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History and the Public Use of History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Nicola Gallerano
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I intend to explore the relationship between the history of historians and the public use of history. This relationship, in my opinion, is both conflictual and convergent. As we shall see later on, this assertion is anything but obvious; among historians the idea of a neat opposition prevails, with no possibility of reconciliation, between professional practices of history (the profession of historians) and the extremely vast and confused domain of its “public use.”

Before undertaking an analysis, I must explain what I mean by the public use of history. I have adopted, at least initially, a purely extrinsic definition of the term. By the “public use of history” I am referring to all that is developed outside the domain of scientific research in its strictest sense, outside the history of historians which is usually written by scholars and intended for a very limited segment of the population. Public use of history includes not only the various means of mass communication, each with its own particularities (journalism, radio, television, cinema, theater, photography, advertisement, etc.), but also the arts and literature; public places such as schools, history museums, monuments and urban spaces, etc., and finally institutions, formal or otherwise (such as cultural associations, parties, and religious, ethnic and cultural groups, etc.), which, with more or less clearly partisan objectives, endeavor to promote a more or less polemic reading of the past as compared to the generally accepted common sense of history or historiography, a polemical reading based on the memory of their respective groups. Indeed, politicians have a large role in the most visible and most talked about manifestations of the public use of history and they have a particular responsibility in its degeneration (I shall return to this point in my conclusion).

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 42 , Issue 168 , December 1994 , pp. 85 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

Notes

1. This article is a revised version of a paper given at a conference on "L'uso pub blico della storia," held in Rome in March 1993 and organized by the Istituto romano per la storia d'Italia dal fascismo alla resistenza. The proceedings are in press and will be published by Franco Angeli, Milan.

2. R. de Felice, Mussolini, vols. 1-4 (6 vols.), (Turin, 1965-1990) and C. Pavone, Una guerra civile. Saggio storico sulla moralità della Resistenza (Turin, 1991). It is at any rate clear that the impact on the public of R. de Felice's historiographic hypotheses is more due to the criticisms(such as Intervista sul fascismo, ed. by M. Ledeen [Bari, 1975]) or the numerous interventions of a more direct political nature in the daily press or periodicals or on television during the last twenty years than to the weighty tomes of the Duce's biography.

3. I am referring to the Italian collection of this debate: G. E. Rusconi (ed.), Germania: un passato che non passa. I crimini nazisti e l'identità tedesca, (Turin, 1987).

4. See Habermas's criticism, ibid.

5. J. Habermas, Storia e critica dell'opinione pubblica (Bari, 1988), 213; published in English as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).

6. Apart from his interventions in the Historikerstreit, cf. his work Marxism, Fascism, Cold War (Assen, 1982).

7. I have discussed Nolte's positions in N. Gallerano, "Storia, memoria, identità nazionale," in: Passato e presente, 20-21 (May-December 1989), 219-231.

8. H. Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy. De 1944 à nos jours (Paris, 1990) (Orig. publ. 1987).

9. M. Frisch, A Shared Authority. Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (New York, 1990).

10. N. Gallerano, "Critica e crisi del paradigma antifascista," in: Idem (ed.), Fascismo e antifascismo negli anni della repubblica, Problemi del socialismo, n.s. VII (1986), 106-133; idem, La memoria pubblica del fascismo e del antifascismo, in: AA.VV., Politiche della memoria (Rome, 1993), 7-20.

11. P. Ortoleva, "Storia e mass media," in the conference proceedings quoted in n.1 above.

12. Thucydides, Histoire de la guerre du Péloponnèse, I, 1 (Paris, 1966), 31.

13. J. Le Goff, Storia, Encyclopedia Einaudi, vol. XIII (Turin, 1981).

14. A. Momigliano, Le radici classiche della storiografia moderna (Florence, 1993).

15. Cf. the analysis of Momigliano's book in A.I.Iacono (ed.), La talpa libri, 5 February 1993.

16. Boddei,"Addio al passato: memoria storica, oblio e identità collettiva," in: Il Mulino, XLI, 2 (1992), 179-191.

17. G. Santomassimo, "Tradizione comunista e azzeramento della storia," in: Passato e presente, n.s. IX, 22 (1990), 9-18.

18. S. Romano, "Gli usi della storia,", in: Il Mulino, XLI, No.2 (1992), 207.

19. I am referring to E. Topitsch, Stalin's War: A Radical New Theory of the Origins of the Second World War; T. Wolton, Le grand recrutement (Paris, 1993). As regards the "negationists," it suffices to refer to the works of P. Faurisson, recently—and unwisely—legitimated in parts at least by E. Nolte.

20. M. Ferretti has given an excellent description of the annulment of the historical memory in the USSR during the Stalinist era in La memoria mutilata. La Russia recorda (Milan, 1993).

21. N. Chiaromonte, "Credere e non credere," in: Il Mulino (1993), 116.

22. Ibid., 118.

23. Y. Yerushalmi, "Réflexions sur l'oubli," in: AA.VV. Usages de l'oubli (Paris, 1988).

24. P. Di Cori, "L'oblio, la storia e la politica. A proposito di alcuni recenti pubbli cazione sulla memoria," in: Movimento operaio e socialista, 3 (1990), 297-316.

25. Cf. M. Frisch, op.cit., 12.

26. A. J. Mayer, "Memory and History: On the Poverty of Remembering and Forgetting the Judeocide," in: Radical History Review, 56 (1993), 5-20; O. Bartov, "Intellectuals on Auschwitz. Memory, History and Truth, History and Memory," in: Studies in Representation of the Past, V, 1 (1993), 87-119. I have com mented on this controversy in "Memoria e storia: un dibattito", in: Passato e pre sente, XII, 33 (1994),105-111.

27. N. Loraux, "Sur l'amnistie et son contraire,", in: AA.VV. Usages de l'oubli, op. cit.

28. P. Veyne, in: Le Goff, Storia, op. cit.

29. P. Bevilacqua, "Sull'uso pubblico della storia," an account of the intervention in the debate on the subject, in: Annale 1991 (Rome, 1992).

30. D. Harlan, "Intellectual History and the Return of Literature,", in: American Historical Review, 3 (1989), 604. The quotation by Rorty is from his book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J., 1980), 5.

31. P. Togliatti, Discorso su Giolitti," in: Momenti della storia d'Italia (Rome, 1963), 79-116 (but the text dates from 1950).

32. C. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms (Baltimore, 1979). Subsequently Ginzburg has returned several times to the convergence and the difference between historians and judges with regard to the problem of evidence; cf., i.a., Il giudice e lo storico (Turin, 1993); "Just One Witness," in: S. Friedlander, Probing the Limits of Representation. Nazism and the Final Solution (London and Cambridge, Mass, 1992).

33. A. Mayer, op.cit.

34. S. Lanaro, Storia dell'Italia repubblicana. Dalla fine della guerra agli anni novanta (Venice, 1992), in particular the reference to the "great transformation of the ‘sixties", 223ff.