Beyond The End of History

12/6/2020 Beyond the End of History
Beyond the End of History

Historians’ prohibition on ‘presentism’ crumbles under
the weight of events
THE REVIEW
By Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins
AUGUST 14, 2020
F
or a long time, it had been broadly assumed that history was over — that, at
least, the liberal international order embodied by Francis Fukuyama’s notion
of the “end of history” had rendered historical thinking about the present less
than useful. All challenges to the United States at home and abroad could be resolved
through technocratic adjustments of the liberal international system. The aim for the
future would be for the United States to expand its military and economic power to
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ensure stability for capitalism, so that failed states (often in the global South) might
experience the universalization of Western liberal democracy.
But Trump and Brexit, the rise of populist strongmen the world over, and what
appears to be a new Cold War with China, have all rendered the inevitability of the
liberal international order less and less plausible. And the disorientation has only
been deepened by the pandemic, and by growing civil unrest at liberalism’s long-term
inability to solve social, racial, and economic inequality, as demonstrated by the
global protest movement in response to the killing by the police of an unarmed Black
man, George Floyd. History has returned with a vengeance.
Little wonder, then, that the press has been awash in historical analogies trying to
make sense of things. The new watch guards of fascism, like the Holocaust historian
Timothy Snyder, the journalist Anne Applebaum, and the Yale philosopher Jason
Stanley, make recourse to Europe’s fascist past of the 1930s to explain the
contemporary political right. Their critics have been quick to claim that their reading
of history is rather politicized, and that their appeal to historical analogies obfuscates,
rather than clarifies, the complexity of current events.
The coronavirus crisis is another case in point. Some scholars have offered historical
analogies to the war economies of World Wars I and II, while others have insisted that
looking to past wars for inspiration could mislead us. In the words of one historian,
“Wars lead us to look for enemies and scapegoats, war solutions are directed from the
top rather than resourced from local communities.” Others still, most prominently the
economic historian Adam Tooze, have stressed the historical uniqueness of the
pandemic.
With the eruption of the George Floyd protests, pundits and scholars such as Niall
Ferguson, David Frum, and Max Boot have suggested similarities with the May 1968
protests, even as other scholars have pointed out the shortcomings of this historical
comparison.
Scholars and nonscholars alike are struggling to make sense of what is happening
today. The public is turning to the past — through popular podcasts, newspapers,
television, trade books and documentaries — to understand the blooming buzzing
confusion of the present. Historians are being called upon by their students and eager
general audiences trying to come to grips with a world again made strange.
But they face an obstacle. The Anglo-American history profession’s cardinal sin has
been so-called “presentism,” the illicit projection of present values onto the past. In
the words of the Cambridge University historian Alexandra Walsham, “presentism …
remains one of the yardsticks against which we continue to define what we do as
historians.”
It is difficult to grasp the force of the prohibition on “presentism” without

understanding the political backdrop against which it developed: the Cold War and
the liberal internationalism endorsed by most Anglo-American historians. The
profession’s current anxiety over presentism is a legacy of the Cold War university,
which sought to resist the radicalism of a new generation of historians emerging in the
1950s and ‘60s, as well as push back against the postmodern turn of the 1970s. This
inherited resistance inhibits a more thoughtful engagement with our current crises.
We have been left strangely ill-equipped to confront history’s return.
We have been left strangely ill-equipped to

confront history’s return.
Prohibitions against presentism are typically couched in philosophical or ethical
terms. To commit the error of presentism, says the Yale American Studies scholar Wai
Chee Dimock, is “to be blithely unaware of historical specificities, to project our
values onto past periods without regard for the different norms then operative.” This
is a kind of “narcissism,” she says, which “erases the historicity of texts.” Michel
Rolph-Trouillot could claim, in 1995, that “academic historians tend to keep as far
away as possible from historical controversies that most move the public of the day.”
T
he latest aggravation of these anxieties is on display in the ongoing
controversy over The New York Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project.
The criticisms of this project by leading historians amount to the charge of
presentism: Its contributors are accused of projecting present-day concerns and
values onto the past, and thus misinterpreting historical facts.
How do we square such exacting proscriptions with the actual present-oriented work
that many historians are doing today? Indeed, there is a blatant contradiction between
the profession’s standards and the actual presentist work of many contemporary
historians. Presentism refuses to go away — but the anxieties it induces continue to
plague the profession.
The ethical standard is summed up in what the Yale historian Samuel Moyn describes
as the demand to respect the “alterity” of history: “Our ancestors,” he writes, “were
trying to be themselves rather than to anticipate somebody else. The past is not
simply a mirror for our own self-regard.”
The failure to respect the alterity of history might have negative real-world
consequences. Timothy Snyder, for instance, has drawn widespread criticism from his
fellow historians for his warnings about totalitarianism under Trump. As Udi
Greenberg and Daniel Bessner argued in a piece titled “The Weimar Analogy,”
Snyder’s appeal to the Weimar Republic — whose political instability led to Hitler’s
rise to power — to explain Trump might lead liberal elites to believe that democracy
cannot be trusted, given that a fascist was voted into office by those pesky
deplorables. From there, one might conclude that for democracy to survive, the state
must curtail freedoms — a position with antidemocratic political implications.
On the other hand, one of the most eloquent defenders of the Weimar analogy is the
Harvard historian Peter Gordon. “Looking at Trump’s conduct and the conduct of
many of his operatives and his most ardent followers,” Gordon told me, “I have
become convinced that many of them no longer really feel at all committed to the
rules and procedures (constitutional and local) and the broader political culture of
American democracy.” What strikes Gordon as most important about the analogy is
that the Weimar Republic offers a reminder of the intrinsic fragility of democratic
institutions. “Democracy in the U.S. has never been all that secure, and it has surely
never been fully realized.”
Gordon criticizes Greenberg and Bessner’s rejection of the Weimar analogy. “Just
because the Weimar analogy could be deployed by Cold War strategists in the past,”
argues Gordon, “it hardly follows that the Weimar analogy means and must mean the
same thing when it is invoked today. Ironically, the inference itself appeals once again
to an analogy: the Cold War politics of the past is presumed to recur.”
A further concern about presentism is philosophical. The ethical responsibility of the

historian to respect the alterity of history is predicated on the debatable assumption
of radical discontinuity between historical periods. Take, for instance, Lynn Hunt’s
highly influential essay “Against Presentism.” The University of California historian’s
argument postulates that a history for the present can only result in wild extrapolation
and the elimination of essential differences, since no two eras can be alike. Any strong
argument for resonances between different periods is impossible, because of the
past’s radical contingency and particularity.
But as many have pointed out, this critique rests on a simplified depiction of
presentism, and assumes the ability of historians to disconnect themselves from their
own context. As Moyn puts it, “Whatever respect we owe the dead, history is still
written by — and meaningful to — the living. If so, abuses of the past call for uses in
the name of a better future.” On this view, some level of presentism appears
unavoidable, since the work of historical reconstruction is mediated by the present
from which it is conducted.
he goal should be to jettison crude versions of presentism without abandoning

presentism altogether. As Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University and a
T
historian of Europe, told me: “The alternative to crude presentism is crude
antiquarianism. Why accept that choice?” To do so is to punt the human
need for historical understanding to those far less qualified to speak on its
behalf. As Jill Lepore puts it, “If people who are cautious about evidence and
argument and method refused to talk about the relationship between the past and the
present, then the only people who will be doing that will be Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity,
and Bill O’Reilly.”
Here we find a yet another reason for the profession’s longstanding opposition to
presentism, which is rooted in political anxiety. Presentist histories are viewed as
disruptive of contemporary political norms and the standard historical accounts of
their emergence. These disruptive challenges become all the more threatening during
times of political crisis.
In his book, In Defense of History, the historian Richard Evans argues that a major
reason the British history profession of the 1950s and early 1960s was so receptive to
the influential work of Lewis Namier — the famed modern European historian whose
scientific approach to history involved the meticulous reconstruction of minute facts
— was that its political implications for the Cold War were reassuring to conservative
British historians.
NATE KITCH FOR THE CHRONICLE
The conservative guard of the profession, argues Evans, was threatened by the Labour
Party’s successes after World War II. In the hands of the newly empowered masses,
history could all too easily be used for an ideological agenda threatening to the
conservative political values of Oxbridge dons. Namier’s accuracy and scientific
objectivity were appreciated because they were devoid of a threatening ideology. As it
happens, Namier himself also despised the masses. Evans suggests that Namier’s
empirical approach served as an alibi for silencing alternative historical narratives
that would challenge the conservativism of the profession — an anxiety brought on by
the Cold War.
Much the same story applies to the United States. The Cold War university spawned
an academic work force dependent on global anti-Communism. It invariably
embedded postwar anti-Communism in the academic work of liberal humanists from
across disciplines. Works by historians such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Richard
Hofstadter reflected a “Cold War consensus” that emphasized the democratic
qualities of American citizenship. Schlesinger himself believed that New Deal
liberalism had resulted in an end of ideology, meaning that the great ideological
debates of the past had been settled.
Little wonder that the neutralist establishment of the history profession during the
1960s entered into battle with the “useful history” historians of the New Left, who
accused the profession of touting the liberal status quo (under the pretense of
scientific objectivity) and ignoring the voices of the marginalized. In turn, the old
guard accused the New Left of presentism. For decades, then, the profession’s
anxieties over presentism were mediated by the Cold War.
D
ebates about presentism are amplified during moments of political
uncertainty, frustration, and disruption — hence their cyclical and
generational nature. The way forward is to move beyond these anxieties
and to reconcile the profession with the present, at a time when historians are sorely
needed.
Perhaps things are already changing. A new generation of historians, who came to
maturity after the Cold War was over, is offering courses with titles like “History of the
Present,” “The History of Now,” and “Understanding America Today.” Kathleen
Belew, an assistant professor of U.S. history at the University of Chicago, recently
taught a “History of the Present” course with 90 students, an impressive enrollment
(“a big lecture at U Chicago normally has 45 students,” she told to me). In the spring
of 2019, the Yale historians Samuel Moyn and David Magaziner taught a course titled
“The World Circa 2000,” which enrolled 140 students. At the University of Wisconsin,
the historian of Latin America Patrick Iber offered a seminar titled “The History of
Now” that was filled to capacity, as was the U.S. historian Seth Cotlar’s course,
“History of the Present,” at Willamette University.
Perhaps such classes signify that the profession is reconsidering its anxieties over
presentism. “Confusion about the meaning and import of presentism,” David
Armitage has written, “has led to multiple babies being thrown out with the bath
water.” In other words, some forms of presentism avoid the pitfalls that have made it a
bad word to the profession. Armitage points to the fruitful work that emerged out of
Foucault’s call for a “history of the present” and François Hartog’s idea of “regimes of
historicity” — approaches that relativize the “omnipresence of the present” by
comparing the present with other historical regimes. Perhaps it’s time to think more
systematically about how to write and teach the history of the present.
Debates about presentism are ampli ed during

moments of political uncertainty, frustration,
and disruption.
My own experience with such challenges grew out of a class I taught at Yale’s Jackson
Institute for Global Affairs, also called “The History of the Present.” Did I need to teach
my students the methodological grounds that justified when a contemporary political
phenomenon — such as Trumpism — could be elucidated with reference to the dying
years of the Weimar Republic or Mussolini’s fascist Italy? Would I need to address the
challenges of doing comparative history, for instance during the week we spent on
“fake news” and the “post-truth society,” when I made recourse to Nazi and Soviet
propaganda campaigns? What about historical analogies involving the Cold War and
what some describe as the “new Cold War with China” — how do I teach students to
distinguish between analogies that clarify present events and those that obscure
them? Would explaining the challenge of presentism give my policy students the
impression that I have a political agenda?
One way to approach the present is through what the Princeton historian David Bell
describes as a “deconstructive” approach to history, calling into question
assumptions about the past that are baked into current political discourse. “This
includes assumptions,” he tells me, “that certain concepts, categories, and practices
are ‘natural’ and timeless (regarding gender, religion, nationalism, etc).” Here, Bell
argues, the historian can usefully illuminate categories that are presumed to have
existed everywhere in the same form.
Victoria Smolkin, a professor of Russian history at Wesleyan University, sees one of

the main purposes of her class, “The Russian World: Past and Present,” as giving
students what she describes as “the historical literacy” to understand how historical
tropes get deployed in contemporary political contexts. “You see this throughout
Russian history,” she writes, “for example, with the recurring revival of the so-called
‘Time of Troubles’—a period of political disunity and strife in the early 17th century,
which was finally brought to a close when the people came together to expel foreign
invaders and elect a strong leader to reconstitute the state.”
When, in 2005, Russia adopted National Unity Day to commemorate the end of the
17th-century Time of Troubles, “it was deliberately echoing the trauma of the post-
Soviet 1990s and the arrival of Vladimir Putin in 2000 as the strong leader Russia
needed.” She notes that we see a similar recourse to the historical trope of Holy Rus
and the Baptism of Rus, which have been evoked in justifying Russia’s annexation of
Crimea. For Smolkin, the lesson is clear: We must go beyond merely reconstructing
historical events in their own context. “The invocations of history in different
presents,” she observes, “destabilizes some of the comfortable narratives about what
history is and what it does that many students bring with them into the college history
classroom.”
The Stanford historian of the British Empire, Priya Satia, echoes this sentiment. In a
forthcoming book, Time’s Monster: How History Makes History, she shows how
historical writing about the past shapes the understanding of contemporary politics.
As Satia told me, “The world we live in, who we live among, the customs and mores —
all that is an inheritance that structures our present day lives, thoughts, actions, and
so shapes the future too.” That past is present with us now.
“I know people say, ‘the past is another country,’” Satia says. “But the present is
another country too — that is, it is a totally contingent outcome of the past.”
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors
or submit a letter for publication.
SCHOLARSHIP AND RESEARCH
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins is managing editor of Modern Intellectual History and a
postdoc in the history department at Dartmouth College. Follow him on Twitter
@daniel_dsj2110.
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037

© 2020 The Chronicle of Higher Education

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12/6/2020 Beyond the End of History

Beyond the End of History

It is difﬁcult to grasp the force of the prohibition on “presentism” without

We have been left strangely ill-equipped to

A further concern about presentism is philosophical. The ethical responsibility of the

he goal should be to jettison crude versions of presentism without abandoning

NATE KITCH FOR THE CHRONICLE

Debates about presentism are ampli ed during

Victoria Smolkin, a professor of Russian history at Wesleyan University, sees one of

SCHOLARSHIP AND RESEARCH

1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037

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