Our understanding of ourselves and the world as historical has drastically changed since the postwar period, yet this emerging historical sensibility has not been appropriately explained in a coherent theory of history. In this book, Zoltán Simon argues that instead of seeing the past, the present and the future together on a temporal continuum as history, we now expect unprecedented change to happen in the future (in visions of the future of technology, ecology and nuclear warfare) and we look at the past by assuming that such changes have already happened.
 
 This radical theory of history challenges narrative conceptualizations of history which assume a past potential of humanity unfolding over time to reach future fulfillment and seeks new ways of conceptualizing the altered socio-cultural concerns Western societies are currently facing. By creating a novel set of concepts to make sense of our altered historical condition regarding both history understood as the course of human affairs and historical writing, History in Times of Unprecedented Change offers a highly original and engaging take on the state of history and historical theory in the present and beyond.
History is in trouble, or even in crisis. At present, this is almost a truism. What sets Zoltan Boldizsar Simon's book apart from other publications making the same claim, in the footsteps of Francois Hartog, Aleida Assmann and others, is that he actually knows why. His theory of unprecedented changes presents a radical - indeed unprecedented - attack on history as developmental process and narrative form, penned by one of the most original new voices in the theory of history.