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Use and Abuse of History
Historical knowledge, this noted Dutch historian declares, should be a result of free investigation and criticism. Since it deals with facts, not imagination, it cannot be cast into a predetermined mold to fit a unified pattern of arbitrary principles. "The most we can hope for," he states, "is a partial rendering, an approximation, of the real truth about the past." In this succinct analysis of the philosophy and method of history, Professor Geyl examines the prevailing concepts of history and the new "awareness of distance" from the past that was lacking in earlier historians. History, he points out, provides an elucidation of the present and its problems by showing them in perspective. This important study of the historical point of view is based on the author's Terry Lecture at Yale.
- GenresHistory
103 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 1955
About the author
Pieter Geyl
73 books11 followersDutch historian and Historiographer. His main focus was Dutch history and the birth of the Dutch as a nation.
Geyl also was one of the first promoters of the "Greater-Netherlands" idea, which goal is a unification of the Netherlands and Flanders in one country.
During the second world war he was forbidden to publish and was interned for a couple of years.
Geyl also was one of the first promoters of the "Greater-Netherlands" idea, which goal is a unification of the Netherlands and Flanders in one country.
During the second world war he was forbidden to publish and was interned for a couple of years.
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June 23, 2026Vital reading for any historian, and especially anyone who wants to understand the c.17th Dutch republic as a case-in-point example of broader ambiguities within history as a tradition and a discipline, or even as a basic human impulse.
A holocaust-survivor’s pertinent warning on the danger of ‘metaphysical’, teleological world-systemic methods largely devised in 19th-century Germany. Way, way ahead of its time.
‘Hegel was not a historian, he was a philosopher. He took up the idea of the historical process and hammered it into a system, and the result of this combination of history and philosophy proved an engine of dangerous potency in fitting men’s heads for the struggles of politics.
Since Augustine there has been no such ambitious and impressive philosophy of history […] and no doubt Hegel owed to the “de civitate Dei” his basic of a “purposeful” development, a development that would bear out god’s scheme.
It is St Augustine secularised, however; for Hegel, although he takes from the circumambient atmosphere of Romanticism the notion of organic unity within the orbit of the nation of the state, is a child of the Enlightenment. He is imbued with its optimism, its belief in progress and perfectibility. And so history is to him the Absolute realising itself […] until complete freedom has been attained through understanding — that is, through his own philosophy, the finest flower of the choice product of that cosmic process - the monarchical and Lutheran Prussian state.’
‘These large systems in which history is made to go through a course of so many stages to come either to salvation or perdition are not based upon the facts of history. They do not spring from history, they are imposed upon it.’
He means herder, Marx, Hegel, even Spengler …
‘I see those system-builders exulting, joyfully or gloomily, at the spectacle of the world and its bewildering past […] St. Augustine comforting himself in the dire anxieties of his time with the thought that the wicked in their triumph are the means by which God works to the predestined […] and Hegel singing his paean to the cosmic spirit, the incarnation of reason…’
A holocaust-survivor’s pertinent warning on the danger of ‘metaphysical’, teleological world-systemic methods largely devised in 19th-century Germany. Way, way ahead of its time.
‘Hegel was not a historian, he was a philosopher. He took up the idea of the historical process and hammered it into a system, and the result of this combination of history and philosophy proved an engine of dangerous potency in fitting men’s heads for the struggles of politics.
Since Augustine there has been no such ambitious and impressive philosophy of history […] and no doubt Hegel owed to the “de civitate Dei” his basic of a “purposeful” development, a development that would bear out god’s scheme.
It is St Augustine secularised, however; for Hegel, although he takes from the circumambient atmosphere of Romanticism the notion of organic unity within the orbit of the nation of the state, is a child of the Enlightenment. He is imbued with its optimism, its belief in progress and perfectibility. And so history is to him the Absolute realising itself […] until complete freedom has been attained through understanding — that is, through his own philosophy, the finest flower of the choice product of that cosmic process - the monarchical and Lutheran Prussian state.’
‘These large systems in which history is made to go through a course of so many stages to come either to salvation or perdition are not based upon the facts of history. They do not spring from history, they are imposed upon it.’
He means herder, Marx, Hegel, even Spengler …
‘I see those system-builders exulting, joyfully or gloomily, at the spectacle of the world and its bewildering past […] St. Augustine comforting himself in the dire anxieties of his time with the thought that the wicked in their triumph are the means by which God works to the predestined […] and Hegel singing his paean to the cosmic spirit, the incarnation of reason…’
December 9, 2018
به مثالهایی از قرون پیش میپردازد که از یک واقعهی تاریخی چه سوء استفادههایی برای مقاصد حکومتها، روشنفکرها و ... شده است. بعد به روشهایی که مورخان برای نوشتن آثار خود به کار بردهاند میپردازد و در واقع گونههای “استفاده از تاریخ” را بررسی میکند.
در پایان هم مناظرهای است بین نویسنده کتاب و Toynbee یک مورخ هلندی دیگر دربارهی اثری که این مورخ نوشته است و اختلاف نگاههایی که این دو به تاریخ دارند.
در پایان هم مناظرهای است بین نویسنده کتاب و Toynbee یک مورخ هلندی دیگر دربارهی اثری که این مورخ نوشته است و اختلاف نگاههایی که این دو به تاریخ دارند.
October 14, 2019
This book was harder to understand than "The Pattern of the Past: Can We Determine It" by the same author as this book. I read both books twice and felt like I still learned nothing from this book the second time around. I am simply rating the book to remind myself to read it again in a few years. I do not own a copy and have to get it from the library.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews