The difference between the study of history and the construction of public memory, the American historian Arno Mayer observed, is that “whereas the voice of memory is univocal and uncontested, that of history is polyphonic and open to debate”. Memory, he added, “tends to rigidify over time, while history calls for revision”.

When Mayer died earlier this month, his death was barely marked in the media. Yet, in an age in which the clash between history and memory lies at the heart of much political conflict, from culture war debates over statues and slavery to the confrontation between the origin stories of Jews and Palestinians, Mayer’s work remains indispensable in making sense not just of where we are, but also of how we got here.

Mayer was born in Luxembourg in 1926 into a Jewish family. Forced to flee the Nazis in 1940, the Mayers eventually found refuge in America. After enlisting in the army, Mayer studied history and settled into academic life, teaching for nearly three decades at Princeton until his retirement in 1993.

Mayer was a Marxist, though unorthodox in his views; he called himself a “left dissident”. What he took from Marx was an insistence that historical events can only be understood within their broader context, each in relation to the totality of events. It often led him to confront the prevailing historical consensus, whether on the French Revolution or the founding of Israel.

The Persistence of the Old Regime is perhaps his foundational work. Published in 1981, it challenged the idea, accepted by both liberal and Marxist historians, that the 19th century marked the replacement of the aristocracy by the bourgeoisie as the ruling class in Europe. To the contrary,........

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