THE FUTURE OF THE PAST, THE FUTURE OF HISTORY
Hugo Merlo in conversation with Edoardo Tortarolo
HUGO R. MERLO
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
Hugo R. Merlo is a PhD candidate at the Doctoral School of Languages and Literature at Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznań, Poland). He is currently working on a doctoral thesis that is tentatively titled “Lack, Excess and Time in Brazilian Modernist Literary and Historical Imagination.” His research interests include the relationship between literary and historical imagination, the theory of comparative approaches to historiography, and the history of historical thinking in Brazil. He recently published the article “A mestiçagem como conceito histórico: Uma descrição teórica” [Mestiçagem as a historical concept: A theoretical description], Revista de Teoria da História 26, no. 1 (2023), 100–19.
Edoardo Tortarolo is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Eastern Piedmont (Italy). He received his PhD in history from the University of Turin in 1987. He is a permanent fellow of the Academy of the Sciences in Turin and a member of the Italian Committee on Historical Studies. Tortarolo’s research interests include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectual history and the history and theory of historical writing and knowledge. He has coedited the third volume of the Oxford History of Historical Writing (1400–1800) and published over one hundred books, essays, and book chapters. His latest book is The Invention of Free Press: Writers and Censorship in Eighteenth Century Europe (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016). Since 1991, he has been the main editor of the prestigious peer-reviewed international scholarly journal Storia della Storiografia.
Cite this post: Hugo R. Merlo and Edoardo Tortarolo, “The Future of the Past, the Future of History,” One More Thing… (blog), History and Theory, October 2023, https://historyandtheory.org/omt-poznan/merlo-tortarolo.
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Hugo Merlo: Thank you, Professor Tortarolo, for accepting our invitation. Could you tell us a little about your intellectual trajectory?
Edoardo Tortarolo: It is probably not true that one knows his biography very well, but I will do my best. First, it is important to point out that, when I started university studies in the mid-1970s, history was one of the most exciting and attractive disciplines. Most young people interested in the humanities were likely to become historians. There were some outstanding, very prominent historians where I was born—in Turin. These historians were prominent and distinguished because they had very eventful lives—like the one who became the supervisor of my master’s and PhD degrees, Franco Venturi. Franco Venturi was not only a highly learned scholar of the eighteenth century, but he also participated in the resistance against the German occupation from 1943 to 1945 and was an attaché culturel in Moscow in the late 1940s before becoming a history professor. So, he went through two different forms of totalitarianism and accumulated an extremely rich political experience that translated into his interest in the history of the eighteenth century. He was one of the many highly charismatic personalities at the university. I was interested in philosophy, literature, and history, the latter being the field that attracted me the most. My decision was the consequence of a fascination for a topic but also for personalities. Franco Venturi was one of the most intriguing people I had the chance to get to know.
HM: You mentioned an interest in literature, history, and philosophy. Throughout your works, there are always some theoretical reflections upon some aspects of the historiographical practice. Do you attribute that to the influence of Venturi?
ET: Compared to Venturi, nobody was more interesting to me. But the person who really—in a way—made my silent interest in philosophy and literature resurface, especially to sort of a philosophical approach to historical studies, was Reinhart Koselleck. With the benefit of hindsight, I can say that he is the second person who attracted me—first when I was reading his books, and [then] after meeting him and having a deeper insight into his personality.
The life of Reinhart Koselleck was paradoxically very similar to Venturi’s. Koselleck was slightly younger and very conservative, while Venturi was a socialist personality. Koselleck was involved in the war, taken prisoner by the Russians, and like Venturi, he saw European political life from the inside. And he mastered this experience in historiographical terms. I believe they never met—Venturi and Koselleck—and they definitely weren’t kindred spirits. But they complemented each other as aspects of twentieth-century European political history. Both were extremely friendly and welcoming persons. I met Koselleck later. After graduation, I wrote my PhD on the German Enlightenment, went to Berlin, and developed a deep interest in German history. So, in the late 1980s, after my PhD, I could spend some years in Berlin on different fellowships. During one of those periods, Koselleck, then a professor at Bielefeld, was actually in Berlin at the Wissenschaftskolleg. I was extremely straightforward at the time: I wrote him a letter saying, “Herr Koselleck, I would like to meet you and interview you.” And he was very kind; he invited me, we had a long conversation, and we kept exchanging letters.
HM: So, you came back to your interests in this more philosophical approach to the historiographical studies around the early 1990s. Do you perceive any difference in the place the theoretical reflection occupies within the area from those days to today?
ET: Yes, absolutely. Things have changed immensely. Let’s take an example: the Enlightenment, the field I chose for myself. I would say that, in the late 1970s and 1980s, and early 1990s, the Enlightenment was the pinnacle of liberal progressivism; most historians would take it for granted, and some critical detachment was very hard to get to. In the 1990s, a more critical, self-reflexive approach developed. And you have to consider the environment where I came from myself. Western Europe was encapsulated in a Cold War climate. There was a black-and-white perspective. Those—I was not among them—who looked to the Soviet Union as a model of a hopeful form of humanity were also embedded in this black-and-white perspective. It was tough, therefore, to develop a sort of personal critical approach to those things. And I would say that the fall of the wall—which I witnessed in Berlin in 1989—was a turning point. Many things that have been only implicit came to fruition. This is my rationalization, obviously, after things took place.
The same applies to the history of historiography. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the history of historiography was primarily understood as a form of checking the veracity of what had been written on a particular topic. The king of the history of historiography in Italy and Europe was Arnaldo Momigliano, a very close friend of Venturi whom I had the fortune of meeting and having enlightening chats with, in 1979, at a big Enlightenment conference in Pisa. His idea was that you have to study the history of historiography to follow the constant reality check that historians have developed in their writings—like playing the role of a judge. This is important, interesting, and very empirical, but even the late Momigliano—who passed suddenly in 1987—developed a more theoretical stance from his discussions with Hayden White in the 1980s. That shift toward a more theoretically oriented understanding of the history of historiography surprised young students, and they were signs that things were changing. But changes reveal themselves quite slowly, and, at least for me, we fully understood that something was happening during the 1990s.
HM: Your work spans many different traditions and also—I would say—various fields. Some people see a very separate and clear definition between the history of ideas, the intellectual history, or the conceptual history; and some claim a specific, distinct status to the history of historiography. Others see intrinsic connections between the history of historiography and the theory of history. How do you perceive these boundaries, differences, and connections?
ET: This is an excellent question. Again, I would like to go back to the paradigms, to the examples, because, after all, writing history or doing history research is not something you do by applying recipes like writing a cookbook. I had these two paradigms—Venturi and Koselleck—that I used first unconsciously and only later consciously. I tried to follow in their footsteps, and they didn’t mind the boundaries between subdisciplines. Venturi was interested in the history of historiography according to his vision of what research in history means—and to him, it was biographies of historians. He did that in a broader existential approach, in which he also analyzed the works, the context, the political implications, et cetera. Koselleck had more of a theoretical approach, but after all, he followed the evolution of the visions of historians, writers, and philosophers. I never really cared a lot about subdisciplines, especially since intellectual history is a very vague notion, and I would dare anybody to define what intellectual history really is.
To me, there is interesting, pathbreaking research, and there is research that doesn’t break new ground and is, therefore, uninteresting. I’m conscious that I also did tedious research during my life, and I’ve been reading irrelevant things. But you know, as a university professor, you have to do things you don’t like. The idea again is that you find yourself doing intellectual history, history of ideas, or history of historiography incidentally, to a certain point. What is important to me, at least, is that over a career—which, in my case, spans more than forty years—you develop a sort of personal approach that goes across the subdisciplinary boundaries, much like those composers that you can recognize because their music differs from those written by somebody else. As intellectuals, we should develop a personal work instead of being obsessed with questions like, “Am I doing history of philosophy?,” or “Am I doing philosophy of history?,” [or] “Am I doing intellectual history or history of ideas?” I don’t think that this is relevant.
HM: Let us move to the things you have been developing recently. At least since you edited the third volume of the Oxford History of Historical Writing with Masayuki Sato and Daniel Woolf and organized the roundtable “Which World for World History?” at the previous ICHS congress in China in 2015, you’ve been concerned with the ideas that are underlying world/global approaches to historiography. My question is about the current ethical/epistemic demands that society has been posing to history as a field of knowledge. We had the opportunity to discuss the underlying world models and the metanarrative of globalization of global history and their limitations earlier this year during a series of seminars you conducted here in Poznań. [1] Many authors have recently favored categories like “planet” or “Earth,” claiming that the uniformizing nature of the “globe” can be limiting or that it induces scholars to overlook the disjunctive relations that sometimes take place—between peoples and cultures, but also between the human and the nonhuman domains. What is your take on this? Do you believe global history can adapt to the demands of “going beyond the global”? Should we discard or enhance the global?
ET: Let me go back to the origin of all this. Global history was conceived in the 1970s and 1980s as an exciting way to go beyond nation-state-centered historiography. This was a big step—especially coming from Italy. Momigliano and Venturi developed very personal ways of approaching history from a broad vision. Despite their limitations, it was crucial to absorb this 1970s and 1980s vision of [the] global that was available at that time. And to me, it has been fascinating to watch how the international discussion on the topic has been adapting itself to the changes in [the] political situation in the last thirty years. Another fundamental difference between the scenario in the 1970s and 1980s and today is the relationship between historiography and other sciences. For instance, historians’ interaction with geneticists is essential today, and I have no idea how it will develop in the next thirty to fifty years. I suspect that, more than the relationship with astronomy or physics, genetics will play an increasingly important role and interact with our vision of the past. What Dipesh Chakrabarty discussed at his inaugural speech is also extremely interesting. [2] But again, I have no idea how these questions will develop, but it is essential to consider this widening of the perspective as an opportunity for historical studies.
HM: Talking about widening perspectives and opportunities for historical studies, how do you envision the future of history and theory of history? What are the challenges and possibilities as of today?
ET: This is a tricky question. From the experience of participating much more than before in book presentations and online seminars in the past four or five years, I have the feeling that our view of the past is changing dramatically, and it will probably change more in the near future. On one occasion, right before the pandemic broke out, I was invited to lecture in Milan on Federico Chabod, one of the great Italian historians in the mid-twentieth century. He died as a relatively young man in 1960 and was the president of ICHS from 1955 to 1960—so mentioning his name here is appropriate. From a methodological perspective, he was a highly conservative Rankean historicist. While rereading the works of this great historian for the occasion and comparing his ideas to the current concerns and preoccupations, it occurred to me that we have to consider the changing ways of relating to the past. And that is what I said to the participants of that lecture. Our friendly discussion led us to the consensus that we must deal with and conceptualize these changes. The first and most surprising one is the gamification of history. On the one hand, gamifying history doesn’t automatically means abandoning an approach to history based on documents, and philology; on the other, we are recovering an approach to history that is more playful, in a way. To put it mildly, I know very little about the gamification of history, but this will probably shape the approach to the past of the next generations, much more so than it has been the case in the last twenty or thirty years. The second one is the changing landscape of mass media, which is evolving quickly and will also affect the study of history. The third one is the enduring popularity of historical novels. The boundaries between factual and fictional accounts of the past have always been controversial and are again becoming extremely porous. There are now fascinating books about events of the past that combine, on different levels, in very creative ways, extremely traditional approaches to the past that resort to written documents and archives and consciously created ways of reliving and reenacting the past. I also do believe that universities, academic writers, and historians in the traditional manner should and will definitely play their role in checking the veracity of historical accounts. They should continue to comply with very conventional truthfulness criteria.
Different types of accounts of the past are multiplying and will continue to grow in numbers as their acceptance (as legitimate forms to approach the past) grows as well. These different accounts of the past can be much more appealing to the general public than the traditional, philologically reliable accounts. Let us save some room for these conventional, sometimes dull, and apparently useless accounts of the past. I am not pessimistic about the future of history; quite the opposite. I believe the past has a future, so to speak, and this future will be different from that of the historiography practiced in twentieth-century Western European universities. As for the future itself, I want to stress some optimism. I am against these pessimistic views of the future. What looks like a catastrophe is often just adaptation to new conditions.
HM: I was particularly interested in the fact that you used the word “useless” to describe these academic accounts of the past. It reminds me of Abraham Flexner’s The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge, [3] which is—as the title suggests—an argument for so-called useless knowledge.
ET: Absolutely. A lot of what is useless for a couple of centuries turns out to be useful after three hundred or four hundred years. One never knows.
HM: Moving forward to my last question, a very simple one: What are you reading right now or have read recently that you would like to share with the readers of this interview?
ET: Apart from, let’s say, strictly professional readings, I’m reading The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, [4] which Patricia Aranha suggested to me during the seminars on world and global history in Poznań. This book encapsulates some of the things I’ve discussed in the previous parts of this conversation. It is a book based on extensive knowledge of archaeology and anthropology that addresses current societal concerns. It is basically about authority, equality, and humanity’s future, and at least to me, it is challenging but also completely wrong. It is challenging because it puts forward an interpretation of universal history, which starts at “the dawn of everything,” the very beginning of humanity in prehistorical times—to use these inherently contradictory words (for there is nothing outside of history). Anyways, it is a book that I strongly disagree with, but at the same time, it is a captivating exercise in committed and devoted thinking. So, I would strongly suggest reading it.
I would like to mention a second book that I’ve been reading recently for partially professional reasons. It is entitled Veronica e il diavolo by Fernanda Alfieri. [5] It has been written in Italian, and as far as I know, it hasn’t been translated into any language. It is the history of a young lady in Rome in the mid-nineteenth century whom the devil apparently inhabited. She’s probably somehow sick and the Jesuits try to drive the devil out of her. Fortunately enough, there is a long series of testimonies, diaries, and reports about it. It is a fascinating book with no answers to the mystery it delves into. So, in the end, we are left with many open questions, which indicate how interesting the topic is and how skilled the author is. She’s a young historian who is very well-read in the history of religion and religious attitudes in general, and she experiments with historical writing. She’s a decent, respected historian, and I admire her intention to break new ground within the historiographical tradition.
The third book I suggest has not been translated into any other language, probably because it is relatively new. It is called Utopia [6] and is a history of the early modern utopias—from the Italian Renaissance until the French Revolution—written by Girolamo Imbruglia. It is captivating, and despite its very traditional topic, the interpretation is very fresh. It focuses on the religious content of utopias instead of being a sort of paleo-Marxist account of the more modern, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century utopias. I have no problems with these paleo-Marxist accounts, but they likely fail to fulfill our need to look toward the future.
Notes
[1] Tortarolo held a guest seminar titled “The 20th Century Discussion on World History” in January 2022 at Adam Mickiewicz University. See: http://ewa.home.amu.edu.pl/Edoardo_Tortarolo_guest_seminars_2022.htm.
[2] See Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Capitalism, Work, and the Ground for Planetary History” in the XXIII International Congress of Historical Sciences: Poznań 2020/2022 Opening Ceremony booklet, 29–37, https://ichs2020poznan.pl/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Ksie%CC%A8ga-OPEN-CEREMONY-4.pdf.
[3] Abraham Flexner, “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge,” Harper’s Magazine 179 (June/November 1939), 544–52, https://www.ias.edu/sites/default/files/library/UsefulnessHarpers.pdf.
[4] David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (London: Allen Lane, 2021).
[5] Fernanda Alfieri, Veronica e il diavolo: Storia di un esorcismo a Roma (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 2021).
[6] Girolamo Imbruglia, Utopia: Una storia politica da Savonarola a Babeuf (Rome: Carocci, 2021).
