How History Works assesses the social function of academic knowledge in the humanities, exemplified by history, and offers a critique of the validity of historical knowledge. The book focusses on history’s academic, disciplinary ethos to offer a reconception of the discipline of history, arguing that it is an existential liability: if critical analysis reveals the sense that history offers to the world to be illusory, what stops historical scholarship from becoming a disguise for pessimism or nihilism? History is routinely invoked in all kinds of cultural, political, economic, psychological situations to provide a reliable account or justification of what is happening. Moreover, it addresses a world already receptive to comprehensive historical explanations: since everyone has some knowledge of history, everyone can be manipulated by it. This book analyses the relationship between specialized knowledge and everyday experience, taking phenomenology (Husserl) and pragmatism (James) as methodological guides. It is informed by a wide literature sceptical of the sense academic historical expertise produces and of the work history does, represented by thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Valéry, Anders and Cioran. How History Works discusses how history makes sense of the world even if what happens is senseless, arguing that behind the smoke-screen of historical scholarship looms a chaotic world-dynamic indifferent to human existence. It is valuable reading for anyone interested in historiography and historical theory.
Author(s): Martin L. Davies
Series: Routledge Approaches To History | 16
Edition: 1
Publisher: Routledge | Taylor & Francis Group
Year: 2016
Language: English
Commentary: TruePDF
Pages: 195
Tags: History: Philosophy; History: Social Aspects
How History Works - Front Cover
How History Works
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Introduction
What are you doing when you do history?
History: working the way the world works
What does history do?
Note
Chapter 1: The situation of historical knowledge: The historicized world
A world already shaped by history
A world that has historically superseded itself
The compulsive self-historicization of the world
Notes
Chapter 2: The technology of historical knowledge: Management systems
The constitution of academic disciplines
The academic standpoint
Preconditions for the production of historical sense
Notes
Chapter 3: The logic of historical knowledge: Causality, rationality, identity
‘Universal idealized causality’
The insufficiency of reason
Identitary thinking
Notes
Chapter 4: The organization of historical knowledge: Categorical coordinators; rhetorical strategy
Structures of coherence
Dynamic forces
Stabilizing components
Summary
Notes
Chapter 5: The purpose of historical knowledge: Comprehension
Historicization: a ‘natural attitude’
Comprehensive knowledge: institutionalized knowledge
The redundancy of a ‘great truth’
Notes
Conclusion: The psychopathology of historicized life
Between aftermath and premonition
‘A world of frightened men’: apprehension
‘Reality precisely reflected’
Notes
Glossary
References
Index
