There has been among historians, philosophers, and semioticians a growing awareness of the theoretical strata involved in the writing of history. Within historical narratives we can find at least three major levels of theory: (i) the naming of events according to everyday concepts; (ii) the interpretation of the class of plot best fitted to the web of events to be narrated; and (iii) the implicit or explicit formal framework employed for systematic narrative. Like medical diagnosis, history applies general knowledge to singular situations; like history, medicine describes events, creates storylines, and draws on general models. This likeness is politically relevant when history is taken as another, higher kind of diagnosis: that of a national malaise in need of political cure. As an empirical case, we analyze a number of historical theories formulated as historical diagnoses in traumatic twentieth-century Spain, and then test the link between theories and therapies.
The English translation of Jörn Rüsen’s Historik is a major event in the global community of the theory of history. Few contemporary thinkers in this field have been so systematic and comprehensive as Rüsen. This book, rendered as Evidence and Meaning, is the outcome of a whole life devoted to the renewal of German historicism. Rüsen’s contribution mirrors the great debates held in West Germany since the 1960s about the theory of history (Historik), discussions that prompted a conjoint reassessment of the old dispute between historicist academia and Marxist or Weberian sociologism, including the consequences of the linguistic turn. Rüsen has opened the German historicist tradition toward spaces of compromise with the Western “scientific” or more generalizing history. Furthermore, Rüsen’s synthetic historicism, with its insistence on praxis, might be taken as a case of convergent evolution between German and American syntheses of historical life and historical knowledge.
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