Measuring Time, Making History

by Lynn Hunt

Time is the crucial ingredient in history, and yet historians rarely talk about time as such. These essays offer new insight into the development of modern conceptions of time, from the Christian dating system (BC/AD or BCE/CE) to the idea of "modernity" as a new epoch in human history.

Genres: History, Philosophy, Anthropology

146 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 2008

About the author

Lynn Avery Hunt is the Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her area of expertise is the French Revolution, but she is also well known for her work in European cultural history on such topics as gender. Her 2007 work, Inventing Human Rights, has been heralded as the most comprehensive analysis of the history of human rights. She served as president of the American Historical Association in 2002.

Reviews

[Marc · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book focusses on the concept of temporality that is underlying the study of history, as it was developed as an academic discipline between the 17th and the 19th century. This concept often is associated with ‘modernity’. Hunt sketches the strengths and weaknesses of this way of looking at the past. In this she subscribes to the theory developed by the German philosopher of history Reinhart Koselleck in the 1970’s, but also offers a way out of the modernity-focus. An interesting but a bit shallow book, a transcript of lectures Hunt gave (2.5 stars).
For a more elaborate review, see my History-account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Sense of History]

This booklet contains three lectures that Lynn Hunt, former professor of History at the University of California, L.A., gave in Budapest, in 2006. She focuses on a few, mostly implicit assumptions of Western historiography and, by extension, of the Western looking at the past.

In the first place, that is the time concept: Western historians in general don't bother about the issue of 'time', but in practice use a Newtonian time frame, which is linear, homogeneous and universal. Hunt outlines how that underlying vision has gradually been incorporated into historiography. The introduction of the Christian dating method around the (non-existent) year 0 played a major role in this: “Since it opened the way to infinite regress into the deep past, the establishment of ‘bc’ made it possible to sever the study of time from its religious origins and pursue secular aims and explanations instead.”

A second, inevitable focus is the concept of ‘modernity’. Hunt reveals that this also is a conceptual framework that has gradually come into the picture, now covers many loads, and is not always adequate. This part of the book is the most interesting. She rightly points out that the concept of modernity is contaminated by the implicit assumption that modern times are the crowning glory of a step-by-step, universally applicable development: “As a dimension or background grid, it is assumed to be universal, homogenous, and ‘deep’ in the sense of stretching back very, very far in time. Its meanings are secular and natural rather than divine or supernatural. Finally, it posits a new relationship to the future, which can only be developed once time has been secularized and naturalized. In the new relationship to the future, people come to believe that study of the natural (and social) world will enable them to ‘make progress’, ‘get ahead’, ‘become more advanced’, ‘make up for lost time’, in other words, gain some kind of control over the passing of time.”

The French Revolution, in particular, is seen as a decisive dividing line: there was an intentional break with the past, putting the present in the first place: “In the herculean effort to break with the past, the revolutionaries created a kind of ‘mythic present’, a sense that they were redrafting the social contract and recapturing a kind of primal moment of national community. With events falling one upon the other at high speed, the present seemed elongated”. It is precisely this gap between the past and the present that made it possible to study the past in a way that has been created in 19th century academic historiography.

Hunt broadly agrees with what the German historian-theorist Reinhart Koselleck since the 1970s has written about the different temporalities (past-present-future). But curiously, she disputes that modernism is an exclusively Western matter: modernism indeed originated from the Western approach to reality, but it is not inherently Western, as witnessed by the acceptance of the concept by just about all non-Western cultures. I am not convinced by that reasoning.

Hunt also ventures into alternatives to look at history and time. Because both the concept of homogeneous, universal time and that of modernity have come under fire, and rightly so. Yet this part is the weakest of her book. Hunt clearly distances herself from the teleological aspect of the modernist vision: the implicit (and often explicit) assumption that history is evolving in a specific direction, whether or not in various steps, with modernity as the crowning glory. “There is no need to argue that history lacks all sense of direction any more than one need claim that evolution is directionless. Both have been characterized by the development of greater complexity, whether in social organization or in the progression from bacteria to the human brain. Greater complexity in evolution may have established the conditions for the emergence of human reason, but greater complexity in social organization does not guarantee either the emancipation or triumph of reason. If the parallel with evolution works, then historians must grant that our current sense of where we are is not a sign of the telos of history—and that serious reversals are entirely possible in the future. Natural selection favors adaptation, but it also leads on occasion into dead ends.”

According to her, it is necessary to go back in time and look at non-teleological views of history, as can be found with historians of the 16th and 17th centuries. This is strange, because certainly in this period there are countless examples of teleological views (mostly religious). In line with Sanjay Subrahmanyam she rather points to non-Western forms of global, universalist historiography: “Here, in this discovery of world history before world history, this rediscovery of an 'imperfect', relentlessly accumulating world history rather than the neatly packaged new style world history that leads inexorably to globalization, the endless pursuit of newer and newer histories itself comes full circle, showing that historical development is not always linear and teleological but sometimes cyclical and ultimately non-teleological. By extending our notions of historicality, then, we can retrace paths long effaced by the great superhighways of intellectual endeavor (Hegelianism, say, or modernization theory), thereby recovering alternative routes to the present and future.”

Hunt does not delve deeper into this, and that is a pity. In general, the whole book suffers from the fact that it is the transcript of lectures: the author introduces her subjects, but has little room to explore them in depth, and the text often stops when it starts to become interesting. (2.5 stars)

Post-read addition: I just read Breaking Up Time: Negotiating the Borders Between Present, Past and Future, published in 2013, in which Hunt has a short contribution. It's a blunt summary of the above book, but ... with a completely different conclusion! Now Hunt concludes that there isn't much alternative to the 'modernist' view on time, because that is what historians do, and they're good at it. It looks like she's taken a Pragmatist Turn, 7 years after her lectures.

[Jean Chu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting read if you want to dwell into time and history with a comprehensive structure and story to it.