SUMMARY:

This is the Russian translation of the fourth 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 4, the authors propose the role of historians in the society as the arbiters making sense of aggregated big data. They believe that in the future, big data will hold the key to uncovering the true meaning of events and processes, past and present, and that historians are uniquely qualified for the job. They could collaborate with archivists, data scientists, economists, and climate scientists in curating larger and more synthetic databases for studying change over time. In this way, they will transcend the sphere of academe, catering to the broader public as well to business and politicians.