1st Edition
The Routledge Companion to Historical Theory
This Companion provides a wide-ranging and up-to-date overview of the conceptual issues that history as a discipline and mode of thought gives rise to.
The book offers both historical and systematic treatments of these issues, as well as addressing their contemporary relevance. Structured in three parts – Modes and Schools of Historical Thought, Epistemology and Metaphysics of History, and Issues and Challenges in Historical Theory – it offers the reader a wide scope and expert treatment of each topic in this vibrant field that can be read in any order. An international team of experts both discuss the basis of their topic and present their own view, offering the reader a cutting-edge contribution while ensuring their chapters are of interest to both students and specialists in the field of historical theory and engaging with the very nature of historical thought, the metaphysics of historical existence, the politics of history-writing, and the intelligibility of the historical process.
The volume is an indispensable companion to the study of history and essential reading for anyone interested in the reflection on the nature of history and our historical existence.
Part 1: Modes and Schools of Historical Thought
1. Historicism
Frederick Beiser
2. Hermeneutics
Katherina Kinzel
3. Marxism
Enzo Traverso
4. Idealism: With History in Mind
James Connelly
5. Positivism
Franz L. Fillafer
6. Phenomenology
Veronica Vasterling
7. Critical Theory
Espen Hammer
8. Narrativism
Veronica Tozzi Thompson
9. Pragmatism
Serge Grigoriev
10. Analytical Philosophy of History
Paul A. Roth
11. Postcolonial Theory: Then and Now
Rochona Majumdar
12. Psychoanalysis
Brian Connolly
Part 2: Epistemology and Metaphysics of History
13. Contingency and Historical Inevitability
Jordan Daniels
14. Imagination and Revision
Giuseppina D’Oro & Jonas Ahlskog
15. Objectivity and Relativism
Reinbert Krol
16. Constructivism and Realism
Rik Peters
17. Explanation
Gunnar Schumann
18. Interpretation
David Weberman
19. Representation
Eugen Zeleňák
20. Truth: What is it for?
Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen
21. Postmodernism: The “Crisis” of Narratives in the Historical Discipline
Nancy Partner
22. Ethics: Or Sharing History
Jonathan Gorman
23. Deconstruction: History, if there is History
Joshua Kates
24. Freedom and Agency
Simon Lumsden
Part 3: Issues and Challenges in Historical Theory
25. Political Ideologies
Edmund Neill
26. Didactics
Tyson Retz
27. Big data
Jo Guldi
28. New Television and Film
Martin Shuster
29. Counterfactuals: A Typological Approach
Gavriel D. Rosenfeld
30. Globalisation/s
Angelika Epple
31. Teleology
Anthony K. Jensen
32. The Sublime
Hans Kellner
33. Experience
Christophe Bouton
34. Memory
Marek Tamm
35. Time
Victoria Fareld
36. Presence
Jacques Bos
37. The End of History
Eric Michael Dale
Biography
Chiel van den Akker is Lecturer in Historical Theory at the Department of Art and Culture, History and Antiquities at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is the author of The Modern Idea of History and its Value. An Introduction (2020) and The Exemplifying Past. A Philosophy of History (2018).
