Nietzsche has never enjoyed the influence in Britain that he still has in America and on the Continent (cf American Nietzsche by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen). But this root and branch critique of history led to the "revaluation of all values", the idea that individuals can and must create their own morality. His subversion of history as inimical to "life" anticipated the anti-historical reaction of modernism, which by the late 20th century had morphed into a "post-modernism" which was radically relativistic and hence even more hostile to the fixed points of history and the canonical works of high culture that went with it. Not only were certain kinds of history discredited — for example, what Herbert Butterfield called the Whig interpretation of history, the idea of history as progress — but history itself was marginalised, in favour of less rigorous disciplines.

Going up to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1975, I was fortunate enough to read history at a time when the subject had not yet been hollowed out by the elimination of facts and dates, when a grasp of the broad sweep of British and European history was taken for granted among the educated, and certainly among those who aspired to lead the country. I belonged to the last generation before the abolition of grammar schools, which still placed a premium on wide reading and the acquisition of historical knowledge for its own sake. Within a decade, that kind of education had come to be seen as a privilege of the well-to-do. David Cameron would still have enjoyed such an education at Eton; yet as prime minister he was stumped by a question about what "Magna Carta" might mean. Today, I wonder how much history even those with degrees in the subject are actually expected to have read. The reaction to Michael Gove's new history curriculum suggests that many teachers don't relish the thought of inculcating knowledge rather than "skills".

Undergraduates who went up to Oxford to read modern history in the mid-1970s found themselves examined in their first term on four historical classics: Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Macaulay's History of England, Alexis de Tocqueville's L'Ancien Régime et la Revolution and the Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen ("Reflections on World History") by Nietzsche's Swiss friend and mentor, Jacob Burckhardt. These texts suited the taste of the Regius Professor, Hugh Trevor-Roper, himself a great historian both of the 17th and 20th centuries whose works had literary as well as academic merit. He was married to the Edwardian daughter of Earl Haig, and himself enough of a Victorian to insist on academic gowns at his lectures. His chosen historians were not such sticklers for academic proprieties. Only one (Burckhardt) ever taught at a university, though he spent most of his time on tour as a connoisseur of Italian art; the only one who had been to Oxford (Gibbon) was removed from Magdalen College by his father in disgrace, having been converted to Catholicism, and sent to Lausanne for religious detox by Swiss Calvinists at the tender age of 16. As a man of letters with a large private income, Gibbon belonged to the world of private scholarship and was scathing about Oxford in his autobiography. Jeremy Jennings writes about Tocqueville elsewhere in this issue of Standpoint (page 61), but he too was a traveller, an aristocrat and a minister rather than a professor. Macaulay, by contrast, Trevor-Roper could not include among his "immortals": he mocked "that infallible, that vulgar egotism", not to mention the Victorian prudishness. "No, he won't do." In his Wartime Journals he quotes Macaulay on William III and Frederick the Great, accused of "abominations as foul as those which are buried under the waters of the Dead Sea" (i.e. homosexuality). "Had Macaulay read the classics in vain," Trevor-Roper told his friends, "that he reacts to an interesting psychological phenomenon as if he were a provincial nonconformist grocer?" 

Looking back, I see Trevor-Roper as one of the last historians in the grand tradition of Gibbon and Macaulay, but perhaps also one of its gravediggers. Today his chair, Froude's chair, is occupied by Lyndal Roper, an Australian specialist on witchcraft in early modern Germany. I intend no disrespect to Professor Roper when I say that she is not exactly a household name. Not only has the Oxford school of history squandered its pre-eminence: history in general has retreated into the ivory tower, or lies rolling in the gutter.