The history problem

At first sight it might seem odd that IR could be considered a ‘discipline without history’,Footnote ¹⁰ or that there could even be serious debate about the significance of history for the subject. Surely there is as much international history to study as there is history of anything else? Doubtless, but to make this simple observation suffices to reveal that what was at issue in the controversy was the significance of history in an altogether different sense. That ‘things happened’, that there is an infinitude of international history to study, nobody denied. At the core of the dispute was, rather, the status of history as such, its meaning, in relation to the international. In this respect, what the history problem descended from and always revolved around was a question of a different order: one from the philosophy of history. An indication of its shape emerges in some remarks on the concept of progress by Theodor Adorno:

Adorno went on to note that in Kant’s construction of the logic of the historical process ‘the concept of history, in which progress would have its place, is emphatic, the Kantian universal or cosmopolitan concept, not one of any particular sphere of life.’Footnote ¹² However, this leads to a contradiction, for ‘the dependence of progress on the totality comes back to bite progress’.Footnote ¹³ Through societal integration on a global scale, the question of the meaning of history has come to exist most urgently at the level of the whole – ‘the concept of progress is linked to that of a fulfilled humanity, and it is not to be had for less’.Footnote ¹⁴ But at that level humanity falls short because its own logic of political organisation as a fragmented totality does not let it attain the whole: it is globalised but without forming ‘a self-conscious global subject’. Still unknown to itself, humanity does not yet exist as such. If the question of progress has come to be located in the problem of global political form, that in turn reflects back upon the nature of the historical process: all history, all the progress of Spirit or development of modes of production, has always been within, but never of, the whole. The one level that now really matters was always, and remains, outside the dynamic of progress. So at that level there has been no real history because there has not been substantive, qualitative change that would transform the character of human existence. Instead, humanity’s mode of social and political organisation is no more rational, coherent, and self-aware now, as a totality, than it ever has been.Footnote ¹⁵ Despite inconceivable advance in so many fields of human endeavour, the self-divided, subjectless whole itself remains outside and essentially unchanging. The problem of the rationality of history has thus come to depend upon the whole, but the whole exists only in absentia, continually posited by humanity’s forms of political organisation and equally continually denied by them. There is, still, no global subject – and where there is no subject, there is no history. History as universal, not merely particular, development has thus reached a block in this absence at the centre of global political form, an absence named, necessarily by indirection, in the term ‘the international’.

This historico-philosophical question of the not-yet-existent global subject formed the ground of the history controversy. In developing as a distinct field of study after the Second World War, IR attempted to articulate the relationship of international existence to historical time. While the Realist writers who principally shaped the discipline were far from ignorant of or uninterested in history, in light of twentieth-century experience they figured that relationship as fundamentally problematic. In the eclipse of so-called Idealism, notions of progress, harmony of interests, and the advance of civilisation originating in the Enlightenment had to be discarded as naïve: there was no linear development of history to higher stages, no gradual pacific integration of humanity through commerce, and no civilisational step beyond war. Prudential statesmanship might avert or at least mitigate conflict in a fractured, fallen world, and a judicious amalgam of bright-eyed liberal vision and Realist worldly wisdom might perhaps be contrived, but that was the limit of expectation.Footnote ¹⁶ In the realm of international politics, it was necessary first and foremost to recognise, accept, and work within the persisting fact of fragmentation and the immemorial realities of power, security, and raison d’état. The division that produced such fragmentation was placed at the conceptual centre of the texts that pressed hardest upon the problem of history in IR. For Martin Wight, having surveyed anything that could be construed as relevant literature, international theory was to be discerned only as a shadowy para phenomenon, perpetually ancillary to the long tradition of political theory, and as such it had no coherent history of its own.Footnote ¹⁷ Political theory necessarily developed over time, as society changed in its essence; international thought did not develop because international existence stayed essentially the same. Where progress could be attributed to the history of states ‘considered in isolation’,Footnote ¹⁸ once set within the context of the whole such a developmental perspective disappeared: domestic advances might astound an observer from the past, but international conditions would be wearyingly familiar, ‘the same old melodrama’.Footnote ¹⁹ The achievement of internal progress sets into relief the obdurately different temporal character of the international, as the ‘realm of recurrence and repetition’.Footnote ²⁰ In this famous essay, the boundary between domestic and international thus marks a profound division between forms of life, demarcating one that knows history, politics, and progress, where humans enjoy rational control of their own existence, from one that does not: ‘Political theory and law are maps of experience or systems of action within the realm of normal relationships and calculable results. They are the theory of the good life. International theory is the theory of survival.’Footnote ²¹ Where Wight’s argument concluded with the strong distinction between inside and outside, Kenneth Waltz made this the premise of his structural theory.Footnote ²² The flat, anarchic space of the international was strictly distinguished from the hierarchical, ordered internal space; everything else followed from that foundational division. This separation was made the organising principle of the theory in order to capture the effects of the fact that international existence, perpetually without overarching authority, does not cohere into a pacified, rational whole but instead remains fragmented and riven by conflict. Waltz readily acknowledged that ‘important discontinuities occur’Footnote ²³ in international history, but these could be explained by changes within political entities. The more profound problem, one that required a different sort of approach, was that despite all of these discontinuities, the character of international existence had never been qualitatively transformed: ‘the texture of international politics remains highly constant, patterns recur, and events repeat themselves endlessly’.Footnote ²⁴ A ‘dismaying persistence’Footnote ²⁵ cancels the innumerable discontinuities, as all the change issues in no change. The borderline that separates anarchy from hierarchy is thus, in Waltz and in Wight, thoroughly temporal and historical in meaning, for it is ‘the enduring anarchic character of international politics [that] accounts for the striking sameness in the quality of international life through the millennia’.Footnote ²⁶ The spatial division – inside and outside – that enables the possibility of the good life has always carried with it a form of division in time – history and repetition. Just as the political entails the international, so the historical entails the non-historical.

It was the publication of Theory of International Politics that provoked the history controversy, as Waltz, by formulating it in the boldest way, sharpening the antithesis for the sake of the unchanging, brought to a head the qualitative problem of the relation of the international space to time and history – the strong distinction he made between anarchy and hierarchy is simply another way of stating the absence of a global subject. It hardly needs saying that Waltz was perfectly aware that a substantial temporal span separated, for instance, the Peloponnesian War from the Cold War, but for the problem he was concerned with the continuity and identity across time were more revealing and mattered more: in international existence the present did not escape the past by decisively differentiating itself from it but simply repeated it in a new form. This apparent disregard for the significance of temporal distance gave rise to a furious response on behalf of history. The most straightforward mode of criticism was to accuse neorealism of being incapable of explaining history in an adequate way. The deliberate parsimony was too insubstantial and too rigid for the variety and complexity of the historical process: the wealth of actual history could never be reducible to such thin theoretical gruel.Footnote ²⁷ This criticism was, in its own terms, largely successful. But it was also beside the point, because the problem of history and the international, as formulated by Waltz, was not one of reconstruction of the historical process but was instead concerned with the qualitative ‘texture’ of international existence and its invariant character. In failing to appreciate what was actually at issue and remaining at the level of historiography, this criticism also missed the further implications of Waltz’s argument about the international and history. Those implications were, however, not lost on his more radical critics, who were quick to interpret them as danger. Although they, too, generally pursued the historiographic critique, they added something else as well: a moral and political outrage at what was being done to history. For them, what was offensive in Waltz’s neorealism, and sometimes in Realism as a whole, was more than just bad history – the denial of history was tantamount to a denial of freedom. So, critical theory, according to Robert Cox, because it is interested in promoting social and historical change, ‘reasons historically’.Footnote ²⁸ The new Realism,Footnote ²⁹ by contrast, should be recognised as ‘nonhistorical or ahistorical, since it, in effect, posits a continuing present’.Footnote ³⁰ As such, it was conservative of the status quo. Richard Ashley likewise indicted Waltzian Realism as ‘a historicism of stasis’Footnote ³¹ and ‘an apologia for the status quo, an excuse for domination’:Footnote ³² it ‘denies history as process’, it denies ‘the significance of practice’, and, most heinously of all, it ‘denies politics’.Footnote ³³ For Justin Rosenberg in 1994, Realism was ‘the conservative ideology of the exercise of modern state power’.Footnote ³⁴ To recover ‘historical agency’, the activity, struggle, and contestation that produce the historical process, from Realism’s deadening abstractions what was needed was ‘historical explanation’,Footnote ³⁵ which would show that ‘the history of the states-system has a live political content’.Footnote ³⁶ Ten years later, Benno Teschke repeated the theme, denouncing neorealism as ‘a science of domination [that] compresses the rich history of human development into a repetitive calculus of power’.Footnote ³⁷ Always, for these critics, what was most offensive in neorealism’s apparent ahistoricism was its political import. This was because, although ‘history’ was the continual cry, it was not primarily the past that was understood to be under threat: ‘Ignoring history does not simply do an injustice to the history of the international system. Most significantly, it leads to a problematic view of the present.’Footnote ³⁸

In the history controversy, at its sharpest point, ‘history’ thus in fact denoted its opposite: today and tomorrow, not yesterday. If, as a result of unhistorical ‘chronofetishism’ and ‘tempocentrism’,Footnote ³⁹ IR had ‘effectively written the issue of “change” off the international relations agenda altogether’,Footnote ⁴⁰ then the history problem was about the possibility of the new, transformation in the present, and the intensity of the conflict arose from its fundamentally political nature. Much more was felt to be at stake than simply debate over the merits of different historiographic preferences: denial of historical process and change was perceived to be denial of the capacity of humans to alter and shape their existence. The question of history in IR thus leads far beyond scholarly study of the past, into conceptions of liberty and political agency. This was always the real substance of the polemics in the 1980s and 1990s. But why that should be so, why history should carry such political significance, was never made explicit in those debates and remains unexplored. To open up the history question in IR and make evident the proper dimensions of the problem of history and the international it is necessary to consider how modern historical consciousness, with its particular relation of past and present, is bound up with the modern form of subjectivity and political being and its idea of freedom.

Past, present and future

The typical move of the radical critics in response to neorealist ahistoricism was to affirm a strong distinction between past and present: to contextualise and historicise, putting the past into the past, in order to show the essential difference between then and now.Footnote ⁴¹ What is the logic of this move? What experience of time and history is implicit in it? Why and how are history and freedom related? And, to begin with, what is the idea of the past that is being appealed to here? Though it may appear self-evident, ‘the past’, as such, is not simply a given of any and all historical thought but denotes a type of relation to what went before that took many centuries to come into being. Developing an argument of Constantin Fasolt’s, Zachary Schiffman proposes that to understand the historicity of ‘the past’, it is essential to see that intrinsic to the ‘distinction between past and present’ – the ‘founding principle’Footnote ⁴² of modern historical consciousness – is the belief that ‘the past is not simply prior to the present but different from it’.Footnote ⁴³ This presumption of difference brings with it modern history’s conviction that ‘each historical entity exists in its own distinctive context, [which] differs from our own’,Footnote ⁴⁴ as well as its ‘most basic principle of method’,Footnote ⁴⁵ anachronism. Historians in the ancient world, so Schiffman argues, did not share this way of understanding history because they did not have a unified conception of ‘the past’. What they knew, instead, were multiple pasts, quantitative–linear and qualitative-episodic, not necessarily commensurable with each other.Footnote ⁴⁶ Likewise, they knew not a single time but multiple times, again linear and episodic and again relative to and incommensurable with each other.Footnote ⁴⁷ The strong conceptual division between past and present characteristic of modern historical consciousness had not yet been made.Footnote ⁴⁸ As a result, their relation to the past, qua object, was different: ‘instead of “the past”’ ancient historians ‘conceived of things that had passed’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Nor was there a consistent sense of anachronism: to the extent that Thucydides, for instance, demonstrates an awareness of differences between past and present, he does so ‘without elevating that awareness to a principle of historical knowledge’ itself.Footnote ⁵⁰ These were not, however, simply primitive and inadequate attempts to articulate the past and history understood in modern terms. Rather, what they expressed were a different form of experience and a different form of subjectivity. Neither time nor the past had yet been unified and articulated to a single point located in the knowing subject. While ‘we expect a historian to view events … from a perspective that relates parts to whole, just as an artist orients the elements of a landscape in relation to a vanishing point’,Footnote ⁵¹ how the self of the ancient historian related to the past precluded him from ‘taking a perspective’ in this fashion and from objectifying the past in the same way – Thucydides’ ‘mental landscape’ was such that ‘he could not subordinate what we regard as the second (and tertiary) to the primary levels of his argument’.Footnote ⁵² This form of subjectivity and relation to the past also determined the ancient historians’ sense of the limits of human agency within a historical time that was understood as essentially repetitive. They did not share ‘our notion of “event”’Footnote ⁵³ and instead thought in terms of ‘occurrences’ – where ‘events generate novelty, occurrences catalyse predictable processes’Footnote ⁵⁴ that unfold with inexorability. The temporal and historical space of ancient history was thus throughout shaped by the way in which, in the absence of an emphatic distinction – a break – between them, what had passed continued to inform the present.Footnote ⁵⁵

‘The past’ is therefore not an a priori but an ‘intellectual construct’Footnote ⁵⁶ and thus itself historical. The mode of experience of the past, and its meaning, changes with the form of subjectivity and the form of society. What, retrospectively, would be termed the Western sense of historical time of course developed substantially from the ancient world, first with the advent of Christianity – the relation of past, present and future being rearticulated in the Augustinian mind and through the idea of the saeculum – and then with the Renaissance’s simultaneous rediscovery of antiquity and relegation of the ‘dark ages’.Footnote ⁵⁷ However, only with modernity did ‘the past’ as a unified entity, decisively divided from the present, come into existence.Footnote ⁵⁸ This development was inseparable from the advent of the new Cartesian and then Kantian subject, through which the metaphysical and epistemological problems associated with the formation of absolute, Newtonian time were resolved: time was refashioned as abstract, homogenous and without limit, completely independent of and separate from any events that took place within it.Footnote ⁵⁹ These revolutionary developments, which turned the world inside out, dividing the subject from the object and subordinating the latter to the former so that the validity of objectivity came to be articulated to and depend upon the subject rather than vice versa, transformed the sense of temporality and historical time. In the conceptual language developed in Reinhart Koselleck’s classic work on the character of Neuzeit, there took place in Europe between approximately the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries a rearticulation of the relation between the ‘space of experience’ and the ‘horizon of expectation’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The relatively close and closed connection between experience and expectation that had undergirded and stabilised previous ages was split open, the new social order being instead characterised by increasing disjunction between the two categories, so that as a principle of its own temporal logic ‘expectations … distanced themselves ever more from all previous experience’.Footnote ⁶¹ The shape of historical time was thereby profoundly transformed, as an entirely new relation between past, present and future was gradually established. The past lost its binding authority over the present for a social form that increasingly felt itself to be in constant motion and to be subject to change as the innermost determination of its being. What was and what had been no longer, and less and less, served as reliable guides to what would be: history could no longer be exemplary. With secularisation and the fading of an eschatological perspective, a temporality was revealed ‘that would be open for the new and without limit’Footnote ⁶² – soteriology gave way to infinity. At the same time, history was reconceived as a single, encompassing, immanent process, ‘history in and for itself’.Footnote ⁶³ Where the old society had been orientated towards the past, the new one, as expectation increasingly diverged from experience, drew validation from the future, which was in principle unknown and open. The category that more than any other encapsulated the character of this new sense of historical time was thus ‘progress’, which ‘opened up a future that transcended the hitherto predictable, natural space of time and experience’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Under the sign of progress, the present distanced itself to an ever greater extent from the past as it moved towards a new future, a new horizon of expectation.

Consciousness of this new temporal character changed the relation to the past in further dimensions. The distinctiveness of the new necessarily contrasted in a virtually absolute way with the old, the past, the gone, which came to be understood as qualitatively different. The novelty of the new made it ‘possible to conceive the past as something that was fundamentally “other”’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Progress differentiated historical times so that the developing European modernity understood and defined itself as distinct from the past. It legitimated itself no longer through continuity but through rupture. Just as the new was different, so each epoch of the past was itself distinct and unique, not continuous with the categories of the present but to be understood in its own terms. ‘The historical axiom of the singularity of all that occurred was … merely the temporal abstraction of modern everyday experience.’Footnote ⁶⁶ The new historical consciousness was founded upon radical difference and the individual quality of the historical event, as it ‘replaced the exemplary with the nonrepeatable’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Only in this way could history as process rather than repetition retain its requisite integrity. Released from a theocentric frame, the logic of causation in history was also transformed. Modern historical thought is based on ‘the conviction that mankind makes history’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Providential history, with the Last Judgement as its ultimate horizon, became secular history, governed by development and progress and stretching out into an unbounded future. ‘Henceforth history could be regarded as a long-term process of growing fulfilment which … was ultimately planned and carried out by men themselves.’Footnote ⁶⁹ Human beings, not the deity, acted in the world: they may not have made it under conditions of their own choosing, but they made history nonetheless. For historical consciousness to be historical and no longer theological, the immanent process of history had to be understood as being the product of the agency and activity of humans.

The reshaping of historical and temporal space and the creation of a new form of historical consciousness thus rested upon a revolutionised view of human action in the world, which it continually affirms. ‘This is the view that human beings are free and independent agents with the ability to shape their fate, the obligation to act on that ability and responsibility for the consequences.’Footnote ⁷⁰ By virtue of this reductio ad hominem, history is tied in its own logic to what was a new form of practice, an unleashed and seemingly unbounded agency, freed from superannuated restrictions. Exigencies of circumstance might constrain that free agency, but it could never be essentially negated. That historical explanation would show the conditions shaping and limiting the possibilities of human action at any given time in no way gainsaid the belief in freedom and responsibility because ‘the technology by which such explanations are produced rests on the opposite assumption: that the bits and pieces historians use in order to construct their knowledge of the past are grounded in some human action taken for some freely chosen purpose—as opposed to custom, providence or nature.’Footnote ⁷¹ History’s reliance on evidence bespeaks this assumption of freedom: what the evidence means may be continually subject to dispute but ‘that it testifies to something some human being did’Footnote ⁷² underlies the use of evidence as the raw material of historical knowledge in the first place. It presupposes that the past is intelligible as the product of what human beings do. In the modern understanding, humans are elevated to the status of being both the agents and the locus of meaning of their own historical process, simultaneously its subject and object, and history, secularised, becomes the record of how they have created their own world. The subjects of history may be everywhere empirically constrained but they are transcendentally free.

Modernity in Europe thus produced a distinctive ‘regime of historicity’.Footnote ⁷³ Not only was this regime new, but it marked a reversal in the priority of terms unprecedented in human existence: just as in this social form’s philosophy the object was subordinated to the subject, so in its historical consciousness the past was subordinated to the future. As a result, the category of the future underwent a transformation. No longer was it simply a repetition or fulfilment of the past; rather, it moved away from it. The topos of historia magistra vitae, which had held sway since ancient times,

In modernity, that circle, which had held together past, present and future within a space of experience, was broken and the relation between the three terms was drastically rearticulated. Descartes had opened modern philosophy and announced the new freedom of the modern subject with a gesture of rupture – radical doubt that rejected received authority. The modern regime of historicity was founded on the same gesture – a break with the power of tradition and what had gone before. ‘The past was, a priori or due to its position (which amounts to the same), outdated.’Footnote ⁷⁵ Disenchanted and devalued, the past was divested of its authority, which was transferred to the future, towards which progress moved: ‘If history still dispensed a lesson, it came from the future, not the past. It resided in a future that was to be realized as a rupture with the past, or at least as a differentiation.’Footnote ⁷⁶ Through that break, ‘the past’ as such, qualitatively divided from the present, came into being as the basic principle of historical thought, along with absolute, homogenous time and history in and of itself. All three were founded in the new, self-grounding subject and its freedom. That new philosophical and historical subject, created through forms of division, was also a new political subject, one to which lines of division were no less essential.

Dividing time, dividing space

Koselleck’s account of the transformation in historical consciousness that took place in early-modern Europe is developed through his method of conceptual history, although he does, in passing, acknowledge that the new idea of historical time implied a new actual subject of history: ‘the bearer of the modern understanding of historical process was the citizen emancipated from absolutist subjection and the tutelage of the Church’.Footnote ⁷⁷ It is the link between history, as a new form of knowledge of the past, and sociopolitical transformation that Fasolt pursues. History, he suggests, was integral to the prolonged and violent struggle that occurred in Europe primarily in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the forces of what was eventually to become ‘citizenship’ sought to liberate themselves from the old order. This conflict between two forms of social and political organisation and authority – declining medieval feudalism and nascent liberal capitalism – was also, and not least, a conflict over time and the relation to the past. In this struggle history was not just one of the stakes but was itself a weapon wielded in the name of freedom, one aimed against the experience of the past embodied in the supremacy of the pope and the Roman emperor. At the apex of the stratified chain of power within medieval Christendom, the authority of pope and emperor derived from a claim to universality in space and time. This claim was made in full awareness of the chronological span separating medieval Europe from antiquity but those who made it judged that extent by a non-modern, non-historical standard, experiencing it not as division but as continuity; priority in time did not here entail difference. Both authorities, temporal and spiritual, ‘insisted that they were in communion with eternity, and both sought to embody the past as though it had endured over the centuries without change’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Contesting and ultimately breaking the power of pope and emperor, and of the medieval form of life, meant contesting and breaking the particular coherence of past and present that held together the medieval shape of historical time. This was what the early-modern ‘historical revolt’ achieved. Its development of historical method and understanding, to produce what Koselleck identified as a temporalised sense of history, refashioned the relation of past and present. In doing so, it destroyed the unity of the medieval conception and thereby removed the grounds of validity of its political authority. This is the sense of Fasolt’s observation that ‘history jumped on the scene of European mental life with the force of a revolution against a specific form of governance’.Footnote ⁷⁹ A measure of the success of the historical revolt was that it ‘imposed a new periodization on history’,Footnote ⁸⁰ a new understanding of the shape of time and of the dynamic of the historical process. Dismissing as illusory the variety of temporal and historical schemas in use in Europe before modernity, historical consciousness in its revolutionary age naturalised as self-evident a tripartite division of history: antiquity, middle ages, modernity.Footnote ⁸¹

The emergence of modern historical consciousness was thus neither the replacement of a mystified religious conception by a properly secular one nor the result of the advance of disinterested intellectual enquiry. Instead, from its origins history was ‘at the service of European princes and republics seeking to emancipate themselves’Footnote ⁸² and was both an instrument and a product of the overthrow of one form of society and polity and its replacement by another. In this sense, before all content, ‘history is in and of itself political’.Footnote ⁸³ The work of history in destroying the medieval mode of imbrication of past and present was coextensive with the effort of emergent sovereign authority in liberating itself from empire. As the founding principle of modern political legitimacy and international order, sovereignty is generally understood as denoting, in simple terms, a state’s territorial delimitation and autonomy, its formal independence from any authority beyond its borders. However, sovereignty should not be thought of as existing exclusively in the spatial dimension: ‘freedom in space (and limits on its territorial extent) is merely one characteristic of sovereignty. Freedom in time (and limits on its temporal extent) is equally important and probably more fundamental.’Footnote ⁸⁴ To be properly self-determining and autonomous, a state must be sovereign in time as much as in space. It cannot be subservient to the superior power of the past. All the qualities Koselleck identified as characterising the modern sense of historical time – change, process, agency, orientation towards the future, the otherness and singularity of the past – relied upon the progressive differentiation of the present from the past, the space of experience from the horizon of expectation, and that process of differentiation, or rupture, which took several centuries to be accomplished, should be understood as expressing the developing realisation of sovereign freedom.Footnote ⁸⁵ Only once that freedom and self-determination in time had been established could a state consider itself sovereign and properly modern. ‘No state could be sovereign if its inhabitants lacked the ability to change a course of action adopted by their forefathers in the past … No citizen could be a full member of a community so long as she was tied to ancestral traditions with which the community might wish to break.’Footnote ⁸⁶ In the age of the historical revolt, sovereignty and citizenship were themselves the newly emergent horizon of expectation, the form of political order and identity that promised liberation and an open future. The conception of freedom operative in sovereignty and citizenship therefore demanded a severing of the ties that once bound the present to the past. The sovereign state and the autonomous citizen ‘require not only borders in space, but also borders in time’.Footnote ⁸⁷

History was an essential part of sovereign authority’s effort to define itself as self-validating and self-grounding and its effect in the early-modern European transformation was that of creating the temporal boundary. If it is indeed the case that ‘the two dimensions are inextricably bound together’ and that ‘changes in the experience of space always also involve changes in the experience of time and vice versa’,Footnote ⁸⁸ then the implication of the claim that ‘history is directly and systematically linked to citizenship, sovereignty, and the state’Footnote ⁸⁹ must be that the borders in space and the borders in time are inseparable from each other: no sovereign territorial space without sovereignty in time. The boundaries in both dimensions are homologous, integral to a single process of the reorganisation of political and social space–time. That restructuring, of which the historical revolt was an intrinsic part, culminated in the European continent’s division into sovereign nation states. These states in turn composed the core of the so-called Westphalian international system that over the following centuries was spread across the world through the empire building of the major European powers. This at first continental and then global reconstitution of political space – resulting in the modern international – was coextensive with the reordering of historical time on a matching scale. Just as European space universalised itself, so did European time: not for nothing was Weltgeschichte the culminating category of the new historical consciousness.Footnote ⁹⁰ The precise bounding of nation-states in the new system worked both geographically and temporally, sharply distinguishing the inside from the outside and the present from the past. If the extent of the transformational process consequent upon the early-modern creation of the European state order is to be comprehended, it is therefore necessary to understand temporal and spatial reformulation together. To adapt the influential terms developed by Carl Schmitt in this context, the new nomos of the earth, which created the Jus Publicum Europaeum, was not only a spatial, territorial arrangement but also a temporal, historical one.Footnote ⁹¹ Indeed, Schmitt’s core category of nomos as the process of ‘order and orientation’Footnote ⁹² could be applied as much to time as to space: both were dependent on the drawing of lines. In his account of the logic of instantiation of geospatial order, Schmitt was at pains to make visible and specify the importance of the foundational acts of appropriation and division of land that lie at the origin of any formalised and stabilised political and social space, as providing a validating quality. Nomos, Schmitt avers, is ‘beyond a doubt … a fence-word’:Footnote ⁹³ ‘In the beginning was the fence. Fence, enclosure and border are deeply interwoven in the world formed by men, determining its concepts.’Footnote ⁹⁴ The possibility of a concrete political order and of political subjectivity depends upon the originating moment of appropriation and division that turns the physical world into property. The subject grasps the world and makes it its own through division. In the same way, the production of modern historical consciousness should be understood as a new form of appropriation and division of time that decisively refigured what has passed as ‘the past’, the object of historical knowledge: ‘We draw a fence around a part of reality, call that the past, and mine it for knowledge in which historians specialize. That is the founding act of history.’Footnote ⁹⁵

The intention of Fasolt’s book is to frame the question of history differently, to show the form of relation to the past implied in modern historical consciousness, and to draw out the consequences. When history’s purely historiographic appearance is stripped away, its political content and function can be made evident. In a move that, argumentatively at least, has a certain similarity, Schmitt, determined to reveal the gesture of sovereign decision that bestows vitality and authenticity on the concrete order of nomos, famously polemicised against legal positivism for obscuring the essential moment of origin, covering over the dynamic act of division with a reified and neutralised system of mere statute and law.Footnote ⁹⁶ The legal order tended to hide the traces of its own foundation, taking on the appearance of a self-validating and self-sustaining system. If this is true of the sovereign division of inside and outside, how much more so is it the case in relation to history. Fasolt observes of the literature on the historical revolt that, while extensive, ‘it is itself chiefly historical in nature and therefore not always as illuminating as one could wish’,Footnote ⁹⁷ unconsciously caught up in a petitio principii of assuming the validity of history as a form of knowledge. Philosophical accounts of historical thought, meanwhile, generally take historical consciousness for granted and concern themselves with issues internal to the logic of history. Uncomprehending of the historicity and political nature of history, they are unable to grasp its ‘rise to prominence, much less its hold over our minds’.Footnote ⁹⁸ On the same theme, the editors of a recent volume on the subject of ‘Breaking up Time’ note that ‘although since the birth of modernity history presupposes the existence of “the past” as its object, “the past” and the nature of the borders that separate “the past”, “the present” and “the future” until very recently have attracted little reflection within the discipline of history’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Such is the extent of the successful naturalisation of the modern borders in time that, they admit, very few historians have troubled to study the subject of historical time in depth. Instead, their time concepts, as well as those of philosophers of history, ‘are still generally based on an absolute, homogenous and empty time’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ All of which suggests the difficulty of recognising the distinctiveness of modernity’s regime of historicity, let alone trying to imagine beyond it, and so to bear out Fasolt’s claim that the borders in time are, if anything, of even greater importance to the freedom of the sovereign state and the citizen than the borders in space. The temporal division is so much now second nature that it has become almost invisible. However, once it starts to be revealed, the meaning of historical thought takes on a different aspect. ‘History only appears to be a form of knowledge about the past. In truth history serves to confirm a line between now and then that is not given in reality.’Footnote ¹⁰¹ This is the function of the two basic principles of historical enquiry. First, the absolute distinction between past and present: whatever we may discover about the past from the interpretation of evidence, that can in no way affect (in fact it only reaffirms) the fundamental characteristics of pastness for historical consciousness, ‘absence and immutability’.Footnote ¹⁰² The past is definitively gone and hence unchangeable; it exists on the other side of a line that it may not be crossed. Secondly, the principle of anachronism, the difference between past and present that is not to be effaced: a prohibition that ‘places the past under a great taboo in order to prevent a kind of chronological pollution’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Seen from this perspective, modern historical consciousness and history are, as Fasolt suggests, before anything else political. They are part of the metaphysical security apparatus of sovereignty: their primary purpose is not to rescue the past for experience but rather to maintain the dividing line between the past and the present for the sake of the freedom of the modern subject.Footnote ¹⁰⁴