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, Mayer argued, the landed elites dominated the European stage until well into the 20th century.

The conflicts that engulfed Europe between 1914 and 1945 were, in his view, part of a “30 years’ war” in which the old patrician ruling classes launched a conservative reaction, attempting to cling to power. “It would take two world wars and the Holocaust,” Mayer wrote, “finally to dislodge the feudal and aristocratic presumption from Europe’s civil and political societies.”

The idea that the ancien régime retained power until the 20th century has proved influential – a British version was developed even earlier by Tom Nairn, who also died this year, and Perry Anderson, who argued that British decline stemmed from the morbid weight of the aristocracy on the nation’s economic and social life, a claim much contested and one that has not withstood too much scrutiny.

Nevertheless, what Mayer’s thesis highlighted was the failure of the liberal order to socially embed liberal ideals of liberty, equality and democracy. Ironically, Mayer argued, it took the emergence of working-class movements – trade unions, social democratic parties, revolutionary groups – and the threat of socialism to make those ideals, in part at least, a reality.

Today, those questions of liberty, equality and, in particular, democracy have returned to the forefront of public debate, partly because of the demise of such working-class movements. Mayer’s analysis of the long reach of the aristocracy may have been wanting, but his understanding of the complex relationship between radical politics and liberal norms, and his distinction between mass movements of left and right, the former seeking to confront inequalities, the latter to bolster hierarchies, provide fresh ways of thinking about contemporary debates and political movements.

The idea of the persistence of the old regime, and of the thirty years’ war, provided the frame for much of Mayer’s work, from The Furies, his study of revolutionary violence, to Plowshares Into Swords, a rewriting of the history of Zionism. The book perhaps most shaped by Mayer’s belief that the conflicts of the interwar period were all linked to the struggles of the old order to retain power was also his most controversial, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, a consensus-defying history of the Holocaust.

The Nazis, Mayer argued, were driven as much by anti-communism as by antisemitism. The old elites used nazism in an attempt to “preserve status and power”. The “final solution” was not pre-planned but arose ad hoc from the failures of Hitler’s military assault on the Soviet Union and the degeneration of his hold on power.

It is a striking analysis, though flawed. There are important criticisms to be made of Mayer’s argument, from the downplaying of the depth of antisemitism and racial ideology within German reactionary movements to the sloppy account of the events leading to the “final solution”. Many of Mayer’s opponents were interested, though, not just in criticism but in condemnation, too, accusing him of being a “Holocaust revisionist”, even of engaging in a “subtle form of Holocaust denial”, as the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer put it. The Anti-Defamation League, an American organisation created to combat antisemitism, included Mayer in its 1993 report on Hitler’s Apologists.

Such dismissals made little sense given that at the heart of Mayer’s book is the reality of the Holocaust (or “Judeocide”, as he preferred to call it). Questioning the accepted narrative of how and why the Holocaust happened is not the same as denying that it did. The fierce denunciations revealed a desire to deem certain forms of historical interpretation illegitimate so as to preserve a particular narrative of the Holocaust.

As DD Guttenplan observed in his book Holocaust on Trial, Mayer was not the first to suffer such a fate. Hannah Arendt and even Raul Hilberg, one of the most important scholars of the Holocaust, faced similar forms of censure. Hilberg, whose The Destruction of the European Jews was a landmark work, was accused of “impiety” and “defaming the dead”, and even barred from using the archives of Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust remembrance centre, for his observation that Nazis had relied on Jews to abet their own destruction. “I was pitting myself against the main current of Jewish thought,” Hilberg observed almost half a century later.

Visible here is the clash that Mayer warned about, between the study of history and the construction of public memory. Today, that clash has become a key feature of political life, many debates becoming forced into straitjackets that define what is acceptable to believe. It is why Mayer was one of our most vital historians. Even when wrong – and he was often right – Mayer’s willingness to provoke thinking beyond the bounds of the orthodox was valuable in suggesting a reassessment of established views. It is an approach we should cherish.

• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist

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