Samuel Moyn, “Imaginary Intellectual History” (2014) In this sense, a proper social history of ideas is the only plausible kind of history of ideas there is.” “There is no idea that is not social, and no society not ideationally founded. “History at its best is the most subversive discipline, inasmuch as it can tell us how things that we like to take for granted came to be.” Peter Gay, “The Social History of Ideas” (1967) “A work of history may be a work of art, calling (like a painting) for iconographical analysis and aesthetic appreciation, but it is also an argument, a structure of propositions, and, unlike its claim to beauty, its claim to truth can be investigated and tested, and its argumentation, its documentation, and its demonstration, confirmed, modified, or rejected.” “History has to be rewritten in every generation, because although the past does not change the present does each generation asks new questions of the past, and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors.”Ĭhristopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (1972) Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics” (1967) “It is true that in retrospect-that is, in historical perspective-every sequence of events looks as though it could not have happened otherwise, but this is an optical, or, rather, an existential, illusion: nothing could ever happen if reality did not kill, by definition, all the other potentialities originally inherent in any given situation.” “The historian of tomorrow will be a computer programmer or nothing at all.”Įmmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Le Territoire de l’historien (1973/78) Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) I would distrust a humanism which was too indifferent to the efforts of the men of former times if the disclosure of being achieved by our ancestors does not at all move us, why be so interested in that which is taking place today why wish so ardently for future realizations? To assert the reign of the human is to acknowledge man in the past as well in the future.” “To abandon the past to the night of facticity is a way of depopulating the world. There is a shape to the past, and it is only by understanding it that we can begin to have a sense of the historical opportunities that exist in the present.” “oments of historical opportunity-moments when meaningful change is possible-follow a distinct, even a cyclical pattern, one that has long been far more coordinated across geographical space than we would ever have imagined. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France (1980) Hobsbawm, as quoted in the epigraph to William H. “I would like to restore to men of the past, and especially the poor of the past, the gift of theory.”Įric J. Élisée Reclus, Nouvelle Géographie universelle, Vol. “Geography is nothing other than history through space, in the same way that history is geography through time.” James Baldwin, speech at the National Press Club (1986) History is not even the past, it’s the present, because everybody operates, whether or not we know it, out of assumptions which are produced only, and only by, our history.” History is not something you read about in a book. “One of the things that has always afflicted the American reality and the American vision is this aversion to history. Heraclitus, in Plato’s Cratylus (4thC BCE) you cannot step twice into the same stream.” “Everything changes and nothing remains still. History is carried in the mind to the remotest places to determine what one’s acts mean even there, and who can say how much it weighs for those who carry it?” means an act imagined as being situated in the context of other such acts and as it will be perceived by others it arises from a social imagination of how one’s private act fits into public life. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension.” “Causes and effects assume history marches forward, but history is not an army. “People think of history in the long term, but history, in fact, is a very sudden thing.” Richard Siken, “Little Beast,” Crush (2005) “History is a little man in a brown suit / trying to define a room he is outside of.” Zora Neale Hurston, “Escape from Pharaoh” (1950) “he present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.” “here are no gestures, words, or sighs that do not contain the sum of all the crimes that human beings have committed or will commit.”Įlena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (2011) Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (1981)
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