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

Lukacs, a renowned historian and prolific author, is as interested in thinking about consciousness as he is in history. He believes that no aspect of thought is more crucial to an adequate understanding of the modern age than the emergence of historical consciousness. This anthology serves as an introduction to Lukacs' diverse writings on such subjects as the process of historical thinking, the work of prominent historians, and the tasks of reading, writing and teaching history. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

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).