Knowing Monsters and Knowing Myself. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Methodological Sentimentalism

Abstract Should historians studying mass crimes set aside the emotions that these crimes evoke? Positive and negative responses to this question can be referred to as methodological objectivism and subjectivism, respectively. This paper addresses this debate based on a case study: Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioner’s methodological sentimentalism. First, I reconstruct Goldhagen’s position and then criticize its central assumption. The upshot of this case study is that methodological sentimentalists should decide between two conceptions of inferential self-knowledge, esthetic and scientific.