Writers and Readers, Pens and Texts: An Exhortation for Historians to Read W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz

Guest post by Brad Baranowski*

University of Wisconsin-Madison

The late W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitzis that rare sort of book that one ought not read with a pen in hand but will probably have to nonetheless. This is not because the book is in need of a good critical thrashing or that its development is so hard to follow that one must map out its twists and turns in the margins; on the contrary, Sebald draws everything to the fore in the most illustrative and radiant way: by hiding the core themes of the book right in plain sight. Along the way, Sebald ruminates on man’s historicity as well as Europe’s history, making Austerlitz a “must read” for historians of all stripes.

The major motifs of the novel—repressed memories, nonlinear time, presence of the past, and self-exploration—are clear to the reader before he or she can fully articulate this fact. In this way, the reader walks by Jacques Austerlitz’s, the book’s main character, side as he explores the relation of his own history to that of Europe’s and the connection of his own emotions, long thought dead, to the unexplained anxiety attacks and spells of amnesia that plague him. Naturally, this necessitates a different sort of reading than many other novels require. One does not read this book; one simply is with this book. So why did I have recourse to the pen?

The short answer: the book is simply too close, too intense, when the only thing separating the reader from its exegesis of the ways emotions such as sorrow, lose, and other feelings in the lack family subtly structure our daily lives that one must, regrettably, reach for a pen as a way to push it away when the separation afforded by spectacles alone proves inadequate.

I ought not universalize so hastily, writing “one” where “I” might be more appropriate. In fact, it is.

All along, I had resisted the urge to underline a sentence, bracket a passage, star a page, or scribble some notes along the edge. When Austerlitz, who left continental Europe as well as his parent behind as a young boy on a Kindertransport to England in the 1930s, discourses on his relation of past to present in history, on how he doubts the existence of linear time and wonders aloud if events we think already occurred aren’t really just waiting to unfold in the future, my mind leaped from the text and to a dozen or so directions this could be taken if seriously pursued. To jot down a few of my own philosophical speculations next to those of Austerlitz’s seemed the most necessary thing at that moment. And yet, the compulsion was not without its undertow: a voice harkened me back to the text and I left my pen sheathed. So why did I have no recourse to the pen then?

Chalk up the resistance to Sebald’s haunting prose that, in never quite addressing the real matter at hand, perfectly captures the anxiety and depression of Austerlitz, or the photos that add to the silent discussion between reader and writer, or simply the frank but fair assessments of some of Europe’s most iconic buildings—holistically speaking, the book creates a world that one must inhabit before even attempting to map [1]. Thus the pen seemed, at first, an obstacle to this. After all, how could I be a cartographer before even getting my own bearings down?

In the end, I don’t think I accomplished this latter bit—discovering where I was either in the text or in relation to the text. But that did not hurt my reading of Sebald, that is, not until I turned the page on Austerlitz’s awkward yet touching brief romance with Marie who, like the protagonist, is fascinated by European architecture.

The scene is set as the two travel together on the continent. Austerlitz draws distant as the journey wears on, becoming more and more taciturn, less and less approachable by Marie. The present sojourn has a tacit dimension rooted in Austerlitz’s largely repressed and unknown past, traced along similar routes that Marie and he follow. Felt but not seen, absent but also immediate, Austerlitz’s own unresolved, tragedy-scarred history quickly dictates his reception of the historical sites around which Marie guides him. At first, this passes by unconsciously, at least by Austerlitz. Soon, however, the issue is confronted obliquely:

“We stood there a couple of paces apart, like two actors on stage. The color of Marie’s eyes changed as the light dimmed. And once again I tried to explain to her and to myself what incomprehensible feelings had been weighing on me over the last few days; how I kept thinking, like a madman, that there were mysterious signs and portents all around me here; how it even seemed to me as if the silent façades of the buildings knew something ominous about me, how I had always believed I must be alone, and in spite of my longing for her I now felt it more than ever before (Sebald, 216).”

Marie protests these feelings, discarding them as obstacles to Austerlitz’s fulfillment, to his own mental health, and to her relation with him. These entreaties, though heartfelt and understandable by Austerlitz’s reckoning, fail. Here are his thoughts on the matter:

“That evening in Marienbad, said Austerlitz, I could not admit to myself how right everything Marie said was, but today I know why I felt obliged to turn away when anyone came too close to me, I know that I thought this turning away made me safe, and that at the same time I saw myself transformed into a frightful and hideous creature, a man beyond the pale (ibid).”

After reading these words, I picked up my pen and wrote beside them: “Vivid.”

Vivid indeed. Both Austerlitz’s description and, at least to myself, the fact that I could not resist the same urge that had earlier been thwarted brought home in a bright and radiant way the stakes of Sebald’s last work. Austerlitz does a lot of kinds of work for a novel. It subtly interrogates the relation of contemporary Europe to the Holocaust; presents new insight on old issues concerning artistic representation and memory; speculates on the philosophy of history and its dependency on linear notions of time; and even, on top of all this, experiments in matters of style, weaving Sebald’s unique prose around dozens of aptly placed photos, maps, and images.

Yet foremost to me among all the things it is doing is what Austerlitz does to the reader. Maybe this is naïve literary criticism; maybe it is just idiosyncratic or egocentric (depending on how you read me); or possibly I am just dabbling in pop psychology. But regardless if any or none of these statements are the case, I must assert that the most important work a piece of art can perform is how it reforms or transforms its interlocutors, be these viewers or readers.

As the American rhetorician and philosopher Kenneth Burke was right to note: “Critical and imaginative works are answers to questions posed by the situation in which they arose. They are not merely answers, they are strategic answers, stylized answers. . . . These strategies size up the situations, name their structure and outstanding ingredients, and name them in a way that contains an attitude towards them [2].” Once more, they answer questions for the reader without him or her even knowing at first. Pieces of art, and Austerlitz is undoubtedly this, size us up even as we try to size them up. Novels, painting, songs, folklore, dirty jokes—these are agents, doers. One simply cannot interact with them without having a perspective emerge [3].

What Austerlitzdoes is make an intervention on this accord that is as timely as it is personal. In an age where insurance companies are eager to outsource the work of the therapist to that of the druggist, where issues of anxiety, depression, neurosis, and other mental health issues are things to be medicated as if they were ahistoric, timeless issues, Sebald performs a valuable service. Austerlitz is a stand in for anyone who has suffered in silence from the traces of repressed memories, who has looked at the commercials selling happiness through pills only to wonder: is this condition I feel only chemical in make-up? And even if this were the case, that these issues are merely the result of “atoms in the void” (to have resort to a Greek while talking about a German), don’t these atoms at least have a past? Austerlitz’s response: Depression, for all its chemical trappings, is a historical condition in the deepest sense of that term. Sebald’s tour of one man’s relation—or, at times, seeming lack thereof—to his own past shows this in spades. His present is the past, refracted through the layers of repression, reverberating through crippling anxiety and severe despondency.

The pen, then, is more a mark of Sebald’s success to connect readers to a complex set of emotions—past and present, explicit and repressed. Writing in the margins at moments of particular intensity is akin to a psychoanalyst asking you to linger on a slip of the tongue: you are at first slightly embarrassed by the incident, then outright confused at its meaning, only to be fueled by a deeper sense indicated by a perturbed feeling that whatever you just said actually had larger significance.  Drawing out these slippages that had been lodged within the readers own subconscious and allowing them to spill in the form of ink onto it pages for later reflection, this might be the most potent sign of Austerlitz’sgreatness.

Novel writing and reading is likely more than just a therapeutic enterprise. Indeed, its uses extend well beyond this endeavor into the realm of creating usable alternatives—be these anywhere ranging from a policy or an argument about something—for contemporaries to deploy in the task of living. But that does not mean that its ability to draw out and treat the emotions such as Sebald details should be either overlooked or underappreciated. As Austerlitzdepicts the great difficulty in accomplishing this feat, so Sebald reminds the reader that a novelist’s approach to the Socratic injunction of “Know thyself” provide valuable tools for its undertaking. At the very least, Austerlitz places at the forefront of this endeavor what all too often gets relegated to the background: humanity’s historicity. For this reason alone, W.G. Sebald’s final piece is well worth the read, whether or not you can keep the pen out of your hand.

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*Thank you to Andrew Hartman for suggesting that I post something to the USIH blog. Also, thank you to Gregory Jones-Katz for recommending this book to me in the first place.

1. I started Austerlitzon my way back from Paris this summer. After visiting the Bibliothèque nationale de France in all its grotesque splendor, these lines of Sebald were well-received: “In order to reach the Grande Bibliothèque you have to travel through a desolate no-man’s land in one of those robot-driven Métro trains steered by a ghostly voice, or alternatively you have to catch a bus in the place Valhubert and then walk along the wind-swept riverbank towards the hideous, outsize building, the monumental dimensions of which were evidently inspired by the late President’s wish to perpetuate his memory whilst, perhaps because it had to serve this purpose, it was so conceived that it is, as I realized on my first visit, said Austerlitz, both in its outer appearance and inner constitution unwelcoming if not inimical to human beings, and runs counter, on principle, one might say, to the requirements of any true reader. (276)”

2. The Philosophy of Literary Form, 1.

3. Burke recognized an important distinction that is worth flagging. “Many of the things that a poet’s work does for him,” Burke wrote, “are not things that the same work does for us (i.e., there is a difference in act between the poem as being-written and the poem as being-read).” I think that the distinction between these two is more pragmatic than essential: that the effects, say, a piece of literature has on its author can also be channeled by the reader insofar as these authorial effects dialectically structured his or her writing of the text from which readerial effects flow. (A point that Burke would likely agree with, I think.) The usefulness of the distinction, however, is that it alerts the critic to the problems—latent or manifest—that the reader brings to the text, as well as the subtle framing that the text does on these issues, and makes the exploration of these an important factor in any fuller work of criticism. (The Philosophy of Literary Form, 73)

Matter's Possibilities

Last week I read Henry Adams, who set the wheels of my mind spinning with his magnificent twinned metaphor, the Dynamo and the Virgin.  That was Adams's most memorable metaphor, but it did not stand alone; The Education of Henry Adams is richly allusive, replete with imagery -- the motions of his mind made sensible to the reader when passed through the materiality of experience.  One of my classmates pointed out the profusion of water imagery in Adams.  For my part, I noticed the importance of roads.

This week I am reading William James's lectures on Pragmatism.  And here is metaphor of a different order of magnitude.  Where Adams announces his master metaphor, James masterfully deploys metaphors throughout his text.  What is the great image?  The "cash value" of an idea?  Pragmatism as a woman?  The universe of discourse?  The little living dynamo of the squirrel running round and round the tree?  James's most important theoretical arguments come embedded and expressed in the fabric of multiplicitous life.  James's prose enacts what his philosophy envisions:  What our intellect really aims at is neither variety nor unity taken singly, but totality (542).

Yes. Totality.  Totality, and mortality.

This is one sensibility that James and Adams share:  their arguments, their explorations, their essays, their assessments, their histories and philosophies unfold in the shadow of death.  Adams passes over in silence the most painfully educative twenty years of his life -- never naming his wife, never naming his loss.  The friends for whom he wrote it knew.  And he knew. And the readers for whom he perhaps did not admit to writing, but that he knew would some day see it -- we also know, even if we do not know the details.  Remembered grief resonates at a register that anyone who has ever mourned can hear.

James too builds his philosophy of possibility in the shadow of mortality.  

Matter is indeed infinitely and incredibly refined.  To any one who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter could have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after.  It makes no difference what the principle of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate cooperates, lends itself to all life's purposes.  That beloved incarnation was among matter's possibilities (527).

One senses that the most practical concern of Pragmatism is the problem of mortality.  This is, in fact, the chief "metaphysical problem" to which James devotes a whole chapter.  The need to which God answers, in James's view, is the need for life to win out at last.  

A world with a God in it to say the last word, may indeed burn up or freeze, but we then think of him as still mindful of the old ideals and sure to bring them elsewhere to fruition; so that, where he is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely final things (533).

But James does not explore -- not here, at any rate -- the fate of the part in relation to the whole.

Adams faces it square, and makes the problem of mortality the problem of history:

Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead; but a young man has only one chance, and a brief time to seize it (255).

This observation comes as part of his account of the diplomatic tussle between Britain and the United States over reparations for the Alabama.  Adams hears and perhaps even joins the hard laughter of history, the irony of understanding that comes decades too late to be of any use.  The American diplomats and statesmen at the center of the crisis, including Adams's own father and Adams himself, the "private secretary," were conscious of their role as actors in a drama, and they believed they understood the motives of their fellow players.  But the historical record -- suspect in some places, to be sure, as Adams notes -- revealed them decades later as all fooled, and all fooling. 

Like all folly, all history is perspectival.  It is a vision of distance and degrees.  And here we stand, you and I, on a raft of flotsam -- not really held together, but just pressed close by the current of our times.  We can almost fool ourselves that we stand on something solid, that our footing will not give, that there is some certain angle we can take upon the past -- that past that runs ahead of us, floating downstream, around the bend and out of view.  But -- inevitably -- our matter will fail our minds. 

Both Louis Menand and Drew Gilpin Faust explored the long shadow of death falling across the minds of a generation.  And what minds they were.  What about this generation of historians?  What shape does the dread shadow take for our profession as a whole today?  

I have been by turns amused, inspired, and worried by James Livingston's vision of the Pragmatic past upon which we might build our present.  I have wondered where, in all that abundance, one might find sustenance, one's daily bread.  The possibilities of self-fashioning may be endless.  But time is wasting.

Without mortality, there would be no such thing as history -- all would be living, and all past would be but living memory.

We historians are death's retainers.  The question is, Can these bones live?  

Ink and paper are a poor substitute for resurrection.  But I will do my best.

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Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams [1918], with an introduction by Leon Wieseltier, Library of America Series (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1983).

William James, Pragmatism, in Writings 1902-1910, edited and with notes by Bruce Kuklick, Library of America Series (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1987).

Theory BLEG: Consumption Communities and Cultural Capital

Today's post is a blog beg. I first forwarded the following naked question at the USIH Facebook page a few days ago. But here I offer more context (or textiles, to follow a clothing metaphor) and a connected concern. The question:

Beyond Daniel Boorstin himself, where have you seen the best critical discussion of his idea of "consumption communities"?*

In addition, I'm particularly interested in any past historical-theoretical discussions linking Bourdieu's idea of cultural capital to Boorstin's theoretical tool (which prominently appeared in The Americans: The Democratic Experience). The links seem, to me, fairly straightforward:

Boorstin first defined a consumption community, in 1969, as a group that "consists of people who have a feeling of shared well-being, shared risks, common interests and common concerns that come from consuming the same kinds of objects."** The goods around which these communities gather mostly qualify, I'm thinking, as things that are beyond the bare necessities (i.e. immaterial and higher order material goods). So despite Boorstin's implied premise of shared and common culture, that leaves room for class and inequality. Enter Bourdieu. He first developed the theory of cultural capital in the 1960s, but it seems to have not entered the American cultural lexicon until the 1980s.*** At any rate, cultural capital can help explain the inequalities that remain in those consumption communities when income/expenditures by each member are held equal.

After seeing the question on Facebook, USIH friend Michael Kramer informed me of an article by one of our respected senior colleagues, David Steigerwald, that offers further discussion of Boorstin's concept. David's article appeared in the Journal of American History, and here's the relevant passage:

Yet just as the premise of the critical consumer drives writers to untenable positions, so has the premise of the enduring community encouraged many consumer historians to see group existence in modern America as a process of negotiation with mass media in which the community often had the upper hand. Like those who deploy the critical consumer, the social historians of consumption often see the process as at least potentially liberating. Daniel J. Boorstin, whose 1973The Americans: The Democratic Experience was the first true consumer history, enthusiastically linked the rise of mass marketing to "consumption communities" as a form of liberation from provincialism. According to Boorstin, once-isolated late nineteenth-century Americans were gently gathered into communities of "customer-millions who would never see one another but who still somehow leaned on one another." Because they were abstract, those communities of choice were "milder, less exclusive" than the rigid communities of the past. Members had an ease of entry and exit, like the urban shopper who could stroll through the department store and stay or leave at will. If the consumer communities were a bit "attenuated," they were also vehicles of liberation from the stifling confines of the village.

Boorstin created a formula in which the consumption of mass-produced goods created new communities built on the abstract foundation of choice. He worked out a dialectic in which integration into the world of mass consumption actually generated a countervailing diversity, and that dialectic reverberates throughout studies of consumption and leisure in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.****

As always, David raises interesting questions. Here and in the article he is explicitly criticizing the positive association of consumer choice and liberation. He wonders about the chains from which we are escaping, and into what new chains we are freely bonding ourselves. These are important points, even if they don't directly help me with my questions about connections between Bourdieu and Boorstin.

Two interesting expansions on Boorstin and Bourdieu in relation to my topics of concern have appeared outside of historical literature, in the Journal of Consumer Research. The first appeared in June 1998. It was authored by Douglas B. Holt and is titled "Does Cultural Capital Structure American Consumption" (Vol. 25, no. 1). The next appeared in 2001. It was authored by Albert M. Muniz, Jr., and Thomas C. O'Guinn, and is titled "Brand Community" (Vol. 27, no. 4).

Because these concepts are now dated (if still useful!), I feel sure that others have done the spade work. I'd like to be able to credit those folks and build on their thinking.

Can anyone help with my question, or at least further the discussion? - TL

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* And no, I do not mean asylums for people with tuberculosis. :)

** Daniel Boorstin, "Welcome to the Consumption Community," in The Decline of Radicalism: Reflections on America Today (New York: Random House, 1969), 22; Michael Davis, "Boorstin Proposes New Concept Of 'Communities Of Consumption'," Rice Thresher [Rice University Student Newspaper] 53, no. 12 (December 9, 1965): 3. He put his idea to work in The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1974), Part Two passim.

*** In these two works: Bourdieu, "Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction," in Power and Ideology in Education, eds. Jerome Karabel and A.H. Halsey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 487-511, and "The Forms of Capital," in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 242-258.

**** David Steigerwald, "All Hail the Republic of Choice: Consumer History as Contemporary Thought," Journal of American History 93, no. 2 (September 2006): 399-400. The article covers pp. 385-403.

Against Irony

"irony, language device, either in spoken or written form in which the real meaning is concealed or contradicted by the literal meanings of the words or in a situation in which there is an incongruity between what is expected and what occurs" (Encyclopedia Britannica)

As historians, most of us probably take pleasure in highlighting ironies of the past. On occasion I point out ironies (perhaps as a way of showing how clever I am). For example, in the first chapter of my manuscript-in-progress on the culture wars, I write: “Many radical feminists learned how to think about personal politics as members of various New Left organizations, especially SDS and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This was ironic, of course, since politicizing the personal, taken to its logical conclusion, led many women to believe that the New Left organizations to which they belonged were chauvinistic. Stokely Carmichael’s notoriously misogynistic claim that ‘the position of women in SNCC is prone’ symbolized the need for women to prioritize their own liberation.”

But should irony be an epistemological or political commitment? Several of my fellow USIH bloggers seen to think so. In his excellent book, Freedom to Offend, Ray Haberski positions himself between the two poles of the debates over sex in art: between the censors on the one hand, and the first amendment absolutists on the other. Ray claims such a position is where irony lives. Similarly, L.D. Burnett has written the following at this blog: “Irony. Humility. Detachment. This is what history has to offer.”

In his comments on James Livingston’s recent post about the historian’s obligations, Dan Wickberg concludes with what I take to be a call for epistemological irony (even though he doesn’t use the word): “All we’ve got are the tools we’ve got; critique is a modernist, historicist form. This seems hardly a reason for despair—it just means that the chastened and humble form of modernism is a better one for living than the totalizing and assertive form of endless revolution and dynamic progress. Maybe we need a new Stoicism—stop thinking you’re stuck, and you’re not. But don’t jump off a moving train—the results can’t be pretty.”

Epistemological wariness of “totalizing” forms of thought is one of the calling cards of  the ironic detachment so central to postmodernism. Of course, ironic detachment was also one of the signal sensibilities of Cold War liberalism, a liberal variant obsessed with consensus, pluralism, technical expertise, detachment, and irony, a zeitgeist that found its apotheosis in Daniel Bell’s 1960 book, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. According to the so-called pluralist thinkers who dominated American social thought during the 1950s, the era of encrusted ideologies, whether expressed from the left or from the right, had been rendered outmoded by the age of affluence. Government by scientific experimentation was the new order. President John F. Kennedy certified this technocratic ethos in a 1962 speech in which he declared that the nation’s problems were merely “technical and administrative” and, as such, “do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past.”

The pluralist thinkers were wrong about a lot. The greatest movement in their midst—the civil rights movement—was inspired by an epistemological orientation more attuned to what educational philosopher Theodore Brameld termed an “audacious and cosmic vision.” More damning to the pluralist thinkers, their ironic detachment from the anticolonial movements of the world often served as cover for U.S. aggression. Furthermore, they were not detached in the Cold War. They were more often decidedly in favor of aggressive American policies against the Soviet Union and its sphere, as if the encrusted ideologies operant in Russia were justification for American foreign policies based on equally encrusted ideologies. Ironic indeed.

In his provocative piece in the current edition of The Baffler, Steve Almond criticizes Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for what amounts to their ironic detachment from the horrors of our society. He writes:

“Over the past decade, political humor has proliferated not as a daring form of social commentary, but a reliable profit source. Our high-tech jesters serve as smirking adjuncts to the dysfunctional institutions of modern media and politics, from which all their routines derive. Their net effect is almost entirely therapeutic: they congratulate viewers for their fine habits of thought and feeling while remaining careful never to question the corrupt precepts of the status quo too vigorously.”

Stewart’s shtick, like all among the ironically detached, is to portray himself above the fray. Almond illustrates this by way of a conversation he had with his guest in 2010, Rachel Maddow:

“…during [the interview] Stewart trotted out one of his favorite canards, that ‘both sides have their way of shutting down debate.’ Maddow asked, ‘What’s the lefty way of shutting down debate?’ ‘You’ve said Bush is a war criminal,’ Stewart replied. ‘Now that may be technically true. In my world, a war criminal is Pol Pot or the Nuremberg trials. . . . But I think that’s such an incendiary charge that when you put it into conversation as, well, technically he is, that may be right, but it feels like a conversation stopper, not a conversation starter.’ This is the Stewart credo distilled: civility at any cost, even in the face of moral atrocity.”

Is this the same thing as saying ironic detachment at any cost, even in the face of moral atrocity? I guess what I’m asking for is a defense of irony from those committed to irony. I’m honestly curious. (By the way, is it ironic to be committed to irony?)

Near Dark at the Museum

by James Livingston

Five years ago I wrote a piece on Richard Hofstadter for boundary 2, the literary journal edited by Paul Bove out of the University of Pittsburgh.  The occasion was David S. Brown’s strangely reductive biography. Here’s how the thing began in draft.

The cultural function of the modern historian is to teach us how to learn from people with whom we differ due to historical circumstances (and these circumstances include the range of ideological commitments they can profess with plausibility).  We “go back” to the people of the past in the hope of changing our perspectives on the present and thus multiplying our choices about the future. 

But these people with whom we differ, and from whom we must learn, are, to begin with, other historians; for we can’t peek around our corner of the present as if they aren’t there, standing between us and the archive, telling us how to approach it.

No one gets to the “primary sources,” whether they’re constituted as the historical record or the literary canon, without going through the priests, scribes, librarians, professors, critics—the professionals—who created them in retrospect, in view of their own intellectual obligations and political purposes.  In this sense, history is not the past as such, just as the canon is not literature as such; it’s the ongoing argument between historians, among others, about what qualifies as an event, a document, an epoch.  It’s the endless argument about what the future holds; for the form and content of the past matter only to those with political commitments in the present, and so to the future.

Richard Hofstadter understood these obvious yet awkward facts better than anyone of his generation, even better, I think, than William Appleman Williams or Eugene D. Genovese or C. Vann Woodward, three great scholars whose published works had improbably profound political consequences in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.  “Historians do not have direct access to their subjects,” as he put it in 1956.  So we don’t have to “go back” very far to appreciate Hofstadter’s lasting effects on American intellectual life.  Indeed I would suggest that we’re just now catching up with him. 

I borrowed these metaphors of going back and catching up from Lewis Mumford’s book on Herman Melville, which was published in 1929.  It’s not actually a biography: the author consciously omitted quotation marks around his subject’s utterance, so there’s no way to tell where Mumford leaves off and Melville begins.  You could of course read this book as a therapeutic answer to Van Wyck Brooks’s unfinished biography of Emerson—the writing of which drove Brooks mad.  But no matter how you read it, these metaphors are unequally useful.  You can’t “go back” to the past without the conviction that it’s always already different from the present, but when you feel you’re just catching up with something from the past, that difference is erased. 

The historian’s obligations, as I understand them, are unequal in the same sense.  I can demonstrate to you how we finally caught up to Hofstadter—I can show you how fresh and immediate his methods and insights remain—but my prior task is to lead you across the historical gap that separates us from him, regardless of how close he might appear to us in chronological time or in political sensibility.  If I don’t get this (hermeneutical) priority straight, if I don’t explain why and how we have to “go back,” I’m ignoring or denying the difference between the past and the present, not to mention our more local differences with Hofstadter as historians—I’m treating him as Mumford treated Melville, as a contemporary.  In doing so, I might be producing extraordinary insights, as Mumford did in ventriloquizing Melville, but I’m not doing History, because I’m overlooking the distinction between meaning and significance (Skinner), meanwhile assuming that understanding and explanation are equivalents (White).  Or put it this way: I’m doing History in the antiquarian mode, acting as if the continuity between past and present is a given—it’s normal or natural—rather than a mere possibility that has to be both produced and proven (Nietzsche, Foucault).

So what?  For many years now, my colleagues have told me that I’m not doing History, anyway—not even the history of ideas.  Their definition of my deviance takes two venerable forms.  On the one hand, they say that I’m doing Theory or Philosophy (of History?), on the grounds, as I understand them, that feminist theory or pragmatist philosophy can’t be both the method and the object, the means and the ends, of intellectual enterprise; or rather, they can be, but the result won’t be History.  On the other hand, they say that what I’ve written about pragmatism, particularly William James and John Dewey, is “fanciful” and “imaginative,” which means either that it lacks a known referent—admissible textual evidence—or that it exceeds the permissible, disciplinary boundaries of historical interpretation by favoring the sublime over the beautiful (Kloppenberg, Westbrook). 

Either way, the colleagues are saying that what I’ve written isn’t based on the facts, documents, and events that they know are relevant to the understanding (not explanation) of the subject at hand, whether that is pragmatism or feminism or corporate capitalism.  It’s instead overdetermined by an unseemly politics of interpretation which allows me to say that pragmatism and feminism were crucial ways of comprehending the transition from proprietary to corporate capitalism as a social, political, and intellectual opportunity—as the opening act of a comedy, not the final scene of a tragedy (White, Burke).

_______________

Why, then, do I insist that I’ve been doing History all along?  Because I don’t see any practical difference between the past as such and what historians (and others) have said about it.  You know the refrain: “Of course interpretations of the past have changed, but not the past itself.”  (E. H. Carr naturalized this notion with his metaphor of the mountain that can be approached from many angles but never changes its shape.)   To which I say, really?  How would you know?  How would anybody?

Yes, there must be unknown moments from the past that still affect us—but again, how would we know without hiring a metahistorical psychoanalyst who was prepared to reveal this dreamwork to us?  The content of our thinking, no matter the object of our scrutiny, is not determined and cannot be known until it takes concrete social form, in language (signs) of some kind.  The content of our thinking about the past is no exception to this rule.  So why would we insist that the past exists apart from our thinking, writing, and teaching about it?

You might answer by saying that even before historians of class, gender, race, and sexuality built out the archive with new documents dredged from abandoned grottoes, subaltern groups were shaping the past from below, always already making history: workers did this, women did that, slaves and freedmen did it too, and eventually homosexuals got in the act.  The relevant facts were always there, right in front of us, we just didn’t notice them.  In short, the past didn’t change, our interpretations did.

Bullshit.  The past changed because the facts changed because the world changed.  You can put these nouns in any sequence you like.  The past in question here began changing for good in the 1950s, when the whole history of Reconstruction had to be revisited (“revised”) because the NAACP got the attention of the Supreme Court and the Montgomery Improvement Association meanwhile got the attention of everybody else.  When black folk became visible historical agents by organizing consumer boycotts, denouncing apartheid, and demanding the right to vote, the political past looked different, and so did the future, or rather the past looked different because the political future did.  In fact, the past was, suddenly, different.

Now the past I invoke is like any other reality, it’s what we can act upon—it’s what we can take for granted because we have decided on its scope and limits, or it’s what we have accepted without thinking, as an unspoken but effective grammar.  When we say that the reality has changed, however, we typically mean that we have changed it, and we mean this because we’re modern individuals.  The scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries taught us what the Reformation did, that the condition of certainty in knowledge was experiment, in the sense that you had to manipulate objects in a purposeful manner if you were to produce the truth.  You couldn’t posit a prime mover and proceed logically from that premise to your conclusion about, say, planetary motion or salvation, you had instead to approximate the motion of bodies in space by miniaturizing and measuring them in a laboratory—or you had to claim that the Kingdom of God could be established here and now, on this earth and in these times.  Philosophers had interpreted the world differently.  Scientists and Protestants changed it.

I’m neither a scientist nor a Protestant, not anymore, and I can’t imagine how anybody would teach History as a science—actually, I can, because I served as Paul Kleppner’s TA for a year—but the point remains: and yet it moves.  The past as such, being indistinguishable from what we have said about it, changes to the precise extent that what we say about it changes.  This actionable object of knowledge—this reality—is as malleable as the mountains of West Virginia.

_________________ 

It follows, I think, that we cannot reproduce the past in any meaningful sense, at least not in good faith.  As both Werner Heisenberg and Elton Mayo discovered in the 1920s, observation is participation.  We’re acting on the past, changing the reality, whenever and however we write it up, because we enter from a world elsewhere—either we “go back”  in time or we acknowledge our separation in social space.

Paul Murphy’s book mystified and irritated me, then, because the writing exhibits no temporal or any other kind of estrangement from the historical moment we call the 1920s.  We don’t have to “go back” to understand this decade (and why do we follow the US Census in deciding on credible historical periods?), he assumes, because we’re in the same place—us intellectuals are unduly alienated from the masses, just like Christopher Lasch and Richard Rorty and Nelson Lichtenstein said we were!  Once upon a time, before and after the 1920s, we weren’t, but our fallen state is not permanent.  We don’t have to stay all modernist, we too can make an “organic” connection to a usable past!

In this excruciating, exhortative respect, Murphy’s book reads like a reproduction of the present—in exactly the same way Mumford’s “biography” of Melville did.  But these writers, artists, and intellectuals of the 1920s are not our contemporaries, no matter how close they might feel and sound.  For every one of them, the novelty of the New Era was determined by its radical break from the past, and this break became legible, for every one of them, as fundamental change in the meanings of work, labor, and necessity.  They created new connections to the past, which is to say they recreated the past as such, because they knew it had been whirled away.  Unlike them, we can take that fundamental change for granted, so an explanation of it is in order—we’ll never understand them, or for that matter ourselves, without such an explanation, without “going back” to where they stood.

________________

My colleague Jackson Lears has recently written an important historiographical intervention that intersects with what I’ve been arguing here.  The piece is called “The Trigger of History”; it was published in the Spring 2012 issue of The Hedgehog Review. 

Lears wants out of the “master narrative of modernity” because he insists we can claim the future by extricating ourselves from the story told there—it is only by changing the very idea of the past, he explains, that we can hope to make a future worth inhabiting.

That master narrative was of course codified by Marx, Weber, and Freud, who were able to show, sometimes without intending to, that capitalism and modernity are pretty much the same thing, because they share a “common future orientation and a common commitment to endless dynamism.”  In explaining this affinity or linkage, the masters sought a trigger of history, “a prime mover that would explain that quickening pace, that forward thrust, wherever it occurred”—something that expelled pre-modern people from their supposedly idyllic, naturally static lives, and that meanwhile started the train of “linear progress” toward the neoliberal wreck of our time.

Lears deftly criticizes all three of the masters, but he doesn’t blame them for the bleak techno-determinism their clerical epigoni have drawn from the original texts.  In fact, he suggests that the trigger metaphor can be “a weapon in the fight against determinism” because it lets us identify who pulls it under real historical circumstances, when genuine choices are available to real human beings.  And he evades the charge of nostalgia by insisting that longing for the good old days is like boarding the train of linear progress on its return trip—it puts you back on the same track first laid by the master narrative of modernity.

Get off the train, Lears urges us.  To do so, he says, is to develop a “politics of place,” which avoids an “oppressive linearity” by sidestepping not the condition of modernity but the master narratives that have convinced us of its ubiquity and inevitability.  Practically speaking, however, the necessary move is rhetorical, because the future changes only insofar as we are able to change the past, rewrite the story, and act upon it accordingly.  Our ability in this regard depends, though, on how seriously we can take the exiles and “off-modernists” among us, mainly artists like Bruno Schulz, Joseph Cornell, Walter Benjamin, Vladimir Nabokov, but then again the small farmers of Egypt who opted out of the increasingly neoliberal agricultural regime of the late 20th-century—all of them experts in getting out of the way of History.

My only objection to the argument is the how part, and this is where I’ll try, finally, to get myself in some trouble.  I agree, we have to change the past if we expect to change the future—and vice versa—but, speaking of the people with their fingers on the triggers, who can afford to ignore both by evacuating the present?  Apart from the 1%, who has enough resources to give up the gun and step off the train?  OK, those small Egyptian farmers did because they could feed themselves.  Can a working stiff, an administrative assistant, or a middle manager in the US do that?

“Determinism, in short, denies history,” Lears declares.  Really?  Are you are now free to choose your destiny because today is the first day of the rest of your life?  Or does the sequence work rather differently, like this: either we acknowledge that the past weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living, shaping and determining us in the present, forcing us back to the primal scene of our crimes, making us change our stories, or we pretend that we’re weightless, free of all ties and obligations to this hollow shell we call the past, able to sample it at our leisure as if it’s a song on the iPod? 

Isn’t the question we’re asking as historians more difficult, more basic: how to refuse this either/or choice?

The past is both real and artificial.  Like God, it’s consequential because we created it.  The past is what we make of it—it’s narratives all the way down—but we make it from these raw materials, and meanwhile they make us. 

The Company We Keep

Before I was a regular blogger here -- before I had even left my first faltering comment as the far-more-mysterious-than-I-intended-to-be "LD" -- I started a personal blog about the process of becoming a historian.  My blogospheric venture was hardly unique.  Lots of PhD students blog -- it can be a way of finding your footing, getting your bearings, training your voice.  That's how it worked for me, anyhow.

The very first post I wrote on that blog was a meditation on the uncanny experience of reading the scholarship of a now-deceased historian named, delightfully, Rising Lake Morrow.  I considered how it is possible that I as a reader can be "in conversation" with this author.

I wrote:

The term "conversation," though, implies some degree of mutuality and perhaps intentionality.  So is it fair to apply it to my reading of Morrow?  After all, I can choose Morrow as a partner in dialogue; he cannot choose me.  Eighty years after his article was published, I doubt that he is around to make any more choices -- just as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison were unavailable for comment when Morrow drew upon their writings for his article of 1936.

But even when those men were writing for the exigencies of the present, they knew they were writing for the future too.  And when Morrow published his article about their thinking, he was writing not only for his contemporaries but also for the generations of scholars who he expected to succeed him, as scholars do.  In a way, then, Morrow did choose to converse with me.  As the writer to the Hebrews put it, "By faith he, though dead, yet speaketh."

This is the faith of scholarship:  believing that our work might speak not only to the questions of the moment but also to those questioners whose time is yet to come.  And upon this faith is built the secular ekklesia of the academy -- not the communion of saints, but the communion of sages.  We converse with each other, and with scholars of generations past, for the benefit not only of ourselves but for all the scholars who will follow us. We respond to living texts and dead authors, not to pass the time or fill the world with words, but to say something worth our own and others' time right now that might still have value later.

I have been thinking a great deal lately about the value of history, the value of being -- or becoming -- a historian.

As I mentioned in a comment on Andrew's post of earlier this week, I have spent the past several days working through the historiography/theory section of my exam list for U.S. Intellectual and Cultural History. 

Yes, I'm overly concerned that I must master this material well enough to give a good account of myself during my written and oral qualifying exams.  Yes, I'm unreasonably annoyed with myself for not having acquired such mastery yet.  How can I be so patient with my students, yet so impatient with myself? (Don't answer that! It's a rhetorical question, not an invitation for armchair analysis.)   Yet despite my angst about my (in)sufficient command of these texts after a whole week of reading (!), despite the impostor syndrome that flares up every time I come across an untranslated German phrase ("How can I be a Real Historian unless I read German?!") -- despite all that, beneath all that, runs a deep, broad current of contentment.

As I read these historians, as I try to understand the sense they have made of the work and worth and wisdom of history, I am filled with an overwhelming sense of gratitude.  I am thankful for them, for their life's work, thankful that they have written what I am reading.  Whatever ideas or insights or arguments I take from their pages, I am at the last simply grateful for their company. 

So far I have read Lovejoy, Collingwood, Mink, Fritz Stern's marvelous anthology of historical writing from Voltaire to C. Vann Woodward, the proceedings of the Wingspread Conference, Joan Scott, and Hayden White.  Right now I'm making my way (again) through Peter Novick's That Noble Dream, and enjoying every word of it.

I know, I know. I'm not expected to read every word of every text on my list -- this is what my profs tell me, this is what my colleagues who have already passed their exams tell me.  Practically speaking, I just need to read enough to sound like I know what I'm talking about.  There are some texts I will need to read more closely than others; there are some texts I would do well to skim. 

But when it comes to this section of my list, I must confess to intransigent impracticality.  I will do no skimming here; I don't want to miss a word. For me, reading what historians have had to say about what it means to think about history or write history, what it means to be a historian, is an absolute delight.  And if I cannot take delight in my work -- well, then why the hell bother? 

Now and then as I have made my way through this reading, I have tweeted a snippet of a sentence or a part of a phrase that struck me as wise or funny or challenging.  But it is rare indeed to come across a historical aphorism of 140 characters or less.  It takes Hayden White twice that long to get to his first comma.  So I have been able to quote only sparingly from texts that are anything but spare.  Rich, bracing, brilliant, daunting, deep -- that's what this reading has been so far. 

Allow me, reader, to share some of these delights with you, before returning to the question of the value of studying history.

From Lovejoy:

"It is the beliefs which are so much a matter of course that they are rather tacitly presupposed than formally expressed and argued for, the ways of thinking which seem so natural and inevitable that they are not scrutinized with the eye of logical self-consciousness, that often are most decisive of the character of a philosopher's doctrine." (7)

"The adequate record of even the confusions of our forebears, may help, not only to clarify those confusions, but to engender a salutary doubt whether we are wholly immune from different but equally great confusions." (23)

From Collingwood:

"The historian's business is to know the past, not to know the future, and whenever historians claim to be able to determine the future in advance of its happening, we may know with certainty that something has gone wrong with their fundamental conception of history." (49)

"Passion and ignorance have certainly done their work, and an important work, in past history, but they have never been mere passion and mere ignorance; they have been rather a blind and blundering will for good and a dim and deluded wisdom." (104)

"History is thus the self-knowledge of the living mind.  For even when the events which the historian studies are events that happened in the distant past, the condition of their being historically known is that they should 'vibrate in the historian's mind', that is to say, that the evidence for them should be here and now before him and intelligible to him.  For history is not contained in books or documents; it lives only, as a present interest and pursuit, in the mind of the historian when he criticizes and interprets those documents, and by so doing relives for himself the states of mind into which he inquires." (202)

"All history is the history of thought: and when an historian says that a man is in a certain situation this is the same as saying that he thinks he is in this situation....The historian thinks it a wrong way; but wrong ways of thinking are just as much historical facts as right ones, and, no less than they, determine the situation (always a thought-situation) in which the man who shares them is placed." (317)

From Stern:

"The historian himself cannot escape this pressure for synthesis and meaning; it is heard within the profession as well as outside....The historian cannot escape these challenges; he broods, alone or in groups, over the presuppositions of his discipline, the logic and the method of his work, the place it should occupy among other, newer pursuits." (23) 

"...the writing of history inflicts on every historian choices for which neither his method nor his material provides a ready answer.  Some answers only the historian himself can give, and this has kept history a live, changing pursuit....History springs from a live concern, deals with life, serves life.  A discipline so close to life cannot remain fixed; it changes with time, with the impact of new hopes, thoughts, and fears.  The history of historiography records the interaction between the fixed elements in history--the critical, systematic method and the sources -- and the time-bound elements embodied in the historian." (24)

"As I said at the beginning, the historian must serve two masters, the past and the present.  And while his obligation to the past, his complete, unassailable fidelity to it, must always claim his first loyalty, he must accept the fact that the choices he makes as a historian are not of consequence to him alone, but will affect the moral sense, perhaps the wisdom, of his generation.  And since he knows that his own being, his intellectual capabilities and his critical faculties as well as his deeper sense of righteousness and love, are engaged in the writing of history, he knows that his work, too, is a moral act." (32)

From Niebuhr (in Stern):

"What Pyrrhus said to his Epirots -- ye are my wings -- expresses the feelings of the zealous teacher towards his listeners, whom he loves and who take part in his lectures with all their hearts.  His own work is promoted not only by the desire to be clear, to present nothing as a truth which might admit of a doubt, but the sight of his audience and his immediate relation to it awaken a thousand thoughts while he is speaking." (53)

"When a historian is reviving former times, his interest in them and sympathy with them will be the deeper, the greater the events he has witnessed with a bleeding or a rejoicing heart." (53)

From Macaulay (in Stern):

"The effect of historical reading is analogous, in many respects, to that produced by foreign travel...But men may travel far, and return with minds as contracted as if they had never stirred from their own market-town.  In the same manner, men may know the dates of many battles and the genealogies of many royal houses, and yet be no wiser." (85)

From Michelet (in Stern):

"Teaching did me good service.  The fierce trial at colleges had altered my character...Those young people, amiable and confiding, who believed in me, reconciled me to mankind....They had done me, without knowing it, an immense service.  If I had, as an historian, any special merit to sustain me on a level with my illustrious predecessors, I should owe it to teaching, which for me was friendship.  Those great historians have been brilliant, judicious, and profound; as for me, I have loved more." (115)

"Let it be my part in the future to have not attained, but marked, the aim of history, to have called it by a name that nobody had given it.  Thierry called it narration, and M. Guizot analysis.  I have named it resurrection, and this name will remain." (117)

From Droysen (in Stern):

"History is Humanity's knowledge of itself, its certainty about itself.  It is not 'the light and the truth,' but a search therefor, a sermon thereupon, a consecration thereto.  It is like John the Baptist, 'not that Light but sent to bear witness of that Light.'" (144)

From Trevelyan (in Stern):

"What is easy to read has been difficult to write.  The labour of writing and rewriting, correcting and recorrecting, is the due exacted by every good book from its author, even if he knows from the beginning exactly what he wants to say.  A limpid style is invariably the result of hard labour, and the easily flowing connection of sentence with sentence and paragraph with paragraph has always been won by the sweat of the brow." (240)

From Hayden White:

"If one is going to 'go to history,' one had better have an address in mind rather than go wandering around the streets of the past like a flaneur.  Historical flaneurisme is undeniably enjoyable, but the history we are living today is no place for tourists.  If you are going to 'go to history,' you had better have a clear idea of which history, and you had better have a pretty good notion as to whether it is hospitable to the values you carry into it." (164)

This whole blog post may be an exercise in flaneurisme.  But I hope it testifies not only to the values I carry to history, but to the value I find in it -- although, if I have understood Hayden White correctly, perhaps there is no difference.

Nevertheless, the value of history is not exhausted by the uses we can make of it.  There is value  (and perhaps not a little danger, not a little risk) in what history makes of us, how the study of history can shape us, how the company we keep as historians might help to make us more fit company for those who walk along with us, and for those who follow after.

Why History Matters

Yesterday, at the fourth annual Graduate Student Symposium at the University of Texas at Dallas, Ben Alpers give an incredible keynote address on "The Future of the Humanities." I won't summarize his talk here, but I will summarize the audience response:  Ben rocked the house.  

After Ben spoke, I presented my own paper as part of a panel addressing the theme, "Why the Humanities Matter."  My colleagues Michele Rosen and Sara Keeth did an extraordinary job of explaining the cultural value of translation studies and literary studies.  Then it fell to me -- because I had gladly if somewhat naively volunteered to do it -- to make the case for "Why History Matters."

The actual title of my talk was more elaborate, but it was no more ambitious than the daunting task I had before me:  to explain why the study of history matters to somebody besides me, and to do so while standing next to a particularly formidable American intellectual and cultural historian, Daniel Wickberg, who moderated our panel.

I have my reasons for valuing history as I do -- and I spoke about some of those reasons yesterday.  But the argument that the study of history can enrich one's life -- and it certainly can, and it certainly has -- is not sufficient to explain what history has to offer to those outside the ivied walls of the ivory tower.

What is the cultural value of being a historian?  Why should the academy continue to train historians?  Beyond the self-perpetuation of the profession, what does that get us?

Training scholars to think historically gets us people who can wade into the contentious conversations in the public sphere while retaining -- and modeling -- some sense of irony and perhaps the faintest bit of humility about the limits of one's own understanding. We get, in other words, people who would (ideally) offer a different model of discourse besides the rhetoric of righteous indignation and moral or political absolutism that is constantly swirling around us.

That was the basic argument of my paper.  Keep in mind that I was explaining "thinking historically" to an audience of people who were coming from other disciplines in the humanities.  I used my own struggle to contextualize the radical abolitionism of William Lloyd Garrison as a way of framing my discussion.  So here's a slightly revised version of part of my argument, which includes some references to discussions taking place on this blog:

This effort to suspend judgment in favor of understanding is part of what it means to "think historically."  It's hard to do.  But it is a disciplinary and self-disciplinary hallmark of historians.  This professional self-discipline, Thomas Haskell explains, "requires detachment":  the ability to "suspend or bracket one's own perceptions long enough to enter sympathetically into the alien and possibly repugnant perspectives of rival thinkers,...to achieve some distance from one's own spontaneous perceptions and convictions, to imagine how the world appears in another's eyes, to experimentally adopt perspectives that do not come naturally."[1]  And, I would argue, the most unnatural perspective of all is to recognize that our own mental conception of the world -- whether it's the idea that slavery is wrong, or the idea that historians ought to approach their subjects with some measure of detachment -- is not a timeless truth; our moral and mental conceptions are ideas, and they too have a history of their own.

Keeping the history of our own mental framework in mind even as we write history practically forces us to embrace some sense of disciplinary humility.  We do our best work when we keep front and center "a conception of the limits of historical knowledge."[2] Instead of a totalizing grand narrative, or grandiose explanatory claims, historians attentive to the limitations of our own discipline would (ideally) write, Allan Megill suggests, with a "greater humility and reflexiveness with regard to the interpretation of the past" -- a "self-ironic style."[3]  This is the practice of history as a sort of tonic of humility -- an ironic self-awareness that we must not be self-righteous in our own certainties.   

Irony. Humility. Detachment.  This is what history has to offer. 

This is what history has to offer?  Oh, how the mighty have fallen!  But it is, I would argue, a fortunate fall -- though not all historians have made the leap.  Indeed, one of my colleagues on the U.S. Intellectual History blog is concerned that I seem to have lost a sense of the heuristic purpose of doing history:  to draw from the particular circumstances of the past some generally applicable principles for the present.  "Isn't that part of how we learn from history," my colleague asked me in a recent blog comment, "learn to avoid the mistakes of the past? Or," he continued, "are you a postmodernist such that you see these applications as overwrought with hazards? How do you talk truth with those who come to history seeking SOME limited universal truths? How do you sell historical thinking if you disallow present applications?"[4]  It's a fair question.  After all, I had been saying there -- and I am saying here -- that "when history veers into a discussion of what is true in a transhistorical or 'timeless' sense, it ceases to be history."[5]

Indeed, "timeless" and "historical" don't really go together. 

Instead, what history can offer is a careful, attentive, thick if not thorough interpretation of a particular past context.  The point of such interpretation is not to distill some lesson that will help us "avoid the mistakes of the past"; because time is on the move, the mistakes of the past are unrepeatable.  That's one of the implications of contingency:  each present moment is the product of innumerable choices made and chances taken by others.  So history can't repeat itself; we are wonderfully free to make new mistakes now.  How's that for a liberated future? 

That's a very liberated future.  In his famous -- and much assigned -- essay, "The Burden of History," Hayden White describes how foregrounding contingency frees up the future.  History has the "special task" of bringing people to "an awareness that their present condition was always in part a product of specifically human choices, which could therefore be changed or altered by further human action."[6]  As George Cotkin affirms, "we are born into structures of power and culture that constrain us.  But, at the same time," he continues, "we retain a degree of agency that may assimilate or change those structures to varying degrees."[7]  Intellectual history in particular foregrounds the way that such structuring ideas shape not only the world that people are born into but also the very conceptual limits of how they can imagine reacting against that world.  Grasping this dynamic -- getting some sense of the sheer weight of what people have to wade through to ever think differently about anything -- makes it easier to view individual people, past and present, with less judgment and more understanding.

...

So our job as historians is to speak to our time, to speak to our culture, by speaking faithfully about the past.

The historian's task is simple:  to reconstruct a moment, or a series of moments, from the past, and to hold that past up to view not so that we might commend or condemn it, but so that we might understand it.  That exercise -- the demonstration of how to suspend judgment in favor of understanding -- repeated again and again, defines both the process and the product of history faithfully practiced.  Leading others through that exercise with us is the pedagogical, the scholarly, and -- in a certain sense -- the pastoral work of  secular historians.  We must leave to our historical subjects the harsh and uncompromising and proudly immoderate rhetoric of moral absolutism.  Let Garrison thunder like a prophet, and let us hear him in the context of his time.  Ironically, in the context of our time, to demonstrate ironic detachment and some sense of humility about our own habitual [historical?] certainties is, in its own way, profoundly prophetic.

--------------------
[1]Thomas L. Haskell, "Objectivity is not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream," History and Theory, Vol. 29 No. 2 (May, 1990), 132.
[2]Allan Megill, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 56.
[3]Megill 186.
[4]Tim Lacy, March 15, 2012 (10:35 a.m.), comment on Tim Lacy, “Tim's Light Reading (3-15-2012): Gretel Adorno, Richard Theodore Greener, Ontics, Defending First Principles, and Tony Judt via Jennifer Homans,” U.S. Intellectual History, March 15, 2012, http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/2012/03/tims-light-reading-3-15-2012-gretel.html.
[5]L.D. Burnett, March 15, 2012 (9:15 a.m.), comment on Lacy, "Light Reading (3-15-2012)."
[6]Hayden White, "The Burden of History," History and Theory, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1966), 133.
[7]George Cotkin, "History's Moral Turn," Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 69, No. 2 (April 2008), 305.