Presentism? Democracy between the historical, genealogical, and historial.
Ajay Skaria
“In 2022, then-AHR President James Sweet’s article “Is History History” courted controversy and opened up debates on the role of history and historians. The topic has enabled us to reflect on historians’ craft while moving beyond the idea that we need to respond to events only when they are in the news cycle, as they were. We are using these essays as a meditation on presentism and as the beginning of an ongoing conversation.”
Alice at St. Stephen's. Alice and the caterpillar, representing a judge. Title of Work: The Westminster Alice, Illustrated by F. Carruthers Gould. London : Westminster Gazette, 1902. Credit: From the British Library archive. Shelfmark: 12332.ff.15.
To his immense credit, following the fierce criticisms of his article, “Is History History,” AHR President James Sweet apologized fulsomely. He acknowledged that instead of opening up a conversation on how to do history in these politically charged times, his examples and “ham-fisted attempt at provocation” unintentionally “foreclosed this conversation,” and caused “anger and dismay” amongst members.
In the wake of that controversy, what still seems worth dwelling on is a concept that in many ways organized both Sweet’s article, and the many responses to it—the concept of presentism. Indeed, Sweet’s apology brought that concept more sharply into view—in it, he insisted that he stood by his attempt to “to draw attention to methodological flaws in teleological presentism.” He regrets primarily that his criticisms of presentism were “clumsy.”
Perhaps the entire matter needs to be understood somewhat differently. It is not so much that Sweet’s examples of presentism are clumsy or “ham-fisted” as that his very conception of presentism is inadequate. And yet, this conception of presentism is worth staying with for a while. This is not so much in order to criticize Sweet’s formulations, though that too may have to happen alongside. It is more because the conception provides a gateway into questions that can deepen our understanding of the work of history, as well as of its relation with democracy.
For Sweet, presentism is the approach that finds the “predictable sameness of the present in the past”; it is the use by people of “history as an evidentiary grab-bag to articulate their political positions.” Sweet is by no means alone in this conception of presentism. Not only those who sharply criticized him, but even more considered studies seem to view presentism in similar terms. For example, what Sweet describes comes close primarily to what David Armitage has, in an extraordinarily helpful classification, described as “analytical presentism” (a presentism that uses some of the criteria dominant in the present to judge the past) and secondarily a descriptive or “perspectival presentism” (on this, Armitage cites Lynn Hunt: “the shift of general historical interest toward the contemporary period and away from the more distant past.”).
Such a conception of presentism is by no means incorrect. But it is too preliminary. For one, it does not have the conceptual wherewithal to distinguish between presentism and the unavoidable phenomenon of our approach to the past being responsive to and shaped by present-day concerns. It recognizes that there is a difference between the two, of course. And yet, it repeatedly conflates them. So it is that Sweet describes presentism at one point as “our increasing tendency to interpret the past through the lens of the present.” And from an opposed perspective that affirms presentism, Armitage, too, conflates it with responsiveness to present-day concerns. Thus, he remarks that “antipathy to presentism also has ethical implications” since such antipathy assumes that “our duty is to the past and its inhabitants,” and by doing so, abandons our “duty to speak to the present.” Similarly, many of those who astutely criticize Sweet’s examples nevertheless do so by simply inverting the terms—sometimes asserting that all history is presentism. But is presentism synonymous with addressing present-day concerns? Or are we failing to conceptually distinguish between the two?
Second, neither Sweet nor his critics leave themselves with any means to conceptually distinguish between the two sorts of figures in his analysis: the anti-democratic Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas Alito on the one hand, and the more democratically-inclined Nikole Hanah-Jones and—unnamed-by-Sweet—professional historians on the other. True, one can distinguish between them in terms of the political stakes of their “presentism,” and Sweet’s critics have rightly reviled him for failing to do. But to anticipate what I shall be saying, we also need to distinguish between them conceptually: on the one hand, “presentism,” and on the other hand intimations of either the “history of the present” or what I shall be calling the historial approach. As long as we fail to do this and simply attack or defend presentism, we fail to have that very necessary conversation that Joan Scott reminded us of the need for—the conversation about the intellectual “line between a politically engaged critical history and a dogmatic reading of the past.”
Could the problem be this?: Sweet, Armitage, and many others who attack or defend presentism remain within the presumptions of the historicity from within which it emerged. Put differently, they work with a distinctive regime of historicity—that involved in homogenous and abstract time. That they do so is unsurprising. We inhabit a world where such a sense of time is so dominant as to be naturalized: it underpins both the nation-state and capitalism. Within such a regime, the present becomes a point in a continuum, systematically separated out from the past and future. Sweet’s remarks are symptomatic of this way of understanding history. For him, it is the “analysis of people’s ideas in their own time,” or “a way to study the messy, uneven process of change over time.” Such descriptions are not wrong, but they do not reflect on the framework of abstract and homogenous time within which the historical approach unfolds—for them, events are simply “in” or “over” this time. Relatedly, presentism appears as the inability to separate out events “in” time, the tendency to judge the past by the yardstick of the present.
Perhaps we need to begin differently—by attempting a more critical relation with the regime of historicity involved in abstract and homogenous time. As a first step towards such a relation, we could recall another term from the same family as presentism—presence. Multiple philosophical traditions have tussled with and complicated the idea of presence. By itself, presence might suggest a simple self-identity and a complete access to its presence for those encountering it. But these traditions have helped us recognize that such full presence is not possible, that absence courses through our everyday world. Even in everyday conversation we cannot ever make our meaning completely present, or say exactly what we mean. Conversation is also about what is absent—unsaid, perhaps unthought and unarticulated. But while most philosophical traditions have recognized absence and thus complicated presence, they have continued to accord primacy to presence. This complicated or recuperated presence, a presence with absence folded in, is the way we usually conceive of difference. For example, we commonsensically recognize that “civilizations” or “cultures” are internally differentiated, but these internal differentiations are folded into what presents itself to us as one—say, “Indian civilization.”
Only from the late nineteenth century onwards have dissenting philosophical traditions (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida especially) and political mobilizations (Gandhi, Ambedkar, and King especially) questioned the primacy of presence. What they have foregrounded instead is an irrecuperable and constitutive absence. This absence is what we think of sometimes as a distinctive kind of difference—a difference that cannot be substantialized, that remains spectral, and is articulated especially forcefully in Derrida’s neologism “differance.”
A handy way of distinguishing between various regimes of historicity would be in terms of how they organize the relation between presence and absence. Doing so would allow us to get beyond what otherwise seems the self-evident association of historicity with abstract time and space. It would also allow us to see better what disciplinary history—or, better, the historical approach, since what I am delineating here is hardly the practice only of professional historians—obscures from our view: where presentism rises from, and how there are ways of being intensely committed to present day concerns without resorting to presentism.
To get to the historical approach as a—the—modern regime of historicity, it helps to revisit the classic distinction between the judge and the historian. Since Marc Bloch, we have often thought of the juridical as engaged in the act of judging and the historical as engaged in the act of understanding. This is correct, but it is still too preliminary a way of putting matters. As Carlo Ginzburg, Ranajit Guha, and others have shown, historians also usually act as judges—for example, in deciding on the veracity of their sources or in privileging a certain narrative over others.
To clarify the stakes further, perhaps we should restate the distinction between the judge and the historian in terms of the play of presence and absence. In their exercise of the sovereign power of the state, judges are engaged in a particular way of judging—that of the decision. To decide is to foreground the present, and take only limited cognizance of what is absent. Thus, while judges may account for extenuating circumstances for a crime (on what is absent in the crime or shows itself only indirectly), they must continue to accord primacy to the crime itself.
Because disciplinary historians, too, must, on occasion, act as judges, they are adjacent to the judge. One important sense of this adjacency is that they are sovereign over the past; more correctly put, the discipline of history, with its protocols for producing “facts,” is sovereign over the past. David Armitage nicely puts his finger on this sovereignty when he remarks that “one fundamental value defining our professional creed” is “the commitment to separate the concerns of the present from the scientific treatment of the past. The past does not speak to us; we speak for the past. Nor does the past look at us: we examine the past. Historians control the interpretation of the past, but it cannot control us.”
But where judges exercise sovereignty by making the event present through their judgment (the decision), disciplinary historians exercise sovereignty through understanding. Four features of history as a modern form of sovereignty are noteworthy. First, understanding works centrally through the practice of contextualizing. To contextualize is to focus not only on what is present in an event, but on what is absent in it. In other words, to contextualize is to stress that an event is not full in itself, that it must also be understood in terms of what is it is not present to us, and that it is marked by an absence that is not entirely recuperable. And every event is capable of being understood in an infinite number of contexts, with each context finite and determinate in itself, but also prone to being undone by other contexts. Context thus introduces a constitutive instability and absence into the presence that juridical logic foregrounds.
Second, and relatedly, the insistence on context also attenuates or postpones the decision. Thus, historians often plead inability to answer questions such as “What really happened?” or “What is to be done?”; they are constitutively unsure that they have made present the full meaning of a phenomenon. Hence there is a tentativeness and caution with which historians are expected to make their arguments, and the centrality of revision and revisionism to the way the profession functions. Because the social sciences and the humanities emphasize understanding so much, the resolution of difference into a decision is nowhere near as important as it is to juridical reasoning.
Third, the historical approach is centered in abstract and homogenous time. The idea of context itself introduces this time—to contextualize, after all, is to place an event in abstract time and space. Most historians would stress that such contextualizing does not rule out beginning from present-day concerns (from a quick look at his other writings, I suspect Sweet would broadly concur, despite the hasty assertions to the contrary in his column). But for them, these concerns should not become criteria for evaluating the past. Rather, these concerns should reveal to us what might often have been invisible even to the actors themselves in the past—for example, the centrality of oppression along the lines of caste, race, or gender. Beyond that, each event should be understood in its own context, including the context that produced our interest in that event.
Fourth, while the historical approach stresses—certainly far more than the juridical decision—that presence is shot through by absence, it continues to accord primacy to presence; its thrust is on trying to recuperate absence for presence. That recuperation, marked already in the sovereignty of historians over their past, involves encountering any phenomenon—past, present, or future—in the spirit of “understanding.” In this broader sense, those who adopt the historical approach do not need to confine themselves only to the past. Rather, the spirit of understanding is broadly shared across the social sciences and humanities, making the line between history and other disciplines difficult to draw.
Obviously, not all disciplines share the emphasis on understanding to the same degree: economics and other policy-oriented disciplines are more oriented to the juridical rationality of making present, or the decision. Obviously, also, the juridical order too has, with modernity, come to be suffused with “understanding”: part of what Foucault does in Discipline and Punish is trace how “now a quite different question of truth is inscribed in the course of the penal judgment,” but arguably in the process, he attenuates too much the distinction between decision and understanding.
The judge and the historian also have a different relation with republican democracy (briefly, the democracy that accords primacy to the public sphere and so is subtly different from liberal democracy, which accords primacy to the private sphere). There is nothing democratic in itself about the juridical order or the sovereignty involved in the juridical decision. The judge only exemplifies the rule of law—a prerequisite for the everyday functioning of republican democracy, true, but by no means itself democratic.
The democratic element originates outside the juridical order—in encountering fellow citizens as equals and equally free. And with this democratic element the historical approach has a complex relation. As the ethical modality most proper to the Enlightenment as a global event (global because it is inseparable from imperialism and colonialism), the historical approach suffuses both the distinctive violence and the distinctive liberatory potential of that event.
Distinctive violence because where Enlightenment is violent—that is to say, where it refuses to recognize the equality of others—it does so in the name of history: either directly or indirectly, this violence is justified by casting its victims as not historical enough, as laggards in their place in abstract and homogenous time, as lacking the ability to contextualize, and so have a conscience (for what distinguishes the modern conscience from its forebears is precisely its foregrounding of contextualization as the cornerstone of conscience.) To these victims, the Enlightenment says either “not yet” (as in the case of the humans it bars from itself—women, the colonized, Blacks, at the very least) or “never” (as in the case of animals and, more flatly still, things.)
Distinctive liberatory potential because the exercise of republican democracy involves imbuing the historical approach with certain equality and liberty. This is so in two senses. First, because at least those to whom this event says “not yet” can fight back by its very criteria, claiming that these criteria reveal them to be fully equal to those included within the fold of the Enlightenment. It is this liberatory potential, centered around the sovereignty of man as human, which is enshrined in republican democracy, as also in the ideology of “liberal education,” which I have elsewhere described as an idealist impossible. Second, and within the world of republican democracy, the historical approach deepens equality: it allows us to encounter our fellow citizens not just as abstract equals in the presents, but as equals in a more interactive sense—in terms of the multiplicity of contexts which have shaped their equality.
Precisely because republican democracy has this unavoidable connection with the historical approach, marginalized groups must draw on the logic of history to claim democratic power as minorities. Again, in speaking truth to power, a historical perspective is necessary point of departure. The “history from below” tradition exemplifies the radical tendency within the historical perspective, excavating as it does the worlds of marginalized historical actors, drawing on their voices to challenge the dominant narrative.
Relatedly, a juridical system in a republican democracy recognizes that even as it must, in practice, set aside the historical approach in order to arrive at its own decisions, it must also continue to accord moral primacy to the historical approach. A striking example of this occurs, ironically, in the profoundly non-democratic context of colonial India, during Gandhi’s 1922 trial. There, the judge, arguably because he believes in the colonial rhetoric of the civilizing mission, recognizes both the legal wrongness and historical rightness of Gandhi’s actions and sentences Gandhi to prison.
We can now also more correctly describe the presentism that Sweet targets. It is a distinctive formation within the regime of abstract and homogenous time: it is the dereliction of that regime which, though staying within abstract and homogenous time, nevertheless fails to adhere to the historical approach or the historicity proper to that time.
Where the historical approach is marginalized in this way, there might arise the presentism that accords primacy to the juridical decision of making-present. It is here that history becomes the “evidentiary grab-bag” that it has for Alito. Or there might even arise something related but more frightening: the presentism of white supremacists who fetishize the Confederates, or the Hindutva supremacists who defend the razing of the mosque in Ayodhya on the grounds that there was once a Hindu temple at that very site.
These latter social groups are vitriolically opposed not only to the historical approach, but even to the factuality it shares as a premise with the juridical approach. Fearing that republican democracy has suffused presence with so much absence as to make facts themselves unstable, they seek not merely a non-democratic exercise of the juridical decision, but a juridical decision and sovereignty more that is no longer centered around “facts” but “sentiments.” (The Indian Supreme Court did just this in its extraordinary dereliction of factual reason in the Ayodhya judgment). The rise of such supremacisms exemplifies the return of what republican democracy and its historical approach represses in trying to make a home within the abstract and homogenous time of capitalism and the nation-state.
To be clear, I do not wish to suggest that presentism is by any means the preserve of the right. Certainly, in our current times the presentism of the right is incomparably more threatening. But we can forget only at our own peril that the left, too, can turn undemocratic. (By itself, leftism is only about the pursuit of social equity and equality. It becomes democratic only to the extent that it combines this pursuit with the practice of a political and moral equality and equity.) And when and where the left turns undemocratic, its presentism can be every bit as vicious as the presentism of the right.
Is a presentism also at work in the 1619 project created by Nikole Hannah-Jones, or Ta Nehisi’s Coates’ essays, or in the brilliant work of Saidiya Hartman (though she is institutionally not a historian) and the many scholars inspired by her? To my mind, not at all. I do not say this because I am sympathetic to their political arguments, though I am. Nor do I say this because I think they are factually correct—on this matter, I am, as a historian primarily of South Asia, unqualified to say much.
My reason for saying so is because it would be a categorical error to describe them as presentist: the 1619 project, and even more the writings of Coates and Hartman, have an agonistic relation with the homogenous and abstract time that anchors presentism. They belong rather to the traditions which emphasize a constitutive and stubborn absence that cannot be recuperated by presence; they are faithful especially to those darkened moments and entities to which and whom the Enlightenment as a global event says “never.” One manifestation of this fidelity is that they have a very different relation with abstract and homogenous time. Hartman most explicitly, and others more implicitly, question the certitudes of the historical approach. And in South Asia, the Subaltern Studies tradition, especially in the later volumes, departs from the “history from below” tradition precisely in its insistence on constitutively irrecuperable absence that the historian must be faithful to in recognizing that the subaltern cannot speak.
This emphasis on a constitutive absence, an absence that cannot and must not be recovered, leads to—maybe springs from: which is the chicken and which the egg?—a dissatisfaction with republican democracy because it is not democratic enough: not attentive enough to those to whom it must say “not yet” and “never.” This democratic questioning of the historical approach manifests in our times in two regimes of historicity, though perhaps here, one should say dispositions rather than regimes. Both regimes arise from an existential analytic—an analytic that is at work whenever we ourselves, in our freedom and responsibility, are the beings to be analyzed and whenever we are in our very being complicitous with what we ask about. And because of their fidelity to the “not yet” and “never,” they give to this analytic a distinctively democratic twist.
But these two dispositions also have a parallax relation with each other. On the one hand, there is the genealogical approach—the Foucauldian tradition that has emphasized the history of the present, and the analogous Ambedkarite tradition that has emphasized annihilation. On the other hand, there is what might be called, to repurpose a neologism, the historial approach—the Derridean tradition that has emphasized deconstruction, and the analogous Gandhian tradition that has emphasized relinquishment.
Neither tradition is at all presentist, but both spring from an intense commitment to questioning and redressing the inequities and inequalities of the present. Both traditions are also skeptical of republican democracy and the historical approach because they find that it cannot respond to questions and concerns raised from the “absence, grief, memory, and resilience” (to cite Sweet’s apology) that are constitutive of the world of the disprivileged, both in the past and for their inheritors in the present. That absence is too intense to be chronicled or conceptualized in the language of the historical approach; it requires the genealogical and historial approaches, and the parallax between them.
Dr. Ajay Skaria is a prominent scholar at the University of Minnesota, where he contributes extensively to the study of South Asian politics and history through the lenses of Postcolonial and Subaltern Studies. He completed his Master's in Medieval Indian History at Maharaja Sayajirao University and earned his Ph.D. from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1992. His academic work includes notable publications such as "Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India" and "Unconditional Equality: Gandhi's Religion of Resistance," through which he explores themes of environmental history, political theory, and the religious and philosophical underpinnings of resistance. Currently, Dr. Skaria is engaged in research projects focusing on the concepts of religion and secularism in contemporary India and Ambedkar's thinking, reflecting his commitment to rethinking equality, neighborliness, and dignity through critical engagement with figures like Gandhi and Ambedkar.
-Prepared with the editorial assistance of Charles Milne-Home