Constantin Fasolt explores in this work the idea that history is supremely a political activity. He demonstrates that history presupposes highly political assumptions about free will, responsibility, and the relationship of the past to the present.

In 1311, at the council of Vienne, William Durant the Younger (c. 1266 1330), the French bishop and count, demanded that general councils ought to meet every ten years in order to place effective limits on the papal plenitude of power because 'what touches all must be approved by all'. This is the first systematic interpretation of William Durant's remarkable project to transfer supreme legislative authority from the papacy to general councils. It suggests that the conciliar theory has a more ambivalent complexion than is sometimes recognized. It confirms, on the one hand, that constitutional...

This book proposes an analysis of the underlying 'logic' of culture, drawing on a wide range of material not previously examined in works of this kind.

History casts a spell on our minds more powerful than science or religion. It does not root us in the past at all. It rather flatters us with the belief in our ability to recreate the world in our image. It is a form of self-assertion that brooks no opposition or dissent and shelters us from the experience of time.
So argues Constantin Fasolt in The Limits of History, an ambitious and pathbreaking study that conquers history's power by carrying the fight into the center of its domain. Fasolt considers the work of Hermann Conring (1606-81) and Bartolus of Sassoferrato (1313/14-57),...