Abstract
What role do socially shared ideas and identities play in historical causation? Large-scale historical causation commonly involves objective factors such as climate, demography, and natural resources; it involves as well reference to social structural factors such as political institutions, cities, or transportation networks. Is there a rigorous meaning to be assigned to the notion of “mentalité”—a broadly shared set of ideas, representations, and values within a given people? Do subjective factors such as paradigms, practices, or moral systems influence historical change? Is there such a thing as a “mentalité” of a people, group, or nation? Take a group of young people at an Iowa potluck supper and a group of young traders at the Chicago Board of Trade—is there a midwestern mentalité that they can be said to share? What factors might be comprised by such a concept? What forms of variation must we expect within a group sharing a mentalité? And what are the social mechanisms through which these hypothesized forms of shared experience and thought are conveyed?
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- 1.
Stephen Greenblatt brings his own expertise as a literary theorist and critic into a similar effort to understand historical sensibilities of Elizabethan writers and audiences in Will in the World (Greenblatt, 2004).
- 2.
See my “Marxism and Popular Politics: The Microfoundations of Class Struggle” (Little, 1998) for further discussion of this issue.
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Little, D. (2010). Mentalités. In: New Contributions to the Philosophy of History. Methodos Series, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9410-0_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9410-0_9
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