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Is history important in our day? Truthfully, following the nationalist conceptions that give a particular importance to history, and after it having become a weapon at the service of political conceptions of democratic openness and of opposition to lines of interpretation, or of ideology
and memory, defended by authoritarian regimes, and even after it had been confirmed as a greatly important science, as an interpretation of the past and of the present, in an interdisciplinary space, history has involved itself in the vast and poorly defined field that is the social sciences.
Consequently, it has at times lost its identity, more so to the extent to which it has become a narrative discourse of divulgation. This is the reflection that we seek to make, discovering whether – perhaps despite and because of the interdisciplinary nature of historiographical discourse
– history is a science that pursues complex and objective analysis and interpretation that is not wrapped up in concerns for ideology and 'opinion' that is characteristic of a period of cultural crisis.

One of the greatest Romantic historians and immensely popular during his lifetime, Jules Michelet (1798-1874) fell into disfavour among the positivist historians who came after him and who regarded his work with disdain as "literature." In the 1920s and 30s, however, he began to be rediscovered and rehabilitated by the members of the influential Annales school. The objects of Michelet's interest—living conditions, popular mentalities, laws and the arts, the historian's relation to the objects of his study, no less than political history—have since come to occupy a central place in modern historical research.

This article was published in the serial, European Journal of Communication [Sage Publications / © The Authors]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0267323114555825 ; One of the possible ways of approaching audience history is by focusing on the history of ideas about audiences. This article examines the benefits and shortcomings of such an approach and develops a set of methodological propositions, drawing on the principles and methods of the German tradition of Begriffsgeschichte (history of concepts). To demonstrate the usefulness of these propositions, the article briefly examines the ideas about audiences in socialist Yugoslavia, focusing on the surge of ideas about politically engaged audiences in the late 1960s. The concluding part of the article situates this historical episode in the wider geographical context and outlines possible avenues for a broader, transnational investigation of the history of ideas about audiences.