Bourgeois Historiography Research Articles

El mundo clásico en Agustín Millares Torres: La «Introducción» a su Historia General de las Islas Canarias

"The Classical World has not gone unnoticed to Canarian historiography. Throughout the different periods, historians have shown their concern about the mythical past associated to these islands, rendering their own interpretations of such stories with unequal success. In the nineteenth century a considerable number of Canarian scholars joined that intellectual tradition. Among these, Agustín Millares Torres and Gregorio Chil y Naranjo are acknowledged as representing prototypical liberal bourgeois historiography. Taking this into account, this work aims to highlight and analyse the references to the Classical world in Millares Torres’ «Introduction » to Historia general de las Islas Canarias."

Les révolutions de 1917 vues dans les manuels d’histoire, de l’époque soviétique à aujourd’hui

n Soviet history textbooks 1917 appeared as a crucial year , as the October Revolution separated “ prehistory ” of the old capitalist world from “ real history ” of the new world . The upheavals of Perestroika didn ’ t affect these narratives . On the contrary , the authors of a textbook published in 1989 insist more than ever on the traditional presentation of the early Soviet history and reply to the attacks of what they call “ reactionary bourgeois historiography ”. In the decade that followed the USSR collapse , the number of pages dedicated to 1917 events , especially to the October Revolution , decreased . Texts of this period pay special attention to the alternative history , while the presentation of the “ Bolshevik coup ” and its aftermath is rather negative . In the later post­soviet textbooks (mainly after 2005 ) the significance of the October Revolution is reaffirmed again , while Lenin's party appears as the only force able to restore law and order . However , these changes are to be explained by willingness to acknowledge the continuity between different periods of the Russian history rather than by intent to return to the Soviet vision of 1917 .

PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY'S RETURN

ABSTRACTKojin Karatani's Structure of World History seeks to rescue the philosophy of history and restore to it the relationship between philosophical reflection and historical practice. This connection is particularly pertinent in Karatani's case since he had earlier worked out the philosophical scaffolding of this monumental study in his book Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, which embarked on a “return to Capital once more to read the potential that has been overlooked.” By juxtaposing Marx to Kant and vice versa to discover the importance of exchange over production, he found what was to become the informing principle of his later philosophy of history. While Karatani's accounting of the structure of world history presumes to recount the passage of the world's history from nomadic societies to the present as a condition to rethink “social formations” from a perspective that recalls the form of a stagist philosophy of history attributed to Marx and Engels, he has abandoned its informing principle of the modes of production. Instead, he offers the perspective of modes of exchange, which means waiving any consideration concerning who owns the means of production: the putative “economic base” underlying superstructural representations like the state, religion, and culture upheld by a vulgate tradition of Marxian historical writing and discounted by bourgeois historiography as deterministic. The decision to shift to modes of exchange means rooting the primary mode of exchange taking place first in nomadic societies, rather than forms of production and archaic communal ownership of land. Although his revised scheme still accords priority to the economic, the putative division between base and superstructures still persists, even though the latter are still produced by the former, which is now the mode of exchange. Whereas Marx privileged commodity exchange as dominant, Karatani places greater emphasis on the earliest mode of exchange, which consists of the “pure gift,” associated with early nomadic social formations and reciprocity practices by clans, and seems to offer nomadic/clan communalism as a model that resembles Marx's own strategic linking of the surviving Russian commune and contemporary capitalism. The point to this project is to transcend the hegemonic trinity of capital, nation, and state and satisfy a desire to share with other globalists a vision that aims to overcome the defects of capitalism and the nation‐state and the failure of a Marxian expectation that nation‐states will simply wither away with the final surpassing of capitalism. To this end, Karatani's appeal to Kant offers to inject a moral element absent in the merely economic structure of history that will thus provide the promise of “world peace,” which ultimately requires an abolition of the nation‐state as a condition for realizing a “simultaneous bourgeois revolution” that would finally overcome state and capital and establish a world federation.

Russian Bourgeois Historiography

Abstract It is customary to consider A.N. Popov the founder of the bourgeois conception in Russian historiography of the War of 1812. The compilers of the 1912 seven-volume jubilee set, The Patriotic War and Russian Society [Otechestvennaia voina i russkoe obshchestvo], even emphasized that Popov had, in fact, launched "the scholarly trend in the historiography of the Patriotic War."

Capitalism, Slavery and Bourgeois Historiography

Capitalism, Slavery and Bourgeois Historiography

Socioeconomic Relations among Mountain Peoples of the Northern Caucasus in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries in Soviet Historiography

Interest in the problem of socioeconomic relations among mountain peoples of the northern Caucasus in the late 19th and early 20th centuries has existed in Soviet historiography since the first years of Soviet power. Two important circumstances determined this interest. First, researchers (the absolute majority of whom were not professional historians and economists) attempted to apply Marxist-Leninist methodology in exploring the extremely complex system of social relations. Second, resolutely distancing themselves from the evaluation given by feudal [i.e., Tsarist—S.P.D.] and bourgeois historiography of the level of socioeconomic development of the mountain peoplesthese investigators brought to light the favorable conditions for the acceptance of the slogans of the October Revolution in this region,. It was no easy task to deal with these problems in the '20s and '30s.

Fašizmo interpretacijos ir dabartinė ideologinė kova

Straipsnyje kritikuojamos fašizmo interpretacijos dabartinės ideologinės kovos kontekste, siekiama įvertinti skirtingų klasinių interesų poveikį fašizmo interpretacijoms ir jo tyrinėjimų rezultatams. Buržuazinių fašizmo tyrinėtojų ideologinė funkcija – išteisinti kapitalizmą, nekaltinti monopolijų dėl fašizmo atsiradimo ir jo piktadarybių. Iki 7 dešimtmečio vidurio tarp buržuazinių lietuvių emigrantų buvo paplitusi totalitarinė fašizmo koncepcija, kuri visą dėmesį sutelkia į totalitarinius valdymo metodus. Psichoanalitinės koncepcijos fašizmo genezę ir jo ypatybes bando pagrįsti socialiniais psichologiniais veiksniais: fašizmas atėjo į valdžią dėl to, kad atitiko tam tikrus žmonių charakterio bruožus; dabartiniam žmogui esą būdingos mechanistinės mistinės savybės, o tai formuoja polinkį fašizmui. Aptariami lyginamieji fašistinių režimų tyrinėjimai. Visos buržuazinės fašizmo doktrinos ignoruoja jo organišką ryšį su monopolijomis. Marksistinė metodologija, išreikšdama darbininkų klasės pozicijas, orientuoja fašizmo tyrinėjimus pirmiausia į jo klasinės esmės bei prigimties analizę, fašizmą nagrinėja kaip tarptautinį reiškinį, kaip imperializmo ir bendrosios kapitalizmo krizės rezultatą.

The dialectic of desire

tempt a version of psychohistory. While that might be fruitful it would be too much a device of bourgeois historiography: I am interested in the particular past, including intellectual biography, only as it might illuminate larger dialectical trends in social structure and open what few emancipatory avenues remain. Of course the Frankfurt theorists as Jews acutely felt their own estrangement from the dom? inant German social order that threatened their mortal existence (Walter Benjamin com? mitted suicide just before he thought he was to be caught by the fascists.) But it is insuffi? cient to reduce their revision of Marxism to this biographical contingency. Instead their identity as outsiders and potential victims was not simply a cause of their subsequent critical theory but a moment within the complex totality of biography and history that allowed them to see the unfolding social world in a new and innovative way. Their own estrange ment as left-wing Jewish intellectuals was for them an example of universal estrangement, which they understood in Marxist terms. But rather than viewing their cultural formation as a reflex of their own class-position, their self-understanding as Marxist Jews became a mode of theoretical articulation in a world gone mad [ 1 ]. It is that mode of articulation which I want to bring to bear here as I discuss the Holocaust and the subsequent evolution of capitalism. The Frankfurt theorists even in the 1930s recognized in almost singular prescience that the perverse horrors of embryonic German fascism would not be erased by an Allied victory, seemingly the triumph of western reason over Aryan myth [2]. Rather they sug? gested that there is a dialectic of victor and vanquished whereby, in Hegelian terms, the essential nature of the vanquished is aufge? hoben negated, preserved, transcended by the victor. In this sense they offered a profound analysis of anti-Semitism that did not exaggerate its historical specificity but rather viewed it as a stage in the development of what Adorno was later to call "totally ad? ministered" society. The eradication of Jewish "otherness" by the fascists presaged the attempt to eradicate all deviant otherness in post-World War II capitalism. Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin and Marcuse wrote a Judaic Marxism that, first, allows us to understand the Holocaust as a stage in the development of Ben Agger is Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

On the So-Called Agrarian Towns of Eighteenth-Century Russia

Soviet historians long ago abandoned the simplistic approach to study of the Russian town characteristic of bourgeois historiography. In contrast to the approach taken in the writings of someone like I. Ditiatin — who considered Rus' to have had few real towns but rather (in the majority of cases) strange settlements bearing the name ‘town’ due to some sort of misunderstanding (1) — contemporary historiography is characterized by a more multifaceted approach to the town — an identification of towns with a variety of socioeconomic functions (industrial centers, centers of transit trade, administrative centers of internal colonization, and so forth). Yet, at the same time one still encounters in writings on the history of the Russian town a not entirely successful definition of types of urban communities and a classification of towns reminiscent of the earlier approach. In particular, in the literature there is a special category of the undeveloped or agrarian type of town. (2) To this very large group ...

Bourgeois Historiography and the Peasant Question

Bourgeois Historiography and the Peasant Question

Lewis Namier and His Place in Bourgeois Historiography

Lewis Namier (1888-1960) was one of the most prominent representatives of English bourgeois historiography. British Marxist historians, characterizing his authority in the last years of his life, observed that thanks to the level of scholarship of his work, Namier "probably ranks above any other historian now alive in England or the USA." (1) He often was ranked with such pillars of English historical scholarship as Gibbon and Macaulay. What is this authority based on? What was Namier's contribution to historical scholarship? A comprehensive and objective evaluation of his contribution is all the more timely and necessary because aspects of his work have not yet lost their significance, and there are groups of bourgeois historians, not in England alone, who continue to develop his ideas and follow his method.

The Tasks of Soviet Historical Scholarship at the Present Stage of its Development

Soviet historical scholarship has traversed a long and complex path in its development. It has been guided at all stages by a major goal — participation in and assistance to the creation of a communist society. Basing itself on Lenin's world-view, making use of Lenin's contribution to historical materialism and his analysis of concrete historical questions, and resting on the achievements of the Marxist current in pre revolutionary historiography, it demonstrated, as early as in the first years of Soviet power, its indisputable superiority over historiography, which rests on the interests of the bourgeoisie and the nobility. Research was extended to encompass the most important aspects of the historical process, which had as a rule been left outside the purview of bourgeois and nobility-oriented historiography. Study of the productive activity of the toiling masses as the true creators of history, of their class struggles, and of the history of revolutionary movements defining turning points in the progre...

"New Left" Historians on the Class Struggle During the U.S. War of Independence

New Left historiography appeared comparatively recently but has already managed to make itself known as a critical school casting doubt on and revising concepts that have developed in American bourgeois historiography. (1)

On the Study of U.S. History in the USSR

One of the characteristic features of the present period is the unflagging ideological struggle between the two systems. Historical scholarship has an important role in this struggle. In the light of the decision of the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress, it is a task of the history discipline to do basic studies, to raise further the ideological and theoretical level of scholarly research, and to intensify the struggle against bourgeois historiography and anticommunism. In this regard, great responsibility is borne by scholars studying the history of the USA.

Daedalus on the Crisis in Contemporary American Historiography

Bourgeois historiography is experiencing an extended crisis. This was confirmed again by two discussions by American and West European historians in 1969 and 1970. In the first discussion, published in Daedalus (1969, No. 4) under the general title New Trends in History, American and Canadian historians considered problems of methodology in current American historiography. The discussion was continued in Rome in the summer of 1970. This time a number of French and British historians also participated. (1) In the preface to the issue of Daedalus in which the presentations by participants in the Rome meeting were published, the editor of that journal, S. Graubart, notes that its object lay in determining what historians are and what they ought to be doing today (1971, No. 1, p. V).

Preface to the Digest of L. A. Bereznyi, a Critique of American Bourgeois Historiography on China: Problems of Soclal Development in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Mr. Bereznii's book is a detailed and systematic Sovietstyle critique of American scholarship on Chinese modern history, the most extensive yet available; it has some 1008 footnotes, mostly textual references to American publications. When I received copies of the book last spring, my own slim command of Russian gave me an idea of what Mr. Bereznii's critique was about but not what it actually said - a distinction perhaps familiar to others who have fallen short of mastering a given foreign language - yet I found and his writings, particularly his joint work with Edwin 0. Reischauer and Albert Craig, cited in something like a third of the footnotes and in corresponding portions of the text. Fairbank seemed plainly t o be a principle anti-hero of the book. (Whether this prominence given to one person indicates an admirable perspicacity or an unfortunate lack of judgment on the part of Mr. Bereznii need not concern us.) I therefore asked Mrs. Ellen Widmer, a 1962 M. A. graduate of the Fletcher...

The Shaping of the Absolutist Ideology in 16th Century England and its Characteristics

The myth that the political evolution of insular England was exceptional, and contrasted with that of continental Europe, is widespread in contemporary Anglo-American bourgeois historiography. The assertion that indigenous democratic traditions exist in England from remote antiquity, that the British always displayed extreme intolerance for despotism and absolutism, and that the British system of government, at all periods in its history, except for brief segments, was legal and constitutional is intensively propagated. As a supposed consequence of this, the general course of British history was allegedly moderate and calm, and marked by continuity, by the absence of sharp leaps and explosions. In the introduction to his recently published History of British Political Thought, Harrison proclaims that the British were always distinguished by restraint and by an inclination to compromise. As a result, class conflicts rarely played a decisive role in the life of the nation, unlike the situation on the cont...

M. N. Pokrovskii — Outstanding Organizer of Research in the USSR

In 1968 the Soviet public marked the centenary of the birth of a major Soviet historian, participant in the 1905-1907 Revolution and in the battles for Soviet power in October 1917, a prominent figure in government and public life, Academician M. N. Pokrovskii. A talented pupil of V. O. Kliuchevskii and P. G. Vinogradov, Pokrovskii began his career as a representative of bourgeois historiography. As he came closer to the Bolsheviks, he went over to the side of the revolution, he stood in the ranks of the ideologists of the working class, and joined Lenin's party. Pokrovskii's career is complex and contradictory; he became a convinced and active figure in the Communist Party after having overcome vacillations, errors, and confusion. Lenin exercised an enormous influence on the shaping of his world view.

Lines of Research in the New Humanities Institutes

The session of the Social Sciences Section of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences dis -cussed the development of research at the recently established Academy institutes: World History, Concrete Social Research, and the Institute on the United States of America. The tasks facing the World History Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences were described by its director, Academician E. M. Zhukov. Along with studying the history of various countries and regions of the world, he said, the central task of the institute is the maximum development of new scientific research lines connected with the exacerbation of the ideological struggle in present-day conditions. Not only representatives of bourgeois historiography, but also some historians who portray themselves as Marxists, are making a fierce attack on the Marxist-Leninist teachings on the progressive replacement of socioeconomic formations, opposing recognition of the objective regularities of societal development and assailing the principle of pa...

Review of Anatolii Gromyko's 1,036 Days of President Kennedy

After the tragic death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th American the most diverse and contradictory myths about his life and activity arose in the United States. American bourgeois historiography promoted the propagation of these myths to a certain degree. Two principal schools of thought about Kennedy's personality and politics are apparent. One of them is exceedingly right-wing, McCarthyist in the very worst sense of the word, represented primarily by the popularly written propaganda publications of such reactionary organizations as the John Birch Society, the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, and others, expressing the interests of the most aggressive circles of U.S. monopolies and of the Texas and California millionaires and billionaires. The scholarly value of these publications, which regard Kennedy as a dangerous liberal and even a red president, is practically zero.