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IAN HESKETH |
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Consilience has long been the dream of many scientific thinkers, best expressed
by the desire for a unified theory that could explain essentially everything. Such a desire is based on the assumption that there is a general
unity that underlies the various branches of science, a unity that should
be expressed by a simple and elegant law of nature. “Best of all would be
if underpinning this scheme,” the astrophysicist Paul Davies explained in
regard to a universal theory of physics, “there was some sort of basic physical
principle that bestowed upon it a credibility and elegance, thus commending
it to us on aesthetic as well as scientific grounds.” Ideally such a theory would
be best expressed in a “mathematical scheme,” one that could be represented
by a single and simple “formula compact enough to wear on your T-shirt.”
And even better would be if such a theory could be extended to include not
just the natural sciences but the humanities as well.
Currently, a group of historians is claiming that it might be history that
provides the framework for a scientific and evolutionary account of everything.
Big History, so named by its foremost practitioner, David Christian,
seeks to unite the two cultures under the framework of an elegant story of
the universe, a history, in the words of fellow practitioner Fred Spier, “that
places human history within the context of cosmic history, from the beginning
of the universe up until life on Earth today.”
Read via free temporary access
See New York Times Magazine's featured article on Big History here:
http://nyti.ms/1lEqBAy. |
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AUGUSTINE SEDGEWICK |
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Motion is the first ingredient of transnational history. Without it, nothing
crosses anything, there is no trans. This essay critiques a metaphor of motion
that has emerged as a master trope of the transnational turn in historical
analysis: the flow. Tracing a genealogy of the flows metaphor, I argue that
it is not only a descriptively, analytically, and politically impoverished way
of representing motion and change. It is also an instrumentality developed
and deployed by vested interests to smooth out, and in so doing legitimate
and win increased power over, the processes by which people and things
move through space and time.
The modern usage of the flows metaphor took shape within linked nineteenth-
century transformations in capitalism and social thought. It vanquished
a rival concept of motion and change, “work”—meaning both labor,
and, in a technical sense, the energy required to move or transform matter
in space, force times distance—because it permitted the nascent discipline
of economics, particularly the universalizing mode of analysis . . .
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KRISTEN GHODSEE |
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On June 3, 2008, a group of conservative Eastern European politicians and
intellectuals signed the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and
Communism in the Czech parliament. The signatories to this Declaration
proclaimed that the “millions of victims of Communism and their families
are entitled to enjoy justice, sympathy, understanding and recognition for
their sufferings in the same way as the victims of Nazism have been morally
and politically recognized” and that there should be “an all-European
understanding . . . that many crimes committed in the name of Communism
should be assessed as crimes against humanity . . . in the same way Nazi
crimes were assessed by the Nuremberg Tribunal.” The signatories addressed
their demands to “all peoples of Europe, all European political institutions
including national governments, parliaments, [the] European Parliament,
[the] European Commission, [the] Council of Europe and other relevant
international bodies.”
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FRANÇOIS HARTOG
Translated by WILL BISHOP and SYLVIA SCHAFER |
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For the last thirty years, the conditions for practicing the historian’s craft have
changed and they continue to change in front of our very eyes. One often reads
the handy formula of crisis as an explanation of this: a “crisis” of history, “disoriented”
history, it has been said, while our relationship to time has continued
to change. With our future closed off, the past has been engulfed in shadow
and the present has become our sole horizon.
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