Global History and Bounded Subjects: A Response to Thomas Bender

Thomas Bender provides a timely and important appeal for historians to more carefully consider "How Wide is the Circle of We," reevaluate the topics of their research, and recognize the multitude of subjects in contemporary political life. He persuasively analyzes the ways in which history has been dominated by the idea of the nation-state, which has served as the privileged site of historical interpretation and narrative throughout the modern era. As Bender points out, the institutional origins of the historical profession were deeply imbricated in the construction of national politics from the nineteenth century onward. The complicity between thinking in historical ways and acting as part of a national subject has had enormous political implications. In the US, for example, narratives of the Civil War undid the promise of postwar reconstruction and postponed repeatedly the complete emancipation of African Americans in order to reconstruct the unity of a divided North and South. Moreover, as a method of research and interpretation, nineteenth-century historicism repeatedly made the case for distinctly national, cultural, and literary traditions. The complicity between history and the nation has been intellectually corrosive in the most general way, as it has elided and subordinated alternative stories that clashed with or might have undermined the advance of the national subject. As a result, history as a discipline has been impoverished for not historicizing the context of its own authority, its intellectual origins, and the essential categories by which its interpretive analysis proceeds. For all these reasons, expanding the contexts of historical study is intellectually sound and morally necessary.

The historical record shows that modern citizens of nation-states have always felt themselves to be participants in world history as well as national history. Bender cites the peripatetic Leon Trotsky, who can stand in for the industrious global activism of international Marxism. Christian missionaries also constructed dense transnational allegiances between North and South; they still do so. And since World War II, references to Hiroshima and Auschwitz have signaled the widely felt need to come to terms with genuinely global perils. In recent years, more and more people around the world have come to think through their own collective tragedies in the vocabulary of the Holocaust, creating not just exceptional histories but perceived commonalities. Moreover, a good case can be made for the argument that global pressure exerted in concert, rather than imperious unilateralism, can create more satisfactory world citizens out of rogue nations, a strategy that stretches from the United Nations in the 1990s all the way back to the post-Napoleonic Congress of Vienna. These international affiliations are part of our lives, and they demand historicization. Opportunities for the improvement of the human condition and for the determination of policies necessary to solve human problems are insistently global. This makes good sense.

But the guiding image of the "circle of we" and the invocation of the cosmopolitan civic feelings that come with the enlargement of that circle are not necessarily the liberal, generous things that Bender implicitly takes them to be. After all, cosmpolitanism is an empty category. As the references to Marxist revolution and to Christian missions indicate, transnational affiliations have long, yet hardly self-evidently benevolent histories. Indeed, for nineteenth-century lay audiences across Europe, imperialism was very much about accepting a host of global responsibilities whether in the name of humanity, Western civilization, or Christianity. Somewhat later, the provincialism of national identity was strenuously opposed by those political activists who sought to affiliate "white" people into a global network of self-defense or who worked to tie together a putative "West" in the name of vigilant anti-Communism. (The "pan"-movements of the nonaligned but also commonly aligned "Third World" worked in similar fashion.) These cosmopolitan affiliations widened the "circle of we" in very meaningful, if politically skewed ways. Moving from the nation to the world is not a guarantee of political virtue. To be sure, the transnational projects of war, colonialism, and racism would all come under the ambit of the globalized historical analysis that Bender is calling for. But this question remains unresolved for both political...