To the Editors:
Professor Norman Cantor’s second attack on Lawrence Stone—in the Letters section of the December issue—is mephitic. Cantor manages to commit in a short space many of the worst sins that a historian can, including that of pride. He brags that the sect of historians to which he claims to belong (“liberal humanist” or “liberal conservative”—there’s nothing like precision) is free from ideological bias in a way that its opponents are not. He lumps together as adherents of a single ideology (“a . . . subtle and poisonous Marxism”—whatever that is) historians of very different, even opposed views and methods. He misrepresents the views of his chief target, Stone, by selective quotation, inaccurate summary, and suppression of inconvenient facts. And he makes fantastic allegations about the conduct of the entire Princeton history department without producing a speck of evidence to support them.

If Professor Cantor showed any sign of open-mindedness or curiosity, we could debate these matters profitably—or at least refer the good professor to the works of the greatest living student of historiography, Arnaldo Momigliano, which would teach him that no historian past or present has ever gone to work without an ideology that determines his choice of questions and methods. Instead, we will urge anyone genuinely interested in our department to attend some of our many public lectures and seminars, to read some of our varied publications, or to examine the volumes produced by the Shelby Cullom Davis Center before taking Cantor’s account as credible.