1st Edition

Plurihistoricity On the Historical Cultures of Extinction, Justice, and the Historical Profession

By Zoltán Boldizsár Simon Copyright 2026
278 Pages
by Routledge

278 Pages
by Routledge

278 Pages
by Routledge

This book situates historical scholarship within a plurihistoricity of contemporary historical culture, exploring conflicting conceptions of historical change in technological utopias of human enhancement, in prospects of human extinction, in societal responses to the Anthropocene, and in the imperative of bringing colonial patterns of historical injustice to justice. Contemporary societies... Read more

On Plurihistoricity: An Introduction  Part 1: Transitioning to Futures  1. History After the End of the World  2. Utopias of Extinction  3. Two Cultures of the Posthuman Future  Part 2: Creating Pasts  4. Making Pasts Matter  5. Modes of Historicization: Historicism and Constructionism  6. Bringing History to Justice  Part 3: Inhabiting Presents  7. Historicities in Conflict: The Desynchronization of Political and Technological Change  8. The Historical Cultures of the Anthropocene  9. Unfathomable Futures and Cognitive Control  On the Societal Function of Historiography: A Postscript in Five Theses           

Biography

Zoltán Boldizsár Simon is a historian and historical theorist at Bielefeld University, Germany. He has been assistant professor at Leiden University and visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. He authored the books History in Times of Unprecedented Change (2019) and The Epochal Event (2020) and co-authored The Fabric of Historical Time (2023).