History’s Mild Redemptive Power

What are the ethical reasons to read history and emotional drives to write its stories?

The new year is a time to reflect on why we want to learn from history.

Why do this strange, near impossible thing? To speak with the ghosts of the past. Why try to breathe life into the victims of history? Why listen to their sad stories? After all, the remorseless grind of events has left behind so many victims, so many ruins, and so much suffering in the now.

Why have so many writers believed, with Walter Benjamin, that history has a ‘mild redemptive power’? For these writers, history is a way to redeem the suffering of the past, to make amends for the sorrows of the present, and to find grounds for hope, or at least to keep going on, into the future.

But why choose history over scientific disciplines or poetic inspiration or pragmatic politics to redeem the world? History was an old form of ‘inquiry’, in Thucydides’ Greek; or a fabulous myth about the cycle of life and death as in the Mahabharata. The Indian epic reminds us that history was a branch of literature for millenia, and that Clio was the most talented of the ancient Greek Muses. For centuries history was also the counsel of rulers. British and American Imperial officials learned their classical history to rule their empires with wisdom distilled from their reading of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

But a century of democracy and two centuries of the modern university have drained the lifeblood from history. Politics as marketing needs no subtle wisdom from the past, not any further back than clips from the last ten years. Historians as academics, competing for grants, have expunged metaphors from history. The greatest muse now serves the Queen of Social Sciences with dull background notes for its speculations on the real drivers of history, and the real sources of power. If you want to change the real world, you speak in the formulae of economics, not the stories of history.

And what if, like Benjamin, you approach historical thought as a kind of poetry? Clio’s poetry would seem redundant in the age of ubiquitous screens. If you want to flee the world into the dream worlds of imagination, there are entire creative industries more captivating than historians. Home cinema, not Clio, guides you to find your own private virtual reality.

History has become the poor cousin of more powerful sciences and more creative image generation. Who needs the fragmentary past, when you have the bountiful present in which infinite images of the future may be generated with a single AI prompt? Who needs its convoluted stories when instantaneous memes entertain us on social media?

Why read history to shift your perspective on this changing world? In this post,

• I connect the themes of Walter Benjamin “Theses on the Philosophy of History” to this question (which I narrated in my mini audiobook series post on 6 January)

• I recommend a thought-provoking book, Priya Satia, Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire (2020), and

• I foreshadow the hidden connections of both books to learning from history through my Slow Read of Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob.

Brief note: I had technical problems that prevented me from recording my customary voiceover this week. I will update the post with audio next week when I fix my microphone.

Walter Benjamin and the poetic vision of history

Walter Benjamin was an enigmatic German, Jewish and Marxist writer on literature and history who lived between 1892 and 1940. His “Theses on the Philosophy of History” - a brief essay composed of twenty imagistic fragments - may be the twentieth century’s most famous vision of history writing.

As I explained, when introducing my narration Walter Benjamin on the Angel of History, this essay inspired me, including the metaphor of the Burning Archive. Section IX describes the Angel of History:

This is how one pictures the Angel of History. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them…. This storm is what we call progress.

–Walter Benjamin

Benjamin believed that history had a “mild redemptive power.” He did not believe in crude historical materialism, scientific Marxism or Social Democracy. He reimagined his modernist and modern world after the technological changes of the early twentieth century. In ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ he became one of the earliest thinkers about the changed sensibility of the modernist world in the age of consumer capitalism and mass society, as represented not by America but the Weimar Germany of Babylon Berlin.

He also introduced Messianic ideas of Jewish mysticism into his philosophy of history. Several of his fragments reimagine the ‘class struggle’ of dull Marxist history as a form of Messianic return. Section XVII explicitly connects the idea of the Messianic return to the practice of the ‘historical materialist’ or Marxist philosophy:

“A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.”

—Walter Benjamin

Benjamin wrote against the practical politics of German Social Democrats and the conformist governing ideas of European liberalism. Both groups shared a belief in Progress; the firestorm from which the Angel of History fled. Benjamin also took flight from this storm. He found refuge in his poetic vision of history as a way to redeem how we suffer in the past and present.

Priya Satia, Time’s Monster and the ethical case for history

This vision has inspired many, but was an insanely impractical program for how to read and write history. The poetry of the image, however, has been invoked countless times by those who hope history can transform the future, and do not look to history for practical advice on how to rule the present.

Indeed, Priya Satia writes “his description has now been cited so often in so many contexts that it is at once iconic and cliché.” Nevertheless her profound reflections on the past and future of history, in Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire (2020), return to Benjamin’s poetic images.

Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire is my recommended book this week.

Priya Satia is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History and Professor of History at Stanford University. Her work focuses on modern British and British empire history, examining the cultural foundations of imperial power and its lasting impacts. Satia's research explores how historical narratives shaped and justified empire. Her books, Spies in Arabia and Empire of Guns won awards. In Time's Monster, she examines the role of historians in enabling imperial expansion and conscience management. The story of the British Empire and the conscience of its historians and history-loving leaders were intertwined.

She echoes Benjamin’s critique of liberal visions of history as Progress. Eight years after Benjamin’s death, Satia returned to his theses, not published in his lifetime, “to restore them to their context of a broader philosophical interrogation, prompted by the world wars, of the idea that history must be a narrative of progress.” (p. 253)

Satia also sought to separate history from its establishment role in the Anglo-American liberal tradition: pragmatic storytelling servant of imperial power. Today that tradition is upheld most prominently by Niall Ferguson, who Satia excoriates as another servant of the British imperial tradition of historians who defended empire in the name of progress. Believers in empire and the greatness of nations, as Priya Satia shows have long written history to serve power. They have salved their conscience with stories from the past that suggested ‘there was no alternative’, and that the poor benighted subject peoples benefited, in the long run, from the institutions of empire.

Satia argues that history writing was empire's enabler, specifically in Britain, and by implication across the West. History was given a special place as a guide to action in the British Empire, as represented in figures like Macaulay, Toynbee and Winston Churchill. Satia argues that the discipline of history played a crucial role in justifying the British Empire as the well-intentioned project of good liberal-minded people who discerned the directions of history.

Satia’s critique of the Anglo-American tradition of history-writing is devastating. In her account, history bares its teeth as Time’s Monster. But her critique is not solely negative. She offers ethical reasons to learn from history - not in the service of power, not in the consolation of nostalgia, not in the Messianic hope of redemption.

Key to this argument is Satia’s challenge to progress within concepts of linear time. The idea of progress allowed imperial actors to justify violence, dispossession, overrule and patronising contempt as vindicated by the judgment of history, evidenced in the progress of humanity. Present wrongs were morally rationalized by the lessons of history, grounded in an expectation of future outcomes. Liberal advocates of empire saw progress in prosperity, development, and national self-realisation. Marxist historians saw progress in the Revolutionary Proletariat and its class consciousness.

But whatever the particular politics of the historian, history was the source for moral fables that allowed leaders, history-writers and citizens to live with their conscience amidst the many atrocities and acts of exploitation by empires. She examines Macaulay, T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) and, more sympathetically E.P. Thompson whose Making of the English Working Class (1963) sought to rescue “from the condescension of posterity” the ‘poor stockinger’ who futilely protested against the effects of the Industrial Revolution, without the benefit of the Marxist science of historical materialism.

“For Thompson, like Benjamin, history-writing might perform a more poetic redemptive function in the face of unremitting loss.”

Satia, Time’s Monster, p. 256

She finds a similar urge to redeem the past in the work of subaltern studies, critical of colonialism, and in the poets and writers of the Partition Generation who responded to the Partition of India and Pakistan by the British Empire during its botched decolonization of South Asia after 1945.

“The scale of mass violence and loss that marked these two events made them resonate at a visceral level as moral narratives, moral tragedies, events in which all the folly of human history was flagrantly on display. History proved inadequate to the moral tragedy they posed, and survivors turned instead to poetry for their bearings, however, inadequate it, too, was to their experiences.”

Satia, Time’s Monster, p. 258

In these poets and in the South Asian historical traditions of cyclical time, the yugas, as told in the Mahabharata, Satia finds an alternative to history’s service of power, progress or prophecy. She finds a way in which complex stories of the past can reengage us in the plurality of the present, and demand our ethical engagement with this complex world. Among the Urdu progressive poets of that Partition generation, who used a metaphor of “dawn” for freedom, Satia finds redemptive inspiration.

“Implying that the time of suffering is like a long night, but, like every night, it must end in dawn. As Faiz wrote: “Lambi hai gham ki shaam magar shaam hi to hai” (Long is the night of sorrow, but it is still just a night). …. We are not going to reach the end of social evolution; time is cyclical. Liberation is not a condition we achieve at the end of linear time, but something we experience in fits and starts in the very pursuit of liberation.”

Satia, Time’s Monster, pp. 296-297

Satia’s Time’s Monster is a complex book. It profoundly blends Western and other traditions of history-writing. It is not an easy book, but it is profoundly rewarding. In ways, it returns to the inspiration of Benjamin’s Angel of History. Its final chapter reworks and reimagines the phrases of “Theses of the Philosophy of History” without the Messiah, and more focussed on the now.

“We will need history to understand how we got here - the tension between a historical and antihistorical outlook will be permanent in our souls. We might tell now, more encompassing, perhaps more chaotic stories that will return us to the fullness of time. In their telling, we may make new history, too. That history can have no end; the struggle to renew humanity is an end in itself.”

Satia, Time’s Monster, p. 298

To me Satia’s call - to tell chaotic stories to respond ethically with the suffering of the present - answers my question: why do we read and write history?

You can buy this book at this Amazon Affiliate Link.

The Link of Benjamin and Satia to Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob

On Wednesday, I explore this call by Satia to tell “more encompassing, perhaps more chaotic stories that will return us to the fullness of time” and how it relates to reading, slowly, Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob.

Tokarczuk similarly called for encompassing, chaotic stories told by “tender narrators” in her Nobel Lecture. Her novel, The Books of Jacob, is a masterpiece of such chaotic stories, told from many perspectives, and enabling us to take a fantastic journey through history.

And the biographical subject of her novel, Jacob Frank, claimed to be the Jewish Messiah. The novel tells many stories of Jewish mysticism, Enlightenment and European Romanticism that met in the tragic mind of Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide in 1940, a few months after writing “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, on the border of France and Spain, when fleeing the murderous outbreak of European anti-Semitism that was Nazi Germany.

Join me then to learn how we can learn from history by reading Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob, slowly.