2009/03/30 by Victor Margolin · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Museums and Cultural Heritage
paper · pdf · doi:10.1162/desi.2009.25.2.94
openalex publication_date 2009/03/30 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
“What is the use of history?” one might ask, when attempting to make sense of contemporary life. What answers might we find in the past to questions about the present when the current configuration of actions and events seems so volatile and unstable? Simply trying to keep our balance demands so much energy and attention that looking beyond the moment for helpful explanations might seem like a useless distraction. However, history has always played a role in shaping contemporary thought, whether it was Herodotus’s attempt to find patterns of human action to explain Athenian military might, the rediscovery of ancient philosophical and literary texts by Petrarch and other Renaissance scholars; or Karl Marx’s teleological vision of a classless society that would dissolve the conflict between the wealthy and the working class.1 “In recent years, most historians have tended to carve the past into small pieces and focus on specialized topics. They have done this rather than pursue the larger spatial and temporal visions that have animated a few of the profession’s most prominent figures including Eric Hobsbawm, the British historian who has written, among many books, an epochal four-volume history of Western politics and society that ranges from the French Revolution in 1789 to the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991. In a collection of his essays, published in 1997 as On History, Hobsbawm presented three papers which dealt, respectively, with the past, present, and future. In “The Sense of the Past,” he affirmed the place of the past in the present. “To be a member of any human community,” he wrote, “is to situate oneself with regard to one’s (its) past, if only by rejecting it. The past, therefore, is a permanent dimension of the human consciousness, an inevitable component of the institutions, values, and other patterns of human society.”2 Hobsbawm combined a belief in “la longue duree” or “the long term” from the French Annales school, which he called the “formalized social past,” with the recognition that this stable component of the social order is complemented by more flexible sectors of social change and innovation.3 Recognizing the various components of society and their differing rates of change can be extremely helpful in contributing to a balanced process of social transformation that does not lead to social destabilization or collapse. Thus, for Hobsbawm, history in its best sense becomes “a process of directional change, of development or evolution.”4 Nonetheless, there are forces that militate against learning from history. One that Hobsbawm identifies is the “a-historical, The initial version of this essay was presented as the keynote address at the 17th Annual Symposium on the Decorative Arts and Design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York City, Thursday, April 3, 2008.