historians

Another line from Levi’s post on his most important books of 2009:

“Let Harman have his Gibbon, I’ll take my Braudel.”

I’ll keep my Gibbon, but I’m not letting Levi have Braudel all to himself. Braudel is fantastic. He’s a shot in the arm every time you read him.

A large number of my favorite authors are historians rather than philosophers, and that must mean something. Part of what it means is that I like people who know how to tell a story. To do so, you need to be attentive to the ambiguities in the object under discussion, knowing how to present it in its times of both light and shadow. To be a good historical writer you can’t jerk around with self-reflexive puns, and neither can you pound the table dogmatically and aggressively (that’s called “propaganda” in historical circles), whereas in our field it’s painfully easy to pose as a philosopher while doing those very things.