The Future of History (review)

John Lukacs often has reflected on the nature of history. This short volume revisits some of what he has written, but with an eye specifically to the future of the historical discipline. He views history, as many of us did, before the appearance of social history and its many stepchildren. For Lukacs, history is a literary rather than a scientific exercise, and, when properly pursued, its achievement is knowledge that participates in both objectivity and subjectivity. But recently the study of history often has not been properly pursued; and in part this book, without being a tale of woe, traces the decline of the field and the appearance of a series of recent unfortunate fads.

The first of the book's seven sections is on "Historianship"—the professional teaching and writing of history. Unfortunately, Lukacs repeats some of the misinformation about the history of such words as primitive and progress found in his earlier writings. If this seems evidence of some superficiality in his knowledge of ancient and medieval history, it does no great damage to his larger arguments. Lukacs retains his sense of humor: Playing with the well-known definition of a specialist as someone who knows more and more about less and less, Lukacs observes that today we have a kind of opposite—specialists who know less and less about more and more, some specializing in multiculturalism (p. 19).

The second section, "Problems for the Profession," gives good discussions of many points. The pages on the limitations of polls especially are worthy of note. As in other of his books, Lukacs stresses the weakening of state authority and sovereignty following World War II and expects this to continue as the bourgeois modern European age passes into history. Nevertheless, he does not see this as justifying the present neglect of the study of diplomatic and military history. What is needed is a new diplomatic history that takes account of how the democratization of the world has complicated the story that is to be told.

In spite of the very real problems that accompany the growth of technology, the decrease in attention spans, and the difficulty of determining what on the Internet is reliable, there has been a real increase in the appetite for history, and this is the subject of section 3 of Lukacs's book. Interestingly, Lukacs sees the growing appetite for history as linked with decrease in belief in progress and increase in skepticism about "modernity." Following Wendell Berry, he sees the emerging division as not between conservatives and liberals, but between those who view themselves as creatures and those who think of themselves as machines.

Lukacs devoted section 4 to "Re-Cognition of History as Literature," and section 5 turns to "History and the Novel." Section 6, "Future of the Profession," takes up such intriguing questions as the future of books and reading, and the shortsightedness of American liberal historians. Lukacs does not view the future optimistically. A final, brief section again adumbrates discussions found in Lukacs's earlier writings, presenting these in the context of his thesis that we are living at the passing of the modern age. One of the chief achievements of that age was the spread of historical consciousness, and Lukacs discusses whether this will last. Following one of Alexis de Tocqueville's insights—that inattention is the greatest defect in democratic character—Lukacs thinks that in the pictorial age that is upon us, respect for the past will not be lost. The book closes with a brief "Apologia."