History and Theory最新文献

{"title":"THE STUPID NINETEENTH CENTURY: PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY IN CRITICAL POSTHUMANIST AND POST-ANTHROPOCENTRIC THOUGHT","authors":"CALLUM BARRELL,&nbsp;SARA RAIMONDI","doi":"10.1111/hith.12373","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12373","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>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.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"64 1","pages":"24-45"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143497254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"WHY STILL KOSELLECK?","authors":"Fernando Esposito","doi":"10.1111/hith.12370","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12370","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Those seeking to gain a deeper understanding of the complex interrelationship between Reinhart Koselleck's oeuvre and the turbulences of the Age of Extremes would be well advised to consult Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann's <i>Der Riss in der Zeit: Kosellecks ungeschriebene Historik</i>. Hoffmann shows how “Koselleck's personal experience of the abysmal meaninglessness of history” and his “experiences of time in extremis” formed the starting point for his numerous historiographical endeavors and, ultimately, for his unwritten <i>Historik</i>. Hoffmann provides an accessible interpretation of Koselleck's oeuvre, contextualizes its insights as a reflex of the latter's experience of the abysmal crises of the twentieth century, and invites a series of far-reaching questions that point beyond Koselleck. The significance of Koselleck for contemporary historical thought is founded on his historicization of historicism. Whereas the initial crisis of historicism constituted the point of departure for Koselleck's project, it was before the backdrop of a second crisis of historicism that he historicized historicism, embarked on a search for a theory of the conditions of possible histories, and opened up a horizon for a new historical concept of history and understanding of time.</p>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"64 1","pages":"123-134"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hith.12370","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143497083","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"HISTORY, THEORY, VERTIGO: HOMODIEGESIS IN CONTEMPORARY HISTORIOGRAPHY","authors":"Andrew Baird","doi":"10.1111/hith.12374","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12374","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Enzo Traverso's <i>Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography</i> 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.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"64 1","pages":"135-145"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143497019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"REVISITING MONTAILLOU","authors":"EWA DOMANSKA","doi":"10.1111/hith.12372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12372","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>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 <i>Montaillou</i> (1975). I revisit the Latin text of Jacques Fournier's register and compare it with relevant fragments in the French and English translations of <i>Montaillou</i>. 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 <i>Montaillou</i> 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 <i>Montaillou</i> for supporting human dignity and agency as well as the “humanity of history” needed in times of social and political upheaval.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"64 1","pages":"3-23"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143497359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"MISFITS, POWER, AND HISTORY: RETHINKING ABILITY THROUGH AN ANIMAL LENS","authors":"ANDREW FLACK,&nbsp;ALICE WOULD","doi":"10.1111/hith.12368","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12368","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this article, we construct a critical history of “ability” by focusing on the specific case study of dark-dwelling animals and the ways in which they have been understood over the course of modernity. Such creatures were frequently the subjects of assumptions and judgments about what they could and could not do. Dark places have historically been imagined as extreme environments and as home to equally strange beings. We argue that discourse relating to dark-dwellers—from bats and hedgehogs to deep-sea creatures—reveals that ability, in the animal context, relates to several connected ideas and phenomena. Not least, these include ideas around specialization, adaptation and adaptability, the concentrated interrogation of “special” sensory organs and neurological pathways, and the idealized coherence between a body and its wider environment. We also show that the idea of ability became increasingly inseparable from notions of vulnerability, resilience, and care especially in the context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century environmental change. The concept of ability, then, was a shifting constellation of many different ideas, and our study underlines how big ideas such as ability are far from homogenous in character but instead are complex, multilayered, and of their time. Reconceptualizing these kinds of ideas about “ability,” particularly as they manifested across diverse contexts, is crucial for understanding how people understood themselves and other beings across time and space. Such an approach to the history of ability matters. It points to the urgency of interrogating the roots of a seemingly everyday idea, one that appears commonplace and apparently unproblematic but that has material consequences for all living beings, human and animal, across a wide range of environments.</p>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"64 1","pages":"75-95"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hith.12368","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143497266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"INHERITANCE AND INCEST: TOWARD A LÉVI-STRAUSSIAN READING OF MONTESQUIEU'S DE L'ESPRIT DES LOIS1","authors":"Paul Cheney","doi":"10.1111/hith.12369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12369","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The premise of this article is that Montesquieu, while seen as an Enlightenment thinker who contributed centrally to the development of the social sciences before the period of discipline formation in the nineteenth century, is generally appreciated in only the vaguest of terms. To the degree that he has been seen as a social theorist rather than as a belletrist or a political writer, scholars have had to amputate major sections of his masterwork, <i>De l'esprit des lois</i> (1748). In so doing, they have tended to give false or at least only partial readings of a work whose author insisted must be read as a whole. This article proceeds in an unorthodox fashion—at least for a historian—through a reading of <i>De l'esprit des lois</i> against Claude Lévi-Strauss's <i>Les structures élémentaires de la parenté</i> (1949). Through this parallel reading, I establish that Montesquieu's treatment of inheritance bears a remarkable homology with Lévi-Strauss's treatment of incest in <i>Les structures élémentaires</i>. These authors saw their respective objects—the incest taboo, in one case, and inheritance law, in the other—as fundamental to regulating sociability itself. This technique offers a more unified reading of <i>De l'esprit des lois</i> and, in so doing, reassesses Montesquieu's contribution to modern social theory. From a methodological point of view, I am hoping to interest my readers in an alternative way of reading historical texts: juxtaposing texts or corpora that do not have the clear genetic links between them that are generally highly valued by historians. This is an example of what Robert B. Pippin has called “interanimation” and what I have elsewhere likened to the painterly technique of simultaneous contrast.</p>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"64 1","pages":"46-74"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hith.12369","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143497358","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"THE ADVANCEMENT OF KNOWLEDGE NOW, OR THE HISTORY OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM","authors":"CLIFFORD SISKIN","doi":"10.1111/hith.12371","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12371","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>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 <i>Great Renewal</i>, 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 <i>The Great Renewal</i> 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—<i>Information: A Historical Companion</i>—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.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"64 1","pages":"96-122"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-11-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143497231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"SENSORY EXPERIMENTS, SENSORY ORDERS, AND AESTHETIC EDUCATION","authors":"Premesh Lalu","doi":"10.1111/hith.12375","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12375","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Erica Fretwell's <i>Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling</i> (2020) raises crucial questions about the making of a concept of difference through marshaling the senses to the ends of a sensory order in postbellum United States. In this essay, I argue that Fretwell's book has opened a crucial horizon for rethinking how race and ideas of difference marking gender and disability were remade through the short-lived but deeply consequential science of psychophysics. While the study focuses on how psychophysics and its aftermaths recast questions of difference in the US, Fretwell indirectly poses a major challenge for the critique of the twentieth-century experience of race elsewhere—for example, of apartheid in South Africa. In this review essay, I argue that, beyond the US, Fretwell's meticulously elaborated argument renews approaches to the problem and problematization of race and difference. Read in relation to the making of race in South Africa, the book inadvertently brings into view a deceptive plot of petty apartheid, a banal everyday constitution of a sensory order that shares its origins in the discourse of psychophysics. When placed alongside the more pronounced forms of grand apartheid, the resultant psychophysical aesthesis conscripts the human sensorium to a cybernetic mode of power that shifts between a racialization of labor and a racialization of desire. Fretwell effectively invites us to consider the endpoints of psychophysics in a hierarchy of the senses, for which an aesthetic education may yet be required to short-circuit and reroute the senses through intervals of synesthesia.</p>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"64 1","pages":"146-155"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hith.12375","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143497206","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"HOW SHOULD HISTORIANS EMPATHIZE?","authors":"TAYNNA M. MARINO","doi":"10.1111/hith.12361","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12361","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Reflecting on the ethical and unethical ways of empathizing is a necessary task for historians interested in the ethics of history. Research on empathy often classifies its various parts into affective, cognitive, and prosocial dimensions. However, in historical scholarship, the cognitive-intellectual dimension of empathy is overemphasized to the detriment of its affective and prosocial dimensions, whose roles in determining the ways historians should practice history are often disregarded. In this article, I will discuss the relations between empathy and ethics and how historians should empathize. Doing so, I argue that empathy's ethical potential for historical scholarship needs to be de-intellectualized by historical scholarship, a task that requires a complementary and supplementary approach to empathy that is in dialogue with moral philosophy, psychology, neurosciences, and animal studies. Only by recognizing empathy as a socially developed evolutionary capacity shared among humans and other species can historians fully develop its possibilities as a tool to guide human morality and ethical decision-making. Finally, I will claim that empathy as an ethical imperative for an ethics of care and vulnerability should guide historians' ethics toward more responsive and responsible ways of relating with others across time, space, cultures, generations, species, and so on.</p>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"63 4","pages":"43-64"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hith.12361","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142596232","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“TESTIMONY STOPS WHERE HISTORY BEGINS”: UNDERSTANDING AND ETHICS IN RELATION TO HISTORICAL AND PRACTICAL PASTS","authors":"JONAS AHLSKOG","doi":"10.1111/hith.12362","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12362","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article explores the relation between testimony and history by considering the recent “ethical turn” toward experience and memory in historical research. By way of a brief history of the concept of testimony in historical research, the article pinpoints current discussions as being about historical understanding rather than factual knowledge about the past. With reference to the revaluation of history within the linguistic turn, influential historical theorists have argued that abandoning objectivism calls for a rapprochement between historical research and attempts to make sense of the past in accounts of memory. Both history and memory accounts, they argue, offer forms of understanding that are equally conditioned by language as well as politics, culture, and identity. Thus, the inclusion of testimony has been framed as not only legitimate but also important for an “ethical” understanding of the past within historiographical discourse. In relation to this development, the article shows that abandoning objectivism in the wake of the linguistic turn cannot justify a general rapprochement between history and memory accounts. On the contrary, abandoning objectivism only increases the importance of appreciating the conceptual distinction between testimony and history as different forms of understanding. For clarifying the conceptual distinction, the article reexamines R. G. Collingwood's (in)famous contention that “testimony … stops where history begins.” Collingwood's main point was not, as previous interpreters have argued, only about epistemology but was about the qualitative difference between historical and practical pasts. In conclusion, the article articulates the importance of the distinction between history and practice in relation to questions about the historian's ethical responsibility.</p>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"63 4","pages":"23-42"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hith.12362","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142596230","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}