Aristotle and the Study of History: A Manifesto

• Autores: Paul A. Rahe
• Localización: Reconstructing history: the emergence of a new historical society / coord. por Elizabeth Fox Genovese, Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, 1999, ISBN 0-415-92278-X, pág. 202
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Iris Murdoch's remarks on Roman law and early Greek history could be applied to history generally. The evidence for life before the immediate past is not just scanty; it often reflects a bias, the nature and depth of which modern researchers are ill placed to discern. The institutional political science of early modern Europe and revolutionary America cannot readily provide "a tissue of hypothesis subtle enough" to elicit fully intelligible speech from "the isolated and uneloquent" facts available to the student of antiquity. Historians do have much to learn from comparative ethnography and political science, but they cannot readily derive what they need most from the homogenized products of contemporary social science. Except in matters of religion, ancient political scientists did not ignore public opinion, explain it away, dismiss it as false consciousness or mere ideology, or interpret it simply as a product of the historical process.