Politika i povijest
Politics and History

Summary/Abstract: The author begins by summarising the reasons for the contemporary revision of the method of historiography. According to him present day historians — in contrast to a positivist or a speculative-dialectical approach — increasingly incline towards a theory of contingency. With its help they try to distinguish specifically historical events from those that do not have a historical character. The author establishes a constitutive link between historical happening and political activity and examines three present day tendencies in the interpreting of this connection. First, there is the view that there are events that cannot be explained either through causes or through consequences, but through a reconstruction of their course, i.e. historically. An opposite tendency maintains that history is constituted by practical, namely political events, and thus it is primarily political history that arises out of the specific character of political activity. That would mean that history takes place only where there is political activity; without it there is neither history nor specifically historical progress. Finally the author maintains that the established philosophy of history of modern times has found its opposition in the existentially based thesis about the contemporaneity of nonsimultaneous events. In order to explain its essence and its methodological scope the author interprets Heidegger’s definition of time as a precondition for the possibility of understanding the meaning of Being. He concludes by finding man to be essentially determined by having history as his second nature. This is way a consideration of the relationship between history and politics will have an exceptional significance for man. Just as we defend ourselves from the maladies that endanger our physical nature so we must defend ourselves — with all available means — against the maladies of our historical or second nature, namely against the pathology of our social and political life that endangers us with equal force as do physical maladies.

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