Origins of presentism.

Our Shadowed Present: Modernism, Postmodernism, and History, by J.C.D. Clark, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. 336 pp.

HISTORY RETAINS A PROFOUND HOLD on the human imagination as individuals and societies alike define themselves by coming to terms with their past. Today, however, a general shift in assumptions about the role of the past in the developed world has changed the relationship of cultures with their history. Events are now located only in the present tense. Having lost touch with a history that provided meaning, Western societies now grapple confusedly with questions of identity.

Jonathan Clark, Hall Distinguished Professor of British History, University of Kansas, calls our pervasive abandonment of history presentism. Whether "at the high level of theory or at the low level of assumptions that seep into every intellectual exchange," presentism has a profound social impact. Contemporary problems often have deep historical roots, and understanding historical context is vital for developing realistic solutions. Clark outlines an important trend in scholarship from Eric Hobsbawm's Invention of Tradition (1983) through Linda Colley's Britons: Forging a Nation (1992) that presses the view that elites typically construct identities to serve political agendas. Constructed identities therefore can be revised to serve other projects, and Colley--who describes herself as European by choice and transatlantic in lifestyle--calls for a substantial rethinking of what it means to be British. Clark argues that such a political use of history either cobbles together a bogus past to justify a current agenda or deliberately mutes profound differences that subsequently emerge in especially virulent forms. "Doctrines that deny the past do not make it go away." Northern Ireland and Yugoslavia both demonstrate that historians who play at politics with historical identities play with fire.

Clark locates the origins of presentism in modernism and postmodernism, both of which examine the past through contemporary preoccupations. Modernism emerged in the nineteenth century as a secularizing, materialist project within which history became a social science applying timeless categories to explain change. It created grand narratives in Europe and in the United State with history as the ratification of the present. Whig history, various nationalist interpretations, and Marxism all developed within the modernist framework for explaining change. In each case, modernity--either the present or the near future--emerged as history's final and highest level. Methodologies that consciously mimicked the physical sciences aimed to set historical scholarship apart from what Lawrence Stone called mere "antiquarian fact-grubbing." Those methodologies remained artifacts of their own time, however, and modernism acquired a dated air by the 1960s.

While rejecting the categories and assumptions of modernism, postmodernism imposed preoccupations of its own that reinforce presentism. Postmodernism involves a radical form of emancipation from history that empowers the expressive individualism of a consumer society. Tradition implies constraint, and deconstructing narratives or institutions give voice to those held down by a hegemonic culture. The preoccupation of postmodernists with cultural and religious symbols reveals their concern with identity. Postmodernism creates a usable liberationist past by excluding some things as merely "invented"--in an English context, foxhunting, the monarchy, and the Oxbridge colleges--while privileging others as "authentic." Such rhetorical symbols touch a nerve among postmodernists that makes them far more significant than cases of suffering and human misery. The project of empowering previously excluded groups mirrors the denial of identity to others by invalidating their historical experience. Those rejected by postmodernism are relegated to "survivals" from a backward era; for postmodernists, some traditions are more invented than others. Where Clark describes modernism as using the past to justify its present, postmodernism reaches into the past to control the present and construct a history to justify idiosyncratic preferences.

Our Shadowed Present explores presentism through a series of case studies that address specific questions. The first four chapters examine how concepts define history, and later chapters offer a comparative perspective as an alternative to modernist and postmodernist fallacies. Clark's discussion of revolution shows the misleading framework imposed by normative categories of social science. Defining revolution in terms that exclude palace coups or localized jacqueries obscures key developments during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example. Historians should focus on what people at the time meant by revolution rather than later definitions.

Other chapters examine the meaning of nationalism and race as categories. The phenomena Colley cites as evidence of a constructed identity open to revision might also reflect older loyalties. Clark traces English identity back to the gens Anglorum described by Bede and to Anglo-Saxon political institutions, both of which long predate either nationalism as a category or the symbolism of Hanoverian Britain. British identity after the 1707 Act of Union built on older, existing identities, and, as the core of a composite monarchy, England's self-conception differed from the forms of nationalism seen elsewhere.

Comparative approaches to historiography also raise questions with broader political implications. Clark observes the decline of shared narratives that link public consciousness across national boundaries and the consequent divergence of perspectives. American exceptionalism underpins a powerful founding myth that leaves the United States peculiarly vulnerable to postmodernism because "its public culture embodies few scenarios of fundamental change apart from revolutionary ones." The historian's project of describing and explaining events thus gives way to a struggle over the content of America's civil religion. That struggle defines much of the so-called "culture wars" in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. Clark argues for the use of counterfactuals to highlight possibilities not chosen and to recover a sense of historical contingency.

Reassessing national histories in comparative perspective also shows how countries sometimes realign themselves with one another. Geopolitical imperatives sustained the view of Germany as an exception to "normal" historical patterns and the idea of a West defined by the United States, Britain, and other liberal European societies. Recent historical scholarship challenges both the German Sonderweg and the "special relationship" between Britain and the United States; the older models pitting liberal democracy against authoritarianism no longer fit available evidence. Significant parallels between German and British history argue for a partial reintegration of Britain's historiography with that of Europe and a consequent disassociation from the United States--though Clark cautions that claiming either a special relationship with the United States or that Britain lies "at the heart of Europe" involves a political rather than historical assertion.

Clark's view of how American public culture differs from European countries requires qualification. The empirical tradition that dominated intellectual culture within Britain and its former colonies promotes very different patterns of thought from either continental Europe or the United States. With the significant exception of Marxism, British intellectual culture has always offered less scope for theoretical approaches to history. American transcendentalists, on the other hand, avidly embraced German idealism from the 1830s, while John Dewey later looked to Hegel and Comte. Clark himself notes that Jurgen Habermas wrote of Germany's debt to "the American pragmatism of Peirce, Mead, and Dewey." Perhaps what Clark has really discovered is a variety of "British exceptionalism."

The difference between an idealist epistemology, particularly one that privileges canonical texts, and an empiricist one that focuses on history parallels a difference between creationist and evolutionary views of national origins. Descartes drew European thought away from empiricism, while an emphasis on texts drawn from dissenting Protestantism in the United States, particularly New England, had a similar result. Trends in a post-Puritan America that James Kurth describes as the "Protestant deformation" have important parallels with post-Christian Europe that Clark might profitably engage. (1) America remains a place where old ideas go to die, and the common dominance of theory in the academic culture of both contemporary America and continental Europe is a noteworthy phenomenon given the differences between their public cultures.

Clark's spirited defense of history accompanied by an implacable rejection of presentism presents an important challenge on several levels. Many critics will simply reject his argument as anachronistic: one reviewer likened him to a Georgian nobleman eyeing the encroachments of agrarian and industrial reform with unease. They doubtless will insist that Clark fails to give due weight to the contributions of scholarship focused on race, class, and gender in revitalizing tired debates and broadening perspectives. Others in the United States will attack Clark as subversive for debunking grand narratives or charge him with lapsing into a historicism that undermines objectivity and embraces moral relativism. Both groups of critics avoid the questions Clark poses by casting his perspective as cranky or idiosyncratic, and their very failure to engage the issues at stake underscores his point.

Our Shadowed Present shows that the past offers more than its disparagers think. Clark makes a persuasive case that the provocative conceptual frameworks that dominate academe are passing fads like the flies of summer. Humane skepticism and a stress on empiricism and contingency constitute an approach to intellectual life that remains a fecund and fundamentally Tory source of understanding. As William Faulkner observed in a different context, "The past isn't dead; it isn't even past."

1. James Kurth, "The Protestant Deformation and U.S. Foreign Policy," Orbis 48.2 (Spring 1998), 221-39.

WILLIAM ANTHONY HAY teaches history at Mississippi State University and is the author of The Whig Revival, 1808-1830 (2005).