WHICH HISTORY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

How should we approach the knowledge of the past at the beginning of the 21st century? In recent decades, this was done by trying to reach places and perspectives until then unexplored. Now we must concern ourselves with the form of the content of our research at a time when ideological changes have carried away many supposed certainties. Calmness and meditation should be the foundation for the historian's work, far from the productive urge and the Manichaeism that history partly took on in the seventies and eighties of the 20th century. In Spain, and to an extent in the other country in the European Mediterranean area, efforts must be made to reject prejudices against the narrative, to search for a balance between local and general history and to place an precise value on the forms recently arrived from the United States, such as formalism, deconstruction or post-structuralism. An especially we have to overcome the aversion of determined academic circles to the permanent opening of new ways to reform and combat the bureaucratisation of the university system.