"Scott is concerned with how the act of representing the past advances the cause of justice. The opening claim of In the Name of History is that the historian, by engaging in this particular 'operation,' is always also defining the relationship between what is no longer and what lies ahead. The history we produce may reveal our consistent fallibilities as humans but, even more, it establishes as past what we want to leave behind, premised on the assumption that we can do better and will. That is particularly so in the case of historically focused tribunals, the subject of two of Scott’s three major examples in this short but intense book."
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