History manifested: making sense of unprecedented change

Abstract

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

Keywords::

• The History Manifesto
• practical past
• the concept of history
• unprecedented change
• philosophy of history
• Anthropocene

This article is referred to by:

History Manifested: A Commentary on continuity, disruption and the production of history

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. Guldi and Armitage, The History Manifesto.

^2. White, The Practical Past.

^3. Mandelbaum, History, Man & Reason, 44.

^4. Ankersmit, “Historicism: An Attempt at Synthesis,” 144.

^5. For the rest of the debate see Iggers, “Comments on F. R. Ankersmit's Paper;” and Ankersmit, “Reply to Professor Iggers.”

^6. The difference is that in the first case there is something that is “other” and “the same” at the same time, while in the second case – in the case of nostalgic restitution – there is no otherness and change over time. In the developmental view, this simultaneity of otherness and sameness is precisely the reason that enabled historical writing to exercise a retrospective stance in which the past was a “foreign country” (to use the popular expression borrowed from David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country), but a foreign country of the very same subject that is still present and is under examination. This duality of otherness and sameness, the duality of qualities exposed to change on the one hand and a changeless self-identical subject on the other, was the ground on which development as such could take place as successive stages of the same subject. And whereas this developmental view takes notice of changing circumstances under which the same subject appears in different shapes, the recent call for embracing this very view seems to disregard the changing circumstances part of the equation, thereby contradicting its own agenda.

^7. See, for instance, White, “The Practical Past;” and White, “Politics, History, and the Practical Past.”

^8. Harlan, “‘The Burden of History’ Forty Years Later,” 171.

^9. Spiegel, “Above, About and Beyond the Writing of History,” 505.

^10. Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 106.

^11. Ibid., 103.

^12. White, “The Burden of History,” 125.

^13. White, The Practical Past, xiv.

^14. Ibid.

^15. Ibid., 7.

^16. See Hutcheon, “Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History;” and Elias, “Metahistorical Romance, the Historical Sublime, and Dialogic History.”

^17. White, The Practical Past, 7, 17, 96.

^18. Ibid., 9.

^19. Ibid., 15.

^20. Guldi and Armitage, The History Manifesto, 19–20.

^21. Cohen and Mandler, “The History Manifesto: A Critique.” See also the reply, Armitage and Guldi, “The History Manifesto: A Reply to Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler.”

^22. Moyn, “Bonfire of the Humanities.” Moyn reviews The History Manifesto together with White's book and Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era.

^23. Rutherford, “The History Manifesto and its Discontents.”

^24. Guldi and Armitage, The History Manifesto, 117.

^25. Ibid., 61.

^26. Ibid., 63–4.

^27. Ibid., 87.

^28. Ibid., 64. A similar, though more nuanced, view about the specificity of history in responding to the current challenge of the Anthropocene can be found in Thomas, “History and Biology in the Anthropocene.”

^29. Ibid., 13.

^30. White, The Practical Past, 14–17.

^31. See Carr, Time, Narrative, and History.

^32. Carr, Experience and History, 116.

^33. Ibid., 105. As for the critiques Carr refers to, see Löwith, Meaning in History; Popper, The Poverty of Historicism; and Danto, Narration and Knowledge.

^34. White, The Practical Past, 103.

^35. Guldi and Armitage, The History Manifesto, 117.

^36. For a clear introduction to the entire problematics and for an assessment of the plausibility of the scenario of a technological singularity (that is, a point where intelligent machines designed by humans outsmart humans in designing more intelligent machines, leading to an “intelligence explosion” unmatchable and uncontrollable by humans) see Chalmers, “The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis.” See also Bostrom, Superintelligence.

^37. Guldi and Armitage, The History Manifesto, 64–73. As for White, although he touches upon what we might perceive as “radical discontinuity” in the shape of “space travel, genetic engineering, atomic weaponry” (White, The Practical Past, 47–8), his discussion takes an entirely different route according to which he could not discuss the possibility of unprecedented change as genuinely unprecedented. Although all his examples of “radical discontinuity” concern post-war occurrences, he thinks about them as characteristic of modernity as such, which rather automatically integrates them into his recurring discussions of “continuity in change” as a feature of the historical thinking of modernity. This treatment, as I discussed it above, is precisely the developmental view.

^38. Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 197.

^39. Bruno Latour has a point of departure in the same scenario in Latour, “A Plea for Earthly Sciences,” 73.

^40. Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 197.

^41. Ibid., 219.

^42. See Koselleck, Futures Past.

^43. Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 219–20.

^44. See Chakrabarty, “Climate and Capital.”

^45. To avoid misunderstandings, I would like to note that I talk about an overarching conceptual problem, and what I consider to be a lack of fit is, in the most general terms, between present-day concerns and conceptualising those concerns by what I call historical thinking in the shape of the developmental view. It does not mean that, for instance, The History Manifesto could not be more up to date and significant in talking about big data and digital humanities. In this respect, the misfit I talk about rather means that The History Manifesto, even when it comes to present-day inner concerns of historical writing, tries to make sense of them within a two-century-old conceptual framework.

^46. Latour, “A Plea for Earthly Sciences,” 75.

^47. Ibid., 74.

^48. Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 220.

^49. Thomas, “History and Biology in the Anthropocene.”

^50. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; Foucault, The Order of Things.

^51. For histories of cybernetics and artificial-intelligence research see Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain; and Nilsson, The Quest for Artificial Intelligence. The former provides a viewpoint from the sociology of science, while the latter is written by a researcher in artificial intelligence. For the corresponding literary and cinematic imagination of the period see Warrick, The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction and Dinello, Technophobia!, 87–114.

^52. All this, of course, is not to say that the sort of “historical” thinking I am talking about was explicitly designed to make sense of artificial-intelligence research or cybernetics. This is only to say that at times when the future began to take the shape of the prospect of unprecedented change, a notion of history accommodated to the change in our future prospects was born simultaneously. And there is, actually, nothing surprising in this. Insofar as history understood as the course of events encompasses the past, the present and the future, a qualitative change in future prospects implies a qualitative change in the notion of history that encompasses those prospects. Also, I do not wish to suggest that Foucault or Kuhn worked out a philosophy of history as such. What I wish to suggest is that their work is informed by a philosophy of history and a concept of history other than the developmental view, despite the fact that this concept is not articulated as a philosophy of history.

^53. This philosophy of history, I think, is already out there to a certain extent. Unlike in the case of Foucault and Kuhn, this time it also characterises efforts that explicitly try to articulate a philosophy of history, even though they still tend to fall prey to substantive concerns. For more details about the quasi-substantive philosophy of history of our times, see Simon, “History Set into Motion Again.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zoltán Boldizsár Simon

Zoltán Boldizsár Simon is a doctoral research associate at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology at Bielefeld University. His research revolves around the interrelated efforts to devise a quasi-substantive philosophy of history to account for history understood as the course of events one the one hand, and to frame a critical philosophy of history that reconciles the linguistic and non-linguistic dimensions of history understood as historical writing on the other. Zoltán's essays related to these efforts can be read in the journals History and Theory, Rethinking History and the Journal of the Philosophy of History.