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This chapter introduces the law of unintended consequences for understanding Catholic changes since Vatican II. The law of unintended consequences simply refers to the insight that historical actions, once undertaken, have consequences of their own, regardless of the actors who made them. This insight is especially important with regard to the Second Vatican Council, as recent debates centered on the intentions of the participants at the event in 1962–65. The chapter thus offers a distinctive point of view on what many refer to as the “Vatican II battles” over the meaning of that Council: it argues that Catholics first recognized historical change in the years after the Second Vatican Council. It was the growth of this historical consciousness within the Church that set off the battles within the Catholic community. The chapter thus sets up the narrative that follows.

This chapter studies the work of the German literary critic Erich Auerbach, who wrote in response to the historical upheaval of the mid-twentieth century as a form of historical engagement. In his work, Auerbach endeavors to portray the evolution of historical consciousness in the West and the discovery of the human and social worlds it yielded. He reflects on this evolution in relating the narrative of realism. In this account, realism is not a literary genre, but rather the evolving recognition of human consciousness of its own conditions, the growing awareness, that is, that reality and the real inhere in the sensuous, the mundane, and the human. At the center of this narrative, Auerbach places Judaism and its heritage rather than Christianity. For Auerbach, history and historical consciousness first appear in the Jewish biblical stories, which provide in turn the structure and the framework for all subsequent expressions of historical thought and experience.

The 1992 Gilson Lecture to the Mediaeval Studies Institute in Toronto, this chapter undertakes a substantial and wide-ranging critique of the theory of ‘historical’ (as opposed to ‘classical’) consciousness elaborated in the later works of Bernard Lonergan and adopted by many theologians since the 1970s. The origins of the phrase, and its self-refuting deployment by Lonergan's predecessor in use of it are traced, and the ambiguities and inconsistencies in Lonergan's employment of it are shown in detail. Weaknesses in the Thomist tradition in relation to history are pointed out, and its neglect (and Lonergan's) of rationality norms is explored in relation to Hume's argument against miracles. The relevance of these problems to moral theology is the chapter's last major theme. Karl Rahner's theory of ‘changing human nature’ is challenged, and the form of coherent moral development traced with reference to marriage, usury, and religious freedom. The fall of Jerusalem and the dating of the Gospels is discussed.

This chapter situates Tocqueville among a set of problems and writers in post-revolutionary France in order to give the reader a sense of both the idiosyncrasy of Tocqueville's project in his own environment and its political relevance. As a theorist and a writer with a cause, Tocqueville aimed to write books that would inspire leaders to direct French political culture along new paths. However, his solitary manner of argument disregarded what is considered the norm of his own time. The chapter places him in the changing patterns of his time: the search for a social science that would save the French from the results of their disastrous experiments in revolutionary politics, the rise of historical consciousness, and the widespread desire to understand a spiritualized version of human reason.

This chapter examines the multiple ways in which authoritarian pluralism shaped the historiographical marketplace. It argues that while authoritarian pluralism allowed previously marginalized groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood to write and publish history, the government monopoly on state records curtailed the ability to ascertain the veracity of historical interpretations. The lack of historical records undermined the value of historical truthfulness and severely damaged the capacity to maintain textual hierarchy. Furthermore, given the state's continuous disregard for other values—such as accessibility, transparency, and public accountability—the professional authority of academic historians, whose agenda of modern research was highly dependent on the maintenance of such values, declined sharply. Consequently, greater sections of the historiographical field became methodologically poor, culturally provincial, and philosophically speculative. Since the 1987 conference on historiography, the various aspects of this process have come to be known as the crisis of historical consciousness.

The third chapter, spanning the period 1981-2000, traces the ways in which newly available historical identities came to be applied in public. Municipal multiculturalism developed educational and cultural policies designed to promote multi-ethnic and pluralistic cities. Ethnic difference in the present was explained by the invention of ethnic pasts and experiences that were tacitly assumed to be the basis of enduring historical identities. The resulting ethnic minority histories, which were initially championed by municipal multicultural policy and later recruited to combat social exclusion, may have effectively challenged the dominant national narrative but they also entailed their own silences and simplicities. It is argued that acrimonious debates, around what constituted ‘indigenous culture’ or ‘authentic history’, demonstrated how the historical sensibility promoted by earlier scholar activists was disappearing. In the practice of cultural difference, and in the associated elevation of ethnic histories as the source of strong identities, history was becoming a celebration of those differences and identities partly imposed by a racist society.

Against the backdrop of the Second World War and the ubiquitous instrumentalization of cinema in propaganda battles, the aesthetic potential of cinema is radically reconceptualized. By examining Kracauer's theories and Visconti's history films, it is made clear that this reconceptualization primarily emphasizes a different idea of the spectator, who is no longer addressed as a mass subject, but as an individual, while the cinema seeks to provide this new spectator with the means to question the position of his or her subjectivity in history and society. In Kracauer the consciousness of a catastrophic history is manifest in the figure of the reading subject of history who, in all the powerlessness of a real individual existence, regains a space of reflection in the cinema. Here, viewers see themselves enclosed in a social reality that has lost sight of active social struggle. With a similar social diagnosis, Visconti's films open up the cinema as a space in which the sensibility of a past time is understood as a lost possibility of history.

This chapter reflects on thinking and writing about writing, an exercise it calls “superscript.” It suggests that all writing is “right”: it is a gesture of setting up and ordering written signs. And written signs are, directly or indirectly, signs for ideas. So writing is a gesture that aligns and arranges ideas. And written signs are the quotation marks of right thinking. All writing is orderly, and there is something mechanical about this ordering. One can leave writing, this ordering of signs, to machines. That is, grammar machines, artificial intelligences that take care of this order on their own and fundamentally perform not only a grammatical but also a thinking function. The chapter then discusses two kinds of thinking, namely, mythical thinking and logical thinking. It also describes writing consciousness as historical consciousness and how writing, as an ordering of written signs into rows, can be mechanized and automated. Finally, it contends that all history can be confidently left to automated machines.

This chapter describes how Wideman’s dialogue with recorded or popular history illustrates his aesthetic effectively. Through the imagination, he can fill the gaps and silences of African American life in the historical consciousness, and in doing so, celebrates the unknown men and women who survived and kept a tradition alive in the wake of slavery, racism, and oppression. Reaching back into the past allows Wideman to confront the site of trauma and the “original sin” of America—slavery. Wideman seeks to question, deconstruct, and displace those histories of the hegemonic culture by revising them or overlapping them within his own fictions, autobiographies, and re-imaginings of the past. He buries the recorded history in his writing as historians have often buried the stories of African Americans in the official chronicles.

The introduction opens the book with two highly symbolic anecdotes of cinematic imagination, respectively provided by filmmakers Cheng Qingsong and Wang Guangli who share a desire to rewrite the socialist past and understand postsocialism on a personal scale. The introduction then introduces the concept of the Forsaken Generation and explicates its peculiar historical consciousness as embodied in a much more personal and critical approach to history when compared with their older siblings found in the “educated youth” or the Fifth Generation. The Introduction concludes with an explication of the methodology used and a chapter outline.

This chapter focuses on Nietzsche's contention that the thirst for historical knowledge engenders a confusing surplus of images and ideas that tempers the immediacy of experience and produces an ironic detachment from the present in the weakened or “impotent” modern personality. In the current historicist critical climate, it is difficult not to appreciate the prophetic qualities of his text. By reducing critical awareness to historical self-consciousness, however, Nietzsche perhaps overstates his case. As David Perkins writes, the aim of literary history is “not merely to reconstruct and understand the past” but “to explain how and why a work acquired its form and themes and, thus, to help readers orient themselves.”

This chapter attempts to retrace how the revolutionary movement took root and developed in one village in particular, that, early on in the People’s War, was declared their capital by the rebels. Thabang is mainly populated by an ethnic minority, the Kham-Magar, which had been virtually absent from national politics before the insurrection. This historical monograph analyses the rise of communism in this ‘non-state’ highland community, the legal and illegal resistance against the state, and the gradual focusing on an armed struggle with the villagers’ support. The question posed is whether the villagers have been used by the Maoist leaders or whether they have been the true actors of the revolution. The conclusion argues for the emergence of a historical consciousness among the Thabanguis who are now turned to the future.

This chapter reflects on the status of writing in the face of the informatic revolution that is giving rise to more effective codes and asks whether historical consciousness has been surpassed by something new that is still beyond our conceptual powers. The level of consciousness that prevailed before history is articulated in terms of pictures, the historical in terms of the alphabet, and the new in terms of digital media. Abysses open between them. Each alphabetic attempt to bridge the abyss in the direction of the digital will fail because it will carry its own linear, goal-oriented structure into the digital, covering the digital up. There are people who write because they think it still makes sense, and there are people who no longer write but go back to kindergarten. And then there are people who write despite knowing that it makes no sense. This chapter is actually directed at the first two but dedicated to the third.

This chapter examines the three film adaptations of Maxim Gorky's novel Mother. It compares the directorial styles of film directors Vsevolod Pudovkin, Mark Donskoi and Gleb Panfilov, and their adherence to Gorky's plot. The chapter suggests that through these three Mother films one can study the history of Soviet culture and Soviet historical consciousness, and explains how Mother attracted recurring interest as a novel and in its life in the theatre and in the cinema.