skip to main content
Idioma:
Primo Search
Clear Search Box
Search in: Busca Geral
Busca Avançada
Busca por Índices

The universal history to bring all universal histories to an end: the curious case of Volney

Borowski, Audrey

Intellectual history review, 2023-07, Vol.33 (3), p.491-505 [Periódico revisado por pares]

Routledge

Texto completo disponível

Citações Citado por
  • Título:
    The universal history to bring all universal histories to an end: the curious case of Volney
  • Autor: Borowski, Audrey
  • Assuntos: Historiography ; Ruins ; Universal History ; Volney
  • É parte de: Intellectual history review, 2023-07, Vol.33 (3), p.491-505
  • Descrição: The French writer, explorer, and historian Constantin-François de Volney (1757-1820) has been interpreted as embracing a Eurocentric Orientalism and a typically Enlightenment progressivist historical understanding. In this article, however, I argue that, far from simply offering yet another rationalistic or teleological historical narrative, Volney set out to refound the historical discipline by erecting historiography on a firmly empirical basis in order to repudiate the idea of historical design altogether. In this respect, his best-known work, The Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires (1791), seems to occupy a special status in his oeuvre in that it did not confine its analyses to the epistemological realm and historiographical practice, but explicitly linked historical narratives and practice to historical developments themselves, ascribing civilizational decline and devastation predominantly to ignorance and blind faith in religion or myths of the past. According to this reasoning, a new, more critical historical practice - akin to social anthropology - would, by making people conscious of their historical agency, liberate historical development itself and ideally bring an end to seemingly unending cycles of political tyranny and social destruction.
  • Editor: Routledge
  • Idioma: Inglês
Voltar para lista de resultados

  • Realização: ABCD-USP USP   Logos de Redes Sociais: Freepik

Buscando em bases de dados remotas. Favor aguardar.