Giovanni Levi (born in 1954), internationally renowned Italian historian and one of the leading microhistorians, is a representative of so-called engaged historiography that demands the separation of history from ideology and is one of the defining frameworks of the post-modern division of historiography. For Levi, one of the main problems of modern historiography is the authoritative style of interpretation. Historians relate narratives as if they were speaking about some objective reality, rarely mentioning the painstaking research process which would lend to their conclusions an air of hypothesis, non-conclusiveness or doubt. Levi points out that other humanities have long since relativized the author's authority, while history lags behind in this respect by ignoring a modern sociological critique of the concepts of rationalization. Similar to some other critics of historiography, Levi, too, thinks that the role of a historian is not solely to give sense to an event, but also to check to what a degree that specific event is an issue of general interest. He draws attention to an important aspect saying that an event is not necessarily something that has happened but something that people are willing to accept as such. A historian should therefore concentrate primarily on MEANINGS, while questions about how the things actually occurred should be understood as a kind of exorcism that is meant to bring the chaos under control and give it a suitable shape. Knowing this, it is not difficult to understand why Levi argues that history is a continual reinterpretation of something already known and that rekindling in people's minds of something that has been forgotten is not the core task of a historian. He further maintains that historical discoveries are rather accidental, with the underlying truth being more or less known and emerging from the novel questions posed by historians/historiography. In Levi’s opinion, the search for answers to the questions of what cultural aspects are shared by a community, what is legitimate, what that common thread is that binds us together forming our shared foundation of values, are the issues over which a continual war is fought by various representations of the past.
Taking Levi's theoretical positions as the basis, I will try to give answers to the questions relating to the role of an author (historian) in modern Slovenian historiography. Is he/she an observer or a judge? An interpreter or an objective eye? In so doing I will concentrate on some eminent monographs by the Slovenian historians of the third millennium.
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