SUMMARY:

This is the Russian translation of the second chapter of The History Manifesto by Jo Guldi and David Armitage. The book’s main focus is a critique of the shortage of long-term thinking that, according to the authors, characterizes the social imagination of our time and the dominant mode of history writing. They propose a return to longue durée history as a tool of social analysis directed toward the future. In a crisis of short-termism, Guldi and Armitage claim, our world needs somewhere to turn for information about the relationship between past and future. History – as a discipline and a subject matter – is an ideal candidate for the job, just the arbiter we need at this critical time.
In Chapter 3 the authors argue that from ca. 1970 to 2000, long-term thinking about the past and the future proliferated largely outside the discipline of history, notably around questions of climate change, international governance, and inequality. They show how recent historical studies have productively engaged these topics, thus verifying some assumptions and providing a firmer foundation for more nuanced conclusions.