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actually be made. Although this argument has never seemed to me to
be valid against the most sophisticated statements of relativism, it may
be .in fact valid against some of the versions which can be found in
Beard and Becker.
A substantial portion of this book is also given over to an account
of the careers of Beard and Becker as publicists, liberal idealists, and re–
formers, to their hopes and disillusionments in the era of two world
wars, and to Beard's isolationism. While Mr. Strout makes it clear that
he considers some of the positions taken by the two men inconsistent
with their relativist views, he is on the whole rather vague about the
precise relationship between his main concerns. It is clear that Beard
and Becker became interested in historical theory partly because of
their urgent concern with public issues. But it is not clear that they
might not have had exactly the same public views, had they espoused
objective history instead of relativism. Mr. Strout's book falls uncom–
fortably between its two main problems: it is neither a thorough dis–
cussion of the problem of historical knowledge nor a full account of his
subjects as public men (though it sheds some new light on the latter,
especially in interesting quotations from unpublished correspondence).
There is probably a moral to be derived from all this, though I
am loathe to draw it at the expense of Mr. Strout, whose work shows
him
to be a historian of more than ordinary gifts. It would be good
if every historian gave some thought to the fundamental problems of
historical knowledge, but it is not by the same token good that many
should feel impelled to write about History instead of writing histories.
I would urge upon my fellow historians at least a brief moratorium
on abstract speculation in this field, which may well be left to those
philosophers who are most concerned with it. The problem of historical
knowledge is neither unimportant nor uninteresting, but dealing with it
effectively does require some special philosophic gifts. Mr. Strout quite
rightly remarks that "the historian's ideas at the practical level of re–
search and writing are of a different order from, and may even be
better than, his ideas at the theoretical level of reflection." Beard's
books of substantive history, even when the current deflation of them
has run its course, will still have more enduring value and interest
than his once useful but often inept efforts to popularize Croce, Mann–
heim, and Riezler. Becker's contribution to quickening the sense of wit
and style among historians will be more valuable than his historical
speculations. The same is true of the historians of the earlier era, who
played with theories of "scientific history." I would rather have written
anyone of the nine volumes of Henry Adams's great history than all
