Hayden White’s Return to the Past as a Source of Human Practice

Authors

  • Gabrielle Spiegel Johns Hopkins University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.48487/pdh.2018.n6.22506

Abstract

This article investigates Hayden White’s use of the concept of the practical past, borrowed from Michael Oakeshott, as a means to argue for individual choices --ethical, moral and existential - in contemporary life, and hence as a way to escape the burden of history, a problem that had motivated White’s examination of historiographical practice from the beginning of his career as a historian. Thus for White, the practical past, in allowing the individual to choose one’s past in order to choose one’s present, also had the ultimately Utopian goal of shaping not only the present but the future as well.

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Published

2021-01-21

How to Cite

Spiegel, G. . (2021). Hayden White’s Return to the Past as a Source of Human Practice. Práticas Da História. Journal on Theory, Historiography and Uses of the Past, (6), 127–135. https://doi.org/10.48487/pdh.2018.n6.22506

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Section

Essays