For Joan Scott, a once-comforting assumption that history would judge the abuses of the past has failed. Drawn from her 2019 Ruth Benedict Lectures at Columbia University, On the Judgment of History examines three efforts to rebuke past crimes: the 1946 Nuremberg Trials, the 1996 South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and calls for reparations for slavery in the United States. Scott rejects the first two. When modern states confront past abuses, she argues, they rely upon the secular myth of inevitable progress, which features “History itself” as the “righteous Judge of the Universe” (76). Nation-states posture as history's final judges (xvi, 81) despite being built upon violence and, “especially, ethnonationalism as an exclusionary principle of membership” (18). Scott's description of the officials at Nuremberg and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as history's final judges is her own; the officials never stated as much. Scott argues that, by organizing the tribunal and commission around the “raison d’état” (5, 11, 18), officials preserved for future generations the centrality of the state and its powers to pronounce judgement on the past (21). To remedy this power grab, Scott contends, we must embrace a radical history that circumvents the state; for Scott, calls for the reparations of slavery in the United States promise exactly that (xxi, 82).

Scott centers each chapter of On the Judgment of History on one of these cases. Chapter one portrays Nuremberg as an effort at self-aggrandizement by the Allied nation states: “the Nuremberg Tribunal featured benevolent nations delivering judgment against an evil regime in the name of its victims. The advance of history is secured by those benevolent nation-states” (2). Scott sees the Nuremberg proceedings as fatally corrupted by Allied hypocrisy. American and British judges did not emphasize parallels between Nazi race ideology and their own racist laws and imperial structures, though others did (8, 10). Scott's suspicion of official efforts to grapple with past crimes also frames her chapter on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She reasonably criticizes the element of unfair emotional coercion in Archbishop Tutu's Christian emphasis on forgiveness by victims (26). She goes further, suggesting that the Commission urged victims to “forget” (26, 32) the very crimes that were being exposed to public (and historical) view, an assertion not corroborated by any evidence she cites.

Scott wishes that both Nuremberg and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had leveled broader social criticisms and promoted more profound reform. For Nuremberg, Scott seems to suggest that, had officials been less concerned with preserving the victor states’ authority in international law, they would have been more constructively critical of state-sponsored racism (6, 20). Instead, the Tribunal isolated Nazi barbarism (13–18), but did so in a way that produced a record of individual crimes, not broad responsibility (14). Similarly, Scott argues that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission should have spearheaded a more thoroughgoing attack on social and economic inequality, though she mistrusts the state as the proper vehicle for this initiative (38, 43, 45). Indeed, Scott argues that the “modern rule of law” should not supersede “alternative juridical forms” such as “township communal deliberations” (38).

Herein lies the appeal to Scott of calls for the reparations for slavery. While appeals for reparations have long highlighted the costs of post-emancipation racism in the United States and the debt owed to African Americans, as Scott nicely summarizes (55–62), there has yet to be an overarching project to put this past (and present) on trial at the national level. She writes that “Reparations . . . is less a literal demand for financial repayment of debt (though for some it surely also is that) than it is a defiant rereading of the history of the United States” (73). The implication is that activists can highlight the extensiveness of the damage racism wrought, unlike in the Nuremberg Tribunal or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

On the Judgment of History is sure to excite interest given Scott's centrality to feminist history and the important ways in which assessments of history have recently gained prominence in public discourse. Yet, there are real difficulties in Scott's arguments that ought to give readers pause. Scott's dark portrait of state power (which she equates with absolutist raison d’état) poorly describes liberal democracies, which rarely attempt to monopolize public discourse about history and even more rarely manage to have the last word. Scott's denigration of the state leads to two difficulties that undergird the text as a whole.

First, Scott puts far too much faith in her alternatives, stated and implied. For South Africa, Scott praises the potential of “alternative judicial forms” in townships. But readers who remember apartheid-era “people's courts” in townships—they routinely sentenced alleged collaborators to “necklacing” with burning tires—may be pardoned some skepticism at Scott's suggestion. In the case of Nuremberg, Scott's emphasis on hypocrisy distracts from something she buries in an aside (19): Nuremberg provided a groundbreaking precedent in the international adjudication of human rights abuses. Indeed, anticolonial and antiracist activists quickly seized upon the implications that the Nuremberg judges had left unstated. The power of ideas outstripped the limitations and hypocrisies of their founding; ideas regularly do. Having set aside this central significance of the tribunal, Scott seems offended by the Nuremberg organizers’ claim to be seeking justice. But what were the alternatives? Should they have delivered mea culpas on behalf of the Allies in front of Hermann Göring and his fellow butchers? Or would it have been better to follow Stalin's suggestion that the Allies dispense with trial proceedings and summarily execute Nazi criminals? This latter course of action would have been genuine raison d’état, a term Scott repeatedly misapplies to the Nuremberg proceedings. Nor does Scott makes any mention of Soviet hypocrisy while participating in the tribunal. Noting the Soviet Union's staggering atrocities would undermine Scott's portrayal of ethnonationalism as the root cause of abusive governance, pointing instead to illiberal rule as the crucial common ingredient of both Soviet and Nazi abuses.

Second, Scott is wrong to claim that state officials in Nuremberg and South Africa tried to foreclose further explorations of the past by historians or the public. If this were their goal, officials undermined it from the start; both proceedings exposed and published vast quantities of evidence about the atrocities they judged. This service to the historical profession goes unnoticed in Scott's text; it is a service that has made possible the very sort of thorough, radical, and defiant histories of injustice that scholars and public commentators have offered in the decades that followed. Nor does Scott's association of “defiant” history with good history deserve confidence. Progressives have no monopoly on defiant histories; today's white supremacists position themselves as the true insurgents against historical orthodoxy. As historians in liberal nations where states are not the main authors of history, we have primary professional responsibility for the “judgment of history”—for showing why some historical interpretations are better than others.