History, politics, and faith-based knowledge: Hobsbawm and Fukuyama take the 90s

Abstract

In this article, I reconsider the reception of two widely divergent historical interpretations of the 20th century with vastly different implications for contemporary political action: Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes (1994) and Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992). By asking how the narrative framing of each book–apart from its historical verdict–affected reactions of reviewers in the mid-90s, I hope to shed light on what it might look like for historians to take seriously the ‘postmodern challenges’ that swept the social sciences during the last quarter of the 20th century. Specifically, I will argue that scholars who present their work as definitive, objective historical accounts are likely to be ‘provincialized’ by reviewers sooner or later, in part because their pretensions are at odds with the presuppositions of the academic enterprise as we know it but also because they threaten the ability of society to think and act politically in instituting the future. Drawing on historians and philosophers of the 1930s, I present political enunciation as a recurrent alternative to continuing pretensions of impersonal objectivity and show that its presence does not blight but can actually enhance and legitimize one’s work.