Book Description

The book focuses on the contribution of Spyridon Zambelios to Greek national history, that is, on his effort to transform the history of Greece into a “history of the Greek nation from its origins to the present”. The book begins by examining a) the works of Greek intellectuals who announce the national historiography of Zambelios, and b) his attachment to the historical conception of the French romantics. It then moves to Zambelios’ contribution to a philosophy, or rather an ontology of history, as well as to a methodology of research and a periodization of historical time, which were meant to authorize the transition to a “history of the Greek nation”. Zambelios considered that nation not only as the main agent of historical action – within a linear and homogenous or “national” time – but also as the object of every possible research into Greek history. The book particularly insists on the ideological character of Zambelios’ work, which accounts for an effort to reorganize the historical culture of his people; the two poles of that culture, the Orthodox imaginary and the Enlightenment, were in the end incompatible with the historical conception imposed by the nationalism of Zambelios, owing to their respective pre-national and proto-national characters.