ABSTRACT
This chapter presents Sigurour Gylfi Magnusson’s claim for the distinct ethics of microhistories. It argues that microhistories are spatio-temporally dynamic. The chapter shows that the lens of microhistory moves neither smoothly one way or the other or across a broad range. Trashing is the kind of strange and seemingly singular material that the Icelandic historian Magnusson would see as the necessary start for a microhistory. Microhistory, Magnusson argues repeatedly through his writings, is the strange singular. Szijarto’s description of microhistories as multiscopic captures the dynamic scale shifting at work in microhistories. Microhistories more often explore the breaking of social bonds. John Rawls understood that the idea of a social contract could be useful for agreeing on principles additional to justice. He saw his social contract as based on the assumption that participants were possessed of the ‘requisite intellectual capacity’ needed to determine the principles of justice.
