As these questions suggest, Steinmetz-Jenkins rejects blanket prohibitions on presentism: “Some forms of presentism avoid the pitfalls that have made it a bad word to the profession,” as he wrote in our pages. A significant source for this re-evaluation is David Armitage’s 2017 paper “In Defence of Presentism.” Presentism, Armitage writes, is a “less polite” term for “anachronism, the willful or inadvertent misunderstanding of the past by applying standards or interpretations from outside the immediate era, context, or milieu under study.”
Armitage doesn’t exactly defend anachronism, but he does insist that before historians can reject presentism they should be more precise about what they mean by it. He offers a useful analytic summary of the word’s often underspecified meanings. He ranges across philosophy, psychology, and historiography to propose clearer definitions of presentism and to delimit the forms he thinks historians cannot avoid. His treatment is tremendously elucidating, but his conclusion is perhaps unsurprising. Since “we have no direct access to the past any more than we can immediately grasp the future,” therefore “our reconstruction of history can only take place in the present, just as our imagination of events to come occurs in the here and now.”
But Armitage’s ultimate questions are ethical. He begins by asking what the discipline of history “can do for human flourishing,” and that question frames his essay. While the precision he brings to bear on presentism is indispensable, he is vaguer about human flourishing. There are of course instances of applied or activist academic history in which a more or less direct benefit to flourishing might be conferred. But that accounts for such a tiny proportion of scholarly work that making it the measure of the discipline can hardly be the goal.
What if the answer to the question of how much the study of history enables flourishing is, at least much of the time, “not much” — that is, unless flourishing encompasses something like the availability of study for its own sake? In The Higher Learning in America (1918), Thorstein Veblen argued that scholarship was modern society’s distinctive way of fulfilling the drive, which he took to be an anthropological constant across cultures, toward “idle curiosity.” Without some such justification, is history still worth doing?
Read Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins’s introduction to MIH’s forum on presentism here; his Review essay “Beyond the End of History” here; and David Armitage’s “In Defence of Presentism” here.
