On the Dialogicity of Historical Thinking. Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder on the Twentieth Century as an Object of Metareflection

Abstract

One of the most advanced forms of historical thinking is metahistorical dialogue. Especially when it is the result of a meeting of two eminent minds and practising historians at the same time, in this case, Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, and the subject of the exchange of ideas becomes the twentieth century or, more precisely, attempts at its cognitive conceptualisation in the milieu of European intellectuals. Above all, conceptualisation through interpretation, that is, making sense of it, also of one’s own involvement/entanglement in history. The article is a story about the entanglement of history, the dilemmas of intellectuals, and the social responsibility of the historian, developed based on commentaries on Judt’s and Snyder’s Thinking the Twentieth Century.