Abstract

DEVOTO, Fernando J.. Acerca de cosmopolitismo y nacionalismo en la historiografía europea anterior a la Primera Guerra Mundial. Prismas [online]. 2023, vol.27, n.1, pp.11-30.  Epub Dec 06, 2023. ISSN 1852-0499.  http://dx.doi.org/10.48160/18520499prismas27.1387.

On cosmopolitanism and nationalism in European historiography before World War I

The discussion between so-called cosmopolitan historians and historians defined as nationalists or, if one prefers, between works that would have one or the other orientation, is a recurring theme in historiography, as is the proposition of long genealogies, as if this dichotomy had been presented unchanged over time. This schematic and sometimes caricatural duality has also been accompanied by other more general dichotomies that encompass them (e. g., illuminism and romanticism) and by explicit or implicit value judgments that generally came from outside the historians’ sphere, but influenced them.

Based on this diagnosis, the proposal of the article is to reflect on two issues. On the one hand, on the ambiguous and polysemic use of many of the labels used. On the other hand, to choose, within a loose periodization, some topical moments, such as the second half of the eighteenth century and the second half of the long nineteenth century, as territories to explore -from an attentive and non-exhaustive approach to the examples- whether it is possible to defend the idea of epochs that have some uniformity of approaches, even within national contexts, or whether, on the contrary, there was a plurality of situations within each of them that blurred the nationalism-cosmopolitanism historiographical dichotomy. The examples chosen, which do not aspire to be representative but rather to allude to the differences, suggest the presence, beyond the canonical perspectives, of an unstable coexistence between both approaches, in the temporal deployment and in the same author, or even an overlapping of both of them, in which dissimilarities in argumentative or scholarly dimensions and intentionality in public intervention could be confused in the same historian.

Keywords : Modern historiography; Cosmopolitanism; Nationalism; Conflicts; Coexistences.

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