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This is an article about the relationship between historical scholarship and pedagogy. The teaching of history can itself be seen as a meaningful form of historical scholarship and poses some of the same methodological, theoretical, and ethical questions as historical research, albeit usually generating quite different answers to the queries. I delve into three sets of questions that are of significance to historians in our roles as researchers and as teachers. In scholarship and in teaching, it pays to consider the relationship between authority and humility. In the library and the classroom, there is a balance to be struck between narrative and analysis. In both settings, one must at times choose between historicist particularity and human universalism. I discuss each set of tensions with reference to such thinkers as Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Friedrich Nietzsche. In each case, I also draw on my own experience in the classroom, particularly my time teaching tenth‐grade world history. Throughout, I suggest that intellectually and ethically flourishing history classrooms are often "houses with exposed beams," in which teachers initiate students as junior members in communities of historical inquiry, often, though not always, through collaborative analyses of revealing primary documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the enduring chronopolitics of Historicism. To do so, I work through two dominant understandings of Historicism: the view that "historicism" is a means to account for the historian's own standpoint or historical situation as the place from which they take up and interpret the past, which I call Historicism A, and the separate (though now more popular) understanding of "historicism" that is derived from Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism, which I call Historicism B. I am less interested in what draws these varying definitions of Historicism apart and instead investigate a point of intersection in their understanding of time and temporality. Both strains serve politics via a concept of time as a neutral, uniform, and apolitical scale upon which any political or ideological agenda is enacted. Time here serves as the basis for historical explanation, but its neutrality, homogeneity, and extra‐historicality are a trick. I employ Gérard Genette's analytic of the palimpsest, with the help of Nancy Partner, to expose the ways that Historicism allows the past to be rewritten and overwritten to political and ideological ends that the temporal construct conceals. This then enables me to work through the politics of Historicism and ultimately deconstruct Historicist time, demonstrating how the universal or eternal claims of Enlightenment or pre‐Historicist thought are actually maintained in Historicism as the mechanism to advance political and ideological positions under the cloak of neutrality. In what follows, I make the temporal mechanism of Historicism explicit in order to expose the ethical failings that this mechanism conceals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time is so deeply interwoven with all aspects of politics that its centrality to the political is frequently overlooked. For one, politics has its own times and rhythms. Secondly, time can be an object and an instrument of politics. Thirdly, temporal attributes are used not only to differentiate basic political principles but also to legitimize or delegitimize politics. Finally, politics aims at realizing futures in the present or preventing them from materializing. Consequently, the relationship between politics and time encompasses a broad spectrum of phenomena and processes that cry out for historicization. In our introduction to this History and Theory theme issue on chronopolitics, we argue that the concept of chronopolitics makes it possible to do this and, in the process, to move the operation of rethinking historical temporalities from the periphery toward the center of historiographical attention as well as to engage in a dialogue with scholars from a wide range of disciplines. To this end, we propose a broad concept of chronopolitics by discussing existing definitions, by distinguishing between three central dimensions of chronopolitics (the time of politics, the politics of time, and politicized time), and by systematizing possible approaches to studying chronopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The image of a backward, archaic South whose barbarian population had remained at a low tier of civilization was a child of Italian unification. Not unlike the Orientalist East, the South that meridionalist discourse brought forth was a "chronotopos"—that is, a time‐space that had supposedly remained in the past. The war against brigandage in the Mezzogiorno demonstrates the workings of the "politics of historicism." This article first sheds some light on the grande brigantaggio and on the descriptions of the South that it generated among both contemporaries and later historians, such as Eric Hobsbawm. With the help of Pierre Clastres's and James C. Scott's political anthropology, it then attempts to uncover the structure beneath the "denial of coevalness." It argues that the dichotomy between the "backward" and the "modern" was based on the political distinction between friend and enemy, which, in the age of historicism, was temporalized; that is, the temporal dichotomy of the savage and the civilized can be understood as the historicist variant of those "asymmetric counterconcepts" that have always served the state and its representatives to demarcate the corpus politicum from other political entities, to justify the state, and to praise the advantages of being governed. In conclusion, the article addresses the close interweaving of state and history, progress and civilization, in the historicist worldview and argues that it was this nexus of state and history that drove the mechanics of time‐power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the formation of Hayden White's chapter on Hegel in Metahistory by comparing it with his earlier essay titled "Hegel: Historicism as Tragic Realism." It also analyzes White's review of George Armstrong Kelly's Idealism, Politics and History and White's well‐known essay titled "The Burden of History." This article argues that White's main concerns in his review essay and in Metahistory were (1) to respond to the existentialist challenge, posed especially by Camus, that history does not matter and (2) to use Hegel to articulate an answer regarding how historical consciousness and action can be combined. White created his version of Hegel early in "Hegel: Historicism as Tragic Realism" by absorbing (probably) Josiah Royce's interpretation of the Absolute and (more certainly) Erich Auerbach's idea of tragic realism. However, White's idea of tragedy, which focuses on the consequences of action, is not the same as Auerbach's idea, which concerns treating the psychological depth of characters seriously. In his review of Idealism, Politics and History and in Metahistory, White further injected the Kantian philosophy of history—as interpreted by Lucien Goldmann and Lewis White Beck—into Hegel's idea of tragedy and comedy. In doing so, White affirmed the philosophical activist's ability not only to recognize the tragic circumstance of the past and the present but also to hold on to the hope for a better, comic future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In The Concept of History, Dmitri Nikulin rehearses an alternative philosophy of history, thus accompanying a certain revival of interest in this discipline since the end of the twentieth century. Conceptualizing an alternative philosophy of history is of fundamental relevance in the context of the global problems that deepen every day in our contemporary world. Undoubtedly, philosophy must be attentive to the present demands and interests of representing the past, whether by the sectors of power or by various dissident collectives, for failing to reflexively address questions of substantive philosophy of history surely leaves room for the (unacknowledged) validity of the teleological‐universalist narrative. The historical trajectory delineated by the modern conception of history is centered on the uniqueness and unity of history and establishes a divide between historical and nonhistorical (or prehistoric) peoples. Nikulin, by contrast, seeks to produce a pluralistic conception of multiple histories, for which he elaborates a notion of "the historical" present in every time period and human culture (oral and written). A central distinction to be established from the beginning, according to Nikulin, is between "the historical" and "history." The historical is nothing other than lists of names, things, actions, and facts to be preserved, and we can find these lists in any culture in any time and place. Such lists are governed by some organizing principle that determines what not to forget. Chapters 3 ("The Epic of History"), 4 ("The Homer Galaxy"), and 5 ("The Logos of History") are, in my view, the most novel and stimulating parts of the book. There, "the historical" (those detailed and organized lists) comes with a narrative (fabula). The historical/fable dyad constitutes the structure of history, which is instantiated in multiple histories but which, in itself (as a structure), is not historical but invariant in each and every history. The seven chapters that make up The Concept of History run through various examples of reflections on and problems related to the subject in ancient history, a period in which Nikulin himself is a recognized specialist. The centrality of ancient Greek history in this study does not imply a commitment to the thesis that history emerged in Greek culture. According to Nikulin, where there are human beings, there is history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: This essay will argue that the traditional opposition between narrative and theory in historical sciences is dissolved if we conceive of narratives as theoretical devices for understanding events in time through special concepts that abridge typical sequences of events. I shall stress, in the context of the Historical Knowledge Epistemological Square (HKES) that emerged with the scientization of history, that history is always narrative, story has a theoretical ground of itself, and scientific histories address the need for a conceptual progression in ever‐improved narratives. This will lead to identification of three major theoretical levels in historical stories: naming, plotting (or emplotment), and formalizing. We revisit Jörn Rüsen's theory of history as the best starting point, and explore to what extent it could be developed by (i) taking a deeper look into narratological knowledge, and (ii) reanalyzing logically the conceptual strata in order to bridge the overrated Forschung/Darstellung (research/exposition) divide. The corollary: we should consider (scientific) historical writing as the last step of historical research, not as the next step after research is over. This thesis will drive us to a reconsideration of the German Historik regarding the problem of interpretation and exposition. Far from alienating history from science, narrative links history positively to anthropology and biology. The crossing of our triad name‐plot‐model with Rüsen's four theoretical levels (categories‐types‐concepts‐names) points to the feasibility of expanding Rüsen's Historik in logical and semiotic directions. Story makes history, theory makes story, and historical reason may proceed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: Frank Ankersmit is often perceived as a postmodern thinker, as a European Hayden White, or as an author whose work in political philosophy can safely be ignored by those interested only in his philosophy of history. Although none of these perceptions is entirely wrong, they are of little help in understanding the nature of Ankersmit's work and the sources on which it draws. Specifically, they do not elucidate the extent to which Ankersmit raises questions different from White's, finds himself inspired by continental European traditions, responds to specifically Dutch concerns, and is as active as a public intellectual as he has been prolific in philosophy of history. In order to propose a more comprehensive and balanced interpretation of Ankersmit's work, this article offers a contextual reading based largely on Dutch‐language sources, some of which are unknown even in the Netherlands. The thesis advanced is that Ankersmit draws consistently on nineteenth‐century German historicism as interpreted by Friedrich Meinecke and advocated by his Groningen teacher, Ernst Kossmann. Without forcing each and every element of Ankersmit's oeuvre into a historicist mold, the article demonstrates that some of its most salient aspects can profitably be read as attempts at translating and modifying historicist key notions into late twentieth‐century categories. Also, without creating a father myth of the sort that White helped create around his teacher William Bossenbrook, the article argues that Ankersmit at crucial moments in his intellectual trajectory draws on texts and authors central to Kossmann's research interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Groethuysen's creation of a new historiographical genre-the anonymous history of the formation of worldviews-was a response to the 'problem of historicism' conceived of as a task of working out a concept of historicity beyond the relativism-objectivism dilemma. In scrutinizing Groethuysen's implementation of phenomenology to study how basic historical phenomena have been experienced, the article draws a parallel with Heidegger's response to historical relativism. In the main argument, Groethuysen's combination of a new approach to the history of ideas and a historicized philosophical anthropology reveals the possibility of avoiding the depressing dilemma between metahistorical objectivism and historicist relativism by means of a double hermeneutics. In this regard, special attention is paid to Groethuysen's phenomenological conception of narrative time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that realist invocations of Weber rely on an unrealistic reading of Weber's realism. In order to escape the allure of Weber's dramatic posture of crisis, we place his seminal lecture on 'Politics as a Vocation' (1919) in its historical and philosophical context of a revolutionary conjuncture of dramatic proportions, compounded by a broader crisis of historicism. Weber's rhetoric, we argue, carries with it not only the emotion of crisis but is also the expression of a deeper intellectual impasse. The fatalistic despair of his position had already been detected by some of his closest contemporaries for whom Weber did not appear as a door-opener to a historically situated theory of political action but as a telling and intriguing impasse. Although the disastrous history of interwar Europe seems to confirm Weber's bleakest predictions, it would be perverse to elevate contingent failure to the level of retrospective vindication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Global history looms large in current historiography, yet its heuristic design and political functions remain ill-reflected. My article seeks to uncover the historical origins of the assumption that the 'world' has one common history and that it is feasible and desirable to write it. I analyze the epistemic infrastructure underlying this assumption and argue that global history as practiced today is predicated on a specific mode of world-making that provides its basic template: Global history both grew out of and intellectually sustains the conception of an increasingly connected world. The type of connectedness thereby implied and reinscribed was established by what I call the 'world-historical process,' a cognitive framework that co-emerged with the early modern and modern European conquest of the world through expansion, discovery, commerce, and culture. The article investigates how this process-template emerged out of the crisis of universal history that could no longer integrate and reconcile the multiple pasts of the world. The format of the world-historical process was central to Enlightenment historians' assertion of the secular and scientific prestige of their craft, as much as to its ability to discern global epochs, in particular the modern and the premodern. My article traces the fortunes of this template through historicism up to present-day global history. Current global history remains structured around the growing connectedness of previously distinct parts of the planet whose pasts are transformed into relevant world history by the very process that makes them increasingly interrelated. Global history may be too much a product of the process of globalization it studies to develop epistemologically and politically tenable alternatives to 'connectivity.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT A difficult point in The Order of Things lies in the historical situation of the archaeologist himself, especially when he speaks about the present. Is it possible to have an adequate view of the episteme in which you stand? Is not the very concept of episteme that of an unconscious determination of the space of knowledge, so that it would be an illusion to claim to be able to 'objectify' one's own epistemological situation? And from what point of view can a part of this situation be considered 'backward'? This article tries to show that the idea of the 'death of man' can be read on two levels: first, it is possible to reconstruct the argument of an appearance and disappearance of man in the space of knowledge from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century; but then, one has to discuss the way Foucault combined his history of knowledge with a philosophical polemics against some contemporary figures. And we can wonder if Foucault's diagnosis has lost any relevance for the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Recent readings of what is commonly known as the dialectic of master and slave have tended to focus either philosophically on concepts such as desire, reflection, and recognition or historically on the specific nature of the economic relation it evokes. In this paper I challenge that division of proper objects, arguing that Hegel's dialectic and its reception raises the question how the nature of servitude (whether that of a bondsman or that of a slave) structures not only the emergence of historical agency but also the relationship between history and philosophy. The importance of reflection in Hegel's treatment of the dialectic of lord and bondsman is both clearly stated and structural. Alexandre Kojève's reading of this dialectic makes explicit that human history originates in it, but, unlike Hegel, Kojève does not emphasize the product of the slave's labor. Judith Butler's reading of the dialectic in Hegel and Kojève locates the difference between Hegel's bondsman and Kojève's slave within the structure of servitude itself as a Foucauldian opposition between 'body' and 'life.' In On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Friedrich Nietzsche differentiates between two varieties of servile work on the basis not of what is produced but instead to whom service is rendered, announcing what turns out to be a problematic familiar from both the Old and New Testaments: the impossibility of service to two masters. In a typically perspectival turn, Nietzsche shows that servitude is a condition of possibility not only of human history but also of its academic study. Self-conscious historians must thus take into account not only the dependence of their object of study upon relations of servitude but also their own place within such relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Isaiah Berlin and other representatives of historicism have made the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment into opposite cultures. The Counter-Enlightenment is a criticism of the Enlightenment from within, so in many respects they overlap. However, with regard to perceptions of time they contradict each other. The times of the Enlightenment lean heavily toward chronology and can be labeled as 'empty,' whereas the time perceptions of the Counter-Enlightenment can be called 'incarnated' and are identical with historical times. As a consequence the differences between the two temporalities lead necessarily to differences in synchronization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This intimidating and massive collection of twenty-nine extended, diverse essays by distinguished scholars, organized around the general theme of the current state and future direction of historical theory, raises some fundamental questions about historical theory as practiced over the past half century as well as about the distinctive nature of historical theory within the broader context of the production of historical knowledge. The editors of the volume suggest that the postmodern linguistic turn in historical theory, especially as articulated by Hayden White and Michel Foucault, marked a decisive, epochal turning-point in human historical self-consciousness, the attainment of a mature stage of autonomous metahistorical reflection on the essential nature of what it means to be historical, on historicity per se. What came before is imagined as a series of preliminary stages, what came after as a working out of implications and consequences. I suggest that a close reading of the implicit and explicit arguments of the individual essays reveals a rather different kind of historical moment, one in which postmodern historical theory has increasingly been demystified of its alleged metahistorical status, and has emerged as a situated object of historical reflection and thus has itself become increasingly defined as historical, recognized in its particularity as a temporally and culturally framed form of historical knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT In this article for the theme issue on 'Historical Theory in a Global Frame,' I argue that 'Peru' is a 'historical theory in a global frame.' The theory or, as I prefer, theoretical event, named Peru was born global in an early colonial 'abyss of history' and elaborated in the writings of colonial and postcolonial Peruvian historians. I suggest that the looking glass held up by Peruvian historiography is of great potential significance for historical theory at large, since it is a two-way passageway between the ancient and the modern, the Old World and the New, the East and the West. This slippery passageway enabled some Peruvian historians to move stealthily along the bloody cutting-edge of global history, at times anticipating and at others debunking well-known developments in 'European' historical theory. Today, a reconnaissance of Peruvian history's inner recesses may pay dividends for a historical theory that would return to its colonial and global origins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its appearance in 2007, Charles Taylor's monumental book A Secular Age has received much attention. One of the central issues in the discussions around Taylor's book is the role of history in philosophical argumentation, in particular with regard to normative positions on ultimate affairs. Many critics observe a methodological flaw in using history in philosophical argumentation in that there is an alleged discrepancy between Taylor's historical approach, on the one hand, and his defense of fullness in terms of openness to transcendence, on the other. Since his 'faith-based history' is unwittingly apologetic, it is not only 'hard to judge in strictly historical terms,' but it also proves that 'when it comes to the most ultimate affairs history may not matter at all.' This paper challenges this verdict by exposing the misunderstanding underlying this interpretation of the role of history in Taylor's narrative. In order to disambiguate the relation between history and philosophy in Taylor's approach, I will raise three questions. First, what is the precise relation between history and ontology, taking into account the ontological validity of what Taylor calls social imaginaries? Second, why does 'fullness' get a universal status in his historical narrative? Third, is Taylor's position tenable that the contemporary experience of living within 'an immanent frame' allows for an openness to transcendence? In order to answer these questions, I will first compare Peter Gordon's interpretation of the status of social imaginaries with Taylor's position and, on the basis of that comparison, distinguish two definitions of ontology (sections I and II). Subsequently, I try to make it clear that precisely Taylor's emphasis on the historical character of social imaginaries and on their 'relaxed' ontological anchorage allows for his claim that 'fullness' might have a trans-historical character (section III). Finally, I would like to show that Taylor's defense of the possibility of an 'openness to transcendence'-as a specific mode of fullness-is not couched in 'onto-theological' terms, as suggested by his critics, but that it is the very outcome of taking into account the current historical situation (section IV). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the notion of distance works in the practice of interpretation by studying the philosophical underpinnings of the originalism debate in American constitutionalism. Focusing on some of its most important spokespeople, the paper shows that they start from the historicist presupposition that distance can in principle be overcome by a reconstruction of the original intentions of the framers of the Constitution. With the help of Hans-Georg Gadamer, who explicitly based his philosophical hermeneutics on the notion of distance, this presupposition will be criticized. The paper concludes that the originalist and hermeneuticist positions do not mutually exclude each other, but can be synthesized if they are seen as different questions about the same text. The meaning of the Constitution is therefore not given but is dependent on the direction of the questions asked by the interpreter. From this question-dependency of meaning it follows that interpretation follows the law of acoustics: 'Angle of incidence equates angle of reflection.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that concerns about historical distance arose along with modernist historicism, and they disappear with postfoundationalism. The developmental historicism of the nineteenth century appealed to narrative principles to establish continuity between past and present and to guide selections among facts. In the twentieth century, modernist historicists rejected such principles, thereby raising the specter of historical distance: that is, the distorting effects of the present on accounts of the past, the chasm between facts and narrative. The modernist problem became: how can historians avoid anachronism and develop accurate representations of the past? Instead of using narrative principles to select facts, modernist historicists appealed to atomized facts to validate narratives. However, in the late twentieth century, postmodernists (Frank Ankersmit and Hayden White) argued that there was no way to close the distance between facts and narratives. The postmodern problem became: how should historians conceive of their writing given the ineluctable distance between facts and narratives? Today, postfoundationalism dispels both modernist and postmodernist concerns with historical distance; it implies that all concepts (not just historical ones) fuse fact and theory, and it dissolves issues of conceptual relativism, textual meaning, and re-enactment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The metaphor of historical distance often appears in discussions about the study of contemporary history. It suggests that we cannot see the past in perspective if we are too near to it. According to founding fathers like Ranke and Humboldt, temporal distance is required to discern historical 'ideas' or forms. The argument may have some plausibility, but the presupposition is plainly false, since we cannot see the past at all. This leaves us with the question of what to make of the so-called historical forms. This article discusses three different views. The first, historicist, view is objectivist and localizes historical forms in the past. The second, narrativist, view is subjectivist and localizes historical forms in the realm of imagination and representation. The third view goes beyond the other two in that it considers both sides. It does not use a one-sided but a two-sided concept of form, which hinges on the idea of a distinction. This means that historical forms occupy both sides of the subject-object distinction or the present-past distinction. Because the subject-object terminology is confusing, the essay employs an alternative distinction between first- and second-order observation. With the help of this distinction, it is possible to redescribe the distance metaphor in such a way that the theoretical status of contemporary history becomes less enigmatic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does 'historical distance' mean? Starting with Johan Huizinga, the famous Dutch historian who refused to lecture on contemporary history, this introductory article argues that 'historical distance' is a metaphor used in a variety of intellectual contexts. Accordingly, the metaphor has ontological, epistemological, moral, aesthetic, as well as methodological connotations. This implies that historical distance cannot be reduced to a single 'problem' or 'concept.' At the same time, this wide variety of meanings associated with distance helps explain why an easily recognizable tradition of scholarly reflection on historical distance does not exist. In a broad survey of nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical theory, this article nonetheless attempts to show that distance has been a major, if seldom explicitly articulated, theme in European and American philosophy of history. In doing so, it pays special attention to those few authors who in recent years have taken up the metaphor for critical study. Finally, the paper summarizes some of the main arguments put forward in the articles comprising this issue on historical distance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Was the crisis of historicism an exclusively German affair? Or was it a “narrowly academic crisis,” as is sometimes assumed? Answering both questions in the negative, this paper argues that crises of historicism affected not merely intellectual elites, but even working-class people, not only in Germany, but also in the Netherlands. With an elaborated case study, the article shows that Dutch “neo-Calvinist” Protestants from the 1930s onward experienced their own crisis of historicism. For a variety of reasons, this religious subgroup came to experience a collapse of its “historicist” worldview. Following recent German scholarship, the paper argues that this historicism was not a matter of Rankean historical methods, but of “historical identifications,” or modes of identity formation in which historical narratives played crucial roles. Based on this Dutch case study, then, the article develops two arguments. In a quantitative mode, it argues that more and different people suffered from the crisis of historicism than is usually assumed. In addition, it offers a qualitative argument: that the crisis was located especially among groups that derived their identity from “historical identifications.” Those who suffered most from the crisis of historicism were those who understood themselves as embedded in narratives that connected past, present, and future in such a way as to offer identity in historical terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arthur Lovejoy's history of unit-ideas and the history of concepts are often criticized for being historically insensitive forms of history-writing. Critics claim that one cannot find invariable ideas or concepts in several contexts or times in history without resorting to some distortion. One popular reaction is to reject the history of ideas and concepts altogether, and take linguistic entities as the main theoretical units. Another reaction is to try to make ideas or concepts context-sensitive and to see their histories as dynamic processes of transformation. The main argument in this paper is that we cannot abandon ideas or concepts as theoretical notions if we want to write an intelligible history of thought. They are needed for the categorization and classification of thinking, and in communication with contemporaries. Further, the criterion needed to subsume historical concepts under a general concept cannot be determined merely on the basis of their family resemblances, which allows variation without an end, since talk of the same concepts implies that they share something in common. I suggest that a concept in history should be seen to be composed of two components: the core of a concept and the margin of a concept. On the basis of this, we can develop a vocabulary for talking about conceptual changes. The main idea is that conceptual continuity requires the stability of the core of the concept, but not necessarily that of the margin, which is something that enables a description of context-specific features. If the core changes, we ought to see it as a conceptual replacement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is a critical discussion of Dipesh Chakrabarty's book Provincializing Europe as well as a first sketch of a History on Equal Terms. After giving a short summary of Provincializing Europe, I first argue, against chakrabarty, that there is no necessary connection between the discipline of history and the metanarratives of modernity. To the contrary: the founding idea of the discipline of history was a turn against such grand narratives. With his attempt to deconstruct the narratives of the European Enlightenment and of modernity, Chakrabarty therefore has to be regarded as a thinker of radical historicism rather than as a critic of the discipline of history. Second, I criticize the use of the term “modernity” in Provincializing Europe and the concept of modernity in general. Instead of a deconstruction of the discipline of history, I propose a deconstruction of the concept of modernity. This could open up the way for a History on Equal Terms situated within the discipline of history, that is, a historiography that would—just as Chakrabarty rightly demands—in principle pay the same attention to and expect relevant results from any region in the world, depending only on the focus of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This response to Carola Dietze's critique of Provincializing Europe takes up for examination three key expressions or ideas on which the original argument of the book was founded: hyperreal Europe, historicism, and political modernity. I appreciate the spirit of Dietze's engagement with the book, but I show that her critique is based on a degree of misapprehension of these three central ideas. While clarifying the details and the degree of my disagreement with Dietze, I provide my own critique of Dietze's proposal of “equal histories” by arguing that Dietze has not named or explained the unit with respect to which different histories could be considered equal. I also argue that Dietze's proposals about judging societies only by their “own” standards, and basing human dignity on the idea of a “human nature” that could be seen as a “constant,” do not solve the problems she sees with my book and are themselves open to some serious historical and logical criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central feature of the narrative structure of Collingwood's "The Idea of History" (IH) is the pivotal role accorded to Bradley, evident in the table of contents and in the two discussions of him. Few readers have noticed that, confusingly, the book's first discussion of Bradley (on pages 134-141) is a revision of the (1935) Inaugural Lecture "The Historical Imagination," which constitutes the book's second discussion of Bradley (on pages 231-249). The differences between these two presentations of Bradley are significant. The 1935 account (presented in IH on pages 231-249) seeks to portray the Bradley of the Presuppositions of Critical History as a Copernican revolutionary in historical thought, even though the neo-Kantian transcendentalism promoted in the Lecture had been the core of Collingwood's approach to philosophy of history from the mid-1920s, many years before he encountered Bradley's essay. By 1935 this transcendentalism was in the process of self-destructing because of inner contradictions. By 1936, once Collingwood's narrative and his criticisms of Bradley left the 1935 claims unsustainable, Collingwood shifted attention to Bradley's later works, in an unsuccessful attempt to sustain the notion of his originality (presented in IH on pages 134-141). Hitherto neglected Collingwood manuscripts held in the Bodleian prove that by 1940 Collingwood recognized this, so that the prominence Knox gave to Bradley in his editing of the IH is demonstrably not in accord with Collingwood's views and plans for The Idea of History. Knox's much-disputed claim that there was a radical shift to historicism in the later Collingwood is, however, confirmed, clear proof being adduced that in the later 1930s the attempt transcendentally to deduce universal and necessary presuppositions of historical knowledge is abandoned for a radically historicist account, paralleled by a demotion of "critical history" as the final form of "history proper" in favor of "scientific history." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Book reviewed in this article: Jürgen Pieters, Moments Of Negotiation: The New Historicism Of Stephen Greenblatt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Talks about the relationship between essentialism and historicism in Arthur C. Danto's philosophy of art from his book `Transfiguration of the Commonplace' up to his `After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History.' Argument of Danto on essentialism and historicism; Why the self-consciousness of modern art precipitated an identity crisis according to Danto; Philosophical reason of Danto why art cannot define itself.

Presents the reply to Georg G. Iggers' comment to the author's essay on historicism. Answer to Iggers' critique of Enlightenment historical writing; Break of historicism from Enlightenment account of change; Unacceptable view of historicists' account of historical change.

Presents the author's historiographical and theoretical disagreement with F.R. Ankersmit's essay on historicism. Distinction made by Ankersmit between Enlightenment historiography and historicism; Question raised on the relation of historicism and narrativism; Ankersmit's view on cultural history.

Deals with the new historicism developed by critic Stephen Greenblatt for which he coined the name `Poetics of Culture.' Movement which presents a new way of reading and interpreting texts; Definition of text; Characteristic of new historicism; Greenblatt's option for the economic metaphor; Interpretation of Shakespeare.

Argues that the German and Anglo-Saxon theorists' views on historicism support rather than exclude each other. German view of the dynamization of the static world-view of Enlightenment; De-rhetoricization of Enlightenment historical writing view of contemporary Anglo-Saxons; Transition from Enlightenment to historicist historical writing.

Focuses on presence of historicisms in French art and literature. Definition of hermeneutics by romanticists; Revolution in literature; Nature of the Restoration historians.

Focuses on the impact of historicism on the nature of historical consciousness in the French Renaissance. Contribution of the Roman law to the awareness of historical and cultural relativity; Distinction between historical consciousness and historical scholarship; Discussion on the traditional interpretation of historicism.

In what follows I shall seek to show that in the very language that the historian uses to describe his object of study, prior to any effort he may make formally to explain or interpret it, he subjects that object of study to the kind of distortion that "historicists" impose upon their materials in a more explicit and formal way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conclusion can perhaps be generalized -- at least tentatively -- by stating that in twentieth-century historicism there is in principle a connection between a retrospective philosophical attitude (and therefore, an attitude of justification of the past) and conservative political theories And that, in the opposite instance, the absence of such an attitude also means a lack of conservative ideological valences Determining if, and when, historicism has a conservative ideological significance, and when it has not, thus leads us to study not only the political theories (and positions) of the individual authors, but also their philosophical formulations and the correlations between the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that "historism" (to adopt the convention that gives its own term to the first stage of historicism) was ushered into the nineteenth century under the protective cover of transcendent ideas that modulated the confrontation with flux, multiformity, and factuality, and cushioned their shock Nowhere has the theme been demonstrated more fully than in the case of Ranke, whose explicit combination of Lutheran religiosity and Fichtean Neo-Platonism has been amply invoked for its supply both of dignity and meaning to particular historical facts and of a universal ground to the general connections between them The evidence is such that the theme can hardly be controverted, but there is reason to question whether it is entirely sufficient for the understanding of Ranke or -- by extension -- of early historicism Having gone as far as we can in the homogenization of Ranke, it should be rewarding to view him again from the perspective of what was heterogeneous in him For it is demonstrably true of Ranke, and arguably true for historism in general, that the cover did not entirely fit, and that both the relationship of transcendence to history and the relationship between the particular and the general levels of history whose connection depended on the historical relevance of the transcendent had something of the problematical about them For both levels of relations, there were aspects in which the connections had to be forged, in addition to those aspects m which they could be assumed
The essay that follows has been written from this perspective of the disjunction between and the mutual autonomy of Ranke's transcendental faith and has passion for particular historical truths Its aim is to plumb one stage of the experience that enabled him to join in historical practice what he could not harmonize in universal principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]