part vii • legal history and legal science 346 vernment would slash the funding of sociology and philosophy.1 The universities, said Weintraub, instead of doing what they should, were just ‘creating chaos’. Instead, the money would now go to branches of scholarship that ‘directly benefit the taxpayers’. Surely, Bolsonaro’s Brazil is an easy example; however, what Bolsonaro’s administration thinks is not worlds away from the way many politicians and funding agencies think about science funding in the liberal West: human and social sciences are, for some, not useful at all, or at most they should be some kind of protected species. History is part of ‘culture’ and therefore worth preserving. Few will admit this, of course, but when looking at how research money is spent and new professorial chairs accorded, it quickly becomes clear. However, my claim here is that the human and social sciences are not only harmless or necessary for the preservation of (national) cultures, but that they are needed for the preservation of liberal democracies. In fact, to paraphrase the German legal historian Hermann Nehlsen, social and human sciences are as important as cancer research. I will concentrate here on examples from my own field, legal history. The discipline of legal history is by no means exceptional. Much the same n may2019, Abraham Weintraub, Brazil’s new Minister of Education under President Jair Bolsonaro, announced that the Brazilian go- I 1 This essay is an extended version of a lecture held at the Faculty of Law at the University of Lund on the occasion of the award of an honorary doctorate in May 2019. Why legal history matters: Dangerous social sciences and the authoritarian state 21. Heikki Pihlajamäki
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