Oxford Brookes Open Lecture Podcasts

The Practical Past is a concept or a figure invented by Michael Oakeshott (in his book of essays, On History), and it refers to that aspect of the past to which we advert in order to answer the question: “what should I (we) do”? This has important implications for dealing with recent debates in the West over the conflict between history and memory, documentary record and personal testimony, knowledge by experience and knowledge by learning, etc. These debates, in turn, bear upon important issues concerning the social reality of modernity, biopolitics, genocides, “states of exception” (Schmitt), and the like. Download the slides from this lecture: http://www.history.brookes.ac.uk/more/podcasts/open-lectures/downloads/HaydenWhite_PracticalPast_slides.pdf