In the first Hedgehog & Fox podcast of 2019, we grapple with some big questions – does history matter? If so, why? And is it, and other forms of knowledge, facing unprecedented challenges to the very notion of expertise? Fortunately, we have high-powered help in tackling these questions: Lynn Hunt, distinguished research professor in the history faculty of UCLA. She told me:
I think there is a general issue about expertise that is going on in the entire western world – this is a broader question than why history is worth doing – which is: what is it about the democratization of education and politics that has actually, paradoxically, created this distrust of expertise?
Lynn published a short, highly readable book last year called History: Why it Matters (Polity Press, 2018), a spirited defence of the value of history in an age when it is particularly beset with controversy: how to teach it? What to teach? How to commemorate it? How to revise it? Who gets to decide?
Lynn writes, ‘What do we learn from the past. For me, it is above all respect for those who came before us.’ Her book shows that respect is not uncritical, it’s interrogative, as though the past can only speak if we make the effort to tune in to its frequency.
Lynn did her doctorate at Stanford and has spent much of her career at UCLA. She is best known as a historian of the French revolution, but her interests are wide-ranging: from the history of human rights, religion, and pornography to the writing of history itself.
When I spoke to Lynn on the phone from California recently, I began by asking her, when she first encountered history as a child, was it love at first sight?