In contrast, some postmodern critics deny that history has any objective "meaning" and that anything known as virtue even exists. As Kagan stated, many modern teachers in the humanities are those "who deny the possibility of knowing anything with confidence, of the reality of such concepts as truth and virtue, who seek only gain and pleasure in the modern guise of political power and self-gratification as the ends of education." Those are fighting words, and Kagan delivered a stinging rebuke to the modern enemies of history.

"Among them it is common to reject any notion of objectivity, of truths arrived at by evidence or reasoning external to whims or prejudices," he asserted. He aimed particular criticism at those who claim that history must be "deconstructed" by literary criticism. These critics "assert that all studies are literature, all, therefore subject to the same indeterminacy as all language."

In the course of his lecture, Kagan considered the contrast between the classic understanding of the artist found in Greek civilization and the modern concept which he traced to the Romantic movement of the modern age. "Ever since the beginning of the Romantic movement the dominant belief has been that a true poet or artist, whatever his genre, must be a rebel against the established order of society," Kagan asserted. "Writers of the past who don't fit the model seem always to be merely the victims of their place in corrupt societies or stooges of those who ruled them. The modern critic who discovers this is, of course, free from such influences."

In other words, critics who assail the writers of the past as being ideologically blind and ignorant of their own oppression simply assume or assert that they are themselves liberated from such constraints and limitations. The modern concept of the artist as rebel produced literature "that is shaped merely by its author's time and his place within the society, by his prejudices and purposes" and "is a poor and weak thing that deserve(s) the social scientific analysis and pseudo-philosophical mumbo-jumbo that passed for literary criticism in our day."

Kagan understands that we live in a time that is hostile to any claim for the value of history. The claim that history is important "has rested chiefly on its search for truths arrived at by painstaking research conducted with the greatest possible objectivity, explaining events by means of human reason." This is precisely the understanding of history that is increasingly out of vogue in the modern academy.

Kagan is most at home with the ancients, conversing with Herodotus, Thucydides, and Livy. From the ancients, Kagan emerged with a coherent and ambitious understanding of the historian's task. "These are the missions for the historian: to examine important events of the past with painstaking care and the greatest possible objectivity, to seek a reasoned explanation for them based on the fullest and fairest possible examination of the evidence in order to preserve their memory and to use them to establish such uniformities as may exist in human events, and then to apply the resulting understanding to improve the judgment and wisdom of people who must deal with similar problems in the future."