Anachronism and Power in Intellectual History
The second Oxford Centre for Intellectual History Graduate Conference took place on June 5 2025, with the theme of ‘Anachronism in History.’ The panel on ‘power’ invited students to contemplate the ways uses of anachronism are related to articulations of power.
The presentations in the day’s second panel offered thoughtful responses to the contemporary challenges, identified in Jack Jacobs’ conference opening remarks, to how we as historians practise our craft. On the one hand, it feels as though historians are increasingly asked to offer judgments on politics and current affairs; on the other, ‘old categories are throwing themselves up violently in our faces in ways that are shocking’. Unsurprisingly, three presentations organised under the sub-heading, ‘Power’, spoke forcefully to those challenges.
Sofia Sanabria de Felipe began the panel with the paper ‘Legitimising Monarchical Power: History as Aesthetic, Discursive Signifier in the French Restoration 1814-1830’. De Felipe used French art-critic and politician’s Auguste comte de Kératry’s Reflexions to ground a consideration of how Kant’s ideas on aesthetics, which Kératry translated into French, were used to justify the Restoration of the French monarchy in the post-Napoleonic period. De Felipe concluded her paper with a photograph of Tavares Strachan’s sculpture, ‘The First Supper (Galaxy Black)', which reimagined Da Vinci’s depiction of the Last Supper, depicting thirteen figures from Black history. The black bronze and gold leaf sculpture announced the themes of the Royal Academy’s 2024 exhibition, Entangled Pasts, 1768-now, Art, Colonialism, and Change. De Felipe argued that a persuasive feeling of belonging was created when, to turn history into an aesthetic signifier, a ‘direct line’ was constructed between the present and an imagined past.
In ‘Melian Anachronisms’, political theorist Michael O’Connor engaged with ways of reading Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue: ‘a key text in the canon of political realism’. O’Connor used a close reading of Michael Waltzer’s anti-realist interpretation of the dialogue to distinguish between different modes of anachronistic reading and delineate where they might be helpful. O’Connor’s interdisciplinary perspective illustrated the benefit to a discipline like political theory of thinking historically about its canons, as well as challenging intellectual historians to embrace the possibility of reading anachronistically.
The third and final paper, by the historian of nineteenth-century political thought Apeike Umolu, also responded to the day’s overarching theme, anachronism, by considering how it might inform the methodology of intellectual historians, and the selection and interpretation of evidence. Umolu noted that nineteenth-century figures who have been enlisted by historians into a canon of ‘Pan-Africanism’ were active, wrote, and thought before the term ‘Pan-Africanism’ was coined. In ‘Patriotism and Anachronistic Claims of 19th Century Pan-Africanism’, Umolu analysed and situated the role of patriotism in the thought of three nineteenth-century writers: Alexander Crummell, Edward Blyden, and J. E. Casely Hayford. Umolu demonstrated how it is possible to write ‘Pan-African History’ while avoiding the reductive anachronism of referring to any of these figures as “Pan-Africanists”. For Umolu, writing ‘Pan-African’ intellectual history involves the historian paying careful attention to thinkers’ overlapping but distinct geographies. Umolu’s consideration of the idea of Christian patriotism illustrated the connections between Crummell, Blyden, and Hayford, clarifying what was at stake in the commitments they shared and the individual solutions each advocated.
All three papers considered how responding to the problem of anachronism informed their craft as historians in the present. As well deploying as a range of methodologies, and ranging in time and space, the presenters demonstrated the range of sources that intellectual historians might trenchantly and thoughtfully bring into consideration. The presenters repeatedly raised the relevance of thinking about translation, whether through highlighting Kératry as a translator of Kant or noting that Waltzer relied on Thomas Hobbes’ translation of Thucydides, to intellectual history. The panel’s contributions suggested that the use of anachronism is always bound up with questions of power. O’Connor’s, de Felipe’s, and Umolu’s papers invited the audience to reconsider realism as a normative way of considering relations between the weak and the strong, at deploying aesthetics to privilege a particular sense of continuity with the past, or of forging solidarities across borders. By interrogating how we have interpreted inherited textual, material, and cultural traces from the past, they suggested ways we might loosen the grip such interpretations exert in the present.
Sam Miller chaired the panel on ‘power’ at the 2025 conference. He is a DPhil student in history at Jesus College.
