Is it history, or histories?
Why it’s important to recognize that history has histories.
Recently, I watched the historian Niall Ferguson and the futurist Peter Schwartz debate their views on the nature of human progress. Organized by the Long Now Foundation, the event took place during the 2008 global financial crisis, meaning that it now counts firmly as history. Beyond the accuracy (or not) of their predictions, what was interesting was how Ferguson described and justified the role of the historian. Historians, he said, commune with the dead. And while there are many futures, there is only one past.
When it comes to the dead person characterization of history, it’s worth pointing out the obvious; historians don’t have some special, unmediated relationship with the dead. There’s no Ouija board involved. Ferguson acknowledges as much in the debate when he says, “We re-enact their thoughts, in their context and ours.” However hard historians may adjust for their biases, they inevitably view the past through the prism of the present. As the poet W. H. Auden expressed it, “the words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.” Readings of the past are also inevitably refracted through layers of previous readings, which means that history is always in part the history of past histories. This is an issue that neither Fergusson nor Schwartz touch on explicitly in their debate; the fact that History, as a field of academic study, has histories. The way we understand and carve up time into past, present, and future has changed over time. History hasn’t always meant was it means today.
At school in the early 1980s, we were given H. E. Carr’s What Is History? to read. Published in 1961, it was hardly a post-modern spin on the contingency of historical meaning, but it did make us reflect on the different ideas about what history is and what it can do. Carr begins the book by citing the historian and statesman Lord Acton’s claim, made in 1896, that given access to unprecedented amounts of information and to “the fullness of the knowledge which the nineteenth century is about to bequeath,” it would soon be possible to write the “ultimate history.” By the late 1950s, Carr reminds us, some historians were taking issue with this. In his introduction to the revised edition of the Cambridge Modern History, which Lord Acton had originally edited, Sir George Clark refuted his predecessor’s assertion. Ultimate history would never be possible given historians now “expect their work to be superseded again and again. They consider that knowledge of the past has come down through one or more human minds, has been ‘processed’ by them, and therefore cannot consist of elemental and impersonal atoms which nothing can alter.”
As a historian of epidemics in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, I was often asked about the lessons history has to teach, and in 2020 made a plea for an explicitly anti-lessons approach to the past, arguing that when we analogize events in the present with those in the past, we tend to over-emphasize similitudes. Instead, I suggested, we need to disrupt habitual modes of thinking and pay attention to differences.
Among the writers who I’ve found most helpful in thinking about the uses and abuses of the past, is the German historian Reinhart Koselleck, who died in 2006. Although he isn’t the easiest historian to read—and if you come to him in translation, he is even harder—he is, at least in my view, one of the most insightful thinkers on the history of history, and on how we reconcile historical specificity with what he called “structures of repetition.” The task Koselleck set himself was to find a middle path between a relativistic, context-specific, and fundamentally meaningless view of history versus history as repetitive, linear, and progressive. Koselleck’s own past undoubtedly shaped his approach. In 1934, aged eleven, he had joined the Hitler Youth and in 1941 volunteered to serve in World War II. In 1945, he was captured by the Red Army and sent to Auschwitz for the clear up operation there, before being held as a prisoner of war in Kazakhstan. As he later observed, his motivation in becoming a historian was “to analyze the mentality, the origins and the feasibility of the Utopian dream—as I called it at the time—that Hitler strove to achieve.”
Koselleck argued that with the advent of modernity in the West, the experience of time was transformed. As he noted in The Practice of Conceptual History, until “well into the seventeenth century, it was theoretically and generally assumed that nothing fundamentally new could occur until the end of the world.” Time was repetitive, and events were understood in relation to natural cycles and divine preordination. Given nothing new could occur, the future could be disclosed by looking back at the past. History was life’s teacher, Cicero’s magistra vitae. However, as new technologies and global connections began to accelerate time and shrink space in the modern period, the present became dislocated from the past and the world was understood to be accelerating toward the future. This was the moment that a new conceptualization of history took shape, providing a framework for making sense of modern experience in the face of quickening change.
For Koselleck, there is no single, coherent historical time. History is “plural” in the sense that every historical event is shaped by previous events. Vestiges of these pre-histories—some distant and some more recent, some rigidly solidified, and others more malleable—inhere within it. He uses the geological metaphor of sedimented strata to describe this temporal stratification.
If all this sounds a little too speculative, perhaps we should just remember, as Ferguson and Schwartz both recognize in their 2008 debate, that historians and futurists have much more in common than they often acknowledge. Insight and foresight aren’t contradictory, and understanding the past has an important role to play in the promotion of a “futures literacy.” After all, in the past the present was once a possible future.