Increasing inequalities – From the Eden to the present

Description

Historiographic trends in the last decades were often intended to demonstrate that the monolithic views are simplistic and unrealistic, that the “meaningful” historical processes are arbitrary interpretations: human societies have always been complex, the top-down view is politically incorrect, the historical processes are less coherent than once believed to be, there is no centre vs. periphery, there is no progress, and so on. Passwords are complexity, inequality, resilience, transition, and others all of them inspired by caution, compromise, peer opportunities. I belong to a generation now dying, and can certainly appreciate the new trends, but feel obliged to add some qualifications. The first is that the task of the scholar (be he a historian or a physicist) is to point out the basic structures in a universe of individual diversities, therefore to build explicative models, not to reproduce the fragmentation of the existing world. The second is that the task of the historian is...

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