With this volume—preceded by Faces of History: Historical Enquiry from Herodotus to Herder (New Haven, CT, 1999) and Fortunes of History: Historical Enquiry from Herder to Huizinga (New Haven, CT, 2003)—Donald Kelley completes his massive trilogy on the writing and understanding of history as they have been shaped in what we cannot but call Western intellectual tradition. To review the completed work would be a task of at least essay length, especially as the trilogy must be read in the context supplied by Kelley's total oeuvre (I think particularly of The Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship [New York, 1970], The Human Measure: Social Thought in the Western Legal Tradition [London, 1991], and The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History [Aldershot, 2002]). All that can be attempted here is a review of Frontiers of History as it stands, with due measure of attention to what it has to say about British studies—though these, as will be seen, are not at the center of Kelley's spectrum.

Kelley is more a historian of ideas than, for instance, a “Cambridge” historian—though he says (212) that his work and mine have intersected “adventitiously and serendipitously”—concerned with intellectual performances in contexts they shape and are shaped by. He is centrally, though by no means exclusively, concerned with the ideas about history, extending to the idea of history itself, formed by historians as they write their histories. It would be fair, though not final, to say that his trilogy is a history of historicism and the philosophy of history, more than it is (though it is also) a history of historiography and the practice of history. This is a fully justifiable choice on his part, but a “Cambridge” historian of historiography will see historians as situated at moments in history, which present them with narratives to be told and with the need and opportunity to retell them. Such historians will be concerned with what Michael Oakeshott calls “the practical past,” the past as the present needs it, though they will arrive at the practically and philosophically important discovery that pasts did not exist as relevant to presents but to themselves. The historian may, but need not, go on to the philosophical questions of what history has been and what it is to say that humans live and have lived in it.

The pursuit of these questions, to be termed “historicism” and “philosophy of history,” has been an important if sometimes malignant process in history as the “practical” historian sees it. Kelley's second and third volumes are concerned with the rise and fall of “historicism” in European history during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when German historians in pursuit of nationality, statehood, and empire, and French and later Marxist historians in pursuit of revolution, formulated ideas of “universal history” and the necessary historicity of human existence but yoked these to political or postpolitical fulfillments and the triumph of the state in Germany or of revolution in the French and later the Communist world pictures. Between 1914 and 1989, however, a series of catastrophes—disasters in both human life and historical self-understanding—destroyed “history” in the sense of Historismus, historisme, and storicismo, and the theme of Kelley's volume comes to be the problematic survival of historical culture in a European world both post-Meineckean and postmodern. (I pause to recall with affection how my late friend Peter Munz, himself German, observed that the school of Meinecke could not feel sure that the ruins of the Third Reich served the purposes of history. “Therefore,” said Peter about 1946, “they are putting their doubts before us.”)

To an anglophone reader, what followed 1945 in particular might seem a not unhealthy return to the history of the “practical past”: the past, that is, renarrated in the light of new experience, though whether it was any longer the experience of Western politics that counted was a question to be investigated. Though Kelley's expertise has lain in the field of French history, early modern to post-Revolutionary, it may be his account of post-1945 German thought that has the more political and philosophical profundity. Germans had to pass through partition, Europeanization, the Soviet failure, and reunification to emerge with a post-Prussian Selbstverstandnis based on Republik rather than Reich. In France, where an academic establishment survived even 1968, Kelley conducts us from the world of Seignobos and Lefebvre to that of Braudel and the Annales: a narrative more philosophical than political, in which we hear less than we might expect of the long duration of Marxism and the work of Furet, Ozouf, and Keith Michael Baker in reviewing, revising, and decentering the French Revolution itself.

When Kelley turns to British history and historiography—he does not use the adjective in any way that distinguishes it from “English”—his central theme loses applicability. In nineteenth-century Britain there was little or no Historismus since there was no revolution to be lived through and no state needing invention or reinvention. Profound changes could—or so it was believed—be fed through familiar channels, and historians continued to deal with the practical pasts they knew already, the constitutional conflicts of the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The state was not identified with its empire and left to civil society and parliamentary liberty the task of making sense of human life in history. The disasters of the twentieth century brought Britain the experience not of defeat, occupation, and rebirth but only of the high costs of victory. The loss of empire and great-power status were traumatic among these, but neither had ever been identified with the being of the state itself, with the result that the latter could continue to be narrated. Kelley seems a little ill at ease with this and perhaps a trifle impatient. C. V. Wedgwood might have been mildly surprised to find herself at the end of a chapter devoted to Freud and Spengler and not best pleased to find her kind of history classified as “vulgar Herodotean and vulgar Rankean” (86–87). There were some remarkable philosophers of history in twentieth-century Britain, but while Collingwood receives due attention in this volume, Popper and (surprisingly) Oakeshott do not. Kelley falls back on the themes of Whig continuity and national decline but might have said more of the ways in which British historians survived “Look Back in Anger,” the protest of the imperfectly educated against a history they resented but did not know how to rewrite, by writing it, rewriting it, and writing new kinds of history when they found reason to do so. There has been the enlargement of English into British history—Three Kingdoms and archipelagic—in both the medieval and the early modern settings; there have been the fascinating revisions of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries; there has been the growth of a populist historiography, in which telly-dons like Starkey and Schama are serious historians, and the twin forces of commercialization and criticism may be attaining a relationship. The history of the practical past keeps itself alive by rendering itself more problematic.

It would be a mistake, then, to think of Kelley's concluding volume—it cannot be the end of his thinking as a historian—as no more than a study of the decline and death of historicism. In the French and German fields, and in the wider perspective of European and North American historiography, there are many things going on as the era of Friedrich Meinecke and his peers recedes, and Kelley is acutely percipient of a great many of them. As historians find new things to do, however, there are countertendencies that render them problematic, and the future of history with them. One of these is globalization, with its tendency—Marx's last stroke, or Fukuyama's first?—to leave us as the inhabitants of nothing more than floating and rapidly dissolving consumer markets, having neither the will nor the structure needed to write or debate their histories. Another, which Kelley mentions more than he or any of us can yet analyze, is the much-heralded yet constantly postponed end of Eurocentrism, backed by the uneasy awareness that history is still a European phenomenon and that the civilization originating in Europe has produced it as a history of itself. It is futile to demand of Euro-Americans that they should cease to write histories centered on themselves since to do so would only be a new way of viewing themselves. We must wait to see—since we certainly do not yet know—whether the civilizations beyond Europe will write histories of themselves that we can read and recognize as histories intelligible in our sense of the term. In eastern Asia something not unlike the European experience might be traced. Japan dealt with Western impact by pursuing the path of empire, China the path of revolution; both ended in catastrophe, and we wonder what histories may now be written. But no true equivalent of Historismus—beyond the great dead end of Marxism—accompanied these adventures, and we have yet to know how Japanese and Chinese historians will narrate the journeys from their several antiquities to the modernity they share with us. Donald Kelley's magnificent enterprise concludes on the frontiers of history; perhaps this is the frontier we are waiting to see expand.