People’s History as an Argument and Discursive Turn

Abstract

The article focuses on an attempt to identify tropes in the meta-scientific analysis of the so-called New People's History, aiming to capture certain patterns in the dynamics of its discourse, including a contextual understanding of the current people's history turn in Poland, along with its specification within a global context. Among other issues, the paper addresses, he problem of defining people's history (and the concept of ‘the people’) and the discursive shift from the postulate of history from below within the model of social history to the multidisciplinary turn in the humanities. The notion of ‘people's history’ is considered as both an argumentative category and a discursive turn, along with its genealogy in historical research. Selected methodological and theoretical aspects of people's history turn, as well as the justification of the Polish genealogical line, are examined in relation to the concept and postulate of the ‘politics of sensitivity’.