Deconstructing Europe

J.G.A. Pocock

History is about process and movement: yet up to now, it has taken as given the perspectives furnished by relatively stable geographical communities, of whose pasts, and the processes leading to their presents, history is supposed to consist. All that may be changing, with the advent of the global village, in which no one’s home is one’s own; with the advent, too, of a universally-imposed alienation, in which one’s identity is presupposed either as some other’s aggression against one, or as one’s own aggression against someone else, and in either case scheduled for deconstruction. Yet the owl of Minerva may continue to fly, as long as there is an ark left to fly from; and the historian, who must today move between points in time, must recollect voyages and may still recollect voyages between known points with known pasts, recalling how the pasts changed as the presents shifted.

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[1] Justice and the Maori: Maori Claims in New Zealand Political Argument in the 1980s by Andrew Sharp (1990).

[2] See Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France. Vol. 1: History and Environment (1988).

[3] ‘The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown Subject’ by J.G.A. Pocock. American Historical Review, LXXXVII, 2 (1982).

[4] J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Tangata whenua and Enlightenment Anthropology’, a paper presented to the New Zealand Historical Association, Christchurch, 13 May 1991, to be published in the New Zealand Journal of History (1992).

[5] New York Review of Books, 11 April 1991.

[6] See, however, J.H. Plumb’s The Death of the Past (1970) and David Lowenthal’s The past is a foreign country (1985).