Legal history and intellectual history 61 American intellectuals in many fields who had been influenced by modernism were confronted with essentially the same accusation — that they were opening the way to Hitler. But (with a sizable dose of hindsight and deliberate anachronism), Peller is able to identify, not just one, but three effective possible respouses to that accusation: One route would have been to continue carrying out the most radical impllcations of the modernist attack on the legitimacy of the old order by reflexively extending the premises of the social sciences, say of sociology or anthropology, to the social sciences themselves ... Asecond possible response to the charge of moral relativismwould have been to take the modernist positions as representing a new, objective vision of truth and society, an actual correction of the “mistakes” of the traditionalists ... The third alternative, the one chosen by the American intellectual mainstream, rejected both of these options. Instead of either continuing to contextualize claims of knowledge to social ideology, or offering the process of contextualization itself as the foundation for a substantive social theory based on the group and the social structure rather than the individual, the mainstreamfifties thinkers answ'ered the criticismof relativism by making the fact/value distinction a foundational organizing principle for post-War intellectual discourse.'--^ Pcller goes on to contend that Dewey’s recognition and pursuit of the third of these routes in the field of philosophy not only blunted the attacks of his critics, but after the war provided “the cultural framework that defined for mainstream American intellectuals their roles as intellectuals and, more generally, their conception of the difference between freedom and domination. Whatever one thinks of the accuracy of Peller’s account, it plainly depicts its protagonists as far less the prisoners of their discourse than does Purcell’s. (^) Expose injustice andinspire indignation andcommitment. The purpose cif history, on this view, is to inspire contemporary readers to act to change their world, rather than to identify the strategies they should pursue. For legal historians, this objective entails demonstrating how law in the past has contributed to oppression, in the hopes of thereby cultivating in readers an attitudeof: “Never again.” None of the four variants of intellectual/legal history is especially well suited to the pursuit of this goal. The aloof, diagnostic stance of both Structuralism and Textualism(as well as their off-putting technical vocabulary) hampers their ability to stimulate indignation, while the exculpatory, determinist tilt of Contextualism (explored in the preceding section) also inhibits anger. The New Historicists’ empathetic explorations of “historemes” and the careers of individual people creates more opportunities to inspire fury in likeminded readers, but the involuted, polyphonic character of their arguments prevents themfromcapitalizing on many of those opportunities. So, for examPdlcr, supra n. 72, 581-83. Ibid., 585.
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