Author: Ricardo Duchesne

Francis Fukuyama heralded a return to a Western-centered universal conception of history — but one which sees universal liberalism as its endpoint.

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Part 7 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 6 here)

We have no standards to judge what are “good” and “bad” forms of being a human, since there are no subjects existing outside the contingencies of historical time and power relationships. All we can do is engage in “discourse analysis” so as to uncover existing hierarchies by analyzing the fields of knowledge through which they are legitimated. We can engage in questioning how we came to be the “humans” we think we are, such as how we came to think that we have natural rights to life, liberty, and happiness, but such a questioning can only show us how our current way of being human is historically contingent and thus changeable. (more…)

Fernand Braudel, widely regarded as the greatest historian of the twentieth century.

5,627 words

Part 6 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 5 here, Part 7 here)

The “Grand Liberal Narrative” of the Twentieth Century

Despite a wide variety of historical schools, a centrist liberal historiography committed to the ideals of rationalism, meritocracy, and the global spread of human rights dominated the writing of history until about the 1980s — while subsequently integrating within its fold the more progressive schools of New Left, feminist, multicultural, and postmodernist historians via a “new liberalism” determined to ensure equal rights for everyone against the continuing racism, sexism, and ignorance of old liberals. (more…)

Anton von Werner, The Proclamation of the German Empire (1885). The rise of the German Empire coincided with the rise of German historicism. Both presented a new challenge to British and French world domination.

2,932 words

Part 5 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 4 here)

German Historicism: The Defeated Alternative to Liberal Progressivism

Peter Watson’s comprehensive book of over 900 pages, The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, The Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century (2010), demonstrates that from 1750 to the 1930s Germany was the dominant intellectual force in Western civilization. (more…)

Giambattista Vico

7,419 words

Part 4 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

Enlightenment Consolidation of the Idea of Progress

One of the great philosophers of history of this era would seem to have retrogressed away from this developing idea of progress with his cyclical view of history — that is, Giambattista Vico, author of Scienza Nuova Prima (1725/1744). First, it needs to be recognized that this book offered a very original and profound perspective on history: the idea that we can only understand cultural practices by studying history, which spoke to the improving historical consciousness of Europeans. (more…)

A medieval depiction of the Emperor of China.

5,586 words

Part 3 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 4 here)

The Stalled Development of Chinese and Islamic Historiography

Did the modern Chinese write better histories than ancient Europeans? Hegel said that “no other people has had a series of historical writers succeeding one another in such close continuity as the Chinese.” (more…)

Justus of Ghent, Saint Augustine, c. 1475

4,344 words

Part 2 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

The Emerging of a Christian Historical Consciousness

For all we have said about Greek and Roman historiography (and there were other historians, such as Suetonius, Appian, and Casius Dios), contemporary scholars invariably agree that the ancients remained a “non-historical” people. Herbert Butterfield is convinced “the Greeks did not achieve historical mindedness, and never could have achieved it, because they had the wrong view of time and the time process.” The Greeks “only knew of a comparatively short history behind them — they thought that the historical past extended back for only a very few hundred years.” (more…)

Theodoros Pelecanos, Ouroboros (1478)

6,611 words

Part 1 of 7 (Part 2 here)

One of the most startling historical truths is that Europeans invented the writing of history as “a method of sorting out the true from the false,” as a conscious search for a rational explanation of the causes of events, while rendering the results of their investigations in sustained narratives of excellent prose. The other peoples of the world, including the Chinese who maintained for centuries a tradition of chronological writers, barely rose above annalistic forms of recording the deeds of rulers or the construction of genealogies devoid of reflections on historical causation. This would not have been judged a controversial view a few decades ago. (more…)

9,202 words

There is an elective affinity — a relationship of reciprocal attraction and mutual reinforcement — between a) John Locke’s argument that a child’s mind initially resembles an “empty cabinet” or a “white paper void of all characters” which can be shaped by controlling the education impressed upon the child’s mind, and b) the origins of a literature specifically written for children in the 1700s in England. (more…)

Robert Danisch is on the right. He claims to be a deep thinker who reads “Nobel prize” winners.

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In case you are wondering what socialist academics are thinking about the trucker convoy, the same overpaid academics who have been talking about the “democratic rights of workers” and supported Marxist revolutions for decades — well, here is Robert Danisch, Professor of “Communication Arts” at University of Waterloo, hysterically calling for the suppression of the truckers on the grounds that they represent a “threat” to the “democratic rights” of Canadians: (more…)

1,726 words

When Westerners complain about cousin marriage among Muslims, they invariably point to the health risks. They don’t emphasize that numerous cultures throughout history have mandated their children to wed close relatives because it strengthens ingroup loyalty and ensures that every member in the group “stays in line” and adheres to their traditions. They don’t understand that Muslims are healthily in tune with their ingroup identities, not the benefits of “humanity.” (more…)

French Canadian Girls’ School in Magog, Québec

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A newly-released statistical study by Charles Gaudreault published in a peer-reviewed journal has concluded that the ethnic French Canadians will become a minority by the year 2042 in their Québec homeland. (more…)

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In a recent article at The Epoch Times, “Erasing, Misrepresenting Canada’s History Erodes Foundations of Society,” a group of well-meaning and harmless conservative historians are cited at length expressing concerns about the tearing down of statues, renaming of buildings and streets, and overemphasis on Canada’s “racist past” without an acknowledgement that this nation has been “constantly improving” away from its “racist past.” (more…)

White students pondering over a Herbert Marcuse lecture on the “one-dimensional mind” of the white race.

1,364 words

No one knows Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802-1861). He was a legal philosopher of Jewish parentage who converted to Christianity and became a defender of Prussian Lutheran conservatism against the imposition of Enlightenment values. He rejected Hegel’s argument (more…)