Abstracts
Antonis Liakos
(University of Athens)
The implied canon of European history: framework of comparative activities
"the idea of Europe as the telos of all comparative activities".
Comparative history is part of a broader practice of comparative activities, which began in the last decades of the 18th century in certain parts of Europe and has grown to embrace the rest of the world ever since. These activities were stimulated by the Enlightenment, nation building, capitalism, technology, emigration, and every movement which was not confined to local and national borders. History was one of these comparative activities, even before it was conscious of being comparative. My argument is that comparison is not a method a la carte but a given and even coercive framework which was historically formed and imposed from within the historical discipline since the 19th century. What I am arguing is that together with historical theory and method, and inside the description of the world past, a canon of world history was offered as an implied code. Something like a worm into the apple! This implied canon imposed a hierarchy of nations and civilizations on the concept of history, the consequence of which was that each nation, in writing its own history, was constrained to deal with the problem of its alluded place in the mental global map. Through encountering the canon, a comparative framework was established, which produced and determined the scope and the meanings of comparison inside national knowledge, and aspired to transnational dialogue.
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