History is Tragic: history as longing and unintended consequences

[Al Liszt]

 One of the aphorisms I resort to in *Rebirth of a Nation* is, “All history
is the history of longing,” but I also felt another aphorism was on point,
which is that “History is essentially tragic.” What I mean is not that
history is sad, though it often is, but that, to paraphrase the historian
E. P. Thompson, all history is the history of unintended consequences. If
you look at the growth of cultural history from the later 1970s, when I
came into the field, you find an effort to get beyond both a social history
that had become largely quantitative and an intellectual history that had
become somewhat distanced from everyday life. One thing that helped this
effort, especially into the 1980s, was the growth of semiotics. Here was a
theory that said meaning doesn’t descend from on high, from some abstract
realm of ideas, but rather that meaning adheres in artifacts, whether those
artifacts are a sermon or a roller coaster or a radio. That creation of
meaning isn’t always intentional; it’s made by people as they live.

http://www.publicbooks.org/interviews/the-confidence-economy-an-interview-with-t-j-jackson-lears
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