Evidence and Meaning

Jorn Rusen is Professor Emeritus of History and Historical Culture at Witten/Herdecke University, and has also taught at the Universities of Bochum and Bielefeld. His books and articles have been translated into twenty different languages. Dr. Rusen is the Founding Editor of the Berghahn Books series Making Sense of History.

“The English translation of Jörn Rüsen’s Historik is a major event in the global community of practitioners of the philosophy, methodology, logic or, broadly speaking, theory of history. Now ideas of universal value speak the universal koine…it is hard to find in all of academia a more suitable book for introducing in an orderly manner the metatheoretical results of 150 years of debates on the nature of history.” • Journal of the Philosophy of History“This book is the late aggregate of numerous ground-breaking texts on the theory of history that Rüsen has published since the end of the 1960s. Rüsen has, in this book, pooled and consolidated many approaches to thinking about the theory of history… Reading and discussing Rüsen’s book… could be, for all history teacher students, one leg in their journeys to becoming routined teachers and something that they will gratefully remember after many years of professional practice.” • Public History Weekly“Rüsen succeeds overall to fulfill the claim of a comprehensive fundamental synthesis. The openness and time-bound nature of a work should be understood as an invitation to develop further the theory of historiography. Rüsen himself has offered, and not only with this book, an important contribution.” • H-Soz-Kult

• List of Tables and FiguresPrefaceIntroductionChapter 1. What is Metahistory?Chapter 2. The Foundation of Historical ThinkingChapter 3. History as Academic DisciplineChapter 4. A Systematic Approach: Categories, Theories, ConceptsChapter 5. Methodology: The Rules of the Historical MethodChapter 6. Topics: How We Write HistoryChapter 7. The Basis of Historical CultureChapter 8. Practical History: Learning, Understanding, HumanityFinal Reflections: Finding Reason between Meaning and MeaninglessnessBibliographyIndex