Tradiciones electivas. Cambio, continuidad y ruptura en historia intelectual
AUTOR(ES)
Sebastián, Javier Fernández
FONTE
Almanack
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO
2014-06
RESUMO
Abstract This essay begins by questioning certain common places regarding such dichotomies as modernity vs. tradition, rupture vs. continuity, stereotypes still circulating among those historians who present a direct opposition between both poles, as if they were radically incompatible factors, mutually exclusive vectors. To this end, it emphasizes the dynamic nature and the productive dimension of tradition, understood to be a fundamental ingredient and irreplaceable mechanism in processes of change and intellectual innovation. The article underlines the fact that modern times - and their revolutions - are a prolific laboratory of what the author calls "elective traditions". By means of these, diverse collective actors in the making - political parties and ideological movements, nations, classes, etcetera - build themselves, adopting different ad hoc pasts: from the variegated store of the past, their leaders and ideologists select certain characters, events and canonical texts with which they shape narrative identities, long-term historical currents and ongoing trajectories in which these actors identify themselves and to which they subscribe with a view to legitimizing their future projects. In this way, the moderns choose their purported predecessors, presenting themselves as their heirs. The focus of "elective traditions", this article suggests, might shed light upon certain aspects of the history of ideologies and of political and social movements in recent centuries.
