Histories before History:Condorcet's Temporal Dimensions Reconsidered

How many overarching histories can we have that are regarded as reliable professional accounts of the past? History of knowledge has both been cherished as a fresh renewal and questioned as too vague and unable to define. The latter argument is that knowledge without a specified subject can be interpreted as including everything from perceptions to practices, both in past and present. The claim to “uncovering and explicating diverse forms of knowledge” , it has been asserted, is not substantial enough to form its own discipline. However, from a view that history should be considered in the plural, this assumed blind alley can be opened up. Until historicism’s academic triumph in middle decades of the nineteenth century history writing was a flexible genre close to literature. History was considered in plural, not a singular universal progressive process. The received view of Condorcet is as a bold defender of universal political values, promoting that a society should keep to a certain model, as a precursor to utopian models, let it be communist, fascist or other totalitarian societies. A helpful concept for a re-interpretation of Condorcet is “regimes of time” or more precisely “multiple of temporal regimes”, a concept from Reinhart Koselleck and further developed by Helge Jordheim ((Jordheim, 2014).