Independent Perspective News

In his new book, "Interesting Times", the most prestigious of the historians alive goes over the key events of the century from the point of view of his 86-year experience. In an exclusive interview, he reflects on his craft and analyzes the ways the world will go on, according to him.

-We're again in a surprising juncture. What role has surprise played in you as a historian?

-I believe the surprise element varies from an era to another. (...) It is also true that some surprise elements depend on contingencies that are unpredictable by definition. For instance, perhaps if two years ago there would have been a few more thousand votes and Gore had been elected President of the United States, we wouldn't be involved in a military crisis on Iraq now. In that sense, as a historian one becomes more and more aware of the importance of these historical accidents in certain circumstances. But I don't think that, in general, this cancels the possibility to discern long-term tendencies: for instance, the rise of the American power at a global scale and the affirmation of the American hegemony.

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-We are undergoing a period of great public interest on history. You have contributed to the expansion of the field yourself. Is this a renaissance of the historical writing?

-There exists a demand on the part of history readers. This demand is particularly important today because the contemporary society tends to be non-historical, not anti-historical. Our technology intends to solve problems here and now, regardless of the past. Our consumer society deals with present-day demands and wishes, without taking the past into account, except perhaps as a source of inspiration for fashion, but not as something important in itself. And this goes against the deep feeling, inherent to human experience, that we're rooted in the past, both in the past of our families and in the national past: we don't exist only now. One can't understand who one is, except one understands where one comes from. Two years ago, for instance, when the 1901 files were made public, during the first few weeks the Internet sites couldn't be accessed due to the amount of people in that country simultaneously trying to do some research on what their ancestries had been doing in 1901. If there is this demand for history on the basis, it should entail a demand for the historical genre, which has been acknowledged by the publishing houses and some historians.

-Has that social interested resulted in a development in the discipline?

-From the historians' point of view, I'm not sure that we're in a flowering period. We'll probably get to be in such a moment again, though. But I tend to think that in the 50s, the 60s and early 70s there was a more positive period regarding the development of History. Then there was a wide consensus regarding the postulation of the great historical questions and the intention to find their answers. Whereas now, the tendency is the opposite. I believe that, paradoxically, the development of science, especially biology, the study of the DNA, will lead us in the following two decades to an enormous revival of history as a part of the evolutionary history of human kind. (...)

-One of the issues that appeared in History of the 20th Century and that comes back in Interesting years is the depolitization of the new generations. What are in your opinion the effects of this tendency?

It's hard to be certain about it. To start with, there are always fluctuations. (...) There's nothing surprising about this period of depolitization; one can't assume it will last forever. At the same time, it's clear that when we talk about massive politization we're not always talking about masses. Massive movements are still possible. Political movement is harder.