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Conventionalism about personal identity over time is the view that personal identity is in some sense dependent on our beliefs, desires, social practices, or language use (collectively: on our "conventions"). This paper provides an opinionated survey of the state of the art about personal identity conventionalism. First, it offers a taxonomy of possible types of conventionalism along four different axes and discusses weak vs. strong, private vs. public, doxastic vs. non‐doxastic, and realizer‐relative vs. assessor‐relative varieties of conventionalism. Second, it reviews the main sources of motivation for conventionalism about personal identity: methodological, epistemological, and normative motivations. Third, it maps out the place of conventionalism in logical space and distinguishes it from related philosophical theses: personal identity pluralism, indeterminacy about personal identity, revisionism, and self‐concern relativism. Finally, some potential avenues for future research are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January of 2015 Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hosted the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the newly built extravagant and highly controversial presidential palace. Sixteen warriors representing all of the former Turkic empires in full costume were present at the welcoming ceremony. This paper uses Volkan's psycho‐political framework to understand state‐led efforts of historical revisionism which manifest itself in historical glories and nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire. The central argument posits that grandiose or mega projects strategically serve historical revisionism in Turkey, amplifying selected glories of Turkish society to bolster support for authentic and national narrative, known as "yerli ve milli (domestic and national)" [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By equating the traditional mindset with traditional beliefs (in magic, ritual, superstitions, etc.), several studies have consistently shown that such beliefs significantly influence people's political behavior and preferences. While these studies have highlighted the political consequences of a traditional mindset in several countries from the Global South, they nevertheless have little to say as to whether holding superstitious beliefs (e.g., believing in fortune tellers, horoscopes, or lucky charms) has certain political implications for countries in the Global North. In this article, we explore whether the traditional mindset has political consequences even in an industrially advanced Germany. We present an analysis of data from the German General Social Survey (GESIS 2019) showing that superstitious voters have less trust in the political system, are more inclined to think that Hitler would be remembered as a good stateman if he had not perpetrated the Holocaust, that the Nazi regime also had a good side, and that the Jews are different and, in any case, have too much influence. Hence, dissemination of superstitious beliefs could make right-wing populists more electorally appealing and successful than they once were. We believe our findings to be of some importance as they show that if the proliferation of superstitious beliefs continues unchecked, they may transform our political systems in ways that policy makers and democratic forces should strive to avoid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We make choices about our own appearance and evaluate others' choices – every day. These choices are meaningful for us as individuals and as members of communities. But many features of personal appearance are due to luck, and many cultural beauty standards make some groups and individuals worse off (this is called "lookism"). So, how are we to square these two facets of personal appearance? And how are we to evaluate agency in the context of personal beauty? I identify three ways of responding to these questions: beauty advocacy, beauty skepticism, and beauty revisionism. Advocates connect an honorific sense of beauty with personal character. Skeptics focus on beauty standards, and primarily offer a social critique of beauty standards. Some skeptics suggest embracing other aesthetic ideals – even ugliness. Revisionists critique beauty standards, but retain an honorific sense of beauty. Each position offers tools to evaluate personal agency as aesthetic agency, whether first‐personally or through our appreciation of others' appearance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Challenging traditional understandings of the past, the toppling of statues of prominent historical figures highlights the ongoing negotiation of collectives with their pasts and the importance of commemoration practices in meaning‐making processes. In Israel, this phenomenon is complex and nuanced, despite its appearance as a lack of concern with revisiting the past. Accordingly, this research examines current practices of de‐commemoration in Israel as a unique tool of social and political protest. Drawing upon qualitative and multimethod studies that combine text analysis, in‐depth interviews, participant observations, and archival work, we suggest a hierarchical typology of de‐commemoration—desecration, reframing, and planned obsolescence—establishing how each practice renegotiates with the present through alteration of the form of commemorated material. Questioning previous understanding regarding the prominence of the past, and building on the unique Israeli case, analysis demonstrates how practices of de‐commemoration are influenced by the transnational climate of change, consciously adhering to the need to realign commemorated pasts in line with the conflicts of the present. Commemoration and de‐commemoration thus complement and build on one another, constituting the civil religion of any given collective. Contributing to current discussions regarding the normative attributions of collective memory, we show how nothing is set in stone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper surveys the literature on the relationship between finance and growth, from the initial simple correlation through debates on causality and channels of impact to the more recent threshold analysis. The gaps in the revisionism regarding the relationship between finance and growth are critically teased out, not least neglect of the effects of speculative finance in developing countries where a positive nexus continues to hold sway in the threshold analysis. The paper argues that the literature has focused on pursuit of a positive nexus, with inadequate attention to institutional context, which is prerequisite for enhancing a positive relationship. It has also narrowed drastically the complexity of cause and effect and ignored broader analytical approaches to the relationship between finance and growth. The classical political economy debate on finance productiveness is drawn upon, in which positive contribution is based on real output, as a critical point of departure for why greater emphasis ought to be placed on institutional context to enhance the contribution of finance to growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across many nascent democracies, living historical memories of past conflicts are vulnerable to contestation. Past scholarship explains such mnemonic dissonances as the outcome of either broad cultural scripts or top‐down political maneuvering. Building on these insights, we utilize the concept of sociogenesis to show how contested memories are semiotically mediated within institutional and informal spaces. Across two studies, we employ mixed methods designs to examine social representations of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, using (a) nationally endorsed history textbooks (N = 86 pages), and (b) online comments (N = 9605) on public YouTube videos (N = 978). We find that textbooks construct the dictatorship in terms of veiled apologetics, leveraging representational strategies of balanced reportage to commensurate the dictatorship's legacies of abuse against contributions to economic and infrastructure programs. Meanwhile, social media messages represent the regime in terms of insurgent nostalgia, which yearns for a mythologized past under the strongman Marcos in rejection of an elite‐coded democratic present. We discuss implications of our findings for broader social psychological discussions of living historical memories in the context of structural fragility, linking to related debates on critical history education, digital democracy, and the resurgence of authoritarianism locally and worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

US policy toward the People's Republic of China (PRC) has come under increasing attack in Washington, as a growing chorus of analysts paints the PRC has a revisionist power seeking to undercut existing multilateral institutions. We observe, however, that China's approach to multilateralism varies across different issue areas, and we argue and show that China's approach differs depending on the strategic landscape of any given context. We conclude that it is thus a mistake to view China through a single lens as either a 'revisionist' or a 'status‐quo' power. China, like every other country, is selective and strategic about how it chooses to invest in multilateralism. Rather than pursuing 'responsible stakeholdership' or 'revisionism' as an overall agenda, China engages with multilateralism in different ways, depending on the strategic context of each issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the psychoanalysis and critical theory of revisionism. Topics discussed include divergences existing between multiple psychoanalytic orientations; role to be played by drives and sexuality; and Jean Laplanche's general theory of seduction and adoption of psychoanalysis.

The purpose of this article is to explore the conditions under which the postpositivist interest in rewriting or reinterpreting history could operate legitimately from a historical point of view. The first part of the article outlines and explains some of the key thematic elements of historical postpositivism. The second proceeds to investigate how these elements can be configured and related to each other within Arthur Danto's influential account of the development of contemporary art, and especially the avant‐garde. The intention is to acquire a sense of the working dynamics of postpositivist thought, so as to better understand its possible implications for the writing of history. In the concluding section an argument is proposed to the effect that, although the postpositivist interest in the rewriting of history can in principle be admitted as entirely legitimate, its legitimacy depends on introducing some substantive constraints on content, in addition to the formal considerations that postpositivist discourse generally tends to favor. It is further suggested that this constraint should take the form of a requirement on historical literacy whose meaning is, finally, elucidated by drawing a contrast with historical common sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does a treaty-based organisation account for its shifts in policy and procedure? With the European Union's history in focus, the paper observes a pattern of evolution by which departures from existing practice are justified as moves to better honour commitments already held. This logic of change-as-fidelity has long been the usual way of doing transnational politics in post-war Europe. The concept of revisionism, borrowed from the study of innovation in purposive organisations more generally, elucidates its place in the early European Community. The paper goes on to examine how more recent developments, especially visible in the Euro crisis, challenge this logic of change and threaten to displace it. It concludes by discussing what this implies for the political nature of the EU, and whether the revival of the revisionist method is plausible or desirable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research programs in empirical psychology from the past two decades have revealed implicit biases. Although implicit processes are pervasive, unavoidable, and often useful aspects of our cognitions, they may also lead us into error. The most problematic forms of implicit cognition are those which target social groups, encoding stereotypes or reflecting prejudicial evaluative hierarchies. Despite intentions to the contrary, implicit biases can influence our behaviours and judgements, contributing to patterns of discriminatory behaviour. These patterns of discrimination are obviously wrong and unjust. But in remedying such wrongs, one question to be addressed concerns responsibility for implicit bias. Unlike some paradigmatic forms of wrongdoing, such discrimination is often unintentional, unendorsed, and perpetrated without awareness; and the harms are particularly damaging because they are cumulative and collectively perpetrated. So, what are we to make of questions of responsibility? In this article, we outline some of the main lines of recent philosophical thought, which address questions of responsibility for implicit bias. We focus on (a) the kind of responsibility at issue; (b) revisionist versus nonrevisionist conceptions of responsibility as applied to implicit bias; and (c) individual, institutional, and collective responsibility for implicit bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I use an ethnographic approach to consider the causes and consequences of a focus on 'survivor' experience in Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Indian residential schools. In this Truth Commission, the interconnected concepts of 'survivor', 'cultural genocide', 'trauma', and 'healing' became reference points for much of the testimony that was presented and the ways the schools were represented. Canada's Truth Commission thus offers an example of the consequences of 'victim centrism', including the ways that 'truth-telling' can be influenced by the affirmation of particular survivor experiences and the wider goal of reforming the dominant historical narrative of the state through public education. Canada's TRC was limited by its mandate to a particular kind of institution and scope of collective harm. It was at the same time active in its creation of narrative templates, which guided the expression of traumatic personal experience and affirmed the category of residential school 'survivor' as the focal point for understanding policy-driven loss of language, tradition, and political integrity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the evaluation of disability in its impact on wellbeing. Topics discussed include revisionism about disability, proponents of the social model of disability, and a debate between two opinions including one stating that disability necessarily harms the wellbeing of people, and one stating that it does not necessarily harm.

This essay reconsiders the category of ' Holocaust denial' as the marked indicator of ethical transgression in Holocaust historiography within American civil religion. It maintains that the present category excludes and thereby enables other violations of responsible Holocaust historiography. To demonstrate the nature and gravity of such violations, the essay engages the widespread claim that Hajj Muhammad Amin al- Husayni, the former mufti of Jerusalem, was an instigator, promoter, or 'driving spirit' of the Nazi genocide against Jews, and the associated suggestions of wider Arab and Muslim complicity. The essay uncovers the history of the Husayni narrative in question, the dramatic circumstances in which it emerged, its role in the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, and its rediscovery and misuse within American popular and political circles over the past two decades. Such misuse, it concludes, corrodes Holocaust recognition within American civil religion and demonstrates the need for a revision of the socially accepted ethical boundary for responsible Holocaust historiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Giorgio Vasari's workshop decorated the Room of Clement VII in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence in circa 1556-62 with history paintings celebrating Pope Clement VII's achievements. The paintings present the Medici pope's family in a favourable light, even at the expense of historical fact, to legitimize their newly established ducal rule. The painting Cardinal Ippolito de'Medici Sent to Hungary as Papal Legate demonstrates Vasari's encomiastic charge. The background reproduces Albrecht Dürer's woodcut of an invented siege to illustrate the cardinal's participation in the 1532 siege of Vienna - a siege that never happened. The painting ignores Ippolito's misconduct to present the Medici as saviours of Emperor Charles V. The use of the Dürer woodcut aids in this revisionism by generalizing the setting while arguing for the emperor's weak defence through its fortification display. With the painting of Cardinal de' Medici, Vasari argued that Medici aid supported and justified the family's imperially decreed duchy, an argument that fits the general truthfulness of Vasari's theme by glossing over the specifics of the historical events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the world of neoliberal corporate capitalism the corporation is commonly represented as both asocial and ahistorical, as little more than the sum of its shareholders. But even within volatile capital markets, the need to project a corporate image of stability and confidence makes the narrative and performative aspects of corporate practice increasingly important. In Anglo American, one of the world's largest mining companies, that story has been told as much through the reinvention of a South African past as through the vision of a 'global future' making foundational myths, tradition and, not least, nostalgia vital corporate assets. Such corporate mythologizing-and the invention of corporate tradition-equips the 'corporate citizen' with both memory and moral self. This article argues that narratives of corporate virtue play a key role, not as the antithesis to the logic of capitalism nor as a company's conscience, but as the warm-blooded twin to the business of mineral extraction and the mechanism through which Anglo American's economic and political hegemony in South Africa is legitimated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of former Polish political leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski. Topics include Jaruzelski's imposition of martial law in December 1981 to hinder the labor union movement Solidarity, the involvement of the Soviet Union in the conflict with Solidarity, and the opinions of former Solidarity activist Adam Michnik on Jaruzelski. Also addressed are the defeat of the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) in Poland's June 4, 1989 election, divisions among the opposition to Poland's communist government, and purported historical revisionism.

This article examines presidential rhetoric about the Vietnam War since 9/11. It argues that both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have faced a rhetorical dilemma when dealing with the legacies of Vietnam because of the potential harm that they believe these legacies may have on public perception of their own military policies. Therefore, although Presidents Bush and Obama have often resisted making comparisons between contemporary conflicts and Vietnam, they have also developed a rhetorical strategy, built on the revisionism of Ronald Reagan and others, which celebrates Vietnam as a 'noble cause' in American history, while they have also selected other 'lessons' from Vietnam that could be useful to their overseas interventions. This rhetorical strategy suggests that Americans should continuously prepare to make long-term military commitments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses China's historic basis of territorial claims to the South China Sea and the Spratly Islands, with information on legal aspects of sovereignty and maritime boundaries set by international law. Topics include the concept of sovereignty and nation-states as a post-imperial notion introduced to Asia through contact with Europe, the historic process of establishing China's 2013 borders during the period of Qing (Manchu) expansionism in the 18th century, and China's use of historical revisionist accounts, propaganda, and folklore to support its claims in the multilateral dispute regarding the South China Sea.

In the post-Cold War period conspiracy theories have become more fashionable, both as an element for explaining international affairs and as one for rewriting history. In this latter aspect, they comprise part of a particularly broad genre, called alternate history. Each of these plural histories of Russia has its own proper focus, in terms of its periods of predilection, of its way of formulating the components of identity (religion, race, culture, state, and so on), and of designation of the enemy. However, nearly all of them use the conspirological framework and its presupposed secret manipulation to articulate the dramaturgy of the nation in logical terms. After a contextualization of the broad domain of alternate history, this article enquires into the modes of nationalist types of alternate history and its multiple conspiracies, and looks in detail at one of its 'textbook cases,' so-called New Chronology. The principal hypothesis defended here is that the conjunction between conspiracy theory and the rewriting of history makes up one of the main instruments for disseminating nationalist theories in today Russia, theories based on a kind of post-modern, paranoid cultural imaginary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a response to an essay written by professor William C. Donahue of Wesleyan University. The professor's origin article heavily criticized the novel "The Reader," by Bernhard Schlink regarding the holocaust. The author rejects Professor Donahue's critical stance and claims that Schlink's novel propagates a revisionist agenda.

The paper examines the role of the German-Soviet war in nation-building in Alyaksandr Lukashenka's Belarus through the medium of contemporary popular narratives (media, movies, documentaries), monuments, and historical sites. After highlighting some examples in the former two categories, it focuses specifically on myth-making at three key historic sites - the Brest Hero Fortress, the Liniya Stalina museum, and the Khatyn historic complex - outlining the correlation between the official interpretation of wartime events at these sites and construction of modern-day Belarusian civic nationalism and nation building; the forging of links between veterans and youth for the evolution of memory into post-memory; and the elimination all vestiges of what is termed 'historical revisionism'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an ethnographic account of peace in contemporary Japanese society, focusing on the ongoing political agenda-the revision of Japan's Constitution. For the Japanese people, pacifism is a culturally embedded concept that has defined their social and political lives during the post-World War II era. It has shaped Japanese individual and group identities, social relations, and practices. This article explores the ways in which peace represents a set of contested identities constructed through politics at the state level as well as through everyday life at the individual level. Peace is not a fixed concept nor can it be defined only by the state or authorities. The dynamic process of identity construction is examined through distinct narratives generated by both pro-revisionists and grassroots anti-revisionists on the Constitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine the role of Germany's so-called 1968 generation in the ongoing competition between collective memories of Germans as perpetrators and Germans as victims. I argue that collective memories of Germans as victims as well as collective memories of Germans as perpetrators were present in the thinking of the West German student movement, which had a more ambivalent attitude to the Nazi past than is sometimes assumed. In particular, while one current within the West German student movement focused on the Nazi past and saw Germany as a nation of perpetrators, other key figures within the movement such as Rudi Dutschke ignored the Nazi past and in particular the Holocaust and tended to see Germany as a nation of victims. These two competing currents were also both reflected in the foreign policy of the 'red-green' government (1998-2005), which is often thought of as a government of 'Achtundsechziger'. The debate in Germany about the Kosovo war in 1999, in which Joschka Fischer played a central role, was dominated by collective memories of Germans as perpetrators, while the later debate about the Iraq war in 2002-3, in which Gerhard Schröder played a central role, was dominated by collective memories of Germans as victims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1916 the Dardanelles Royal Commission was convened to investigate the circumstances surrounding the Dardanelles naval fiasco of the previous year. Lords Fisher and Kitchener, former heads of the Royal Navy and British Army respectively, were ultimately found to have been culpable, in having failed to adequately warn the Cabinet War Council of the dangers implicit within the naval operation. Winston Churchill, the political head of the Royal Navy was also admonished, though to a lesser degree. It is the contention of this paper that the findings of the Dardanelles Commission were seriously flawed and that Fisher and Kitchener were unjustly castigated, as convenient scapegoats. This proposition will be tested against all of the relevant evidence available, including hitherto-neglected primary sources, in order to determine who in fact was responsible for that disaster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 1300, a procession in honour of Florence's patron saint, San Giovanni, was assaulted by a group of eminent Florentines. For Dino Compagni, the attack was an attempted coup organized by Cardinal Matteo d'Acquasparta, papal legate and former general of the Franciscans, and the Black Guelfs. Compagni, however, is the only chronicler to mention it. Nevertheless, his account of the conflict in 1300 shares in common with Giovanni Villani's Nuova cronica a fight that had broken out between the leading families of the factions during a festa on May Day 1300 and some connection with the Guelf victory at Campaldino in 1289. These events and their retellings provide windows into the manipulation of urban space and concepts of political legitimacy through narrative and ritual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political potency of national history has been understood for generations. Yet there has been an unquestionable surge in history's political influence over the last twenty or thirty years, as the various history wars that have broken out around the world attest. Australia has been no exception: disputes over its national story continue to generate considerable controversy in the media, in politics and in public debate. But how has this politicisation of the past affected Australian political history in the present? This paper examines how history is practised in contemporary Australian politics — and notices an increasingly strategic use of the past by politicians in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I seek to contest certain aspects of the 1960s revisionist history of the discipline of anthropology, narratives that can be accused ironically of an autocentric overestimation of the power of the imperial West in their very uncovering of its more or less hidden influence over the genre of ethnography and anthropological practice. Taking as my focus in this regard the case of the anthropology of the Kurds, I suggest that not only have Western ethnographic texts been relatively un-influential in the wider scheme of discourse about Kurds, but also that the recent decision of Kurdish publishing houses in Istanbul to translate and re-publish them indicates where in the present many Kurds feel an active ‘colonial project’ is continuing. The role and development of anthropology in Turkey, then, complicate this by now decades-old examination of the embeddedness of ethnographic discourse in Western modernist projects of political transformation. Résumé L'auteur de cet article cherche à contester certains aspects de l'histoire révisionniste de la discipline anthropologique qui avait cours dans les années 1960 et que l'on peut accuser, avec ironie, d'une surestimation autocentrée de la puissance de l'Occident impérial alors même qu'elle démasquait l'influence plus ou moins voilée de celui-ci sur l'ethnographie et la pratique anthropologique. Centrant son approche sur le cas de l'anthropologie des Kurdes, l'auteur suggère que non seulement les textes ethnographiques occidentaux ont eu relativement peu d'influence sur le discours général concernant les Kurdes, mais que la récente décision des maisons d'éditions kurdes d'Istanbul de traduire et de republier ces ouvrages indique dans quel domaine beaucoup de Kurdes sentent aujourd'hui encore un «projet colonial»à l'œuvre. Le rôle et le développement de l'anthropologie en Turquie vient encore compliquer le problème, avec des dizaines d'années d'étude de l'inclusion du discours ethnographique dans les projets modernistes occidentaux de transformation politique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attributes the relative lack of attention to the ‘public sphere’ in Geoffrey Holmes's work to the pervasive influence of Lewis Namier and the Namierite conception of political history. Holmes's British Politics can be understood as a product of what might be called the revisionist's dilemma. Because the main thrust of the argument of this work was to challenge the Namierite interpretation of the structure of politics in Anne's reign, Holmes could not fail but to replicate the structures of the original Namierite paradigm. Nevertheless, Holmes's demolition of the Namierite view of Augustan politics also opened up new possibilities for further research; it ultimately widened our understanding of the ‘political’ and it prepared the ground for the remarkable interdisciplinary dialogue between literary historians, intellectual historians, and political historians. The article concludes with a discussion of how Holmes's successors began to build on his work in ways that can help explain why the Habermasian public sphere paradigm emerged to the foreground of current scholarship in a field where it had been ignored for three decades. Historians are now beginning to build a detailed post-Habermasian understanding of the ways in which the public sphere affected the structures of politics in later Stuart Britain. Work along these lines may well finally help explain the transformation of British politics from an age of Stuart revolutions to the age of Hanoverian oligarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the current understanding of English paganism relies too heavily on the belief that, when they wrote of the pre-Christian religion(s) of the English, Pope Gregory I (d. 604), in the letters preserved in his Register, and the Northumbrian monk Bede (d. 735), in his Ecclesiastical History, were describing English religion before conversion to Christianity as it really was. Their purpose in discussing English paganism, it is argued, was to provide succour and support for the process by which the English would be saved from eternal damnation in the face of the coming Day of Judgement. Neither Gregory nor Bede, both of whom came to be revered as Fathers of the Church, were passive observers of the conversion process. On the contrary, both men were active participants in the eradication of error amongst the English; error whose detail they had no interest or incentive to describe empirically. These were men who answered to a greater Truth – the Truth of the Word of God. It was this Truth which, this article argues, actually informed their descriptions of English paganism and should inform our understanding of their words on this subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The search for validation and quest for justification in the past is a commonplace tendency. It is of particular note at the present and is widespread across the political spectrum and around the world. Using the past can also entail the deliberate erasure of contentious episodes. While motivated by a search for good relations, contesting the past creates new ‘victims’, in so far as those whose role is neglected or actively misrepresented can be seen as victims or at least as having a grievance. From this perspective, the historian emerges as the necessary opponent of false consciousness, with his own obligation to truth in both past, present and, therefore, future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the various forces that may help to explain the ongoing historio-graphical phenomenon of revision. It takes as its point of departure Michel de Certeau's understanding of the writing of history as a process consisting of an unstable and constantly changing triangulated relationship among a place (a recruitment, a milieu, a profession), analytical procedures (a discipline), and the construction of a text (or discourse). For de Certeau, revision is the formal prerequisite for writing history because the very distance between past and present requires continuous innovation simply to produce the objects of historical knowledge, which have no existence apart from the historian's identification of them. The specific nature of revision at a given moment is determined by the specificities of the process as a whole, that is, by the characteristics of place, procedure, and text and their contemporary relational configuration. Taking the rise of "linguistic-turn" historiography as exemplary of the process of historical revision in its broadest possible meaning, the article seeks to discover the possible "causes" for that turn. It begins with an analysis of the psychological roots of poststructuralism as a response to the holocaust and its aftermath, and then proceeds to explore the possible economic and social transformations in the postwar world that might account for its reception, both in Europe but also, more counterintuitively, in the United States, where postmodernism proved to have an especially strong appeal. Added to this mix are the new patterns of social recruitment into the historical profession in the "sixties." The essay suggests that, to the extent that revision is understood as the result of the combined effect of psychological, social, and professional determinations, it is unlikely that there will ever be genuine consensus about the sources of revision in history, since all historians bring to their work differing congeries of psychological preoccupations, social positions, and professional commitments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recognizing the contingent entanglement between historiography's social and political roles and the conception of the discipline as purely factual, this essay provides a detailed analysis of "revision" and its connection to"revisionism." This analysis uses a philosophical approach that begins with the commonplaces of our understanding as expressed in dictionaries, which are compared and contrasted to display relevant confusions. The essay then turns to examining the questions posed by History and Theory's Call for Papers announcing its Theme Issue on Revision in History, and, where philosophically relevant, answers them. The issue of paradigm change proved to be quite significant and required particular attention. A "paradigm" is analyzed in terms of Quine's "web of belief," and that web is itself explained as an ongoing process of revision, in analogy with Rawls's concept of pure procedural justice. Adopting this approach helps clarify the entanglement between politics and historiographical revision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely agreed that a new conception of history was developed in the early nineteenth century: the past came to be seen in a new light, as did the way of studying the past. This article discusses the nature of this collective revision, focusing on one of its first and most important manifestations: Ranke's 1824 "Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker." It argues that, in Ranke's case, the driving force of the revision was religious, and that, subsequently, an understanding of the nature of Ranke's religious attitude is vital to any interpretation of his historical revision. Being aesthetic-experiential rather than conceptual or "positive," this religious element is reflected throughout Ranke's enterprise, in source criticism and in historical representation no less than in the conception of cause and effect in the historical process. These three levels or aspects of the historical enterprise correspond to the experience of the past, and are connected by the essence of the experience: visual perception. The highly individual character of the enterprise, its foundation in sentiments and experiences of little persuasive force that only with difficulty can be brought into language at all, explains the paradoxical nature of the Rankean heritage. On the one hand, Ranke had a great and lasting impact; on the other hand, his approach was never re-utilized as a whole, only in its constituent parts—which, when not in the relationship Ranke had envisioned, took on a new and different character. This also suggests the difference between Ranke's revision and a new paradigm: whereas the latter is an exemplary solution providing binding regulations, the former is unrepeatable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revision in history is conventionally characterized as a linear sequence of changes over time. Drawing together the contributions of those engaged in historiographical debates that are often associated with the term "revision," however, we find our attention directed to the spaces rather than the sequences of history. Contributions to historical debates are characterized by the marked use of spatial imagery and spatialized language. These used to suggest both the demarcation of the "space of history" and the erasure of existing historiographies from that space. Bearing these features in mind, the essay argues that traditional, temporally oriented explanations for revision in history, such as Thomas S. Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions," miss the mark, and that a more promising line of explanation arises from the combined use of Michel Foucault's idea of "heterotopias" and Marc Augé's idea of "non-places." Revision in history is to be found where writers use imagery to move readers away from rival historiographies and to control their movement in the space of history toward their desired vision. Revision is thus associated more with control than with liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is an account of the "revisionism" movement of the 1970s and 1980s in Soviet history, analyzing its challenge to the totalitarian model in terms of Kuhnian paradigm shift. The focus is on revisionism of the Stalin period, an area that was particularly highly charged by the passions of the Cold War. These passions tended to obscure the fact that one of the main issues at stake was not ideological but purely disciplinary, namely a challenge by social historians to the dominance of political history. A similar challenge, this time against the dominance of social history on behalf of cultural history, was issued in the 1990s by "post-revisionists." Although I was a participant in the battles of the 1970s, the essay is less a personal account than a case-based analysis of the way disciplinary orthodoxies in the social sciences and humanities are established and challenged, and why this happens when it does. In the case of Soviet history, I argue that new data and external events played a surprisingly small role, and generational change a large one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the theoretical and methodological implications of the revisionist debates. It focuses on the political, academic, and moral dimensions of the process of rewriting history and its interrelation with the public sphere. The article examines the recent debate in Greece and compares it with case studies of Germany, Spain, Israel, the Soviet Union, and Ireland. It comments on the common elements of these cases and proposes a basic typology of the revisionist debates in terms of similarities and differences. It categorizes the revisionist endeavors into three types: the successful, the failed, and the bewildered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the ways that the specter of deconstruction has been haunting history over the past thirty years, in particular this specter's effects on the revision of intellectual and cultural history. The essay uses the terms "specter" and "haunting" to express the fact that while deconstruction is repeatedly targeted in attacks against the dangers of postmodernism, poststructuralism, or the linguistic turn, very few historians actively use deconstruction as a historical methodology; in this regard the target has always been a phantom. However, some historians have employed the methods of deconstruction, and by examining their work as well as the attacks on it the essay attempts to explain the historiographical reasons behind these attacks. The goal of the essay is ultimately to indicate some of the ways that deconstruction is useful for the historian, as evidenced in the project of historical revision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written in recent years about the ways Gypsies (Roma) relate to their past. One important study of Holocaust memory has used the Roma as a paradigmatic case of a people who forget rather than remember their history. Rather than examining processes of ‘obliterating’ or downplaying the past, the approach taken here is to consider ways in which, despite Gypsy ‘presentist’ rhetoric, the past is ‘remembered’ among Gypsy populations. Following Maurice Bloch's call for greater integration of psychological and anthropological work, this article considers what can be gained from seeing memory as a socially distributed function in which the role of ‘implicit’ memories, embedded in dealings with others, is significant. This approach enables us better to grasp how Romany communities, which were persecuted by the Nazis and their allies during the Second World War, ‘remember’ the past even though they may not commemorate it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses the issue why proximity tends to make amoral difference in light of the lessons learnt from the Holocaust. The article adds that if there is a lesson to be learned from the Holocaust, the first condition that must be met is to bid farewell to the two-fold premise that what happened then was fundamentally abnormal, and that it took abnormal men to make it happen. Only if one let go of the defenses built to the effect that the Holocaust, a singular phenomenon, was the making of monstrous men, and put the premise of abnormality into question, one can hope to reach the declared goal of the lesson that it never happen again. In his book, Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman sets out to subject this premise to critical scrutiny. In doing so, Bauman takes some crucial steps toward the construction of a theory of morality capable of accommodating in full the new knowledge generated by the study of the Holocaust. This article examines the central claims in the sociological theory of morality launched by Bauman.

The article presents abstracts on historical topics which include a revisionist account of the slave narratives of Georgia collected in the 1930s and published by historian George Rawick, a philosophy of world history which incorporates Asian beliefs, and a history of early modern economy and culture in the Atlantic region.