History is Tragic: history as longing and unintended consequences

[Ian Livingston]

Interesting interview.


On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 8:24 AM, Al Liszt <alliszt at gmail.com> wrote:

>  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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