RT Article
T1 Signing on: A Contractarian Understanding of How Public History is Used for Civic Inclusion
JF Ethical theory and moral practice
VO 26
IS 5
SP 651
OP 665
A1 Abrahams, Daniel
LA English
PB Springer Science + Business Media B. V
YR 2023
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1871758866
AB What makes public history more than just another hill to fight over in culture war politics? In this paper I propose a novel way of understanding the political significance of how public history creates and shapes identities: a contractarian one. I argue that public history can be sensibly understood as representing groups as a society's contracting parties. One particular value of the contractarian approach is that it helps to elucidate the phenomenon of "signing on," where a marginalized or oppressed group is offered membership in a society without the social order being meaningfully changed.
K1 Applied Ethics
K1 Collective Memory
K1 Contractarianism
K1 Public History
K1 Social and political philosophy
DO 10.1007/s10677-023-10386-0