1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910821058003321

Autore

Flynn Thomas R

Titolo

Toward an existentialist theory of history / / Thomas R. Flynn

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Chicago, : University of Chicago Press, 1997

ISBN

0-226-25469-0

1-281-43068-4

9786611430689

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (359 p.)

Collana

Sartre, Foucault, and historical reason ; ; v. 1

Disciplina

901

Soggetti

History - Philosophy

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Preface: The Diary and the Map -- Acknowledgments -- Works Frequently Cited -- 1. Living History: The Risk of Choice and the Pinch of the Real -- 2. The Dawning of a Theory of History -- 3. Dialectic of Historical Understanding -- 4. History as Fact and as Value -- Conclusion to Part One -- 5. History Has Its Reasons -- 6. The Sew of History: Discovery and Decision -- 7. History and Biography: Critique 2 -- 8. Biography and History: The Family Idiot -- 9. Sartre and the Poetics of History: The Historian as Dramaturge -- 10. History and Structure: Sartre and Foucault -- Conclusion to Volume One -- Notes -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Sartre and Foucault were two of the most prominent and at times mutually antagonistic philosophical figures of the twentieth century. And nowhere are the antithetical natures of their existentialist and poststructuralist philosophies more apparent than in their disparate approaches to historical understanding. A history, thought Foucault, should be a kind of map, a comparative charting of structural transformations and displacements. But for Sartre, authentic historical understanding demanded a much more personal and committed narrative, a kind of interpretive diary of moral choices and risks compelled by critical necessity and an exacting reality. Sartre's history, a rational history of individual lives and their intrinsic social worlds, was in essence immersed in biography. In Volume One of this



authoritative two-volume work, Thomas R. Flynn conducts a pivotal and comprehensive reconstruction of Sartrean historical theory, and provocatively anticipates the Foucauldian counterpoint to come in Volume Two.