(Extract from) Asking the big why questions: History: a new age of reason By Eric Hobsbawm, Le Monde diplomatique,

December 2004 The major immediate political danger to historiography today is "antiuniversalism" or "my truth is as valid as yours, whatever the evidence". This appeals to various forms of identity group history, for which the central issue of history is not what happened, but how it concerns the members of a particular group. What is important to this kind of history is not rational explanation but "meaning", not what happened but what members of a collective group defining itself against outsiders - religious, ethnic, national, by gender, or lifestyle - feel about it. That is the appeal of relativism to identity-group history. For various reasons the past 30 years have been a golden age for the mass invention of emotionally skewed historical untruths and myths. Some of them are a public danger: I am thinking of countries like India in the days of the BJP (8), the US, Sylvio Berlusconi's Italy, not to mention many of the new nationalisms, with or without fundamentalist religious reinforcement. This produces endless claptrap and trivia on the further fringes of nationalist, feminist, gay, black and other in-group histories, but it has also stimulated some extremely interesting new historical developments in cultural studies, such as the new memory boom in contemporary historical studies as Jay Winter (9) calls it, of which Les Lieux de Mmoire (Places of memory) (10) is a good example. It is time to re-establish the coalition of those who want to believe in history as a rational enquiry into the course of human transformations against those who systematically distort history for political purposesand also, more generally, against relativists and postmodernists who deny this possibility. Since some of these relativists and postmodernists consider themselves on the left, this may split historians in politically unexpected ways. I think the Marxist approach is a necessary component of this reconstruction of the front of reason, as it was in the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed the Marxist contribution is probably more relevant today since the other components of the coalition, for instance the post-Braudelian Annales and those inspired by structuralfunctional social anthropology have rather abdicated. Social anthropology as a discipline has been particularly affected by the stampede towards postmodern subjectivity.