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The Social Function of History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Enrique Florescano
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“There is not, then, more than one science of man in time (history), and that science has the task of uniting the study of the dead with the study of the living.”

— Marc Bloch

Unlike the scientist, who in the nineteenth century was anointed with the aura of the solitary genius, the historian has, since ancient times, been thought of as a creator conditioned by his social group. The historian knows his profession thanks to routine apprenticeship under his professors. He trains in the discipline by reading the models inherited from his predecessors. He discovers the secrets of the art by analyzing the work of his colleagues. His richest sources of inspiration are the masterpieces of all times from the most diverse cultures.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 42 , Issue 168 , December 1994 , pp. 41 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

Notes

1. See Enrique Florescano, Memoria mexicana, (México, 1994). There is also an English edition: Memory, Myth and Time in Mexico (Texas University Press, 1993).

2. John Updike, "El escritor como conferenciante," La Jornada Semanal, 19 February 1989.

3. Cited by Erwin Panofsky, El significafo en las artes visuales, (Madrid, 1991), 38-39.

4. Erik Hornung, Les dieux de l'Egypte (Paris, 1992), 233.

5. Agnes Heller, Teoria de la historia (Mexico 1989), 165. The preceding reference to Hegel is also drawn from here.

6. Ibid, 179-80.

7. See Josefina Vázquez, Nacionalismo y educación en México (México, 1970); David A. Brading, Los orígenes del nacionalismo mexicano (México, Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1972); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, 1991); E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (London, 1990).

8. Bloch, Introdticción al estudio de la historia (Mexico, 1952), 166.

9. Ibid, 16.

10. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York, 1994), 260-61.

11. Lawrence Stone, "Una doble función. Las tareas en que se deben empeñar los historiadores en el futuro." El País. 29 July, 1993.