1st Edition

Words in Time A Plea for Historical Re-thinking

By Francesco Benigno Copyright 2017
    204 Pages
    by Routledge

    204 Pages
    by Routledge

    Through questions such as ‘What is power?’, ‘How are revolutions generated?’, ‘Does public opinion really exist?’, ‘What does terrorism mean?’ and ‘When are generations created?’, Words in Time scrutinizes the fundamental concepts by which we confer meaning to the historical and social world and what they actually signify, analysing their formation and use in modern thought within both history and the social sciences.

    In this volume, Francesco Benigno examines the origins and development of the words we use, critiquing the ways in which they have traditionally been employed in historical thinking and examining their potential usefulness today. Rather than being a general inventory or a specialized dictionary, this book analyses a selection of words particularly relevant not only in the idiom and jargon of the social sciences and history, but also in the discourse of ordinary people.

    Exploring new trends in the historical field of reflection and representing a call for a new, more conscious, historical approach to the social world, this is valuable reading for all students of historical theory and method.

    Acknowledgements

    Introduction: writing history at a time of memory

    0.1 The distancing of modern

    0.2 The challenge of memory

    0.3 Traditional history vs memorial history?

    0.4 Conclusion: a plea for critical history

     

    Part I Rethinking Early Modern Europe

    Chapter 1 Violence

    Rites of violence?

    Different from us

    Losing one’s head

    Conclusions: violence as judgement

    Chapter 2 Popular culture

    2.1 The standard historiographical understanding of popular culture

    2.2 A thousand Menocchio

    2.3 The hermeneutical turn

    2.4 Folklore and reflexive anthropology

    2.5 Inventing the people

    2.6 Conclusions: rethinking the concept of popular

     

    Chapter 3 Public opinion

    3.1 Critique as the matrix of the crisis

    3.2 An utopia of communication

    3.3 A deformed ancien régime

    3.4 Possible pluralisms

    3.5 Conclusions: counterposed rhetorics

     

    Chapter 4 Revolutions

    4.1 After the revisionisms

    4.2 The mother of all revolutions

    4.3 Revolutions before "the Revolution"

    4.4 Conclusions: revolutions and public memory

     

    Part II Rethinking Modernity

    Chapter 5 Identity

    5.1 There was once a thing called class

    5.2 Between radical individualism and representations

    5.3 The discovery of identity

    5.4 New types of subjectivity

    5.5 The modernity we have lost

    5.6 The liquified world

    5.7 Simul stabunt simul cadent: nation, class and identitary divisions

    5.8 Conclusions: coming in terms with lost innocence

    Chapter 6 Power

    6.1 The time of Grand Theories

    6.2 The anti-positivistic reaction

    6.3 Foucault

    6.4 Power in social organizations

    6.5 Power, institutions, identity

    6.6 Conclusions: the communicative dimension of power

    Chapter 7 Generations

    7.1 Wave on wave

    7.2 Grounding the concept of generation

    7.3 Historians and the concept of generation

    7.4 Generational memory and constructing of an event

    7.5 Conclusions: the generation call

    Chapter 8 Terrorism

    8.1 Improbable definitions and unbelievable genealogies

    8.2 Revolutionary terrorism

    8.3 Insurgency and counter-insurgency

    8.4 The evil scourge

    8.5 Conclusions: terrorism on the stage

    Index

    Biography

    Francesco Benigno is Professor of History at Teramo University, Italy, and the author of several books, including Mirrors of Revolution: Conflict and Political Identity in Early Modern Europe (Brepols, 2010).

    "Francesco Benigno offers a panoramic overview of methodological issues in contemporary historical writing. Like many historiographers in our times, he provides a perspective on the proposition that we have crossed from a modern into a postmodern age.[...]His message seems to be that historiography, when viewed from the perspective of actual historians at work, is a dynamic process that mimics the speed of communication in our times."

    -Patrick Hutton, University of Vermont, Journal of Modern History