Pierre Vidal-Naquet

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Pierre Emmanuel Vidal-Naquet (born July 23, 1930 in Paris , † July 29, 2006 in Nice ) was a French ancient historian and political social historian. Most recently, he taught at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and, together with Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne, founded the so-called École de Paris of historical anthropology.

Live and act

Vidal-Naquet comes from a Jewish secular family. The father was born in Paris in 1899, was the lawyer Lucien Vidal-Naquet and politicized by the Dreyfus affair . The mother, Marguerite Valabrègue, was born in 1907. His parents were deported and murdered in 1944.

After completing his studies, Vidal-Naquet specialized in ancient Greece and contemporary history . One of his research topics were the Atlantis dialogues Timaeus and Critias of Plato. In doing so, he examined, among other things, the attitude of religion and the Enlightenment towards Judaism and the associated functionalization of Plato's Atlantis myth. He himself considered Plato's Atlantis to be an allegory , an idealization of the Greek polis , which has been appropriated by various political ideologies in modern times. In it he succeeded Moses I. Finley and Arnaldo Momigliano .

Vidal-Naquet recognized the prominent role of the hoplites in the Doric polis and in Athens and regarded them as a separate social class. This consists of military citizens who can both be integrated into the phalanx and represent their individual rights as free citizens. In such a military democracy, which replaces the aristocratic lone warrior of the Homeric epoch with the disciplined army of the citizens, all civil areas of life are militarily reshaped.

Vidal-Naquet attracted public attention mainly through his political engagement: He worked on the French crimes during the Algerian War 1954–1962 and turned against Holocaust denial in parts of French society. In 1999 he was elected a corresponding member of the British Academy .

Vidal-Naquet died on the night of July 28th to 29th, 2006 at the age of 76 as a result of a hemorrhage in the brain.

criticism

Outside France, especially in Italy , his approach was heavily criticized primarily by philologists who, like him, were not far from Marxism . He was accused of having an ahistorical trait that blurred the differences between individual authors and epochs, as well as manipulating the texts by describing them in categories that were fundamentally alien to them, such as polysemy and ambiguity .

Fonts (selection)

  • with Michel Austin: Économies et Sociétés en Grèce ancienne. Périodes archaïque et classique , Armand Colin, 1972
    • German edition: Society and Economy in Ancient Greece . Munich 1984 ISBN 3-406-09457-0 ( together with Michel Austin )
  • Le Chasseur noir. Formes de pensées et formes de société dans le monde grec , François Maspero, 1981; La Découverte, 2005
    • German: The black hunter. Forms of thought and societies in ancient Greece . Peter Lang, Frankfurt 1989 ISBN 3-593-33965-X
  • L'Atlantide. Petite histoire d'un mythe platonicien , Les Belles Lettres, 2005
    • German: Atlantis . Story of a dream . Translated by A. Lallemand, CH Beck, Munich 2006
  • Myth et Tragédie en Grèce ancienne. Avec Jean-Pierre Vernant , François Maspero, 1972; La Découverte, 2005
  • with Jean-Pierre Vernant: La Grèce ancienne , Le Seuil, coll. Points Essais
  1. You mythe à la raison , 1990
  2. L'Espace et le Temps , 1991
  3. Rites de passage et transgressions , 1992
  • with Jean-Pierre Vernant: Œdipe et ses mythes , Complexe, 2001
  • with Jean-Pierre Vernant: Travail et esclavage en Grèce ancienne , Complexe, 2002
  • La Démocratie grecque vue d'ailleurs , Flammarion, 1990
  • Les Grecs, les historiens et la démocratie , La Découverte, 2000
  • Le Miroir brisé: tragédie athénienne et politique , Les Belles Lettres, 2002
  • Le Monde d'Homère , Librairie académique Perrin, 2000
  • Fragments sur l'art antique. Agnès Viénot, 2002

Contemporary history:

  • L'Affaire Audin 1957-1978 . Éditions de Minuit, 1989
  • La Torture dans la République: essai d'histoire et de politique contemporaine 1954 - 1962 . Minuit, 1972
    • English: Torture. Cancer of Democracy. Penguin, 1963
  • Face à la raison d'État. Un historien dans la guerre d'Algérie. La Découverte, "Cahiers libres" collection, Paris, 1989
  • Les Crimes de l'armée française. Algérie 1954 - 1962 La Découverte, 2001 [Préface inédite de l'auteur]
  • La raison d'état. Texts publiés par le Comité Audin. La Découverte, 2002 (first Éditions de Minuit in 1962)
  • Les Assassins de la mémoire. Le Seuil, 1995
  • Les juifs, la mémoire et le présent. Le Seuil, 1995
  • Le trait empoisonné. La Découverte, 1993, 2002 (via Jean Moulin )

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ L'Atlantide. Petite histoire d'un mythe Platonicien. Paris 2005.
  2. ↑ La Démocratie grecque vue d'ailleurs . 1990.
  3. ^ The black hunter , 1989, p. 90.
  4. ^ Fellows: Pierre Vidal-Naquet. British Academy, accessed August 13, 2020 .
  5. ↑ Vincenzo Di Benedetto , Il Filottete e l' efebia secondo Vidal-Naquet , in: Belfagor 33 (1978), pp. 191-207, and Vincenzo Di Benedetto, L'ambiguo nella tragedia greca : una categoria fuorviante , in: Euripide " Medea ", introd. di V. Di Benedetto, trad. di E. Cerbo , Milan, 1997, pp. 62-75.
personal data
SURNAME Vidal-Naquet, Pierre
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vidal-Naquet, Pierre Emmanuel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French historian
DATE OF BIRTH July 23, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH July 29, 2006
Place of death Nice