I am grateful to Dirk Moses for taking the time to study my work so assiduously and to comment on it so perspicuously. His essay is eminently well-informed and even-handed, and I have little to add to or correct of his characterization of my many, long on-going, and admittedly flawed attempts to deconstruct modern historical discourse. He understands me well enough and I think that I understand his objections to my position. We do not disagree on matters of fact, I (...) think, but we have different notions about the nature of historical discourse and the uses to which historical knowledge can properly be put. (shrink)

Historical method rests on the common-denominator values that characterize modernity. Postmodernity challenges those values across the range of practice and with them the very foundations of historical explanation. Responding to this challenge is central to the ethics of history at the present time. An adequate response requires at least three things summarized here: a clear understanding of the cultural function of history as one of the representational methods characterizing modernity; a definition of postmodernity and its challenges that is less trivial (...) than those currently prevailing in North America; and even some experimental effort to explore some of the positive possibilities of the postmodern challenge, including alternative uses for “the past.”. (shrink)