The following guest post, by Bill Fine, continues Burke week at the blog. In reading Burke’s Attitudes Toward History and talking about it at the conference, I was struck by what seemed his strongly sociological treatment of individual identity, and attention to “corporate identity.” I have no reason to dispute Jonathan Arac’s statement that Burke was perhaps “the first English-language critic to make extended use of the terms ‘identity’ and ‘identification.’” [1] It’s apparent that Burke would be important, were intellectual historians to address themselves to the much neglected history of identity. Here I want to problematize Arac’s conjunction and Read more