Current Issue

PREAMBULAR HISTORY: THE VIEW OF THE PAST IN KEY HUMAN RIGHTS INSTRUMENTS

Antoon De Baets

This article claims that the preambles of foundational human rights instruments, taken together, articulate a consistent view of the past. This view is firmly rooted in historical processes, embedded in metaphysical truths, and enacted in service of the future. . . . Read more →

EIGENSINN AND DOMINATION IN LIBERAL AND ILLIBERAL SOCIETIES

Alf Lüdtke & Alexandra Oeser

This article is a posthumously published text that was written by Alf Lüdtke and Alexandra Oeser but was left unfinished when Lüdtke died in February 2019. It examines two central notions—and their articulations—that Lüdtke and Oeser use differently in their work: domination and Eigensinn. . . . Read more →

ON HISTORICAL (ANTI-)REALISM

João Ohara

The problem of historical realism has gained some new momentum recently, with a fresh challenge to what is taken to be an anti-realist hegemony in the theory and philosophy of history. Unfortunately, this has also provided the opportunity for the reheating of old polemics and lazy scholarship that characterized the 1990s reaction to “postmodernism.” Ill-defined questions distract us from more important issues. Here, I offer a map that aims to clarify the conceptual space. . . . Read more →

HISTORICAL REALITY: A MANIFESTO

F. R. Ankersmit

From the times of Herodotus and Thucydides until deep into the eighteenth century, the eyewitness account (or “autopsy”) was the model for historical knowledge. The eighteenth-century Historical Revolution replaced this emphasis on autopsy by introducing the notion of the point of view, as explicated in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's Monadology. That notion radically separated the historian's present from the world of the eyewitness's past. Historical knowledge was, from this point on, essentially ex post facto, and autopsy was reduced to the status of that which offers essentially questionable historical evidence. . . . Read more →

ORIGAMI PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Martin Jay

Review article on Representation: The Birth of Historical Reality from the Death of the Past, by Franklin Rudolf Ankersmit (Columbia University Press, 2024).

Drawing on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's monadological metaphysics, with its nominalist emphasis on the integrity of the individual, the eminent Dutch philosopher of history Franklin Rudolf Ankersmit proposes a radically new interpretation of the way historical representations create “historical reality” based on the “death” of the no longer actual past. Representation: The Birth of Historical Reality from the Death of the Past is an unapologetically baroque exercise that seeks to fashion a unified argument by drawing on the most diverse of elements. . . . Read more →

THE CONTENT OF THE NARRATIVE

Serge Grigoriev

Review of The Exemplifying Past: A Philosophy of History, by Chiel van den Akker (Amsterdam University Press, 2018).

In The Exemplifying Past: A Philosophy of History, Chiel van den Akker presents a compelling argument for understanding historical narrative as an instrument of historical cognition rather than as a literary device or an artifact. In the first part of this review essay, I present and explicate van den Akker's sophisticated and lucid account of the content of the narrative as that which comes into view when we adopt the thesis (or perspective) embodied in the composition of the narrative (considered in its entirety). In the second part, I raise some questions concerning van den Akker's attempt to express the resulting conception of the narrative and its meaning in terms borrowed from the analytic philosophy of language, giving rise to what van den Akker calls a “pragmatist theory of narrative truth”. . . . Read more →

FROM HOFSTADTER TO LEPORE: NATIONAL HISTORY FOR THE AMERICAN PUBLIC

David A. Hollinger

Review of Popularizing the Past: Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America, by Nick Witham (University of Chicago Press, 2023).

Nick Witham's Popularizing the Past: Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America provides cogent and accurate accounts of the careers of five American academic historians of the post-World War II era who won large popular audiences for national narratives: Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Howard Zinn, and Gerda Lerner. Witham omits, without explanation, the highly relevant case of Oscar Handlin, author of the 1951 work The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made America. He also fails to engage the heavily Jewish ethnoreligious matrix of popular American historiography of the postwar era. . . . Read more →

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