History and Theory最新文献

{"title":"PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AS A CRITIQUE OF VIOLENCE: HISTORY, THEOLOGY, AND POLITICS IN WALTER BENJAMIN'S EARLY WRITINGS","authors":"VINSENT NOLLET","doi":"10.1111/hith.12380","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12380","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence” became a classical work on revolutionary politics mainly due to influential political-theological expositions of its arguments. The main challenge with the political-theological understanding of the essay, however, is that Benjamin seemingly argued against any reconciliation of politics and theology. For this reason, this article develops a historical-philosophical rather than a political-theological interpretation of Benjamin's “Critique of Violence.” It demonstrates how Benjamin's essay on violence can be best understood if it is read as a text containing a speculative philosophy of history. In the essay, Benjamin indeed presented the role of violence in history as a historical “law of oscillation” between lawmaking and law-preserving violence. The problem of violence transcends the framework of the political, which can witness only “administered” violence, not violence as such, and hence cannot escape the dialectical movement of this “law.” While Benjamin's philosophy of history is usually located in the final period of his philosophical activity and comprises a messianic-Marxist complex, Benjamin's “Critique of Violence” suggests the existence of a more substantial philosophy of history in Benjamin's early writings than is usually assumed. The period between 1919 and 1922 especially shows a concentration of anarchistic and nihilistic texts devoted to developing this philosophy of history.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"64 2","pages":"178-200"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143950575","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":"ETHICS FOR ARTIFICIAL HISTORIANS","authors":"Marnie Hughes-Warrington","doi":"10.1111/hith.12377","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12377","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Artificial historians do not need to have intentions to complete actions or to solve problems. Consequently, a revised approach to the ethics of history is needed. An approach to ethics for artificial historians can be proposed through the recognition of historiographical logic, which is a hybrid of modal, propositional, and erotetic (question-based) types. Looking to examples of texts produced by artificial and human historians, I argue that this hybrid historiographical logic is seen at play in what Jo Guldi has called “signal” (which can denote both the focus and interpretation of historians) and I call “healthy noise,” or metadiscursive question-begging and possible world generation. Together, the signal and noise of histories generate an ethical stance of openness toward the possibilities of new evidence from the past, new ways of interpreting that evidence, and new combinations of signal and noise. Recognizing the potential presence of this logic in modal-propositional-erotetic statements about the past in a wide range of texts, I argue for the recognition of historiographical logic as broadly useful for AI and specifically useful for the discipline. This historiographical and logical turn facilitates stepping beyond treating ethics as the generation of lists of principles that may fail in application and toward recognizing particular forms of logic as indicating ethically beneficent outcomes. This shift may facilitate the detection and deterrence of histories shaped by logics that indicate ethically maleficent outcomes.</p>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"64 2","pages":"159-177"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hith.12377","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143950236","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":"“A GUESSER IN THIS VALE OF TEARS”: ON THE POLITICS OF HISTORY WRITING","authors":"Joan W. Scott","doi":"10.1111/hith.12379","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12379","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>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.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"64 2","pages":"252-264"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143950267","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":"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":"CREATIVE DISINTEGRATION: THE PERPETUAL EMERGENCE OF MODERN POLITICAL THOUGHT","authors":"IAN HUNTER","doi":"10.1111/hith.12376","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12376","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Michael Sonenscher's <i>After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought</i> 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.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"64 2","pages":"281-300"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143950284","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}