History’s Time

The article maintains that the so-called temporal turn that has recently taken hold in the theory of history expands the subject matter of academic historiography (allow- ing it to include the previously little-studied ways of experiencing and ordering time during the eras that preceded the institutionalization of historical knowledge and the formation of classical historicism’s linear temporality), while also eliciting questions about its practical purpose and “the use and abuse of history in life.” The author sug- gests using Michel de Certeau’s idea from the 1980s of repoliticizing historiography as a way to gain insight into this topic. The author finds that repoliticization adopted as a research strategy can be deployed in two modes: a) as a critique of professional historiography’s ambition to obtain maximally objective knowledge about a past which is considered fundamen- tally different from the present and incompatible with it; and b) as a special practice- oriented philosophy of history, which is to be called “radical historicism.” In the first use of repoliticization, the criticism is along the lines of studying the “practical past” as Hayden White advocated in his book of that title, the last one to be published before his death. In it he exposed the antagonism between the historical past that is created by professional historians and the practical past that is available to any- one without exception. The author proposes his own approach to the concept of rad- ical historicism, inspired by Mark Bevir’s writings as well as by the ideas of a number of famous Marxist thinkers and theorists of radical democracy. Generally speaking, radical historicism holds to a contingent ontology of the historical event (its radical novelty) and a rejection of the present state of affairs (in which the historian lives) as a “natural” or “legitimate” configuration of historical forces and processes.