HISTORIA MAGISTRA VITAE,INTERRUPTING: THUCYDIDES AND THE AGONISTIC TEMPORALITY OF ANTIQUITY AND MODERNITY

In this essay I discuss Koselleck's thesis on the dissolution of historia magistra vitae in modernity with a view to exploring how the modern historiographical engagement with Thucydides entails qualifications of this argument. Focusing on Barthold Georg Niebuhr's contextualization of Thucydides in a new temporality of “ancient and modern history,” I examine how modernity is caught between conflicting notions of its own prehistory, and that this conflict suggests that the forward‐leaping qualities of Neuzeit were co‐articulated with other temporal notions, and particularly an idea of historical exemplarity associated with historia magistra vitae. This plurality of times highlights an agonistic temporality linking antiquity and modernity: a model of conflicting times inscribed in a dialogue through which modern historiography interrupted the “useful” history of antiquity, while simultaneously being itself interrupted by it. By following this dialogue, I seek to test two interrelated hypotheses: a) that modernity produced a multitemporal scheme in which the ideas of differential time and the future were intertwined with a notion of historia magistra vitae as meaningful and sense‐bearing time; and b) that contradictions in this scheme arising from the modern confrontation with Thucydides's poetics challenges the opposition between historia magistra vitae and modern historical sense and configures a temporality that is self‐agonistic in the sense that it confronts historical actors before and beyond the terms through which they may be able to give it meaning. Formulated as a poetics of the possible, this notion is approached as a corrective alternative to the modern consideration of the future as distanced from the space of experience, but nonetheless as grounded in actuality and therefore largely mastered by human knowledge and action.     

Reinhold Niebuhr and Richard John Neuhaus on Religion and Democracy in the United States

Abstract

Richard John Neuhaus, like Reinhold Niebuhr before him, understood the vital civic role that religion plays in democratic society. As pastors and public intellectuals, both men were committed to public or civil forms of religion that, at their best, could inform, inspire, or chasten American political thought and action. There are crucial differences, nevertheless–between Niebhur’s and Neuhaus’s historical contexts, theological outlooks, political positions, and attitudes toward the American project–that help to explain their distinctive legacies and different receptions within the academy. However much Neuhaus admired Niebuhr, these differences suggest why Neuhaus was not the Reinhold Niebuhr of his day.     

Responsibility,Humility, and Intervention

Abstract

This paper proposes an analysis of The Responsibility to Protect that is rooted in the Christian realism of Reinhold Niebuhr. R2P rests on three central claims: sovereignty ought to be understood in terms of responsibility rather than control, the just cause criterion for war should include humanitarian protection, and rightful authority ought to be relocated to multilateral institutions. In turn, Niebuhr’s Christian realism proposes a dialectic of responsibility and humility that shapes our understanding of justice and coercion. While examining R2P through a Niebuhrian lens shows some compatibility between the two moral frameworks, it also reveals the insufficient understanding of humility with respect to human motivations and limitations that underlies R2P’s criteria.     

DWELLING WITHIN: THE INHABITED RUINS OF HISTORY1

Addressing the recent call to rethink history as a form of presence, the essay works toward a recovery of a space in which such presence of history is encoded. I argue that history as a form of active perception is akin to virtual witnessing of the past in the moment of our encounter with historical artifacts, be they texts, photographs, or buildings. To this end, I engage with the conceptual and material aspects of historical perception, deriving a model of history as “inhabited ruins,” the way it emerges together with historical consciousness and finds an especially dynamic expression in Georg Simmel's philosophy of culture. Throughout, I work with the notion of distance and trans‐dimensional presence as the forces that shape and reshape historical awareness. Ruins, intimately connected to the modern historical imagination, are approached not as sites of commemoration or nostalgia, but as spaces of active exchange between presence and disappearance. As such, they are taken to be the models for the transitive character of history itself, blurring the division between perception and thought. In other words, ruins are taken as structures that evoke and summon the past to an encounter with contemporary reality—a type of co‐appearance that opens the possibility of virtually witnessing the past. I conclude that the logic of “inhabited ruins” constitutes the event‐horizon of modern identity, always placing history right at the threshold of fragmentation.     

Corpus cartographique pour l'histoire de Damas,Syrie, à la fin de la période ottomane (1760–1924)

Abstract

De manière générale, la cartographie des villes de l'empire ottoman est peu abondante. Au dix‐neuvième siècle, malgré plusieurs réformes administratives, l'autorité publique ne recourait pas à des documents cartographiques pour organiser les travaux d'édilité tandis que les étrangers rencontraient les plus grandes difficultés pour établir des représentations de ces villes. Damas constitue une exception à ce tableau. On dispose de plusieurs cartes antérieures à l'établissement du mandat français (1920) qui sont de qualité inégale. Les auteurs étrangers sont les plus nombreux et les plus fiables; le plus souvent archéologues ou historiens, ils ont dressé des documents partiels par toujours faciles à évaluer. Cependant, et malgré la faiblesse de son volume (sept documents), le corpus des premières cartes de Damas constitue une source essentielle pour l'histoire du développement spatial de la ville entre le milieu du dix‐neuvième siècle et l'établissement du pouvoir mandataire.     

4. EVENTS GETTING AHEAD OF THEMSELVES: RETHINKING THE TEMPORALITY OF EXPECTATIONS

Whereas most theoretical and historiographical accounts of the event have focused on its present and past dimensions, this article addresses the relatively underexplored phenomenon of the future event. As temporal junctures, events often already elicit effects before they come to pass, and even if they never do. Building on foundational work on the relation between experience and expectation by Hans‐Georg Gadamer and Reinhart Koselleck as well as on current historiographical debates on “past futures,” I develop a threefold typology of the future event, distinguishing between the assumption of the routine event, the expectation of the relative event, and the adumbration of the radical event. Engaging with case studies like the year 2000, the ambivalent character of so‐called media events, and ongoing debates about a possible climate collapse and the COVID‐19 pandemic, I show how reconsidering the complex temporalities of the future event can shed new light on the ways in which past societies made their futures present.     

HISTORY,AFRICA, AND DEFAMILIARIZATION: A COMMENT

After initially identifying defamiliarization as a central aspect of Nancy Rose Hunt's essay “History as Form,” this comment reflects on the implications that her reading of Georg Simmel and her emphasis on objects and materiality have for the writing of history. If Hunt suggests, with Simmel, that the form of history is autonomous from history as it unfolds, the claim here is rather that there is no necessary relationship between writing and its topic. Considering how earlier European historiography excluded Africa (in particular) from the domain of history, it is no coincidence that this contingent relation between form and history has been particularly energizing for Africanist historiography—leading to innovations both in practice and theory. The comment concludes by briefly discussing three concepts that have informed such innovation: the vernacular, suturing, and multiple temporalities.     

Hope,Cynicism, and Complicity: Worldly Resistance in Reinhold Niebuhr's Criticism of Karl Barth

This paper seeks to investigate the relationship between hope, cynicism, and despair in the stakes of a well-known dispute between Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr accuses Barth, and those who adopt Barth's central doctrinal and political positions, of quietism: in the name of religious perfectionism, such Barthians are not disposed toward incremental but necessary social reforms. For Niebuhr, this is a sure sign of “Barthian pessimism,” the despair that results from a conscience oversensitive to the absolute demands of God's righteousness. This paper seeks to show that a certain form of Barthian political theology is defensible as an ethical disposition since it need not fall victim to the helpless despair that Niebuhr fears, and simultaneously that a defensible account of what I call “total complicity” reflects the self-awareness and self-criticism that often become deformed into cynical despair and reshapes them toward repentant engagement with the world.