Footnotes on Jeffrey Andrew Barash’s Politiques de l’histoire

The paper analyzes J.A. Barash’s Politiques de l’histoire, and brings into question the author’s reconstruction of German historical thought, which is considered as propaedeutical to the spread of the “fascist” totalitarian nationalism. Barash’s opposition between a good and a bad Historicism, stemming from an alleged distinction between Ranke’s and Treitschke’s thought, is here discussed and brought into question too. The relationship between the emergence of the anti-Semitic nationalism and the German academic historiography, whose problematic epistemological distinctions are not sufficiently analyzed by the author, is also critically considered, as well as the interpretation of Löwith’s theory of Secularization and Leo Strauss’ skeptical relativism