The intellectual mood in the 1990s -- The revisionist : a new type of intellectual -- Internal critique : vicissitudes and potentials -- The loss of history and the new historians' fight against propaganda on the Irish and continental "front" -- The clash between the new historians and the Bureau of Military History -- Weaknesses in ethnographic method -- Theoretical underpinnings and their impact -- The claims of memory and critique -- The epistemological and philosophical position of Irish revisionism -- The revolution comes under revisionist scrutiny -- The concept of totalitarianism : comparison and its pitfalls -- Revision, deconstruction, semiology : similar methods? -- Relativism and its opponents -- The problematic of ends and means -- Grappling with the problem of objectivity