Claiming the People’s Past Populist Politics of History in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Berber Bevernage, Eline Mestdagh, Walderez Ramalho, and Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, 2024
In this chapter, I address the role of emotions in populist politics and ask whether the emotions... more In this chapter, I address the role of emotions in populist politics and ask whether the emotions that populism appeals to form a specific set that distinguishes populism from other ideologies or discourses, especially from ethnic nationalism and nativism. In order to answer this first question, I first need to clarify the definitions of populism, ethnic nationalism, and nativism that I adopt. I depart from the well-known definition of populism formulated by Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Kaltwasser and indicate the problems connected with this kind of definition in the light of ethnic nationalism. Then I elucidate the concept of ethnic nationalism and its relationship to populism because at least in Western Europe and in the United States of America (USA) they both appear to be very closely related. In the chapter, I will further focus on this ‘Western’, right-wing brand of populism and only occasionally refer to other varieties. Second, I discuss the concept of nativism and argue why it enables us to explain the connection between the two main characteristics of ‘Western’ populism – that is, its fundamental critique of ‘the (corrupt) elites’ and its fundamental critique of those who do not belong to ‘the people’. Third, after having cleared the strong conceptual and historical interconnections between ‘Western’ populism, nativism, and ethnic nationalism, I analyse the relationship between this type of collective identity and collective emotions. I do so because populist discourse appeals to and formulates specific emotions and specific collective identities. This leads me to the role played by fear versus security, hope versus despair, pride versus shame, and anger versus guilt in the mobilization of collective identities connected to populism, nativism, and ethnic nationalism. It also leads me to the important distinction between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ identities. Fourth, I go into the question of how the collective emotions typical of populism are connected to time and into the question of whether populism is following a specific narrative template that is different from ethnic nationalism, as Hakkı Taş has suggested. Here, I argue that the basic rise–fall–resurrection temporal trajectory is not only characteristic of populism but is also found in the Christian religion and in ethnic nationalism. Fifth and last, I end with concluding remarks
In ´The Primacy of Method in Historical Research: Philosophy of History and the Per-
spective o... more In ´The Primacy of Method in Historical Research: Philosophy of History and the Per-
spective of Meaning´, Jonas Ahlskog presents a critical and lucid engagement with con-
temporary philosophies of history and makes a sustained case for a return to the ideas
of history and social science as developed by R. G. Collingwood and Peter Winch. What
philosophy needs again is, first, a recognition of the “primacy of method”—that is, the
insight that what one knows about reality depends on how one knows it. Second, philoso-
phers need to take “the duality of method” seriously again and to recognize that the modes of explanation in the human sciences and the natural sciences are categorically different from each other—especially now that this difference has been blurred in recent debates about the Anthropocene. Ahlskog’s book is thus also a contribution to the classical debate about causal explanation versus meaningful understanding. On closer analysis, however, Ahlskog’s “untimely meditations” on “historical method” suffer from an insufficient engagement with counterarguments. A first line of critique challenges the idea that human action cannot be explained causally. A second line of critique challenges the idea that all aspects of human action can be “understood,” because the unintended aspects and consequences of individual actions cannot. These require causal explanation. A third line of critique concerns Ahlskog’s denial of the fundamental plurality of ideas of history and the social sciences. Squeezing this plurality into one philosophical mold comes at a price. Unintentionally, Ahlskog’s “untimely meditations” also show that much.
Keywords: philosophies of history, historical method, causal explanation and understand-
ing, history and social science, irrelevance of time
Fictionality, factuality and fake in history., 2024
The text is concerned with the distinctions between fictionality and factuality in historical and... more The text is concerned with the distinctions between fictionality and factuality in historical and narratological discourse and - last but not least - their distinction with fake history as a problem. A German version is in press in: Michele Barricelli, Nicola Brauch, Estevão de Rezende Martins, FriedrichJaeger and Jörn Rüsen (eds.), Handbuch der Historik, Wiesbaden: Springer Verlag 2024.
This is my contribution to the liber amicorum of Ewa Domanska on the occasion of her 60th. birthd... more This is my contribution to the liber amicorum of Ewa Domanska on the occasion of her 60th. birthday in December 2023 (`Book of Memories and Wishes´, forthcoming).
Том 30 Сшыткі 1-2 (58-59) Снежань ЗМЕСТ Артыкулы Уладзімір Падалінскі. Вобраз соймавага пасла ў м... more Том 30 Сшыткі 1-2 (58-59) Снежань ЗМЕСТ Артыкулы Уладзімір Падалінскі. Вобраз соймавага пасла ў мове палітычнага дыскурсу ВКЛ (другая палова XVIпач. XVII ст.
In this article I argue that the present ‘burdensome’ condition of important parts of the past is overstretching the ‘normal’, professional concept of history. I interpret White’s recent introduction of the ‘practical’ past next to the ‘historical’ past as his way of addressing the same problem. I reconstruct his conceptual work and come to the conclusion that opposing the ‘historical’ and the ’practical’ past is not enough, because this opposition leaves unquestioned the positivistic presuppositions upon which the distinction itself rests. I develop my argument in four steps. First, I signal some ambiguities in White’s formulation of the distinction and trace them back to Michael Oakeshott who first theorized it. Second, I identify two problems shared by Oakeshott and White concerning the unity of ‘the past’ and ‘the present’ and the ‘break’ between them. Third, I argue that the pluralisation of pasts and presents formulated by Preston King represents a convincing conceptual solution to the first problem, and John Searle’s speech acts theory provides a solution to the second problem. Lastly, I conclude that the very distinction between the ‘historical’ and the ‘practical’ past is rooted in empiricist and positivist assumptions long discredited by the work of W. V. Quine and T. H. Kuhn, and thereby suggest that the present state of the philosophical debate should have consequences for our thinking about the distinction between the historical and the practical past.
As far as the question of truth is concerned, we live in strange times. Although the question is ... more As far as the question of truth is concerned, we live in strange times. Although the question is at least as old as Western philosophy, since 2016, i.e. since Donald Trump's election campaign and Boris Johnson's Brexit campaign, it has been increasingly claimed that the question has become irrelevant because we are living in an age beyond truth (post-truth) and beyond facts (post-factual). What are we to make of these ideas? Using the example of Donald Trump, I argue that the phenomena that have been suggested since 2016 under labels like 'post-truth' and 'post-factual' can best be understood as forms of 'bullshit' as analyzed by philosopher Harry Frankfurt in 2005.
Was die Frage der Wahrheit betrifft, leben wir in merkwürdige Zeiten. Obwohl die Frage mindestens... more Was die Frage der Wahrheit betrifft, leben wir in merkwürdige Zeiten. Obwohl die Frage mindestens so alt ist wie die westliche Philosophie, wird seit 2016, d.h. seit Donald Trumps Wahlkampagne und Boris Johnsons Brexit-Kampagne, immer häufiger behauptet, dass die Frage irrelevant geworden ist da wir in einem Zeitalter jenseits der Wahrheit (post-truth) und jenseits der Fakten (post-faktisch) leben würden. Was ist von diesen Ideen zu halten? Am Beispiel von Donald Trump argumentiere ich dass die Phänomene die seit 2016 mit Labels wie 'post-truth' und 'post-faktisch' angedeutet werden, am besten als Formen von 'bullshit' verstanden werden können, wie diese in 2005 von dem Philosoph Harry Frankfurt analysiert wurde.
Keywords: presentism; order of time; regime of historicity; multitemporality; homogeneous time; m... more Keywords: presentism; order of time; regime of historicity; multitemporality; homogeneous time; modern history; chronoference.
The article offers a thoroughgoing critique of the concept of presentism, through which the famous French intellectual historian François Hartog conceptualized the modern sense of history. Introducing the concept of “the regime of historicity,” Hartog pointed to the socio-cultural conditionality of the relationship between the present, past and future. He redefined Koselleck’s description of the genesis of modern history during the “saddle time” in terms of a transformation in the regimes of historicity. The author of the article points out the duality of Hartog’s presentism, which is both an “ideal type” and a description of a chronologically defined span of time. Although Hartog explicitly speaks of presentism as a heuristic tool designed to deal with the temporal experiences of people, he does not investigate them anthropologically or sociologically. Hartog describes the specific tendencies inherent in twentieth-century historiography — its memorialization and juridification, and the concepts that have become key in dealing with the past — memory, commemoration, heritage and identity. These arguments of Hartog’s contain normative judgments and indicate a negative attitude toward the change that he witnessed in the social status of historiography. Careful study shows that Hartog’s use of presentism as a diagnosis of the modern era is incompatible with presentism as an analytical category. The former assumes a progressive linear course of time and is the inverse of modernism. The latter is a way of pluralizing time. The half-heartedness of such a status can be seen by contrasting it with Achim Landwehr’s concept of chronoference, which explains the sociocultural nature of historical time. If the distinctions between past, present and future are not ontological (as the historians of modernity imagined them) but instead situational, then the dominance of any one order of time is impossible. But unlike Landwehr, Hartog is not ready to completely abandon the modernist concept of history.
in: Omar Acha, Daniel Brauer, Facundo N. Martín y Adrián Ratto (editores), Las Identidades Colectivas Entre Los Ideales Y La Ficcion. Estudios de filosofía de la historia, Prometeo Libros, Buenos Aires 2021, 31-65. , 2021
Who needs - collective - identity? This tantalizing question that was formulated in 1996 by the f... more Who needs - collective - identity? This tantalizing question that was formulated in 1996 by the founding father of cultural studies in the UK, the Jamaican-British sociologist Stuart Hall, still has a paradoxical ring 25 years later. In 1996 Hall tried to explain the “paradoxical development” he observed concerning the use of the concept of collective identity both in the humanities and in public discourse. He noticed that since the 1980’s “there has been a veritable discursive explosion around the concept of identity, at the same moment as it has been subjected to a searching critique”. In this article I argue that Hall’s observation still applies 25 years later and that icollective identity issues even have become more present and pressing than they were in 1996. Not only the countless varieties of populism and other forms of neo-nationalism in politics can be seen as evidence supporting this observation but also the ‘cultural wars’ concerning racism, feminism/ gender, environmentalism and most recently – public health. They all are basically conflicts concerning collective identities and collective rights. At the same time the concept of collective identity is still essentially contested in the social sciences and in the humanities and there is no shadow of consensus on the horizon.
In my article I proceed in the following way. First, I briefly introduce two opposing views concerning the advantages and disadvantages of collective identity as a category of analysis in the social sciences and the humanities. For simplicity’s sake I label them the foes and the friends of collective identity. Second, I present a recent example of the (mis)use of collective identity as an analytical tool in order illustrate why the concept is fundamentally criticized. Third, I present and analyse the positions of the foes of collective identity and their arguments (especially Frederic Cooper, Roger Brubaker and Lutz Niethammer). Fourth, I present the friends of collective identity and analyse their arguments (Chantal Mouffe, Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas and others). Fifth and last, I conclude that although the academic discussions concerning ‘collective identity’ appear to be a thing of the – recent – past, the philosophical issues at stake – especially the status of the social in relationship to the individual - are still very present and controversial today.
Chris Lorenz is known primarily as an insightful theorist of historiography. In this remarkable a... more Chris Lorenz is known primarily as an insightful theorist of historiography. In this remarkable article, he offers a critical overview of German historiography in the postwar period, arguing that until recently (post-1990) the Holocaust has been an absent presence, largely repressed or avoided by foremost German historians. What he says about Reinhart Koselleck is pointed and probably unknown or bracketed by most of those who have discussed his influential work. The extreme limitations and dubiousness of Koselleck’s comments about the Holocaust are signaled in a manner that brings out the latter’s proximity to other German historians of his generation, notably Andreas Hillgruber. Lorenz’s comments are informed by a skillful use of psychoanalytic concepts. His discussion of German historians would benefit by being further supplemented by an analysis of non-German historians, notably in the United States, England, and Israel, as is at times intimated in his footnotes.
in: Niels F. May & Thomas Maissen (eds.), National History and New Nationalism in the Twenty-First Century. A Global Comparison, Routledge: New York, 72 - 95 , 2021
This chapter analyses the relationship between Dutch historiography and neo-nationalism in the 21... more This chapter analyses the relationship between Dutch historiography and neo-nationalism in the 21st. century. It argues that the major issues in public history and in national history are directly connected to the imperial and colonial past of the Dutch.
First, the chapter analyses the return of exclusive, ethnic nationalism in Dutch political discourse and in public history in direct relation with the revisionist counter-narratives, that demand the public recognition of the inherent violence of slavery and colonialism. Second, the chapter zooms in on three particular topics that are publicly contested by revisionists and ethnic-nationalist anti-revisionists. The first issue concerns the statues and the streets carrying the names of the seafaring heroes who played a leading role in the Dutch colonial enterprise. The second issue revolves around the symbolic meaning of ‘Black Pete’ and the third issue concerns the continuing use of the name ‘Golden Age’ for the Dutch 17th century.
The third and fourth sections of the chapter analyse academic varieties of the anti-revisionist and revisionist views. While the anti-revisionist views implicitly hark back to essentialist notions of the Dutch nation, revisionist historians claim that Dutch history can only be adequately written by taking its imperial and global character seriously.
Analysing Historical Narratives. On Academic, Popular and Educational Framings of the Past, 2021
Book description: For all of the recent debates over the methods and theoretical underpinnings of... more Book description: For all of the recent debates over the methods and theoretical underpinnings of the historical profession, scholars and laypeople alike still frequently think of history in terms of storytelling. Accordingly, historians and theorists have devoted much attention to how historical narratives work, illuminating the ways they can bind together events, shape an argument and lend support to ideology. From ancient Greece to modern-day bestsellers, the studies gathered here offer a wide-ranging analysis of the textual strategies used by historians. They show how in spite of the pursuit of truth and objectivity, the ways in which historians tell their stories are inevitably conditioned by their discursive contexts.
Stefan Berger and William Niven (eds.), A Cultural History of Memory in the Long Twentieth Century (vol.6), Bloomsbury., 2020
This chapter asks how the dimensions of space and time have been framed and discussed in memory s... more This chapter asks how the dimensions of space and time have been framed and discussed in memory studies and how memory has been distinguished from history in the long twentieth century. I will first present a three-part periodization of memory studies in the long twentieth century: the foundational period, identified with the work of Maurice Halbwachs on collective memory, the memory boom period identified with the sites of memory approach of Pierre Nora, and the present-day period of transnational, transcultural and multidirectional memory, identified with the work of memory scholars like Michael Rothberg, Ann Rigney, Astrid Erll, Daniel Levy, and Nathaniel Sznaider and—last but not least—Aleida and Jan Assmann.I will secondly flesh out the explicit and implicit ideas about space in the work of Halbwachs and Nora. I will argue that they both ultimately frame memorial space in terms of the relatively closed container-space of the nation-state. In the case of Nora this identification is exemplified in the remarkable absence of the French overseas empire from his memorial construction of France.
Thirdly, I will argue that a fundamental break with notions of container-space and container-time are the two major characteristics of the post-Nora, transnational, transcultural, transgenerational, transmedial, and multi-directional period. Memory scholars in this period usually emphasize that all memory is “traveling” in relatively openmultiscalar spaces and in multidirectional times—and thus cannot unambiguously be located in one place or in one time, nor connected to one fixed identity. Michael Rothberg’s analysis of the interrelationship between the memory of the Holocaust and of decolonization and Daniel Levy’s and Nathaniel Sznaider’s analysis of the globalization of Holocaust-memory exemplify these recent approaches.
Fourthly, I will address the framing of time in memory studies by analyzing the influential analyses of François Hartog and Aleida Assmann—the only two book-length analyses concerning the changing experiences of time over time. Both Hartog and Assmann hold that the relationships between past, present, and future have fundamentally changed since the memory boom, but they offer completely different analyses and evaluations of this change. While Hartog—following Nora—interprets the memory boom as a pathogenic symptom of a crisis of—modern—time, Assmann interprets memory studies as a cultural-political achievement of post-Holocaust and postcolonial societies that have learnt the hard way that change does not automatically equal progress.
This introduction summarizes the basic ideas behind the articles collected in ‘Bordercrsossings’.... more This introduction summarizes the basic ideas behind the articles collected in ‘Bordercrsossings’. The first basic idea is the idea that the writing of history has a ‘border crossing’ character, meaning that history writing involves border crossings 1. between history and philosophy, and 2. between history and ‚politics‘ in a broad sense. The second basic idea is that the dialectical mechanism of ‘inversion’ (of ‘negation’ and of ‘the unity of opposites’) is fundamental for our understanding of debates in philosophy of history and in historiography. The third idea is that interesting prejudices and other assumptions in both philosophy and in history are found by contrast, not by analysis (Feyerabend). Analysis of controversies is therefore the most fruitful point of departure in philosophy of history and in historiography. Because all key ideas in the humanities are ‘essentially contested concepts’ (Gallie) controversies are the ‘normal’ discursive condition in the humanities.
In 'Reply to my critics' (Monika Bobako, Krzysztof Brzechczyn, Ewa Domańska, Juliusz Iwanicki, Av... more In 'Reply to my critics' (Monika Bobako, Krzysztof Brzechczyn, Ewa Domańska, Juliusz Iwanicki, Aviezer Tucker, and Hayden White). I am answering several critical arguments that have been formulated concerning my texts that have appeared in the book ‘Bordercrossings. Explorations between philosophy and History’ - a book that has been published in Polish and Chinese translations. In the 'Introduction' of this book I outline the contexts in which the chapters originated and some of the overarching ideas.
In my 'Reply' first, I dismantle the critique that I am subscribing to some version of ‘covering law explanation’. Second, I clarify in what – limited - sense I find Lakatos ideas concerning ‘scientific researchprogrammes’ fruitful for philosophy of history. The cognitive and political Doppelexistenz of theories in the human sciences explains why epistemological analyses always need to be complemented by practical analyses. Third, I defend my ‘double focus’ against the postmodern critique that my ‘internal realism’ is ‘powerblind’, and fourth, against the critique that ‘scientific history’ is ‘beyond politics’. Fifth and last I argue that in criticizing positions it is fruitful also to include the discussions about them in the critical argument.
My 'Introduction' to 'Bordercrossings' can also be downloaded on Academia.edu. The contributions of my critics can be downloaded from the website of 'Historein'.
This is a draft version including footnotes that are missing in the version that will be published. The essay is forthcoming in: Historical Understanding: Past, Present and Future. Eds. Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Lars Deile (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 2021
In my contribution I analyze an important and influential way in which an increasing number of hi... more In my contribution I analyze an important and influential way in which an increasing number of historians and historical theorists have conceived the problem of historical time over the last twenty years. Helge Jordheim has aptly baptized this way of thinking the stratigraphic model of time-derived from stratigraphy, a subdiscipline of geology (Jordheim 2017). According to this model, that was made famous by Reinhart Koselleck (2000), historians can best conceive of historical times in terms of layers of time or temporal strata-Zeitschichten in German-analogous to the way in which geologists conceive of the crust of the earth in terms of geological strata. So the stratigraphic model basically consists of a metaphor that maps specific characteristics of the study of earth history on the study of human history. Next to Jordheim, other interpreters have debated and promoted the stratigraphic model that has recently acquired an extra relevance in the light of the debate about the Anthropocene, although this debate is rarely mentioned (Zammito
in: Marek Tamm & Laurent Olivier (eds.), Rethinking Historical Time. New Approaches to Presentism, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 23-43. Now also in Russian translation in: Logos, vol.31, no.4. 2021, 31-65., 2019
If it would not sound a bit pathetic, one could say that anno 2018 there is a spectre haunting Eu... more If it would not sound a bit pathetic, one could say that anno 2018 there is a spectre haunting Europe, the spectre of presentism. In my contribution I will depart from this Zeitdiagnose basically in order to question it. I will do so by problematizing the influential analysis of ‘presentism’ by the French historian François Hartog. Although Hartog did not invent or discover the word ‘presentism’, as he sometimes suggests, he has certainly played a fundamental role in its spread in history and in historical theory over the last fifteen years. I take Hartog’s analysis of presentism as a point of departure and I argue that his notion of presentism is fundamentally ambiguous. Actually Hartog has presented two versions of presentism that cannot be reconciled. The first version I call presentism no. 1 according to which presentism basically means our ‘present’, ‘contemporary’ period. This periodizational interpretation of ‘presentism’ fits in the linear and progressive time conception of modern history, because modern history basically conceives of the past as a progressive succession of periods. Modern History with the capital H is conceived of as the train of time that travels on one (linear) track with an accelerating speed (as Koselleck among others emphasized) from the past to the present and towards the future. The second version of ‘presentism’ however, that I call presentism no. 2, conceives of ‘presentism’ not as the contemporary period – not as a specific, substantially filled block of time – but as an analytical ideal type of what Hartog calls an ‘order of time’ or a ‘regime of historicity’. This version characterizes a particular view on the relationship between past, present and future, in which one of them is dominant – and ‘presentism’ represents the regime of historicity in which the present is dominant. Order of time and regime of historicity are Hartog’s conceptual instruments to pluralize the notion of time by clarifying that the relationship between past, present and future varies over times and cultures. Hartog explicitly presents presentism no. 2 as the interpretation that he intends: presentism is meant to be a heuristic tool for further research concerning experiences of time. Therefore presentism no. 2 is not a chronological ‘block of time’ and does not fit in the linear time track of modern history. Hartog’s ambiguity in this case exemplifies more general problems of thinking beyond linear time in terms of ‘multi-layeredness’ and to conceive of ‘history without chronology’, in Stefan Tanaka’s phrasing.
In order to develop my arguments I proceed in four steps. First, I analyse how Hartog has introduced ‘presentism’ in the context of the ‘memory wars’ in France and how his presentism is firmly rooted in what he calls ‘a crisis of time’. Second, I argue that his analysis of presentism is basically an inversion of modernism, and that some of the problems of presentism therefore can best be understood as the inverted problems of the modern regime of historicity. Third, I develop my argument that Hartog’s presentism actually comes in two varieties and that both versions of presentism are at odds with each other and why. Fourth and last, I draw conclusions from my analysis and put Hartog’s presentism in a comparative perspective.
Claiming the People’s Past Populist Politics of History in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Berber Bevernage, Eline Mestdagh, Walderez Ramalho, and Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, 2024
In this chapter, I address the role of emotions in populist politics and ask whether the emotions... more In this chapter, I address the role of emotions in populist politics and ask whether the emotions that populism appeals to form a specific set that distinguishes populism from other ideologies or discourses, especially from ethnic nationalism and nativism. In order to answer this first question, I first need to clarify the definitions of populism, ethnic nationalism, and nativism that I adopt. I depart from the well-known definition of populism formulated by Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Kaltwasser and indicate the problems connected with this kind of definition in the light of ethnic nationalism. Then I elucidate the concept of ethnic nationalism and its relationship to populism because at least in Western Europe and in the United States of America (USA) they both appear to be very closely related. In the chapter, I will further focus on this ‘Western’, right-wing brand of populism and only occasionally refer to other varieties. Second, I discuss the concept of nativism and argue why it enables us to explain the connection between the two main characteristics of ‘Western’ populism – that is, its fundamental critique of ‘the (corrupt) elites’ and its fundamental critique of those who do not belong to ‘the people’. Third, after having cleared the strong conceptual and historical interconnections between ‘Western’ populism, nativism, and ethnic nationalism, I analyse the relationship between this type of collective identity and collective emotions. I do so because populist discourse appeals to and formulates specific emotions and specific collective identities. This leads me to the role played by fear versus security, hope versus despair, pride versus shame, and anger versus guilt in the mobilization of collective identities connected to populism, nativism, and ethnic nationalism. It also leads me to the important distinction between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ identities. Fourth, I go into the question of how the collective emotions typical of populism are connected to time and into the question of whether populism is following a specific narrative template that is different from ethnic nationalism, as Hakkı Taş has suggested. Here, I argue that the basic rise–fall–resurrection temporal trajectory is not only characteristic of populism but is also found in the Christian religion and in ethnic nationalism. Fifth and last, I end with concluding remarks
In ´The Primacy of Method in Historical Research: Philosophy of History and the Per-
spective o... more In ´The Primacy of Method in Historical Research: Philosophy of History and the Per-
spective of Meaning´, Jonas Ahlskog presents a critical and lucid engagement with con-
temporary philosophies of history and makes a sustained case for a return to the ideas
of history and social science as developed by R. G. Collingwood and Peter Winch. What
philosophy needs again is, first, a recognition of the “primacy of method”—that is, the
insight that what one knows about reality depends on how one knows it. Second, philoso-
phers need to take “the duality of method” seriously again and to recognize that the modes of explanation in the human sciences and the natural sciences are categorically different from each other—especially now that this difference has been blurred in recent debates about the Anthropocene. Ahlskog’s book is thus also a contribution to the classical debate about causal explanation versus meaningful understanding. On closer analysis, however, Ahlskog’s “untimely meditations” on “historical method” suffer from an insufficient engagement with counterarguments. A first line of critique challenges the idea that human action cannot be explained causally. A second line of critique challenges the idea that all aspects of human action can be “understood,” because the unintended aspects and consequences of individual actions cannot. These require causal explanation. A third line of critique concerns Ahlskog’s denial of the fundamental plurality of ideas of history and the social sciences. Squeezing this plurality into one philosophical mold comes at a price. Unintentionally, Ahlskog’s “untimely meditations” also show that much.
Keywords: philosophies of history, historical method, causal explanation and understand-
ing, history and social science, irrelevance of time
Fictionality, factuality and fake in history., 2024
The text is concerned with the distinctions between fictionality and factuality in historical and... more The text is concerned with the distinctions between fictionality and factuality in historical and narratological discourse and - last but not least - their distinction with fake history as a problem. A German version is in press in: Michele Barricelli, Nicola Brauch, Estevão de Rezende Martins, FriedrichJaeger and Jörn Rüsen (eds.), Handbuch der Historik, Wiesbaden: Springer Verlag 2024.
This is my contribution to the liber amicorum of Ewa Domanska on the occasion of her 60th. birthd... more This is my contribution to the liber amicorum of Ewa Domanska on the occasion of her 60th. birthday in December 2023 (`Book of Memories and Wishes´, forthcoming).
Том 30 Сшыткі 1-2 (58-59) Снежань ЗМЕСТ Артыкулы Уладзімір Падалінскі. Вобраз соймавага пасла ў м... more Том 30 Сшыткі 1-2 (58-59) Снежань ЗМЕСТ Артыкулы Уладзімір Падалінскі. Вобраз соймавага пасла ў мове палітычнага дыскурсу ВКЛ (другая палова XVIпач. XVII ст.
In this article I argue that the present ‘burdensome’ condition of important parts of the past is overstretching the ‘normal’, professional concept of history. I interpret White’s recent introduction of the ‘practical’ past next to the ‘historical’ past as his way of addressing the same problem. I reconstruct his conceptual work and come to the conclusion that opposing the ‘historical’ and the ’practical’ past is not enough, because this opposition leaves unquestioned the positivistic presuppositions upon which the distinction itself rests. I develop my argument in four steps. First, I signal some ambiguities in White’s formulation of the distinction and trace them back to Michael Oakeshott who first theorized it. Second, I identify two problems shared by Oakeshott and White concerning the unity of ‘the past’ and ‘the present’ and the ‘break’ between them. Third, I argue that the pluralisation of pasts and presents formulated by Preston King represents a convincing conceptual solution to the first problem, and John Searle’s speech acts theory provides a solution to the second problem. Lastly, I conclude that the very distinction between the ‘historical’ and the ‘practical’ past is rooted in empiricist and positivist assumptions long discredited by the work of W. V. Quine and T. H. Kuhn, and thereby suggest that the present state of the philosophical debate should have consequences for our thinking about the distinction between the historical and the practical past.
As far as the question of truth is concerned, we live in strange times. Although the question is ... more As far as the question of truth is concerned, we live in strange times. Although the question is at least as old as Western philosophy, since 2016, i.e. since Donald Trump's election campaign and Boris Johnson's Brexit campaign, it has been increasingly claimed that the question has become irrelevant because we are living in an age beyond truth (post-truth) and beyond facts (post-factual). What are we to make of these ideas? Using the example of Donald Trump, I argue that the phenomena that have been suggested since 2016 under labels like 'post-truth' and 'post-factual' can best be understood as forms of 'bullshit' as analyzed by philosopher Harry Frankfurt in 2005.
Was die Frage der Wahrheit betrifft, leben wir in merkwürdige Zeiten. Obwohl die Frage mindestens... more Was die Frage der Wahrheit betrifft, leben wir in merkwürdige Zeiten. Obwohl die Frage mindestens so alt ist wie die westliche Philosophie, wird seit 2016, d.h. seit Donald Trumps Wahlkampagne und Boris Johnsons Brexit-Kampagne, immer häufiger behauptet, dass die Frage irrelevant geworden ist da wir in einem Zeitalter jenseits der Wahrheit (post-truth) und jenseits der Fakten (post-faktisch) leben würden. Was ist von diesen Ideen zu halten? Am Beispiel von Donald Trump argumentiere ich dass die Phänomene die seit 2016 mit Labels wie 'post-truth' und 'post-faktisch' angedeutet werden, am besten als Formen von 'bullshit' verstanden werden können, wie diese in 2005 von dem Philosoph Harry Frankfurt analysiert wurde.
Keywords: presentism; order of time; regime of historicity; multitemporality; homogeneous time; m... more Keywords: presentism; order of time; regime of historicity; multitemporality; homogeneous time; modern history; chronoference.
The article offers a thoroughgoing critique of the concept of presentism, through which the famous French intellectual historian François Hartog conceptualized the modern sense of history. Introducing the concept of “the regime of historicity,” Hartog pointed to the socio-cultural conditionality of the relationship between the present, past and future. He redefined Koselleck’s description of the genesis of modern history during the “saddle time” in terms of a transformation in the regimes of historicity. The author of the article points out the duality of Hartog’s presentism, which is both an “ideal type” and a description of a chronologically defined span of time. Although Hartog explicitly speaks of presentism as a heuristic tool designed to deal with the temporal experiences of people, he does not investigate them anthropologically or sociologically. Hartog describes the specific tendencies inherent in twentieth-century historiography — its memorialization and juridification, and the concepts that have become key in dealing with the past — memory, commemoration, heritage and identity. These arguments of Hartog’s contain normative judgments and indicate a negative attitude toward the change that he witnessed in the social status of historiography. Careful study shows that Hartog’s use of presentism as a diagnosis of the modern era is incompatible with presentism as an analytical category. The former assumes a progressive linear course of time and is the inverse of modernism. The latter is a way of pluralizing time. The half-heartedness of such a status can be seen by contrasting it with Achim Landwehr’s concept of chronoference, which explains the sociocultural nature of historical time. If the distinctions between past, present and future are not ontological (as the historians of modernity imagined them) but instead situational, then the dominance of any one order of time is impossible. But unlike Landwehr, Hartog is not ready to completely abandon the modernist concept of history.
in: Omar Acha, Daniel Brauer, Facundo N. Martín y Adrián Ratto (editores), Las Identidades Colectivas Entre Los Ideales Y La Ficcion. Estudios de filosofía de la historia, Prometeo Libros, Buenos Aires 2021, 31-65. , 2021
Who needs - collective - identity? This tantalizing question that was formulated in 1996 by the f... more Who needs - collective - identity? This tantalizing question that was formulated in 1996 by the founding father of cultural studies in the UK, the Jamaican-British sociologist Stuart Hall, still has a paradoxical ring 25 years later. In 1996 Hall tried to explain the “paradoxical development” he observed concerning the use of the concept of collective identity both in the humanities and in public discourse. He noticed that since the 1980’s “there has been a veritable discursive explosion around the concept of identity, at the same moment as it has been subjected to a searching critique”. In this article I argue that Hall’s observation still applies 25 years later and that icollective identity issues even have become more present and pressing than they were in 1996. Not only the countless varieties of populism and other forms of neo-nationalism in politics can be seen as evidence supporting this observation but also the ‘cultural wars’ concerning racism, feminism/ gender, environmentalism and most recently – public health. They all are basically conflicts concerning collective identities and collective rights. At the same time the concept of collective identity is still essentially contested in the social sciences and in the humanities and there is no shadow of consensus on the horizon.
In my article I proceed in the following way. First, I briefly introduce two opposing views concerning the advantages and disadvantages of collective identity as a category of analysis in the social sciences and the humanities. For simplicity’s sake I label them the foes and the friends of collective identity. Second, I present a recent example of the (mis)use of collective identity as an analytical tool in order illustrate why the concept is fundamentally criticized. Third, I present and analyse the positions of the foes of collective identity and their arguments (especially Frederic Cooper, Roger Brubaker and Lutz Niethammer). Fourth, I present the friends of collective identity and analyse their arguments (Chantal Mouffe, Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas and others). Fifth and last, I conclude that although the academic discussions concerning ‘collective identity’ appear to be a thing of the – recent – past, the philosophical issues at stake – especially the status of the social in relationship to the individual - are still very present and controversial today.
Chris Lorenz is known primarily as an insightful theorist of historiography. In this remarkable a... more Chris Lorenz is known primarily as an insightful theorist of historiography. In this remarkable article, he offers a critical overview of German historiography in the postwar period, arguing that until recently (post-1990) the Holocaust has been an absent presence, largely repressed or avoided by foremost German historians. What he says about Reinhart Koselleck is pointed and probably unknown or bracketed by most of those who have discussed his influential work. The extreme limitations and dubiousness of Koselleck’s comments about the Holocaust are signaled in a manner that brings out the latter’s proximity to other German historians of his generation, notably Andreas Hillgruber. Lorenz’s comments are informed by a skillful use of psychoanalytic concepts. His discussion of German historians would benefit by being further supplemented by an analysis of non-German historians, notably in the United States, England, and Israel, as is at times intimated in his footnotes.
in: Niels F. May & Thomas Maissen (eds.), National History and New Nationalism in the Twenty-First Century. A Global Comparison, Routledge: New York, 72 - 95 , 2021
This chapter analyses the relationship between Dutch historiography and neo-nationalism in the 21... more This chapter analyses the relationship between Dutch historiography and neo-nationalism in the 21st. century. It argues that the major issues in public history and in national history are directly connected to the imperial and colonial past of the Dutch.
First, the chapter analyses the return of exclusive, ethnic nationalism in Dutch political discourse and in public history in direct relation with the revisionist counter-narratives, that demand the public recognition of the inherent violence of slavery and colonialism. Second, the chapter zooms in on three particular topics that are publicly contested by revisionists and ethnic-nationalist anti-revisionists. The first issue concerns the statues and the streets carrying the names of the seafaring heroes who played a leading role in the Dutch colonial enterprise. The second issue revolves around the symbolic meaning of ‘Black Pete’ and the third issue concerns the continuing use of the name ‘Golden Age’ for the Dutch 17th century.
The third and fourth sections of the chapter analyse academic varieties of the anti-revisionist and revisionist views. While the anti-revisionist views implicitly hark back to essentialist notions of the Dutch nation, revisionist historians claim that Dutch history can only be adequately written by taking its imperial and global character seriously.
Analysing Historical Narratives. On Academic, Popular and Educational Framings of the Past, 2021
Book description: For all of the recent debates over the methods and theoretical underpinnings of... more Book description: For all of the recent debates over the methods and theoretical underpinnings of the historical profession, scholars and laypeople alike still frequently think of history in terms of storytelling. Accordingly, historians and theorists have devoted much attention to how historical narratives work, illuminating the ways they can bind together events, shape an argument and lend support to ideology. From ancient Greece to modern-day bestsellers, the studies gathered here offer a wide-ranging analysis of the textual strategies used by historians. They show how in spite of the pursuit of truth and objectivity, the ways in which historians tell their stories are inevitably conditioned by their discursive contexts.
Stefan Berger and William Niven (eds.), A Cultural History of Memory in the Long Twentieth Century (vol.6), Bloomsbury., 2020
This chapter asks how the dimensions of space and time have been framed and discussed in memory s... more This chapter asks how the dimensions of space and time have been framed and discussed in memory studies and how memory has been distinguished from history in the long twentieth century. I will first present a three-part periodization of memory studies in the long twentieth century: the foundational period, identified with the work of Maurice Halbwachs on collective memory, the memory boom period identified with the sites of memory approach of Pierre Nora, and the present-day period of transnational, transcultural and multidirectional memory, identified with the work of memory scholars like Michael Rothberg, Ann Rigney, Astrid Erll, Daniel Levy, and Nathaniel Sznaider and—last but not least—Aleida and Jan Assmann.I will secondly flesh out the explicit and implicit ideas about space in the work of Halbwachs and Nora. I will argue that they both ultimately frame memorial space in terms of the relatively closed container-space of the nation-state. In the case of Nora this identification is exemplified in the remarkable absence of the French overseas empire from his memorial construction of France.
Thirdly, I will argue that a fundamental break with notions of container-space and container-time are the two major characteristics of the post-Nora, transnational, transcultural, transgenerational, transmedial, and multi-directional period. Memory scholars in this period usually emphasize that all memory is “traveling” in relatively openmultiscalar spaces and in multidirectional times—and thus cannot unambiguously be located in one place or in one time, nor connected to one fixed identity. Michael Rothberg’s analysis of the interrelationship between the memory of the Holocaust and of decolonization and Daniel Levy’s and Nathaniel Sznaider’s analysis of the globalization of Holocaust-memory exemplify these recent approaches.
Fourthly, I will address the framing of time in memory studies by analyzing the influential analyses of François Hartog and Aleida Assmann—the only two book-length analyses concerning the changing experiences of time over time. Both Hartog and Assmann hold that the relationships between past, present, and future have fundamentally changed since the memory boom, but they offer completely different analyses and evaluations of this change. While Hartog—following Nora—interprets the memory boom as a pathogenic symptom of a crisis of—modern—time, Assmann interprets memory studies as a cultural-political achievement of post-Holocaust and postcolonial societies that have learnt the hard way that change does not automatically equal progress.
This introduction summarizes the basic ideas behind the articles collected in ‘Bordercrsossings’.... more This introduction summarizes the basic ideas behind the articles collected in ‘Bordercrsossings’. The first basic idea is the idea that the writing of history has a ‘border crossing’ character, meaning that history writing involves border crossings 1. between history and philosophy, and 2. between history and ‚politics‘ in a broad sense. The second basic idea is that the dialectical mechanism of ‘inversion’ (of ‘negation’ and of ‘the unity of opposites’) is fundamental for our understanding of debates in philosophy of history and in historiography. The third idea is that interesting prejudices and other assumptions in both philosophy and in history are found by contrast, not by analysis (Feyerabend). Analysis of controversies is therefore the most fruitful point of departure in philosophy of history and in historiography. Because all key ideas in the humanities are ‘essentially contested concepts’ (Gallie) controversies are the ‘normal’ discursive condition in the humanities.
In 'Reply to my critics' (Monika Bobako, Krzysztof Brzechczyn, Ewa Domańska, Juliusz Iwanicki, Av... more In 'Reply to my critics' (Monika Bobako, Krzysztof Brzechczyn, Ewa Domańska, Juliusz Iwanicki, Aviezer Tucker, and Hayden White). I am answering several critical arguments that have been formulated concerning my texts that have appeared in the book ‘Bordercrossings. Explorations between philosophy and History’ - a book that has been published in Polish and Chinese translations. In the 'Introduction' of this book I outline the contexts in which the chapters originated and some of the overarching ideas.
In my 'Reply' first, I dismantle the critique that I am subscribing to some version of ‘covering law explanation’. Second, I clarify in what – limited - sense I find Lakatos ideas concerning ‘scientific researchprogrammes’ fruitful for philosophy of history. The cognitive and political Doppelexistenz of theories in the human sciences explains why epistemological analyses always need to be complemented by practical analyses. Third, I defend my ‘double focus’ against the postmodern critique that my ‘internal realism’ is ‘powerblind’, and fourth, against the critique that ‘scientific history’ is ‘beyond politics’. Fifth and last I argue that in criticizing positions it is fruitful also to include the discussions about them in the critical argument.
My 'Introduction' to 'Bordercrossings' can also be downloaded on Academia.edu. The contributions of my critics can be downloaded from the website of 'Historein'.
This is a draft version including footnotes that are missing in the version that will be published. The essay is forthcoming in: Historical Understanding: Past, Present and Future. Eds. Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Lars Deile (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 2021
In my contribution I analyze an important and influential way in which an increasing number of hi... more In my contribution I analyze an important and influential way in which an increasing number of historians and historical theorists have conceived the problem of historical time over the last twenty years. Helge Jordheim has aptly baptized this way of thinking the stratigraphic model of time-derived from stratigraphy, a subdiscipline of geology (Jordheim 2017). According to this model, that was made famous by Reinhart Koselleck (2000), historians can best conceive of historical times in terms of layers of time or temporal strata-Zeitschichten in German-analogous to the way in which geologists conceive of the crust of the earth in terms of geological strata. So the stratigraphic model basically consists of a metaphor that maps specific characteristics of the study of earth history on the study of human history. Next to Jordheim, other interpreters have debated and promoted the stratigraphic model that has recently acquired an extra relevance in the light of the debate about the Anthropocene, although this debate is rarely mentioned (Zammito
in: Marek Tamm & Laurent Olivier (eds.), Rethinking Historical Time. New Approaches to Presentism, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 23-43. Now also in Russian translation in: Logos, vol.31, no.4. 2021, 31-65., 2019
If it would not sound a bit pathetic, one could say that anno 2018 there is a spectre haunting Eu... more If it would not sound a bit pathetic, one could say that anno 2018 there is a spectre haunting Europe, the spectre of presentism. In my contribution I will depart from this Zeitdiagnose basically in order to question it. I will do so by problematizing the influential analysis of ‘presentism’ by the French historian François Hartog. Although Hartog did not invent or discover the word ‘presentism’, as he sometimes suggests, he has certainly played a fundamental role in its spread in history and in historical theory over the last fifteen years. I take Hartog’s analysis of presentism as a point of departure and I argue that his notion of presentism is fundamentally ambiguous. Actually Hartog has presented two versions of presentism that cannot be reconciled. The first version I call presentism no. 1 according to which presentism basically means our ‘present’, ‘contemporary’ period. This periodizational interpretation of ‘presentism’ fits in the linear and progressive time conception of modern history, because modern history basically conceives of the past as a progressive succession of periods. Modern History with the capital H is conceived of as the train of time that travels on one (linear) track with an accelerating speed (as Koselleck among others emphasized) from the past to the present and towards the future. The second version of ‘presentism’ however, that I call presentism no. 2, conceives of ‘presentism’ not as the contemporary period – not as a specific, substantially filled block of time – but as an analytical ideal type of what Hartog calls an ‘order of time’ or a ‘regime of historicity’. This version characterizes a particular view on the relationship between past, present and future, in which one of them is dominant – and ‘presentism’ represents the regime of historicity in which the present is dominant. Order of time and regime of historicity are Hartog’s conceptual instruments to pluralize the notion of time by clarifying that the relationship between past, present and future varies over times and cultures. Hartog explicitly presents presentism no. 2 as the interpretation that he intends: presentism is meant to be a heuristic tool for further research concerning experiences of time. Therefore presentism no. 2 is not a chronological ‘block of time’ and does not fit in the linear time track of modern history. Hartog’s ambiguity in this case exemplifies more general problems of thinking beyond linear time in terms of ‘multi-layeredness’ and to conceive of ‘history without chronology’, in Stefan Tanaka’s phrasing.
In order to develop my arguments I proceed in four steps. First, I analyse how Hartog has introduced ‘presentism’ in the context of the ‘memory wars’ in France and how his presentism is firmly rooted in what he calls ‘a crisis of time’. Second, I argue that his analysis of presentism is basically an inversion of modernism, and that some of the problems of presentism therefore can best be understood as the inverted problems of the modern regime of historicity. Third, I develop my argument that Hartog’s presentism actually comes in two varieties and that both versions of presentism are at odds with each other and why. Fourth and last, I draw conclusions from my analysis and put Hartog’s presentism in a comparative perspective.
Este segundo volumen de las investigaciones y reflexiones de Chris Lorenz en el ámbito de la teor... more Este segundo volumen de las investigaciones y reflexiones de Chris Lorenz en el ámbito de la teoría de la historia e historia comparada de la historiografía, cubre un amplio recorrido temático, desde las historias nacionales a las tareas de desmitologización, pasando por las representaciones de la identidad, la historia conceptual y la historiografía alemana moderna y contemporánea. De esta modo, el presente libro es una adecuada continuación y ampliación del Volumen 1, que presenta la indagaciones del autor sobre la relación entre historia y teoría, el conocimiento histórico, las filosofías narrativas de la historia y las relaciones entre verdad y objetividad.
Introduction Bordercrossings. Explorations between history and philosophy (Peking UP 2015)
The ... more Introduction Bordercrossings. Explorations between history and philosophy (Peking UP 2015)
The articles selected for this volume are based on my research in the domain of philosophy of history and historiography over the past 15 years. Although they have been produced in a variety of contexts and have been published in a variety journals and collected volumes, there is some coherence which connects them and which I shall address in this introduction. At the same time the selected articles represent articulations of my own position in the theoretical and historiographical debates. The first basic idea which connects the articles is the idea that the writing of history has a ‘bordercrossing’ character , meaning that history writing involves bordercrossings 1. between history and philosophy, and 2. between history and politics in a broad sense. Although this may sound pretty ‘postmodern’ to some, my arguments in case are usually directed against and opposed to postmodernist positions. In my view the justified philosophical critiques of all crude variants of realism - which is indeed a widespread position among historians - do not lead to a rejection of realist positions in toto, but to a more sophisticated brand of realism. This idea runs counter to the dominant positions in philosophy of history between 1975 and 1995, which all favored idealism and relativism in some form as alternatives for naïve realism. The second basic idea connecting the articles is the idea that the mechanism of ‘inversion’ (or ‘negation’) is important for our understanding of debates in philosophy of history and in historiography. This holds for intellectual history in general.. The ‘dialectical’ mechanism is explanatory in many intellectual debates because positions often owe their origin and existence to an inversion of the position that constitutes the object of critique. Classical examples of this procedure in history are found, for instance, in Marx’ materialistic inversion of Hegel’s idealism and in Braudels ‘structural’ inversion of the political history of events (‘l’histoire evénementielle’). As a consequence the ‘inverted’ positions have the same conceptual structure as the criticized ones, carrying along similar conceptual problems (same contrasts, dichotomies etc.).
In this volume I develop my own position along two routes. The first route is the route of philosophy, the second one is the route of the history of history writing alias historiography. In the first part of this volume four articles are selected in which a critical evaluation takes place of our present day predicament in philosophy of history. In ‘Historical knowledge and historical reality’ I develop a position I label (after Hillary Putnam) as ‘internal realism’. I argue that only a realist position is capable of elucidating the fundamental relationship between historical writing and historical research in history conceived a discipline. Only realist positions can offer a philosophical justification of the practice of professional historians to establish facts in methodical and intersubjective ways. The same holds for their presupposition that it is the essential connection to critically established facts which distinguishes historical narratives from other genres of narrative. Therefore, only realist positions can give an explanation why the discipline of history has a discursive and critical character, driven by the interplay between factual evidence and interpretative frameworks. In order to grasp the practical functions of history writing I argue that the epistemological focus needs to be extended into the domain of ethics and of politics. ‘Internal realism’ enables this extension by bridging the supposed ‘gap’ between judgments of facts and judgments of value in the form of a self-conscious ‘anti-foundationalism’ and by emphasizing the discursive character of both.
En la serie de textos aquí reunidos de Chris Lorenz se condensan investigaciones y reflexiones en... more En la serie de textos aquí reunidos de Chris Lorenz se condensan investigaciones y reflexiones en el campo de la teoría de la historia que son el resultado de una larga trayectoria en la disciplina. Resulta difícil describir el sentido general del programa de investi¬gación aquí desplegado, y de sus resultados, sin hacer alusión a la clara y sistemática exposición con la que el mismo autor muestra, en la “Introducción general”, las líneas centrales que han orientado su empresa y su posicionamiento en el debate contemporáneo. Lorenz nos presenta, a la vez que su inusual capacidad de dar cuenta de la “realidad” del pasado, una defensa del oficio del historiador y una comprometida intervención en controversiales debates de innegable actualidad. Sus exploraciones teóricas se sirven siempre de ejemplos de textos historiográficos específicos, incorporando una dimensión práctico-política ajena a toda pretensión de asepsia objetivista y revisando una y otra vez la concepción del tiempo que subyace en cada caso al canon historiográfico.
INDICE
La elusiva realidad del pasado histórico: presentación de la edición en español, por Daniel Brauer.
Capítulo 1.- Introducción general. Capítulo 2.- Historia y teoría. Capítulo 3.- Conocimiento histórico y realidad histórica: una defensa del “realismo interno”. Capítulo 4.- La ciencia histórica y las leyes: una historia ambivalente. Capítulo 5.- ¿Puede ser verdadera la historia? Acerca de las filosofías narrativas de la historia de Hayden White y Frank Ankersmit. Capítulo 6.- “Tú tienes tu historia y yo la mía”: algunas reflexiones sobre la verdad y la objetividad en la historia. Capítulo 7.- Despegado del tiempo. O la repentina presencia del pasado. Capítulo 8.- Dividir el tiempo. Explorando las fronteras entre presente, pasado y futuro.
Thirteen expert historians and
philosophers address basic questions on
historical time and on... more Thirteen expert historians and
philosophers address basic questions on
historical time and on the distinctions
between past, present and future. Their
contributions are organised around
four themes: the relation between time
and modernity; the issue of ruptures in
time and the influence of catastrophic
events such as revolutions and wars on
temporal distinctions; the philosophical
analysis of historical time and temporal
distinctions; and the construction of
time outside Europe through processes
of colonialism, imperialism, and
globalisation.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Berber Bevernage and Chris Lorenz: Breaking up Time –
Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past and Future
1. Time and Modernity: Critical Approaches to Koselleck’s Legacy
Aleida Assmann: Transformations of the Modern Time Regime
Peter Fritzsche: The Ruins of Modernity
Peter Osborne: Global Modernity and the Contemporary: Two Categories of the Philosophy of Historical Time
2. Ruptures in Time: Revolutions and Wars
Sanja Perovic: Year 1 and Year 61 of the French Revolution: The Revolutionary Calendar and Auguste Comte
Claudia Verhoeven: Wormholes in Russian History: Events ‘Outside of Time’
François Hartog: The Modern Régime of Historicity in the Face of
Two World Wars
Lucian Hölscher: Mysteries of Historical Order: Ruptures, Simultaneity and the Relationship of the Past, the Present and the Future
3. Thinking about Time: Analytical Approaches
Jonathan Gorman: The Limits of Historiographical Choice in Temporal Distinctions
Constantin Fasolt: Breaking up Time – Escaping from Time: Self-Assertion and Knowledge of the Past
4. Time outside Europe: Imperialism, Colonialism and Globalisation
Lynn Hunt: Globalisation and Time
Stefan Tanaka: Unification of Time and the Fragmentation of Pasts in Meiji Japan
Axel Schneider: Temporal Hierarchies and Moral Leadership:
China’s Engagement with Modern Views of History
William Gallois: The War for Time in Early Colonial Algeria"
Popularizing National Pasts is the first truly cross-national and comparative study of popular na... more Popularizing National Pasts is the first truly cross-national and comparative study of popular national histories, their representations, the meanings given to them and their uses, which expands outside the confines of Western Europe and the US. It draws a picture of popular histories which is European in the full sense of this term. One of its fortes is the inclusion of Eastern Europe. The cross-national angle of Popularizing National Pasts is apparent in the scope of its comparative project, as well as that of the longue durée it covers. Apart from essays on Britain, France, and Germany, the collection includes studies of popular histories in Scandinavia, Eastern and Southern Europe, notably Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Armenia, Russia and the Ukraine, as well as considering the US and Argentina. Cross-national comparison is also a central concern of the thirteen case studies in the volume, which are, each, devoted to comparing between two, or more, national historical cultures. Thus temporality –both continuities and breaks- in popular notions of the past, its interpretations and consumption, is examined in the long continuum. The volume makes available to English readers, probably for the first time, the cutting edge of Eastern European scholarship on popular histories, nationalism and culture
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Papers by Chris F G Lorenz
In the chapter, I will further focus on this ‘Western’, right-wing brand of populism and only occasionally refer to other varieties. Second, I discuss the concept of nativism and argue why it enables us to explain the connection between the two main characteristics of ‘Western’ populism – that is, its fundamental critique of ‘the (corrupt) elites’ and its fundamental critique of those who do not belong to ‘the people’. Third, after having cleared the strong conceptual and historical interconnections between ‘Western’ populism, nativism, and ethnic nationalism, I analyse the relationship between this type of collective identity and collective emotions. I do so because populist discourse appeals to and formulates specific emotions and specific collective identities. This leads me to the role played by fear versus security, hope versus despair, pride versus shame, and anger versus guilt in the
mobilization of collective identities connected to populism, nativism, and ethnic nationalism. It also leads me to the important distinction between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ identities. Fourth, I go into the question of how the collective emotions typical of populism are connected to time and into the question of whether populism is following a specific narrative template that is different from ethnic nationalism, as Hakkı Taş has suggested. Here, I argue that the basic rise–fall–resurrection temporal trajectory is not only characteristic of populism but is also found in the Christian religion and in ethnic nationalism. Fifth and last, I end with concluding remarks
spective of Meaning´, Jonas Ahlskog presents a critical and lucid engagement with con-
temporary philosophies of history and makes a sustained case for a return to the ideas
of history and social science as developed by R. G. Collingwood and Peter Winch. What
philosophy needs again is, first, a recognition of the “primacy of method”—that is, the
insight that what one knows about reality depends on how one knows it. Second, philoso-
phers need to take “the duality of method” seriously again and to recognize that the modes of explanation in the human sciences and the natural sciences are categorically different from each other—especially now that this difference has been blurred in recent debates about the Anthropocene. Ahlskog’s book is thus also a contribution to the classical debate about causal explanation versus meaningful understanding. On closer analysis, however, Ahlskog’s “untimely meditations” on “historical method” suffer from an insufficient engagement with counterarguments. A first line of critique challenges the idea that human action cannot be explained causally. A second line of critique challenges the idea that all aspects of human action can be “understood,” because the unintended aspects and consequences of individual actions cannot. These require causal explanation. A third line of critique concerns Ahlskog’s denial of the fundamental plurality of ideas of history and the social sciences. Squeezing this plurality into one philosophical mold comes at a price. Unintentionally, Ahlskog’s “untimely meditations” also show that much.
Keywords: philosophies of history, historical method, causal explanation and understand-
ing, history and social science, irrelevance of time
In this article I argue that the present ‘burdensome’ condition of important parts of the past is overstretching the ‘normal’, professional concept of history. I interpret White’s recent introduction of the ‘practical’ past next to the ‘historical’ past as his way of addressing the same problem. I reconstruct his conceptual work and come to the conclusion that opposing the ‘historical’ and the ’practical’ past is not enough, because this opposition leaves unquestioned the positivistic presuppositions upon which the distinction itself rests. I develop my argument in four steps. First, I signal some ambiguities in White’s formulation of the distinction and trace them back to Michael Oakeshott who first theorized it. Second, I identify two problems shared by Oakeshott and White concerning the unity of ‘the past’ and ‘the present’ and the ‘break’ between them. Third, I argue that the pluralisation of pasts and presents formulated by Preston King represents a convincing conceptual solution to the first problem, and John Searle’s speech acts theory provides a solution to the second problem. Lastly, I conclude that the very distinction between the ‘historical’ and the ‘practical’ past is rooted in empiricist and positivist assumptions long discredited by the work of W. V. Quine and T. H. Kuhn, and thereby suggest that the present state of the philosophical debate should have consequences for our thinking about the distinction between the historical and the practical past.
The article offers a thoroughgoing critique of the concept of presentism, through which the famous French intellectual historian François Hartog conceptualized the modern sense of history. Introducing the concept of “the regime of historicity,” Hartog pointed to the socio-cultural conditionality of the relationship between the present, past and future. He redefined Koselleck’s description of the genesis of modern
history during the “saddle time” in terms of a transformation in the regimes of historicity.
The author of the article points out the duality of Hartog’s presentism, which is both an “ideal type” and a description of a chronologically defined span of time. Although Hartog explicitly speaks of presentism as a heuristic tool designed to deal with the temporal experiences of people, he does not investigate them anthropologically or sociologically. Hartog describes the specific tendencies inherent in twentieth-century historiography — its memorialization and juridification, and the
concepts that have become key in dealing with the past — memory, commemoration, heritage and identity. These arguments of Hartog’s contain normative judgments and indicate a negative attitude toward the change that he witnessed in the social status of historiography.
Careful study shows that Hartog’s use of presentism as a diagnosis of the modern era is incompatible with presentism as an analytical category. The former assumes a progressive linear course of time and is the inverse of modernism. The latter is a way of pluralizing time. The half-heartedness of such a status can be seen by contrasting it with Achim Landwehr’s concept of chronoference, which explains the sociocultural nature of historical time. If the distinctions between past, present and future are not ontological (as the historians of modernity imagined them) but instead situational, then the dominance of any one order of time is impossible. But unlike Landwehr, Hartog is not ready to completely abandon the modernist concept of history.
DOI: 10.22394/0869-5377-2021-4-31-61
In my article I proceed in the following way. First, I briefly introduce two opposing views concerning the advantages and disadvantages of collective identity as a category of analysis in the social sciences and the humanities. For simplicity’s sake I label them the foes and the friends of collective identity. Second, I present a recent example of the (mis)use of collective identity as an analytical tool in order illustrate why the concept is fundamentally criticized. Third, I present and analyse the positions of the foes of collective identity and their arguments (especially Frederic Cooper, Roger Brubaker and Lutz Niethammer). Fourth, I present the friends of collective identity and analyse their arguments (Chantal Mouffe, Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas and others). Fifth and last, I conclude that although the academic discussions concerning ‘collective identity’ appear to be a thing of the – recent – past, the philosophical issues at stake – especially the status of the social in relationship to the individual - are still very present and controversial today.
First, the chapter analyses the return of exclusive, ethnic nationalism in Dutch political discourse and in public history in direct relation with the revisionist counter-narratives, that demand the public recognition of the inherent violence of slavery and colonialism. Second, the chapter zooms in on three particular topics that are publicly contested by revisionists and ethnic-nationalist anti-revisionists. The first issue concerns the statues and the streets carrying the names of the seafaring heroes who played a leading role in the Dutch colonial enterprise. The second issue revolves around the symbolic meaning of ‘Black Pete’ and the third issue concerns the continuing use of the name ‘Golden Age’ for the Dutch 17th century.
The third and fourth sections of the chapter analyse academic varieties of the anti-revisionist and revisionist views. While the anti-revisionist views implicitly hark back to essentialist notions of the Dutch nation, revisionist historians claim that Dutch history can only be adequately written by taking its imperial and global character seriously.
Thirdly, I will argue that a fundamental break with notions of container-space and container-time are the two major characteristics of the post-Nora, transnational, transcultural, transgenerational, transmedial, and multi-directional period. Memory scholars in this period usually emphasize that all memory is “traveling” in relatively openmultiscalar spaces and in multidirectional times—and thus cannot unambiguously be located in one place or in one time, nor connected to one fixed identity. Michael Rothberg’s analysis of the interrelationship between the memory of the Holocaust and of decolonization and Daniel Levy’s and Nathaniel Sznaider’s analysis of the globalization of Holocaust-memory exemplify these recent approaches.
Fourthly, I will address the framing of time in memory studies by analyzing the influential analyses of François Hartog and Aleida Assmann—the only two book-length analyses concerning the changing experiences of time over time. Both Hartog and Assmann hold that the relationships between past, present, and future have fundamentally changed since the memory boom, but they offer completely different analyses and evaluations of this change. While Hartog—following Nora—interprets the memory boom as a pathogenic symptom of a crisis of—modern—time, Assmann interprets memory studies as a cultural-political achievement of post-Holocaust and postcolonial societies that have learnt the hard way that change does not automatically equal progress.
In my 'Reply' first, I dismantle the critique that I am subscribing to some version of ‘covering law explanation’. Second, I clarify in what – limited - sense I find Lakatos ideas concerning ‘scientific researchprogrammes’ fruitful for philosophy of history. The cognitive and political Doppelexistenz of theories in the human sciences explains why epistemological analyses always need to be complemented by practical analyses. Third, I defend my ‘double focus’ against the postmodern critique that my ‘internal realism’ is ‘powerblind’, and fourth, against the critique that ‘scientific history’ is ‘beyond politics’. Fifth and last I argue that in criticizing positions it is fruitful also to include the discussions about them in the critical argument.
My 'Introduction' to 'Bordercrossings' can also be downloaded on Academia.edu. The contributions of my critics can be downloaded from the website of 'Historein'.
depart from this Zeitdiagnose basically in order to question it. I will do so by problematizing the influential analysis of ‘presentism’ by the French historian François Hartog. Although Hartog did not invent or discover the word ‘presentism’, as he sometimes suggests, he has certainly played a fundamental role in its spread in history and in historical theory over the last fifteen years.
I take Hartog’s analysis of presentism as a point of departure and I argue that his notion of presentism is fundamentally ambiguous. Actually Hartog has presented two versions of presentism that cannot be reconciled. The first version I call presentism no. 1 according to which presentism basically means our ‘present’, ‘contemporary’ period. This periodizational interpretation of ‘presentism’ fits in the linear and progressive time
conception of modern history, because modern history basically conceives of the past as a progressive succession of periods. Modern History with the capital H is conceived of as the train of time that travels on one (linear) track with an accelerating speed (as Koselleck among others emphasized) from the past to the present and towards the future. The second version of ‘presentism’ however, that I call presentism no. 2, conceives of ‘presentism’ not as the contemporary period – not as a specific, substantially filled block
of time – but as an analytical ideal type of what Hartog calls an ‘order of time’ or a ‘regime of historicity’. This version characterizes a particular view on the relationship between past, present and future, in which one of them is dominant – and ‘presentism’ represents the regime of historicity in which the present is dominant. Order of time and regime of historicity are Hartog’s conceptual instruments to pluralize the notion of time by clarifying that the relationship between past, present and future varies over times and cultures. Hartog explicitly presents presentism no. 2 as the interpretation
that he intends: presentism is meant to be a heuristic tool for further research concerning experiences of time. Therefore presentism no. 2 is not a chronological ‘block of time’ and does not fit in the linear time track of modern history. Hartog’s ambiguity in this case exemplifies more general problems of thinking beyond linear time in terms of ‘multi-layeredness’
and to conceive of ‘history without chronology’, in Stefan Tanaka’s phrasing.
In order to develop my arguments I proceed in four steps. First, I analyse how Hartog has introduced ‘presentism’ in the context of the ‘memory wars’ in France and how his presentism is firmly rooted in what he calls ‘a crisis of time’. Second, I argue that his analysis of presentism is basically an inversion of modernism, and that some of the problems of presentism therefore can best be understood as the inverted problems of the modern regime of historicity. Third, I develop my argument that Hartog’s presentism actually comes in two varieties and that both versions of presentism are at
odds with each other and why. Fourth and last, I draw conclusions from my analysis and put Hartog’s presentism in a comparative perspective.
In the chapter, I will further focus on this ‘Western’, right-wing brand of populism and only occasionally refer to other varieties. Second, I discuss the concept of nativism and argue why it enables us to explain the connection between the two main characteristics of ‘Western’ populism – that is, its fundamental critique of ‘the (corrupt) elites’ and its fundamental critique of those who do not belong to ‘the people’. Third, after having cleared the strong conceptual and historical interconnections between ‘Western’ populism, nativism, and ethnic nationalism, I analyse the relationship between this type of collective identity and collective emotions. I do so because populist discourse appeals to and formulates specific emotions and specific collective identities. This leads me to the role played by fear versus security, hope versus despair, pride versus shame, and anger versus guilt in the
mobilization of collective identities connected to populism, nativism, and ethnic nationalism. It also leads me to the important distinction between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ identities. Fourth, I go into the question of how the collective emotions typical of populism are connected to time and into the question of whether populism is following a specific narrative template that is different from ethnic nationalism, as Hakkı Taş has suggested. Here, I argue that the basic rise–fall–resurrection temporal trajectory is not only characteristic of populism but is also found in the Christian religion and in ethnic nationalism. Fifth and last, I end with concluding remarks
spective of Meaning´, Jonas Ahlskog presents a critical and lucid engagement with con-
temporary philosophies of history and makes a sustained case for a return to the ideas
of history and social science as developed by R. G. Collingwood and Peter Winch. What
philosophy needs again is, first, a recognition of the “primacy of method”—that is, the
insight that what one knows about reality depends on how one knows it. Second, philoso-
phers need to take “the duality of method” seriously again and to recognize that the modes of explanation in the human sciences and the natural sciences are categorically different from each other—especially now that this difference has been blurred in recent debates about the Anthropocene. Ahlskog’s book is thus also a contribution to the classical debate about causal explanation versus meaningful understanding. On closer analysis, however, Ahlskog’s “untimely meditations” on “historical method” suffer from an insufficient engagement with counterarguments. A first line of critique challenges the idea that human action cannot be explained causally. A second line of critique challenges the idea that all aspects of human action can be “understood,” because the unintended aspects and consequences of individual actions cannot. These require causal explanation. A third line of critique concerns Ahlskog’s denial of the fundamental plurality of ideas of history and the social sciences. Squeezing this plurality into one philosophical mold comes at a price. Unintentionally, Ahlskog’s “untimely meditations” also show that much.
Keywords: philosophies of history, historical method, causal explanation and understand-
ing, history and social science, irrelevance of time
In this article I argue that the present ‘burdensome’ condition of important parts of the past is overstretching the ‘normal’, professional concept of history. I interpret White’s recent introduction of the ‘practical’ past next to the ‘historical’ past as his way of addressing the same problem. I reconstruct his conceptual work and come to the conclusion that opposing the ‘historical’ and the ’practical’ past is not enough, because this opposition leaves unquestioned the positivistic presuppositions upon which the distinction itself rests. I develop my argument in four steps. First, I signal some ambiguities in White’s formulation of the distinction and trace them back to Michael Oakeshott who first theorized it. Second, I identify two problems shared by Oakeshott and White concerning the unity of ‘the past’ and ‘the present’ and the ‘break’ between them. Third, I argue that the pluralisation of pasts and presents formulated by Preston King represents a convincing conceptual solution to the first problem, and John Searle’s speech acts theory provides a solution to the second problem. Lastly, I conclude that the very distinction between the ‘historical’ and the ‘practical’ past is rooted in empiricist and positivist assumptions long discredited by the work of W. V. Quine and T. H. Kuhn, and thereby suggest that the present state of the philosophical debate should have consequences for our thinking about the distinction between the historical and the practical past.
The article offers a thoroughgoing critique of the concept of presentism, through which the famous French intellectual historian François Hartog conceptualized the modern sense of history. Introducing the concept of “the regime of historicity,” Hartog pointed to the socio-cultural conditionality of the relationship between the present, past and future. He redefined Koselleck’s description of the genesis of modern
history during the “saddle time” in terms of a transformation in the regimes of historicity.
The author of the article points out the duality of Hartog’s presentism, which is both an “ideal type” and a description of a chronologically defined span of time. Although Hartog explicitly speaks of presentism as a heuristic tool designed to deal with the temporal experiences of people, he does not investigate them anthropologically or sociologically. Hartog describes the specific tendencies inherent in twentieth-century historiography — its memorialization and juridification, and the
concepts that have become key in dealing with the past — memory, commemoration, heritage and identity. These arguments of Hartog’s contain normative judgments and indicate a negative attitude toward the change that he witnessed in the social status of historiography.
Careful study shows that Hartog’s use of presentism as a diagnosis of the modern era is incompatible with presentism as an analytical category. The former assumes a progressive linear course of time and is the inverse of modernism. The latter is a way of pluralizing time. The half-heartedness of such a status can be seen by contrasting it with Achim Landwehr’s concept of chronoference, which explains the sociocultural nature of historical time. If the distinctions between past, present and future are not ontological (as the historians of modernity imagined them) but instead situational, then the dominance of any one order of time is impossible. But unlike Landwehr, Hartog is not ready to completely abandon the modernist concept of history.
DOI: 10.22394/0869-5377-2021-4-31-61
In my article I proceed in the following way. First, I briefly introduce two opposing views concerning the advantages and disadvantages of collective identity as a category of analysis in the social sciences and the humanities. For simplicity’s sake I label them the foes and the friends of collective identity. Second, I present a recent example of the (mis)use of collective identity as an analytical tool in order illustrate why the concept is fundamentally criticized. Third, I present and analyse the positions of the foes of collective identity and their arguments (especially Frederic Cooper, Roger Brubaker and Lutz Niethammer). Fourth, I present the friends of collective identity and analyse their arguments (Chantal Mouffe, Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas and others). Fifth and last, I conclude that although the academic discussions concerning ‘collective identity’ appear to be a thing of the – recent – past, the philosophical issues at stake – especially the status of the social in relationship to the individual - are still very present and controversial today.
First, the chapter analyses the return of exclusive, ethnic nationalism in Dutch political discourse and in public history in direct relation with the revisionist counter-narratives, that demand the public recognition of the inherent violence of slavery and colonialism. Second, the chapter zooms in on three particular topics that are publicly contested by revisionists and ethnic-nationalist anti-revisionists. The first issue concerns the statues and the streets carrying the names of the seafaring heroes who played a leading role in the Dutch colonial enterprise. The second issue revolves around the symbolic meaning of ‘Black Pete’ and the third issue concerns the continuing use of the name ‘Golden Age’ for the Dutch 17th century.
The third and fourth sections of the chapter analyse academic varieties of the anti-revisionist and revisionist views. While the anti-revisionist views implicitly hark back to essentialist notions of the Dutch nation, revisionist historians claim that Dutch history can only be adequately written by taking its imperial and global character seriously.
Thirdly, I will argue that a fundamental break with notions of container-space and container-time are the two major characteristics of the post-Nora, transnational, transcultural, transgenerational, transmedial, and multi-directional period. Memory scholars in this period usually emphasize that all memory is “traveling” in relatively openmultiscalar spaces and in multidirectional times—and thus cannot unambiguously be located in one place or in one time, nor connected to one fixed identity. Michael Rothberg’s analysis of the interrelationship between the memory of the Holocaust and of decolonization and Daniel Levy’s and Nathaniel Sznaider’s analysis of the globalization of Holocaust-memory exemplify these recent approaches.
Fourthly, I will address the framing of time in memory studies by analyzing the influential analyses of François Hartog and Aleida Assmann—the only two book-length analyses concerning the changing experiences of time over time. Both Hartog and Assmann hold that the relationships between past, present, and future have fundamentally changed since the memory boom, but they offer completely different analyses and evaluations of this change. While Hartog—following Nora—interprets the memory boom as a pathogenic symptom of a crisis of—modern—time, Assmann interprets memory studies as a cultural-political achievement of post-Holocaust and postcolonial societies that have learnt the hard way that change does not automatically equal progress.
In my 'Reply' first, I dismantle the critique that I am subscribing to some version of ‘covering law explanation’. Second, I clarify in what – limited - sense I find Lakatos ideas concerning ‘scientific researchprogrammes’ fruitful for philosophy of history. The cognitive and political Doppelexistenz of theories in the human sciences explains why epistemological analyses always need to be complemented by practical analyses. Third, I defend my ‘double focus’ against the postmodern critique that my ‘internal realism’ is ‘powerblind’, and fourth, against the critique that ‘scientific history’ is ‘beyond politics’. Fifth and last I argue that in criticizing positions it is fruitful also to include the discussions about them in the critical argument.
My 'Introduction' to 'Bordercrossings' can also be downloaded on Academia.edu. The contributions of my critics can be downloaded from the website of 'Historein'.
depart from this Zeitdiagnose basically in order to question it. I will do so by problematizing the influential analysis of ‘presentism’ by the French historian François Hartog. Although Hartog did not invent or discover the word ‘presentism’, as he sometimes suggests, he has certainly played a fundamental role in its spread in history and in historical theory over the last fifteen years.
I take Hartog’s analysis of presentism as a point of departure and I argue that his notion of presentism is fundamentally ambiguous. Actually Hartog has presented two versions of presentism that cannot be reconciled. The first version I call presentism no. 1 according to which presentism basically means our ‘present’, ‘contemporary’ period. This periodizational interpretation of ‘presentism’ fits in the linear and progressive time
conception of modern history, because modern history basically conceives of the past as a progressive succession of periods. Modern History with the capital H is conceived of as the train of time that travels on one (linear) track with an accelerating speed (as Koselleck among others emphasized) from the past to the present and towards the future. The second version of ‘presentism’ however, that I call presentism no. 2, conceives of ‘presentism’ not as the contemporary period – not as a specific, substantially filled block
of time – but as an analytical ideal type of what Hartog calls an ‘order of time’ or a ‘regime of historicity’. This version characterizes a particular view on the relationship between past, present and future, in which one of them is dominant – and ‘presentism’ represents the regime of historicity in which the present is dominant. Order of time and regime of historicity are Hartog’s conceptual instruments to pluralize the notion of time by clarifying that the relationship between past, present and future varies over times and cultures. Hartog explicitly presents presentism no. 2 as the interpretation
that he intends: presentism is meant to be a heuristic tool for further research concerning experiences of time. Therefore presentism no. 2 is not a chronological ‘block of time’ and does not fit in the linear time track of modern history. Hartog’s ambiguity in this case exemplifies more general problems of thinking beyond linear time in terms of ‘multi-layeredness’
and to conceive of ‘history without chronology’, in Stefan Tanaka’s phrasing.
In order to develop my arguments I proceed in four steps. First, I analyse how Hartog has introduced ‘presentism’ in the context of the ‘memory wars’ in France and how his presentism is firmly rooted in what he calls ‘a crisis of time’. Second, I argue that his analysis of presentism is basically an inversion of modernism, and that some of the problems of presentism therefore can best be understood as the inverted problems of the modern regime of historicity. Third, I develop my argument that Hartog’s presentism actually comes in two varieties and that both versions of presentism are at
odds with each other and why. Fourth and last, I draw conclusions from my analysis and put Hartog’s presentism in a comparative perspective.
The articles selected for this volume are based on my research in the domain of philosophy of history and historiography over the past 15 years. Although they have been produced in a variety of contexts and have been published in a variety journals and collected volumes, there is some coherence which connects them and which I shall address in this introduction. At the same time the selected articles represent articulations of my own position in the theoretical and historiographical debates.
The first basic idea which connects the articles is the idea that the writing of history has a ‘bordercrossing’ character , meaning that history writing involves bordercrossings 1. between history and philosophy, and 2. between history and politics in a broad sense. Although this may sound pretty ‘postmodern’ to some, my arguments in case are usually directed against and opposed to postmodernist positions. In my view the justified philosophical critiques of all crude variants of realism - which is indeed a widespread position among historians - do not lead to a rejection of realist positions in toto, but to a more sophisticated brand of realism. This idea runs counter to the dominant positions in philosophy of history between 1975 and 1995, which all favored idealism and relativism in some form as alternatives for naïve realism.
The second basic idea connecting the articles is the idea that the mechanism of ‘inversion’ (or ‘negation’) is important for our understanding of debates in philosophy of history and in historiography. This holds for intellectual history in general.. The ‘dialectical’ mechanism is explanatory in many intellectual debates because positions often owe their origin and existence to an inversion of the position that constitutes the object of critique. Classical examples of this procedure in history are found, for instance, in Marx’ materialistic inversion of Hegel’s idealism and in Braudels ‘structural’ inversion of the political history of events (‘l’histoire evénementielle’). As a consequence the ‘inverted’ positions have the same conceptual structure as the criticized ones, carrying along similar conceptual problems (same contrasts, dichotomies etc.).
In this volume I develop my own position along two routes. The first route is the route of philosophy, the second one is the route of the history of history writing alias historiography. In the first part of this volume four articles are selected in which a critical evaluation takes place of our present day predicament in philosophy of history. In ‘Historical knowledge and historical reality’ I develop a position I label (after Hillary Putnam) as ‘internal realism’. I argue that only a realist position is capable of elucidating the fundamental relationship between historical writing and historical research in history conceived a discipline. Only realist positions can offer a philosophical justification of the practice of professional historians to establish facts in methodical and intersubjective ways. The same holds for their presupposition that it is the essential connection to critically established facts which distinguishes historical narratives from other genres of narrative. Therefore, only realist positions can give an explanation why the discipline of history has a discursive and critical character, driven by the interplay between factual evidence and interpretative frameworks.
In order to grasp the practical functions of history writing I argue that the epistemological focus needs to be extended into the domain of ethics and of politics. ‘Internal realism’ enables this extension by bridging the supposed ‘gap’ between judgments of facts and judgments of value in the form of a self-conscious ‘anti-foundationalism’ and by emphasizing the discursive character of both.
INDICE
La elusiva realidad del pasado histórico: presentación de la edición en español, por Daniel Brauer.
Capítulo 1.- Introducción general. Capítulo 2.- Historia y teoría. Capítulo 3.- Conocimiento histórico y realidad histórica: una defensa del “realismo interno”. Capítulo 4.- La ciencia histórica y las leyes: una historia ambivalente. Capítulo 5.- ¿Puede ser verdadera la historia? Acerca de las filosofías narrativas de la historia de Hayden White y Frank Ankersmit. Capítulo 6.- “Tú tienes tu historia y yo la mía”: algunas reflexiones sobre la verdad y la objetividad en la historia. Capítulo 7.- Despegado del tiempo. O la repentina presencia del pasado. Capítulo 8.- Dividir el tiempo. Explorando las fronteras entre presente, pasado y futuro.
philosophers address basic questions on
historical time and on the distinctions
between past, present and future. Their
contributions are organised around
four themes: the relation between time
and modernity; the issue of ruptures in
time and the influence of catastrophic
events such as revolutions and wars on
temporal distinctions; the philosophical
analysis of historical time and temporal
distinctions; and the construction of
time outside Europe through processes
of colonialism, imperialism, and
globalisation.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Berber Bevernage and Chris Lorenz: Breaking up Time –
Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past and Future
1. Time and Modernity: Critical Approaches to Koselleck’s Legacy
Aleida Assmann: Transformations of the Modern Time Regime
Peter Fritzsche: The Ruins of Modernity
Peter Osborne: Global Modernity and the Contemporary: Two Categories of the Philosophy of Historical Time
2. Ruptures in Time: Revolutions and Wars
Sanja Perovic: Year 1 and Year 61 of the French Revolution: The Revolutionary Calendar and Auguste Comte
Claudia Verhoeven: Wormholes in Russian History: Events ‘Outside of Time’
François Hartog: The Modern Régime of Historicity in the Face of
Two World Wars
Lucian Hölscher: Mysteries of Historical Order: Ruptures, Simultaneity and the Relationship of the Past, the Present and the Future
3. Thinking about Time: Analytical Approaches
Jonathan Gorman: The Limits of Historiographical Choice in Temporal Distinctions
Constantin Fasolt: Breaking up Time – Escaping from Time: Self-Assertion and Knowledge of the Past
4. Time outside Europe: Imperialism, Colonialism and Globalisation
Lynn Hunt: Globalisation and Time
Stefan Tanaka: Unification of Time and the Fragmentation of Pasts in Meiji Japan
Axel Schneider: Temporal Hierarchies and Moral Leadership:
China’s Engagement with Modern Views of History
William Gallois: The War for Time in Early Colonial Algeria"