History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century by Zoltán Boldizsár Simon (review)

In recent years, historians have engaged with the question of how to theorize time and different conceptions of temporality, especially with regard to conceptualizations of historicity. Reinhart Koselleck's works on the semantics of historical times are examples of this trend; so, too, is the rising popularity of theories that discuss our recent times as presentist or theorize our times as the end of history.

In close interaction, but also often in dispute with these and with other widely accepted theorizations of history, most prominently narrativism, Simon has set out to describe a certain historical sensibility—an emerging conceptualization of temporality—he calls postwar historical sensibility. This new historical sensibility has emerged predominantly in the technological and ecological realms. Its specific feature is that it has ceased to see time as a processual, developmental progression but instead regards historical events as disruptive, unexpected incidents. Hereby Simon records two major shifts in the perception of time: first, the vision of the future shifts from assuming a linear development of time to expecting unprecedented and abrupt incidents, and second, and in line with that, our relationship to the past is changing from associative to dissociative. He observes that "postwar visions of the future do not promise to fulfil anything like an already assumed past potential. Instead, in the shape of nuclear warfare, anthropogenic climate change and technological visions of artificial intelligence, bioengineering, transhumanism and radical enhancement, the postwar Western world increasingly conceives of its future as changes that do not develop from previous states of affairs but bring about something unprecedented" (p. 7). Simon's goal is to formulate and think through this new postwar historical sensibility in all its facets. This formulation also means not conceptualizing this sensibility as a successor to the existing processual conception of time. He insists that through the emergence of this new postwar historical sensibility the existing modern one did not cease to exist or lose validity. Instead, both exist in parallel.

Describing this emerging historical sensibility implies the need to, on the one hand, describe anew historical change and, on the other, reconceptualize historical writing. To do so, Simon divides the book into two parts, consisting of three chapters each, framed by a prologue and an epilogue. The first part tries to conceptualize historical change under the condition of unprecedented change, and the second part focuses on historiographical change and how to theorize encountering the world in times of unprecedented change. A preface sets the (theoretical) tone by reminding us that "contrary to common belief, history is not concerned with the past" (p. vii). Instead, the task of historical writing—at least in its existing modern historical sensibility—is to make the new less frightening and to domesticate it by placing it in a longer processual framework and developmental narrative. Under the new postwar historical sensibility, this approach loses its adequacy.

In the first chapter, Simon sets out to compose what he calls a quasi-substantive theory of history that surmounts directionality and teleology while at the same time not omitting an understanding of change and movement. History as a disrupted singular, as he conceptualizes it, "configures change in human affairs as the supersession of ever new subjects" (p. 28). He insists that he does not need to propose this idea of a quasi-substantive theory of history because it is already there. Instead, he outlines this theory by drawing heavily on the ideas of Eelco Runia, Frank Ankersmit, and Jean-Luc Nancy and by bringing those ideas into dialogue with one other.

The following two chapters deal with this conceptualization of historicity by trying to determine the consequences it has for our relationship to the past (Chapter 2) and to the future (Chapter 3). What makes the theory "quasi" is its abandoning of a unitary central subject of historical narrative, a subject that stays coherent and self-identical over the course of affairs. As he...