New Left Review 66, November-December 2010
Alberto Toscano
THE SPECTRE OF ANALOGY
The Western world’s imagination of historical time seems at present to be pulled between auguries of irreversibility and narratives of stubborn repetition—focusing now on impending ecological collapse, now on a new Great Game that retraces an older geopolitics, or else on the extent to which the current economic crisis will re-run the sequence of 1929–33. [1] Luciano Canfora, L’uso politico dei paradigmi storici, Bari: Laterza 2010, €16, paperback 140 pp, 978 88 420 9208 7 The so-called ‘lessons of history’ tend to provide little by way of orientation, at most serving as a series of warning signs. But for all the condemnations and celebrations of postmodern amnesia, the question of the identities and differences between past and present—and of their relevance for political practice and historical research—remains very much on the agenda.
|
Subscribe for just £36 and get free access to the archive Please login on the left to read more or buy the article for £3 |
’My institution subscribes to NLR, why can't I access this article?’