RICHARD SCHLATTER
613
remains in touch with the great moral issues of the outside world. For a
little time in the thirties American universities were in touch, and they
were transformed as institutions. The Harvard to which I returned
from Oxford in 1937 was a very different and much more vital place
than the Harvard which I had left in 1934. Scholarship and teaching
had a new significance and the acquisition of knowledge was infused
with meaning and purpose. This combining of thinking and acting
did not affect all individuals equally-Perry Miller was never much of
an activist-but it affected the whole institution and thus, indirectly,
all its members. Everyone was aware of the question, "knowledge for
what?"
We read Marx and Mannheim and other German sociologists and
learned something about the sociology of knowledge. The historian's
work rests on assumptions which are related, as radical or conservative,
to his own age. The good scholar tries hard to uncover his own
assumptions, to look at them critically. He does this by listening
imaginatively and sympathetically
to
the voices of the past and by
listening attentively to the voices of his colleagues who start with
different assumptions. And in so doing he may, perhaps, be able to rise
a little way above the limitations of his own age and society. We were
doing that at Oxford and Harvard in the thirties, and we came close, I
think, to establishing a proper relationship between scholarship and
action, to creating an academic conscience. Two books, among many
others, which came from Harvard in the thirties and forties are
evidence of what was happening then: Matthiessen's
American Renais–
sance
and Schlesinger's
Age of Jackson
are both professional works of
scholarship whose special interest is that they are committed to views
of what American society should be and might become. The decline of
political commitment in the forties and fifties led to the pedantry of
"the end of ideology." Leo Marx and Carl Schorske have written
eloquently on this decline, and I agree with them.
The question of the relation between teaching and political action
was widely debated at Harvard in the thirties. In my own case, I think
nothing has changed. I was taught at Harvard and Oxford that an
historian's assumptions shape his views of the past. My own teaching
and scholarship have been shaped by my assumptions about justice,
equality, the nature of man and of society, and the causes of historical
change. In teaching, I try to reveal these assumptions and to make clear
that without the framework and the motivation which they provide I
would see no point in studying history at all. This is not to propagan–
dize and is not inconsistent with impartiality if it is combined with
