Extended Look:

In this book lunch I will discuss one of the more original and profound works of history to come along in many years: Moved By The Past by Eelco Runia.

In this text Runia develops a sophisticated and contrarian theory of History that argues against the prevailing conventions of narrative oriented and deterministic History that are so popular.

Instead Runia says that discontinuity is more common than the cause and effect structure of continuity. All too commonly this takes the form of individuals and collective groups of people such as whole nations being willfully destructive, "burning their bridges behind them" and embarking upon the unknown just for the hell of it - without this behavior being either inevitable or necessarily "caused" by preceding history.

Runia is a practicing psychologist, an historian and a novelist and accordingly, "Moved By The Past" is a deeply humanistic work. Instead of dry, statistical and mathematical graphs and proofs, he deals with arts and letters: the novels of Sebald and Tolstoy, the poetry of Wordsworth, the writing of Giambattista Vico , the nature of moments and memorialization, as well as psychological theories of selfhood and behavior.

In this book lunch I hope to do justice to this unique and imaginative book.

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