THE WORDS OF HISTORY

In From History to Theory, Kerwin Lee Klein writes a history of the central terms of the discipline of theory of history, such as “historiography,” “philosophy of history,” “theory of history,” and “memory.” Klein tells us when and how these terms were used, how the usage of some (“historiography” and “philosophy of history”) declined during the twentieth century, and how other terms (“theory” and “memory”) became increasingly popular. More important, Klein also shows that the use of these words is not innocent. Using words such as “theory” or “historiography” implies certain specific ideas about what the writing of history should be like, and how theoretical reflection on the nature of history and its writing relates to the practical issues of the discipline. In the second half of his book, Klein focuses more on the concept of memory and the memory boom since the later part of the 1980s. He observes that “memory” came to be seen as a kind of “counterhistory,” a postcolonial, fragmented, and personal alternative to the traditional mainstream discourse of history. Klein does not necessarily disagree with this view, but he does warn us about unwanted side effects. More specifically, he argues that the discourse of memory is surprisingly compatible with that of extremist right‐wing groups, and should be treated with suspicion. Although Klein certainly has a point, he presents it in a rather dogmatic fashion. However, a more nuanced version of Klein's criticism of memory can be developed by building on Klein's suggestion that there is an intimate connection between memory and identity.     

4. REASON,AGENCY, AND HISTORY: REMARKS ON KANT AND BENJAMIN

This essay begins by determining the nature of Richard Eldridge's project. Referring mainly to writings by Immanuel Kant and Walter Benjamin, I view his attempt as considering what it involves to be an agent in a historical setting. According to Eldridge, the correct answer will have to involve the right combination of Kant's emphasis on rational self‐determination and Benjamin's account of spontaneous (yet nonrational) self‐transformation. In response to this answer, I suggest that Benjamin's view may not easily lend itself to being made compatible with Kantian thinking. In particular, Benjamin's effort to think experience in terms that do not make any reference to rational self‐determination must be viewed as deeply foreign to Kant's project. I also argue that Kant's third Critique, in particular its conception of reflective judgment, could have provided Eldridge with a view of agency and experience that does not deviate substantially from Kant's project elsewhere. At the end of the essay, I argue that the duality we find in Eldridge's exposition should be viewed as not only related to individuals but to society in general. An attempt to resolve it must involve reflection on how historically constituted social forms create such stark oppositions between reason and its other.     

THE POLITICS OF DESPAIR AND THE CALLING OF HISTORY

What happens to history as a set of practices and intellectual protocols when the assumed subject of our historical narratives is not a product of the European Enlightenment? Such has been the question motivating much of Dipesh Chakrabarty's work for almost thirty years. This essay offers a largely chronological account of Chakrabarty's major works. It begins with his first book, published in 1989, which provided a culturalist account of working‐class history in Bengal. It then tracks his movement in the early 1990s toward a position positing radical disjuncture and even incommensurability between the worlds of Indian subalterns and Western moderns, and his subsequent attempts to soften and blur precisely this kind of disjuncture. Meditating on the problems posed by the experiences of subjects who did not live within the time of history led him to answer in the affirmative the question of whether there are experiences of the past that history could not capture. Soon thereafter, however, he drew back from the most extensive articulation of this claim, suggesting that the experiences of the non‐Enlightenment subject could function as a positive resource and not merely as the source of a profound and destabilizing critique. I argue here that this solution to the problem of incommensurability is not entirely satisfactory, for it relies implicitly on precisely the kinds of argumentative asymmetries of which his earlier analysis taught us to be wary. Chakrabarty himself, meanwhile, has continued to step further away from the radicalism of the early 1990s; his most recent book may be read as a defense of rationalist history in the face of contemporary threats posed by the rise of a politics of identity in India.     

THE CONCEPT OF TRANSPARENCY,ITS HISTORY,AND THE THEORY OF BEGRIFFSGESCHICHTE

In this review essay, I examine the theoretical assumptions required in order to reconstruct an understanding of another historical period. Stefanos Geroulanos has produced a masterful history of mid‐twentieth‐century French thought, and he argues for a significant difference between that period and our own based on the values and ideas associated with the concept of transparency. The book is innovative in both its method and interpretation of the period of 1945–1984. However, despite the suggestive theoretical framework announced at its start, Geroulanos prefers to explore the theoretical content of conceptual history more than to explain how one might go about identifying, understanding, and translating the concepts of a different epoch. In order to contribute to what is already a successful project, I endeavor to extend some of Geroulanos's theoretical sketches through a comparison with Reinhart Koselleck's theory of Begriffsgechichte. Despite some muted criticism of Koselleck from Geroulanos, I argue that the projects share similar commitments, although Geroulanos needs to develop his theoretical premises at greater length, both for a full comparison and in order to complete the critical project that Transparency appears to be undertaking.     

RESTORING CONTINUITY: NOTES ON HISTORY AND FICTION

In 1935, as Europe witnessed the rise of fascism, Paul Valéry tried to identify the origins of the crisis in a lecture titled “Le bilan de l'intelligence.” Things were better, he claimed, when people were able to understand their present moment as the result of past events—that is, when “continuity reigned in the minds.” In this article, I discuss why that sense of continuity with the past is, in fact, indispensable for individuals and societies alike; using instances from great works of fiction, ranging from Don Quixote to the novels of Toni Morrison and Abdulrazak Gurnah, I suggest that fiction—the literary imagination of the historical past—might be uniquely adept at restoring continuity when it is broken.     

Reassessing the ‘Crisis of Faith’ in the Victorian Age: Eclecticism and the Spirit of Moral Inquiry

This article examines both recent scholarship in the field of Victorian religion and conviction alongside new research on secularization that have cast doubt on an older historical narrative about the ‘crisis of faith’ and the ‘triumph’ of the secular. My discussion challenges the emergence of an alternative narrative of crisis that focuses on the ‘crisis of doubt’ rather than the ‘crisis of faith’. In particular, it answers the recent work of Timothy Larsen who argues that many past (and some present) approaches to Victorian religious culture have overemphasized doubt at the expense of considering enduring forms of Christian religiosity. By reappraising the career histories of the radical secularists (notably, Annie Besant) that Larsen uses to support his thesis, I test some of the key assumptions and conclusions of his influential account. My analysis questions the positioning of faith and scepticism as polar opposites and the usefulness of the idea of ‘crisis’ when examining either belief or doubt. Changes in individuals' convictions and practices might be better seen as part of their life-long quest for an all-embracing morality.     

HETEROTEMPORALITY,THE ISLAMIC TRADITION,AND THE POLITICAL: LAROUI'S CONCEPT OF THE ANTINOMY OF HISTORY1

If tradition has often figured as modernity's other, the Islamic tradition has long played the role of the modern constitutive other par excellence. Modern secularizing practices of timing and spacing feed this grounding of the political beyond the conceptual grip of tradition. The works by the Moroccan historian and philosopher Abdallah Laroui (b. 1933) put forward a concept of heterotemporality that distances itself from secularizing practices of timing and spacing, and, importantly, also from theological ones. His critique enables us to understand each of these practices as viewing heterotemporality through one master temporality, a view that represents temporality as, in Laroui's words, “absolute” time. First, this privileged temporality is the homogeneous time of secular progress, and second, it is the homogeneous time of theological truth. Laroui unsettles both practices of timing and spacing by discussing heterotemporality as governed by what he calls the antinomy of the concept of history. For Laroui, this antinomy refers to a specific temporal dynamic that results from the tension between the fundamental discontinuity and incoherence of history, on the one hand, and the production of continuity and coherence through human observers, on the other. Laroui thus reveals that the claims about continuity and coherence that sustain groundings of the political within homogeneous time—either secular or theological—must always be understood in relation to their position within the temporal dynamic of the antinomy of the concept of history. In revealing the temporal dynamic of this antinomy within the Islamic tradition, Laroui reworks the architecture of difference that keeps the secular modern and the Islamic theological conceptually separated from each other.     

DEEP GENETICS: UNIVERSAL HISTORY AND THE SPECIES

The popularity of books such as Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind suggests that universal history‐writing has a continuous not a broken past. Rather than “returning,” it is perhaps the most enduring genre of all. This review essay explores the deep‐history element of universal histories and the ongoing purchase of the stadial tradition for a new history of the species. Why are deep histories of the species so reliably appealing, and what do they mean in the twenty‐first century? Although the Anthropocene would seem to be the pertinent context for this ongoing historiography, this essay suggests that the new domain of genetic genealogy powerfully individualizes and commercializes deep history for neoliberal times.     

RESISTING MODERN TEMPORALITIES: TOWARD A CRITICAL HISTORY OF BREAKS IN TIME

This is an exceptionally sophisticated and wide‐ranging book on historical time, the construction of the past, present, and future, and the problem of periodization. Its major thesis is that temporal divisions of history are produced by social actors, including historians, who break up time from their distinct temporal positions. The book inquires about the theoretical underpinning and historical constitution of temporal breaks: the premises sustaining notions of pastness, presentness, and futurity; the relations constructed by these notions between historiography and other fields of knowledge; the specific articulation of shifting and mutually competing temporalities both within and beyond European history; and the political implications of temporal divisions. Throughout the book the breaking up of time is studied as a fundamental political operation. To engage with temporal breaks, the authors contend, is to engage with the historian's contemporary, to negotiate borders that act upon the present, including the border that safeguards the presumed autonomy of the time of history‐writing. Focusing especially on the temporality of European modernity, the book invites reflection on the politics of time as articulated through categories of historical totalization imposed on modernity's others. But it also suggests that this imposition gave rise to acts of resistance indicating how historical time defies the analytical categories through which social actors seek to organize and control it. This dialectic of imposition and defiance is made evident through the comparative study of temporal concepts that replace one another, compete with one another in certain historical settings without any of them constituting a final historical representation. It is also traced in the continuing significance of suppressed or “failed” temporalities, which are nonetheless still capable of challenging and qualifying our insights into historical time. The book's key contribution lies precisely in the attempt to intensify this challenge by translating the contradictory constitution of modern temporality into a language of self‐critique.     

LEVINAS,HISTORY, AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

In this book Anton Froeyman has provided us with a colorful and intriguing account of a Levinasian approach to historical inquiry and historical writing. In my discussion of his book I describe central features of his account and notice how he uses, to develop his view, recent developments in historiography—including the work of figures like Natalie Davis and Carlo Ginzburg, in philosophical thinking about history and historiography, and in various postmodern developments. I sketch central features of Levinas's ethical metaphysics and show that Froeyman's focus on Levinas's interest in our relations with other persons and in particular with their relative differences from us is too narrow. A proper understanding of our infinite responsibility to and for all others, as Levinas portrays it, leads to a broader account than the one Froeyman gives and one that enables us to understand with greater clarity how historiography fits into the Levinasian understanding of our temporal and interpersonal relations with others.     

HISTORY AND INCOMPLETENESS

Vera Schwarcz's Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden examines the moral, philosophical, and historical meanings of a garden built by a Manchu Chinese prince, subsequently destroyed by British imperialists, commandeered by Red Guard radicals, and finally transformed into the grounds of an art museum. Reading Singing Crane Garden in the context of Schwarcz's previous writings on Chinese intellectuals and Jewish traditions, as well as insights provided by critical philosophers and geographers, this essay explores the moral and ethical dimensions of locating history in specific "emplacements". The argument begins by examining the phenomenology of place articulated by Edward Casey, weaves through discussions of Chinese spatiality, embodiment, and garden aesthetics, and comments on Schwarcz's study of broken monuments and stele through comparisons with Classical Chinese writers and the contemporary American poet Louise Glück. Comparisons are made between the destruction of the garden by the British forces of James Elgin, the murder of the journalist Thomas Bowlby, and the purging, imprisonment, torture, and brutality against scholars and intellectuals by the Red Guards under Mao. The essay closes with commentaries on Schwarcz's reflections concerning continuing global atrocities, and new insights into the ways that understanding landscape architecture as a form of history can bring meaning to questions of memory, loss, and the desire to evoke unrecoverable experiences.     

UNCERTAINTY AND THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

Intellectual historians often make empirical claims, but can never know for certain if these claims are right. Uncertainty is thus inevitable for intellectual historians. But accepting uncertainty is not enough: we should also act on it, by trying to reduce and report it. We can reduce uncertainty by amassing valid data from different sources to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of competing explanations, rather than trying to “prove” an empirical claim by looking for evidence that fits it. Then we should report our degree of certainty in our claims. When we answer empirical questions in intellectual history, we are not telling our readers what happened: we are telling them how strong we think our evidence is—a crucial shift of emphasis. For intellectual historians, then, uncertainty is subjective, as discussed by Keynes and Collingwood; the paper thus explores three differences between subjective and objective uncertainty. Having outlined the theoretical basis of uncertainty, the paper then offers examples from actual research: Noel Malcolm's work shows how to reduce and report uncertainty about composition, and David Wootton's work shows how to reduce and report uncertainty about beliefs.     

GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY BEYOND HEGEL AND MARX

Recent years have seen the growing prominence of “global history” as a subject of research, especially in North America and Europe. However, there is no consensus on what the contours of the subject are, or what the appropriate research methods for it might be. Further, there are quite a few skeptics among historians with regard to this trend. The appearance of a volume on the subfield of “global intellectual history” is an occasion to reflect on all these issues, especially when the volume in question suggests that “the future of intellectual history as a discipline lies in this direction.” This review essay, while appreciative of the effort to lay out the contours of the field, as well as to point to possible future directions for research and reflection, is nevertheless somewhat critical of the actual execution of the project. It is found to be lacking in chronological depth, and also highly uneven in quality, as well as excessively centered on a few “great thinkers” such as Hegel and Marx. A greater attention to the centuries between 1500 and 1800, when a polycentric global regime of knowledge (however tenuous it proved) was established, would have been particularly helpful. Most important, there is the question of whether a history claiming to be “global,” as distinct from “universal,” should not pay closer attention to questions of space and geography.     

EXPERIENCE AND HISTORY: THE REACH AND LIMITS OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO HISTORY

Experience and History: Phenomenological Perspectives on the Historical World presents the summa of David Carr's phenomenological approach to history. I acknowledge the value of this perspective, but I find it doubtful that a phenomenological account can replace the paradigms of memory and representation against which Carr pits it. The concept of historicity is, rather, complementary in that it alerts us to the prethematic presence of history. Phenomenologically, Carr's attempt to tie history closely to experience runs into problems as it is based on a questionable use of Husserl's notion of retention and risks blurring the distinct temporality of history. At the same time, the central concepts of Carr's approach, both experience and narrative, could be deployed in further ways. As literary scholars have come to emphasize, narrative triggers experiences in its readers. Thus, even if it is impossible to recreate the experiences of historical protagonists, narrative lends itself to giving readers a sense of the experiential dimension of the past. In this sense, narrative is not only a medium of representation, but also a means of presence.     

CULTURAL HISTORY,THE POSSIBLE,AND THE PRINCIPLE OF PLENITUDE1

Cultural historical research has deliberately challenged “historical realism,” the view that history is comprised entirely of observable actions that actually occurred, and instead has emphasized the historical significance of thoughts, emotions, and representations; it has also focused on the invisible, the momentary, and the perishable. These latter elements introduce the notion of the possible in history. This article examines the ways in which cultural history has approached the notion of the possible, as well as the methodological and theoretical implications of this approach. Its chief claim is that the idea of possibility is fundamental for the concept of culture and ineliminable from its historical study. The question of possibility is present in multiple ways in the study of history; it is important to distinguish among different levels of possibility. The possible may mean, for instance, what it is possible for historians to know about the past, or the possibilities open to historical agents themselves, or, indeed, the possibilities they perceived themselves as having even if these seem impossible from the point of view of the historian. The article starts with the first aspect and moves on toward the possibilities that existed in the past world either in fact or in the minds of those in the past. The article argues that the study of past cultures always entails the mapping of past possibilities. The first strand of the essay builds on the metaphor of the black hole and intends to solve one of the central problems faced by cultural historians, namely, how to access the horizon of the people of the past, their experience of their own time, especially when the sources remain silent. The second, more speculative strand builds on the notion of plenitude and is designed to open up avenues for further discussion about the concept of culture in particular.     

HISTORY AND POLITICS AS IF WE STILL LIVED IN THE HOLOCENE

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), by David Graeber and David Wengrow, is a monumental, boldly revisionist study of the human past from the last ice age to the present. It is geared explicitly toward the present in political terms and seeks to explain how primordial forms of human freedom were lost in ways that resulted in our current structures of violence and domination. The authors explore a vast range of prehistoric, ancient, and non-Western peoples to undermine (neo)evolutionist, stadial theories of long-term human development, particularly any that imply determinism, inevitability, or teleology. If so many peoples in the past were so much freer than we are today, how is it that we got stuck? And are we really as stuck as we think? Graeber and Wengrow successfully undermine the social scientific template of stage-based human development from hunter-gatherers to modern capitalist nation-states, but their book suffers from two major omissions. First, they ignore almost entirely the Anthropocene epoch and show no grasp of its implications for their analysis of the present or prospects for the future. Second, their “new history of humanity” ignores the history that is most relevant to answering their own questions about how we have arrived globally in our current structures of violence and domination: the early modern and modern history of expansionist, colonialist, capitalist, belligerent, imperialist Western European nations and their extensions since the fifteenth century. These two omissions are connected: it is disproportionately the history of the (early) modern West before and after the Industrial Revolution that explains how the planet arrived in the Anthropocene with the “Great Acceleration” around the mid-twentieth century. But heeding this history and its consequences would have undermined the authors’ upbeat political vision about our prospects for the future—essentially, a recycled Enlightenment vision about human self-determination and individual freedom that depends on environmental exploitation as if we still lived in the Holocene. For all its undoubted achievement, The Dawn of Everything neglects the history that is most salient to answering the main questions its own authors pose. What matters most about that history is not that it was inevitable but that it was actual—and that its cumulative consequences remain with us.     

BALANCED TRUTH: STEVEN SPIELBERG'S SCHINDLER'S LIST AMONG HISTORY,MEMORY, AND POPULAR CULTURE1

Looking at the public reaction to it, one might say that Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List is undoubtedly the most successful film about the Holocaust. The film's success in the U.S. and other Western countries can be traced back mainly to the fact that it creates the impression of telling a true, apparently authentic, story. This essay investigates how this impression of historical truth and authenticity emerges in a fiction film. For this purpose the essay reverts to a concept developed by Jörn Rüsen, which distinguishes among three dimensions of historical culture, namely political, aesthetic, and cognitive. In addition to the historical context that serves as a specific precondition for the film's success, the essay primarily investigates the strategies of authentication Spielberg applied at both the visual and narrative levels. The investigation concludes that the impression of evidence produced by the movie is significantly a result of the sophisticated balancing of the three dimensions mentioned above. The film utilizes artifacts of an existing and increasingly transnational (visual) memory for the benefit of a closed, archetypical narrative. It follows the aesthetic and artistic rules of popular narrative cinema, and largely recurs to conventions of representation that were common in film and television programs of the 1990s. Although these forms condense the historical course of events, the film manages to stay close to insights gained by historiography. The hybrid amalgamation of history and memory, and of the imaginary and the real, as well as the combination of dramaturgies of popular culture with an instinct for what can (not) be shown—all of these factors have helped Schindler's List to render a representation of the founding Holocaust myth in Western societies that can be sensually experienced while being emotionally impressive at the same time.