History, politics, and faith-based knowledge: Hobsbawm and Fukuyama take the 90s

ABSTRACT

In this article, I reconsider the reception of two widely divergent historical interpretations of the 20^th century with vastly different implications for contemporary political action: Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes (1994) and Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992). By asking how the narrative framing of each book – apart from its historical verdict – affected reactions of reviewers in the mid-90s, I hope to shed light on what it might look like for historians to take seriously the ‘postmodern challenges’ that swept the social sciences during the last quarter of the 20^th century. Specifically, I will argue that scholars who present their work as definitive, objective historical accounts are likely to be ‘provincialized’ by reviewers sooner or later, in part because their pretensions are at odds with the presuppositions of the academic enterprise as we know it but also because they threaten the ability of society to think and act politically in instituting the future. Drawing on historians and philosophers of the 1930s, I present political enunciation as a recurrent alternative to continuing pretensions of impersonal objectivity and show that its presence does not blight but can actually enhance and legitimize one’s work.

KEYWORDS:

• Narrativism
• philosophy of history
• political ideology
• Marxist scholarship
• postmodernism
• Hayden White
• Eric Hobsbawm
• Francis Fukuyama

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Stephan Palmié, whose wonderful class and encouragement occasioned this paper and to Charles Stewart for time spent providing thoughtful suggestions. Thanks also to Ramzi Rouighi, Morgan Mamon, and Alana Osterling for many years passed in discussion.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I read 16 reviews of Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes and 18 reviews of Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, all written in the 1990s, originating from a wide variety of journals, and written by scholars ranging across the social sciences. Most of these were gathered on JSTOR, but I also read a few reviews from publications aimed at a broader audience (e.g., the NY Review of Books). Because of the cross-disciplinary influence of these two works, it is appropriate to compare their reception despite the differing disciplinary commitments of their authors. Reviews that contributed to my assessment but are not cited in the paper’s main body include Baur (1994), Chase (1996), Freedman (1997), Kiernan (1996), Rich (1996), Roberts (1999), Roth (1993), and Sharpe (1997).

2. I borrow the term ‘provincialize’ from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference ([2000] 2007), in which he explores ‘in what sense European ideas that were universal were also, at one and the same time, drawn from very particular intellectual and historical traditions that could not claim any universal validity’ (xiii).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francesca Conterno

Francesca Conterno is currently an MA student in the social sciences at the University of Chicago where she is working on a master’s thesis about sovereignty and spatial production on Indonesia’s archipelagic border.