The Historian’s Present

Abstract

The conditions for the practice of the historian’s craft have changed over the last 30 years or so, and they continue to change in front of our eyes. The convenient formula of crisis has often recurred: one has spoken of the “crisis” of history, of history “disoriented” while our relationship to time has been day after day transformed. The future closed in on itself, the past was obscured, and the present was becoming our unique horizon (Hartog, 2012). What then becomes of the place and function of he who defined himself in the 19th century — when history was eager to be counted as a science and organized as a discipline — as the scholarly mediator between past and present about the most important, if not unique, object, the Nation or State, in a world that henceforth privileged the current period, often only the present, which declared itself globalized and which has, in some cases, presented itself (e.g., in Germany for a while) as post-national?