kept as open and as rigorous as possible. The penalty of a lack of vigilance is that some ‘official version’ may come to represent for us a true and final account of the past. It may also thus come to form part of an unjustifiable, because clearly distorting, ‘dominant ideology’ within its receiving society, as seems to have happened to both sides in the period of the Cold War. On this account the deconstructionist historian differs from the others only in a tendency to worry aloud, as he or she writes, about the difficulties of the job.
