History and Theory最新文献

{"title":"REVISITING MONTAILLOU","authors":"EWA DOMANSKA","doi":"10.1111/hith.12372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12372","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Based on extensive scholarship in English and French, this article offers an analytical survey of both the laudatory and critical reception of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's <i>Montaillou</i> (1975). I revisit the Latin text of Jacques Fournier's register and compare it with relevant fragments in the French and English translations of <i>Montaillou</i>. This comparison provides a starting point to comment on Le Roy Ladurie's novelistic writing style and the “hypnotic effect of narrative” achieved by the book. It also enables me to address historians’ criticisms of how Le Roy Ladurie used historical sources. In the second part of the article, I discuss anthropological history and the history of mentality as subdisciplines of contemporary historical writing, and I situate <i>Montaillou</i> within this tradition. Following Charles Tilly, I argue that Le Roy Ladurie's work is an example of “retrospective ethnography,” a term that more accurately describes Le Roy Ladurie's traditional approach to anthropological research, particularly the method of participatory observation. I also highlight prosopography as a method in Le Roy Ladurie's study of social relations in the medieval village. In conclusion, I reflect on the contemporary relevance of <i>Montaillou</i> for supporting human dignity and agency as well as the “humanity of history” needed in times of social and political upheaval.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"64 1","pages":"3-23"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143497359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"MISFITS, POWER, AND HISTORY: RETHINKING ABILITY THROUGH AN ANIMAL LENS","authors":"ANDREW FLACK,&nbsp;ALICE WOULD","doi":"10.1111/hith.12368","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12368","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this article, we construct a critical history of “ability” by focusing on the specific case study of dark-dwelling animals and the ways in which they have been understood over the course of modernity. Such creatures were frequently the subjects of assumptions and judgments about what they could and could not do. Dark places have historically been imagined as extreme environments and as home to equally strange beings. We argue that discourse relating to dark-dwellers—from bats and hedgehogs to deep-sea creatures—reveals that ability, in the animal context, relates to several connected ideas and phenomena. Not least, these include ideas around specialization, adaptation and adaptability, the concentrated interrogation of “special” sensory organs and neurological pathways, and the idealized coherence between a body and its wider environment. We also show that the idea of ability became increasingly inseparable from notions of vulnerability, resilience, and care especially in the context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century environmental change. The concept of ability, then, was a shifting constellation of many different ideas, and our study underlines how big ideas such as ability are far from homogenous in character but instead are complex, multilayered, and of their time. Reconceptualizing these kinds of ideas about “ability,” particularly as they manifested across diverse contexts, is crucial for understanding how people understood themselves and other beings across time and space. Such an approach to the history of ability matters. It points to the urgency of interrogating the roots of a seemingly everyday idea, one that appears commonplace and apparently unproblematic but that has material consequences for all living beings, human and animal, across a wide range of environments.</p>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"64 1","pages":"75-95"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hith.12368","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143497266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"INHERITANCE AND INCEST: TOWARD A LÉVI-STRAUSSIAN READING OF MONTESQUIEU'S DE L'ESPRIT DES LOIS1","authors":"Paul Cheney","doi":"10.1111/hith.12369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12369","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The premise of this article is that Montesquieu, while seen as an Enlightenment thinker who contributed centrally to the development of the social sciences before the period of discipline formation in the nineteenth century, is generally appreciated in only the vaguest of terms. To the degree that he has been seen as a social theorist rather than as a belletrist or a political writer, scholars have had to amputate major sections of his masterwork, <i>De l'esprit des lois</i> (1748). In so doing, they have tended to give false or at least only partial readings of a work whose author insisted must be read as a whole. This article proceeds in an unorthodox fashion—at least for a historian—through a reading of <i>De l'esprit des lois</i> against Claude Lévi-Strauss's <i>Les structures élémentaires de la parenté</i> (1949). Through this parallel reading, I establish that Montesquieu's treatment of inheritance bears a remarkable homology with Lévi-Strauss's treatment of incest in <i>Les structures élémentaires</i>. These authors saw their respective objects—the incest taboo, in one case, and inheritance law, in the other—as fundamental to regulating sociability itself. This technique offers a more unified reading of <i>De l'esprit des lois</i> and, in so doing, reassesses Montesquieu's contribution to modern social theory. From a methodological point of view, I am hoping to interest my readers in an alternative way of reading historical texts: juxtaposing texts or corpora that do not have the clear genetic links between them that are generally highly valued by historians. This is an example of what Robert B. Pippin has called “interanimation” and what I have elsewhere likened to the painterly technique of simultaneous contrast.</p>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"64 1","pages":"46-74"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hith.12369","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143497358","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"CREATIVE DISINTEGRATION: THE PERPETUAL EMERGENCE OF MODERN POLITICAL THOUGHT","authors":"IAN HUNTER","doi":"10.1111/hith.12376","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12376","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Michael Sonenscher's <i>After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought</i> offers a rich overview of nineteenth-century French, Swiss, and German political thought. The work's central argument is that modern political thought emerges in a series of attempts to close germinal “gaps” opened in the fabric of European intellectual life by Kant's philosophy and philosophical history. Less a narrative than a bricolage, the work consists of a myriad of intellectual cameos, walk-on roles, philosophical speculations, and political and social theories whose detail threatens to overwhelm even the most assiduous reader. The most striking feature of Sonenscher's book, however, is its theoretical method. Measuring his distance from both dialectical philosophical history and Cambridge school contextualism, Sonenscher makes powerful use of a method of intellectual history whose last great exponent was Arthur Lovejoy. Under this method, political thought is neither governed by the telos of self-consciousness nor explicable in terms of the historical circumstances in which it has arisen and whose uses and purposes it might serve. Instead, political thought “emerges” unforeseen from a condition of sheer metaphysical indeterminacy. This condition is brought about by the dissolution of prior conceptual oppositions in an amnesic maelstrom of inversions, arguments, and debates. New oppositions are then created through “chance and choice” only to disintegrate in their turn, leading to further cycles of destruction and recreation that Sonenscher calls “palingenesis.” This anti-contextual method is responsible for the rich mosaic of intellectual fragments that the reader encounters in this engaging book. It is also responsible for the book's central shortcoming, for it renders the author oblivious to the way in which their impact on those forced to live and think through them makes historical circumstances resistant to their metaphysical liquefaction, with this in turn making Sonenscher heedless of the historian's duty to investigate these circumstances.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"64 2","pages":"281-300"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143950284","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"THE ADVANCEMENT OF KNOWLEDGE NOW, OR THE HISTORY OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM","authors":"CLIFFORD SISKIN","doi":"10.1111/hith.12371","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12371","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>What role should history play in the advancement of knowledge? Because it was so “hard,” so “unbelievably difficult … to get people to believe” in his <i>Great Renewal</i>, Francis Bacon thought a history of knowledge could provide evidence of advancement—a reason to “believe” and participate in his experiment. By indexing advancement, historians of knowledge could foster it. If Bacon were with us today, he would be happy to hear that the history of knowledge is a thriving enterprise. But upon reading our version, he would be dismayed to discover that advancement is nowhere to be found. It's the elephant in the room. That shouldn't surprise him or us—the great difficulty of <i>The Great Renewal</i> is that it always needs to be renewed—but this is a new kind of precarity. I call it friendly fire, because it's damage done not by those who wish to contain or undermine knowledge but by those whose purpose it is to produce and valorize it. Why, I ask in this article, is a volume that offers so much of value—<i>Information: A Historical Companion</i>—so unattuned to issues of advancement? Although occasioned by the current ubiquity of “information,” its focus is not on change—asking such questions as “why information?” and “why now?”—but on asserting the “belief” that “every age is an information age.” In a history built on that belief, change is relegated to subordinate clauses (“while recognizing changes over time”) and advancement isn't even on the table. I put it back on not by rejecting this companion but by providing a companion for it, one in which identifying and classifying change is the central task. I take two preparatory steps. First, I clarify how the concept of “culture” configures the agenda and the findings of Companion 1 while fencing out advancement. Second, I set the agenda for Companion 2 by specifying that the knowledge at stake in advancement is “explanatory knowledge.” I both address concerns about the notion of “progress” and provide a vocabulary for explanation highlighted by the concepts of “fit” and “reach.” Companion 2 then approaches the elephant from a number of angles, from a shift in information over four centuries from a matrix of currency to a matrix of possibility to the pacing of that change by a feature of the history of knowledge that I call the “sequence of surprise.” Since Bacon's highest hope for his history of knowledge was to make us better at advancing it, I conclude with a speculative turn to information's future, from Alan Turing's first use of the word “information” in its modern sense to a rethinking—through the history of knowledge—of the “hallucination” issue in our new forms of generative AI.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"64 1","pages":"96-122"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-11-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143497231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"SENSORY EXPERIMENTS, SENSORY ORDERS, AND AESTHETIC EDUCATION","authors":"Premesh Lalu","doi":"10.1111/hith.12375","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12375","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Erica Fretwell's <i>Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling</i> (2020) raises crucial questions about the making of a concept of difference through marshaling the senses to the ends of a sensory order in postbellum United States. In this essay, I argue that Fretwell's book has opened a crucial horizon for rethinking how race and ideas of difference marking gender and disability were remade through the short-lived but deeply consequential science of psychophysics. While the study focuses on how psychophysics and its aftermaths recast questions of difference in the US, Fretwell indirectly poses a major challenge for the critique of the twentieth-century experience of race elsewhere—for example, of apartheid in South Africa. In this review essay, I argue that, beyond the US, Fretwell's meticulously elaborated argument renews approaches to the problem and problematization of race and difference. Read in relation to the making of race in South Africa, the book inadvertently brings into view a deceptive plot of petty apartheid, a banal everyday constitution of a sensory order that shares its origins in the discourse of psychophysics. When placed alongside the more pronounced forms of grand apartheid, the resultant psychophysical aesthesis conscripts the human sensorium to a cybernetic mode of power that shifts between a racialization of labor and a racialization of desire. Fretwell effectively invites us to consider the endpoints of psychophysics in a hierarchy of the senses, for which an aesthetic education may yet be required to short-circuit and reroute the senses through intervals of synesthesia.</p>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"64 1","pages":"146-155"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hith.12375","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143497206","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"HOW SHOULD HISTORIANS EMPATHIZE?","authors":"TAYNNA M. MARINO","doi":"10.1111/hith.12361","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12361","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Reflecting on the ethical and unethical ways of empathizing is a necessary task for historians interested in the ethics of history. Research on empathy often classifies its various parts into affective, cognitive, and prosocial dimensions. However, in historical scholarship, the cognitive-intellectual dimension of empathy is overemphasized to the detriment of its affective and prosocial dimensions, whose roles in determining the ways historians should practice history are often disregarded. In this article, I will discuss the relations between empathy and ethics and how historians should empathize. Doing so, I argue that empathy's ethical potential for historical scholarship needs to be de-intellectualized by historical scholarship, a task that requires a complementary and supplementary approach to empathy that is in dialogue with moral philosophy, psychology, neurosciences, and animal studies. Only by recognizing empathy as a socially developed evolutionary capacity shared among humans and other species can historians fully develop its possibilities as a tool to guide human morality and ethical decision-making. Finally, I will claim that empathy as an ethical imperative for an ethics of care and vulnerability should guide historians' ethics toward more responsive and responsible ways of relating with others across time, space, cultures, generations, species, and so on.</p>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"63 4","pages":"43-64"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hith.12361","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142596232","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“TESTIMONY STOPS WHERE HISTORY BEGINS”: UNDERSTANDING AND ETHICS IN RELATION TO HISTORICAL AND PRACTICAL PASTS","authors":"JONAS AHLSKOG","doi":"10.1111/hith.12362","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12362","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article explores the relation between testimony and history by considering the recent “ethical turn” toward experience and memory in historical research. By way of a brief history of the concept of testimony in historical research, the article pinpoints current discussions as being about historical understanding rather than factual knowledge about the past. With reference to the revaluation of history within the linguistic turn, influential historical theorists have argued that abandoning objectivism calls for a rapprochement between historical research and attempts to make sense of the past in accounts of memory. Both history and memory accounts, they argue, offer forms of understanding that are equally conditioned by language as well as politics, culture, and identity. Thus, the inclusion of testimony has been framed as not only legitimate but also important for an “ethical” understanding of the past within historiographical discourse. In relation to this development, the article shows that abandoning objectivism in the wake of the linguistic turn cannot justify a general rapprochement between history and memory accounts. On the contrary, abandoning objectivism only increases the importance of appreciating the conceptual distinction between testimony and history as different forms of understanding. For clarifying the conceptual distinction, the article reexamines R. G. Collingwood's (in)famous contention that “testimony … stops where history begins.” Collingwood's main point was not, as previous interpreters have argued, only about epistemology but was about the qualitative difference between historical and practical pasts. In conclusion, the article articulates the importance of the distinction between history and practice in relation to questions about the historian's ethical responsibility.</p>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"63 4","pages":"23-42"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hith.12362","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142596230","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A HOUSE WITH EXPOSED BEAMS: INQUIRY-BASED LEARNING AND HISTORIANS’ ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITIES AS SCHOLAR-TEACHERS","authors":"Zachary Conn","doi":"10.1111/hith.12366","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12366","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"63 4","pages":"106-127"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hith.12366","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142596331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"OPEN LETTERS IN CLOSED SOCIETIES: THE VALUES OF HISTORIANS UNDER ATTACK","authors":"Antoon De Baets","doi":"10.1111/hith.12365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12365","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This article explores a question of practical ethics: To which values do historians appeal when they come under sustained attack from political power? An important instrument of historians living in closed societies to express their values is the open letter, defined as an unauthorized public statement cast in epistolary form and addressed to either political leaders or fellow historians, but always with the general public as a silent reader in the background. Limited to the post-1945 period, a search for such open letters yielded 106 examples from 39 countries in closed and open societies. Four types of open letters were identified: those describing repression effects, those rebutting official historical views, those defending basic principles, and those presenting transitional historiography. Nine telling cases from six closed societies were then reviewed in detail and analyzed from a variety of angles (authorship, rhetoric, audience, impact, criticism, regime stage, and regime type). When these cases were examined in light of the initial question, it was found that most letters contained a great diversity of values but focused on how the human rights of historians were threatened. Invariably, their theme was historical writing in its full breadth, including its documentary infrastructure and its ramifications in education and the public sphere. Respect for historical truth was invoked more than any other value. It was a minimalist truth conception, however, understood as the absence of historical lies and falsification. The reason for this emphasis on an integrity-oriented conception of historical truth may lie in an old and deep-seated professional fear: the fear that the dictator's corrupted and divisive version of history survives and triumphs as the final verdict.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"63 4","pages":"152-175"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142596332","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}