New Issue: The Use and Abuse of History

From the editor: Our new Summer issue is now live on HedgehogReview.com! Subscribers will have full access to an exciting slate of reviews and essays from familiar favorites and new authors such as Eric B. Schnurer, Martha Bayles, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Brian Patrick Eha, Ryan Kemp, Philip Weinstein, John M. Owen, B.D. McClay, Philip S. Gorski, Jay Tolson, and many others.

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"The Use and Abuse of History," the Summer issue's theme, seeks to uncover what the study of history can (or cannot) contribute to our communities, political culture, and ourselves. As senior editor Kyle Edward Williams writes in "From the Editor," "We live in a moment in which people look to history to find out what is missing—and to imagine what to do." This search for an understanding of the past that can be useful for us today hearkens back to a deep tradition within American and European intellectual life:

"'What is important for us?' asked a young Van Wyck Brooks in 1918, then still in the springtime of his long career as a historian and literary critic. 'The past is an inexhaustible storehouse of apt attitudes and adaptable ideals; it opens of itself at the touch of desire.' Brooks made an impassioned plea for a form of history bound not by inert facts and impersonal scholarship but one driven by a creative impulse to revive the spiritual welfare of the nation. 'For the spiritual past has no objective reality,' he reminded, 'it yields only what we are able to look for in it.' What Brooks looked for—and what his generation of young intellectuals and progressive historians set about writing—was what he called a usable past."

Continue reading "From the Editor."

From the new issue: The idea that history can be used to change the world is a powerful and alluring one—probably because it seems to work, at least sometimes. Prominent scholars and politicians use history to create patriotic narratives that lend support for a political vision of American exceptionalism, say, or of liberal democracy. Others use history to do the opposite: to critique the power structures of politics and society—and also to support their own political agendas and movements.

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, professor of intellectual history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, shows in her penetrating essay, "Nietzsche's Quarrel with History," how the great German thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche, identified the uses and abuses of history. One of his key insights was that things can quickly go wrong when we expect history to do too much.

"Using history to cultivate bonds of affiliation while not letting those bonds harden into smugness, ressentiment, and forms of political and legal exclusion is exceptionally difficult and rarely pulled off. That is why the stakes of using history wisely are so high. The point of Nietzsche's essay on history is not to downplay the importance of a historical consciousness, but—quite the opposite—to stress the centrality of healthy historical awareness to a culture's integrity and vitality. For that reason, he thought that the task of creating and sustaining such a consciousness was supremely challenging."

Also from the new issue: It is perhaps cliché to say that we live in an age of technological disruption, but whatever you call it, the acceleration of digital technologies over the last few decades has hardly left untouched any facet of our economic, social, and political lives. We have only begun to reckon with the crisis of governance caused by this disruption, writes Eric B. Schnurer in "Democracy Disrupted." But Schnurer, a writer and public policy expert, argues that technology is not the sole driver of history. The relationship among culture, politics, and technology is dialectical—each shaping and being shaped by the other. The challenge we face is to rethink governance in an increasingly virtual and massively distributed world:

"The vast majority of people are now able to imagine the world as they want it to be, to work with others to attain that reality, and to believe that they have done so. In many cases, they actually have. We indeed are living in a time of tremendous freedoms and, in the democratization of virtually everything, a Golden Age of Democracy.

"The vetocracy emerging from this hyperdemocratic state of affairs—in which we all expect to get everything we want, including blocking anyone else who wants something different—is, however, both illiberal and antisocial. As 'reality' has become more and more personalized, the right and necessity to protect that reality against alternative realities has become more compelling. Trump's encouragement of his supporters to armed insurrection was merely a reflection of the coming 'democratization' of force. It is a forewarning of the future of government—of 'legitimate force'—itself, when, as Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum argue in their book, The Future of Violence, we all will have our own drones, WMDs, or worse. The current threat, in sum, is not really a centralized 'authoritarianism.' It is a dispersed reality and a nearly universal intolerance of everyone else's. All of this is incubating within a social framework shaped largely by communications channels constructed specifically to encourage anger, disagreement, and the spread of rumor and falsehood, because these propagate most readily and thus generate the most revenue for their owners."