Politics of Historical Thinking – serie

This book is about the production and consumption of history, themes that have gained in importance since the discipline's attempts to disavow its own authority with the ascendancy of postmodern and postcolonial perspectives. Several parallel themes crosscut the book’s central focus on the discipline of history: its intellectual history, its historiography, and its connection to memory, particularly in relation to the need to establish the collective identity of ‘nation’, ‘community’ or state through a memorialisation process that has much to do with history, or at least with claiming a historicity for collective memory. None of this can be undertaken without an understanding of the roles that history-writing and history-reading have been made to perform in public debates, or perhaps more accurately in public disputes. The book addresses a discomfort with postcolonial theories in and as history. Following are essays that examine the state of the discipline, the art of reading and using archives, practices of tracking the history of ideas, and the themes of history, memory and identity.

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Despite its prominence in public discourse, the notion of elites remains a highly contested and ambiguous part of modern political discourse. This monograph rehabilitates the idea of elites and gives it a solid theoretical footing, while relating it with the historical development of liberal thought in the west. The analysis offered in the book concentrates on the tradition of liberal political thought in France, which has consistently tackled the question of the elites, their role in society, and the process of their formation.Combining theoretical insights with practical wisdom, French liberal thinkers have seen the elite as an indispensable social category and as a vehicle for the development of human liberty. In their different prescriptive doctrines, French liberal thinkers have sought to reconcile the emergence of social elites with the requirements of social and political equality, as well as with the ongoing modernization of mores and institutions. The monograph offers a unique contribution to scholarship in modern political thought by engaging analytically with the notion of elites, as well as by offering a structured discussion on the historical development of liberalism in France.

This book is the first systematic study of the genealogy, discursive structures, and political implications of the concept of ‘Greater India’, implying a Hindu colonization of Southeast Asia, and used by extension to argue for a past Indian greatness as a colonial power, reproducible in the present and future. From the 1880s to the 1960s, protagonists of the Greater India theme attempted to make a case for the importance of an expansionist Indian civilisation in civilizing Southeast Asia. The argument was extended to include Central Asia, Africa, North and South America, and other regions where Indian migrants were to be found. The advocates of this Indocentric and Hindu revivalist approach, with Hindu and Indian often taken to be synonymous, were involved in a quintessentially parochial project, despite its apparently international dimensions: to justify an Indian expansionist imagination that viewed India’s past as a colonizer and civilizer of other lands as a model for the restoration of that past greatness in the future. Zabarskaite shows that the crucial ideologues and elements used for the formation of the construct of Greater India can be traced to the svadeśī movement of the turn of the century, and that Greater India moved easily between the domains of the scholarly and the popular as it sought to establish itself as a form of nationalist self-assertion.

The past decades public interest in history is booming. This creates new opportunities but also challenges for professional historians. This book asks how historians deal with changing public demands for history and how these affect their professional practices, values and identities. The volume offers a great variety of detailed studies of cases where historians have applied their expertise outside the academic sphere. With contributions focusing on Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Pacific and Europe the book has a broad geographical scope. Subdivided in five sections, the book starts with a critical look back on some historians who broke with mainstream academic positions by combining their professional activities with an explicit political partisanship or social engagement. The second section focusses on the challenges historians are confronted with when entering the court room or more generally exposing their expertise to legal frameworks. The third section focuses on the effects of policy driven demands as well as direct political interventions and regulations on the historical profession. A fourth section looks at the challenges and opportunities related to the rise of new digital media. Finally several authors offer their view on normative standards that may help to better respond to new demands and to define role models for publicly engaged historians. This book aims at historians and other academics interested in public uses of history.

What we know as history from below has long been considered a more democratic form of history-writing and research than forms of history that have counted, sometimes by default, as elite, and therefore by implication elitist. But history from below also has a tendency towards populism: an emphasis on authenticity, on voices uncontaminated by elite narratives, and a focus on the indigenous. Apart from its having a long-standing problem of finding sources to ‘give voice’ to the underrepresented, the question as to who can write about (and therefore represent) the people below, and a possible focus, in consequence, on themes of blood, soil, and the Volk. This volume explores, over nine essays and an introductory thematic essay, these tensions and dichotomies. The purpose is to bring to the foreground a long-standing danger of celebrating voices from below, perhaps uncritically at times, and therefore also of a romanticisation of those voices.

What is history? What are historians doing, when we create our histories? The need for answers is more urgent than ever. We live in an era when history is often rejected or ignored, and when all teachers of history confront formidable challenges. In the culture of screen capitalism and social media, historical knowledge is evaded in an expanding present-minded consciousness. How can history be defended, and what is it that we are defending?This book argues that history is a mode of thinking, a form of imaginative reasoning with its own informal logic. In non-technical language and using examples from important works of history, the book defines core elements in historical thinking. These include contingency, complexity, temporality, parts and wholes, consilience, perspectives, analogy, and abduction. These elements are subsumed into the concept of imaginative reasoning. The overall argument echoes the work of hermeneutic philosophers. History is a disciplined imagination, tempered and empowered by its forms of reasoning. It embraces ethical imperatives that the historian has a duty to declare. Equipped with such understanding, historians may answer the many rejections of history and secure its place in our shared futures.Winner of this year's Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titles: www.choice360.org/choice-pick/outstanding-academic-titles-2025

What is history? What are historians doing, when we create our histories? The need for answers is more urgent than ever. We live in an era when history is often rejected or ignored, and when all teachers of history confront formidable challenges. In the culture of screen capitalism and social media, historical knowledge is evaded in an expanding present-minded consciousness. How can history be defended, and what is it that we are defending?This book argues that history is a mode of thinking, a form of imaginative reasoning with its own informal logic. In non-technical language and using examples from important works of history, the book defines core elements in historical thinking. These include contingency, complexity, temporality, parts and wholes, consilience, perspectives, analogy, and abduction. These elements are subsumed into the concept of imaginative reasoning. The overall argument echoes the work of hermeneutic philosophers. History is a disciplined imagination, tempered and empowered by its forms of reasoning. It embraces ethical imperatives that the historian has a duty to declare. Equipped with such understanding, historians may answer the many rejections of history and secure its place in our shared futures.Winner of this year's Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titles: www.choice360.org/choice-pick/outstanding-academic-titles-2025

This book focuses on political presuppositions animating modern historical reflection in Germany that underwent sharp radicalization in the post-World War I context of the Weimar Republic. It is in this context that a novel polemical use of political concepts, nourished by radical forms of reflection on the historical character of human existence, brought to the fore interpretations of collective mentalities or group perspectives that crystallized in specific conceptions of “ideology” and of “political myth”. By centering analysis on the insight of a variety of twentieth-century thinkers whose works are of central importance for the elucidation of this topic, the author examines different interpretations of the role of reflection on human historicity in the elaboration of this novel polemical use of political concepts. Beyond an historical inquiry into this topic, this work aims to provide a theoretical investigation to elucidate the complex range of significations of the concepts of “ideology” and of “political myth”, the province of each of these concepts in the delineation of group perspectives, and the problematic legacy that the polemical use of these concepts has bequeathed to the contemporary world.