The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

by Carl R. Trueman

The memorable first lines of part 1 of the Communist Manifesto capture this thinking succinctly: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.34 The point is simple: history is one long story of oppression. And when one holds such a view, the usefulness of history is not so much that it is a source of positive wisdom for the present as that it provides warnings about how people are exploited. For those who see history through this lens, historians will thus fall into one of two camps: reactionaries who use history to justify exploitation and radicals who use history to unmask the exploitation it embodies. As I argue later, it is the latter model that has come to dominate history as an academic discipline. Suffice it here to note that this idea is now deeply embedded in our cultural imaginary, where phrases such as “being on the right side of history” are typically deployed (as they were in the debates over gay marriage) to argue for the repudiation of established historical norms.