Whose Meaning of History’?<\/em> \u00bb : nous employons le terme de signification pour \u00e9viter celui de sens qui pourrait convenir dans une de ses d\u00e9finitions, mais qui a acquis une r\u00e9elle ambigu\u00eft\u00e9 \u00e0 cause de l’usage).<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tPfaff est croyant. Il pense que l’Histoire a une signification et un sens par cons\u00e9quent, qui lui sont donn\u00e9s par Dieu. Il observe que la grande bataille de la modernit\u00e9, depuis la nouvelle que Dieu est mort est celle d’une imposture : comment prendre la place de Dieu pour pr\u00e9tendre conduire l’Histoire et lui donner un sens ? Sans doute est-ce l’accomplissement ultime de la vanit\u00e9 humaine.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\tL’int\u00e9r\u00eat de sa chronique est de situer l’histoire des deux derniers si\u00e8cles \u00e0 la lumi\u00e8re de cette interrogation, avec les divers protagonistes, ou candidats \u00e0 la reprise du r\u00f4le de Dieu, la Raison, le Progr\u00e8s, le marxisme, le fascisme Cette br\u00e8ve chronique a la vertu de droitement remettre \u00e0 sa place l’aventure bushiste (et, \u00e0 notre sens qui n’est pas n\u00e9cessairement celui de Pfaff, peut-\u00eatre bien l’aventure am\u00e9ricaniste elle-m\u00eame ?), c’est-\u00e0-dire une imposture de plus de Dieu par l’homme, et nullement, comme elle pr\u00e9tend \u00eatre, une politique inspir\u00e9e et guid\u00e9e par Dieu.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\tApr\u00e8s avoir rapidement rappel\u00e9 la longue cohorte de calamit\u00e9s historiques qui peuplent notre histoire depuis l’av\u00e8nement de la Raison (et de l’Homme \u00e0 la place de Dieu par cons\u00e9quent), Pfaff poursuit :<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\t\u00ab This is the recent record of human progress through reason; although some would object that it is no worse than much that preceded it. But the age of reason was supposed to be better. Reason and science were supposed to move steadily towards solution of the great problems of history.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bb Instead, post-Enlightenment Europe had recourse to secular philosophies of history, or stories of why man exists, to substitute for religion.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bb The latest of these to gain international significance was, of course, the Bush freedom doctrine, saying that everyone everywhere wants American-style democracy, and that when they have it, history will have reached its goal (or the world will come to an end, the religious interpretation of Bush’s foreign policy made by some of his and Israel’s Evangelical Protestant supporters).<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bb The Bush doctrine is a na\u00efve version of the most important of the post-Enlightenment stories about history. Marxism was a secular religion in the guise of a scientific interpretation of history, finding in history a story of class struggles that would eventually produce the perfection of human society, a secular heaven on earth. It took nearly a century for this belief to collapse of its own untruth, and because of the cruelty and inhumanity of the methods used to impose it.<\/em> \u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tPfaff place donc justement l’aventure bushiste dans la logique s\u00e9culi\u00e8re \u00e0 l’oeuvre depuis les Lumi\u00e8res. (Ce pourquoi bien des intellectuels europ\u00e9ens ont tant de difficult\u00e9s \u00e0 se situer vis-\u00e0-vis d’une politique belliciste qu’ils devraient pourtant condamner sans une seule h\u00e9sitation.) Il conclut :<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\t\u00ab These undoubtedly will not be the last secular religions that will appear in the guise of political ideologies or world-historical schemes. Such are needed to mobilize people for struggle and as we are plausibly told by Washington, the world is only at the start of the long war against Evil (itself a theological reinterpretation of a political effort to control the Middle East).<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bb As for my own view, I do not think that God is dead, and I think that only he knows the meaning of history. The problems arise when men and women try to substitute their own for the divine intelligence an endeavor which can be relied upon to continue, to the general misfortune.<\/em> \u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\tMis en ligne le 26 juillet 2006 \u00e0 08H52<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
William Pfaff et la question de la signification de l’Histoire William Pfaff est l’un des vraiment tr\u00e8s rares chroniqueurs internationaux dont on peut dire qu’il est aussi (mais nous dirions: d’abord) un historien, et qu’il a de l’Histoire une vision proche du transcendantalisme. R\u00e9guli\u00e8rement, il publie une chronique, tr\u00e8s courte comme toutes ses chroniques, o\u00f9… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[868,3466,3518,5679,5677,1131,5535,5678],"class_list":["post-67794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bloc-notes","tag-bush","tag-dieu","tag-histoire","tag-homme","tag-marxisme","tag-pfaff","tag-raison","tag-seculier"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67794\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}