EPISTEMOLOGIA STORICISTICA, CONCETTUALIZZAZIONE CRITICA, TOTALITÀ APERTA NEL PENSIERO STORIOGRAFICO DI ETTORE LEPORE

The recent publication of a selection of essays on historiography, planned by Lepore in the months preceding his death in 1990, draws one’s attention to the peculiar historiographical conjuncture in which the book was conceived – the “short 1980s” between the middle of the decade and the collapse of communism – and to its original interpretation by Lepore himself: the emergence within the European historical studies of a more authentic form of pluralism and the transnational convergence of their avant- gardes, including the Marxists, in the direction of a multilateral history of past politics, allowed one to trust in the coming true of a conception of the historian’s craft hinged on the awareness of the role played by the personality of the researcher in the construction of the object of his research, on an undogmatic approach to the related work of conceptualization, on the critical use of the category of totality as opposed to the holistic claims of both paleo-Marxism and the anti-humanist and anti-historicist variants of French structuralism.