Looking Forward to the Past

The Future of History
by John Lukacs

A maverick but respected historian, John Lukacs had a lot to say about his own profession, and in the sunset of his life he gathered together his thoughts on the subject in this small but far from easy book. His theme is the role of history and the historian at the end of a historical era, the Modern Age.

Lukacs believed that modern Western civilization was something qualitatively different from its presumed forebears, the Classical Age of Greece and Rome and the so-called Middle Ages. In his conception, it lasted from roughly the late Renaissance to the end of the ‘short’ twentieth century, which his colleague Eric Hobsbawm defined as having ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Lukacs foresaw a period of cultural retrogression commencing in the twenty-first century – but not necessarily a reversion to ‘barbarism’ as popularly defined, because he thought technology would sustain the lineaments of civilization even as human culture declined and fell. So far, events appear to be proving him right.

This is a book of concentrated wisdom, gnomic and highly quotable. It is often eye-opening, as when, for example, Lukacs writes that

Flaubert’s Sentimental Education is more historical than its near-contemporary War and Peace... Flaubert’s portrait of 1848 is, historically speaking, more complex and more meaningful than Tolstoy’s of 1812, because Flaubert describes how people thought and felt at that time; his novel abounds with descriptions of changing sensitivities, of mutations of opinions and transformations of attitudes.

As the above suggests, The Future of History is much concerned with the relationship of history to literature. Lukacs insists that historians should be readers first, writers second and historians, in a professional sense, only third. He quotes with approval Jacob Burckhardt’s advice to students of history, bisogna saper leggere – ‘you must learn how to read’. This championship of non-professional historical scholarship and authorship runs right through the book, from his praise for de Toqueville to his contempt for the liberal historians who failed to discern or describe the rise of American conservatism in the late twentieth century. Since I am a writer of historical articles and books but no historian, it gives me great pleasure to read that ‘in the twenty-first century the best, the greatest writers of history may not be certified professionals but erudite and imaginative “amateurs”.’

This is in keeping with Lukacs’s view that history is a literary genre and a creative endeavour rather than a strictly empirical pursuit. Yet he is insistent that a historian’s task is above all to search for truth, and he champions diligent research, using original sources as much as possible. He is refreshingly sceptical that such a thing as ‘scientific’ history can exist and contemptuous of what he calls ‘historical fads’ such as social, psychological or feminist history, which he regards as inevitably prejudiced and bound, therefore, to produce false results.

The Future of History is a book best taken in small doses, one or two pages at a time. Read it with a pencil in hand, and mark the bits you find quotable or interesting, because you are sure to want to return to them later: even, perhaps especially, if you disagree with them.