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David D. Roberts, Nothing But History
Critical
Studies in the Humanities
In this
reissue of a highly praised intellectual history, which
traces historical and anti-historical themes from Nietzsche,
Croce, and Heidegger to Gadamer, Foucault, Derrida, and
Rorty, David Roberts pinpoints tendencies toward
overreaction in the postmodern turn, and shows how
historians can deepen their self understanding and play a
more central role in a postmodern culture. His way of
rethinking such contested categories as presentism and
relativism, master narratives and "others," enables us
better to understand the cultural place of historical
inquiry. Included is a new preface that responds to
critics and places the work within the changing framework of
debate over postmodernism and history.
Contents
Preface to new edition
Preface to first edition
1 Postmetaphysical History
A Difficult Adjustment
Dissolving and Inflating the
Historical
Expansion and Polarization in
Empirical Historiography
A Historical Approach to the Changing
Culture of History
2 Tentative Steps into History: From Vico to Dilthey
The Question of Modern Historical Consciousness
Individuality and Completeness in
Vico and Hegel
Historicism and Historiography after
Hegel
Dilthey and the Unfinished Revolution
3 The Reduction to History
New Confrontations with Time and
History
This Particular World
History, Language, and Individual
Experience
4 Nietzsche: The Innocence of Becoming
The Trouble with History
Emptiness and Connectedness
Reshaping the Past
Affirming the Particular Totality
Nietzsche’s Triple Legacy
5 Croce: History as Thought and Action
Croce’s Uncertain Legacy
A Postmetaphysical Historicism
Knowing the World as History
Experiencing Action as History
Commitment and Collaboration,
Humility and Faith
Croce’s Limits
6 Heidegger: Historicism, Disengagement, Holiness
Heidegger and the Reduction to
History
Being and Time and After
Being and History, Our History and
Nihilism
The Scope for an Active Response
Out the Other Side of Historicism
Attuning Ourselves to the Sending
7 Gadamerian Hermeneutics: Belonging to a Growing Tradition
Interlude: Pathways in a New Terrain
Heidegger, Gadamer, and Croce
Belonging to History
Confinement and Openness
Concealment and the Fusion of
Horizons
The Authority of Tradition
8 Deconstruction: The Uses and Limits of Perversity
Deconstruction and the Cultural
Displacement
Foucault and the End of Man
Derrida and the Dissolution of
Metaphysics
The Premium on Disruption
Plausible Extremity
Overreaction and Preclusion
9 Pragmatism, Historicism, Aestheticism
Rorty’s Neopragmatism
From Foundations to History
From Philosophy to Textualism
Irony, Redescription, Autonomy
Suffocation, Weightlessness, and the
Prophets of Extremity
Reconnection and Truth
10 Past, Process, and Contest in Contemporary Historiography
Historiographical Openness
Processes to the Present
The Uncanny Past
Scott versus Himmelfarb
Groups, Processes, and Axes of
Contest
Polarization and Revitalization
11 Responding to the World as Historical
Postmetaphysical Moderation
Care, Learning, and Truth
The Process of Interaction
Between Rational Critique and
Disruptive Play
Openness and Risk in Historiography
The Extremes and the Middle Ground
Notes
Index
The Author
David D. Roberts is Albert Berry Saye Professor of History
at the University of Georgia. In addition to the present
book, first published by the University of California Press
in 1995, Roberts is the author of The Syndicalist
Tradition and Italian Fascism (1979), Benedetto Croce
and the Uses of Historicism (1987), The Totalitarian
Experiment in Twentieth-Century Europe: Understanding the
Poverty of Great Politics (2006), as well as two books
in Italian and numerous articles and reviews. He has served
as President of the Society for Italian Historical Studies
(2001-2003) and Chair of the University of Georgia
Department of History (1993-1998). Roberts joined the
faculty at Georgia in 1988 after teaching at the
Universities of Virginia and Rochester.
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