History in the Discursive Condition: Reconsidering the tools of thought by Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth  (Routledge), 2011

144pp., £22.99,  paper, ISBN 978-0-415-78219-7

This is a bold and challenging book in which Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth traces the broadly established challenges to modernity that now confront historians and more generally citizens of Western societies. She provides a clear definition of both the empiricism of The Modern Condition and of The Discursive Condition that challenges it and briefly introduces the most important practical implications of those challenges to accepted definitions and tools of thought.  In broad terms, she argues that our tools of thought have not kept up with the shift from the Modern to the Discursive Condition and that this prevents society from fully benefitting from the shift beyond modernity.  After decades of conflicting work on related issues, this book provides a succinct, lucid and wide-ranging discussion of what is at stake. Drawing on a broad range of intellectual and cultural history from Homer to Hayden White and from the arts to physics, philosophy and politics, this book defines a new stage in the history of ideas. With the practice and assumptions of historians at its core, the book demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary practice in addressing the big questions currently confronting the humanities and social sciences in Doing History.  This elegant and lucidly argued book will certainly challenge the thinking of history teachers.