Presentism

Abstract

Presentism

Perry Anderson

University of California, Los Angeles

The charge , if not the term, of  ‘presentism’,  as the abstraction of ideas of the past from their historical context for misuse of them in the present,  first gained salience with Butterfield’s Whig Interpretation of History, written in the early thirties.  Probably current in Cambridge by the fifties, the term acquired full force with early methodological texts of Skinner, Dunn and Pocock, polemicizing against the history of ideas as practised by Lovejoy or Sabine, or in a different register Macpherson.  Proposing a radical transformation of the way the field should be studied, these found exemplification in  Pocock’s Ancient Constitution, Skinner’s Foundation, Dunn’s  Political Thought of John Locke. No protocol of the ‘Cambridge School’  was more severe, or won wider acceptance, than its prohibition of presentism. Political ideas of the past belonged to languages of the past, which were not continuous with those of the present, and had to be reconstructed if the true meaning of any text articulated within them was to be understood. They were not available for ignorant transport into contemporary discourse.

The Cambridge ‘revolution in the history of the political thought’, though it insisted on the primacy of historical context, did not on the whole apply its precepts to itself. But its original setting seems fairly clear: the post-war  consensus  in the Anglosphere, in which linguistic philosophy flourished and the end of ideology was promised. This was, at least internally, a markedly depoliticized arena (externally, of course, the Cold War was far from over). In continental Europe, no such comfortable conditions obtained. There, against the recent backdrop of fascism and resistance to it, and an ongoing scenery of communism and the battle to contain or repress it, ideological passions ran far higher. Unsurprisingly, the admonitions of the Cambridge School were less observed. In the Germany of the fifties and early sixties, the two leading works in the history of ideas, Koselleck’s Kritik und Krise (1954) and Habermas’s Strukturwandel (1962),  could in their own fashion be seen as no less of a revolution in method, and findings, than the work of the Cambridge historians was felt to be in Britain. But each had no compunction in making direct —if antithetical connexions between Enlightenment concepts of the public sphere and burning contemporary concerns:  the dangers of totalitarianism, the culture of commercialized media and the politics of acclamation. 

Such European usages of the past have persisted. It is enough to think of Bobbio, who started writing on Hobbes in the forties. Three decades later, he moved without a tremor to a transposition of the design of Leviathan  to the risks of war in a nuclear age, arguing for the need for a single super-power with a monopoly of terminal inter-state violence  if a stable peace was to be secured  (Il problema della guerra e le vie della pace, 1979).  Or conversely:  Habermas could take up Kant’s  scheme for a perpetual peace, without any sense of awkwardness or incongruity,  as a maquette for  UN humanitarian interventions in the nineties.  Or, more recently: Rosanvallon, restoring Guizot to public notice for the benefit of a recovery of French liberalism in the eighties —Le Moment Guizot (1985)  as a flanking operation of ‘le moment Furet’ of the time— musters him to the same ends in La contre-démocratie  (2006) twenty years later. Presentism has not been a major anxiety in these continental declensions. 

It might be objected that none of these thinkers, with the exception of Koselleck, could be regarded as a historian in the strict sense – even Koselleck incurring the charge of practising something closer to a philosophical than a conventional form of history. But if we look at the latter-day productions of the Cambridge historians themselves, they have long since departed from the antiseptic prescriptions of their youth. The reasons for that change are not hard to seek.  The placid verities of the fifties have lost their hold. Skinner’s Liberty before Liberalism (1998), seeking to recall ‘neo-Roman’ ideas of liberty to be found in Nedham, Harrington or Sidney, as freedom of dependence on the will of others, offers them as an antidote to Hobbes’s negative conception of freedom  as mere absence of impediment to action, that has become conventional wisdom. This construction, plainly a reaction to the era of Thatcherism, would be taxed with just the sin that Skinner made his name condemning.  In the eyes of Worden and Pocock, it was patently presentist. Dunn, more radically dissatisfied with what had become of Western democracy, turned in Setting the People Free (2005) to Robespierre and Babeuf  for insights into the limits which ‘the order of egoism’ has placed on it. Even Pocock,  the most authoritative of all,  has not resisted the lure of  the present. The Machiavellian Moment already ended with Watergate. But his way of linking the past to the present has characteristically differed.  Richard Nixon could figure in Pocock’s pages as a creature of the Old Whig imagination, but overt proffering of thinkers of the past for present instruction is not his way, at once more oblique and more direct.  The Discovery of Islands (2005) puts no Tucker or Gibbon to service. But its searing attack on the dismantling of national sovereignty, and the triumphs of commodification, in the European Union  —object of admiration for Skinner— is more pointedly political than anything Pocock’s colleagues have allowed themselves.  There is no need for its line of descent to be traced. That we are dealing with republicanism in the peculiarly trenchant sense that, early on,  Pocock brought home to moderns is never in doubt.

Is all this recidivist, a late lapse to presentism?  The term is liable to a confusion. The meaning of a political idea can only be understand in its historical – social, intellectual, linguistic - context. To wrench it out of these is anachronism. But, contrary to the tired adage attributed to Wittgenstein, meaning and use are not the same. Ideas from the past may acquire contemporary relevance – even, on occasion, more than they originally possessed - without misprision. There is no guarantee against their distortion; nor of their mummification.