The Future of History
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
For more than sixty years, John Lukacs has been writing, teaching, and reading about the past. In this inspired volume, he turns his attention to the future. Throughout The Future of History, Lukacs reflects on his discipline, eloquently arguing that the writing and teaching of history are literary rather than scientific, comprising knowledge that is neither wholly objective nor subjective. History at its best, he contends, is personal and participatory.
Despite a recently unprecedented appetite for history among the general public, as evidenced by history television program ratings, sales of popular history books, and increased participation in local historical societies, Lukacs believes that the historical profession is in a state of disarray. He traces a decline in history teaching throughout higher education, matched by a corresponding reduction in the number of history students. He reviews a series of short-lived fads within the profession that have weakened the fundamentals of the field. In looking for a way forward, Lukacs explores the critical relationships between history and literature, including ways in which novelists have contributed to historical understanding. Through this startling and enlightening work, readers will understand Lukacs's assertion that "everything has its history, including history" and that history itself has a future, since everything we know comes from the past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The self-confessed reactionary Lukacs (Five Days in London) renders another lament for the passing of not just a historical generation, but an epoch. His perspective stretches back more than 400 years this time, to the Renaissance, with special emphasis on the 1750s, when a patrician western European bourgeoisie flourished. He mourns the departure of larger-than-life individuals, like Churchill and Napoleon, and historians like Acton and Burkhardt, who wrote about "politics and states and their leading persons." For him, the modern age, with its science and technology, is a pale replica, characterized by bureaucracy, anonymity, and mediocrity that pervade politics, education, even life itself. Lukacs memorializes the passing of the old order, and even questions the meaning of history and historians, the difference between history and fiction and how both relate to truth and justice, and what he calls our "choice" of ideas. It could be argued that the life Lukacs misses has continued, but in channels other than the ones the author prefers; new pens for the emerging story of mankind have been created. This slim requiem is full of reminiscences of a lost world which will likely ring hollow to many American ears.
