The Contemporary Era

After its clamorous reception by the media and the praise heaped upon it from many different quarters, the História de Portugal edited by Rui Ramos (and particularly the chapters for which he himself was responsible) met with a chorus of criticisms made by some of his peers in statements that were gathered together and published by a daily newspaper.3 The most negative reactions related, above all, to the author’s approach to the period of the Portuguese Republic and the New State. More than seeing it simply as a revisionist exercise, some historians suggested that what we were witnessing was a kind of whitewashing of the iniquities of Salazar’s dictatorship. It would be hard to think of a more unfortunate way of beginning the debate that this work undeniably merits, and my personal wish in this matter is that initiatives of the sort now being promoted by the e-Journal of Portuguese History will be able to pave the way for a more rational and calmer tone in this debate. Rui Ramos has never enjoyed what might be described as an easy relationship with the tribe of Portuguese historians. In his vast and important oeuvre about contemporary Portugal (most particularly covering the period ranging roughly from the Regeneration to the end of the Republic), very few books have merited the critical review of other colleagues from the same profession. Curiously, it was a Spanish political science journal that was to publish what has so far been the only joint examination of his work and his theoretical and methodological premises.4 The fact that, in recent years, the author has become one of the best known and most popular intellectuals (he was a columnist in three leading national newspapers and a resident commentator on a TV talk-show), making no bones about his defense of a program of liberal reform for Portuguese society, has won him few friends in academic circles, where left-wing ideas still tend to prevail. It would clearly be absurd to reduce everything to a question of envy or resentment. After all, Ramos is not the first openly right-wing historian to be adopted by the media. The antibodies he has aroused may perhaps be explained in two ways. First of all, as a reaction to his adopting a clearly different approach to history from the one that traditionally prevailed in Portuguese historiographic circles until quite recently—currents of thought that are in some ways linked to a Marxist origin, on the one hand, and the “French Historical School” (the generation of the Annales and their continuers in the 1970s), on the other hand. In line with the criticism leveled by the American historian Gertrud Himmelfarb against the so-called New History (which includes the post-Annales historiography and other more “structuralist” currents), Ramos wrote an article in 1991,5 defending the supremacy of a political history that constructed its problems from the questions posed by the witnesses and sources of each period, and not from some agenda provided