Memory, History, Forgetting.(Book Review)

Memory, History, Forgetting

Paul Ricoeur

University of Chicago Press 664 pp 28 [pounds sterling] ISBN 0-226-71341-5

WHY ARE SOME EVENTS REMEMBERED and others forgotten? What is the relationship between history as a discipline and memory as a social process? Do historians have a civic and political duty to engage with society and say what should be commemorated and why? Since the 1990s such questions have become a fertile terrain for scholarship as academics, conscious too of the unfolding tragedies in the Balkans and Rwanda, have grappled with the legacy of traumatic ...

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