• 165 pages
• Author: Rastko Močnik
• Original title: O pisanju zgodovine

Using concrete historical material, the book develops the epistemology of historiography and tackles some of the most urgent questions on a high theoretical level and with concrete analyses. In the introduction, the author posits the problem and presents the basic thesis that epistemological questions are best posed and solved during epochal historical events. Before tackling concrete analyses of such historical moments, he constructs a logical model, based on Arnaldo Momigliano’s note on the Roman festival Lupercalia, that illustrates the epistemological dilemmas in historiography. The first break that the author discusses is the break in aesthetic practices that took place in the progressive and revolutionary artistic creation in the 1930s and ’40s in Slovenia. The author then tackles the epistemological problems of the history of socialism. With a conceptual apparatus built while analysing concrete examples of historical discontinuities, Močnik finally analyses the epistemological problems in three eminent texts by Slovenian historians.

About the author

Rastko Močnik

Rastko Močnik (1944) is a retired Professor of Sociology of Culture at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. His fields of interest are primarily the theories of ideology, the theories of discourses, theoretical sociology, theoretical psychoanalysis, semiotics, and the epistemology of the humanities and social sciences. In the previous two decades, he has significantly contributed to the generational renewal of the local theoretical production in historical materialism.