Historical Writing and the Liberal Imagination

FAIN: FA-12092-78

Jeffrey L. Gossman
Princeton University (Baltimore, MD 21218-2608)

Study will be concerned with selected individual writers and their work (Voltaire, Gibbon, Thierry, Michelet, Macaulay, Backofen, and Burckhardt) in order to explore the place of history-writing in the evolving ideologies of the state and of the individual in the 18th and 19th centuries and, in particular, to examine how the historical text manifests, at the level of its own economy and organization, the aspiration to totality and autonomy of its two principal heroes—the modern nation state and the modern individual consciousness.