History in Times of Unprecedented Change

A Theory for the 21st Century

Zoltán Boldizsár Simon

Published: 13-06-2019

Format: Hardback

Edition: 1st

Extent: 256

ISBN: 9781350095052

Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic

Dimensions: 234 x 156 mm

RRP: £85.00

Online price: £76.50

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About History in Times of Unprecedented Change

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.

Table of contents

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