions necessary for belief in a disciplined mode of historical thinking, including the study of the relations obtaining between the scientific study of history, on the one hand, and the rest of the human and social sciences (such as anthropology, sociology, psychology and yes, even philosophy, literary theory and linguistics) on the other. I do not know whether the discussion which followed his lecture led