Writing the Practices

TL;DR: On the edge of the cliff as discussed by the authors is a book about the history of professional historians that has attracted much attention from the media and the general public, including from the authors of this book.

Abstract: First of all, I would like to thank very warmly Bonnie G. Smith,Jonathan Dewald, and William H. Sewell Jr. for the attention they paid to my book On the Edge of the Cliff and for their astute comments and criticisms, which oblige me to clarify some of my historiographical positions or propositions. 1. I agree with Smith's ironic and critical comment about the contradiction between the claim for a universal knowledge made by historians and the specificity and particularity of each practitioner's own social place or professional locus. I do not think that historians can avoid the risk of mythical reconstructions of the past. "Identitarian" mythological and fanciful histories are not linked with specific (and often dominated) identities. Like others, professional historians are capable of projecting the desires and needs of the present onto the past, possibly writing a history of their discipline according to a heroic and idealistic narrative that ignores the exclusions that have sustained the process of professionalization itself. It seems to me, nonetheless, that we have to distinguish firmly between the social description of the inequalities that have inhabited and still inhabit the historical discipline and the epistemological characterization of the operations and controls that govern the production of a "scientific" discourse -especially if the term "scientific" is understood, following Michel de Certeau, as "the possibility of conceiving an ensemble of rules allowing control of operations adapted to the pro-