Theory and Practice of Historical Writing in Times of Globalization

Abstract

In recent years, radical changes have taken place to the ways of thinking of historical writing, its methodology and its meaning as a specific field of knowledge. These changes are connected with the historical situation of which it is itself a part, and are also concerned both with a dispute within the discipline and with the current ethical-political debates that cannot accurately be removed from attempts to better understand today’s world. As part of these changes, we are faced with a radical review of historiographical paradigms. These changes concern not only the practice of historical writing, but also the role of history as a source of political legitimation and as a way in which individuals understand their belonging and commitment to the political-institutional frameworks within which they lead their lives. Like no other human science, history is an essentially interdisciplinary field whose boundaries are hard to define. Its repertoire of concepts not only has to do with the detailed and documented empirical reconstruction of what happened—it also has an interdependent relationship with other social disciplines concerning the topics involved in each case, so that any innovations in the theories of those disciplines have an impact on historical narratives (just as historical reconstructions can help to test and reconfigure them). On the other hand, historiography itself is also situated in a historical context, which it tries to understand simultaneously with shaping its concepts. The normative dimension of the historical account concerns not only the values a historian shares with her contemporaries, but also the secular role of history as a source of legitimation of power and of the identity policies for civic education. The changes in this role also entail modifications to the way individuals understand their belonging and commitment to the political-institutional frameworks within which they lead their lives. While recent debate in historical theory has revolved around two main themes —namely, the narrative structure of historical discourse and what we might call the ‘memory paradigm’—with globalization (and the thematization thereof in the context of the new ‘global history’), we enter a postnarrativist stage of the debate, in Daniel Brauer, Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) / Centro de Investigaciones Filosóficas (CIF) OpenAccess. © 2018 Daniel Brauer, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110492415-029 Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 3:26 AM which, as regards the first theme, the empirical character of historical research is recovered. In this way, it becomes possible to exit the blind alley of historiography understood as a purely linguistic construction, consisting in a matrix of timeless rhetorical and narrative devices, independent of any cognitive claim. As regards the second theme, by placing history in the context of the debate concerning a better understanding of its own time, it is possible to account for its role in the exploration of the past as well as in the diagnosis of the present and the attempts to think of and act in future events. One of the consequences of the post-ethnocentric ‘global history’ project is a critical rehabilitation of key aspects of the vilified ‘speculative’ philosophy of history.