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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2016
Prophecy is inescapably controversial; tension is always in the air. Prophetic utterance, no doubt properly, is apt to make many historians irritable and uncomfortable. Preoccupied with the past, the last thing they want to be saddled with is any responsibility for discerning the future or even seeking to make sense of the present. When Hugh Trevor-Roper, as he then was, attacked the writings of Arnold Toynbee in a savage article in Encounter in 1957, the gravamen of his charge was that Toynbee was not a historian at all, but a prophet, and, for good measure, a false one at that. Decent historians should not bother with the ten volumes of A Study of History because they were not history. The charges, in detail, may well have been justified, but the asperity went deeper. The caste of mind of historians, if they were truly professional, should make ‘prophetic history’ an impossibility. Prophets were indifferent to ‘facts’, or cavalier in their treatment of them, in pursuit of a grand vision. Historians, on the other hand, were obsessively fussy about details and were relatively unconcerned about grand theory. Indeed, historiography had ‘come of age’ precisely to the extent that it emancipated itself from prophecy.
I am grateful to Dr R. P. Carroll, Mr G. B. A. M. Finlayson, and Professor G. Newlands for their advice and comments on an earlier draft.
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