Current Issue

ETHICS FOR ARTIFICIAL HISTORIANS

Marnie Hughes-Warrington

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. . . . Read more →

PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AS A CRITIQUE OF VIOLENCE: HISTORY, THEOLOGY, AND POLITICS IN WALTER BENJAMIN'S EARLY WRITINGS

VINSENT NOLLET

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. . . . Read more →

FROM ETERNITY TO APOCALYPSE: TIME, NEWS, AND HISTORY BETWEEN THE MUGHAL AND BRITISH EMPIRES, 1556–1785

Abhishek Kaicker

The eighteenth-century origins of colonial orientalism in India spurred not just the translation of Indian texts but the production of interstitial histories, works that were forged in the intellectual culture of the Mughal Empire and created by individuals who explicitly sought to inform and influence their new colonial patrons. Turning to one such interstitial text, Muhammad Bakhsh Ashob's History of the Martyrdom of Farrukh Siyar and the Reign of Muhammad Shah (1782), which was produced at the behest of the East India Company orientalist Captain Jonathan Scott, this article explores the origins of the pervasive misconception that Mughal historical thought had faded to insignificance in the eighteenth century. . . . Read more →

“CIVILIZATION” OR “EMPIRE”?: “CHINA” AS A HISTORICAL ENTITY IN CONTESTATION

Nagatomi Hirayama

Two distinct approaches have shaped the landscape of modern Chinese historical studies. One approach is the civilization-to-nation thesis, which examines modern China's difficult emergence out of its supposedly cohesive civilizational past, a past that could be shared across different groups of people in contemporary China. The other approach—that is, the empire-to-nation thesis—focuses on China's national rise from the disjointed colonial empire of the Qing (and, to a lesser degree, the Ming), a transformation through which China has become the metropolitan center that enacts structural imperial control over different local or ethnic groups across its territorial domains. This article discusses the epistemic capacities, limits, and distortions of both approaches by examining their historiographical and political implications through different historical configurations of late-imperial China and the resubstantiation of national histories in Taiwan and Hong Kong. . . . Read more →

“A GUESSER IN THIS VALE OF TEARS”: ON THE POLITICS OF HISTORY WRITING

Joan W. Scott

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. Read more →

DECOLONIZING THEORY AND CONCEPTS: PERSPECTIVES FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH

Margrit Pernau

Review article on Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South, edited by Dilip M. Menon (London: Routledge, 2022)

Until recently, most concepts and theories used in social sciences and the humanities were developed in the West. They were both provincial, as they were based on Western experience and designed to interpret these local experiences, and presumed universal. If they did not fit developments in the Global South, this was due not to the inadequacy of the concept but to a “history of lack.” Dilip M. Menon's edited volume Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South can be situated within the broader movement to not only challenge these concepts and theories but also offer alternatives developed from the Global South. . . . Read more →

CREATIVE DISINTEGRATION: THE PERPETUAL EMERGENCE OF MODERN POLITICAL THOUGHT

Ian Hunter

Review article on After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought, Michael Sonenscher (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023)

Michael Sonenscher's After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought 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. . . . Read more →

HISTORICAL ANTIFASCISM AND THE GLOBAL LEFT

Terence Renaud

Review article on Everything Is Possible: Antifascism and the Left in the Age of Fascism, by Joseph Fronczak (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023)

Joseph Fronczak's Everything Is Possible: Antifascism and the Left in the Age of Fascism presents antifascism in the 1920s and 1930s as a universal cause that united people across social and ideological divides, creating the discursive framework for the global Left we know today. It revises standard accounts according to which the Left originated either with the Atlantic revolutions circa 1800 or with the international workers’ movement that took shape in the late nineteenth century. This article accepts the weak form of the book's argument that the antifascist era was remarkably creative and essential for understanding the development of today's Left. . . . Read more →

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