Comparative history

20/09/2021

LEZIONE 1

There was an idea that human history had ended because human beings were completly satisfied and the human desire for expansion for material power had been satisfied. When you are satisfied you become conservative in order not to change this situation.

Then came the populism whose issues brought back a debate of irrationalit and aratioality of human behaviour. When it is regular and when it is irregular

The social sciences are very good at studying rational behaviour but the irrational part is very difficult to explain through laws and we can study this by sensation and sensitivity and you can enhance your sensitivity through studying history.

Given that history is not over studying history is very important because we have to understand the past to know were we are now.

What are we doing when we do political history?

Traditional political history was more or less invented in the 19th century (leopold von Ranke). It was a system to legitimise the State, history is made by nation state which interact one with the other. After 1945 nations entered a crisis beacuse they started to appear less important than the international organizations or the international “sides” (western block-eastern block).

Leonnal (?) thought that studying the nation state and the events was not so important but studying the long term deep phenomena was very important, it is the change of mentality created through the change of climate. What really matters is social history, economic and cultural history

LEZIONE 2 23/9/2021

The political systems are conditioned by the boundaries of demcracy

Hystory can help us solve current problems

There is no a final and stable democracy. In democracy you have the consensus of the people and provisional values and you have to rebuild consensus and the values on which democracy is built EVERY DAY

LEZIONE 3 30/9/2021

Liberal democracy is a general solution to the challenge of modernity

The idea is that the advent of modernity in the last 2 centuries created many problems like legitimisation of political power, a problem of organization of the international sphere, a problem of social order given that human beings are free to choose their personal lives.

Liberal democracy provides an answer to all these problems. In a totalitarian system if you don’t believe in the ideology, the totalitarism takes care of you. In liberalism the belief in the ideology is very important because if people do not believe in this ideology then the liberalism has a big problem. Liberty needs time more than other values. What do we do in a short term? And how do we convince human beings, who live in the short term, to work for the long term?

The mid 19th century is the moment when liberalism has triumphed and everyone wants to be liberal (even though there are many problems and challenges). We start from the idea that liberalism can be the answer to all the problems. The problem is that by the end of the 19th century a lot of doubts of its ability start to born. Germany is an alternative model (imperial) and it is

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