Thursday, July 06, 2023
Illusions, Fancies, and Errors
J. Huizinga (1872-1945), The Waning of the Middle Ages, tr. F. Hopman (1924; rpt. London: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 55:
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So the mistake, it may be argued, is theirs, and our conception of the Middle Ages is right. This would be so if, to understand the spirit of an age, it sufficed to know its real and hidden forces and not its illusions, its fancies, and its errors. But for the history of civilization every delusion or opinion of an epoch has the value of an important fact.Id., p. 91:
And even political history itself, under penalty of neglecting actual facts, is bound to take illusions, vanities, follies, into account. There is not a more dangerous tendency in history than that of representing the past as if it were a rational whole and dictated by clearly defined interests.
