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Creer en la historia
La historia fue una potencia y la gran creencia de los tiempos modernos. Auténtica teología organizaba el mundo y le daba sentido. Nos pusimos a su servicio, hasta el punto de enceguecernos, incluso de cometer lo peor en su nombre. Jueza suprema de las conductas y de los acontecimientos, entusiasmó y aterrorizó. En tanto que asunto de los historiadores, ambicionó ser una ciencia, mientras que los novelistas se dedicaron a decir este mundo atravesado por la Historia.
Desde los años ochenta esta omnipotencia ha sido cuestionada. Nuestra relación con el pasado, en adelante, es más un asunto de memoria que de historia: demasiado imprevisible o demasiado previsible, el porvenir parece haber desaparecido de nuestro horizonte y el historiador está atrapado en la urgencia del presente. Actualmente justiciable antes que jueza, a la historia le cuesta cumplir su papel de vínculo entre el pasado, el presente y el futuro. ¿qué sentido darle hoy en día a la palabra “historia”?
En la estela de sus trabajos sobre el tiempo, François Hartog convoca, durante esta amplia investigación sobre nuestro mundo contemporáneo, a historiadores, filósofos y novelistas –de Tucídides a Braudel, de Aristóteles a Ricoeur, de Balzac a McCarthy-con el fin de poner de relieve lo que hoy mismo se juega esta época.
Desde los años ochenta esta omnipotencia ha sido cuestionada. Nuestra relación con el pasado, en adelante, es más un asunto de memoria que de historia: demasiado imprevisible o demasiado previsible, el porvenir parece haber desaparecido de nuestro horizonte y el historiador está atrapado en la urgencia del presente. Actualmente justiciable antes que jueza, a la historia le cuesta cumplir su papel de vínculo entre el pasado, el presente y el futuro. ¿qué sentido darle hoy en día a la palabra “historia”?
En la estela de sus trabajos sobre el tiempo, François Hartog convoca, durante esta amplia investigación sobre nuestro mundo contemporáneo, a historiadores, filósofos y novelistas –de Tucídides a Braudel, de Aristóteles a Ricoeur, de Balzac a McCarthy-con el fin de poner de relieve lo que hoy mismo se juega esta época.
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
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About the author
François Hartog
44 books26 followersFrançois Hartog is a French historian and Chair of Modern and Antique Historiography at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Born in 1946, Hartog attended the 'École normale supérieure. A former student of Jean-Pierre Vernant and assistant to Reinhart Koselleck, Hartog’s early work focused on the intellectual history of ancient Greece and historiography, while his recent work deals mainly with temporality.
His most recent book to be published in English, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time (Columbia University Press, 2015, translated by Saskia Brown), engages our “ways of relating to the past, present, and future.” Hartog also tackles the concept of “presentism,” or how we adhere to present-day ideas to attempt to understand the past via interpretations of writing as the “motor of history” and the “contradictory qualities of our contemporary presentist relation to time.”
Hartog’s research frequently attempts to situate the progressions of time and memory against the realities of repetition and methodologies of understanding history from various theoretical reference points.
His other publications include Mémoire d'Ulysse: récits sur la frontière en Grèce ancienne (Gallimard, 1996), Anciens, modernes, sauvages (Galaade, 2005), and Vidal-Naquet, historien en personne (La Découverte, 2007), as well as countless articles, lectures, and, more recently, a series of podcasts on ancient and modern history.
Selected Bibliography
-Le Miroir d'Hérodote. Essai sur la représentation de l'autre, Gallimard, 1980.
-Le XIXe siècle et l'histoire. Le cas Fustel de Coulanges, PUF, 1988.
-Les Usages politiques du passé, avec Jacques Revel, EHESS, 2001,
-Régimes d'historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps, Le Seuil, 2002 (Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, Columbia University Press, 2015; translated by Saskia Brown)
-Anciens, modernes, sauvages, Galaade, 2005.
-Évidence de l'histoire. Ce que voient les historiens, EHESS, 2005.
-Vidal-Naquet, historien en personne, La Découverte, 2007.
-Croire en l'histoire, Flammarion, 2013.
-Partir pour la Grèce, Flammarion, 2015.
His most recent book to be published in English, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time (Columbia University Press, 2015, translated by Saskia Brown), engages our “ways of relating to the past, present, and future.” Hartog also tackles the concept of “presentism,” or how we adhere to present-day ideas to attempt to understand the past via interpretations of writing as the “motor of history” and the “contradictory qualities of our contemporary presentist relation to time.”
Hartog’s research frequently attempts to situate the progressions of time and memory against the realities of repetition and methodologies of understanding history from various theoretical reference points.
His other publications include Mémoire d'Ulysse: récits sur la frontière en Grèce ancienne (Gallimard, 1996), Anciens, modernes, sauvages (Galaade, 2005), and Vidal-Naquet, historien en personne (La Découverte, 2007), as well as countless articles, lectures, and, more recently, a series of podcasts on ancient and modern history.
Selected Bibliography
-Le Miroir d'Hérodote. Essai sur la représentation de l'autre, Gallimard, 1980.
-Le XIXe siècle et l'histoire. Le cas Fustel de Coulanges, PUF, 1988.
-Les Usages politiques du passé, avec Jacques Revel, EHESS, 2001,
-Régimes d'historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps, Le Seuil, 2002 (Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, Columbia University Press, 2015; translated by Saskia Brown)
-Anciens, modernes, sauvages, Galaade, 2005.
-Évidence de l'histoire. Ce que voient les historiens, EHESS, 2005.
-Vidal-Naquet, historien en personne, La Découverte, 2007.
-Croire en l'histoire, Flammarion, 2013.
-Partir pour la Grèce, Flammarion, 2015.
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October 21, 2024In this book ("Believing in History", not translated yet), Hartog continues to stick to the threefold distinction he has launched in his first major book, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, a distinction which he largely derived from the German historian-philosopher Reinhart Koselleck: until the 18th century the classical view of history as a teacher (magister vitae) dominated, the past as a source of moral lessons for young and old. Then gradually came the breakthrough of the modern history regime that saw the historical developments as a linear development, focused on a (brilliant) future, and thus especially in service of progress (of whatever kind); Hartog describes this as the era of "faith in History". This era clearly has ended, and according to Hartog has been replaced by presentism, the vision on time that erases all distinctions between past, present and future and in which the present dominates; presentism manifests itself in the flight that 'memorial history' has taken, especially since the 1970s: concepts such as memory, commemoration, patrimony and identity are the most characteristic manifestations of this.
Much better than in his first book, Hartog is able to illustrate these different "regimes of historicity", partly on the basis of literature and historiography itself. In this sense, this book is much more accessible and readable, although, for example, his very detailed discussion of literary-historical concepts in Plato and Aristotle in part 2 is of a very abstract level and for a non-philosophically educated reader almost inimitable.
But I continue to have an issue with, in my opinion, Hartog’s much too simple presentation: the tripartite division between the different successive historicity regimes is far too simplistic, too generalizing. For starters, you can endlessly discuss the chronology: Hartog constantly contradicts himself about the beginning of presentism. First he situates that in the 1970s and 1980s, then immediately after the First World War, and then again after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989. Hartog indicates that the modern historicity regime got serious blows after the First World War. But this is in manifest contradiction with the fact that this regime was given a new boost with the Russian Revolution of 1917, and even more so in the optimistic 'age of the Golden Thirty Years' after the Second World War in the West. Moreover, the linear-progress view, oriented on the future, already flourished in christian historiography, long before the 18th Century. Even now, ideologies and convictions are omnipresent that both focus on the future and the past, not the present (the revival of religious fundamentalism in the Islamic world and in the US, for example). And at the same time, you cannot deny that there still is a very large stream of historical work that is inspired by the very classic, exemplary model. Hartog occasionally indicates that his various historicity regimes cannot be completely separated from each other chronologically, but still he’s sticking to his threefold sequence.
His position is even weaker when you look at his theory on a broader scale, namely in a cultural-geographical sense. Just like in his previous book, Hartog (like most French intellectuals) focuses almost exclusively on French history and literature; occasionally he makes an attempt to look a bit broader (his analysis of the work of Robert Musil and W. G. Sebald, for example, is very interesting). But the essence of his regime theory is fully occidental! That’s strange, because the notion of 'temporality' in the sense of Reinhart Koselleck, lends itself perfectly to a much more globalized view of looking at the past: why not consider what historicity regimes there are to discern in non-Western cultural spheres (Islamic, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Latin American, African etc.)? At the end of his book Hartog indicates that he is aware of this eurocentric shortcoming, and he briefly zooms in on the new insights that Global History yields. He rightly draws the conclusion that there is some perspective in this approach, since it distances itself from a too monopolistic view (which in my opinion is the essence of Global History): « thus, we still believe in history (we avoid the capital H), which, in total, would regain another formula of evidence (certainly less glorious and imperious): globalized, that is to say, fragmented and multiplied , rid of the illusion of a collective singular, history, rendered in the plural of its forms and the variety of its uses, cognitive, playful, political»(pp 281)
And so I ended reading this book with the ambiguous feeling that Hartog's theory of "regimes of historicity" does rightly emphasize the importance of the past-present-future relationship, but by its simplistic, generalizing and too Western view overshoots its target.
Much better than in his first book, Hartog is able to illustrate these different "regimes of historicity", partly on the basis of literature and historiography itself. In this sense, this book is much more accessible and readable, although, for example, his very detailed discussion of literary-historical concepts in Plato and Aristotle in part 2 is of a very abstract level and for a non-philosophically educated reader almost inimitable.
But I continue to have an issue with, in my opinion, Hartog’s much too simple presentation: the tripartite division between the different successive historicity regimes is far too simplistic, too generalizing. For starters, you can endlessly discuss the chronology: Hartog constantly contradicts himself about the beginning of presentism. First he situates that in the 1970s and 1980s, then immediately after the First World War, and then again after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989. Hartog indicates that the modern historicity regime got serious blows after the First World War. But this is in manifest contradiction with the fact that this regime was given a new boost with the Russian Revolution of 1917, and even more so in the optimistic 'age of the Golden Thirty Years' after the Second World War in the West. Moreover, the linear-progress view, oriented on the future, already flourished in christian historiography, long before the 18th Century. Even now, ideologies and convictions are omnipresent that both focus on the future and the past, not the present (the revival of religious fundamentalism in the Islamic world and in the US, for example). And at the same time, you cannot deny that there still is a very large stream of historical work that is inspired by the very classic, exemplary model. Hartog occasionally indicates that his various historicity regimes cannot be completely separated from each other chronologically, but still he’s sticking to his threefold sequence.
His position is even weaker when you look at his theory on a broader scale, namely in a cultural-geographical sense. Just like in his previous book, Hartog (like most French intellectuals) focuses almost exclusively on French history and literature; occasionally he makes an attempt to look a bit broader (his analysis of the work of Robert Musil and W. G. Sebald, for example, is very interesting). But the essence of his regime theory is fully occidental! That’s strange, because the notion of 'temporality' in the sense of Reinhart Koselleck, lends itself perfectly to a much more globalized view of looking at the past: why not consider what historicity regimes there are to discern in non-Western cultural spheres (Islamic, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Latin American, African etc.)? At the end of his book Hartog indicates that he is aware of this eurocentric shortcoming, and he briefly zooms in on the new insights that Global History yields. He rightly draws the conclusion that there is some perspective in this approach, since it distances itself from a too monopolistic view (which in my opinion is the essence of Global History): « thus, we still believe in history (we avoid the capital H), which, in total, would regain another formula of evidence (certainly less glorious and imperious): globalized, that is to say, fragmented and multiplied , rid of the illusion of a collective singular, history, rendered in the plural of its forms and the variety of its uses, cognitive, playful, political»(pp 281)
And so I ended reading this book with the ambiguous feeling that Hartog's theory of "regimes of historicity" does rightly emphasize the importance of the past-present-future relationship, but by its simplistic, generalizing and too Western view overshoots its target.
October 28, 2018
The merit of this book is that it makes Hartog's first book on historicity regimes more accessible: in this book, Hartog is making a lot of effort to formulate his theory more clearly and give it more background, and that is fruitful. Much more than in "Régimes d'historicité", the reader gains an insight into the evolution that perception of history (and time) as such and of historiography as a métier has undergone. Particularly the third and fourth parts of this book provide more concrete material: in the evolution of literature (third part) and of historiography (fourth part). But still, I continue to have problems with Hartog's strict three-way division in historicity regimes and in his opinion that today presentism dominates everything. See my review in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
March 29, 2025
Retirei este livro na biblioteca da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina porque estava buscando livros que fizessem alguma correlação com História e ficção, com regimes da verdade ou algo assim. Me deparei por acaso com este na prateleira, algo que acontece muito quando a gente vai à biblioteca. Procura um livro, não acha, e acaba pegando um que estaria perto dele. Embora seja de leitura tranquila e fluida fiquei um pouco decepcionado com o livro, pensei que seria um livro que trataria de crença, de verdades e mentiras, mas encontrei um livro que discute a própria História, ou seja, os acontecimentos por ela apresentados. Então dessa vez a semelhança por proximidade não funcionou.
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