Lost Worlds

When Friedrich Meinecke reflected on the development of historical thought in the nineteenth century, he asserted boldly that it was ‘one of the greatest intellectual revolutions that has ever taken place in Western thought'. In this collection of essays, Jonathan Dewald reveals the extent to which Meinecke was right. He does this by focusing on the emergence of social history in nineteenth-century French historical thought—an ambitious topic. As someone who has written with profound insight on the nature of the cultural experience of aristocracy, and on the nature of cultural and social history, Dewald is certainly well placed to undertake it (The Formation of a Provincial Nobility [1980; rev. ante, xcvi (1981), 388–90]; Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570–1715 [1993; rev. ante, cxi (1996) 464–5]; The European Nobility, 1400–1800 [1996; rev. ante, cxiii (1998), 465–6]). But Lost Worlds promises much more. Dewald shows how the advent of social history was a critical element of French intellectuals' attempts to make sense of a new democratic universe and the individual's place within it. Underpinning his analysis is the idea that, by examining how nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians and intellectuals engaged in this activity, we might derive deeper insights into our own form of selfhood in a globalised ‘postmodern' age. Lost Worlds therefore represents an important contribution to the growing body of historical and philosophical literature on modern selfhood

Aristocracy (class · Art · Cultural history · Economic history · Literature · Nobility · Political science · Politics · Postmodernism · Sociology · European Political History Analysis · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law