History

 

'Historical understanding is always situated and necessarily coloured by our present values and interests. Historical accounts are stories we tell to provide a coherent narrative about who we are and how, through interacting with each other and the world, we got here. Such stories are inherently retrospective - each community in each age will tell the story differently - and they are constructed. The only sense in which a historical narrative can “gets things right” is by telling a story which proves to be both acceptable and enabling to the members of a community; and the only sense in which one such narrative can be “better” than another is not by offering a more faithful description of the objective sequence of events, but rather by redescribing the events in a novel and helpful way.’  

James Conant. ‘Freedom, Cruelty and Truth: Rorty versus Orwell’. 

In Rorty and His Critics, edited by Robert B. Brandon. 

Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, 276.

Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus