History and Theory最新文献

The essay makes three points about historians’ responsibilities in the current moment. The first has to do with making sense of the present by bringing the past to bear on it—that is, offering to the current eruptions of politics a history that can help explain what has brought them to this point in the form of narratives that counter the dominant ones. The second is what Foucault called a “history of the present.” That is a critical interrogation of the terms we use to represent the past, a dismantling of the naturalized understanding of history that has long served to legitimize modernity as the inevitable outcome of a singular chronology. The third calls for the avowal of our ethical investments in the history we write.

This article addresses the charge of “stupidity” leveled at nineteenth-century thought by recent critical posthumanist and post-anthropocentric theorists. The article's first section traces a particularistic reading of nineteenth-century philosophy of history in the writings of Rosi Braidotti and Bruno Latour, both of whom have employed the nineteenth century as an intellectual shorthand for human exceptionalism and its implicit collusion with the present ecological crisis. Their respective posthumanist and post-anthropocentric provocations (1) question the composition, agency, and exceptionalism of the human, and (2) posit multiple temporalities as an alternative to the linear time of universal history. While intellectual historians have begun to complicate the first provocation in relation to the nineteenth century, we lack an equivalent intervention for the second. In response, the article's second section draws on John Stuart Mill's (1806–1873) reception of Auguste Comte (1798–1857) to demonstrate that speculative philosophy of history in fact grappled with its own problems of scale, multiplicity, and direction. We show that Mill, partly in response to Comte, employed incommensurable historical registers, such as the universal and the relative, to interpret the past at different scales of analysis. These scales were undeniably human, not to mention Eurocentric, but they nevertheless invite a more nuanced reading of the nineteenth century as well as a less linear and troubled logic of overcoming that afflicts Braidotti, Latour, and others. In this spirit, the article's final section suggests that nineteenth-century philosophy of history may actually facilitate the recomposition of the human in time, a task that is central to the multifaceted crisis of the present posthumanist, post-anthropocentric, and Anthropocenic conjuncture.

Enzo Traverso's Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography argues that contemporary historical writing is undergoing a “subjectivist turn” characterized by the increasing prevalence of first-person narration, or homodiegesis. Traverso attributes this shift to the influence of neoliberalism and its emphasis on individual experience. This review essay follows Judith Surkis's analysis of the linguistic turn in questioning whether “turn talk” obscures more than it illuminates about contemporary historiography, especially given the extreme diversity of the field in terms of method, object, and approach. This essay proposes Hayden White's notion of the “practical past” as a better context for understanding the increasing prevalence of first-person narration in historiography, insofar as it brings to the foreground what is lost or ruled out when history bases its authority and epistemological status on third-person narration and a rigid distinction between historical and literary writing.

Based on extensive scholarship in English and French, this article offers an analytical survey of both the laudatory and critical reception of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou (1975). I revisit the Latin text of Jacques Fournier's register and compare it with relevant fragments in the French and English translations of Montaillou. This comparison provides a starting point to comment on Le Roy Ladurie's novelistic writing style and the “hypnotic effect of narrative” achieved by the book. It also enables me to address historians’ criticisms of how Le Roy Ladurie used historical sources. In the second part of the article, I discuss anthropological history and the history of mentality as subdisciplines of contemporary historical writing, and I situate Montaillou within this tradition. Following Charles Tilly, I argue that Le Roy Ladurie's work is an example of “retrospective ethnography,” a term that more accurately describes Le Roy Ladurie's traditional approach to anthropological research, particularly the method of participatory observation. I also highlight prosopography as a method in Le Roy Ladurie's study of social relations in the medieval village. In conclusion, I reflect on the contemporary relevance of Montaillou for supporting human dignity and agency as well as the “humanity of history” needed in times of social and political upheaval.

Michael Sonenscher's After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought offers a rich overview of nineteenth-century French, Swiss, and German political thought. The work's central argument is that modern political thought emerges in a series of attempts to close germinal “gaps” opened in the fabric of European intellectual life by Kant's philosophy and philosophical history. Less a narrative than a bricolage, the work consists of a myriad of intellectual cameos, walk-on roles, philosophical speculations, and political and social theories whose detail threatens to overwhelm even the most assiduous reader. The most striking feature of Sonenscher's book, however, is its theoretical method. Measuring his distance from both dialectical philosophical history and Cambridge school contextualism, Sonenscher makes powerful use of a method of intellectual history whose last great exponent was Arthur Lovejoy. Under this method, political thought is neither governed by the telos of self-consciousness nor explicable in terms of the historical circumstances in which it has arisen and whose uses and purposes it might serve. Instead, political thought “emerges” unforeseen from a condition of sheer metaphysical indeterminacy. This condition is brought about by the dissolution of prior conceptual oppositions in an amnesic maelstrom of inversions, arguments, and debates. New oppositions are then created through “chance and choice” only to disintegrate in their turn, leading to further cycles of destruction and recreation that Sonenscher calls “palingenesis.” This anti-contextual method is responsible for the rich mosaic of intellectual fragments that the reader encounters in this engaging book. It is also responsible for the book's central shortcoming, for it renders the author oblivious to the way in which their impact on those forced to live and think through them makes historical circumstances resistant to their metaphysical liquefaction, with this in turn making Sonenscher heedless of the historian's duty to investigate these circumstances.

What role should history play in the advancement of knowledge? Because it was so “hard,” so “unbelievably difficult … to get people to believe” in his Great Renewal, Francis Bacon thought a history of knowledge could provide evidence of advancement—a reason to “believe” and participate in his experiment. By indexing advancement, historians of knowledge could foster it. If Bacon were with us today, he would be happy to hear that the history of knowledge is a thriving enterprise. But upon reading our version, he would be dismayed to discover that advancement is nowhere to be found. It's the elephant in the room. That shouldn't surprise him or us—the great difficulty of The Great Renewal is that it always needs to be renewed—but this is a new kind of precarity. I call it friendly fire, because it's damage done not by those who wish to contain or undermine knowledge but by those whose purpose it is to produce and valorize it. Why, I ask in this article, is a volume that offers so much of value—Information: A Historical Companion—so unattuned to issues of advancement? Although occasioned by the current ubiquity of “information,” its focus is not on change—asking such questions as “why information?” and “why now?”—but on asserting the “belief” that “every age is an information age.” In a history built on that belief, change is relegated to subordinate clauses (“while recognizing changes over time”) and advancement isn't even on the table. I put it back on not by rejecting this companion but by providing a companion for it, one in which identifying and classifying change is the central task. I take two preparatory steps. First, I clarify how the concept of “culture” configures the agenda and the findings of Companion 1 while fencing out advancement. Second, I set the agenda for Companion 2 by specifying that the knowledge at stake in advancement is “explanatory knowledge.” I both address concerns about the notion of “progress” and provide a vocabulary for explanation highlighted by the concepts of “fit” and “reach.” Companion 2 then approaches the elephant from a number of angles, from a shift in information over four centuries from a matrix of currency to a matrix of possibility to the pacing of that change by a feature of the history of knowledge that I call the “sequence of surprise.” Since Bacon's highest hope for his history of knowledge was to make us better at advancing it, I conclude with a speculative turn to information's future, from Alan Turing's first use of the word “information” in its modern sense to a rethinking—through the history of knowledge—of the “hallucination” issue in our new forms of generative AI.