For a History That Free us From the “Spectres of History”: António Sérgio's Historiographic Modernism

This article addresses the problem of the spectral presence of the past by developing an alternative account to those offered by memory studies and contemporary philosophies of presence. I focus here on the historical thought of Portuguese essayist António Sérgio, who like other intellectuals of the first half of the 20 th century, such as Collingwood or Croce, postulated the thesis of a “living history” capable of transcending the “spectral” kind of historical discourses used at that time as support and propaganda for totalitarian political regimes. I study the theoretical approaches that Sérgio advanced in this regard in his Introdução Geográfico-sociológica à História de Portugal (1941), as well as the discursive strategies that he developed there by practicing a historiography in accordance with his concept of a “living history.” I suggest that the epistemological perspectivism, paratactic style, encyclopedic tone, and montage structure of Sérgio’s Introdução provide an early example of the type of discourse that Hayden White characterized as “postmodernist history.” I argue that, through a series of formal avant-garde , modernist discursive strategies, Sérgio created a model of historiography able to show its own society (as well as future societies) how to free itself from the “spectres” of nationalist-totalitarian history and politics—that is, from essentialism, objectivism, uncritical thinking, and unreflective nostalgia.