Presentism in Intellectual History
The inaugural Oxford Centre for Intellectual History Graduate Conference took place on 31 May 2024 at Magdalen College, Oxford with the theme of ‘Methods in Intellectual History’. As convenors of the conference, a key aim of ours was to provide an opportunity for graduate students working in intellectual history within different departments to present their work and share ideas with each other. In spite—or rather, because—of the breadth of approaches that students of intellectual history have adopted, what unites us is an interest in methodological questions surrounding the discipline, and it was for this reason that we landed on our chosen theme.
The first panel, on ‘Presentism in intellectual History’, responded to ongoing debates about how intellectual historians should study the past with respect to the present. In an earlier blog post concerning the issue of presentism, I noted that ‘historians have highlighted the inescapability of presentism: contemporary concerns necessarily shape one’s view of the past and approach towards history’. The panel agreed in this regard; but, as the papers by Connor Grubaugh, Joseph Hettrick, and Oliver Gough collectively demonstrated, this inescapability manifests itself in different ways, even when historians take conscious steps to avoid the charge of presentism.
‘A historian cannot possibly abandon the contextualizing imperative,’ Antoine Lilti wrote recently, but one must always ‘acknowledge the hermeneutic dimension of the historiographical operation’. It was precisely this dimension that Grubaugh emphasised in his paper on the work of J.G.A. Pocock, whose references to St. Augustine had served to supply part of the context for the historical narrative that he had constructed in The Machiavellian Moment. Crucially, Grubaugh pointed out that Pocock relied for his understanding of Augustine not on his own interpretation of the latter’s texts, the contexts of which Pocock himself had not mastered, but on the work of Robert Markus and Hannah Arendt. On Grubaugh’s account, the presentism of the contextualising imperative thus consists in both the delineation of context from text and the inevitable reliance on contemporary secondary sources to supply at least some of that context.
The relationship between contextualism and presentism is further treated in Hettrick’s paper on Christopher Hill. By treating Hill as a historian of ideas and considering the accusations of ideological bias that were levelled against him by his contemporaries, Hettrick examined the extent to which any effort to curate—or what he called ‘mining and lumping’—primary sources can come under the charge of presentism. For Hettrick, although Hill’s curatorial principles may have been informed by his Marxist commitments, the (re-)contextualisation of certain texts alongside others in such a politically motivated way rendered the historical reality of the ideologically charged meanings of these texts more explicit. If, as Quentin Skinner (alongside the philosophers J. B. Schneewind and Richard Rorty) once claimed, ‘[t]o understand the text just is to relate it helpfully to something else’, then the historian may in fact put certain modes of presentism to productive use.
Such an overt embrace of presentism will not be acceptable to all historians, however. Indeed, in defending the distinctiveness of their field, historians of emotions have sought precisely to escape presentism by rejecting universalist theories in favour of treating emotions such as fear as experiences that are deeply historically situated. Yet, as Gough observed in his paper, the ‘emotional turn’ in history has simultaneously involved the endeavour to transcend past linguistic contexts in order to study emotional experiences prior to, and beyond, their written expression. In Gough’s view, this endeavour serves only to reinstate the very kind of presentism embedded in universalist theories which assume that past emotions were commensurable with our own, contemporary emotional experiences. While the attempt to understand the history of emotions with reference solely to written sources may distort that history, non-linguistic forms of contextualism equally fail to do justice to the historically specific ways in which emotions were experienced in the past.
Presentism, then, is inherent in any effort to contextualise texts, curate primary sources, and interpret pre- or extra-linguistic experiences historically. In my view, this does not imply that intellectual historians should reject these approaches entirely; only that we should acknowledge the intricate relationship between the past and present and judge certain forms of presentism to be more helpful than others.
Ming Kit Wong chaired the 'Presentism in Intellectual History' panel at the 2024 Oxford Centre for Intellectual History Graduate Conference. He is a DPhil student in Politics at Magdalen College, Oxford.
