Hiding from History: Politics and Public Imagination

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Overview

In Hiding from History, Meili Steele challenges an assumption at the heart of current debates in political, literary, historical, and cultural theory: that it is impossible to reason through history. Steele believes that two influential schools of contemporary thought "hide from history": liberal philosophies of public reason as espoused by such figures as Jürgen Habermas, Martha Nussbaum, and John Rawls and structuralism/poststructuralism as practiced by Judith Butler, Hayden White, and Michel Foucault. For Steele, public reasoning cannot be easily divorced from either the historical imagination in general or the specific legacies that shape, and often haunt, political communities.Steele introduces the concept of public imagination—concepts, images, stories, symbols, and practices of a culture—to show how the imaginative social space that citizens inhabit can be a place for political discourse and debate. Steele engages with a wide range of thinkers and their works, as well as historical events: debates over the display of the Confederate flag in public places; Ralph Ellison's exchange with Hannah Arendt over school desegregation in Little Rock; the controversy surrounding Daniel Goldhagen's book, Hitler's Willing Executioners; and arguments about the concept of a "clash of civilizations" as expressed by Samuel Huntington, Ashis Nandy, Edward Said, and Amartya Sen. Championing history and literature's capacity to articulate the politics of public imagination, Hiding from History boldly outlines new territory for literary and political theory.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Hiding from History is an excellent book on a very important issue. It concerns the nature of practical reason, how we deliberate about good and bad, right and wrong. Of course, we deliberate as individuals too, but the issue here is how we deliberate in common. Meili Steele addresses the nature of public reason, highlighting the way in which literature can contribute to rational debate, sometimes in ways that philosophical argument cannot match."—Charles Taylor, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, McGill University

"Meili Steele has written a great book, tightly argued, but expansive in scope. He shows how contemporary political thought and action have been handcuffed by the persistent attempt to transcend historical and cultural specificity. His compelling alternative of 'public imagination' avoids multiculturalism's identity fetishism by understanding culture as a process through which selves can reflect upon, reason about, and revise their lives with others."—John McGowan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, author of Democracy's Children

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780801443855
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Publication date: 12/1/2005
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 224
Product dimensions: 6.00 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 0.90 (d)

	Introduction : the history debates as a crisis for liberalism	1
1	Eliding public imagination : Habermas's isolation of principles from history	17
2	Avoiding judgment : structuralist and poststruralist approaches to history	42
3	Reasoning through public imagination	76
4	The politics of race and imagination : Arendt versus Ellison on Little Rock	104
5	Globalization and the clash of cultures	124
	Conclusion : is there no such thing as principle?	141

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