History manifested: making sense of unprecedented change

An essential element usually passes unnoticed in recent discussion about how history as an academic discipline is supposed to be relevant for the shaping of our public life. It is the concept of history itself (history as both the course of events and historical writing) that underlies the whole discussion, which also configures the two currently most influential and fashionable efforts to reinstate the public relevance of history: The History Manifesto, co-authored by Jo Guldi and David Armitage, and Hayden White's The Practical Past. In advising to turn to the past in order to shape the present and the future, both books rely on the familiar developmental view that characterised nineteenth-century thinking in general, and on which the discipline of history became institutionalised in particular. The author's main contention in this essay is that turning to this notion of history is not the solution for the problem of the supposed public irrelevance of professional historical studies, but the problem itself. The developmental view, based on a presumption of a deeper continuity provided by the subject of the historical process that retains its self-identity amid all changes, certainly suited the discipline of history when it was engaged in the project of nation-building. However, it hardly fits our present concerns. These concerns, like the Anthropocene, take the shape of unprecedented change, and what they challenge is precisely the deeper continuity of the developmental view. The discipline of history can regain public relevance only insofar as it proves to be able to exhibit a thinking of its own specificity which can nevertheless explain such unprecedented changes. What such historical thinking could provide is what the developmental view can no longer: the possibility to act upon a story that we can believe.     

DEPROVINCIALIZING THE STUDY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS: A CRITIQUE

Though the fourteen contributors to this volume bring varied perspectives on method, most striking is their common engagement with contextualist approaches. While some of the essays advocate a temporally and spatially extended, renewed history of ideas with debts to Arthur Lovejoy, and are critical of excessive contextualization, several either defend contextualism, or the culture concept, or offer a more robust materialist foundation for the history of thought and culture. This review focuses on the logic and metaphors used to criticize contextual methods and highlights problems with both the new history of ideas and the new materialist gestures.     

Contesting the Divided City: Arts of Resistance in Skopje

This paper examines issues of power and resistance in “divided cities”. Basing my analysis on fieldwork I carried out in Skopje, Macedonia, I look at how urban space may be constructed and used by hegemonic groups as a means of asserting their power and how, in turn, the city may be a place of resistance where power is contested and public space reappropriated. Drawing on Lefebvre's perspective on the production of space, I compare the conceived city to the lived city and examine how urban inhabitants may resist the division of the city and challenge hegemonic representations. I also draw on Debord's psychogeography to define an artistic, active and participatory approach to urban space through which the inhabitants may re‐conquer their right to the œuvre and to the city. I argue that the city as a lived environment may offer narratives other than division and that there are alternatives to the divided city.     

The Last of Australian Imperial Dreams for the Southwest Pacific: Paul Hasluck,the Department of Territories and a Greater Melanesia in 1960

This paper is a study of the vision held at the beginning of the 1960s by Paul Hasluck, the minister for external territories, and his department of the path to decolonisation for Melanesia. Faced by the ongoing West New Guinea crisis, Hasluck and his officials proposed to keep the western part of New Guinea out of Indonesian hands by expanding Australia’s empire, step by step, to include most of Melanesia. This greater Melanesian empire would eventually be guided to self-government. The proposal stood in a long line of ideas by Pacific-minded Australians going back for 100 years for an expanded Australian empire in the southwest Pacific. Consequently the Menzies cabinet’s rejection of Hasluck’s proposal was not just an important step towards changing its policy towards WNG; it marked the end to a century of Australian dreams and designs of a greater formal empire in the southwest Pacific.     

“Ceci n’est pas un fragment”: Identity,Intertextuality and Fictionality in Sappho’s “Brothers Poem”

In this article, Sappho’s Brothers Poem is re-evaluated and analysed from various perspectives that have not been addressed sufficiently in scholarship so far. First, some questions of principle regarding the role of the brothers and the Sapphic speaker are discussed. Secondly, the poem’s communicative situation is examined, and different options for the identification of the person addressed as “you” are considered. Thirdly, it is demonstrated how the poem establishes an intertextual dialogue with the Homeric Odyssey on various levels, and how this dialogue affects the general understanding of the poem. Finally, the commonly held view that the five transmitted stanzas do not represent the entire poem is challenged. The article concludes with some wider considerations about some of the most common assumptions regarding the nature and the fragmentary state of the Brothers Poem.     

Doxographical or Philosophical History of Philosophy: On Michael Frede's Precepts for Writing the History of Philosophy

Summary

In a series of articles from the 1980s and 1990s, Michael Frede analysed the history of histories of philosophy written over the last three hundred years. According to Frede, modern scholars have degenerated into what he calls a ‘doxographical’ mode of writing the history of philosophy. Instead, he argued, these scholars should write what he called ‘philosophical’ history of philosophy, first established in the last decades of the seventeenth century but since abandoned. In the present article it is argued that Frede's reconstruction of the history of histories of philosophy is historically problematic.     

Crossing the Great Divides: Hans Aarsleff's Lessons for Nineteenth-Century Intellectual Historians

SUMMARY

This essay discusses Hans Aarsleff's long battle to demonstrate the importance of the French and British thinkers of the mid-eighteenth century to the development of modern linguistic thought. Contesting claims that German scholars were the first to develop historicised theories of language, Aarsleff, along with his Princeton colleagues Lionel Gossman and Anthony Grafton, helped pioneer longue durée studies of the history of philology and of historiography that cross national boundaries as well as the so-called Sattelzeit (stretching from about 1780 until 1820). Although the importance of his work was, for a long time, little appreciated by modern intellectual historians, this essay argues that it is time that we fully learned Aarsleff's lessons.     

A Great American Scholar of the Royal Navy? The Disputed Legacy of Arthur Marder Revisited

This article examines the scholarly reputation of the late Professor Arthur J. Marder. Once universally acclaimed as the doyen of historians of the Royal Navy in the First World War era, in recent times his work has come in for sustained criticism from a small group of revisionist historians, who not only dispute his conclusions, but argue that his entire methodology and approach were fundamentally flawed. This article assesses the specific charges of inadequate scholarship levelled against Marder by these revisionist historians and concludes that, while aspects of Marder's analysis may well be open to dispute, there are no grounds for attacking his scholarly integrity. On the contrary, he thoroughly deserves his reputation as a pioneering and painstaking scholar.