Historicism, Modernism and the Left: Part 1 — Introduction
This text has had an protracted genesis. Started in 2016 it has continued to expand ever since, until the necessity of publishing in sections became unavoidable.
So this text will be published in 4 sections. This preface and prologue being the first part. The second part will be the investigation on the theoretical critique of historicism, mainly concentrating on Althusser’s critique in Reading Capital. This part is unavoidably dry stuff, as it makes little or no reference to current struggles or questions of strategy. The third part will be the theoretical investigation of modernism, as seen from the perspective of the critique of historicism introduced in part 2. Finally, part 4 will be a non-exhaustive look at how the problem of historicist-modernist ideology impacts on a number of problems facing the contemporary anti-capitalist movement, including theoretical conflicts between various brands of Marxism and Feminism, left modernist attacks on postcolonial theory and international solidarity with movements such as the Zapatistas and the Kurdish Freedom Movement. Conclusions and future perspectives will either be wrapped into part 4 or assigned to an additional part 5, depending on final length of the last section.
Introduction
“Always historicize!” was the slogan the US Marxist cultural critic Frederic Jameson made the opening line of his 1981 book, “The Political Unconscious”. Great slogan. But what does it mean? And is it actually good or bad advice? In order to answer these question we need to investigate what meaning or meanings historicism, and the commandment to historicise, contain. Not as an academic exercise, but as a prelude to understanding what effect these ideas have had on the thought and activity of left and contestational movements.
Prologue: From Dreamtime to the End of History
People have always told stories about the deeds of past ancestors, gods and heroes. However the transition from a story-based cultural engagement with the past, to the contemporary concept of history as an accumulating line of progress, is relatively recent in the human story, dating to the early modern period and locating in the European cultures that began to define their contemporaneity, relative to the past, in a new and different way — as modernity.
Of course the idea of the past as a place where gods and heroes were bigger and bolder than they are in the contemporary, is far older. The ancient Greek poet, Hesiod, thought to be a contemporary of Homer’s, described a past Golden Age in contrast with which contemporary society was corrupt and venal. While Hesiod’s five Ages of Man schema, echoes modern ideas of historical stages, it differs most strikingly in that the stages are stages of degeneration from perfection to absolute degradation. And this is a general feature of Golden Age thinking — that things were at their best in an unreachable lost period in the past and that the contemporary is a lesser age, the era or epoch of decline.
Cyclic history, in which cultures go through successive golden ages, followed inevitably by periods of decline ending in (usually catastrophic) rebirth and the recommencement of the cycle, dominated much thinking about the relation between the contemporary and the past throughout the ancient and medieval world. [In passing we should note that the historical validity of concepts like “the medieval world”, at a global level anyway, is part of what we want to question in this piece, but for simplicity we use them in the common way until it is time to specifically deconstruct them].
This picture starts to change in Western European societies in the Early Modern period. We see the emergence of the idea of historical progress and the related idea of “advanced” and “backwards” societies, relative to a monotonically increasing line of social development. The reasons for this are worth an essay in their own right and Kaviraj’s essay on modernism¹ includes a useful summary.
Suffice it to say that by the mid-18th century, Enlightenment philosopher such as Turgot and Adam Smith had established an orthodox bourgeois “Four Stages” theory of history. Rather than the spiritual and pessimistic stages of degeneration of Hesiod and Ovid’s Ages of man, the four stages of primitive, hunter-gatherer, peasant and commercial societies presented a more optimistic view of progressive improvement in human societies, both materially and morally.
This four stage model remained dominant from the 18th century to well into the 20th and shaped derivative historiographical schools such as Whig history and, in a radicalised form, the four-plus-one stage model of Marxist historiography of unilinear progression from primitive, ancient, feudal, capitalist to communist as the universal trajectory of human development. The addition of a fifth stage beyond capitalism as the true final destination or “telos” (end/purpose) of teleological history should not overshadow the fact that more connects the Marxist version to its bourgeois template than separates it.
Sections
Historicism, Modernism and the Left: Part 2 — Historicism
Historicism, Modernism and the Left: Part 3 — Modernism
Historicism, Modernism and the Left: Part 4 — Problems of Left Modernism
Historicism, Modernism and the Left: Part 5 — Conclusions (forthcoming)
Notes:
- Kaviraj, Sudipta, ‘An Outline of a Revisionist Theory of Modernity’, European Journal of Sociology 46(03):497–526 · December 2005