Can History Absolve? Can History Judge?

Martin Jay

History and Theory 64, no. 3 (2025)

Appealing to history, rather than to God, to provide an ultimate judgment about human actions can have a justificatory or consolatory function. The former grants proleptic absolution for acts that may be morally dubious because of their benign consequences, while the latter enables victims in the present to gain a measure of relief by imagining they will be honored by posterity. In both cases, problematic assumptions about “history” and “judgment” call into question the belief that future generations will vindicate present-day struggles. The first of these assumptions is that “history” conveys worth by what might be called “victors’ justice,” in which success proves that the winner was morally superior. The second is that “history” is an impersonal process that can be recounted in a single metanarrative rather than an ongoing series of different narratives that are themselves variable depending on who is doing the narrating. When “history” means the community of historians who recount and analyze the past, there is rarely, if ever, a grand consensus agreed upon by all. Finally, whereas the judgment of God is assumed to be qualitative and individualized, and thus perfect for each case, human judgment depends either on deontological rules, which may not be universal, or on analogies that are only roughly equivalent. In either case, the judgment can never transcend the fallibilities of those doing the judging and approach the perfection of a divine Last Judgment. Perhaps the most plausible version of “history will judge” is the realization that we are judged in the present by the still admirable aspirations of the past, which have yet to be realized.

Photo by Ben Vaughn.