Abstract
In this paper, I attempt to offer some new insights into an age-old question: what is the public usefulness of history and historians? More specifically, I discuss the role of the ideal of the disinterested and objective historian in two different and very important public historical debates: the German Historikerstreit and the Australian History Wars. My analysis is not so much aimed at analysing the outcome of these debates, but rather at the way these debates were held, and the specific ways in which the participants argued with each other. I combine a rhetorical analysis of these debates with a method from analytic philosophy of science to arrive at the following conclusion: both the Historikerstreit and the History Wars were haunted by a misguided ideal of historical objectivity that in the end had a negative influence on the quality of these debates. Finally, I also suggest an alternative view on the public role of the historian, which is based on Chantal Mouffe’s distinction between agonistic and antagonistic pluralism.