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This work represents the first truly comprehensive and non-biased history of psychohistory, a vanguard branch of historical scholarship that studies the psychological dimension of the past using principles of psychoanalysis and psychology as its theoretical ground. Tomasz Pawelec is an experienced methodologist and historiographer who systematically examines, reconstructs, and evaluates the major theoretical and methodological guiding assumptions shared by psychohistorians. In effect, he provides the reader with an intriguing portrait of a peculiar research paradigm - and a specific intellectual "monad" - that developed within the twentieth-century American history. At the empirical foundation of his work lies a broad collection of psychohistorical publications.
List of contents
The reconstruction of psychohistory's guiding assumptions - the systematizing characteristics of psychohistory's adherents' actual research into the past - the ambiguous notion of psychohistory - psychohistorians' "methodological thought" and their "applied methodology" - deep analyses of a few exemplary psychohistorical works
About the author
Tomasz Pawelec, Professor of History at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. His research interests include history of historiography in Poland and the USA, the methodology of history, and collective memory. He authored or co-authored seven books and several other publications related to these areas.
