Shakespeare's Fault or Yours? Melzer's Maxim: A Guide to Tentative Omniscience for the Congenitally Hyperfallible

Abstract

Arthur Melzer's tremendous accomplishment is even greater than he may realize. The tradition of esoteric writing in political philosophy exists, as he convincingly demonstrates, and the consequences of this discovery are as significant as he claims. But the method of esoteric reading that he recommends applies more broadly than he seems to suggest. Applied liberally, moreover, as a corrective to nearly everything that's gone wrong with education in the humanities and social sciences over the last forty years, his humble heuristic—Melzer's Maxim, I call it—has the potential to reorient and renew the whole concept of Liberal Education for an age whose pedagogy is foundering. A boon to the sub-discipline of Political Theory in particular, Philosophy Between the Lines has even more to offer to classroom instruction in general. Read between the lines, Melzer's specialized work of scholarship promises nothing less than the opening of the American mind. It is the antidote to the poison of politically correct multiculturalism.     

20世纪西方分析或批判的历史哲学

分析或批判的历史哲学的兴起,一方面批判了思辨的历史哲学,另一方面将历史哲学研究的重点从解释历史的性质转移到解释历史知识的性质上来。这极大地推进了史学理论的发展,也为历史学确立了更为稳固的根基。德国历史哲学家狄尔泰、文德尔班、李凯尔特继承德国历史主义传统,从文化科学与自然科学相异的角度来分析历史知识的性质;克罗齐、柯林武德也遵循了这个传统。分析学派罗素、波普尔、亨佩尔等人,则从语言逻辑的角度来分析理解历史的方式和历史知识的可能性。这两个方向共同构成了20世纪西方历史哲学的主流,进一步深化了人们对自我的认识。     

THE LAST EUROPEAN: A PLEA FOR A RE‐POLITICIZED BENJAMIN

This review of Alexander Gelley's captivating book follows its attempt to respond to Benjamin's plea to “expound the nineteenth century” and liberate us “from the stupendous forces of history,” using aisthesis, “a weak messianic force,” and “dream visions.” Taking the cue from Gelley's reference to Benjamin's rebellion against “a secret agreement between past generations and the present one” (156), this review attempts to open up the context and to wonder about “the secret agreement” between recent Benjamin scholarship and its own sense of the past. The review pleads with future Benjaminians to start asking questions relating to the twentieth century, and attempts to consider the relevance of Benjaminia for current political analysis and recent trends in critical studies.     

METHOD AND MEANING: RANKE AND DROYSEN ON THE HISTORIAN'S DISCIPLINARY ETHOS

In this article I revisit nineteenth-century debates over historical objectivity and the political functions of historiography. I focus on two influential contributors to these debates: Leopold von Ranke and Johann Gustav Droysen. In their takes on objectivity and subjectivity, impartiality and political engagement, I reveal diametrically opposed solutions to shared concerns: how can historians reveal history to be meaningful without resorting to speculative philosophy? And how can they produce a knowledge that is relevant to the present when the project of “exemplary” history has been abandoned? I focus especially on the relativist themes in Ranke's and Droysen's answers to these questions. Ranke's demand for impartiality leads him to think of all historical epochs as equally valid, whereas Droysen's emphasis on subjectivity relativizes historical truth. In order to explain why Ranke and Droysen nevertheless remained unfazed by the problem of historical relativism, I analyze their normative conceptions of the historian's disciplinary ethos. I show that Ranke and Droysen think of objective impartiality and subjective partiality not only in methodological terms but also in terms of justice and ethical duty. By way of this normative element, their historical methodologies secure for the professional study of history an ethical-political relevance for the present.     

THINKING HISTORICALLY ABOUT THINKING HISTORICALLY: IS HISTORICAL THEORY A HISTORICAL OR A METAHISTORICAL PRACTICE?

This intimidating and massive collection of twenty‐nine extended, diverse essays by distinguished scholars, organized around the general theme of the current state and future direction of historical theory, raises some fundamental questions about historical theory as practiced over the past half century as well as about the distinctive nature of historical theory within the broader context of the production of historical knowledge. The editors of the volume suggest that the postmodern linguistic turn in historical theory, especially as articulated by Hayden White and Michel Foucault, marked a decisive, epochal turning‐point in human historical self‐consciousness, the attainment of a mature stage of autonomous metahistorical reflection on the essential nature of what it means to be historical, on historicity per se. What came before is imagined as a series of preliminary stages, what came after as a working out of implications and consequences. I suggest that a close reading of the implicit and explicit arguments of the individual essays reveals a rather different kind of historical moment, one in which postmodern historical theory has increasingly been demystified of its alleged metahistorical status, and has emerged as a situated object of historical reflection and thus has itself become increasingly defined as historical, recognized in its particularity as a temporally and culturally framed form of historical knowledge.     

BONDSMEN AND SLAVES: SERVILE HISTORIES IN HEGEL AND NIETZSCHE

Recent readings of what is commonly known as the dialectic of master and slave have tended to focus either philosophically on concepts such as desire, reflection, and recognition or historically on the specific nature of the economic relation it evokes. In this paper I challenge that division of proper objects, arguing that Hegel's dialectic and its reception raises the question how the nature of servitude (whether that of a bondsman or that of a slave) structures not only the emergence of historical agency but also the relationship between history and philosophy. The importance of reflection in Hegel's treatment of the dialectic of lord and bondsman is both clearly stated and structural. Alexandre Kojève's reading of this dialectic makes explicit that human history originates in it, but, unlike Hegel, Kojève does not emphasize the product of the slave's labor. Judith Butler's reading of the dialectic in Hegel and Kojève locates the difference between Hegel's bondsman and Kojève's slave within the structure of servitude itself as a Foucauldian opposition between “body” and “life.” In On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Friedrich Nietzsche differentiates between two varieties of servile work on the basis not of what is produced but instead to whom service is rendered, announcing what turns out to be a problematic familiar from both the Old and New Testaments: the impossibility of service to two masters. In a typically perspectival turn, Nietzsche shows that servitude is a condition of possibility not only of human history but also of its academic study. Self‐conscious historians must thus take into account not only the dependence of their object of study upon relations of servitude but also their own place within such relations.     

THE TIME OF POLITICS,THE POLITICS OF TIME,AND POLITICIZED TIME: AN INTRODUCTION TO CHRONOPOLITICS

Time is so deeply interwoven with all aspects of politics that its centrality to the political is frequently overlooked. For one, politics has its own times and rhythms. Secondly, time can be an object and an instrument of politics. Thirdly, temporal attributes are used not only to differentiate basic political principles but also to legitimize or delegitimize politics. Finally, politics aims at realizing futures in the present or preventing them from materializing. Consequently, the relationship between politics and time encompasses a broad spectrum of phenomena and processes that cry out for historicization. In our introduction to this History and Theory theme issue on chronopolitics, we argue that the concept of chronopolitics makes it possible to do this and, in the process, to move the operation of rethinking historical temporalities from the periphery toward the center of historiographical attention as well as to engage in a dialogue with scholars from a wide range of disciplines. To this end, we propose a broad concept of chronopolitics by discussing existing definitions, by distinguishing between three central dimensions of chronopolitics (the time of politics, the politics of time, and politicized time), and by systematizing possible approaches to studying chronopolitics.