The son of a Congregational minister and mother with considerable sympathy for the underdog, the boundaries of Macintyre's thinking were further expanded by an inspirational history teacher at school, a former Uniting Church minister with similar views to his parents. 'The historian is now inside the history,' he writes, 'inextricably caught up in a continuous making and remaking of the past.' The ethical demands and complexities of this approach are explored in The Historian's Conscience, a new book published this month in which Macintyre and 13 other historians put history and their profession under the microscope. Historians, he writes, no longer approach their subject as detached observers, unfolding and interpreting forces that shaped societies, providing contemporaries with the capacity and confidence to make sense of the present. Macintyre argues that the traditional approach to writing history exemplified by the great 19th-century literary historians has fallen into disrepute.

This chapter, What Next?, begins with a brief but fascinating discussion on the role of the historian.

He acknowledges that he misjudged the change of mood, but as he points out in the new last chapter of his recently reissued A Concise History of Australia, historians are not futurologists. Historian Stuart Macintyre thought the Howard Government a temporary aberration when it won the election in 1996. Mary Ryllis Clark, in the Australian Age (Oct.

The history wars stuart macintyre