Remembered past: John Lukacs on History, Historians, and Historical Knowledge--a Reader

Among the most accomplished historians of his generation, John Lukacs has written more than twenty books and hundreds of essays and reviews. His scholarship encompasses the history of the modern age, focusing especially on the political, ideological, intellectual, and military struggles of the twentieth century. Integral to that project has been Lukacs's effort to clarify and interpret the evolution of thought and consciousness during the approximately 500 years that constitute "modern" history. As the modern age passes, as the institutions, ideas, values, and experiences that composed the life of the era recede and disappear, Lukacs has assumed the responsibility to "think about thinking." And for Lukacs, no aspect of thought is more important to understanding the modern age than the emergence of historical consciousness. Remembered Past: John Lukacs on History, Historians, and Historical Knowledge: A Reader draws together Lukacs's scattered and diverse writings on history. The volume serves at once as an introduction to this essential aspect of Lukacs's thought and an indispensable compendium of his most important writings on the subject. In the essays, reviews, commentaries, and book chapters collected in Remembered Past, Lukacs addresses the problem of historical knowledge, evaluates the contributions of historians and writers who have used, and often abused, history, and examines the significance of place in developing a sense of the past. He concludes with a consideration of the twentieth century and the task of reading, writing, and teaching history. Significantly, this authorized "reader" also includes a complete bibliography of Lukacs's writings through 2003.

Among the most accomplished historians of his generation, John Lukacs has written more than twenty books and hundreds of essays and reviews. His scholarship encompasses the history of the modern age, focusing especially on the political, ideological, intellectual, and military struggles of the twentieth century. Integral to that project has been Lukacs's effort to clarify and interpret the evolution of thought and consciousness during the approximately 500 years that constitute "modern" history. As the modern age passes, as the institutions, ideas, values, and experiences that composed the life of the era recede and disappear, Lukacs has assumed the responsibility to "think about thinking." And for Lukacs, no aspect of thought is more important to understanding the modern age than the emergence of historical consciousness. Remembered Past: John Lukacs on History, Historians, and Historical Knowledge: A Reader draws together Lukacs's scattered and diverse writings on history. The volume serves at once as an introduction to this essential aspect of Lukacs's thought and an indispensable compendium of his most important writings on the subject. In the essays, reviews, commentaries, and book chapters collected in Remembered Past, Lukacs addresses the problem of historical knowledge, evaluates the contributions of historians and writers who have used, and often abused, history, and examines the significance of place in developing a sense of the past. He concludes with a consideration of the twentieth century and the task of reading, writing, and teaching history. Significantly, this authorized "reader" also includes a complete bibliography of Lukacs?s writings through 2003.

Library Journal

The prolific Lukacs will probably be remembered as a critic of historical method as well as a historian of World War II and the Cold War, and this collection of various essays, reviews, and book chapters is indispensable to anyone wanting a strong and well-supported opinion on significant controversy in the field. However, Lukacs is not everyone's historian; his dismissal of the American "puerility of the 1960s... [which] existed already in the 1950s" signals the deeper problem of a temperament at emotional odds with much historiography of the recent past-which limits judgment rather than sharpening it. Still, this characteristic (which, arguably, he shares with other EmigrE Central and East European intellectuals) can be remarkably useful in some areas. Lukacs's sympathy for Lord Acton, Tocqueville, and Churchill, among others, brings insights to familiar subjects, and historians should appreciate his resistance to the confusion between bourgeois and middle class, for instance. Taken together, these essays are insightfully cautionary at their best and petulantly scolding at their worst, but somehow the good in Lukacs's self-confessed "reactionary" views well outweighs the bad. Recommended for larger academic libraries.-Zachary T. Irwin, Sch. of Humanities & Social Science, Pennsylvania State Univ., Erie Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

John Lukacs Was born in Budapest, in 1924, came to the United States in 1946. Until his retirement, he taught history at Chestnut Hill College near Philadelphia. He also held visiting professorships at Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Tufts, and the University of Pennsylvania. A prolific writer, Lukacs's best-known works include The Duel (Yale University Press, 2001), Five Days in London (Yale Nota Bene, 2001), The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age (Ticknor & Fields, 1993), A Thread of Years (Yale University Press, 1999), and Historical Consciousness (Transaction Publishers, 1994).