Our understanding of ourselves and the world as historical has drastically changed since the postwar period, yet this emerging historical sensibility has not been appropriately explained in a coherent theory of history. In this book, Zoltán Simon argues that instead of seeing the past, the present and the future together on a temporal continuum as history, we now expect unprecedented change to happen in the future (in visions of the future of technology, ecology and nuclear warfare) and we look at the past by assuming that such changes have already happened. This radical theory of history challenges narrative conceptualizations of history which assume a past potential of humanity unfolding over time to reach future fulfillment and seeks new ways of conceptualizing the altered socio-cultural concerns Western societies are currently facing. By creating a novel set of concepts to make sense of our altered historical condition regarding both history understood as the course of human affairs and historical writing, History in Times of Unprecedented Change offers a highly original and engaging take on the state of history and historical theory in the present and beyond.
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Acknowledgements Preface: On Novelty Living in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Prologue Part I - On Historical Change 1. A Quasi-Substantive Philosophy of History 2. The Dissociated Past 3. The Unprecedented Future Part II - On Historiographical Change 4. The Expression of Historical Experience 5. Encountering the World 6. The Step towards Historical Sense-Making The Unprecedented and the Crisis of the Political: An Epilogue Bibliography Index
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In History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century, Zoltán Boldizsár Simon offers a groundbreaking examination of the historical sensibility centered on unprecedented change that has coalesced since the mid-twentieth century ... his book is timely and invigorating, and it stands as a new signpost in historical thought.
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An innovative conceptualization of history as unprecedented change resulting from technology and the Anthropocene in the 21st century and beyond.
Explores how technological and ecological discourses are transforming our conceptualization of the world as 'historical'

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781350095052
Publisert
2019-06-13
Utgiver
Vendor
Bloomsbury Academic
Vekt
494 gr
Høyde
234 mm
Bredde
156 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
224

Om bidragsyterne

Zoltán Boldizsár Simon is Research Fellow and Board Member of the Centre for Theories in Historical Research at Bielefeld University, Germany.