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Abstract
Presentism is generally regarded as a necessary evil in historiography. This paper explores the upside of that inevitability. Using a philosophical approach to discourse analysis in the tradition of new cultural history, the paper distinguishes between a strategic use of presentism on the one hand, and a rationalistic approach to history on the other hand. The paper concludes by considering some political implications of rationalistic accounts and strategically presentistic accounts in historiography. Rationalistic accounts inscribe expectations of the past into visions of the future; they cast the historian in the role of prophet; and they perpetuate notions of ahistoric agency. In contrast, strategically presentistic histories incorporate an orientation that deliberately uses the lenses and perspectives of the present in order to bring current assumptions and perspectives into focus. When assumptions are examined in relation to presentistic perspectives, those assumptions loosen their reins on thought. Since presentism is unavoidable, presentism should not be dismissed outright, but ought to be subject to probing and critical examination. With such a focus, strategically presentistic historiography allows for a reflection on the limits of what it is possible to think.
Notes
1 See, e.g., Miguel A. Cabrera, Postsocial History: An Introduction, trans. Marie Mcmahon (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004); Thomas S. Popkewitz, Barry Franklin and Miguel A. Pereyra, eds, Cultural History and Education: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Schooling (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001); Sol Cohen, Challenging Orthodoxies: Toward a New Cultural History of Education (New York: Peter Lang, 1999); Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History: Essays by Aletta Beirsach (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
2 The meaning of strategic bears some resemblance to other terms that signify post‐analytic approaches. Strategic history is considered pragmatic by some; see, for example, Donald H. Sheehan and Harold C. Syrett, eds, Essays in American Historiography; Papers Presented in Honor of Allan Nevins (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960); Cleo H. Cherryholmes, Reading Pragmatism (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999); and Norman J. Wilson, History in Crisis? Recent Directions in Historiography (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice‐Hall, 1999). It has been called critical and effective by others; see, for example, Mitchell Dean, Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault’s Methods and Historical Sociology (New York: Routledge, 1994) and David Owen, “Genealogy as Exemplary Critique: Reflections on Foucault and the Imagination of the Political,” Economy and Society 24, no. 4 (1995 November): 489–506. Strategic presentism is also related to some meanings of reflexive in sociology; see, for example, Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). It also resembles the notion of challenging orthodoxies as in Sol Cohen, Challenging Orthodoxies: Toward a New Cultural History of Education (New York: Peter Lang, 1999). I use the term strategic here to emphasise a self‐consciously ethical project in historiography.
3 See Cohen’s Challenging Orthodoxies for an example of a strategically presentist history of mental hygiene in education.
4 Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980).
5 Beverly Southgate, History: What and Why? Ancient, Modern, and Postmodern Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 1996).
6 Michel Foucault, “On Ways of Writing History,” in Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, And Epistemology, ed. James Faubion. Vol. 2 of The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1998); Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, And Epistemology, ed. James Faubion, Vol. 2 of The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1998); Michel Foucault, “Return to History,” in Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, And Epistemology, ed. James Faubion, Vol. 2 of The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1998).
7 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, 129.
10 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, 236.
8 Nisbet writes, “[I]f there is one generalization that can be made confidently about the history of the idea of progress, it is that throughout its history the idea has been closely linked with, has depended upon, religion or upon intellectual constructs derived from religion” (p. 352).
9 Spencer, quoted in Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, 178.
11 Ibid., 171.
12 Southgate, History: What and Why?, 106 (emphasis in the original).
13 Foucault, “On Ways of Writing History,” 279.
14 Ibid., 282.
15 Ibid., 283.
16 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. (New York: Random House, 1970), xv.
17 John D. Pulliam and James J. Van Patten, History of Education in America, 7th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice‐Hall, 1999).
18 Ibid., v–vi.
20 Southgate, History: What and Why?, 13.
19 She notes that the ideal of separating “what happened” from our perceptions and memories of what happened was expressed as early as the second century AD by Lucian.
21 See, for example, Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
22 Pulliam and Van Patten, History of Education in America, 99.
23 Ibid.,120.
24 Ibid.,138.
25 Ibid.,151.
26 Ibid.,15.
27 Ibid., 98.
28 David Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).
29 Pulliam and Van Patten, History of Education in America, 303.
30 Ibid., 304–305. Pulliam and Van Patten’s history distinguishes itself from other more critical educational histories when it states forthrightly in the conclusion that “The challenge for education is to prepare individuals for job market reality” (p. 305). Not all progressive histories of education espouse this liberal view.
31 David Hamilton, Towards a Theory of Schooling (London: Falmer, 1989).
32 See, for example, Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983); and Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607–1783 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).
33 Hamilton, Towards a Theory of Schooling, 78.
34 Ibid., 9.
35 Ibid., 10. Later, at the turn of the next century, pedagogical techniques would again target individuals, but that “individual” would no longer be the authentic humanist like Emile; rather the progressive individual would be seen to be in personal possession of populationally defined characteristics such as race, class and gender. For a discussion of “possessive individualism” see Thomas S. Popkewitz, A Political Sociology of Educational Reform: Power/Knowledge in Teaching, Teacher Education, and Research (New York: Teachers College Press, 1991).
36 Hamilton, Towards a Theory of Schooling, 116, endnote 11.
38 Cohen, Challenging Orthodoxies, 56.
37 See Cohen’s Challenging Orthodoxies.
39 Remarkably, it was Marx who said that true freedom could not be envisioned by those who were not yet free.
40 For a discussion comparing the attitude of nostalgia with that of imagination, see Stephen E. Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990).
41 Dennis Carlson, “Finding a Voice, and Losing Our Way?,” Educational Theory 48, no. 4 (1998): 548.
42 Ibid., 553.
43 Furthermore, any possibility of emancipation requires the intervention of the critical intellectual in order to write the autonomous agent into theory.
44 See Cohen, Challenging Orthodoxies.
45 This proposed vantage point is also inevitably shaped by a presentistic perspective. As they say: It’s turtles all the way down.
46 Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
47 Michel Foucault, “The Order of Things,” in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 14–15.
48 Cohen, Challenging Orthodoxies, 27–28.