CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
Refine
Year of publication
- 2022 (1)
Document Type
- Article (1) (remove)
Language
- German (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (1)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (1)
Keywords
- Gedenken (1) (remove)
This article explores some of the moral meanings vested in the concept of historicization. With the help of a discussion of Jules Michelet's notions about the "duty of the historian" - to rescue the dead from oblivion - it becomes possible to flesh out these moral meanings and to insert them into a series of historical contexts. These contexts comprise the cultural history of humanitarian morality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and the intellectual and cultural histories of ideas of immortality, memory, forgetting, and the valorization of the human life. The resulting meaning of historicization is that of a humanitarianism for the dead, with all the ambiguities this position entails.