On The Future of History

John Lukacs has arguably done the best writing on historical consciousness in recent decades. The Future of History renews for me a custom that I have followed for more than half a century: reading his books. I purchased his very first one, The Great Powers and Eastern Europe, in 1955 just before I entered graduate school. It powerfully seized my imagination and became briefly my favorite history book. Looking back on The Great Powers now, it is clear that it was already a representative Lukacs work. The Great Powers is a good deal more than diplomatic history; in fact, though it was published long before the term became fashionable, it is "international history." And it is very well written.

Some of Lukacs's best writing in later years deals with the development of history as a form of understanding and the trend toward historicity in modern thought. The Future of History deepens awareness of these themes. No one has better set forth the ultimate function of history: the pursuit of truth, together with the correction of untruth, and the gaining of understanding even more than accuracy, though without the latter the former will not be achieved. Equally important is his contention that the most important objective of history is to understand not merely what people have done but what they have thought. Another of Lukacs's key themes is the indispensable literary character of history, which will continue to be the case despite the current threat to the future of the book. Serious historical study preceded the appearance of books in their modern format and will survive their technological transformation.

The Future of History poses a paradox: How can we reconcile the massive decline of history in school curricula at all levels (combined with the zeal of younger historians to avoid major historical problems) with the popularity of history among the educated minority and the broad extension of a historical consciousness that has never before existed to this extent? One response might be to posit a highbrow/lowbrow distinction, and conclude that a greater awareness of history reflects the fact that so many more people have had access to advanced education during recent generations, even though at the present time the young study little history. On the other hand, in terms of the proportion of books read and purchased, the small educated minority of the second half of the 18th century probably consumed more history than does the larger minority of educated readers at the present time.

But there is a trend toward more historical reflection, which is due not merely to greater education, but also to broader cultural changes that indicate the maturing of a cultural cycle and a need to assess its origins and development. In the United States this is manifested by the pronounced growth in the number of books published and purchased on the Founding Fathers.

The interest of undergraduates in history, in terms of the number of majors and enrollment in courses, has been cyclical over the past half century—it was way up in the 1960s (in that sense only, a "golden age"), a seemingly contradictory facet of cultural trends otherwise inimical to disciplined thought and the modern bourgeois age. An abrupt collapse early in the 1970s was only partially reversed some two decades later, after which enrollments declined once more. More recently there seems to have been new growth, but one should not put too much stock in undergraduate trends, which are a little like business cycles. In general, the tendency among the young is overwhelmingly in the opposite direction.

John Lukacs on Bill Moyer's Journal (PBS, 1988).

Certainly, the disarray and decline to which Lukacs points both in school curricula and in "historianship," as he puts it, are profound realities. The former is not going to be reversed very soon, if at all, and in the universities the younger historians seem steadily to be losing the capacity to do history. Bred on the bits and pieces of data retrieval and electronic presentation, they seem to be losing the capacity to write books (certainly those of...