Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End?

by Lutz Niethammer, Patrick Camiller (Translator)

Whether its ultimate resting-place is deemed to be Fukuyama’s liberal democracy or Baudrillard’s hyperreality, history, according to a number of pundits, has reached the end of the line. In the inflated debates that have ensued, it is precisely history which has been ignored, for the conception of posthistoire is far from new. Here, Lutz Niethammer, Germany’s leading practitioner of ‘history from below’, explores in fascinating detail the forms the conception has taken in the twentieth century and assembles what amounts to an intellectual history of disillusion and resignation. In his survey of thinkers as diverse as Kojeve, Heidegger and Junger, he finds adherents to the idea of the end of history on the Right and Left. But whether they pinned all their hopes on the nation or the proletariat, in different ways they have all conflated the apparent collapse of a particular historical project with the collapse of history itself.

Genres: History, Philosophy

158 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1992

Reviews

[Tim]

The general thesis of this book, to simplify grossly, is that the idea that we are living in (or else rapidly approaching) the "end of history" has its genesis in the failure of particular historical projects, its original proponents being disillusioned ex-fascists and ex-communists. But this is poorly argued. Niethammer's writing style is too ostentatious and obscure, his examples too German (7 out of the 8 thinkers he profiles in depth, plus most of those covered more briefly), and his argument badly structured. He relies too much on simplistic psychologizing to write off the arguments of his subjects, and he tends to focus on details at the expense of explaining the larger picture, saving his clearest and most illuminating points for brief mentions in the conclusion. There also seemed to me no good reason for not telling his intellectual history chronologically - jumping back and forth between time periods made the lines of influence difficult to follow.

I guess you could also say it's more of an "intellectual pre-history". Except for occasional brief digs at Baudrillard, his story more or less ends in the 1970s. The thinker nowadays most associated with the "end of history" idea, Francis Fukuyama, makes only a brief appearance in a footnote, where his book is derided as a bowdlerized "laborious reenactment" of Alexandre Kojeve. I think that's a fair assessment, but what makes the footnote frustrating is that Niethammer gives even Kojeve short shrift. Perhaps this is because his enthusiasm doesn't fit the book's emphasis on posthistoire as a symptom of resignation? (Although there is a direct line linking Kojeve to the disillusioned post-'68 French postmodernists - an avenue that Niethammer neglects to explore)

The most frustrating section was the penultimate chapter, on Walter Benjamin. Instead of using Benjamin's philosophy of history to refute or provide an alternative to the posthistoire thesis, Niethammer spends the whole chapter debunking attempts by various intellectuals to recruit Benjamin's thought to the end of history cause. I thought this was an incredibly esoteric, purely academic exercise and really, a massive missed opportunity.

All in all, the book is useful for uncovering a particular forgotten strand of intellectual history (I was grateful for being introduced to a few new names), but it fails as a comprehensive, up to date history or as a convincing refutation of the posthistoire thesis. I don't know of any one text that fulfills both of those criteria, but if you're looking to fill in the gaps, I would recommend Alberto Toscano's book 'Fanaticism' and Simon Critchley's essay "Mystical Anarchism" for a genealogy and critique of some more contemporary posthistoire proponents (though that's not the main focus of either), and Michel Lowy's outstanding 'Fire Alarm' for a clear and thorough explication of Walter Benjamin's historical thought (including using it to critique of Fukuyama).