Now, with these considerations in mind we are perhaps in a better position to tackle the question, what is the activity of being an historian? with greater expectation of reaching a reasoned conclusion.
We have observed, first, that 'the historian' is one who understands the events of the world before him as evidence for events that have already taken place. Other sorts of inquiries do this also; 'the historian' is unique in never doing any [sic] else. But, what sort of statements does he make about the past thus revealed? What is the character of these statements about the past which 'historians' (but not other kinds of writers about the past) sometimes (but not always) make?
Their first characteristic is that they are not designed to assimilate the past to a present, either of fact or desire: the attitude towards the past is not what I have called a practical attitude.
The practical man reads the past backwards. He is interested in and recognizes only those past events which he can relate to present activities. He looks to the past in order to explain his present world, to justify it, or to make it a more habitable and a less mysterious place. The past consists of happenings recognized to be contributory or non-contributory to a subsequent condition of things, or to be friendly or hostile to a desired condition of things. Like the gardener, the practical man distinguishes, in past happenings, between weeds and permissible growths; like the lawyer, he distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate children. If he is a politician, he approves whatever in the past appears to support his political predilections and denounces whatever is hostile to them. If he is a moralist he imposes upon the past a moral structure, distinguishing virtue and vice in human character, right and wrong in human action, approving the one and condemning the other. If his point of observation gives him a wide view, he perceives in the more profound movements of events those that are malign and those that are beneficent. If he is governed by a favourite project, the past appears as a conflict of events and actions relative to that project. In short, he treats the past as he treats the present, and the statements he is disposed to make about past actions and persons are of the same kind as those he is disposed to make about a contemporary situation in which he is involved.
But in the specifically 'historical' attitude (as represented in the kind of statements about the past I have in mind as peculiar to historical writers), the past is not viewed in relation to the present, and is not treated as if it were the present. Everything that the evidence reveals or points to is recognized to have its place; nothing is excluded, nothing is regarded as 'non-contributory'. The place of an event is not determined by its relation to subsequent events. What is being sought here is neither a justification, nor a criticism nor an explanation of a subsequent or present condition of things. In 'history' no man dies too soon or by 'accident'; there are no successes and no failures and no illegitimate children. Nothing is approved, there being no desired condition of things in relation to which approval can operate; and nothing is denounced. This past is without the moral, the political or the social structure which the practical man transfers from his present to his past. The Pope's intervention did not change the course of events, it was the course of events, and consequently his action was not an 'intervention'. X did not die 'too soon'; he died when he did. Y did not dissipate his resources in a series of useless wars: the wars belong to the actual course of events, not some imaginary illegitimate course of events. It was not 'the Liberator' who addressed the meeting in Dublin; it was Daniel O'Connell. In short, there is to be found an attitude toward the past which is discernibly different from the 'practical' attitude; and since this attitude is characteristic (though, of course, with some qualifications) of those whom we are accustomed to call 'historians' because of their sustained and exclusive interest in the past, its counterpart may be called the specifically 'historical' past.
(Michael Oakeshott, "The Activity of Being an Historian," in his Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, new and expanded ed. [Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991], 151-83, at 168-70 [italics in original; footnote omitted] [essay first published in 1958])
