Will history’s time come?

Abstract

Considering some episodes from the early 18th to the late 20th century, this essay intends first to suggest the lasting tension that the historiographical praxis – in the process of asserting itself along with the contemporary world – has absorbed between an increasingly high level of specialization demanded by the professional drive of the field in the West, and the role that the subject has taken over as knowledge to guide large and diversified strata of the population in life. Secondly, it intends to discuss the place that history has come to occupy in Brazil, considering on the one hand the exponential increase in the number of graduate programs and, on the other, the shortcomings of the historical conscience that the country seems to have developed. In order to attain these goals, the paper draws heavily upon arguments extracted from Philippe Ariès’ The time of history [1954], an otherwise underrated book.