Mythical Past, Elusive Future: History and Society in an Anxious Age is a book by the Hungarian sociologist Frank Furedi, published by Pluto Press in 1991 (ISBN 0745305318)

Contents

Preface

Chapters

1. History under siege
   1. A sense of crisis
   2. Plundering the past
   3. The confusion of the past with the present
   4. Competing histories
   5. The themes
2. History in demand
   1. The past under siege
   2. The demand for tradition
   3. The terms of the debate
   4. The political terrain
      1. The United States
      2. Germany
      3. Japan
      4. Britain
   5. Conclusion
3. History and society
   1. With a capital H
   2. The past, History and historical consciousness
   3. History as anti-change
   4. The limits of Reason
      • The mystique of the particular
   5. The decline and rise of nationalist history
      1. Waiting for a comeback
      2. Second time farce
4. The moral impasse
   1. The demand for cohesion
   2. Perceptions of the problem
      1. Education
      2. Tradition
      3. Insecure cultures
      4. Defending the West
   3. Absolutes and relatives in history
      • The return of the absolute
5. Attempts to recover absolutes
   1. The intellectual crisis of the right
   2. Containing the Nazi legacy
   3. Whitewashing imperialism
      1. The retrospective defence of empire
      2. Anti-Third World ideology
   4. The theme of betrayal
      • 1960s: reality and myth
   5. Rection to the 1960s
6. The other 1960s and the fatal compromise
   1. The abandonment of progress
   2. The big compromise
      1. The renunciation of history
      2. The new consensus
   3. The betrayal of the intellectual
      1. Dangerous clerks
      2. Explaining treason
   4. Prolonging the pain
7. Dreading change: the closure of the historical mind
   1. Fear of change
   2. The primacy of tradition
   3. Restraining reason
   4. Consciousness devalued
   5. The sense of terminus
      • The Fukuyama thesis explored
8. New historicism and the destruction of historical thinking
   1. The annihalation of history
   2. With little histories and little communities, little changes
   3. Judge not...can't judge
   4. Special pleading history
9. A critique of history: ideas for the restoration of historical thinking
   1. Consciousness versus identities
   2. The denigration of the human potential
   3. The transformation of historical materialism into History
   4. For a critique of history
      1. Reason
      2. Human potential
      3. Change

External links

• Frank Furedi

  Official website

• Pluto Press

  Official website