The Aesthetics of Scale

Ian Hesketh, Knox Peden

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    1 Citation (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Today, leading historians are calling on colleagues to look up from their specialized agendas to write and think on a much grander scale. Such is the bracing message of Jo Guldi and David Armitages The History Manifesto (2014), a work that has generated no small amount of controversy and which insists that historians have a world to win.1 They will win it, evidently, by writing histories that will draw on the historians special skills and knowledge to inform public policy. But that knowledge set needs to be increased, and directed at broad and important questions that span centuries. Most urgently, it should not be primarily employed in pursuit of the antiquarian micro-histories that have come to define the discipline in the last half century. In a less polemical vein, Daniel Lord Smail has similarly lamented the narrow nature of historical research and has argued that the era of written records can no longer be the historians primary area of expertise, which must now extend into the terrain typically occupied by the historical sciences.2 David Christian pushes this logic further still in his grand anthropocentric narrative, Maps of Time (2004), arguing that historians need to stop being so modest and embrace their true calling by providing the kind of grand secular origin story that modern society so desperately needs.3 And both Christians Big History and Smails deep history were founded under the premise that we need to understand that the present is shaped not only by intentional human agency but also by scientific processes that have been at work for millennia, if not time immemorial. While deep history focuses primarily on the way in which human history has been shaped by biological and neurological necessity, Big History extends even further back in time in its claim that understanding human history requires putting it in the context of the history of the cosmos as a whole
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)169-175
    Number of pages7
    JournalJournal of the Philosophy of History
    Volume9
    Issue number2
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 14 Aug 2015

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