History is Tragic: history as longing and unintended consequences

[Al Liszt]

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo3635283.html


On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 11:57 AM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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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