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search, deflected from
his
original quest by the pull of orthodox
his–
torical problems (who did what first, and when? and what did they say
in doing it?) which have just enough remote connection with the orig–
inal issue to maintain the fiction that he is still pursuing it. Finally,
after all the research, he turns abruptly to some of the crucial questions
which originally bothered him. The fervor of his original concern, the
overwhelming data piled up in his historical research, the importance
of his final speculations - all hide the lack of connection among his
three operations.
At the very end, the questions Williams asks have nothing to do
with his research, which has not suggested those questions, nor answered
them in any way. They just represent his abrupt return to the suf–
fering world after his long professional digression. He asks radicals: is
"doing one's thing" comparably dangerous to Adam Smith's market–
place freedom? is doing
our
own thing a step toward imposing our
values on others? should we not therefore think about decentralized
forms of society which avoid uniformity? do we really "win" when we
adopt the immoral tactics of the other side? These are good questions,
but they are more logically the beginning of some other book
than
the
end of this one.
The historian is not two persons: historian and citizen. The schizo–
phrenia that Williams wants us to "cultivate" is not healthy. The his–
torian is one person, a citizen granted extra time to read and write,
whose recovery of pieces of the past should not get in the way of his
remembering that his chief concern is the present and future.
