From Rhodes Must Fall to Black Lives Matter, recent years have seen a remarkable wave of struggles to topple colonial and racist monuments. Critics on both the right and the left have dismissed these movements as attacks on free speech, as vandalism, or as symbolic politics distracting from the real work of material change. Johannes Schulz offers the first book-length philosophical defense of the new iconoclasm as a struggle for recognition, breaking with the dominant academic approach that treats commemoration as a question of who deserves to be honored. He shows how the politics of memory reproduces social inequality through three distinct wrongs of tainted commemoration: degradation, alienation, and delusion. Drawing on Freud and the Frankfurt School, he also shows how working through the past can help societies overcome such inequality. The argument is developed through cases from the US, Canada, the UK, South Africa, and Germany.

‘A great many societies are marked by the scars of historical injustice, deepened by tainted forms of commemoration. In his excellent and rich treatise, Johannes Schulz carefully analyses the wrongs that the presence of this past implies. Connecting Anglo-American political philosophy and the Frankfurt School, he develops an impressive theory of working through the past that bridges idealist and materialist approaches. A great example of historically situated critical theory in the best sense of the term.’

Rainer Forst - Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy, Goethe University Frankfurt

‘Well-written and compellingly argued, The Present Past brings welcome clarity to the politics of collective memory. Schulz makes a convincing case that how we commemorate the past is inseparable from questions of social equality. This will become the standard book on commemorative politics in liberal democracies.’

Jeff Spinner-Halev - Kenan Eminent Professor of Political Ethics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

‘Schulz combines historical examples and theoretical argument with real skill to advance an original theory of how we might work through the legacies of historical injustice. The account he develops of working through the past, drawing on the resources of the Frankfurt School tradition, is among the most interesting contributions to the debate on historical injustice I have read in recent years. Wide-ranging, ambitious, and genuinely stimulating.’

Lea Ypi - Ralph Miliband Professor of Politics and Philosophy, LSE