I agree with Paul Landau completely. I am also disturbed by the
ongoing tendency of historians to choose a side, thus creating a
quantities--versus--ideas debate. How can we function as scholars
without a committment to both a quantitative rigor and a willingness
to listen to and argue any proposal, no matter how distasteful (not
that I have detected anything distatsteful in this thread)? When we
reject, for instance, the quasi-historical rants of holocaust
revisionists as beneath our notice, their ideas simply go out into
the world unchallenged, to pick up converts where they may.