Overview

""The late Siegfried Kracauer was best known as a historian and critic of the cinema. His main intellectual preoccupation during the last years of his life was the relation between past and present, and the relation between histories in different levels of generality. Philosophy is concerned with the last things while history seeks to explain 'the last things before the last.' One after another he examined various theories of history and exposed their strengths and weaknesses. Well written and cogently argued."" --Library Journal This edition features a new introduction by editor Paul Oskar Kristeller of Columbia University.

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9781558760806

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Reviews

Kracauer sees history as a distinct area of reality, much as his Theory of Film stressed the supposedly unique properties of photography. Here he decides that they are both intermediate or anteroom areas. He dwells on the art-nor-science character of the historian's work. But he never comes up with a real Theory. So the book does not provoke the kind of critical attention which resulted in Pauline Kael's attack on his cinematic dogmas and opaque formulations thereof. Not that Kracauer has renounced grandiloquent opacity: take the question as to whether the underlying subjectivity of historical writings may not transcend itself. But if he neglects to unpack questions like this, he declines to press them either. They serve as motifs for a gallery of appraisals and suggestions, a montage of issues and writers. The issues include man's relation to society, the structure of an historical period, notions of time. Writers include Hegel, Marx, Tolstoy, Burckhardt, Croce, Dilthey, Husserl, Collingwood, Bloch, and Levi-Strauss, as well as Proust, who engenders some of the more fruitful remarks. Kracauer pays no attention to current academic philosophers of history (except Mandelbaum). They will find the book passe and muddled. Certainly a dose of analytic rigor would have expedited Kracauer's quest for a redefinition and rehabilitation of certain modes of thought peculiar to historians. Yet the name may attract a certain audience, and students can use the book as a chatty and erudite biography. (Kirkus Reviews)

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