With a broad, interdisciplinary command of the subject, Patrick H. Hutton considers the ideas of philosophers, poets, and historians, focusing especially on the work of Giambattista Vico, Maurice Halbwachs, Philippe Ariès, and Michel Foucault. He surveys such questions as the roots of contemporary historical interest in the memory topic, the eternal paradox of repetition and recollection as moments of memory,the ways in which the art of memory has been refashioned to serce the needs of the modern age and becomes integrated into historical thinking, and historians’ changing attitudes toward the historiographical tradition of scholarship on the French Revolution.

PATRICK H. HUTTON is Professor of History at the University of Vermont where he participates in the Integrated Humanities Program. He is author of The Cult of the Revolutionary Tradition (1981), coeditor of Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucalt (1988), and editor-in-chief of An Historical Dictionary of the Third French Republic (1986).