Abstract

This paper calls for an ethical turn in historiographical theorizing, for reconfiguring history as a discipline of the good as well as the true. It bases this call on the juxtaposition of two recent strands of historiographical discourse hitherto entirely separate: the invocation of the Holocaust, the most morally charged of all past events, as the limit case of historiographical theory in the polemics of Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Richard Evans, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Omer Bartov against post-linguistic-turn historiographical thinking; and the profound unease about the adequacy-indeed the very possibility-of reconstructing Auschwitz accurately in the theoretical reflections to which the practice of Holocaust history has led Raul Hilberg, Saul Friedlander, and Dominick LaCapra. The embrace of right and wrong as the other of history's true and false will both enable a more robust condemnation of the Holocaust negationists and nurture a genre of historical representation that will speak more meaningfully to a manifestly history-hungry public than the historical writing of professional historians has done