Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End?

Kent, Christopher

Such a title as this is guaranteed to cause many historians to snort with disgust and walk away muttering about intellectual faddists, paradox-junkies, and theory-mongering vagrants of no fixed disciplinary address. That would be a pity, though it would also make one of the author's points. To the historian who doesn't immediately walk away, but stays at least long enough to ask of the title "What history? Who says? and, So what?," Niethammer's responses may prove very worthwhile. But first off - relay, academic votaries of Clio: nobody in this book is threatening your jobs. If anything, the end of history makes them even more secure. Despite the pretensions of historians to control its definition, history does not just mean the past: it also means the present (the journalist's "History was made today when . . ."), and the future (the deposed dictator's "History will be my judge!"). To the extent that this temporal promiscuity embarrasses historians, the end of history might seen welcome to them, since it chiefly means the abandonment of the present and the future, and the definitive confinement of history to the past. It means history is over; the historical process has stopped. Things will still happen, of course, but they will have no direction and will be essentially repetitious, unworthy to be called events. History will be diminished, impotent, indeed, dead. And historians will have no tiresome rivals in their claims to the corpse.

One way for historians to dismiss all this is to note that every use of the word history in the last paragraph should be capitalized, that it is all about History, the fabrication of philosophers, and not historians' history. It is all part of the unfortunate legacy of Hegel, in particular. Certainly Hegel figures in Niethammer's book, but he is not alone, and is certainly not the sole progenitor of the end of history. As Niethammer (who is, it should be emphasized, an historian) shows, the idea of the end of history has a rich and fascinating history. It had a considerable past before Hegel in the great Judaeo-Christian tradition of salvationism, and a rich future lay ahead of it after Hegel. And whatever else it is today, the end of history is certainly not dead. But in contrast to today, when the majority of its prophets view the end state in a decidedly pessimistic light (a notable exception being the light-hearted, and somewhat light-headed Fukuyama), most of the nineteenth century's end of history men (and men they generally were) viewed it optimistically - Marx, notoriously, Saint Simon, Comte, and even John Stuart Mill, whom Niethammer does not mention. But Niethammer gives particular attention to the less well known mathematician Antoine Cournot, for whom the triumph of scientific knowledge would transform the chaos of human existence into a precisely calculable, self-regulating, technological society of world peace and prosperity in which history would be "reduced to an official gazette, recording regulations, statistical data, the accession of heads of state . . . which therefore ceases to be history in the customary sense of the word." For a darker, late nineteenth-century version of the end of history, Niethammer turns to a bona fide historian, a president of the A.H.A., no less, Henry Adams, who plotted the historical curve in world energy consumption, inferring from it a "law of social acceleration," and predicting a societal enactment of the second law of thermodynamics - a state of social entropy. Not a bad prediction this, at least of what people would be worrying about.

In the twentieth century the end of history has become firmly tied to the ideologies of left, right, and even centre. Niethammer assembles some interesting clusters of intellectuals, of different, and often shifting ideological positions, all of whom at some time or another felt themselves to be at one with the movement of history, but with the defeat or collapse of their cause attempted to effect an "escape from history" in the form of intellectual withdrawal, or even actual physical flight, which was subsequently rationalized and universalized by some variant of the end of history theme. The historical dynamic to which they had committed themselves had somehow failed them, and rather than admit that they might have been mistaken, they preferred the much more dignified alibi that history had come to a stop, an alibi that had the additional attraction of exonerating them from responsibility.

As two exemplars of this strategy, drawn from the right, Niethammer offers us Martin Heidegger and Ernst Junger, two sometime Nazis who elevated self-exculpation literally to an art form - poetry (and, of course, philosophy) for the former, the novel for the latter. Which brings us to another of this book's important themes, the problem of aestheticization. Niethammer examines closely the implications of a number of metaphors, Hegel's man on horseback, and master-slave dialectic, the wreck of the Titanic, and the rustic metaphors beloved of German self-apologists, as well as the several influential scientific metaphors such as entropy, indeterminacy, crystallization and neurosis. He is extremely rewarding on the ways in which metaphor can be used as a substitute for explanation, scientific metaphor especially having a particular allure since science, for historians as much as others, has come to be seen as the privileged arbiter of explanatory validity. The end of history is, of course, a metaphor in itself. Niethammer gives equal attention to fugitives from history of the left such as Walter Benjamin, whose cryptic metaphors of the blown-away angel, and the chess playing automaton have generated a virtual industry of exegesis. The extraordinarily influential and adaptable Alexandre Kojeve receives his share of attention, as does the currently reigning star of end of history thematics, Jean Baudrillard, refugee from the 1960s new left and Althusserite structuralism, whose notion of hyper reality is seen as an appropriately up-dated version of what is evidently a very durable and flexible idea.

So who cares? Well, perhaps from this review it will be evident that intellectual historians, at least, might be interested in the history of the idea. But I would suggest that all historians who spend any of their time in the present and think at least occasionally about the future would profit from this short book, the richness of which I have inadequately conveyed here.