Thursday, December 15, 2011

The Future of History

The other week I happened to spot The Future of History on the shelves at Kramerbooks. It is slim, about 180 pages. Like all of John Lukacs's books it is generally well written. To those who have read Lukacs's other works, the themes will be familiar: the end of a bourgeois or European age; the importance of historical thinking; the intrusion of what is thought into material conditions; history as the remembered past; Tocqueville, Burkhardt, and Huizinga as exemplars of historical writing.

Those who have not read Lukacs might do better to start with his earlier work: Confessions of an Original SinnerA Thread of Years,  or Budapest 1900, and then read further as inclination guides. One can also get a large and wide sample with the reader Remembered Past.

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