Key Metaphors for History: Mirrors of Time 1138354465, 9781138354463

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Key Metaphors for History

This book casts a fresh look at what to date has been a relatively unexplored question: the enormous value and usefulness of the metaphor in the understanding and writing of history (and at the historical culture refected by these metaphors). Mapping a wide range of tropes present in historiography and public discourse, the book identifes some of the key metaphorical resources employed by historians, politicians, and journalists to represent time, history, memory, the past, the present, and the future and examines a selection of analytical concepts of a temporal nature, built upon unmistakeably metaphorical foundations, such as modernity, event, process, revolution, crisis, progress, decline, or transition. The analysis of these and other pillars on which modern history has been built, whether as a philosophy of history, as an academic discipline, or as a set of events, will interest graduates and scholars dealing with the historical and social sciences and the humanities in general. Key Metaphors for History ofers a broad overview of historiography and historiosophy from an unfrequented point of view, halfway between conceptual history, theory of history, and metaphorology. Moreover, it constitutes a form of self-refection of the historian on his or her own positionality when researching and writing history. Javier Fernández-Sebastián is Professor Emeritus at the University of the Basque Country. He has worked extensively on conceptual history and has recently been interested in the theory of history. His latest publications include Historia conceptual en el Atlántico ibérico (2021), Metafóricas espaciotemporales para la historia (2021), and Tiempos de la historia, tiempos del derecho (2021).

Routledge Approaches to History

Combining Political History and Political Science Towards a New Understanding of the Political Edited by Carlos Domper Lasús and Giorgia Priorelli Lebanese Historical Thought in the Eighteenth Century Hayat El Eid Bualuan Polish Theory of History and Metahistory in Topolski, Pomian, and Tokarczuk Jan Pomorski The Cultivation of Character and Culture in Roman Rhetorical Education The Available Means Anthony Edward Zupancic When Jews Argue Between the University and the Beit Midrash Edited by Ethan B. Katz, Sergey Dolgopolski and Elisha Ancselovits Historical Narratives Constructable, Evaluable, Inevitable Mariana Imaz-Sheinbaum The Biographical Landscapes of Raphael Lemkin Piotr Madajczyk Ujamaa and Ubuntu Conceptual Histories for a Planetary Perspective Bo Stråth Key Metaphors for History Mirrors of Time Javier Fernández-Sebastián For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Approachesto-History/book-series/RSHISTHRY

Key Metaphors for History Mirrors of Time

Javier Fernández-Sebastián

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Javier Fernández-Sebastián The right of Javier Fernández-Sebastián to be identifed as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-138-35446-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-73635-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-42480-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781032736358 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To Pablo

Contents

List of figures List of abbreviations Introduction. The power of metaphors 1 2

x xii 1

Metaphors 5 On historians and metaphors 10

PART I

Conceptual metaphors for history

19

1

21

Metaphorizing history 1.1

1.2

1.3 1.4 2

Metaphors for history 21 1.1.1 Mirrors 23 1.1.2 Perspectives 30 1.1.3 Constructions 32 1.1.4 Masters and teachers 33 Clio transfgured 36 1.2.1 Railways and trains 38 1.2.2 History in motion 39 1.2.3 Court of justice and dustbin 42 Counter-metaphors 45 Turns, levels, professions, territories, borders 50

Time and memory 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4

Memory of time/time of memory 60 Clio, Chronos, and Kairos 63 Circles, lines, and points 64 Water, rivers, and seas 67

60

viii

Contents 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8

3

Atmospheres and thresholds 72 Levels, sediments, strata 74 Turbulent times 77 A deluge of memory 81

Pasts, presents, and futures 3.1 3.2

3.3

97

The essential triad 98 Past and present 104 3.2.1 A foreign country 106 3.2.2 The living and the dead 108 3.2.3 Distances and dimensions 111 Present and future 114 3.3.1 Lights 120 3.3.2 Seeds 121 3.3.3 Horizons 123 3.3.4 Shards 127

PART II

Metaphorical concepts in historiography

133

4

135

Sources, events, processes 4.1 4.2 4.3

5

Sources and traces 135 Events and facts 141 Processes and structures 149

Revolution, crisis, modernity 5.1 5.2 5.3

Revolution 164 Crisis 184 Modernity 191 5.3.1 Revelation, discovery, disappointment 193 5.3.2 Action and mastery 195 5.3.3 Rationalization and secularization 196 5.3.4 A perennial gale 198 5.3.5 The pile of sand and the contract 200 5.3.6 Globalization and Great Acceleration 202 5.3.7 Perverse efects and counter-metaphors 206

164

Contents 6

Progress, decline, transition 6.1 6.2 6.3

ix 218

Progress, advancement, development 219 Decadence and decline 232 Tradition and transition 240

PART III

257

7

Final thoughts

259

Bibliography Acknowledgements Index

284 312 315

Figures

1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 6.1 6.2 6.3

Cover and logo of the journal Speculum of the Medieval Academy of America (founded in 1926). “‘Mugged’: For the Rogues’ Gallery.” Political cartoon by Charles Dana Gibson. Life, 28 February 1918. Theodore Roosevelt apostrophizing History. Cartoon by Boardman Robinson, c. 1916. First emblem of the Spanish Royal Academy of History (1738). “Let’s see if we can fnish the historical memory business as soon as possible and start to imagine the future.” El País, 29 June 2021. Allegory of History. Cristoforo Giarda, Bibliothecae Alexandrinae icones symbolicae (Milan, 1628). The past, the present, and the future of science, according to British illustrator Harry Furniss (late 19th century). “The revolutionary torrent.” Engraving published in Le Charivari (Paris, 1834). Revolution as a tsunami. Cartoon by Bill Mauldin (USA, 1962). The Russian Revolution of 1905, as seen by a cartoonist for Philadelphia Inquirer (15 July 1905). “March, in giant strides, of the September Revolution” by Francisco Ortego. Gil Blas, Madrid, 12 May 1870. “Revolution is knocking at the door!” Gil Blas, Madrid, 18 February 1865. “The Fisherman and the Genie.” Cartoon by E. F. Hiscocks, from New Zealand Graphic, 28 January 1905. M. John Progrès, astride his Steam Horse, by Octave Penguilly L’Haridon. (Paris, 1846). “October Revolution – to a Brighter Future.” Russian Communist poster from 1920. Chart depicting the rise of Bolshevism, from the founding of the newspaper Iskra (1900) to the establishment of communism at an undetermined date. Poster from 1939.

23 27 48 70 86 101 103 170 171 172 174 179 180 226 228 229

Figures 6.4

6.5 6.6 6.7

Engraving inscribed in the book El universo en marcha, o Ensayo flosófco-político sobre las leyes del progreso racional [The Universe on the Move, or A Philosophical-Political Essay on the Laws of Rational Progress] by “Un ofcial del Ejército” (Lérida, 1838). “The Next Rung.” Political cartoon by Blanche Ames. Woman’s Journal (20 November 1915). “O subir o bajar” [“Either Up or Down”]. (Milan, 1642, LX). Buonapartes Stufenjahre [“Buonaparte’s Step Years”]. German print from 1814.

xi

231 233 234 235

Abbreviations

DPSMI-I

Diccionario político y social del mundo iberoamericano – I (see Fernández-Sebastián, ed. 2009) DPSMI II Diccionario político y social del mundo iberoamericano – II (see: Fernández-Sebastián, ed. 2014) GG Geschichtliche Grundbegrife (see Brunner, Conze, and Koselleck, eds. 1972–1990)

Introduction. The power of metaphors

Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of a few metaphors. – Jorge Luis Borges

This book is an invitation to the reader interested in the theory of history, intellectual history, and the humanities and social sciences to take the history of metaphors seriously and, specifcally, to refect upon the cognitive benefts resulting from the historical study of metaphors in historiography. One of its main goals is to demonstrate that the two-way relationships between history and metaphor – historical metaphorology, on the one hand, and historiography of metaphors, on the other – deserve to be carefully re-examined and reassessed, given that the theory of history and history tout court have much to gain from this process. History, historians, the past, memory, and time itself have been represented and imagined under very diferent guises. A systematic review of that rich, changing metaphorics should help to shed light upon some signifcant shifts and turning points in the way of contemplating the past and conceiving of the raison d’être of the historian’s craft. In this introduction, I shall restrict myself to underlining the vital importance of metaphorical language and its suitability as a port of entry into intellectual history (the history of historiography, in this case). After a cursory explanation of the functions of metaphor and presenting the fundamental objectives and arguments of the book and its methodological framework (as well as its limits), I shall briefy present its structure and the content of its seven chapters. Metaphor is an essential ingredient of any cognitive process, and historiography and the social sciences are no exception. It is a well-known fact, however, that until recently, historians hardly paid any attention to this subject, and when they did so, more often than not it was to advise against and frown upon the use of metaphor(s). The time has come to overcome old pseudo-scientifc prejudices and readily accept that metaphor is both an indispensable ally when investigating the past and a subject worthy of far more profound and systematic historical studies than those undertaken to date. DOI: 10.4324/9781032736358-1

2

Introduction. The power of metaphors

My work will show that, as is the case in other areas of knowledge, metaphor also performs irreplaceable functions in historiography in both the research stage (the posing of questions, analysis, and interpretation of sources) and the writing phase (narration and reasoning). Even more so in philosophies of history or “historiosophies,” whose speculative assertions have invariably been woven upon a warp of metaphors. The centuries-old mistrust that scientists have exhibited towards metaphors, an attitude typical of the rationalism, empiricism, and scientism of classical modernity, accentuated at the end of the last century by the average historian’s suspicion of all that might ring of postmodernism, has for a long time impeded a methodological and unbiased approach to this problématique. It should be acknowledged, in fact, that among professional historians there has been recurrent evidence of mistrust of and opposition to the study of metaphors. The reluctance of so many historians to address this subject is partly due to the fact that these kinds of refections and readings are generally considered to be too abstract or fanciful, too close to philosophy, or too far from history. In short, they were unattractive for sober-minded professional historians, eager at the end of the 19th century, at the time of the emergence of the profession, to refne their methods and distance themselves as much as possible from authors of fction with a view to achieving the recognition of history as science, and under pressure at the end of the last century from the dire threat of narrativism and the so-called crisis of history. Faced with the challenge of confronting an intellectual history riddled with metaphors, some historians felt uneasy, regarding that perspective as dangerously close to poetry or the literature of fction (however, attitudes in this respect have changed signifcantly in recent times, from Michel De Certeau’s “the poetics of historiography” (1988; Carrard 2001) to Jablonka’s “contemporary literature” (2018)). And though history has been open for some time to interdisciplinary trafc with other social sciences, the determination of historians to remain in the safe territory of social science would explain their reluctance to devote attention to – much less incorporate into their toolbox – any form of fgurative language. This prudent distancing might even be interpreted as a sign of the sobriety and scientifcity of their profession, given that, as Fernando Betancourt has noted (2007, 5), “since the 18th century nothing has been further removed from the feld of science than metaphor.” Indeed, although we know that Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, and others – including the frst authors of artes historicae, strong advocates of a clear and plain style of historical writing – inveighed against rhetoric, despite employing in their writings an entire panoply of suggestive metaphors,1 it is no less true that the rationalist and empiricist philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries regarded metaphor – as had Plato – as an obstacle to “true knowledge.”2 A similar attitude would be adopted by 19th- and 20th-century positivist authors, although, paradoxically, the most prominent

Introduction. The power of metaphors

3

scientists established their theoretical proposals upon unmistakably metaphorical foundations. Fortunately, in recent decades, a group of pioneering theorists and historians have cleared the land delimited by the intersection of history and metaphorology, transforming it into a promising feld for historical research and experimentation. This work seeks to continue ploughing the furrows opened by those pioneers so as gradually to convert what was once a barren wasteland into a lush garden. Historians of science and cultivators of historical epistemology are well aware that metaphor makes a fundamental contribution to the advance of knowledge. Indeed, scientifc revolutions have been described as “metaphoric redescriptions” of nature (Rorty 1989, 16), and it is difcult to think of any relevant theories in any sphere of knowledge without immediately evoking fundamental metaphors that underlie them. How can Darwinism be explained without natural selection, constitutionalism, and liberalism without checks and balances and the invisible hand, international relations without the balance of powers, or physical cosmology and some aspects of the theory of general relativity without the big bang and black holes? In truth, however much metaphors usually refer to great insights and overall visions, while concepts are generally considered to be colder, more analytical, and consolidated intellectual instruments (Mieke Bal once observed that sometimes a concept is a “miniature theory,” but the same could be said of the metaphor), the fact is that in many contexts the two – metaphors and concepts – are barely distinguishable. Numerous worn-out metaphors are lexicalized as concepts and subsequently used as living metaphors in a new context (Ricoeur 2004b, 342–3). Moreover, processes of conceptualization and metaphorization never stop, and the stabilization of any cognitive instrument at one or other pole of that continuum is extremely rare. Not only is there an abundance of intermediate states of crystallization – that is, conceptual metaphors and metaphorical concepts – but one can never be certain that such and such a concept will continue to be employed for much time in a literal sense without someone deciding, at any given moment, to once again lend it a fgurative twist and vice versa. At the end of the day, both – metaphors and concepts – are interchangeably and frequently used by actors/ speakers as pivots around which their arguments revolve and as descriptiveevaluative levers by means of which to move their readers or listeners and thus tip debates in their favour (Foxlee 2018). The main attempts to combine the theory and history of metaphors were undertaken by a handful of German scholars, largely in the footsteps of Hans Blumenberg (2010; Bödeker 2002; Kroß and Zill 2011). There is even an early monograph on metaphors used by historians (Demandt 1978), a dictionary of philosophical metaphors (Konersmann 2011), and an ambitious project in progress to compile a historical lexicon of transdisciplinary concepts – many of them metaphorical – based at Berlin’s Center for Literary and Cultural Research (Müller 2021b). The evolution of this project is evidence

4 Introduction. The power of metaphors of the indefnability of certain crucial metaphors that continually cross the borders between natural and social sciences and are capable of generating emerging semantic felds, sometimes even new disciplines (Müller 2011). Furthermore, recent years have seen the publication of some works on certain aspects of the relationship between metaphorology and historiography (among them, a collective volume on spatial-temporal metaphors for history: Fernández-Sebastián and Oncina 2021). Nevertheless, much remains to be done. There is a need, in particular, for an updated, organized, and comprehensive work on the use of metaphors in the writing of history. This book seeks to contribute to flling this gap, taking a fresh look – more selective than exhaustive – at this question. This has been a surprisingly neglected subject, since, in spite of the vast bibliography on the theme of metaphor,3 far less has been written specifcally about the history of metaphors.4 Yet this is not a history of metaphors in general, but, more precisely, metaphors for history (or, to be more accurate, an outline of a history of the main historiographical metaphors). In this chapter I shall set aside “historical metaphorography,” that is, the collection of monographs published in relation to the tropes employed by certain writers or in certain eras, areas, or domains of knowledge – for instance, in the feld of philosophy, science, religion, or politics – in order to concentrate on “historiographical metaphorology” (or, in other words, on “historiological metaphorography”).5 To this end, we must occupy an intermediate vantage point between the empirical and theoretical levels and focus our attention on the use of certain metaphors by historians, men of letters, journalists, philosophers, and intellectuals to refer to history, whether history as research and writing (cognitio/narratio rerum gestarum) or history as an ensemble of events, actions, and processes (res gestae). So vast is the topic that it is advisable to establish from the outset two more constraints in order that the book does not exceed a reasonable length. First, from the point of view of the cultural and chronological framework, I shall focus above all – but not exclusively – on the discourses on history produced during the past two centuries in the West, especially in recent decades. Second, I shall concern myself in particular with those tropes associated with a limited repertoire of basic concepts of a disciplinary and temporal nature – history, historian, and historicity; historical time and temporality; past, present, and future – and with some termini technici central to the discipline – process, event, transition – and instrumental notions typical of modernity – crisis, revolution, progress, decline. Nonetheless, given that the sources teem with metaphors, I have opted to restrict my analysis to a manageable number thereof. I shall consider only the most representative metaphors, which also tend to be those most often repeated in discourse, although it is a good idea not completely to close the door on those signifcant singularities that Kenneth Burke (1962, 323–5) called “representative anecdotes.” I am fully aware, however, that the topic is inexhaustible, and, therefore, my choice of certain metaphorics at the expense of others is in no small way subjective, artisanal, and impressionistic (not, I hope, arbitrary). Although

Introduction. The power of metaphors

5

the wealth of primary and secondary sources I have examined is considerable, and the metaphorics assembled here represent only a fraction of those that can be found in texts,6 quantitative treatment of this same material, accessing massive textual databases and computational models characteristic of digital humanities (in line, for example, of De Bolla’s work in 2013), would almost certainly produce very diferent conclusions to those reached here. On the other hand, an alternative, more specifc approach from a pragmatic point of view would allow for a more detailed analysis of the circumstances, contexts of enunciation, and concrete uses of each metaphoreme.7 I am also aware that many of the metaphors to which I devote a few lines – or, at most, a few pages – could be the subject (some already have been) of far more detailed, lengthy, and profound monographic studies, as it is clear that the “same” metaphor, like a chameleon, changes colour – and even acquires a substantially diferent value – depending on the context and environmental conditions of its immediate surroundings. The book, more descriptive than normative in tone, will move within a border zone between intellectual history and the theory of history, so it is to be hoped that scholars of both specialities might fnd it useful. In any case, under no circumstances is it my intention to recommend certain metaphors as purportedly better equipped to capture the study of the past or the course of history. On the contrary, the goal of this book is simply to provide a representative sample of the metaphorics used by very diverse agents (historians, of course, but also politicians, philosophers, and writers) in their texts to encapsulate and efectively communicate in fgurative language the major evolutionary trends in society over time, and the gist of a genre and later a discipline, historiography, of invariably controversial and volatile profles. This monograph, in short, belongs to a genre that is not easily classifed: it is not, strictly speaking, a theoretical essay on historiography, or on the philosophy of history, but rather on metaphorography applied to the history of historiography and to the philosophy of history. However, as I say, my assumption is that analysis of fgurative language referring to history and historiography ofers us essential keys with which to unlock and decipher the fundamentals of this feld of knowledge, its raison d’être or rationale, and its development over the centuries. To this end, I shall focus above all on the phases of the paradigmatic crises, in other words, on those moments when a change of metaphor reveals and entails profound transformations in historiographical culture. That said, one should be particularly careful to assess the impact of the metaphorical factor in a reasonable manner and not overestimate its scope, as may have occurred in the case of certain bestsellers.8 1.

Metaphors

Before we begin our journey, it is worthwhile briefy recalling what is usually understood by metaphor, although I should like to make clear from the outset that in this book I will use this term in its broadest sense, encompassing

6

Introduction. The power of metaphors

very diverse formulae and ways of indirectly describing or representing certain qualities of something by means of cognitive resources borrowed from other areas of human activity.9 The Greek root μεταφορα – from the verb μεταφέρω (to carry over) – literally refers to the act of transporting or transferring something and fguratively to the distorted, deviated, apparently illogical, or at least striking, application of a word from one semantic feld to another diferent one, thus revealing the metaphorical origins of the very concept of metaphor.10 As has often been noted, a metaphor seeks to explain something in terms of something else, to comprehend the unknown in terms of the known, the invisible through the visible, the abstract through the concrete (as Thomas Aquinas writes of the Holy Scriptures, traduntur nobis spiritualia sub metaphoris corporalium: quoted by Blumenberg 2010, 82). Of course, there are metaphors – allegories, images, similes, synecdoches, parables, comparisons – of very varied scope and depth. The inventor of a powerful metaphor eschews the beaten path, the accepted guidelines of intelligibility.11 And the person who, faced with the impossibility of describing a certain state of things with the conceptual tools available, resorts to a metaphor or a trope (from the Greek τρόπος, shift, turn) takes a detour: they attempt to circumvent that cognitive difculty with the help of a concept or intuition brought from elsewhere. An auxiliary idea that generally comes from an environment more familiar and intelligible for the speaker, closer to their lifeworld (Lebenswelt), to use a term from Husserlian phenomenology. Normally based on an analogy that gives rise to a transit of properties and attributes between two situations, objects, or states of things, the metaphor would be the main strategy available to man in order to “semantically colonise” the unknown, that is, to attempt to access the unfamiliar and render it familiar (more rarely this occurs in the opposite sense when the aim is to distance oneself from the familiar in an attempt to contemplate it as foreign, as is sometimes the case in the formulation of hypotheses). This is “an intellectual process by means of which we succeed in comprehending what lies beyond our conceptual power. With what is close and more easily controlled, we can achieve mental contact with what is remote and less approachable” (Ortega 1983). The need for metaphors and their generative power is better understood if we bear in mind the radical insufciency of concepts for linguistic comprehension of the realities in which we live. This leads us to peer into the abyss of the preconceptual in our quest to explain by means of a theory of nonconceptuality (Unbegrifichkeit) (Blumenberg 1997) how the emergence of some explosive metaphors makes it possible for the unthinkable and ungraspable suddenly begin to seem conceivable (Palti 2011). The use of this metaphorical device to fll a conceptual gap may be seen as a mechanism – perhaps the mechanism par excellence – of semantic construction (and not only semantic, as the thinkable often becomes doable). This autopoietic potential recalls the Nietzschean characterization of the metaphor as a tool-making tool.

Introduction. The power of metaphors

7

Meanwhile, the metaphors that Blumenberg calls “absolute” are those of a foundational nature that refuse to dissolve into pure conceptuality and cannot be translated into strictly logical terms. But if between concepts and metaphors there are no barriers as insurmountable as is generally supposed, if our conceptual system is largely built upon metaphorical foundations, and if most tropes only make sense within a certain cultural, spatial, and chronological framework, in such a way that the same metaphorics or constellation of metaphors may undergo major transformations as circumstances vary, the sometimes twisting evolution of certain metaphorical felds over time is usually closely related to underground cultural changes (on the historicity of conceptual metaphor systems, see Musolf [2010, 71–3]), and observation of these processes may prove highly instructive for intellectual history (in the case of this book, for the history of historiography).12 In a sense, great metaphors lay the foundations of the logical thought upon which are built the strictest and most rigorous notions, smaller units of signifcation contained in the broad semantic vessel created by the former. The fundamental metaphorics establish the rules of the game and chart the contours within which are to be found the conceptual reticles that in turn order and legitimize practices and institutions. Figurative knowledge would thus be, in a way, the horizon, herald, and host of conceptual knowledge. From this perspective, as Hans Blumenberg (2010, 13) suggested in his seminal work of 1960, the history of great metaphors is even more signifcant, illuminating, and conclusive than the history of concepts, since upon the former depend the “horizons of meaning within which concepts undergo their modifcation.” Blumenbergian metaphorology, embedded in his philosophical anthropology (García-Durán 2017), probably constitutes the most ambitious epistemological horizon imaginable for the study of metaphors. Signifcantly, for the German philosopher, metaphor and myth are the two main weapons man possesses with which to confront the “absolutism of reality” (Absolutismus der Wirklichkeit). The most superfcial level of this study would include those interested in the metaphor as a simple literary artifce or rhetorical fgure. A second level would comprise those authors who also consider it to be an instrument with primary gnoseological and conceptual value: more than a fgure of speech, it would be a means of knowledge. Finally, on a third, more philosophical level, we fnd a small number of scholars who identify in the systematic use of metaphors an anthropological trait, that is, a distinctive characteristic of human beings. The frst two levels have been represented since antiquity by a long series of authors who have addressed this subject. This tradition can be traced back to Aristotle, who perceived its cognitive potential, as, unlike ordinary words, “it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of new ideas” (Rhetoric III: 1410b). Following in his footsteps, other Greek and Latin authors were aware that the metaphor’s function was not only ornamental and expressive

8

Introduction. The power of metaphors

but also creative; as Cicero and Quintilian noted, it made it possible to invent names for things that previously had none. In the Middle Ages, too, some rhetorical writers (e.g. Benedictine monk Alberto de Montecassino in the 12th century) argued that the metaphor twisted, as it were, the usual way of speaking with a view to innovating and creating something new. In fact, after the profound change in the concept and value of the metaphor brought about by Nietzsche (Hines 2020), diverse historians and theorists of language have reached the conclusion that an extremely high percentage of the lexicon is metaphorical in origin. And in the modern world, particularly from 1960 onwards, numerous theorists – Max Black (1962), George Lakof, and Mark Johnson (1980), among others – have drawn attention to the omnipresence and the heuristic value of the metaphor, transcending rhetoric and literary studies to enter many other scientifc felds (including cognitive linguistics, translation studies, the philosophy of science, and epistemology), to the point of declaring “the constituent metaphoricity of the world” (Couceiro-Bueno 2012). However, there is no doubt that it was Hans Blumenberg whose research into this feld went furthest to the extent that, for him, homo sapiens – or rather, homo loquens – is not only animal symbolicum but more specifcally a metaphorizing animal. The range of images to which philosophers and philologists usually resort to illuminate the functions of the metaphor – some of which I have used myself in earlier paragraphs – is very revealing of the variety of facets and tasks attributed to the latter. Many of these meta-metaphors underline its irreplaceable role in the genesis of concepts – “sub-structure of thought,” “subsoil of logos,” “breeding ground for systematic crystallizations,” “placenta of concepts,” “spearhead of conceptual creation” – as well as its characteristic as remnants that bear witness to primordial stages of intellective development – “roots,” “seeds,” “fossil guides of an archaic state of the process of theoretical curiosity.” Other images – “fuel for thought,” “orthopaedic prostheses or organs of understanding,” “instrument of colonization of the unknown,” “scafolding for the mind” – meanwhile, celebrate the capacity of fgurative language to propel the intellect and transport it to places that are inaccessible for rational-conceptual language.13 When metaphors are said to be condensed comparisons, ties, ropes, nets, or bridges that connect diferent things, points of intersection or nodes, types of hubs where many conceptual routes intersect, the aim is to highlight their capacity to connect diferent areas of knowledge, in a word, their interdisciplinary quality (a quality that stands out in the frequent images relating to the migration or nomadism of concepts and also in Jorge Luis Borges’s oft-quoted phrase about the “secret sympathies of concepts”). When the metaphor is equated with a leap in the dark, an almighty fat, a magic wand, a beam of light, a fash of lightning, a glimmer, the spark that ignites a fre or the eruption of a volcano, what is being emphasized is its capacity to make us understand something quickly, as well as its unpredictable, expeditious, surprising, disruptive, almost miraculous nature. By contrast, when there is

Introduction. The power of metaphors

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a reference to the sliding of meanings, attention is drawn towards slow, surreptitious semantic movements, which go unnoticed by most observers but generate unconventional novel meanings. If the images evoked are weapons or tools, the intention is to highlight their defensive or instrumental functions; the map, the compass, or the path alludes to their guiding role. And so on.14 The idea that some great metaphors – by applying to one object the characteristics of another and thus revealing unsuspected aspects of the former, which is seen in the guise of the latter – project analogical insights that facilitate immediate understanding of a complex situation and have the ability not only to shed new light on deep-seated problems but to uncover hidden meanings and thereby build new concepts, is not new. Many inquiring minds had been sensing this demiurgic power, especially since the fnal decades of the 18th century and the frst decades of the 19th century, and it was reiterated a century later by authors such as Nietzsche or Ortega y Gasset, before, from the 1960s onwards, some theorists, among whom Hans Blumenberg stands out, assigned maximum academic dignity to the study of metaphors. In a 1971 text, the Lübeck philosopher wrote in an aphoristic tone, “[T]he human relation to reality is indirect, circuitous, delayed, selective, and above all, ‘metaphorical’” (Blumenberg 2020, 408). A century earlier, Nietzsche, in his essay On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873), had already observed that the drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for an instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself. This drive is not truly vanquished and scarcely subdued by the fact that a regular and rigid new world is constructed as its prison from its own ephemeral products, the concepts. (Nietzsche 1979, 89) In truth, the historical precedence of metaphorical over conceptual language, of imagination over reason, had been emphatically proclaimed since the beginnings of romanticism. One of the precursors of this movement, Johann Georg Hamann, was of the opinion that, just as painting preceded writing, “metaphors [come] before reasoning” (Berlin 1994a, 87). Various 20th-century scholars have essentially corroborated Hamman’s intuition, also hinted at by Herder and previously by Vico and Condillac. There appears to have been a period haunted by poetical thought in which allegorical language was the norm rather than the exception. This was a pre-literal era, a golden age of metaphors and allegories that were not recognized as such – and of parallelisms, fgurations, and historical analogies (Leutzsch 2019; FernándezSebastián 2021d) – since they tended to be regarded as true correspondences between facts, individuals, situations, objects, and events until, with the

10

Introduction. The power of metaphors

advent of modernity and the disenchantment of the world, “the book of nature was coming to be interpreted literally rather than allegorically, part of a general ‘rise of literal-mindedness’” (Burke 1993, 1997, 346). 2.

On historians and metaphors

In spite of the fact that the Cartesian anxiety characteristic of the modern world to which I referred initially had resulted in the metaphor being disparaged as a dispensable, frivolous, and insubstantial rhetorical device, assimilable to the world of fction and myths – Giambattista Vico in fact described the metaphor as “a small myth,” although with no derogatory intention whatsoever – a number of historians and theorists have noted that the writing of history is full of tropes. Moreover, not only have they concluded that recourse to these fgures of speech in the composition of their works is a habitual practice of historians, but on occasions they have even claimed that the historiographical operation is in essence constitutively metaphorical. According to Koselleck, since the early days of historical inquiry, the imagination that endeavours to learn about the past presupposes a metaphorical relationship between sources and the events or processes to which they testify. (The very word “source” is a metaphor that alludes to the knowledge that springs from the latter, that is, to the inferences drawn from remains, documents, and signs.)15 Referring to the concepts present in the textual documents analysed by the historian, he wrote that “the language used in the primary sources (Quellensprache) for a given period can be treated as a metaphor for the history” (Koselleck 2011, 7). The same author argued elsewhere that what diferentiates history from other sciences is its metaphorics (Koselleck 2000, 305). Yet, beyond that oblique relationship between events, sources, and accounts, the “metaphorical shift” of part of historiographical theory would be completed above all when, from the mid-1970s onwards, theorists of history like Hayden White (1973) or Frank Ankersmit (1983, 209–20, 1994, 2001, 13–20, 2012, 73–6) published some well-known works in which they unequivocally proclaimed, from diferent premises and perspectives, the narrative and largely metaphorical structure of history and its tropological languages.16 Further contributors to this shift – obviously closely related to the socalled cultural turn, linguistic turn, and rhetorical turn, sometimes also hermeneutic or interpretive turn, which in one way or another afected all social sciences and humanities – were several works by Paul Ricoeur, in which the author suggested in a similar vein that history performs a kind of metaphorization of past events, which are represented, and in a way recreated, by means of narratives that inevitably present them in a diferent light to that which illuminated them when they actually occurred (Ricoeur 1983, I, 13, 1975, 305f.). In fact, for Ricoeur, there is a great afnity between narrative and metaphor. One might say, therefore, that both modern hermeneutics and

Introduction. The power of metaphors

11

the postmodern theory of history assumed in their own way the fundamentally metaphorical structure of historical narrative – a narrative that assumes a certain correspondence and interaction of meanings that move to and fro between the past and the present, backwards and forwards, between what really took place and the account thereof. The renewed emphasis on the categories of historical experience (Carr 2021) and of presence (Gumbrecht 2004, 2006; Runia 2006, 2014)17 and the increase in studies on collective memory subsequently lent further complexity to this relationship, which would no longer be unlimited to the analysis of the four tropes of classical rhetoric conducted in his day by Hayden White (1973). Thus, Edoardo Tortarolo (2008), commenting upon a work by Eelco Runia (2006) on history-presence, contrasts the history-metaphor formula, interested in the “intellectual” or “semantic” representation of the past on the basis of temporal distance or diachrony, with an alternative trope: that of a history-metonymy associated with historical memory, which would be more concerned with the spatial dimension and afective proximity.18 According to Tortarolo, this new modality of history would aspire to the creation of places of presence by means of which to establish a kind of “emotive contact with the past.” In short, the “memorialization” of the past would represent a leap from the metaphorical to the metonymical modality of history.19 In any event, metaphors for history abound in public discourses and debates beyond specialized circles. And each of these implicit similes focuses on specifc aspects of the same object – be it history, time, or memory – projects sensibilities, interests, anxieties, and values that highlight certain aspects and downplay others,20 thereby altering the image of the past and its importance for the present. And depending on whether one understands history mainly as record, speculation, raising of questions, narration, memory, plot, reasoning, or research, depending on how each individual conceives of history’s relationship with other disciplines and associated branches of knowledge, complementary or rival, one will turn to one trope or another, since there is no doubt that it is by means of these that we structure both the great “philosophical” visions of the past and the diverse theories, currents, methods, and styles of writing history. In this sense, the dominant metaphors, their metaphorical projections, not only tell us much about the answers to our questions: they also aford us a glimpse of the implicit questions that the agents we study asked themselves (Gadamer 2004, 363–71). Naturally, it is not my intention in these introductory paragraphs to analyse in detail a question whose gradual development constitutes the substance of the chapters that follow. It will sufce for now to list some examples of a range of diferent metaphors whose heuristic undertone, in each case, confers upon the historical discipline and its underlying concepts, contents, and connotations that establish the contours of what might be termed the “historical culture” of a society – or the subcultures, sometimes in confict, of certain sectors of that society. As we shall see, replacing one guiding metaphor that refers to time, the past, or history with another always involves a more or less

12

Introduction. The power of metaphors

considerable change of perspective. On a few occasions, the change of metaphoreme (which usually incorporates an emotional value) is accompanied by a methodological change and implies a kaleidoscopic spin that completely transforms the resulting image, a sort of gestalt switch that transforms the duck into a rabbit, as it were (Mariana Imaz-Sheinbaum (2024) has recently emphasized that changing historical narratives are often based on this kind of Gestalt shifts). It seems obvious, therefore, that it is not the same to imagine the past as a prelude to the present or as a foreign country, as a temple or as a burden, as a linear trajectory segmented into a succession of stages or as the accumulation of superimposed layers, as presence or as absence, as a reassuring patrimony or as an annoying shadow, as a necropolis or as a ghost. And is time more like a circle, an arrow, or a spiral? A river or a sedimentary formation whose strata move at diferent speeds? A raging torrent, a bottomless abyss, or a flm that can be slowed down, accelerated, or even rewound? A continuous and seamless thread or a shattered chain with numerous broken links? Neither is it the same to compare the fgure of the historian to that of the witness or notary as it is to that of the judge, the referee, the educator, or the moralist; to that of the sculptor, painter, or photographer as it is to that of the medium, prophet, translator, or interpreter (even to the fgure of an interpreter of dreams!), to that of the investigator or detective as it is to that of the traveller, the explorer, or the cartographer. And what about memory? Imprint or warehouse? List of grievances to be redressed, aching wound, or formidable weapon for political combat? Poison or antidote? Shame or pride? Balm or festering scar? Symphony orchestra or battlefeld? Traumatic legacy or, inasmuch as guilt becomes debt, a powerful gift in the service of an idealized collective identity? And, interwoven with these discussions, standing out from them all is the central metaphor for history itself, the disputes to establish one or more metaphoremes capable of immediately transmitting an intuitive idea of each of the two main defnitions of this word. As research and writing, is history frst and foremost an art or a science? Master or servant of life? Faithful mirror or laborious construction? Indelible writing or palimpsest? Historiography or historiosophy? And as an all-encompassing sequence of events and processes that contains all the history that has occurred, including the present and the future: eternal return or one-directional macroprocess? A wheel that turns on itself or a wheel that moves along a linear trajectory? Path, ladder, theatre, tapestry, or maze? Heavy burden or glorious inheritance? Tragedy or epic? Prison from which it is extremely difcult to escape or malleable material that would allow agents to shape the future to their liking? Triumphant march or a mass of victims and a jumble of ruins? Progress or decadence? Supreme judge issuing fnal judgements from on high or defendant obliged to appear in the dock? These and other metaphors that will be selected and analysed in the following pages are revealing of subtle, and sometimes fundamental, changes in

Introduction. The power of metaphors

13

systems of time and historicity (Torres 2021; Hartog 2003) in the diferent kinds of relationships – material, moral, aesthetic, political, or epistemic – that human beings establish with the past (Paul 2015), in academic traditions, and in the prevailing historiographical trends in the West and in the contemporary world. This is unsurprising since, as can be concluded from what has been said so far, the economy of the metaphor is inseparable from history in any of its forms. The metaphors that seek to help us understand the historian’s tasks are closely linked to the images we use to refer to history as a discipline and to time itself. And all of them, especially the most incisive metaphors, that tend to have an epistemological basis, largely refect zeitgeist, the cultural and intellectual atmosphere of each moment, or enable some of the actors involved to propose a bold movement with a view to introducing an unusual vision, an alternative strategy or a new methodology. On occasions, they can even radically alter the rules of play, as a revolution in the governing metaphor, converted into a founding metaphor, game changer metaphor, may imply a complete change of paradigm (see, however, a pertinent caveat in note 8). *** On the basis of the ideas that I have just set out, the book is organized into two large blocks, in which I strive to respond in an organized fashion to the questions raised. In the three chapters that constitute the frst part, I shall address the most important metaphors that have been employed in relation to history, historians and historicity; memory and historical time; and its three traditional dimensions, namely, past, present, and future. In the second block – also composed of three chapters – I consider some of the concepts most frequently used in historiography, both those of a methodological or, as it were, “infrastructural” nature – event, process – and other more substantive concepts – modernity, crisis, revolution, progress, decline, transition – whose metaphorical background is still recognizable to the attentive observer, although their widespread use by historians, philosophers, and publicists has transformed them into full-fedged concepts. To close, I have added a brief chapter of conclusions. Despite the fact that in this type of work it is a long-established custom for the author to ofer in the introductory pages a summary of each of the chapters, in this case I believe that the titles are sufciently eloquent for a glance at the table of contents to provide the reader with a reasonable idea of its subject matter. We shall therefore skip that formality, and I shall conclude instead by clarifying a little further the “architectural” logic that governs the book. Its title (Key Metaphors for History) indicates two things at least. First, although my unit of analysis is the metaphor, I do not pretend to analyse them all – something, moreover, plainly impossible, since anything may be a metaphor for something – but concentrate on a few constellations or clusters of images that – from a perspective more diachronic than synchronic and more semantic than pragmatic – strike me as key, in other words, especially

14

Introduction. The power of metaphors

important and signifcant from the historical point of view (i.e. the metaphors selected have been chosen on account of their recurrent appearance and relevance in the discursive formations of the past). Second, these are key metaphors for history. In other words: of the four words in the title, the last two (for History) take precedence over the frst two (Key Metaphors). What I ofer the reader, therefore, is not exactly a taxonomy of the types of metaphor to be found in historiographical works but rather a selective search for those tropes and central metaphorical crossroads where many discussions converge and where intensive discursive trafc occurs, particularly in moments of epistemic crisis. And, faced with the unavoidable need to choose between structuring the book according to metaphorical felds or major argumentative and conceptual topics (which by no means exclude the metaphorical), for the sake of clarity, I thought it wiser to opt for the latter solution.21 Notes 1 Hobbes, for instance, employs disparaging similes to describe the tropes themselves. In chapter V of his Leviathan, he likens metaphors to illusory will-o´-thewisps [ignes fatui] and contrasts them with the true light of understanding, which would solely emanate from perspicuous and well-defned words (Hobbes 1976, 116–7). Another major source of anti-metaphorical metaphors is clothing. The topos of the naked truth (that includes historia nuda as one of its variants) is based precisely on the supposition that metaphors are veils that conceal the truth and should be removed from the female body, the allegorical representation of that truth so that it might shine in all its splendour. 2 In this general landscape, however, certain exceptions stand out. Hispanic humanists such as Juan Luis Vives, writers and playwrights such as Miguel de Cervantes and Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and prose writers like Baltasar Gracián, value the use of the metaphor as an ideal means of broadening experience and knowledge of the world. The enlightened Benito J. Feijoo, on the other hand, in the frst half of the 18th century, rejected outright the application to philosophy of the “metaphorical idiom.” 3 A partial list of references published three decades ago (Van Noppen and Hols 1990) included over 3,500 for the period 1985–1990 only, and since then academic production on this subject has grown steadily (see also Van Noppen et al. 1985; Shibles 1971). 4 By way of illustration, I shall mention two well-known works about other metaphors referring to politics and the law, respectively (Mayr 1986; Stolleis 2004), and an interesting comparative study of the metaphors used by two outstanding 17th-century authors (Fernández Ramos 2017). 5 While acknowledging from the outset that this survey tends more towards description than towards theory (or, in other words, is more historical than systematic), its centre of gravity should not be too far removed from the balance between -graphy and -logy, two sufxes that here are almost interchangeable. Preference for one or other ending will depend on whether the main weight of the materials used in this analysis and epistemic orientation shifts at a given point in time from the metaphor pan to that of history and from description (-graphy) to more systematic scientifc discourse (-logy), or vice versa. 6 To facilitate the reading of the book, I have opted to lighten as much as possible the critical apparatus. Therefore, referenced quotations and the bibliography will constitute a small fraction of the sources I have used. With regard to the most

Introduction. The power of metaphors

7

8

9

10

11

15

important metaphors for history, mindful of the fact that not all of them will be here, I try to ensure at least that all those here are. Following Cameron and Deignan (2006), I understand a metaphoreme to be a specifc combination, which begins to establish itself, of “lexical and grammatical form with specifc conceptual content and with specifc afective value and pragmatics.” Some famous works demonstrate that it is easy to fall into crude simplifcations on the basis of binary models and extremely dichotomic schemas, generally constructed upon antithetical metaphors. Certain authors have tended to exaggerate the impact of specifc metaphors and their capacity to make a diference. Two such diferent books as historian of technology Otto Mayr’s work (1986) on a political culture’s propensity for liberalism or authoritarianism, depending on the predominance of the metaphor of the clock or of automatic machinery, and literary critic M. H. Abrams’s no less celebrated volume (1953) on the transition from the enlightened metaphor of the mirror to the romantic metaphor of the lamp have been strongly criticized for attributing excessive prominence to those images, considered to be crucial in the feld of political or cultural history (see Pasanek 2015, 192–6 and passim). Hans Blumenberg (2010, chap. VI, in particular 111), meanwhile, addressed the schematism that associates organic images with conservative theories, on the one hand, and mechanical images with revolutionary ideologies, on the other. In view of this and other criticism, pace Rorty (see n. 12), is it not reasonable to accept that intellectual history necessarily advances via processes of metaphorical substitution and that the mutation of metaphors does not mean that one replaces another? It is possible, and in fact there are examples thereof, for various types of metaphors to overlap, coexist, and be partially reused. Nevertheless, I have no doubt that, in the words of poet Archibald MacLeish’s celebrated verse, “A world ends when its metaphor has died.” Specialists – I. A. Richards, M. Black, and G. Lakof, inter alia – have employed diverse syntagms to refer to each of the poles of comparison implicit in what, according to some, constitutes a metaphor. Although the terminology varies considerably from one author to another, among the most common are tenor, target, ground, base, frame, or simply topic, for the frst pole, in relation to the area of application, that is, the situation, phenomenon, or subject under analysis; vehicle, source, focus or fgure, for the second, that is, for the idea or concept taken from a diferent domain to be used in a fgurative sense. Max Black (1955) argued that the meaning of a metaphor is a result of the interaction of frame and focus since conceptual projections are produced in both directions. So that insofar as “a metaphorical sentence mixes two copresent, interacting vocabularies” and, as Samuel Johnson said, “it gives two ideas for one,” there are occasions when “text and context, fgure and ground” seem to be “reversible” (Pasanek 2015, 3, 19–20 and 256–7). A concise overview of the modern theory of metaphor in Lakof 1993; a brief history of the concept and its social role in Lambourn 2015. The close relationship between metaphor and translation is evident from the similar meaning of their etymological roots: μεταφορα and translatio in Greek and Latin, respectively. This relationship is explored further in Evans 2001. As we shall see later, various theorists have identifed multiple links, relationships, and parallelisms of history with translation and with metaphor, relationships that have been particularly important since the turn of the century, when various disciplines were allegedly afected by a translation turn, as Susan Bassnett termed it (SnellHornby 2009). The variety of adjectives and epithets that diferent authors have employed to refer to diverse types of fundamental metaphors – generative, constitutive, living, radical, strong, absolute, explosive – indicates the semantic relevance of some of them.

16

Introduction. The power of metaphors

12 Rorty (1989, 9, 16) even suggested that given that progress in knowledge is closely linked to “a history of increasingly useful metaphors,” “intellectual history” could be understood “as the history of metaphor.” 13 As will be seen, the etymology of some of the terms that convey fundamental concepts provides efective access to their metaphorical subsoil. Metaphor presents a Janus face: on the one hand, it looks backwards, towards the origins of meaning; on the other hand, it looks forwards, towards the horizons of human experience, pragmatically orienting cognition (Bajohr 2022, 125). 14 A synoptic overview of the most common metaphors used for translation in diverse source domains, and inversely, of the use of the metaphor of translation across the disciplines, in Guldin 2016, 36, 71. Andrew Hines (2020, 189–90) has interpreted the Nietzschean conception of metaphor as a kind of peace treaty for cognition, a provisional ceasefre capable of suspending for a time the arduous semantic conficts that confront one “mobile army of metaphors” with another, that is, some truths with others, in “the battlefeld of consciousness.” 15 I take this opportunity to clarify that in this study, my sources will almost exclusively be texts from printed publications. It would be possible, of course, to incorporate into this inquiry other types of source (iconographic and audio-visual, for example) – especially if we bear in mind that the metaphor has an “iconic moment” (Ricoeur 1975, 238–42), but for reasons of space, with the exception of a few “visual metaphors,” I felt it appropriate to limit myself to the vast amount of textual material. 16 An early criticism of the “metaphorical narrativism” of these authors in Lorenz 1998. However, Barthes (1967, 72) had already distinguished between a metaphorical history, in the style of Michelet, a metonymic, such as Thierry’s narrative, and another refexive history, à la Machiavelli. 17 An article of bibliographical revision by J. Toews (1987) was, in its day, one of the frst symptoms of the growing interest in historical experience as an alternative or complementary category to that of meaning, as would later be the paradigm of presence, defned by Eelco Runia (2006, 1) as “the unrepresented way the past is present in the present.” 18 According to Roman Jakobson (1956, 76), “the development of a discourse may take place along two diferent semantic lines: one topic may lead to another either through their similarity or through their contiguity. The metaphoric way would be the most appropriate term for the frst case and the metonymic way for the second.” The frst, the metaphorical route, would, in this case, appear to be closer to the dimension of meaning, while the second, the metonymic, would bear a closer resemblance to presence. 19 The two characterizations need not necessarily be incompatible. According to Greg Dening (1996, 34), “histories – all the ways we transform lived experiences into narratives – are metaphors of the past and metonymies of the present.” On memoria histórica or historia memorial, as they are called in Spanish (“historical memory,” or rather “politics of memory” in English), see Benigno 2013, 41–54, and Barash 2016. 20 “A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing – a focus upon object A involves a neglect of object B” (Burke 1935, 69). 21 Therefore, pace Derrida (1974, 18–20), instead of classifying metaphors according to their source, as is the norm in dictionaries of metaphors and studies on the metaphorics of certain philosophers or writers, I have organized this exercise in cultural or historical semantics into fundamental items of the target domain, in this instance, history and historiography. For example, rather than grouping together the entire variety of fuvial or hydrological tropes (applied to time, to the past, to history, and so on), metaphors of the river, the sea, and the like will

Introduction. The power of metaphors

17

be associated with those elements of historiographical vocabulary to which this metaphorics has been applied. My selection of core elements of historical vocabulary as headings (some of which have, in turn, been divided into subheadings) inevitably leads to a degree of repetition, but I believe that this approach enables me to present my argument – this at least is my intention – in a more organized and compelling fashion.

Part I

Conceptual metaphors for history

1

1.1

Metaphorizing history

Metaphors for history

Mapping the metaphors used over the centuries to represent history in all its facets and dimensions is a Herculean task, impossible to accomplish in a few dozen pages. Therefore, within the coordinates that I established in Introduction, in this chapter I shall confne myself to presenting some of the main similes that have served obliquely to describe the substance of history and the tasks of the historian. I shall begin with an account of the metaphorics referring to history as narrative, research, and discipline before summarizing those that attempt to grasp the prominent features of the course of history as a connection of multiple events. Beyond the cognitive and aesthetic interests in the past, I shall focus above all on those metaphorics applied to history during modern times that, because of their ideological undertones, have been mobilized by intellectuals and writers in their socio-political disputes. In fact, this book, like so many others on the subject of history and historiography, is based on a controlled anachronism, namely the extremely broad use of the word history. Starting with the modern idea of history, as it began to take shape a little over two centuries ago, paradigmatically in the German language (Koselleck 1979, 2004a) before giving rise to a branch of scholarship in the following decades, I shall occasionally return to earlier periods when the uses of this ancient Greek-Latin word were very diferent from the present-day range of meanings (for a summary of the evolution of the concept in modern Europe, see Cheirif Wolosky 2013). Although I am fully aware that extended meanings of the term I am considering here may lead the occasional distracted reader mistakenly to think that the same concept has been underlying history since the days of Herodotus to our own, I believe that examination of some fundamental metaphors with reference to historiographical practices will enable me to demonstrate the contrary. My objective is to shed light on some abrupt discontinuities in the conceptions and ways of writing history over time. Analysis of these translational discourses will clearly show how that fickering, virtual, and protean historiographical object to which for the sake of convenience we attach the label “history” has on various occasions drastically DOI: 10.4324/9781032736358-3

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Conceptual metaphors for history

changed its functions, methods, and objectives, and its relations with other branches of knowledge and of human action. So that, rather than a longterm concept, what we have is a plethora of meanings that vary over time, although the maintenance of the same word – ἱστορία, historia – for over two millennia tends to blur the discontinuities.1 Because, as in so many activities and areas of knowledge, the habit of retrojecting our patterns of comprehension towards the past is a fruitful source of all kinds of errors. One need only bear in mind, to refer to only some purported founding fathers of the discipline, that Thucydides never employed the word “history” to designate his own writings, Polybius never applied to himself the label “historian,” and neither medieval chroniclers nor many other narrators of past events would necessarily recognize themselves under that name. Yet, as we shall now see, a few metaphors that have been used recurrently over centuries to speak of history have served as a bridge between diverse and successive conceptions, thus providing ammunition for those who presuppose the existence of a transtemporal central thread between all the forms of writing history. I understand that such a thing is possible because, as some scholars have convincingly demonstrated, the decidedly context-bound nature of tropes means that the “same” metaphor – that is, a series of allegorical and fgurative uses as a vehicle that, in a hypothetical dictionary of metaphors, could be classifed under a common heading – might be invoked with very diferent objectives, making it possible for agents to modulate its contents until it eventually refers to completely diferent things and emphasizing very diferent properties of the target (of history, in this case). In this redescriptive fashion, as we shall see, over time, some metaphoremes come to transmit an idea that is very diferent from, even contrary to, the original insight. This would be a case, therefore, of a mere appearance of continuity. This apparent continuity is better understood if we bear in mind a couple of more considerations. First, the complexity of every metaphor or concept, since both metaphors and concepts originate with the simplifcation and schematization of heterogeneous things: “by equating the unequal” (Nietzsche 1982, 879–80). Second, a metaphor or concept usually restricts itself to setting a stage that accommodates quite discordant conceptions and interpretations. The uses of a metaphor are always selective and may involve misalignments, thus establishing a variable balance in terms of benefts and costs in cognitive terms. One might say, therefore, that the genealogy and evolution of the concept of history are not very diferent from the history of the metaphors employed to speak about it.2 *** The spectrum of metaphors for history began to take shape in antiquity, and many of those inaugural images have endured until the present day. History as a mirror and master and historian as a judge were already present in the writings of diverse Greek and Roman authors. The Hebrew Bible is also full of metaphors, particularly in relation to the history of Israel. Not only that:

Metaphorizing history

23

many of the biblical myths, even the Old Testament as a whole, have a clearly metaphorical structure (Stienstra 1993; Cho 2019). Furthermore, a signifcant fraction of medieval and modern historiographical refections would lose much of their meaning if we ignored the numerous debts that the fgurative language in which they are formulated owes to chapter II of the Book of Daniel, the Book of Revelation, or De Civitate Dei and other less known works by Augustine of Hippo in which the historical-exegetic perspective predominates. And, as has often been noted, Christianity is a religion that springs from a historical-allegorical substratum. 1.1.1

Mirrors

Used by Lucian as early as the 2nd century bc, the metaphor of the mirror applied to the writing of history has travelled a long and winding road, or rather a number of roads, which here I shall limit myself to sketching out. In the Middle Ages, too, the image is very present in diverse texts and chronicles. A famous cento of vaguely historical legends compiled by Vincent de Beauvais in the 8th century is titled Speculum historiale (the leading American institution for medieval studies plays with the word and the mirror image in its journal: see Figure 1.1), and in the Islamic world the mirror-for-prince genre also fourished (Dakhlia 2002). From the outset and along many of these zigzagging and arborescent paths, the mirror of history has been associated with an image no less full of meaning: that of the naked truth. The supremely efective rhetoric of anti-rhetorical simplicity – the clear mirror that refects events as they occurred, without any ornamentation (see n. 1 in Introduction) – would reappear with a fourish at the beginning of early-modern times in the frst treatises on the art of writing history. From Bodin and La Popelinière to

Figure 1.1 Cover and logo of the journal Speculum of the Medieval Academy of America (founded in 1926). Reproduced with permission from the Medieval Academy of America

24

Conceptual metaphors for history

Fénelon and Bayle, the insistence on the advantages of a sober, direct style and of historia nuda over histora ornata is one of the most conspicuous traits of this metaphorics (Koselleck 2018, 12–13; Jablonka 2018, 26, 122, 215–16). And, certain nuances notwithstanding, we can see how, with the passage of time, the same themes and images continue until Ranke, who declared that his “idea of history” was encapsulated by his desire to show the “naked truth without any decoration” (Blumenberg 2010, 86).3 The metaphorics of the mirror refection is very common in diferent spheres of philosophy, science, and culture in general. That imagery often matches the old ideals of mimetic representation (Auerbach 2003), be it the imitation of nature by art, the imitation of man by man as an anthropological constant (Toutain 2020), the modern conception of the human mind as a mirror of the outside world (Rorty 1979), or literature as a refection of human actions.4 According to Habermas (1987, 18), the discourse of the frst modernity from Descartes to Kant is based upon an essentially refexive structure: “It is the structure of a self-relating, knowing subject, which bends back upon itself as object, in order to grasp itself as in a mirror image – literally in a ‘speculative’ way.” History as a mirror would therefore be a particular case – or rather, a series of cases – of a wide-ranging, long-term cultural pattern that has accompanied Westerners for centuries – and not only them: it is also present in the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun (14th century), for example – although not always in a positive sense. In fact, the metaphor of the mirror also appears in a pejorative vein in a tradition that was initiated by Plato to spurn hollow repetition and mere simulation stripped of cognitive value. (One could perhaps include in this tradition of contempt for the refection as false appearance that deceives the senses the mention of “a mirror, that pretends to be full but is empty” in an essay by Jorge Luis Borges as well as the hall of mirrors metaphor to indicate those situations or moments of confusion in which it is difcult to distinguish between illusions and realities.) In a way, Marx’s stance, when he maintains that ideologies are distorted “refections” of the social being, is in part concomitant with this tradition. Another important source of images, instead of interpreting the mirror as the refection of the truth or as inane artifce, is that which contemplates the mirror as enigma or also as an optical illusion, mirage, or anamorphosis, even as an inverted image.5 But mirror imagery is polyvalent and ofers multiple versions and facets (some of them, concerning Golden Age Spain, in Robbins 2022, 273f.). Here I shall only mention a few of these, restricting myself to the terrain of historiography. First of all, it is not the same to claim that history is, or should be, a mirror that faithfully refects the past, as it is to observe critically, that too often, what occurs is precisely the opposite: many historical writings in practice refect the present more than the past (Pihlainen 2014, 20; Hunt 2018, 144).6 This is a typical example of how the meaning of a metaphor can be reversed and used by some agents whose objective is diametrically opposed to that

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of the authors of the original image (in the latter case to denounce anachronisms and presentisms). We will return to this question. In the metaphorics of the mirror, the three dimensions of time – past, present, and future – combine and intertwine in diferent ways. Let us consider some of these. To begin with one of the classic formulations, a mid-19th-century Spanish historian wrote, for instance, that history is “the mirror of the past, guide of the present, lighthouse of the future” (Ferrer del Río 1850, xx). One can go a step further and, without renouncing the function of refecting the past, assign priority to the future. In these cases, the metaphor of the mirror dovetails easily with that of history as an educator. Thus, Argentine General Tomás de Iriarte recommended in 1858 that since “history is the mirror in which the past refects the future,” useful lessons should be drawn from political failures to avoid repeating the same mistakes (DPSMI-I, 585). And if in France, in the frst half of the 19th century, Guizot interpreted the English Civil War of the 17th century in the retrospective light cast by the mirror of the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century, in Le rouge et le noir (II, 1), Stendhal, by contrast, has Julien Sorel say that “the history of England serves as a mirror to show me our future.” Over time, this idea became a cliché at the service of politicians of all persuasions and ideologies. Thus, Chinese President Jiang Zemin declared in October 2001 that “History is a mirror for the future” (which should not necessarily be interpreted as a carbon copy of Western arguments, as in China too history has been equated with a mirror since time immemorial and the Buddhist philosopher Fazang understood reality as a hall of mirrors endlessly refecting one another: Wang 2022; Collins 1998, 289; Ng and Wang 2005).7 A slightly more sophisticated version of the cliché of the mirror in relation to the times of history is that employed by those political leaders who cast a pragmatic glance at the “rearview mirror” of history when establishing historical analogies between the predicaments of the present and certain events in the past with a view to furthering their designs or taking risky decisions (Vogt 2019). The mirror metaphor, of course, is just one of the most successful optical metaphors of the many that associate the sense of sight with science, art, and knowledge, since, as we know in the case of intellectual life in our culture, sight clearly has primacy over the other senses, including hearing (which is particularly important in Jewish tradition). It is no coincidence that the Greek roots of two central terms in my inquiry, theory and history, subterraneanly connected, both refer to the metaphorics of sight.8 The fgurative language associated with sight can also be seen when a historical account is compared to a painting or sculpture9 and, later, to a flm. After all, a mirror image is not so diferent from a portrait (whether literary, painted, or sculpted), from a photograph, or even from a flm (although, as we shall see, some of these related metaphors eventually undermined the foundations of the original insight and turned against this metaphorics). I could mention myriad examples of authors who have employed visual, pictorial, or iconographic analogies to refer to history as true “imitative narration” and

26 Conceptual metaphors for history to draw attention to the aesthetic aspects and the beauty of the composition (as does Bossuet in Augustine’s wake). I shall leave aside all those associated with painting (a comparison favoured by Droysen to emphasize the historian’s perspectivism and also by Namier, who preferred to compare the fgure of the historian with that of the painter rather than the photographer) to take a closer look at a few tropes that compare the faithful recording of history to technical procedures of production and reproduction of images perfected and popularized from the 19th century onwards. The reality efect (efet de réel), which Roland Barthes applied to the writing of history in his essay Le Discours de I’histoire (1967) and Ankersmit (1989) discussed at length two decades later, reached its peak with the development and expansion of photography, which many understood as a “certifcate of presence” or “referential illusion” that bears witness to what has indisputably taken place to the point of describing – as does Barthes when he speaks of Michelet – historians as photographers who, thanks to the magic formula of their developer, are able to révéler [develop] the latent image of the dead past and bring it back to life (Hartog 2021, 193–200).10 Thereafter, some writers, whether giving an account of something that had really happened or composing fction, attempted to sound more credible by virtue of very precise, more photographico descriptions of certain minor details. It was no coincidence, as Barthes observed, that the century which invented history also invented photography, and the supposed objectivity of the latter could easily be transferred to the former (Bann 1995, 42–3). In a certain republican Diccionario published in Peru in the mid-19th century, history is described as the “mirror of the age to which it refers,” an age that should be portrayed by the chronicler “with the veracity of the daguerreotype” (DPSMI-I, 656). This is just one of the countless examples of parallelisms between photography and “objective” history that proliferated from the central decades of the 19th century until well into the 20th century and of their impact upon the practice of history (Edwards 2021; in 1916, a collective book titled The Camera as Historian was published in London). In an allegorical caricature published in the Life magazine during the First World War (Figure 1.2), Lady History appears as a photographer who, with imperturbable professionalism, records the violent scene before her: Western democracy bravely defends itself against the assault by the Central Powers, represented by a German ofcer on whose belt is inscribed the word “Autocracy.” Over time, however, this metaphorics began to be branded as “naive realism” by diverse critics of positivism, including Marc Bloch and Johan Huizinga. Siegfried Kracauer (1995, 51–61), in particular, made considerable use of the photographic – and, to a lesser degree, cinematographic analogy – specifcally to question the mirror metaphor. A camera is anything but a mirror, he claimed. Historians, like photographers,11 are not mere “copyists”: on the contrary, they are active observers who employ diverse techniques to produce certain kinds of images but without distorting the meaning of the evidence extracted from the sources that nourish their account of the facts.

Metaphorizing history 27

Figure 1.2 “‘Mugged’: For the Rogues’ Gallery.” Political cartoon by Charles Dana Gibson. Life, 28 February 1918. Private collection of Gonzalo Capellán.

28

Conceptual metaphors for history

Ultimately, Kracauer believed that photography and above all cinema, deeply associated with the “fow of life” and therefore the profession of the historian and of the photographer – as Michelet had suggested – and even more so that of the flmmaker, very closely resembled one another. Prior to the invention of the cinematograph, a fondness for representing living history, contemporary events, by means of diverse technical devices converted into popular entertainment was very present in Europe and America. Newspapers in big cities, along with museums and traditional theatre, advertised projections with the magic lamp and dioramas exhibiting images alluding to all kinds of events and political novelties that caught the attention of an audience eager to preserve scenes of a very recent past, which vanished almost immediately (Bann 1995, 122f.). In this context of accelerated loss of the past, historians – and also the women, mothers, and wives responsible for safeguarding a certain image library or “family album” – appeared as “guardians of memory” (Le Gof 1992, 89–90; Fritzsche 2004, 198–9). Gradually, as image reproduction techniques advanced, the fondness for staging the past would be replaced by an even more pressing desire to resuscitate and, as it were, “live the past” (Bann 1995, 130–62). The cinema’s impact on the historian’s profession was signifcant from various points of view (Burke 2001, 154–6; Kaes 1989; Kittler 1999). Even if we leave to one side consideration of flm material as a new documentary source, both the writing and the reading of historical works were directly afected by cinema. To begin with, the styles and ways of composing historical accounts underwent changes inspired by cinematographic techniques and flm scripts, a methodological line that has been developed considerably since then. Analogies between flms and historical processes, frames, and events, or between specifc techniques such as the wide-angle lens and the distortion of historical perspective, no longer surprise us. Swiss historian Andreas Suter (1997, 559–60) presented a proposal years ago to address the study of events making use of visual analogies such as rapid-fre photography or slow motion (Zeitlupe). Carlo Ginzburg noted that it is possible “to write history as if it were a sequence resulting from flm editing, in which there is a close-up, a long shot, and so on” (Ginzburg 2014, 92). The “cinematographic style” of writing history has given rise to complex narrative structures in which there are scene changes, accelerations and delays, intertwined plots, reverse motion, rapid transitions, and fashbacks. Ways of seeing have also been afected by cinema. In the early 1940s, José Ortega y Gasset (1964c, VI, 388) wrote that reading Émile Bréhier’s History of Philosophy was akin to seeing “the flm reel of twenty centuries.” “In the age of flm, the band of historical time could turn into a flmstrip that could rewind itself in a loop” (Wimmer 2015, 183). But the mirror metaphor has historically been applied to a multitude of objects in the modern world, and while it began its decline in some areas, it was renewed and strengthened in others. Historiography has capitalized upon it as a heuristic tool (one thinks of Pocock’s suggestive description (1985, 29) of intellectual history as a system of mirrors that refect one

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another or of K. P. Fazioli’s monograph The Mirror of the Medieval (2017) and H. Hartog’s The Mirror of Herodotus (1980) (see Ricoeur’s juicy comments in 2004, 553–4)), but journalism too has been described as “a mirror of the times” (Vos 2011), and in the mid-1990s, the discovery of mirror neurons evidenced the fact that science is not alien to the explanatory power of this powerful metaphor. In any case, the most frequent underlying assumption of this trope is the claim that it sees and refects things “as they are,” which is why history-mirror is without a doubt one of the master metaphors of 19th-century “scientifc history.” Thus, as Bacon had fantasized in the 17th century, declaring, frst, that “God hath framed the mind of man as a glass capable of the image of the universal world” (Valerius terminus 1), to argue later that it “all depends on keeping the eye steadily fxed upon the facts of nature and so receiving their images simply as they are” (Instauratio Magna, Preface), positivist historiography arrived at the supposition that facts – or, according to other versions, sources, or the past – could speak for themselves. Historians were perfectly capable of knowing “what really happened” if they acted with the almost automatic objectivity of a polished and faithful mirror. This presumption, however, began to be seriously questioned in the 20th century from various angles.12 Most critics pointed out, in one way or another, that narratives about past events and processes cannot be rigorously compared with the events themselves, as the latter are too complex for it to be possible to apprehend them in objective and indubitable fashion (Munz 1997, 840, 843). This would be, therefore, a completely diferent phenomenon from the equivalence between an object and its refection or between a model and the painting that represents it. The decline of the mirror metaphor would be accentuated at the end of the 20th century coinciding with the crisis of representationalism (and, by extension, of the correspondence theory of truth). The awareness that “human events and institutions are not simply ‘there’ to be mirrored as a ‘true picture on the retina’, as the metaphor suggests” (Heller 1990, 18–19) indeed shatters its epistemic foundations. “In addition, memoirs and histories are not cases of veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus, that is, they are not precise copies of past actions and events, but are instead selective compilations or consolidated sequences of past actions and events” (Kasabova 2008, 344). In recent years, one of the frmest afrmations of the obsolescence of this imagery has been provided by Brian Fay. In his review of an important book by Kuukkanen (2015), Fay proposes a series of alternative metaphorics for the theory of history, closer to the pragmatist approach, which has to do with strategic movements, searches for solutions, diagnoses, and legal pleadings. The metaphors of picturing, mirroring, copying, photographing, refecting – all expressions of the act of representing, and ones that have dominated the philosophy of history – become not just beside the point but indeed misleading with respect to understanding language in

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general or historiography in particular. More apt metaphors become those of moving a piece in a chess game, or discovering a solution to a puzzle, or diagnosing an illness, or arguing in a court of law – metaphors for moves in an ongoing, rule-governed practice that embodies certain basic ethical and ontological assumptions. (Fay 2016, 5) 1.1.2

Perspectives

Among the many metaphors that have come to replace that of the mirror, apart from those mentioned by Fay (in which the stamp of pragmatism is patent), I would highlight the tropes of perspective and construction, both omnipresent during recent decades in Western historiography. The former, perspective, is obviously, like that of the mirror, a visual metaphor. Not for nothing are the Latin roots of both words in the main European languages entangled: whether they come from specere – per-spectivus, speculum – or from mirare, in both cases they refer to actions described by verbs such as watching and observing. As regards perspective, we know that it is primarily a drawing technique to represent three-dimensional objects on two-dimensional surfaces. The latter, construction, is an engineering concept that is usually applied to anything that can be made, formed, and manufactured, generally as a result of efort and following a certain plan or design. The optical metaphor of perspective and the correlative notion of temporal perspectivism (Whitrow 1988, chap. 9; Carr 2018), developed on the basis of Renaissance discoveries in relation to the geometric representation of depth in painting (Damisch 1987), respond to a spatial imagination that, applied to history, presupposes that the historian contemplates the past from a distance and from a particular vantage point (Ginzburg 2001, 139–56), which not only considerably contemplates the metaphorics of the mirror but is diametrically opposed to the idea that it is possible to look at the past “from nowhere,” from a point completely external to the world and to history, as if it were God’s eye view (see, in this respect, Nagel’s classic 1986 work). The change is the result of the partial substitution of the metaphor of the mirror by that of the window, according to Leon Battista Alberti’s famous description of painting in his treatise De Pictura (1436), when he writes that when he starts to paint, he draws a rectangle on the surface as if it were “an open window through which the object to be painted is seen” (Azúa 2019, 78), although Alberti remains in the realm of mimesis and goes so far as to suggest that the inventor of painting was Narcissus, contemplating his own image refected on the surface of the pond. Additionally, as Chladenius noted in the mid-18th century, as the vantage point (Sehepunkt) of the “eye witness” changes with the simple passage of time, historians are obliged periodically to rewrite their histories (Koselleck 2004b, 137–8). And, beyond that, the multiplicity of possible perspectives and the need to avoid bias and partisanship in the

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interest of impartiality have created a range of images that together make up a complex metaphorics that fatly rejects an impossible non-perspectival objectivity. As for temporal perspectivism, it can be seen as part of an epistemological attitude exhibited by such prestigious authors as Nietzsche, Ortega y Gasset, and Jaspers. Thus, according to the Spanish philosopher (Verdad y perspectiva [Truth and Perspective], 1916), only the multiplication of points of view and the subsequent addition of – but also confrontation with – a large number of diferent intellectual perspectives can bring us closer to the truth.13 The need to transcend the limitations of a narrow view, which might produce in the observer the much-maligned “tunnel vision,” has led some authors, from Ranke to Rüsen, to underline the eminent function of history as orientation in time, as well as the development of a restricted concept of objectivity, reconstrued as intersubjectivity.14 The logic of the plurality of perspectives has also extended to the evaluation of sources, as is the case of Peter Burke (2005, 47), when, returning in a diferent way to the theme of photography, he observes that “many historical sources might be described as ‘snapshots’, taken from a certain viewpoint at a certain moment.” Some scholars, indeed, have turned to tropes that, in line with the old Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant, have underlined the epistemic benefts arising from the integration of various perspectives: “objectivity” in relation to anything would increase as the number of eyes that contemplate it increase in number. Thus, Portuguese historian Alexandre Herculano suggested as early as 1842 that history is “a multifaceted column,” which should be examined by the researcher “on all its sides” (DPSMI-I, 672). However, this holistic aspiration to encompass all the facets of an object, which led several historians of the Annales school to advocate a “total history,” is at odds with the limitations inherent to the perspectivist conception of knowledge. In this sense, the limits to the formal systems that, in the domain of mathematical logic, were set out by Gödel in his incompleteness theorems, have been metaphorically transferred to other felds, including social sciences, precisely to underline the impossibility of completely understanding any object and, consequently, the impasse to which an allegedly all-inclusive approach leads. Ultimately, seeing things from every perspective at once is as impossible as seeing them from nowhere. In this domain, on the basis of a Husserlian defnition of a horizon, understood as “the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point” (Gadamer 2004), what appears to be far more reasonable is Gadamer’s hermeneutic theory of “fusion of horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung), in all probability one of the most appropriate heuristic metaphors when it comes to rethinking the relationships between diferent eras, cultures, and temporalities, which ofers a sensible way out of the false dilemma between objectivism and historicism, universalism and relativism.

32 1.1.3

Conceptual metaphors for history Constructions

Another great regulatory trope that came to displace the metaphorics of the mirror was that of construction. Stemming from Kantian, Viconian, phenomenological, or other theoretical roots, social constructionism, which frst made an impact in the mid-1960s with P. Berger and T. Luckmann’s book The Social Construction of Reality (1966), experienced a spectacular boom from the 1980s onwards, so that, around the turn of the century, Hacking (1999) could attest to the fact that constructionism was already the new orthodoxy. The basic argument had been set forth on more than one occasion, and between the realist metaphor of discovery and the constructionist metaphor of invention, intermediate positions can be discerned. Oakeshott (1978, 94–5), for example, had already written in the 1930s that “the historian’s business is not to discover, to recapture, or even to interpret; it is to create and to construct.” The building and construction metaphor had been applied to morals and to studies for centuries. Aedifcatio and other cognate terms regularly appeared in Christian religious literature, particularly in relation to training and teaching, and to meditation and the vita contemplativa as ways of strengthening virtue. The increasing acquisition of knowledge by successive generations had also been compared on occasions to a long-term constructive process. However, it was not until the fnal decades of the 20th century that the convergence of the linguistic turn with the ever more widespread idea that knowledge is a collective creation by human beings (Sewell 2005, 358–9) led most social constructionists to the conviction that “language does not mirror reality; rather it constitutes it” (Fairhurst and Grant 2010, 174). It is a conviction that admits many degrees and nuances, since obviously the fact that every construction is artifcial in no way means that it is arbitrary (as some postmodern authors claimed). In any case, the narrative turn of the seventies and eighties, by underlining the artifciality and the inevitably rhetorical nature of any historical account, also broke with the metaphor of the mirror. In spite of some coincidences with historicism, historiographical constructionism is markedly diferent from the former, in that it adopts a mode of historicization that, by emphasizing the radical discontinuity between moments, states of afairs, and socially constructed realities that occur over time, often presents them as mutually incomparable, rather than seeing them as successive states of a continuous process of development, as historicism frequently does (Simon 2019b). The depth of some changes in historiography between the seventies and the end of the century can be fathomed by simply focusing on the evolution of the (basically metaphorical) titles of a handful of signifcant works in which there are an ever-growing number of words of a cultural, mental, and hermeneutic nature such as interpreting, imagining, creating, constructing, rethinking, and inventing. The resounding success of a few books that caused quite a stir early in the eighties, such as E. Hobsbawm

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and T. Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition (1982) and B. Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) (let us remember, however, pro memoria, that the essay La invención de América, by Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman, dates from 1958) explains the growth of “inventionism,” understood as the application to all kinds of objects from the past – identities, countries, individuals, wars, even historical eras, disciplines, and entire continents – of a radically constructionist, sometimes mythopoietic, approach. Hacking’s Historical Ontology (2002) might be considered to be one of the most valuable theoretical contributions made by this approach. The frequent overlapping in this historiography of some metaphors referring to construction with others evocative of horizons and perspectives is hardly surprising, bearing in mind the imbrications between constructionism and the hermeneutic approach, owing in part to their habitual rejection of any form of epistemological foundationalism. 1.1.4

Masters and teachers

Witness, light, life, teacher, messenger: of the fve consecutive metaphors proposed by Cicero to characterize history in an oft-quoted passage from his work,15 the fourth is by far the most celebrated. In fact, the Ciceronian topos that renders history a teacher of life would be repeated on countless occasions, in every tone and infection, over more than 20 centuries. Strictly speaking, this was not a new idea. Four centuries earlier, in a no less famous passage (Peloponnesian War, I, 1 and 22), Thucydides had already proclaimed the usefulness of drawing lessons from past events in order to confront the future. And a hundred years before Cicero, Polybius had suggested that the mastery of history was indispensable in political life (Historiae, I, 1). It was Cicero who succeeded in coining an elegant phrase – historia magistra vitae – destined to enjoy a very long life. It is an expression that implicitly linked, and in a way subordinated, history to rhetoric, morals, and politics. Enshrined by a tacit alliance between Clio and polis, that is, by the desire to preserve the memory of the glories of the community of citizens, history as teacher, directress, guide, school, book, or counsellor, useful above all by dint of its teachings in the political arena, would undergo numerous variations over the centuries. The reception of Polybius in Renaissance Europe (Momigliano 1977) would multiply the echoes of those classic tropes so that history and politics – including the philosophy of history and political thought – would have close ties in the modern world. The nexuses between both domains do not preclude identifcation of the diferences. Ranke emphasizes that, while politics directs its activity towards the future, historical knowledge focuses its interest on the past (Rüsen 2002, 107). Very diverse authors would agree henceforth that “history is experimental politics” and politics is history in the making (in the words of John Seely, “history was past politics and politics present history”: Hunt 2018, 85),16 which would

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establish solid two-way bridges between spheres of both action and knowledge (which explains, among other things, the prolonged pre-eminence of political history and also the fact that Droysen saw the statesman as a sort of “practical historian”).17 In the Early Modern Age, the task of historians consisted for a long time in compiling frst- or second-hand experiences to transmit these in synthetic fashion to the designated readers of their works, usually rulers and the power elite. And given that, as Jesuit Juan de Mariana declares at the beginning of his Historia general de España [General history of Spain] (1601), past and present times resemble one another in essence and history is a repository of accumulated experiences in the form of exemplary narrations from which to extract prudent rules of conduct, the lesson of history “teaches more in one day than others learnt from the experience of many years” (Juan de Santa María, Tratado de república [Treatise on the Republic] 1615). Hence the striking praise of history as an essential source of good judgement and wisdom profered by Juan Luis Vives in his De tradendis disciplinis [Concerning the Teaching of Disciplines] (1555): “Historia si adsit ex pueris facit senes: sin absit, ex senibus pueros” [the reading of history makes children mature, while ignorance thereof turns adults into little children], an adage that would be repeated time and time again by many treatise writers in the ensuing decades. In Don Quixote (I, 9) we read one of the many variations of the Ciceronian dictum, where Cervantes describes history as the mother of truth,18 “rival of time, storehouse of deeds, witness for the past, example and counsel for the present, and warning for the future.”19 Spanish diplomat Saavedra Fajardo, meanwhile, recalling Polybius, wrote that “history is the master of true politics, and who best teaches the prince how to reign, because it incorporates the experience of all past governments and the prudence and wisdom of our ancestors” (Idea de un príncipe político cristiano [Political Maxims. Idea of a Christian Political Prince], IV, 1640).20 Shortly afterwards, Baltasar Gracián presented the muse of history, “queen of the times” (El Criticón [Book of Critique], II, 4), as “teacher of life, life of fame, fame of truth, and truth of facts.” At this point, the metaphor of history as teacher and counsellor connects with that of history as mirror, as from the Middle Ages onwards, this word also began to be used in a fgurative sense to refer to a model of virtuous conduct, as occurs with so-called mirrors for princes, the best-known subgenus of the medieval speculum literature (but its origins in the East are much older: Wang 2022). Perhaps that is why the compilation of classics ad usum Delphini, intended for the preparation of heirs to the French crown in the 17th century, frequently included texts by Latin historians such as Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus. This compilation is reminiscent of the ancient genre of the specula principum.21 From the 16th to the 18th century, it was common for history to be metonymically compared to a book – “the book of kings” – a compendium of

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exemplary stories basically taken from Greek and Latin historians, which in political matters complemented the undisputed authority of the Holy Scriptures. The modern revolutions would underline its usefulness not only for rulers and political elites but also for ordinary citizens. This is apparent in many 19th- and 20th-century texts, although that new historiography that accompanied the change of era – “the book of citizens” – is no longer a collection of examples but rather a new type of work that, at best, sought harmoniously to insert national into universal history.22 Moreover, the metaphor of the “Book of History,” transmitted via school and popular literature, would accustom citizens to the illusion of the “course of history” conceived of as a vast abstraction associated with a specifc temporality that E. Eisenstein (1966, 59–62) called “history-book time.” A one-directional conception of time that imagines the human adventure on the earth as a continuous and essentially uniform process in which humanity passes from one page to another until it arrives at the present. The advocates of this vision tend to interpret the present as the penultimate chapter of the giant book of universal history, destined as such, either to a change of era or to a forthcoming end that would coincide with travelling mankind’s arrival at its fnal destination (think, for instance, of Hegel, Marx, or Fukuyama’s propositions). Koselleck addressed in a classic work (2004, 26–42) the “dissolution” of the topos of historia magistra vitae, pointing out that the disconnection of the future from the past that resulted in full modernity led people to question the usefulness of the lessons of the past when it came to dealing with their own afairs.23 Henceforth, it would be the (anticipated) future that would shed light upon the present and the past (a light comparable to that resplendent lux veritatis that Cicero attributed to history but contrasting in terms of its origin, direction, and nature, as corresponds to a very diferent conception of history). Metaphors of farewell to the pedagogical notion of history as a guide to life can be followed in a series of 19th-century texts, beginning perhaps with Hegel’s dramatic assertion in the introduction to his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1830) that “what experience and history teach is this – that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it,” followed a decade later by the no less celebrated passage in which Tocqueville complains that “as the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity” (Democracy in America II [1840], IV, 8).24 At the end of the century, Langlois and Seignobos – two champions of positivist historical science (science de l’histoire) – fatly rejected, as an old-fashioned and obsolete illusion, history’s function as teacher of life (Cheirif Wolosky 2013, 61–2), at a time when the idea of history as magistra seemed to be much more to the liking of conservative politicians “faithful to the past,” such as Charles Maurras, than of the Dreyfusard left (Paulin-Booth 2023, 52). Nevertheless, the consideration of history as magistra was never entirely abandoned, not even during the French Revolution (Hartog 2015, 176) or at other moments of rupture (for the Iberophone world in a state of revolution,

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see Zermeño et al. 2009). Christophe Bouton (2018) has ofered compelling evidence that, although there can be no doubt that the role of history underwent a major transformation with modernity, its didactic, pragmatic, and normative functions have continued until the present day to be valid in one way or another (as they are, paradoxically, in the aforementioned Hegelian formulation, where a fnal lesson is learnt from a teacher who supposedly no longer teaches anything).25 1.2

Clio transfgured

The historical acceleration produced by the revolutions at the end of the 18th century undoubtedly marked a turning point in the uses of metaphor and in the type of history associated with it. The old exemplar history gave way to the notion that the past was fundamentally diferent from the present, and, therefore, it was extremely difcult to draw lessons from the former to be applied to the latter (in Chapter 3 we shall examine the metaphor of the past as a foreign country), one of the pillars of this new historical consciousness. Comparison of some texts prior and posterior to the great revolutionary caesura would reveal that, initially, Revolution – from 1789 onwards, the capitalized use of this term referred above all to the traumatic events in France – assumed some of the educational functions that had traditionally been attributed to Clio. Thanks to the revolutionary acceleration, the recent history of the last decade or two could accumulate more teachings than the study of various centuries of the distant past. Instead of history, revolution would now be the teacher (Fernández-Sebastián 2021c, 331, 421). The transfer of the venia docendi – authorization to teach – from the former to the latter is evident in a multitude of texts. While Mably, at the beginning of the fourth quarter of the 18th century, continued to see history as a school of morals and politics (De l’étude de l’histoire, 1775), a few decades later, Joseph Görres, in his essay Teutschland und die Revolution (1819), on the eve of a new wave of civil unrest, frmly recommended adopting revolution as teacher in political matters (Koselleck 2004b, 80). At this point, when its usefulness for life was being openly questioned, one might have thought that history had begun an irreversible decline. Far from that, the loss of its traditional function as moral tutor was to be more than compensated for by the coronation of the “new science” (Vico dixit) as queen of modern societies. The exaltation of history and its pre-eminent role in 19th-century Europe and America was the paradoxical result of a series of factors that included, along with the aforementioned revolutionary rupture and the so-called historicist revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries,26 processes of nation-building, which required the services of historians for the writing and dissemination of national histories (nations that began to be seen as a long chain of generations united by the state’s action: DPSMI-II-3, 136).

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Integrated within the educational system, institutionalized and professionalized, history acquired unusual prestige and projection (it began what a certain number of authors, including Foucault, have called “the Age of History”). Endowed with near-divine attributes, promoted to the category of preferred science in various Western countries, it became an ersatz of religion. Marx wrote in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843) that “the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, is to establish the truth of this world” (Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 7 and 10 February 1844). Even more explicitly: “History is the religion of our time,” we read in another German text from 1876 (Koselleck 2004b, 144). Thus, as its pedagogical function waned, history began its reign as allegedly trustworthy oracle of the direction of time, supreme court of events and conduct, and road map to the future (Hartog 2013b). From historian-magister, corresponding to the retrospective history account, there was an almost imperceptible shift to historian-prophet, representative of a new history, more philosophical and oriented towards the future. For, in parallel to the aforementioned process of enshrinement, a substantial mutation of the concept of history was taking place, which became clearly visible in its metaphors. As we know, the corpus of fundamental metaphors and concepts of an era is not merely an indicator of the changes that occurred during that period but a factor that drives those changes. I refer to their transformation into an all-encompassing collective singular, referring to History itself understood as a universal process that includes all the pasts, presents, and futures and no longer requires any specifc object, given that history tout court is now the independent subject that produces itself, a colossal actor that is almost confused with Time and is the protagonist of its own evolution. Of course, this semantic change is inseparable from the profound socio-cultural transformations that were taking place during those crucial decades and from the experiences and expectations of those who lived through them. By merging the incipient idea of history as connection of events, actions, and experiences with that of its knowledge, this quasi-transcendental meaning of history confated space of consciousness with space of action (Koselleck 2004b, 32, 93), which promoted the emergence of new metaphors referring not to history-narration (narratio rerum gestarum) but to brand-new history process (to the totality of res factae). The most characteristic feature of these metaphorics, in line with the progressive philosophies of history that began to spread from the end of the 18th century onwards, simplifed and disseminated as political ideologies, is their emphasis on the epic capacity of human beings to shape the course of events (“to make history”) and on the acceleration of a process that advances inexorably towards a specifc telos. This was a goal that, depending on the ideology in question, could be freedom, equality, a classless society, or another similar emancipatory objective. According to the new schema, man would no longer restrict himself to passively recording events but should aspire to writing the script of history in advance and strive

38 Conceptual metaphors for history to make it a reality. Nonetheless, in the age of Euro-American revolutions, the relationship between individual and history was not devoid of tension and ambiguity. It oscillated between two opposite extremes: voluntarism and determinism. In fact, in the literary and political sources of the day we fnd both enthusiastic praise of the Promethean capacity of the romantic hero to shape future events and terrifying metaphors that portray history as a fearsome force that annihilates individuals, however exceptional they may be (in this aspect, modern philosophies of history connect, as has been noted on many occasions, with the providentialism of the Christian history of salvation and even with the fatalism of pre-Christian antiquity) (Arendt 2005, 341; Hunt 2003, 6–7). Thus, while in the Iliad, Zeus plays with mortals as if they were leaves blown by the wind, caudillo Bolívar laments in one of his speeches that, in spite of his apparent control of the situation, he has been no more than a weak straw at the mercy of the revolutionary hurricane (Fernández-Sebastián 2021c, 313–5). 1.2.1

Railways and trains

The old iconography that represented Clio, the muse of History, usually seated, her head turned, writing on the back of Father Time (also praised sometimes qua past as tempus magister), would be largely replaced by new repertoires of far more thrilling images, among which perhaps the most suggestive is that of a rapid convoy hurtling towards an unknown future that, however, some claim knowledge of in advance. The train of time, the railway of progress, the locomotive of history – three slightly diferent versions of the same imagery – travel purposefully forward at great speed, as they have to make up for lost time and arrive as soon as possible at their destination. The gentle maiden and impartial teacher of yore, faithful notary registering great events that would supposedly merit being recorded in her annals for the edifcation of her readers had been transfgured into a furious self-propelled machine, advancing at diabolical speed and steamrollering any obstacle en route to its destination. At the end of the 19th century, Engels acknowledged in one of his letters that “History is about the most cruel of all goddesses, and she leads her triumphal car over heaps of corpses, not only in war, but also in ‘peaceful’ economic development” (quoted by Carr 1990, 81). This potentially tyrannical and deadly facet of Clio, however, went relatively unnoticed for a long time and only became fully visible with the great wars and atrocities of the 20th century. Both the iconography and the historical-political metaphorics of the 19th century and the frst half of the 20th century abound with representations of Revolution, Progress, Freedom, Republic, Democracy, Civilization, the Spirit of the Century, and other similar normative concepts materialized in a diversity of images and symbols – disseminated as much or more via engravings, cartoons in the press, and popular literature than via traditional arts like painting or sculpture – and personifed by individual and collective actors enlisted into a great triumphal march towards

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utopia.27 In fact, these and other agents and teleological concepts function as heteronyms of History: diverse ways of naming the historical movement, the pilgrimage towards the Promised Land. The metaphorics of trains and convoys, epitomized in Marx’s hackneyed allegory of revolutions as “locomotives of history” (Malia 2006) or in Spencer’s praise of the railway network as the paradigm of progress,28 speaks of travelling full steam ahead (but also of advances and delays);29 of unshakeable faith in a brilliant future conceived of as the fuel that feeds the boiler; of itineraries, through stations, and travel companions; of well-oiled wheels and alternative routes, drivers, switchmen, and sidings. Some specifc episodes, such as Lenin’s arrival aboard the sealed train at the Finland station in Petrograd to lead the revolution, even seemed to transfer that imaginary to the world of facts. Well into the 20th century, however, when those exciting trains of History completed their journeys at the rail yards of the Gulag Archipelago or the gatehouse to Auschwitz (Heller 1993, 217–19, 224; Hartog 2013b, 231, 289–90), all that rhetoric collapsed. During the First World War and the inter-war period, a few writers and essayists30 had already voiced serious doubts with regard to the benefts for society of that avalanche of history and had warned – as had Robert Musil in The Man Without Qualities – about the risks of “accelerationism” and the uncertain destination to which the train of history might take.31 The historical optimism of those 19th-century ideologists who invited everyone to board the train of history and speed up its progress began to dissipate and would soon give way to a gloomy pessimism. Later on, when, in the second half of the 20th century, to the cruel disenchantments of utopias, the totalitarianisms and wars of previous decades were added growing concern over the future of human life on the planet, climate change, and other existential threats, this metaphorics was eventually completely reversed. Walter Benjamin was one of the frst to urge the humanity on board that train to pull the emergency break and quickly leave the carriages before the derailment. After all, added Benjamin (2006, 402), maybe the revolution was not actually the locomotive, as Marx maintained, but rather its antithesis: the emergency brake that avoids a catastrophe. Since then, a number of intellectuals and commentators have reiterated that same warning time and time again in increasingly urgent and agonizing fashion: the train must be stopped before it drags us into the abyss, and now, before it is too late. 1.2.2

History in motion

Although the railway metaphorics far from exhausted the forid fgurative language of the speculative philosophy of history, it was certainly one of the most efective. Positivist history, as allegedly scientifc knowledge, equipped itself with a more sober imagery, which included, among others, the metaphorics of the river and the road, which I will address in Chapter 2, and left in the hands of some philosophers the ambition, undoubtedly unbridled,

40 Conceptual metaphors for history to interpret universal history as a totality endowed with meaning (Bowden 2017; a succinct overview of some early attempts to conceive of a universal history, in Bjørnstad et al. 2018). Thus, there occurred a certain distribution of roles between historians and philosophers of history, albeit the border between the two genres – historiography and historiosophy – is not always very clear and conficts of jurisdiction between both accompanied the deployment and expansion of historical disciplines for more than a century. The philosophy of history possesses its own tropes (one might say that to a large extent it is a fabric of tropes), including some as famous as the Kantian “hidden plan of nature” or the Hegelian owl of Minerva, cunning of reason (die List der Venunft), world spirit (Weltgeist), and several others. Prominent among the images applied by its critics to the philosophy of history as such32 is that of the centaur, a disrespectful metaphor coined by Jacob Burckhardt, who, at the beginning of his Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen [Refections on History] (1905), disdainfully describes this hybrid genre as an indomitable centaur. “Philosophy of history” would be, according to Burckhardt, an oxymoron that seeks to combine two largely incompatible disciplines: one, inductive, history (which, he argues, is basically non-philosophy), and another, essentially deductive, philosophy (i.e. non-history) (see n. 8). This pejorative metaphor emphasizes the monstrous nature of this strange creature, half man, half horse,33 and numerous professional historians, indeed, would consider with distrust those philosophers who, instead of laboriously devoting themselves, like them, to clarifying the particular and contingent, pontifcate over the meaning of universal history and other entelechies. It must be acknowledged, however, that the pride of place occupied by history in modern societies was as much or more the result of grandiose philosophical speculations on the meaning of history than the consequence of the patient research of professional historians. Of course, the great philosophers, historiographers, and artists would never have succeeded in elevating history to such a lofty position without the participation of a legion of politicians, journalists, scribblers, cartoonists, and graphic illustrators who brought those titanic abstractions down to the level of the man in the street (efectively blurring the borders between history and fction) – a new era of intense politicization and popularization of some great events of the immediate past that, as far as the plastic arts are concerned, began in the years of the French Revolution (Reichardt and Kohle 2008). Post-revolutionary historiography and romantic painting, but above all 19th-century literature and press, were full of spirited stallions, smoking trains, monuments, ruins of the past, masses in movement, and revolutionaries in action. All those images and the enormous body of illustrations that cover page after page of books and journals from that century respond to a peculiar popular culture, which goes far beyond academic history and encompasses everything from political discussions on issues of the past, museums, and dioramas to historical novels and dramas, poems, and popular legends. The thirst for history did not consist solely in libido sciendi (passion for knowledge): it was not quenched by

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erudite books but demanded other kinds of libations that were more accessible to the general public. It is a sort of historiomania, a complex pathos consisting not only in nostalgia for a lost past but in the yearning, characteristic of the ideologies of the 19th century to satisfy a certain historical need for improvement and collective emancipation that at times appears to be within reach. The “historical fever” that, according to Prosper de Barante, possessed French society of the day could therefore easily end by “endowing the historian with the high mission of the prophet” (Bann 1995, 26). That lofty mission involved the nationalization of history. Along with the written record of the past, it was necessary to construct “visual discourses” and “speak to the eyes” of the public. The historical accounts of Thierry, Guizot, and Mignet, as well as Michelet’s, on the formation and development of the Third Estate until its defnitive emancipation with the Revolution and the dawn of constitutionalism in France are better understood if that reading is complemented by glance at Jacques-Louis David’s unfnished painting The Tennis Court Oath, Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People and, above all, the pamphlets, cartoons, and caricatures – many of them anonymous – of those revolutionary decades lived under the sign of historical acceleration. As David wrote in 1792, artists “will no longer have to go searching through the history of ancient peoples for worthy subjects,” since the France of his own time ofered sublime subjects “on which to practice our brushwork” (Reichardt and Kohle 2008, 91). The convoluted intellectual constructions of Hegel or Marx, conveniently vulgarized for consumption by the layman, project a new light upon many more or less allegorical paintings and drawings (and vice versa). The “world-soul on horseback” that Hegel thought he saw going down the street in front of his house in Jena is easier to imagine if one is contemplating David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps, the portraits by Gros, or any of the numerous prints of the emperor that appeared in popular publications. The historical representation of the popular uprisings in Spain against Bonaparte is much more vivid if one combines reading of textual sources with a look at two great paintings by Goya with the events of 2 and 3 May in 1808 in Madrid. The role of the proletariat en route to socialism is better visualized if one has at hand a copy of Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s impressive canvas The Fourth Estate (and even more so with a viewing of Bertolucci’s 1900 or certain works of the militant artists, flmmakers, and muralists who exalted the great revolutions of the 20th century in Mexico, Russia, or China).34 Finally, to gain a comprehensive understanding of John O’Sullivan’s doctrine of Manifest Destiny and Frederick Turner’s classic frontier thesis, it is helpful to look at both their writings and an allegorical artwork that illustrates their vision. A painting by John Gast, called American Progress, shows how the expansion brought the light of civilization, symbolized by a woman holding a telegraph wire and a school book, to the dark and savage lands where the native people lived. The painting also depicts the telegraph network and the railway line that enabled the communication and transportation of the settlers. By reading O’Sullivan’s

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articles in the Democratic Review and Turner’s essay The Signifcance of the Frontier in American History, and by observing Gast’s painting, one can better understand the ideology of the American expansion to the West.35 These and many other texts and images, resulting from the coordinated work of pen, pencil, burin, and brush (not forgetting the phantasmagorias of the panorama and magic lantern), are nothing but celebration of the movement of history during those frantic decades (Sternberger 1977; Marrinan 1988). All of them faithfully refect the intense emotions and great expectations of societies that were rushing with a mixture of enthusiasm and uncertainty towards a future laden with promises. All of them – texts and images – may be seen as historical-political symbols, literary or visual tropes overfowing with idealism, graphic metaphors of History in action. 1.2.3

Court of justice and dustbin

Another of the rhetorical devices most often employed to extoll history has been its comparison to a court of law.36 In this domain, once again the philosophers – or to be more precise, some philosophers of history – were those most given to cladding history in garments normally worn by justice, as if Clio hoped to supplant Themis, exchanging her notebook for the latter’s scales and, above all, transforming her stylus into an avenging sword. It would be interesting to follow the winding path that, beginning with the adage veritas flia temporis and the old rhetoric on fame and the “verdict of posterity” (as well as the frequent representations of justice as daughter of truth and, of course, of the stories of the Old and New Testament), culminated at the end of the 18th century in Schiller’s famous dictum Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht [The History of the World Is the World’s Court of Justice] (Löwith 1949, 12; Rosen 2014, 270; Koselleck 2004a, 60–5), the echoes of which would resonate until the inter-war period (only in Germany, the phrase was still invoked with reverence by two such diferent authors as Oswald Spengler and Karl Liebknecht). The enthronement of History with a capital “H” as supreme court of the world, a classic trope of enlightened criticism, is inseparable from the parallelism (and later transposition) between divine justice and human justice, a well-established topos since the Middle Ages (González García 2016), followed by other profound cultural transformations. Among them, I shall mention the shift from otherworldly hopes to revolutionary expectations perceptible in a multitude of texts of the time and above all the conversion of History into a formidable collective singular that would come to operate in many discourses as a substitute for divinity. Thereafter, it was not difcult to imagine History in Majesty judging all humans while around sounded the trumpets of the Apocalypse, as if it were a transmutation of Fame’s clarion.37 In that context, the future, imaginatively anticipated as genuine, utopian justice, would be seen as the secular equivalent of Heavenly Jerusalem and the point of arrival of humanity’s great march through time. From the frst

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decades of the 19th century onwards, the popularization of philosophies of progress would make that history-totality the supreme legal authority. Thus, while Robespierre and other French revolutionaries entrusted everything to the judgement of posterity, but generally not yet to that of history (Koselleck 2004a, 62),38 barely decades later, some Hispanic revolutionaries fully commended themselves to future history. In July 1829, Bolívar wrote: “My name already belongs to history: she will judge me” (Aguilar 2000, 196). It goes without saying that the Hegelian and Marxist visions of the historical process would hugely reinforce this judicial metaphor. Saint-Simonian Philippe Buchez (1833, 1) defned the “science of history” as the study that makes it possible “to foresee the political future of humankind.” So that whoever is in possession of that exalted “science of history,” the keys of which K. Marx and F. Engels would soon claim for themselves, would be able to defne which would henceforth be legitimate, that is, progressive ideas, and also to condemn those other obsolete and mistaken opinions that would oppose this putative “natural course of history” (Angenot 2005, 225f.). Ideas that, as Trotsky commented to his comrade Martov almost a century later, deserved to be thrown “into the dustbin of history.”39 Claiming fnally to have identifed the path of history, these discourses painted a new highly evaluative timescape, populated by the just and the unjust, heroes and villains, winners and losers, and urged their audiences to support the right side of history. Thanks to the anticipatory quality of their would-be interpreters, even before reaching the fnishing line, History would already have issued its indisputable verdict, saving some and condemning others. While the former – revolutionaries, liberals, democrats, socialists, communists – loyal allies and servants of historical need, had earned the right to a place of honour in the annals of history, the latter – counter-revolutionaries, traditionalists, conservatives – for persistently turning their backs on the spirit of the age, would be inexorably swept away, hurled into the abyss, the graveyard of all the errors and mistaken ideas discarded by humanity during its heroic self-emancipatory journey. And it appears to be no coincidence that it was in the Russia of the Revolution where that metaphor, wielded by Bolshevik Trotsky against his Menshevik opponents, began to spread until its enshrinement as a valuable asset of political rhetoric (and not only that, since Trotsky’s words about the dustbin of history, an invitation to shed the burden of those “moderate” pseudo-revolutionaries, represented for the latter the prelude to persecution and extermination). Over the years, however, some of those allegedly erased from history would turn the metaphor on its head and use it against its own creators. Thus, in the early 1980s, US President Ronald Reagan ventured to predict in one of his speeches that democracy would succeed in relegating Marxism-Leninism to “the ash heap of history.” The cult of historical becoming, tinged with millennialism, followed by the so-called romantic prophets, meant that in many of their discourses, revolution, which in its diverse avatars and personifcations promised the

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eradication of all the evils that afict humankind, acted as fnal judgement. The French Revolution, in particular, as predicted by Robespierre and other Jacobin leaders, by claiming for itself the establishment of the reign of true justice, would in fact fnd itself absolved of all its crimes by the court of the future. As Tolstoy would write at the beginning of War and Peace, the profound signifcance of that revolution would be associated not with its outrages but with its lofty ideals of emancipation, equality, and the rights of man (Angenot 2005, 226, 281, 283; Confno 2012, 18–19). Before long, that revolution, which at its high point aroused feelings of horror in most of its contemporaries, would be engraved in History in letters of gold, understood as the great epic story of freedom. The “religion of History” that underlies the political Messianisms of the 19th century and the belief in the inevitability of progress led its devotees to scrutinize the oracle of the ages in an attempt to identify the meaning of history. In a way, History – metaphysical subject of itself – became the last instance of ideological rationale. Politics would limit itself to carrying out “the instructions written in the Book of Time,” which created no little tension between those who held determinist or fatalist visions and those who preferred to place the accent on voluntarism and human freedoms (Bénichou 1977; Koselleck 2004b, 135f.). The totalitarianisms of the 20th century would even intensify that historicist rhetoric. And the same thing would happen, in the opinion of its advocates, with most of the subsequent revolutions, whatever their orientation. In inter-war Europe, while leaders and intellectuals afliated to diverse factions of Marxism engaged in passionate debates in an attempt to clarify which of them had history on their side, Adolf Hitler defended himself against the accusation of high treason for organizing the Beer Hall Putsch, defantly declaring before the Munich court trying him that “the goddess of the eternal court of history” would smash the court’s verdict into a thousand pieces and grant him absolution (Koselleck 2004b, 65). Three decades later, Cuban lawyer Fidel Castro, on trial for the assault on the Moncada Garrison, appealed to the philosophy of history to defend himself against his accusers, arguing his status as revolutionary. Castro ended his plea by exclaiming that his likely conviction was of no importance: “History will absolve me!” (De la Cova 2007). Thereafter, the growing scepticism vis-à-vis speculative philosophies of history saw that kind of historiosophy enter a crisis period. Early in the 21st century, although now and then one still hears the occasional populist politician declare that their party programme forms a part of that Long March of history, there appears to be no doubt that this rhetorical strategy has lost much of its power of persuasion. In fact, it is increasingly difcult to justify before the general public political actions in pursuit of a hypothetical historical telos whose coming is taken for granted.40 Even those historians who seek to “settle a score” with the past have reformulated the trope bequeathed by the Enlightenment – according to which “the righteous Judge of the Universe

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is . . . understood to be History itself . . . conceived as an autonomous movement whose infallible judgment will right all wrongs” – and trust that “the trial of history,” thanks to the activism of certain movements, will gradually correct the injustices of history in the very long term (Scott 2020, 76f.). “Judgment Day is .  .  . doomed to remain historically, eternally deferred” (Felman 2002, 18). Furthermore, in these times of storytelling, alternative facts, and fake news, rather than entrusting themselves to the benevolent judgement of history, less scrupulous politicians prefer to rely upon their own capacity for manipulation to distort the writing thereof, twisting Clio’s arm if necessary in order that their sycophants might guide the muse’s quill. A sketch by cartoonist Andrés Rábago in a Madrid newspaper (El País, 11 September 2007) is quite explicit in this respect: a political leader gesticulates from his platform while cynically proclaiming: “History will judge me, but just to be safe, I shall choose the historians.” 1.3 Counter-metaphors Of course, not everyone was as enthusiastic about the excellence and unrestricted authority of history. Even before the disasters of the 20th century spread a black cloud of pessimism right across Europe, and with it an unprecedented crisis of faith in progress, dissenting voices had already been raised, criticizing the exaggerated cult to Clio. Prominent among these early critics of the excesses of history was Friedrich Nietzsche. In his famous essay On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (1873) – the title itself is telling enough – Friedrich Nietzsche, the young professor from the University of Basel, presents a panoply of arguments and alternative metaphors for history and its modes. Nietzsche’s (counter) metaphors, in fact, represented a complete amendment of some of the most important tropes that had been forged and repeated for history for centuries. Nietzsche challenged several commonplaces associated with history and, to do so, had to undermine the predominant metaphorics of the 19th century (some of which, in fact, as we have seen, went back a long way). In his view, opinions that were presented as evident truths solidifed by the passage of time were ultimately no more than “illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions.” Consequently, he mobilized his own “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms,” as he famously defned the truth, to combat established opinions and their metaphors. Nietzsche turned some fundamental metaphors around and battled against others. He directly attacked the quasi-religious conception, between theological and teleological, of history and criticized the absurd idea of making it a supreme court, as advocated by various illustrious philosophers. To the contrary, he argued, it should be “life” that judged the pros and cons of history (although critical history reserves the right to judge and condemn the past in the manner of a court). He countered the metaphorics of the

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mirror – so consistent with the Rankean desire to show “how things actually were” – with those of interpretation and perspective. Against what he understood as “historical malady,” consisting in an indigestible mass of knowledge about the past and also in an abuse of monumentalism as a result of which, subverting natural practice, the dead end up burying the living, he proposed a reasonable use of history and savouring the past with moderation as “hearty nourishment.” The important thing for him was that history should be at the service of life and never hinder the actions of people who always live their lives in the present (Nietzsche 1980). The latter is without a doubt the crux of his proposition. Nietzsche found it outrageous that “history is honoured above life” and spoke out angrily against the attempt to subordinate the latter to the former. As opposed to the memento mori (Remember you must die) with which Christians liked to recall the transience of life, he provocatively proclaimed an alternative slogan: memento vivere (Remember to live). Upon these foundations, instead of elevating history to a court bench, as had Schiller and so many others, Nietzsche bluntly declared that it is life that must judge history. Critical history, he added, is like a knife that cuts out the roots, certainly not without risks, of an obsolete past. Nietzsche brutally redescribed the old Ciceronian adage according to which history was the master of life, relegating it to being life’s servant. From master to subordinate, the discipline’s change of position in relation to “life” could not have been more drastic: in the Nietzschean anti-historicist argument, the noble lady had become a humble maid. This humiliation, from magistra to ancilla vitae (servant of life) should be understood as the philosopher’s radical criticism of what he viewed as the exaggerated importance assigned to history in the 19th century to the extent that it had been granted clear pre-eminence over the unfolding and afrmation of life (and for Nietzsche there was no doubt that it was personal existence that should enjoy epistemological primacy). In his opinion, vital spontaneity, in a way unhistorical or suprahistorical, should take over from history and place the latter at its service (Koselleck 2018, 190–3). Thus, the aphorism had been turned on its head. Over time, this priority would be understood by some historians as a simple recommendation to rely on one’s own experience when attempting to understand the lives of others. Even if what one seeks is a correct intellection of the past, “the old truism Historia magistra vitae becomes Vita magistra historiae, which means giving priority to the experience of history as a prerequisite for knowing history” (Ankersmit 2012, 178; Liakos and Bilalis 2017, 213–14). The master/slave polarity and its variants – mistress/servant, teacher/disciple, and similar – have been addressed in many ways, also metaphorically referring to the tension between disciplines and spheres of action. As far as the hierarchy of disciplines is concerned, discussions regarding the relative value of poetry and history – an old dispute initiated by Aristotle in his Poetics (IX, 1451b) – reappeared time and again. And, with them, the attribution

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of a more or less leading role to each of the two rival fgures: the historian and the poet. At the end of the 17th century, in France and England they were still extolling the advantages of poetry over history (Steedman 2018, 14–15, 225). And a century later, Lessing still believed that, thanks to their superior capacity to play with events at will, poets were the true “masters of history” (Koselleck 2018, 13). The complex master/slave dialectic has been projected onto diferent areas of knowledge to describe the interactions between dominant and dominated disciplines, for example, between history and other branches of the humanities and social sciences, including philosophy, sociology, anthropology, economics, and linguistics. This idea also uses the images of geometry, such as centres and peripheries, and of geopolitics, such as realms and disputed territories, to show the diferent positions and infuences of these felds of knowledge. Little by little, History, which accompanied Europeans in their expansion across other continents, would come to be seen as master of time and of the world. Moreover, the gradual historicization of all the sciences and aspects of human life saw its scope broaden to include more and more subjects and disciplines. In the middle of the 19th century, George Henry Lewes (1844, 110) wrote that “historical science includes everything.” In 1895, Lord Acton declared, even more conclusively, that “History is not only a particular branch of study, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches.” In recent decades, the growth of the politics of memory has displaced history from that hegemonic position to the extent that Hartog (2013, 28–31) wrote that Mnemosyne, the mother of muses, has usurped the position of her daughter Clio (it is worthwhile remembering, however, that the relationship between history and memory has always been ambiguous and complicated; one could even say that frst it was the former that usurped the functions of the latter: Le Gof 1992). In other words: History has relinquished its dominant position and, considerably weakened, has become a mere assistant of Memory, a capacity to remember that – once collectivized – appears to have taken the place of the former. Via a very diferent route to that of Nietzsche, more than a century after his celebrated essay, we see how History has been returned to an ancillary position, although on this occasion it has had to serve Memory, rather than subordinating itself to Life, as the German philosopher had desired. In the 20th century, if not before, history began to fnd itself more and more involved in political events in a new and surprising way. Sometimes it is represented, personifed, no longer interacting with other allegories, but with politicians of fesh and bone, and is even urged to take sides. An early-19thcentury French painting shows Clio fattering Napoleon, glorifying before the nations the Corsican general’s victories (Hartog 2013b, 155–6). On occasions, it resembles more an impertinent servant than a teacher. A drawing dating from the First World War (Figure 1.3) represents Theodore Roosevelt campaigning in favour of the United States’ involvement in the war. In the heat of the controversy, the American ex-president angrily orders Lady

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Figure 1.3 Theodore Roosevelt apostrophizing History. Source: Cartoon by Boardman Robinson, c. 1916 (Library of Congress).

History, represented in this case as an archivist safeguarding the records of the past,41 to erase from them objectors to war, to which the lady replied by calling him a fool. However, if we leave to one side historiography and turn our attention to history as human events, we will see that in this terrain too, history was ousted from its privileged position in the second half of the 20th century. After the Second World War, Mircea Eliade, in his work Le mythe de l’éternel retour [The Myth of the Eternal Return] (1949), wondered whether human beings are capable of withstanding the “horror of history.” As has been noted (Garapon 2008, 10; Hartog 2013b, 32), the Nuremberg trials constituted a turning point as far as this subject is concerned. The trial of a handful of leaders of Nazi Germany at the end of the war overturned the metaphorics of history as court, which Schiller had so successfully endorsed. Accused of and sentenced for new, heinous crimes (crimes against humanity, genocide), that macro-trial of the perpetrators for events that had occurred but a few years earlier was tantamount to trying the immediate past, and in this sense one might say that at Nuremberg, History/res factae was judged. This forceful expulsion of Clio from the bench to the dock – from judge to judged – has profound implications for my subject, particularly in view of the fact that,

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after the creation of the International Criminal Court, the gesture of Nuremberg and Tokyo has since been repeated on several occasions. The two-fold metaphorical removal of Clio – from master to servant; from judge to accused – especially the latter, corresponds to a profound cultural change in the Western world. After the second post-war period, sympathy for the sufering of the vanquished defnitively displaced the celebration of progress, and the cult of the hero was replaced by that of the victim, while there was growing scepticism towards metanarratives (Fernández Sebastián 2021a). Themis would appear to be demanding reparation for Clio’s abuses, and in the public space, war memorials and monuments to victims of extermination increasingly overshadow triumphal arches and monuments to victors. This was a change of mentality that, as advocated by Albert Camus, instead of praising those who make history, opts to side with those who sufer it. One of the pioneers of this ethical and cultural inversion during the inter-war period was Walter Benjamin. All his ambiguities notwithstanding, Benjamin merits consideration, along with Nietzsche, as the other great destroyer of metaphors and prolifc creator of counter-metaphors. Many of his insights into history, often expressed in aphoristic fashion, are scattered across several of his essays, from the Arcades Project to his Theses on the Philosophy of History, and including his correspondence and various lesser known fragments. We have already seen how Benjamin, in spite of his undoubtable appreciation for Hegelian dialectics, distanced himself from both orthodox Marxism and the optimistic vision of progress, to the point of dismantling the railway metaphor of revolutions. For the Berlin critic, Ranke’s conception of history as mirror of the past is basically erroneous. The past is not “a fxed point” to be found in “what has been”: it is more like a collective dream from which it is necessary to awaken in order to free oneself from it42 and, at the same time, understand it better in pursuit of a historical consciousness that would promote emancipatory action in the present. And, although the awakening is not a matter of a moment, and there is no clear-cut distinction between sleeping and waking, rather a fuctuation between sleep and wakefulness – past and present – for Benjamin, action is clearly the priority. He describes the “Copernican revolution in historical perception” as a new relationship between the past and the present that has overturned the Rankean model, so that “politics attains primacy over history” (1982, 491–2). One of his most poetical and controversial texts in this terrain is thesis IX on the Concept of History. The Angel of History looks ahead not to sing the glories of the past – whose protagonists, as Hegel said, trampled on some innocent little fowers as they advanced – but to contemplate the immense catastrophe caused by the hurricane of progress, whose dead pile up before its impotent, terrifed gaze (Benjamin 2007, 257–8). I will return to these questions in Chapters 2 and 6. In the end, Benjamin had subverted the metaphorical foundations of both conventional historiography and the philosophies of history: the past does

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not resemble a mirror but a dream; revolution, more than a locomotive, should be conceived of as an emergency brake; progress, far from being a joyful march towards the future, is a destructive storm. And, to crown its task of demolition, the Angel of History denounces the outrage of progress and repudiates the glories once sung by the muse, which for the angel have been reduced to a heap of rubble. The Angelus novus is a genuine anti-Clio.43 1.4

Turns, levels, professions, territories, borders

In the following chapters I shall review some of the most common instrumental metaphors employed by historians. For the time being, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to some of their rhetorical strategies at times of methodological shift. One has only to read the famous passage in which Thucydides distances himself from Herodotus, declaring his intention to renounce the attraction of myths and legends for the sake of truth and the usefulness of his work for the future, and immediately afterwards, reread the no less well-known quotation from Ranke in which the latter distances himself from the historians who preceded him and understood history as judge and master, instead of restricting itself “to showing how it really was” (zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen), to observe that both strategies have a family resemblance.44 The German historian’s preference, largely shared by the professional historians of his time, for Thucydides over Herodotus, is hardly surprising. Both, Thucydides and Ranke, separated by so many centuries, present their respective “realist” approaches to the study of the past under the guise of a change of metaphor. Throughout the 19th century, theorists and historians resorted to new, powerful tropes whenever they sought to introduce a signifcant methodological change (for the case of German historiography, one can consult Demandt 1978). A few, the positivists in particular, went even further and proposed the eradication of all metaphors. In late-19th- and early-20th-century France, Langlois and Seignobos did not conceal their unambiguous will to bring an end to fgurative language in the writing of history (Hartog 2013b, 150). Shortly afterwards, the analytical philosophers of the Vienna Circle would maintain positions equally opposed to the use of metaphors in science. A logical empiricist like Carl Hempel, author of a famous article in which he argued in favour of the inclusion of history within science (understood as a unitary endeavour), suggested replacing “vague analogies” and “mere metaphors without cognitive content” with “general laws” endowed with a certain predictive capacity (Hempel 1942). Of course, neither the positivist nor the neo-positivists achieved their goal.45 Metaphors continued to fow, fulflling an irreplaceable role in the development of science – history and social science included. In a more realist vein, after strongly criticizing what he called “le système de la commode” [“the chest of drawers system”] created by Seignobos – with its conventional classifcation of economic, social, political, and intellectual

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events into independent, airtight, and hierarchical “drawers” – Lucien Febvre (1965, 26) recommended “changing the traditional corpus of metaphors used by historians”: replacing the old, obsolete images they continued to use through inertia with others that were more dynamic and above all better adapted to the “mental needs” (“besoins mentaux”) of his age, in keeping with the new times marked by technical advances such as electrical energy or air transport. The new school certainly introduced signifcant modifcations of some metaphors. However, the persistent spatial imagination from which these schemas emanated – implicit within Seignobos’s “chest of drawers system” but equally decisive in the construction of so many other historiographical concepts – would essentially remain unscathed. The most conspicuous representatives of the second and third generations of Annales would continue to employ architectural or stratigraphical imagery to organize historical knowledge: the journal’s ternary subtitle Annales (Économies, Sociétés, Civilizations) is revealing. Think, for instance, of the hackneyed metaphors referring to bases and superstructures or of Braudel’s famous cross section of the three temporal levels that, from the turbulent surface of the political/événementiel, vertically penetrates down to the depths of the almost abysmal time of the longue durée, passing through the intermediate dimension of the temps conjoncturel of economic and social history (in Chapter 2 we will dwell on this seminal metaphor). A not very diferent imagery underlies the recurrent fgure of history as a three-storey building. This is the case of Pierre Chaunu’s histoire à trois étages [“history of three foors”] – the economic, the social, the mental – and of the ulterior displacement of primary interest “de la cave au grenier” [“from the cellar to the attic”] (Burke 1990, 67f.), a movement that developed in the course of the 1960s and 1970s, associated with the name of Michel Vovelle (although it was Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who coined the phrase), which at that time however was usually accompanied by the express will not to omit in the analysis any of the levels of the social building, including cultural history, or “history at the third level” (Vovelle 1980). During those same decades, some Marxist British historians employed a spatial imagery – “history from below” – to refer to their interest in the study of ordinary people and of the lowest social strata, while Anglophone cultural history tends to use hierarchical labels such as highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow as cultural categories to diferentiate between high, middle, and low culture. Each and every one of the new branches and the numerous historiographical “turns” produced in these recent decades has been accompanied by its corresponding retinue of more or less apt metaphors (beginning with the metaphorical concept of “turn” itself, which imagines history as a vehicle or a person that moves or looks in a certain direction). Some of them will be discussed in the following chapters. Let me mention now, for illustrative purposes, one single case. With regard to the advent of so-called microhistory – that genre characterized by its analysis of very broad questions, focusing

52 Conceptual metaphors for history on small places, thus revisiting the old theme of the relationship between the micro and the macro – of which the publication of Montaillou (1975) is usually considered “an early example,” Peter Burke (1990, 82) wrote that its author, E. Le Roy Ladurie, “studied the world in a grain of sand, or, in his own metaphor, the ocean through a drop of liquid.” Neither is it infrequent to encounter the use of photographic metaphors – lenses, focus, zoom, closeup – relating to optical experimentation with focal lengths capable of altering scales and thus make it possible to appreciate minor historical details that might go unnoticed by the naked eye or the long shot. And in historiography and theory of history books, historians themselves have been described in very diferent ways, “disguised” in an array of attire corresponding to other activities or professions with which they supposedly share certain characteristics. For some, the historian can alternately be compared to the fgures of the witness, the judge – let us remember that, in ancient Greece, ἵστωρ meant either a witness/guarantor or an arbitrator – or the notary. For others they would be more akin to a kind of artist, sculptor, painter, or photographer (even a magician), or an architect, builder, or man of letters. According to some, they bear a closer resemblance to a master, educator, tutor, or moralist. And there have been some who, like Fichte, have compared the business of the historians to picking peas. Carlo Ginzburg and the advocates of the so-called indiciary paradigm (we shall see this in more detail in Chapter 6), without disdaining analogies of their methods with the work of the painter46 and the psychoanalyst, have usually likened the fgure of the historian to those of the investigator, the detective, and the doctor, who diagnoses via evidence. Recently, numerous parallels have been drawn between the functions and occupations of the historian and those of an explorer, traveller, medium, translator, or interpreter. Each of these images equates to history’s rapprochement to one discipline or another – from Law, Morals, and Politics to Fine Arts, from Philology, Psychology, and Sociology to Anthropology – and highlights certain aspects and qualities – accuracy, wisdom, persuasion, sagacity, impartiality, inventiveness, objectivity, inbetweenness, empathy, reliability, among others – which in each case should grace the ideal historian. One only needs to refect for a moment to observe that several of these attributes correspond to the basic metaphors of history as mirror or as construction, as teacher or judge, and so on. Meanwhile, the discourses of inter- and transdisciplinarity, so frequent in recent years, and the source of the number of “mixed” or liminal disciplines, have also engendered, of course, their own metaphorical vocabularies, associated, on the one hand, with mixture, grafting, intercrossing, and hybridity, and on the other with interweavings, connections, bridges, imbrications, and intersections. As occurs in other felds of knowledge, in historiography, theoreticalmethodological refections have often been expressed via a territorial metaphorics (long before the professionalization of history gave rise to any kind of esprit de corps among historians). Placing history at the apex of humanistic disciplines – “the Queen of the Humanities,” in the words of E. P. Thompson – would

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become a commonplace among the new professionals. It should be borne in mind, in this respect, that for centuries no clear borders existed between history and philosophy, rhetoric, theology,47 morality, geography,48 philology, literature, or politics, and that domains which today seem clearly distinguishable were not so then. Others such as economics, anthropology, or sociology, which would establish very strong links with certain branches of history, emerged later. What is beyond any doubt is that modern historiography and its multipole specialities and subdisciplines are full of invocations to territories, regions, hegemonies, maps, and border controls, within a decidedly expansionist spirit. Even the metaphorical denominations of some alternative historical paths, new methods such as Foucault’s “archaeology” or “genealogy” – two epistemological strategies that allude to the recovery of remote or hidden origins – may be interpreted in this vein, as an extension of historiographical tasks to include new objects or deeper levels. In the case of “archaeology,” as its name indicates, rather than the homochrony of a conventional history based on a linear, unidirectional, and progressive time, Foucault emphasizes the need to excavate deeper temporal strata of knowledge, while when, following in Nietzsche’s footsteps, he proposes a “genealogical” approach, he is referring more to a “counter-history” that encompasses themes and aspects linked to power and to the great epistemological discontinuities that had not previously been historicized. It would seem that historical knowledge has not ceased to expand over the last two centuries. More and more objects have entered history’s radius of action, as new approaches, new themes, and new problems have emerged. That said, this expansion was accompanied by the other side of the coin: fragmentation. In the midst of the “crisis of history,” François Dosse (1987) did not hesitate to diagnose the situation as a “crumbling of the discipline.” The fact is that History has continuously incorporated new provinces into its empire, while claiming for itself the central role among social sciences. And historiographic “turns,” sometimes superfcially described as trends, waves, or tides, have more often than not consisted in the acceptance of a new hegemon or dominant perspective – be it language, culture, narration, the political, space, time, the iconic-visual, and so forth – on the ensemble of social and historical sciences. Thus, the return of the (new) political history in 1980s France was presented by René Rémond (1988, 380–5) as the acknowledgement of politics as – this at least was his impression at the time – the brightest star in the social frmament: the place of global management and the “concentration point” of a society; a sphere, in short, that “partly directs other activities” and that, moreover – again we note the geopolitical jargon – “lacks natural borders.” Recently, this expansive trend has been questioned on the basis of the ongoing transformation of historiographical practice in response to the existential challenge of the Anthropocene, a transformation that for some should embrace the historical study of non-human phenomena and the outcome of which remains to be seen at the time of writing. Therefore, it is

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debatable whether Bruno Latour’s geostory (géohistoire) represents another step forward for this conquering history or rather a redefnition of the discipline. After a long period in which historical writing “resembles a practice of annexationist inclusion on a mobile frontier” (Trüper 2019, 26), with its proposal of an “anthropocenic historical knowledge,” it is far from clear, as Marek Tamm says, “whether we are currently witnessing a massive extension of the territory of the historian or rather its extinction and merging into a new constellation of knowledge during an unprecedented tectonic shift” (Simon et al. 2021, 410). If ultimately it is the latter case, and we are on the threshold of “a new constellation of knowledge” – note the change of metaphor – this epistemological movement could herald the end of the old analogy of history with a steadily expanding territory.49 Thus, the struggle continues between alternative metaphoremes – expanding territory or part of an emerging constellation? – to describe in a nutshell where history is heading, whether as a subject or as an ensemble of interconnected events. As far as the discipline is concerned, both the analogy with a domain and the image of the constellation – with its entourage of associated terms: stars, planets, satellites, orbits, and the like – are centuries old. However, as I suggested earlier, the long life of any metaphorics involves so many metamorphoses that the ways of understanding history one seeks to convey in each case and context, despite apparently employing the same metaphorical focus, may vary enormously. As can be seen from what has been said so far, the economy of the metaphor is inseparable from history in any of its forms. The metaphors that attempt to help us understand the historian’s functions are closely related to the images we use to refer to history as a discipline. And all of them, naturally, particularly the most incisive examples, which usually have an epistemological background, largely respond to the prevailing world-view and intellectual and cultural atmosphere of the moment. One might say that the regulatory metaphors employed in each era to refer to history or science are themselves second-degree metaphors of the existing cognitive culture or epistemological paradigm. Thus, it is not at all surprising that the same or similar change of metaphor proposed by Nietzsche for history, refuting Cicero – from master to servant – was applied a century later to describe the precarious status of truth at the beginning of postmodernity: “Truth, far from being a solemn and severe master, is a docile and obedient servant” (Goodman 1978, 18). Notes 1 Let us remember that the Greek word ἱστορία means search, inquiry, and has no temporal connotations. Originally, it referred to knowing something through inquiry, preferably by having been an eyewitness (ἱστορ) thereof. The Latin verb corresponding to the Greek ιστορειν (to inquire) is in-vestigare (investigate, search into), that is, to follow the tracks (vestigia) of past events.

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2 This is equally applicable to other basic concepts, like for example the idea of truth, or the idea of sin, studied respectively by Blumenberg (2010, caps. I–IV) and G. Anderson (2009). 3 The symbolic association between the mirror and the naked truth, which has a long iconographic history, reached its culmination at the end of the 19th century, in various paintings and sketches by Jean-Léon Gérôme and Édouard Debat-Ponsan on the subject of truth emerging from her well, mirror in hand. 4 This is the case of the novel, classically described by Stendhal in Le Rouge et le Noir as “a mirror going down the road.” Three centuries earlier, Cervantes had written that drama places “before us at every step a mirror in which we may see vividly displayed what goes on in human life” (Don Quixote, II, 12). Cervantes may have been partly inspired by the sentence attributed to Cicero, according to which drama is “imitatio vitae, speculum consuetudinis, imago veritatis” (“imitation of life, mirror of customs, refection of truth”), mirror metaphors that act as a counterpoint to Cicero’s famous passage on history (see n. 15). 5 The idea of the mirror image as an inverted copy of something has multiple versions and applications, and with the invention of photography, similar comparisons between negative and positive would frequently be made. To mention one example, Fabian, in his infuential book Time and the Other (2014 [1983], 144), argues that the colonial West “required Time to accommodate the schemes of a one-way history: progress, development, modernity (and their negative mirror images: stagnation, underdevelopment, tradition).” 6 The refection of the past/refection of the present dichotomy is comparable to that presented by some critics when they point out that the metaphor may be applied to language understood as both refection of the world (in the sense of classic epistemology) and as refection of the interpreter (in the sense of romantic expressionism and postmodern constructionism). 7 Among the various aspects of the legendary wisdom attributed to King Solomon and his famous table in which, since things repeat themselves and there is nothing truly new under the sun (Eccl. 1,9), Portuguese preacher António Vieira imagined in one of his sermons (1672) two mirrors placed opposite each other, one of them refecting the past and the other the future. But if in the mirror of the past we see the future, and vice versa, then, looking at both at the same time, we would see the present, “because the present is the future of the past and the present itself is the past of the future.” 8 In spite of this, theory and history or, rather, theoretical-deductive knowledge and historical-descriptive knowledge, were for centuries regarded by scholastic tradition – also by rationalists like René Descartes or Christian Wolf – as two forms of alternative knowledge with a strong hierarchy between them. Since Aristotle’s declaration in Metaphysics (XIII, 1086b) that true science addressed the universal, empirical, idiographic knowledge was clearly subordinated to philosophical knowledge, which seeks causes, principles, and laws (Eskildsen 2022, 2, 45). The fact that expressions like “universal history” or “philosophy of history” sounded like oxymorons in early modern Europe refects a similar incompatibility between the historical description of particulars and the philosophical search for universals. 9 To paraphrase Horace (ut pictura poiesis) – pace Aristotle (Poetics, 1451b) – history can also be construed as mimesis and as poiesis (creation). 10 Walter Benjamin would employ a similar but more sophisticated metaphor to emphasize the heuristic productivity of temporal distance. In his Paralipomena to “On the Concept of History” (1940), quoting André Monglond, he writes: “If one looks upon history as a text, then one can say of it . . . that the past has left in them images comparable to those registered by a light-sensitive plate. The future

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Conceptual metaphors for history alone possesses developers strong enough to reveal the image in all its details. Many pages in Marivaux or Rousseau contain a mysterious meaning which the frst readers of these texts could not fully have deciphered” (Benjamin 2006, 405). Moreover, the sepia tonality of certain old photographs and the simple ageing of pictures produce shifting efects between present and past (Bann 1995, 120). Unlike the painter, an alternative comparison proposed shortly before by Namier, to underline, to the contrary, that the photographers are mechanical reproducers who do not diferentiate between the minor details of the image of the object they portray, while painters “single out and stress” those elements that they fnd most interesting. The history of pictures, however, shows to what extent the evolution of painting and photography are much more intertwined than is often believed (Hockney and Martin 2016). One of the technical devices that are at the origin of photography, the camera obscura, frequently served as a metaphor for the fdelity of a copy or representation of something. But its implications could sometimes be diametrically opposed. Rousseau, for example, uses this trope in the preamble to his Confessions to emphasize the truthfulness of his testimony: his memoirs, he says, are not a book but a self-portrait obtained through a camera obscura. Marx, on the other hand, compares the distorting efect of ideology – false consciousness – to a camera obscura, where the images appear upside down. Friedrich Meinecke questions the implicit objectivism of this image and suggests that the task of the historian, by combining objectivity and subjectivity, is more like that of a creative mirror (Krol 2021, 239). If we move from the optical to the acoustic metaphorics, the trope of polyphony – frequently used by historians when speaking of the diversity and complementarity of their sources – would be a sonic equivalent of this visual imagery. Both orientation and intersubjectivity are spatial metaphors associated with the idea of perspective. “Historia vero est testis temporum, lux veritatis, vita memoriae, magistra vitae, nuntia vetustatis” [“History is truly the witness of times past, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity”] (Cicero, De oratore, II, 9, 36). We have already seen that, for today’s politicians too, history can guide their actions, or at least they can justify their decisions by invoking lessons of the past, like a driver looking at the rear-view mirror (Vogt 2019). “The statesman is the historian in practice,” wrote Droysen (1897, § 93, 56). Pocock (2009, 25), meanwhile, has argued that historical thought might be a branch of the study of political thought and historical consciousness a product. On the history-politics relationship, see also Fernández-Sebastián 2021c, 421, 475–6. By temporalizing history, the topos of history as mother of truth became a variation of the old apophthegm veritas flia temporis [the truth is the daughter of time]. A phrase that, since it was uttered by Aulus Gellius (Noctes Atticæ, XII, 11) in the 2nd century, has been revisited by countless authors, although their interpretations and developments are more complex than is generally thought (after all, error is also the son of time), as Blumenberg illustrates (2007, 135–83) for the case of Fontenelle. The theme of Time revealing Truth is relatively common in Western art (see my thoughts on this matter in Chapter 2, Section 1). Much rarer is the iconography that adds to these two allegorical representations that of History. Notable among the latter is an oil painting titled Truth, Time, and History that Francisco de Goya painted in Madrid at the beginning of the 19th century. The complete fragment reads as follows: “[F]or it is the business and duty of historians to be exact, truthful, and wholly free from passion, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor love, should make them swerve from the path of truth, whose

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mother is history, rival of time, storehouse of deeds, witness for the past, example and counsel for the present, and warning for the future.” In another passage from this work (chap. XXVIII) Saavedra Fajardo writes that the ruler will ensure that his vessel (i.e. the state) sails more safely if it has as a “pilot the experience of the past.” History is a valuable guide that will enable him to anticipate the dangers of his voyage. Although Corneille warned in one of his works that the example may be a “miroir trompeur” (a deceitful mirror), the metaphors of the teacher, the mirror, and the book are sometimes interlinked. Juan Espinosa, author of a Diccionario para el Pueblo [Dictionary for the People] published in Lima in 1855, wrote, for instance, that “history is a school teacher who teaches modern societies to read the book in which they learn to spell ancient ones” (DPSMI-I, 656). The introduction to a classic national history of the period, referring to Spain, describes mankind as an “immortal giant” that is renewed over generations and always marches forward, linking past, present, and future (Lafuente 1850, I, 4). The idea of humanity as an everlasting colossus was already present in Pascal’s thinking and could be seen as a corporal metaphor that precedes the Hegelian idealist construction of the “Spirit of the world.” The most usual, in any case, is that historiographers in the service of the national cause, especially with regard to ethno-nationalist movements, invent an ad hoc past to legitimate their national community. This systematic manipulation of the past means that, as Hobsbawm once stated (1996, 255), today, still, many “historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers are to heroin addicts.” It is they who “supply the essential raw material for the market.” Actually, the process of questioning exemplar history had already begun in the Renaissance in parallel to the growing awareness of anachronism: Schifman 2011, 178–82. Half a century earlier, at the outbreak of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke (1951 [1790], 75) had used a diferent metaphor – that of the compass and navigation – to illustrate a similar sentiment: the disorientation of one who is suddenly deprived of the “ancient opinions and rules of life.” The fact that George Santayana’s celebrated sentence (The Life of Reason, 1905) “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” has become a commonplace is evidence of history’s tenacious reluctance defnitively to yield its functions as magistra. Historicism, which was accompanied by a variety of organic metaphors, can be understood as a cultural revolution that, accentuating dynamism as opposed to “the old static system” (Mannheim), “became ‘the Archimedean lever’ for the modern worldview and life experience” (Kelley 2015, 94). Some historians, like Prosper de Barante in 1824, were torn between their commitment as participating actors in the “great drama” of history – theatrical language referring to scenographic representations of the past was very frequent during the romantic period – and his desire for impartiality with a view to painting an authentic “picture of the truth” (Bann 1995, 20–1). A number of 19th-century Hispano-American intellectuals believed at the time that their countries needed only to imitate the United States in order to catch the “train of civilization” (Zea 1978, 238). In the last pages of his book The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama (1992, 338–9) still compares mankind with “a long wagon train strung out along a road,” all advancing towards the same glorious destination. Some wagons are about to reach it, while others have met major obstacles that delay their progress, have lost their way, and are likely to arrive much later (in Chakrabarty’s ironic terms (2007, 65) one might say that they would spend some time in

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Conceptual metaphors for history the “waiting room” of history). With his evocation of a wagon train so similar to those heading for the West, Fukuyama gives a nod to the North American public and to Turner’s frontier imagery. In one of his essays, Paul Valéry (1960, 35) sternly condemns history as “the most dangerous product ever to have been concocted by the chemistry of the intellect.” Among those unhappy with the railway metaphor was critic of Whig historiography Herbert Butterfeld (1950, 67), who questioned the comparison of history to a train and preferred to liken it to a symphony in which every note counts. This last image recalls Ranke’s assertion that “every age is equally next to God.” Hispanic American intellectual Andrés Bello, for example, used to say that, by applying philosophy to history, we dye the past with a colour that is alien to it, as if contemplating it “through a stained glass window” (Aurell et al. 2013, 383). The centaur, however, is an ambiguous fgure which enjoys considerable prestige in some spheres and at certain moments of Western culture. For centuries, the mythical centaur Chiron, in particular, had an excellent reputation as a wise teacher. Machiavelli’s interpretation, when he presents Chiron as the tutor of princes (The Prince, XVIII), partly continues the classical tradition but substantially modifes it by recommending the special political teachings that, both in the area of law and in the use of force, are to be expected of a teacher who is “half beast and half man.” Even more so, in an era like ours, in which “visual thinking of the past, metaphor and symbol may become far more important than amassing data or creating a logical argument” (Rosenstone 2002, 479). The rhetoric of the “race of civilization” (also metaphorized as a ladder, a carriage, or a thermometer and sometimes identifed with railway tracks) became extraordinarily important in the Ibero-American world, especially from the 1830s onwards (DPSMI-II-1, 172–3, 193, 225, 228, 235, 241, 284, and 287; DPSMIII-3, 45; DPSMI-II-5, 24, 78). The representation of history as a court should not be confused with the comparison between the respective roles of the judge and the historian, a subject I have recently addressed elsewhere (Fernández-Sebastián and Tajadura 2021). The Greek verb κλέω (to celebrate), Latinized as Clio, alluded to the fact that the muse of History and of epic poetry, frequently represented as holding a trumpet, would sing the praises of the feats of the heroes of the past. It seems that the etymology of Clio, unlike that of History, which has to do with sight, refers to the sense of hearing. It is with good reason that fame, renown, reputation, and glory are associated in classical Greece with oral tradition, rumour, epic, and word-ofmouth transmission. During the trial of Louis XVI, the king’s defence plea, read by Raymond Desèze on 26 December 1792, concluded, however, with the following words: “I stop myself before History. Think how it will judge your judgement, and that the judgement of him will be judged by the centuries.” One perceives a certain similarity between Trotsky’s metaphor and the famous paragraph from Introduction to The Philosophy of History (paraphrased years later by Engels and many others), where Hegel writes that those powerful individuals who embody Weltgeist (world-spirit) “must trample down many an innocent fower in their path.” Needless to say, Darwin’s theses on the survival of the fttest would soon add scientifc respectability to that way of simultaneously contemplating nature and history. See, however, Gupta’s observations (2022, 286) on the sustained increase in the use of phrases such as “right side of history”/“wrong side of history” between 1979 and 2019. This growth seems to indicate that the crisis of the philosophies

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42 43

44

45 46 47

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of history in academic circles has not prevented some clichés derived from such philosophies from becoming popular in recent decades. In various late-19th-century and early-20th-century drawings, History is personifed as a notary who merely records what has occurred in a notebook. Thus, in a cartoon published in Puck on 27 July 1898, following the Spanish defeat by the United States, Lady History awaits, book in hand, before a corpse that represents Spain, the international verdict on the latter’s killer, while Uncle Sam contemplates the scene scornfully. The caricaturist suggests that in fact this was a case of suicide. In another American cartoon of 1906, an old man shows his grandson a large book titled History of the World to extoll the merits of President Roosevelt, who, as the Daily Press reports, has just been given a standing ovation. Some years later, the protagonist and anti-hero of James Joyce’s Ulysses had distanced himself from the triumphalist visions of history. For Stephen Dedalus, history is no more than “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Of course, Benjamin’s pessimistic vision of history was not without precedent, particularly among some 18th- and 19th-century revolutionaries, who condemned the past en masse. For Chilean writer Francisco Bilbao (1866, 302), for instance, history was an immense “ocean of blood and darkness” that mankind had to cross in order to reach, at the end of its pilgrimage, a paradise of peace and freedom. A verse from the International – “Du passé faisons table rase” – by Eugène Pottier, clearly states the revolutionary desire to wipe clean the slate of the past. “The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not refect it, I shall be content. In fne, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time” (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, I, 22). “History has been accorded the role of judging the past in order to provide the contemporary world with useful instruction for future years. The present study renounces such high ofces: it wants only to show how it really was” (Leopold von Ranke, Preface to his Histories of the Romanic and Germanic Peoples, 1824). The similarity is even greater if we compare this passage by Ranke with another from How to Write History by Lucian. Ironically, the name by which Hempel’s proposal is known – “covering law model,” as this theory was christened by William Dray – is obviously metaphorical. For the opposite perspective, that of the painter as historian, see Burke 2001, 157–9. Among the numerous links between the Christian religion and history, perhaps the strongest is the shared need, perceptible in Eusebius of Caesarea’s Ecclesiastical History, to overcome at the same time “the experiential absence of God” and “the absence of the past.” Filling this two-fold experiential void could be the underlying motivation to construct respectively “a verbal theology” and “a written history” (Kemp 1991, 11). In accordance with the “visual paradigm” for sciences that prevailed in the West, geography and maps, in particular, have often been described since the end of the 16th century as the “eyes of history” (oculi historiae), while history itself has sometimes been described as the “eyes of the world” (oculi mundi). A. Ortelius in his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570) used the former, and G. Mercator in his Atlas (1594), the latter. Even those historians who seek to substantially transform the status quo of the discipline designate their disruptive theoretical and epistemological proposals as “new territories” (Kleinberg et al. 2022, 94).

2

Time and memory

2.1

Memory of time/time of memory

Any approach to the study of time and of memory – or, to be a little more precise, to historical temporality and to collective memory – is necessarily metaphorical. “Familiarly strange, enigmatically obvious” in Marramao’s accurate words, time is so elusive that we can only attempt to grasp it with the help of more or less appropriate spatial analogies. As for so-called collective memory, it is clear that the simple use of this phrase analogically projects upon the group an ability to remember, which strictly speaking is only possessed by the individual. We have, therefore, two inherently metaphorical concepts, which can barely be spoken of except in fgurative language. “A moving image of eternity” (Plato, Timaeus 37d). “Number of change with respect to the before and after” (Aristotle, Physics IV, 10–4). Early formulae like these clearly indicate the almost insurmountable difculties that have faced theorists since antiquity whenever they have sought to decipher the enigma of time. For this reason perhaps, rather than these pseudo-defnitions, it is a handful of mainly Heraclitean and Augustinian insights, questions, and aporias that have survived the centuries and reached us: “Everything fows”; “No man ever steps in the same river twice”; “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” This last, paradoxical statement by Augustine of Hippo (Confessions, XI) which gives rise to substantial speculation regarding the apparent inconsistency of pasts, presents, and futures, along with other refections of his on the close relationship between autobiographical memory and the anticipation of future events, or certain parallelisms between music and the order of time, has since then been repeated and discussed over and over again in the Western philosophical tradition. The long life of such unanswered questions and the survival of these fragmentary images until the threshold of the modern world attest to the fact that the epistemological obstacles to be overcome in order to arrive at a range of responses shared by specialists in diferent felds of knowledge vis-à-vis the problems of temporality and memory in any of their dimensions are probably insurmountable.1 DOI: 10.4324/9781032736358-4

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If we leave aside the classical contributions by Newton, Kant, and other great luminaries of modern philosophy in relation to time – incidentally, according to Hartmut Rosa, time has become one of the central problems of modern societies; revealingly, the word time is nowadays the most used noun in English – and concentrate on the main trends of the last century, it is soon apparent that from the turn of the century onwards, this subject began to be addressed with unusual intensity and that this interest has been maintained and even increased during various successive waves until the present day. First, it was the philosophers – Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger – who focused on the question of temporality (a theme that acquired enormous relevance as a result of discoveries in the feld of physics, particularly with Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum theory, which favoured the transition from “the Physics of Being” to “the Physics of Becoming,” in the words of Ilya Prigogine). Later, the fascination with the mysteries of time is very present in the writings of other illustrious representatives of phenomenology and hermeneutics, such as H. G. Gadamer, H. Blumenberg, and P. Ricoeur. In parallel fashion, signifcant contributions began to be made by the social sciences (mainly sociology, anthropology, and the history of science) until, in the second half of the 20th century, a few eminent historians – Fernand Braudel (1958), Krzysztof Pomian (1984), and above all Reinhart Koselleck (2004 [1979]) – made substantial contributions to the analysis of historical time. These authors, by focusing attention on the semantics of historical time, in dialogue with philosophers and sociologists – and in doing so, incidentally, all employing the metaphor of strata, albeit on the basis of clearly diferent premises – paved the way for other historians and theorists to stop taking historical time for granted and gradually embark on criticism and the historicization of it. Upon such foundations, in the 21st century, a sophisticated literature has developed on the subject of the crisis of modern historicity and temporality. The mere mention of the names of some prominent scholars from two successive generations – François Hartog, Lucian Hölscher, and Aleida Assmann, from one; Helge Jordheim, Marek Tamm, and Zoltán B. Simon, from the other – sufces to give us an idea of the vitality and interest of this vibrant literature in recent years.2 We know that great metaphors guide thinking, and in this sense the dominant metaphors referring to historical time and temporality – almost all of them spatial – that I shall now examine, tell us much about the alternative visions of the changing relations between time and history, visions that become more complex as more and more theorists arrive at the conviction that it is not exactly time that exists but rather times, in plural. To begin with, there is growing awareness that historians, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and historians of art or of sciences – not to mention astronomers, biologists, or physicists – work with not only diferent standards but, inevitably, diferent conceptions of time (just as, for that matter, philosophers, psychologists, and historians work with diferent concepts of memory: Nikulin 2015). Moreover, with the gradual adoption of the constructionist

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approach for all kinds of cultural realities and, consequently, the characterization of time itself as a social and cultural construct,3 one modality or several modalities of times would correspond to each type of historical research; thus, political, economic, social, demographic, and cultural history do not have to share the same temporal schemas. Going a step further, along with these distinctions according to spheres, perspectives, or areas of interests within historiography, with each of which would be associated with its particular temporalities, some authors would discover the “vertical” multiplicity of historical times, which would give rise to various proposals – usually metaphorized by means of asynchronic and polychronic strata – which some have included under the umbrella term of heterochronies (Salomon 2018b), compatible with a horizontal plurality of chronotopes, that is, of successive or competing regimes of historicity. It is not my intention, however, to ofer a picture of the diverse classifcations of our conceptions of time, conceptions that, as Norbert Elias showed, are not limited to a trite contrast between an objective, natural, cosmological, and absolute time, on the one hand, and another subjective, human, social, and relative time, on the other, nor to the no less hackneyed opposition between cyclical and linear time.4 Instead of that, I shall present a small selection of some of the metaphorics most frequently used by diverse agents in relation to historical time and memory. Before that, however, it is worth noting that the surprising resilience of some ancestral metaphors, such as fows and currents of time, might be partly attributable to the “ontologizing” of our ways of speaking of these phenomena. Even grammar tends to reify the subjects of certain rather pleonastic verbal expressions. Thus, as Norbert Elias observed (1993, 53–4), phrases such as “the wind blows,” “the river fows,” or “time passes” seem to suggest that the wind, the river, or time was something substantially different from their movement, that is, the act of blowing, fowing, or passing, which is their essential distinguishing trait.5 Of course, expressions and vocabularies of temporality difer considerably from one society to another, as each culture has its peculiar accent and “its own unique set of temporal fngerprints” (Rifkin 1987, 1; Levine 2006, xi). Spanish speakers, for example, have two terms – ser and estar – with strong temporal connotations for the semantic complex that in most languages is expressed with a single verb (“to be”). This duality enables them to distinguish at the level of predication between the permanent (ser) and the transitory or circumstantial (estar).6 It has also been pointed out that the difculty involved in grasping time lies in the fact that temporality is a constitutive trait of the human being. If we are made of time and the temporal dimension always accompanies us, it is very difcult to see that which is part of our own nature. “Pursuing Time,” wrote J. B. Priestley (1964, 81), “we are like a knight on a quest, condemned to wander through innumerable forests, bewildered and bafed, because the magic beast he is looking for is the horse he is riding” (Priestley 1964, 81). I

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would say more: so fused have we become with our mount that we are more like a centaur than a knight.7 2.2

Clio, Chronos, and Kairos

The personifcations of time in Greek and Roman mythologies and the long shadow cast by these fgures in Western literature and fne arts over centuries contributed signifcantly to their hypostatization. The allegorical representations that pair up Father Time and History, traditionally embodied by Cronus/Chronos/Saturn and Clio, tell us a great deal about the way of historically conceiving of the complex relationship between the muse and the titan (or the god with whom she has fnally merged).8 Most of these representations, especially during the 17th and 18th centuries, depict Clio writing on Chronos’ back (some examples in Fernández-Sebastián 2021c, fgs. 7.1, 8, 9, 10, and 11).9 It would appear, then, that the latter is commonly represented as an ally of the muse who collaborates with her, since, as the proverb veritas flia temporis says, it is he who eventually discovers historical truth (veritas vincit, we sometimes read in the notebook in which Clio writes).10 On other occasions, however, when one underlines that the passage of time erodes and dissolves things (tempus edax rerum), what is being emphasized is rather the destructive action of a time that devours everything and therefore hinders the preserving mission of historical writing. According to this Saturnian imagery, time, more than a resource of history, would be an obstacle to its task of clarifcation. While Clio strives to combat forgetfulness, Chronos would work towards oblivion. With good reason, Herodotus claimed at the beginning of his Histories (1, 3) he was conducting his inquiry in order “that time does not abolish men’s achievements and to ensure that their great exploits . . . do not fade into oblivion.”11 Of these two contrasting ways of relating Time and History, in which Father Time alternately appears as a disclosing or a concealing force, the former is by far the most frequent, but it is important not to disregard some cases in which the second aspect stands out.12 In Wiblingen Abbey library, we fnd one of the best iconographic examples of this kind of relationship. In a superb baroque sculpture that Paul Ricoeur (2004, viii–ix) reproduced on the cover of one of his most important works, Time is portrayed as an enemy that History has to outwit so as to ward of his destructive power. The picture shows Chronos trying to tear a page out of the book of history, while the muse, with her left hand, halts the winged god’s gesture, while, in her right hand, displaying the instruments of her profession: the book, the inkpot, and the stylus.13 Signifcant too is the absence of allegories in which Clio is associated with Kairos (καιρός). Unlike Chronos’s uniform, continuous time, Kairos is the time of the feeting occasion, the surprising event, and the singular, unrepeatable opportunity that suddenly changes everything (the time, in short, of human decision and action). In a way, Kairos/Caerus/Occasio combines all

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the modalities of time (including Χρόνος and Αἰών (Aion), which the Romans and ecclesiastical scholasticism interpreted as saeculum, aevum, or even aeternitas). From the perspective of present-day historiography – characterized among other things by renewed interest in the event – history as genre would have a greater afnity with this qualitative and eventful time than with Chronos’s merely quantitative version. However, judging by the absence of allegories linking Clio and Kairos, contrasting with the iconographic abundance of the Clio-Chronos pairing, there is no doubt that for centuries, the historian’s time was much more chronological than kairological.14 When the writers of the New Testament wished to highlight particular moments in history – the most important of which was undoubtedly the coming of Christ, considered the Messiah – they were obliged to build metaphorical bridges between Chronos and Kairos. Such bridges seem to have been essentially of two kinds. On the one hand, the concept of Crisis in that context played an eminent role in connecting profane history and salvation history. Moreover, in the Christian world the idea of the “fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4) and the solemn statement that “the time is fulflled” (Mark 1:15) clearly express the fulflment of prophecy. The great crisis of the advent of Christ suddenly transformed Chronos into Kairos (Cullmann, Christus und die Zeit, 1946). On a more mundane terrain, several languages have idioms – such as the English phrase “the time is ripe” – that metaphorically associate the ripeness of time with the right moment to do something. This expression can be used for personal matters as well as for collective actions. On 9 May 1968, for example, the Pakistani writer Tariq Ali stated, in relation to the events taking place in France at the time, that “the time is ripe for a revolution.” 2.3

Circles, lines, and points

Yet if there is one historical-temporal topic that has caused rivers of ink to fow among historians, philosophers, and anthropologists, that is the contrast between cyclical and linear time. In this sense, the classical, pre-Christian, representation of time as a circle is usually contrasted with the fgure of the straight line, usually associated with the Christian conception, especially since Augustine’s energetic refutation of the cyclical model of the stoics in the City of God. Very diverse authors have discussed and interpreted this dichotomy, and although in general they have acknowledged its didactic use, most agree that this opposition is historically less strict than we tend to think. On the one hand, it appears that linear and cyclical conceptions – which ultimately share a vision of time as a continuous succession of discrete instants – are more compatible than had been supposed, although one of them is usually dominant (Momigliano 1966; Zerubavel 2003, 23–5).15 In fact, applied to diferent activities and social spheres, both conceptions coexist in most societies, including the Euro-American societies of today.16 Furthermore, historically it is possible to identify diverse alternatives to this dichotomy, such

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as the absolutely immobile, stationary time of eternity (which is rather a non-time), the expectations of Gnosticism, and some forms of millennialism and Messianism, which characteristically expect an immediate abrupt interruption of time, some philosophical or scientifc proposals that seek to position themselves on a transcendental or atemporal level,17 or the metaphorics of the spiral that, in any of its versions, combines the imagery of the line that advances and the curve that turns (see for example Latour’s “polytemporal” proposal 1993, 75).18 All these visual and verbal metaphors, incidentally, reveal the enormous difculty, so often highlighted, of referring to time other than by means of spatial similes, thus establishing a kind of temporal topology, a topology that is modifed as conceptions of space are transformed and new lands are discovered (also in this sense the assertion of the geographer Friedrich Ratzel, which Schlögel (2016) transformed into a beautiful book, seems plausible: “in space we read time”). Philosophers and theologists made huge eforts to explain how the fall of man in time could be inserted, by way of parenthesis, within eternity, the latter an exclusive feature of divinity sometimes symbolized by a coiled serpent eating its own tail (ouroboros) and as the phoenix, and to this end employed an array of geometric and mechanical images, such as that of the unmoved mover, the circular motion of the heavens, Augustine of Hippo’s potter’s wheel – also his comparison of the minutest drop of water (time) with the ocean that everywhere fows around the globe (eternity) – and the diferent interpretations of the world-clock, in which the cyclical and linear patterns of time frequently intermesh (Blumenberg 1987, 433–523), as occurs with medieval Christian chronosophy, according to which the circular rhythms of the secular calendar are perfectly compatible with the chronotope of Salvation History. In the 13th century, William of Auvergne imagined eternity as an immense fxed wheel that encompasses everything, within which turns a smaller sphere: the wheel of time (Agamben 1993, 96).19 By the mid-17th century, Spanish Jesuit Juan Eusebio Nieremberg had published his widely disseminated Treatise on the Diference Between the Temporal and the Eternal (1640),20 of which there were multiple editions. It was even translated into Arabic, Guarani, and other indigenous American languages and contains an assortment of images related to time in all its facets and dimensions. Portugal’s António Vieira, who spent much of his life in Brazil, at the beginning of his História do futuro, written in 1649, established this analogy between time and global space: Time, like the World, has two hemispheres: one superior and visible, which is the past, the other inferior and invisible, which is the future. In the middle of both hemispheres are the horizons of time, which are these instants of the present that we live, where the past ends and the future begins. From this point, our History takes its beginning, which will discover the new regions and the new inhabitants from the second

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Among the 20th-century proposals that difer from the prevailing model of circles and lines, and subject to criticism the traditional idea of continuous, quantifed time, Agamben (1993, 102–4) recalls Benjamin’s insights (2007) on temporality in his Theses on the Philosophy of History and Heidegger’s analysis of the inescapably temporal condition of the human being (Being and Time, 1927). For the Italian philosopher, this “coincidence in two thinkers so far apart is a sign that the concept of time which has dominated Western culture for nearly two thousand years is on the wane” (Agamben 1993, 102). In his characteristic language of revolutionary and Messianic tones, Benjamin ofers an alternative conception of historical time that attaches enormous importance to certain feeting points in time – more qualitative than quantitative – in which the continuum of history could explode. The Benjaminian “time of the now” (Jetzt-Zeit), “a particular condition in which history appears to be concentrated in a single focal point,” would make possible an encounter full of meaning between past and present (Tamm and Olivier 2019, 6–7; Benjamin 2007). This form of “full time” would be “the true site of historical construction.” As opposed to the mechanical causality of the temporal chain of historicism, which simply constructs “sequences of events as if they were the stringed ‘beads of a rosary’,” Benjamin proposes a singular Kairology, inspired by the “the messianic time of Judaism, in which every second was the ‘strait gate through which the Messiah might enter’” (Agamben 1993, 102; Benjamin 2007, 264). Another paradoxical metaphor to emphasize the sudden appearance of a disruptive event that, however, continues to look to the past is his surprising description of revolution as “a tiger’s leap into the past” (Benjamin 2007, 261). In any case, for Benjamin (2007, 263) it is beyond doubt that the core and the key to history is to be found in time, however difcult it may be to decipher: “The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.” In less poetic and more academic tone, various social scientists have used a handful of analogies to explain the historical-temporal dynamics in diferent cultures. In the mid-20th century, while historian of religion Mircea Eliade contrasted mythical thinking, essentially circular and based on eternal return, with historical thinking that constructs time as a line or the path of an arrow, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss proposed a heuristic associated with temperature that distinguishes between “hot” and “cold” societies. For the French ethnologist, the diference between our modern societies and primitive ones resides in the fact that the former systematically seek innovation and change and make history the engine of their development, while the latter strive to preserve their cyclical balances, limit changes, and keep history at

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bay (Assmann 1997, 12–17). In a sense, these human groups would renounce historicity: they would not be peoples “without history” but “without historicity.” Although Lévi-Strauss’s theory has been hotly debated, his schema based on the degree of heat attained by a collective has been applied to other moments, domains, and cultural circumstances, in particular to the spheres of history and memory, whether in relation to the rhythm or speed of changes, to ideologies, or to the afective resonance with which specifc moments from the past are experienced. In this sense, reference tends to be made to “hot” and “cold” memories – and pasts – to “cooling” of hot societies and “heating” of cold societies, and so on. In the feld of historiography, one of the most elegant heuristic models that harmoniously combines the circle, the point, and the line – without excluding the metaphorics of strata – is Reinhart Koselleck’s theory (2018, 158–74) on the structures of repetition (Wiederholungsstrukturen) in language and history. After observing that cycle and line are constantly interlinked in historical processes,21 the German historian demonstrates that recurrence is “a precondition for singularity” and concludes by underlining the mutual involvement between singular events and repetitive structures, where the latter have “little or nothing to do with the traditional doctrine of cyclical return” (Koselleck 2018, 5, 158–74). In any case, timeline and chronology continue to be essential instruments for historians when it comes to ordering dates and data and establishing periodizations. However, that deceiving idol (Bergson dixit) that is the timeline – and its associated images: the thread, the river, the path, the railway – has seen its uses and its ambitions somewhat diminish. Chronology, which aspired to being nothing less than the “soul of historical knowledge,” has ultimately been reduced to being little more than its skeleton (Rosenberg and Grafton 2010, 23, 138). 2.4 Water, rivers, and seas Among all the metaphors that attempt to encapsulate the passage of time, that of the river is without a doubt one of the oldest and most enduring. The river might be regarded as the most complete and conspicuous model of an extensive hydrological, marine, pneumatic, and eolic metaphorics composed of fuids and currents, lakes and seas, gases and vapours, winds and hurricanes. Probably due to its ability to capture both incessant change and a certain basic continuity, the Heraclitean image of the movement of fugitive water has been the most common and recurrent for centuries.22 However, although the notions of time and river, which make it possible counter-intuitively to dovetail the transitory with the permanent,23 share those kinds of mysterious afnities between concepts about which Borges wrote,24 it was the historicist revolution that placed this image, laden with teleological connotations, in the foreground. Rapidly, the river became the historicist metaphor par excellence: thereafter, “all social reality” came to be seen “as a historical stream or river” (Tamm and Olivier 2019, 4).25

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Countless philosophers, writers, politicians, and historians have used and abused the river trope to represent so many facets and properties of human experience in time that it is barely possible here to sketch out a minimum impressionistic summary of some samples of that vast literature. The observer’s position vis-à-vis the current – inside or outside of it; on the bank of it, on an elevated position from which to contemplate the river’s trajectory – is an essential factor in order to distinguish the implications of diferent metaphors. Thus, it is not the same to think of historical time as the current that leads us to interpret history, unidirectionally, as a great river fowing downstream from its source until it empties into the present or to invoke the bird’s eye view of the river, at some intermediate point of its length, which facilitates simultaneous contemplation both upstream and downstream.26 Given that time is born of the relationship between human beings and things – time is a relational dimension – and has no objective existence itself, what is important is to establish the observer’s position in relation to the things that surround them. Time presupposes a view upon time. Thus, time is not like a stream; time is not a fuid substance. This metaphor has been able to survive since Heraclitus up until today because we surreptitiously place in the river a witness to its fowing. If, on the other hand, the observer is now placed in a boat and follows the current, it can certainly be said that he descends with it toward his future, but the future is in those new landscapes that await him at the estuary, and the fow of time is no longer the stream itself, but is rather the unfolding of the landscapes for the moving observer. (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 433–4) It is no coincidence that the impressions of literati and novelists in the early decades of the 19th century were particularly rich in this type of metaphorics. With regard to the enormous changes that had taken place in Scotland between the mid-18th century and the moment of his writing, Walter Scott had already observed in Waverley (1814) that the change, though steadily and rapidly progressive, has, nevertheless, been gradual; and, like those who drift down the stream of a deep and smooth river, we are not aware of the progress we have made until we fx our eye on the now distant point from which we have been drifted. (Barash 2016, 188) Chateaubriand, meanwhile, speaking of the profound changes that accompanied the French Revolution, wrote, “I found myself between two centuries

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as at the confuence of two rivers; I plunged into their troubled waters; regretfully leaving the ancient strand where I was born, and swimming hopefully towards the unknown shore” (Hartog 2015, 66). In this case, “each age is a river which carries us along,” although “some (the Republicans) have thrown themselves in impetuously and crossed to the other bank,” while others “have stayed on this side” (i.e. in the ancien régime) and refused even to board (Hartog 2015, 80). Spanish journalist Mariano José de Larra wrote something similar at around the time: the Iberian country was experiencing “one of those transitions in which a great people of ideas, uses, and customs usually move” and soon “we will be amazed to see ourselves all on the other side of the river that we are currently crossing” (La Revista Española, Madrid, 12 January 1834). The liberals were convinced that “the river of time fows in one direction only” and that, insisting on stopping the torrent of history and swimming against the tide, as the reactionaries – those “time’s exiles” – did, inevitably led to shipwreck and melancholy (Lilla 2016, 10–15). As can be seen, the river is a multi-purpose metaphor, according to which one focuses on the direction and speed of the current, the surrounding countryside, the need to cross it, or some other signifcant characteristic or aspect. The logical evolution of the metaphor saw it develop in diferent directions. For instance, to navigate the river one might need a boat, even a boatman. But these kinds of nautical metaphors – which would lead some authors of fction to speculate on the possibility of travelling in time – again connect history, narration, and politics. Writer Ursula K. Le Guin pointed out that the “story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time,” which is not far removed from Ricoeur’s famous thesis (1985, III, 241), according to which narrative is the “guardian of time, insofar as there can be no thought about time without narrated time.” For the French philosopher, historians would be the “guardians of change” (Ricoeur 1984, I, 105). However, were rulers not traditionally the helmsmen of the ship of state? This was certainly the view held by Bismarck, who saw himself as “boatman on the river of time” and “appealed to this metaphor repeatedly throughout his career” (Clark 2019, 118f.). In 1852, he wrote that “man can neither create nor direct the stream of time, he can only travel upon it and steer with more or less skill and experience” (Clark 2019, 118). “It is pointless and impossible,” he added, “to halt the fow of time or to dam it up” (Clark 2019, 130). Chateaubriand and Tocqueville thought more or less the same, but while the former regretfully acknowledged in 1814 that “nations, like rivers, do not go up to their sources,” the latter assigned a very specifc destination to that unstoppable temporal current: the advent of democratic society. Husserl, who shared with William James, Bergson, and many others the metaphorical use of fow, would on occasions insist upon the now – constantly transformed “into ‘no longer,’ and ‘not yet’ into ‘now’” – as a “primal source-point” that permanently feeds the current of time consciousness (Ricoeur 2004a, 111–12). It has been possible to apply similar images not

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Figure 2.1 First emblem of the Spanish Royal Academy of History (1738). Source: Courtesy of the Real Academia de la Historia (Spain).

only at individual level but also to the public time of history (Pocock 1985, 91), including “national time” which has sometimes been symbolized by a river and its fountainhead. The emblem adopted by the Spanish Real Academia de la Historia in 1738 (Figure 2.1), a gushing fountain accompanied by the motto “In patriam popvlvmque fvit” on an undulating phylactery,27 is one of the frst symbolic representations of the history of a country – Spain, in this case – as a “river of time.” Beyond national histories, philosophy and history would enshrine humanity as the supreme and single protagonist of the great river of historical becoming: “What the philosophers impose from above, the historians try to achieve from below; they too are haunted by the chimera of universal history, this phantom-like counterpart of fowing time” (Kracauer 1966, 66). But the use of this kind of metaphors is not restricted to the indisputable fow of the ephemeral, of the acceleration of times and other liquid fgures of movement (e.g. that “fow of movement” (Flusse der Bewegung), mentioned by Marx in Das Kapital), images that, as we shall see in Chapter 5, would return with renewed strength in late modernity. And I do not refer only to the metaphorical-statistical concept of wave or to the ebb and fow of tides, both omnipresent in times of crisis and economic fuctuations such as our own. Also, from an opposite perspective, when one wishes to underline the enveloping and inescapable nature of a sea that bathes all, and in which we are all

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immersed, water may be a good ally. In fact, the image of the ocean has been invoked many times to refer to both the temporality and the linguisticality of the world.28 Gadamer employed this imagery to explain the unsurpassable historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) of every interpretation and every meaning29 Frank Ankersmit compared the historians, anxious to discover the “objective” of the texts and processes they study, as Dilthey would have sought to do in his unwise quest to overcome his own historicity (Gadamer 2004, 213f.), with a person wading through the water of a lake and trying to get a grasp on all the ripples in the water caused by her. Each attempt to grasp with her fngers the ripples of water will merely cause new ripples beyond her reach; and the more desperately she tries to get hold of them, the more ripples she will cause escaping her grasp. So it is with history and with historical meaning: We live in a sea of historical meaning, and the more we try to domesticate history and to appropriate historical meaning, the faster both will move away from us and from our “cognitive fngers.” (Ankersmit 2005, 215) The ungraspable nature of water, which – like the horizon – recedes when any attempt is made to hold it in one’s fngers, has also given rise to historical-political tropes. Plato and other Greek and Latin writers knew very well that in aqua scribere – writing on water – was a perfectly useless activity. At the end of his eventful life, a despondent Simón Bolívar, by this stage making no attempt to conceal his disappointment with the meagre results of his revolutionary activity, included in one of his fnal letters a similar metaphor to characterize the disheartening instability of newly independent Hispanic America: “He who serves a revolution ploughs the sea” (Bolívar 1950 (9 December 1830), III, 501–2). *** Although trace still remained, the metaphorics of the river entered into crisis in the 20th century, especially in the second half, while the philosophies of progressive history typical of 19th-century historicism began to show cracks. Heidegger was neither the frst nor the only person to question it. Various French authors, such as Merleau-Ponty (Hoy 2009, 56, 59, 66), Canguilhem, Bachelard, and Serres expressed their discontent with the metaphor. For Canguilhem, the history of science should not be based on a linear, fuid, and transparent time but rather on an intermittent, viscous, and opaque version thereof. Foucault’s emphasis on discontinuity would deliver a fnal blow to “the great metaphorics of fow” (Ricoeur 2004a, 202). Michael Serres, meanwhile, after pointing out that the fow of time is as “extraordinarily complex” as “the dance of fames in a brazier” – water and fre share certain characteristics that render both elements appropriate images for transmission

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of the capricious inconstancy of time – declared that its dynamics is not laminar and ordered; on the contrary, “it folds or twists” – Gilles Deleuze’s neobaroque revival of the theme of the fold [in French, pli] is very signifcant in this respect – and is fltered as if through a sieve: at the same time, “it passes and doesn’t pass.” Ultimately, “time doesn’t fow; it percolates” (Serres and Latour 1995, 58–9). These changes were probably perceptible in fctional literature before historiography. This is suggested by the contrast between the metaphoric associations employed by some 19th-- and 20th-century novelists. While the former tended to use the images of the current, the path, or the thread to describe the historical background – generally understood as a simple sequence of events – of the protagonists of their stories,30 in modernist novels we observe far greater temporal complexity. The deployment of diverse rhetorical devices and fgures of speech enabled authors to show that the afective memory of their characters often interrupts unidimensional, rectilinear time. Proustian, Joycean, and Musilian metaphors break the thread of the story, introduce evocations and reminiscences, complicate and pluralize time, and challenge the continuity of conventional history. Mark S. Phillips suggests replacing the worn-out time-river metaphor with the more sophisticated analogy of historical time as “a city street, where the trafc changes its rhythms with the fow of everyday life” (Phillips 2013, 4). In recent decades, the insistence on the turbulence, discontinuity, and heterogeneity of time has almost become a commonplace (see, for example, Senellart 1995, 46; Didi-Huberman 2003, 276; Rufel 2018, 21; Landwehr 2018, 267). And the dominant metaphorics that has largely occupied its place – along with whirlpools and vortices, mixtures, knots, and storms – is none other than a geological imagery based on layers, folds, displacements, cracks, and fault lines in time. 2.5

Atmospheres and thresholds

Before examining this stratigraphic imagery, however, I should like briefy to address a metaphorics that obsessed the frst generations of historians of the Annales school. Marlon Salomon (2018a, 149) described the situation, rather hyperbolically, as follows: “History, with the Annales, fowed out of the river of time and settled into an atmospheric inertia.” Indeed, both Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, like Fernand Braudel, under the strong infuence of Bergson, clearly stressed, below its constant changes, the underlying continuity of time and, to do so, employed a fundamental notion: that of “atmosphere of the age.” Everything began with Febvre’s monograph on Rabelais (1947). The French historian’s unreserved condemnation of anachronism – which, as Jacques Rancière observed, henceforth would be less the confusion of dates than the confusion of eras – was based upon the idea that, in the 16th century, atheism was not possible, as the Christian religion constituted “an atmosphere” that enveloped one and

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all, which no one could escape. Beliefs were nothing less than the air people breathed. And, as Bloch liked to say, “men resemble their times more than they do their fathers.” In other words, the principle of co-presence – a generation, a time – prevailed over the principle of succession – ancestors, parents (Salomon 2018a, 148). In that way, the era – understood as a coherent cultural-chronological block of a certain extension and compared to an atmosphere, an environment, a context31 – was promoted to the category of instrument of periodization and explanatory precept. There then occurred a kind of “geographization” of historical time, which was freed of movement. Every era would be a relatively stable and autonomous “temporal link” that, connected to the previous and the subsequent one, would form a long chain in line with the typically modern conception of history. Above all, however, by accentuating the extraordinary slowness of some historical processes, they were laying the foundations for Braudel to advance a step closer to the almost stationary time of the longue durée, and design his tripartite vision of as uniform time, at once both plural and single (Salomon 2018a, 150–1, 165). Among the antecedents to the notion of the atmosphere of the age were some well-known expressions: genius seculi, spirit of the age, spirit of the times, Zeitgeist. And it is interesting to note that some 19th-century writers and politicians were already using metaphors of the atmosphere and climate – even that of the river – to capture the intellectual cultural characteristics of a specifc age. In the second volume of Democracy in America (II, 2, 1), Alexis de Tocqueville again employed the metaphorics of fows to state that “in every age” there is some pregnant idea or some ruling passion, which attracts to itself, and bears away in its course, all the feelings and opinions of the time: it is like a great stream, towards which each of the surrounding rivulets seems to fow. (At that time, incidentally, the English word “mainstream” had not yet been lexicalized and was still a metaphor.) Some years later, Spanish democratic parliamentarian Ordax Avecilla, who had probably read Tocqueville, declared in one of his speeches in parliament in Madrid, combining atmospheric and hydraulic analogies, that “democracy is the principle [of legitimacy] of these times.” A principle that is present “in the atmosphere we live in, in the air we breathe, and against which it is futile to struggle,” so that “today any dam built to hold it will eventually disappear and the current will continue to fow” (Diario de Sesiones, 16 December 1854). Stefan Zweig, in his posthumous autobiography The World of Yesterday (1943), refected on the contrast between the relative ease of establishing facts within an era and the enormous difculty involved in reconstructing their “spiritual atmosphere,” an undertaking that a good observer might

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perform by foraging not “in ofcial events, but rather in the small, personal episodes” that they themselves have experienced. Changes of era would be the consequence of major events and fractures capable of generating a new principle of legitimacy, a new world-view, or an alternative social organization. The French Revolution is usually cited as a paradigmatic example of an epoch-making event, but the most important changes often happen surreptitiously and via gradual accumulation, without it being possible to identify one single event that triggers them. Thus, historians have developed a varied repertoire of “transitological” metaphors to describe those situations that give rise to abrupt ruptures and changes of era. It is difcult to imagine the writing of history referring to these kinds of discontinuities, breaks, and transitions without recourse to axes, thresholds, abysses, breaches, doors, bridges, hinges, and so on. The case of Koselleckian saddle time (Sattelzeit) or of the threshold period (Schwellenzeit) constitutes in this respect a case of long Trennung, when an epochal crisis arrives to break the connection between a historical moment and the time that immediately precedes it. But we have at our disposal a repertoire of intellectual tools that, in German academia alone, range from Karl Jaspers’s Axial Era (Achsenzeit der Weltgeschichte) to Dan Diner’s “temporal thresholds” (Zeitenschwellen), especially civilizational rupture (Zivilizationsbruch), and including Hans Blumenberg’s “epochal threshold” (Epochenschwelle) and reoccupations (Umbesetzungen). Along with these, from the point of view of the history of sciences and historical epistemology, we could also consider here the ruptures épistémologiques of the French tradition (G. Bachelard, G. Canguilhem, M. Foucault), the scientifc revolutions, paradigm shifts of the Anglo-American tradition (T. Kuhn), and several other labels. All of them highlight the fact that “there are no genuine concepts that address historical time. It is always a question of metaphors” (Koselleck 2012, 97; on the metaphorics of thresholds, see Fernández-Sebastián 2021b). It is interesting to explore how a few major catastrophes have prompted intellectual responses that in a sense involve an epistemological rupture. In particular, diverse philosophers and writers have argued – and here names like Adorno, Benjamin, or Sebald immediately spring to mind – that “Auschwitz was conceptually devastating” (Neiman 2015, 254).32 If certain concepts have been devastated, the need to replace them prevails, and, therefore, some particularly catastrophic singular occurrences – epochal events – have the capacity to spur the emergence of new ways of representing and making sense of the world that surrounds us. 2.6

Levels, sediments, strata

Albeit signifcant precedents of this metaphorics exist, it was in the second half of the 20th century and above all the frst decades of the 21st century when the image of strata would become the new pivotal metaphor to speak about historical times.

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Braudel was undoubtedly one of the pioneering historians in this approach. We should not forget, however, the rich oceanic metaphorics that preceded his famous tripartite temporal schema (Braudel 1958). Miguel de Unamuno, for example, in an essay at the end of the 19th century, employed an image of this kind to explain his concept of intrahistoria [intrahistory]. According to the Spanish philosopher, the contemporary political events normally covered by newspapers, some of which later crystallize into historiographic accounts, are merely the choppy waves that ripple the surface of the sea of history. But that sea is far more stable, deeper, and more imposing. In the abyssal depths of intrahistory – which, like the burning core of the earth, underlies the thin crust we live upon – evolves the everyday life of millions of men and women who pursue their dark labours in all the countries of the world, working the land from dawn to dusk, while above them, on the surface, bubbles the foam of history, that is, the ripples of political events. The almost motionless seabed constitutes true, universal, and everlasting tradition, which fuels progress. The daily work of the peasants, like silent sub-oceanic madrepores, lays the foundations from which the islets of discernible history rise (Unamuno 1996, 62–3: Fernández-Sebastián and Capellán 2021, 35–7).33 Unamuno’s metaphor highlights the diference between more or less trivial hot news and the intrahistorical roots of mankind’s common tradition. A diference defned by oppositional pairs – surface/bottom, movement/stillness, noise/silence, speed/slowness, politics/geography, economy/environment,34 short term/long term – that recall the crucial distinction between two of Braudel’s three scales of time (1958), namely “evental history,” involving the short term in which occur “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs” (Braudel 1972, I, 21), and on the other, the structural history that corresponds to an extraordinarily slow time, which the leader of the Annales school compares to the parsimonious rhythms of nature. Some years earlier, Karl Löwith (1990, 119) had underlined a similar historical contrast between the marine landscape disturbed by noisy surface waves and a background reality that, like the sea bed, remains silent and oblivious to that roar. These two Braudelian times, to which should be added the intermediate level of medium-term conjunctures, very useful above all for economic and social history, had a profound impact upon the members of the second generation of Annales, whose approach to historical time essentially consisted in a response to the question of how to fnd the appropriate scale for the study of each historical phenomenon which relied on a stratigraphic metaphor built upon the perception of a sort of historical depth. However, despite initial appearances, Braudel (1958), disagreeing with Gurvitch, remained adamant in arguing that, in the face of the “multiple temporalities” of sociologists, “the uniform time of the historians” had to be safeguarded at all costs.35 As in the mystery of the Holy Trinity, the temporality of history, for Braudel, is simultaneously one and triune: three distinct times form one true single time (Braudel 1958, 750, 2009, 199–200).

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In his famous article on the longue durée, the French historian does not yet employ the image of strata, although he does speak of levels (niveaux), of layers (nappes), and of foors, stages and pillars (étages, paliers). His dissatisfaction with the commonplace of the river of time is apparent when he advocates the pluralization of currents: “There can be no simple descent down the slopes of time,” but rather “a series of descents, following the multiple and innumerable rivers of time” (Braudel 1958, 734, 739, 2009, 181, 187–8).36 The rhetorical strategy that consisted in pluralizing threads, lines, and currents proved in many cases – for instance, in Bachelard’s work – to be an efective bridge in order subsequently to access an alternative vision of time of a stratigraphic, sedimentary, or rhizomatic nature (Salomon 2018b, 16, 37).37 “Rivers of time” were often the walkway that rendered conceivable the leap from one single current to a multiplicity of “layers of time,” as if to reach the latter conception one had frst to pass through a multilinear and polychronic stage. And, as tends to happen in this kind of cultural mutation, the gradual replacement of one metaphorics by another – which involves the discovery, under the linearity and the superfcial level, of a third temporal dimension – took place in parallel in diverse spheres, including literature, philosophy, and the history of science. Undoubtedly, Braudel’s name is associated with the three-layered image of historical time, and diverse authors – for instance, Arthur Danto – have compared the past with a vast container into which successive temporal layers are gradually decanted (Danto 1965; Mudrovcic 2013, 20–1). However, the theorist who most methodically employed the stratigraphic model for history is Reinhart Koselleck. The abundance of literature on the German historian in recent years, in particular on the subject of his temporal metaphors (Oncina 2021; Schmieder 2021; Lorenz 2022), allows me to be extremely succinct here. The transfer of the image of strata from geology38 to history gained momentum above all with the proposal that Koselleck, in line with his sustained eforts to construct a theory of historical times (in plural),39 launched his proposal in the 1970s,40 continued in the 1980s,41 and explored further at the turn of the century in his volume Zeitschichten [Temporal strata] (2000; in English in 2018). In the introduction to this collection of essays, Koselleck states the following: “Layers of time,” just like their geological prototype, refer to various temporal levels of diverse duration and diverse origin, which still exist and are efective at the same time. Even the synchronicity of the nonsynchronous [die Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen], one of the most informative historical phenomena, is taken up in this concept. Everything that happens at the same time, everything that emerges from heterogeneous life circumstances, both synchronically and diachronically.42 The Koselleckian Zeitschichten, which without a doubt constituted a major heuristic fnding (among other things, because of its aptitude to defy

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periodizations (Jordheim 2012) as well as its capacity to question and complexify the idea of Zeitgeist, underlining its fallacious monolithism), has been the object of criticism, in particular of the insufciency of the image of sedimentation to describe more complex historical processes (Hellerma 2020, 195, 207). Recently, Chris Lorenz (2022) has probed the limits of the metaphor, identifying some inconsistencies when it comes to transposing the parameters of geology – superpositions, foldings, intrusions, cross-cuttings, methods of measurement – into historiography (see also FernándezSebastián 2023b). Whatever the case, there can be no doubt that in recent decades, the likening of time to a sedimentary formation or to an archaeological dig has proved to be a source of inspiration for many theorists and historians. There is even evidence that the metaphor is expanding. Some have spoken of a “geological turn currently underway in historiography” and have applied the logic of decomposition, solidifcation, sedimentation, and fossilization to historical futures (The Lifetimes Research Collective 2022). Taking inspiration from Koselleck’s Zeitschichten, Hagen Schulz-Forberg (2013) coined the concept of Raumschichten (spatial layers). If multilayered time had served to show the limits of linear history and dispense with its entire retinue of associated schemes – including rigid periodizations, one-way paths, advances and delays, obligatory way stations, and so on –43 by transferring to space that same “stratigraphic gaze,” traditionally two-dimensional maps acquire a certain thickness and, with it, the simplistic image of empires and nations as territories separated by clear and well-defned borders give way to multilevel spaces with porous limits that, depending on the historical moment and the perspective adopted, may totally or partially overlap or connect. SchulzForberg’s proposal fts within a context in which various scholars have questioned the strict separation of time from space, arguing instead, as did Doreen Massey (1992, 80), that, when analysing social realities, it is necessary to consider space and time together rather than identifying, as tends to be the case, time with the dynamics and stratifed dimension, and contrasting it with space, as if the latter were fat and static. For, as J. Fabian clearly saw (2014, 144), the ideological foundations of all geopolitics lie within chronopolitics. 2.7

Turbulent times

Since the last part of the 20th century, the time regime of modernity seems to be sufering a terminal crisis. Aleida Assmann (2014, 79–81) believes we are witnessing “a continental shift” in the structure of Western temporality: “the future has lost its lure” and that, as far as memory is concerned, we have moved from a culture of triumph to one of trauma (or, as other authors have suggested, that we have entered a post-heroic age: the victim is the hero of our time). In these circumstances, it seems logical that the repertoire of metaphors that used to be employed to make sense of time has been violently shaken. And not even the replacement of the image of fow with that of

78 Conceptual metaphors for history strata (Marramao 2008, 73) is sufcient to describe the crisis of time that we are experiencing. While, returning to a tired metaphor, we wonder whether time is once again out of joint (Assmann 2020), numerous theorists have brought to the table a handful of images, many of which allude to turbulence, rupture, acceleration, uncertainty, and chaos (see, for instance, Serres and Latour 1995, 54; Tanaka 2019, 300f.). Turbulence brings us back to the metaphorics of fow, except that it is no longer a case of more or less predictable rivers with familiar sources and mouths but of sophisticated metaphors of fuid dynamics and furious currents that drag us to unknown destinations. In these liquid times in which global elites, asylum seekers, and economic migrants “epitomize the unfathomable ‘space of fows’ where the roots of the present-day precariousness of the human condition are sunk” (Bauman 2007, 48, 103–4), fows have become chaotic and encourage all kinds of mixtures (Rufel 2018, 21). And, as usually occurs during periods of accelerated transit between systems, conceptual changes, extraordinarily swift, no longer depend solely on the combination of discursive sediments proceeding from diferent eras but originate in a turbulent regime that gives rise to unforeseeable mixtures (Senellart 1995, 46). An image referring to the past, which in the wake of revolutions becomes confusing, as when various items of laundry of difering materials and colours are chaotically mixed in the washing process, transmits a similar idea: “it is like the glass front of a washing machine, behind which various bits of the wash appear now and then, but are all contained within the drum” (Koselleck 2004b, 260). Acceleration and uncertainty usually appear together. But if, as Koselleck argued (1972; 2004, 255–75), during the threshold period (Schwellenzeit) of revolutions, straddling the 18th and 19th centuries, there occurred a dramatic rift between experience and expectation, the dizzying sensation of entering an unprecedented era, marked by increasing acceleration – historical-social acceleration is certainly one of the metaphors/experiences/phenomena that have profoundly afected modern times (Rosa 2013; Bouton 2022) – has since then been repeated with every generation (Eisenstein 1966, 58–9). Various historians, philosophers, and social scientists of the second half of the 20th century were quite explicit in this respect. “We are beset by a new sense of uncertainty because we feel ourselves on the threshold of a new age to which previous experience ofers no sure guide” (Barraclough 1955, 1). “Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, each generation and each individual thinker has tried to defne that historic mutation” (Aron 2002, 464–5). The recycling of old metaphors for history, in its double facet of what has occurred and what is recorded, is a good sign of that bewilderment. Thus, the historical process has been compared to an arrow pointing in any direction, given that it lacks a target (Cruz 2017). The past has been compared to a palimpsest (R. Chartier) – the writing of history, to the weaving of a “tapestry of time” which is constantly made and unmade, like Penelope’s cloth, in the warp

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and weft of which are woven patterns of continuity and repetition with specifc events and data (Fernández-Sebastián 2019, 85–8; Kleinberg 2021). But it is probably historical times that have generated most images. Among these, some of the most suggestive have been coined by historians and theorists. Lucian Hölscher (2014) presented his proposal of time gardens as a heuristic metaphor suitable “for describing some basic features of eighteenthcentury enlightened historiography.” And, as usual, literature tends to function as an accurate seismograph for this kind of temporal metaphorics. In one of his stories, titled “The garden of forking paths” (1941), Jorge Luis Borges wrote about a certain vision of the universe characterized by the breathtaking proliferation of “divergent, convergent, and parallel times.” Subsequently, the Argentine writer’s text gave rise to numerous interpretations, as well as several novels, TV series, art installations, and speculations, ranging from counterfactual history to future contingents and the multiverse. At the beginning of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979), generally considered to be one of the frst examples of postmodernist narrative, Italo Calvino contends that long novels based on the continuity of time are no longer suited to his age, one in which temporality appears to have exploded: “the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes of along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.” Germanist Ruth Klüger, recalling her childhood under the Nazi regime (Weiter leben. Eine Jugend, 1992; Still Alive 2001), writes something similar: “Time was splintered. I didn’t experience it as a continuity but rather as a heap of broken glass, shards cutting into your mind when you try to put them together.” “Phenomena, freed from the unifying bond of the philosophy of history, fall apart into fragments,” so “the creator of allegories works with shards,” as the allegorical ruins of progress “now thrown at the feet of the Angelus Novus” (Kittsteiner 1996, 61). The phenomenon can be seen in many other felds of culture, where we fnd similar metaphors that fatly deny monochrony (Speranza 2017). As opposed to the fction of a continuous, sequential, and homogeneous time, the history of art has also seen the introduction of an approach that establishes connections between heterogeneous and discontinuous, polychronic and heterochronic times (Didi-Huberman 2017). Other authors have spoken of the frayed time of postmodern narrative (Brantly 1997, 310–11). Cuban writer Leonardo Padura, meanwhile, superimposes in his novel La transparencia del tiempo [The Transparency of Time] (2018) very distant historical moments, which are held up to the light, thus contradicting far more common metaphors – the curtain, the impenetrable veil, the mists of time – that usually describe the opacity of past and future times in relation to the present. While literature and art play with the images of broken glass and shattered time, the theory of historiography employs a metaphorical palette – palimpsests, fractals, mosaics, hybrids, folds, kaleidoscopes, and other images alluding to half-erased strata, mottled colours, surprising mixtures, games of regularities and irregularities, or abrupt changes of perspective – which

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emphasizes fragmentation, discontinuity, hesitation, surprise and disquiet, extreme volatility, temporal overlapping, fractured patterns, and crossed histories. This brief overview of temporal metaphors would not be complete if I omitted to mention a couple of notions that have had a major impact during the last two decades. On the one hand, one of the most successful conceptual metaphors in current theory of history is that of regimes of historicity or chronotopes. On the other hand, the metaphorics of strata has felt the full efect of the recent historiographic polemic surrounding the Anthropocene. Both cases involve questions of considerable theoretical signifcance, worthy of far more extensive treatment than the two or three paragraphs I can devote to them here. First, it is important to note that the multiple temporalities of a sociological nature to which I referred earlier and historians’ heterochronies by no means exhaust the consciousness we have today of temporal plurality in the variegated worlds we inhabit. And the current crisis of modern historical time has triggered an anxious search for alternative temporal confgurations (see lately Simon and Tamm 2023). If the great geographical discoveries of the beginnings of the modern age placed before the eyes of conquistadors and missionaries the divergent cosmovisions of pre-Hispanic cultures, including temporal conceptions that directly clashed with Western frameworks of comprehension of time and history, at the last turn of the century –44 due in part to some works by anthropologists like Johannes Fabian45 or Marshall Sahlins on non-Western temporalities – we have become far more aware of the plurality of “temporal cultures” in space and in time. Hartog’s notions of regimes of historicity (2015 [2003]) and H.-U. Gumbrecht’s concept of chronotope (2014)46 – as well as others such as F. Torres’s temporal regimes (2021), A. Landwehr and T. Winnerling’s chronisms and chronoferences (2019), chronocenosis (Edelstein et al. 2020), or V. Fareld’s chronoschisms (2022, 30), to name a few recent proposals – have been among the most debated theoretical contributions in recent years (the profusion of composite terms with chrono as prefx or sufx is highly revealing of the air du temps). And, while until a few decades ago one often found books that still spoke of historical consciousness or of historicity in singular, the burgeoning literature regularly published on this subject generally assumes that the modern regime of historicity, which more or less corresponds to the historicist chronotope of progress, is just one of many ways of imagining time and, specifcally, of conceiving of relationships between present, past, and future. The other major emerging debate has to do with the suitability of the stratigraphic metaphorics to address the challenge posed by the Anthropocene and the profound transformations of historiography – big history, planetary age – caused by the appearance of a new epistemic object called the “Earth system.” Just as any excavation of the subsoil of an ancient city – in México, in Cádiz, in Roma, in Aleppo, or in Jerusalem – usually reveals archaeological levels that make visible the sediments of time upon which the present-day city

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stands, speaking of layers of the Anthropocene could cease to be a metaphor and become a literal afrmation. Given that human interventions, through activities such as agriculture, livestock farming, logging, and industry have left a permanent mark on the earth’s crust, the historical and the natural become blurred and, as Chakrabarty (2021, 171) says, following in Zalasiewicz’s footsteps, “time is written into the strata of the planet.” However, if geologists, by examining these strata, can assess the impact of human activities upon the lithosphere, it is evident that we are approximating two kinds of phenomena and two time scales that in principle are very far apart: geological or planet-centric time and historical human-centric time. If we add the vastly larger universe-centric time scale, it seems that the new multidisciplinary proposals of deep history and, above all, of big history – which would encompass everything from the Big Bang until the present day – attempt to describe how widely modern science has opened the scissors of time – increasingly separating the feeting time of life and the immense time of the world – to use Blumenberg’s classic metaphor (Blumenberg 2007, 68, 144).47 2.8

A deluge of memory

If I had written this book fve or more decades ago, this section would in all likelihood not have existed. At that time, the theme of memory had no relevance for historians (neither did, incidentally, gender or identity, another two categories imposed upon social sciences today almost with the force of evidence). Things changed quickly, however. Interest in the history-memory relationship began tentatively to emerge in the late-1970s and was soon overwhelming. “Over the course of the 1980s, an initial trickle of writing on history and memory became a food” (Megill 1998, 43). Making use of a similar metaphor, Jan Assmann recalled in 2010 that when, 25 years earlier, Aleida Assmann and he thought of “cultural memory as a topic for a common book project,” that “was then a small river of discourse. Today, the river has grown into a sea” (Assmann 2011, xi). The images usually employed to evidence the growing interest in this subject – food, rise, boom, swelling, obsession, fever – clearly refect how surprising and overwhelming the phenomenon was. Some authors reacted critically, denouncing the abuses of memory (Todorov 2000), while others christened the period The Era of Witness (Wieviorka 2006), which was followed by formulae such as The Empire of Trauma (Fassin and Rechtman 2009) or The Rise of Victimhood Culture (Campbell and Manning 2018; Giglioli 2017), since the semantic feld of memory – especially in the case of painful, resentful memory – has encompassed in recent years a cloud of words that includes identity, heritage, witness, victim, trauma, debt, recognition, reparation, and so on. In recent years, there has been talk of saturation, which suggests that we may have reached a tipping point at which the fndings of historical studies on memory are beginning to decline. However, the

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concept of memory is so broad and can be approached from such diferent angles – philosophy, history, literature, psychology, anthropology, sociology, political science, cultural studies, cognitive science, computer science – that its multidisciplinary metaphorical treatment is clearly immeasurable. One of the most accomplished attempts to chart this varied metaphorography was the work of Draaisma (2000). His work, originally published in Dutch in 1995, ofers a dazzling historical tour through the museum of memory (a characterization that in this case is particularly appropriate, given that memory metaphorics has been continually renewed in line with technical innovations).48 The volume includes a wide assortment of metaphors for both internal and external memory, although it barely contemplates so-called collective memory. Here I shall restrict myself to a brief overview, in which, as usual, I will focus my attention on historiographical aspects. To begin with, it is perhaps worth pointing out the fundamental signifcance of memory in our philosophical tradition. I shall mention just a couple of examples, separated by over two thousand years. If, pursuant to his theory of ἀνάμνησις (anamnesis), for Plato, to know is to remember, Nietzsche does not hesitate to characterize the human being as an “animal that remembers” (Warren 2015, 231–3). In the temporal arc that spans from classical Greece to the 21st-century West, the repertoire of images for memory has continued to grow and multiply. Apart from discussing in his dialogue Phaedrus the efects of writing upon memory, in another of his texts (Theaetetus), Plato launched two celebrated similes that have shown themselves to be extremely adaptable: the wax tablet and the aviary or dovecote, which inaugurated very enduring metaphorical lines: the former refers to the act of putting marks on a surface (the archetypes are probably writing and the palimpsest) and the latter to more or less organized storage places for housing and retrieving birds/ thoughts. Many centuries later, Nietzsche and Freud, among others, revisited those Platonic metaphors to discuss their appropriateness and nuance some of them (as is the case of the splendid image of Freud’s magic slate: Draaisma 2000, 7–23). Jacques Derrida, meanwhile, in his famous essay Plato’s Pharmacy (1969), showed that writing, unlike the spoken word, can both beneft and harm that creature of remembrance which is the human being. The ambiguity of the Greek word φάρμακον (pharmakon), which means both a remedy and a poison, hints that writing – thanks to its two-fold and contradictory capacity to set and to weaken memory (external and internal respectively) – might be a poisoned cure for the animal recordans (which is, at the same time, a forgetful being). It is interesting to connect this ambivalence with my earlier comments on the paradoxical relationship between Clio and Chronos. If, as we saw, Time, qua pater veritatis (begetter of the truth) is usually considered to be an ally of History, yet qua comestor rerum (devourer of everything) is its most formidable enemy, writing too – which, in this sense, can be understood as a near synonym of History – could be seen as either Memory’s faithful assistant or its most dangerous rival by jeopardizing the mnemonic ability of rhapsodes

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to recite their lengthy poems by heart. These intricate links between Time and History, on the one hand, and Writing and Memory, on the other, further complicate the already stormy relationship between Mnemosyne and her daughter, Clio.49 This entangled relationship, to which I already alluded in Chapter 1 in reference to Hartog’s complaints about the recent attacks upon history as an academic discipline by the politics of memory – politics that are often presented as antagonistic to history – goes far back in time and is not infrequently misinterpreted, since the meanings of both terms – history and memory – vary considerably depending on the moment and the discursive context (for instance, there is good reason to believe that “history in the Roman manner was a matter of memory rather than enquiry”: Detienne 2008, 50). The modern classifcation of sciences was based on the three human faculties – memory, reason, and imagination – so that in both Bacon’s arbor scientiarum and the system of knowledge of the Encyclopédie, both types of history – natural and civil – sprout from the branch of memory. To a degree, then, memory can be regarded as the matrix and one of the sources of history, but “it is a mistake to think of memory as being the raw material of history” (Megill 1998, 54).50 Moreover: memory may constitute the legitimate object of a type of history, as occurs with mnemohistory (Gedächtnisgeschichte), a term “coined by [Jan] Assmann in his 1997 book Moses, the Egyptian, where he defnes it as follows: ‘Unlike history proper, mnemohistory is concerned not with the past as such, but only with the past as it is remembered’” (Tamm 2013, 464). On the other hand, however, some sophisticated forms of history – such as Nietzschean genealogy, according to Foucault – can be seen as a “counter-memory” that breaks with the teleological habits of historicism. In any case, although since antiquity there has been an abundance of literature on memory, the characteristic feature of the food of memory that prevailed in the fnal decades of the last century was the recovery of the concept of collective memory, as theorized by French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs during the frst half of the century. And, this being a question of “collective memory” – a notion that some authors have pluralized and subdivided into social, political, and cultural memory – one of the main hobby horses is the fact that, strictly speaking, groups – nations, parties, local communities, ethnic minorities – have no memory, as the latter is a bio-psychological attribute that is exclusive to individuals, which has not prevented many in recent decades from assuming “that the historical past [even the remote past] is retrieved as ‘collective memory’” (Barash 2016, 172), without even being aware that they are employing fgurative language. Memory is today the great metaphor for history, and the frequency with which expressions such as “memory of the past” are used to refer to history is perhaps the most eloquent symptom of this shift. Although in quite a few cases, the leap – itself metaphorical – from the personal to the politicalsocial has entailed a number of tropes, the fact is that some images that are

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perfectly valid at an individual level do not function when projected upon a collective (witness an attempt to transfer the famous Proustian image of the madeleine to collective memory in n. 52). However, despite the fact that the large number of images related to artifcial memory – in particular to the arts of writing – tends to be applied in everyday language to natural processes of remembering and forgetting,51 the dividing line between (internal) human memory and (external) artifcial memory, although permeable, is still signifcant (as is the distinction between functional and latent memory). Nevertheless, certain places and objects have the virtue of reviving memory and even testify to half-forgotten facts and events. Pierre Nora suggested that “the sites of memory are . . . ‘like shells left on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded’” (Hartog 2015, 126). The metaphorization of elusive internal memory in terms of places such as warehouses, rooms, palaces, caves, labyrinths, theatres, caskets, and so on is a refection of the notorious “spatialization” and “materialization” of time. Since memory always refers to the presence of absent things, the metaphorics of prints and marks tends to be particularly efective. Also that of germs, sprouts, and seeds, as “for true memory, inscription is a kind of sowing” (Ricoeur 2004a, 143). Other equally efective images for memory are those that suggest underground, hidden, or inaccessible places – secret doors, mineshafts, sea beds – as well as associations between diverse things by means of links, connections, and threads. Technical advances gradually introduced a series of prosthetic devices that made possible a considerable variety of increasingly sophisticated means of recording and fling – printing, photography, phonograph, cinematograph, sound recorder, computer – that facilitated external memory, contributing thus to the expansion of what has been called the “extended mind” (Andy Clark) by means of diferent types of vicarious experiences and remembrances (Landsberg 2004; see n. 54). And, most signifcantly, these inventions served to increase and render more complex the arsenal of metaphors, concepts, and theories about memory. Along with all the above, modern politics of memory, which, especially in the wake of the Second World War, were generally linked to collective traumas, wars, and large-scale crimes, usually fall back on a range of bitter metaphors that refer to memories as wounds and scars that require healing, shadows52 one seeks to banish, and tribulations that need to be mourned. The 1980s, in particular, constituted a decisive moment in the shift towards memory. That decade saw the beginning of the publication of Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire, the premiere of the documentary Shoah, by Claude Lanzmann, and the outbreak of the historians’ dispute (Historikerstreit) in Germany (at the same time that, incidentally, the future was changing colour, as evidenced by Ulrich Beck’s book Risk Society). However, according to some critics, both the technical devices and the memory museums and other mnemonic institutions designed to activate

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metonymic relations between the minds of visitors or users and certain reminding objects would be double-edged swords. In line with Plato’s criticism of writing as pharmakón for the memory, in the opinion of these critics, techniques of recording, on the one hand, and memorials to the fallen and ritual commemorations of tragic events such as the Holocaust, on the other, might ironically be contributing to the weakening of memory. Erecting a monument, “museumizing” the traumatic past, and periodically staging a bombastic institutional ceremony, they claim, is also a form of absolving oneself of one’s personal and civic responsibility to remember and, therefore, a step towards oblivion. At the opposite end we fnd those political agendas that, for diverse reasons, habitually employing the metaphorics of cancellation, seek directly to erase from memory certain individuals or episodes from the past, a range of activities that would encompass anything from damnatio memoriae, whether on the initiative of the authorities or groups of activists, such as the toppling of historic statues by diverse iconoclasts of our day – to the so-called cancel culture. However, things are often more complicated. Frequently, the same populist leaders at both ends of the political spectrum, who cover up certain issues that they fnd uncomfortable, strongly campaign in favour of memory in relation to other questions that might beneft them in the eyes of public opinion and portray them as victims and thus reinforce their partisan or identity policies. In recent years in Spain, for example, the avalanche of memory with reference to the civil war of the last century, far from encouraging reconciliation between citizens, is indissociable from the activism of the fringes on the left and on the right, interested in fomenting with their divisive policies confrontation between sectors of public opinion (a brief overview of the manipulation of memory, used as agitprop, in the Spanish case: Fernández-Sebastián 2021a, 127–31). In the context of national political debates surrounding the so-called Historical Memory Law – against which a group of scholars subscribed in March 2018 to a Manifesto for History and Freedom – a cartoonist contrasted the fascination with unearthing some of the darkest episodes of the national past – in this case, those executed by fring squad during the Civil War 1936–9 who have not yet been properly identifed – with the hope for a change of direction towards other policies oriented towards the construction of a shared future (Figure 2.2). Halfway between those who, like Borges’s hypermnesic character Funes the Memorious, wish for all memories to be preserved, and those others, volunteer amnesiacs, who opt to shed the weight of uncomfortable remembrances and bury them in oblivion,53 most historians and social scientists would probably agree with Paul Ricoeur (2004a, 413–14) – and with specialists like Tzvetan Todorov, David Rief, or Henry Rousso – regarding the need to fnd a just balance between remembering and forgetting. A balance that, when we speak of fratricidal wars and violence within a community, is not always easily arrived at. In such situations, which are usually followed by a

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Figure 2.2 “Let’s see if we can fnish the historical memory business as soon as possible and start to imagine the future.” Source: Cartoon by Andrés Rábago in El País (29 June 2021).

“war of memories” between both sides, the best solution is surely mutually to consign to oblivion past grievances. In this context, the expression “echar al olvido” means consciously and willingly deciding to leave to one side those wrongs and cruelties sufered and inficted by both parties, which are remembered all too well, for the sake of civil reconciliation. That is exactly what happened in Spain with the amnesty law during the Spanish transition from Franco’s dictatorship to democracy (Juliá 2003). *** I shall now review some of the tropes employed by historians specifcally to refer to certain aspects of collective memory and also to the history/memory

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antithesis. Most of them are the result of the adaptation for social uses of the rich tropological tradition applied to individual memory, whether in its internal (interior door, secret path, dark attic) or external facet (library, warehouse, container, palimpsest). Among these images, some highlight the disorder and confusion that reign in memories kept by a person or a collective messy bag, maze, untidy trunk, a flm edited by a madman. Others – companion, partner, retinue – underline the fact that memories usually accompany us everywhere, sometimes not without a disturbing or threatening undertone (shadow, ghost, spectre). Observers have also pointed out on many occasions the selective and multifaceted aspects of a capricious, blatantly presentist memory, which adapts like a glove to the needs of whoever invokes it, as if it were a prism that one controls at will, showing the face that one wishes to at any given moment, and concealing the face that one wants to remain invisible. Thus, as Tony Judt notes in Postwar, nations tend to hide their inglorious episodes in memory holes. Of course, memory itself (personifed in a number of texts as a conjuror or a magician who specializes in sleight of hand) can unwittingly trick us, making us believe that some things happened diferently to how they actually did.54 Furthermore, some geological and archaeological images used for time – such as that of chronological strata – have also been applied to memory. If they were employed in the past by, among others, memory researcher Richard Semon, as well as Husserl and Freud – who compared psychoanalysis to an excavation – (Warren 2015, 243, 254), it was foreseeable that the stratigraphic logic would be transferred to collective memory (Barash 2016, 87f., for instance, explains the processes of “sedimentation,” “stratifcation,” and “fragmentation” that afect “the web of experience retained by collective memory”). “Landscapes of memory” do not lack a vertical dimension. And just as, over time, metamorphic and erosive forces turn sand into stone and vice versa, memory can be conceived of as sediment and petrifed time (to be re-crumbled in order to start again). Even the words and concepts that we all use, according to Ian Hacking (2002, 37), “have memories”: they recall and incorporate events that we have forgotten. When it comes to characterizing memory in contradiction to history, it is normally pointed out that, unlike the essentially subjective and capricious nature of memory (Megill 1998, 56), history seeks to achieve a certain degree of objectivity, impartiality, and certainty. History may be common; memories, on the other hand, are always diverse. It has also been noted that while the latter generally opts for moral judgement, the former prefers cognitive deliberation (Megill 1998, 59). Nonetheless, the contrast between the two should be qualifed: Memory is a domain of obscurity: it is not to be trusted. Yet at the same time one should not think that history is by this token the domain of light, for along with the relative light of history and the relative darkness of memory, one must acknowledge the existence of a vast domain

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Conceptual metaphors for history of historical unknowability. This is a lesson taught to us by the problematising of identity in our time, for in undermining the notion that there is a single authoritative perspective to which we can have access, the problematising of identity also undermines the arrogance of both history and memory: on the one hand, the arrogance of defnitiveness; on the other, the arrogance of authenticity. (Megill 1998, 57)

From a very diferent point of view, more than a century ago Charles Péguy, speaking about experienced events, associated memory with (synchronic) depth and history with duration (or diachrony). “Memory and history,” wrote the French poet, “form a right angle. History is parallel to the event, memory is central and axial to it” (quoted in Raulf 1999, 115). In the 20th century a considerable number of metaphors attempted to grasp the diferences between the two. If, according to Hacking, memory has come to serve as “a surrogate for the soul,” in recent years the partial eclipse of history by memory and the emphasis upon the importance of identity and heritage would have resulted in the metaphorical mode or reasoning being displaced by new fundamentally metonymic culture. Sites of memory would represent a “memorialization of the past.” Thus, for example, the European canon has been built upon a series of metonymies that sound very familiar to us: Athens for the Classical past, Rome for the Roman Empire, Charlemagne for the Christian civility of the Middle Ages. These moments of the past were connected with special features of the present: Athens for democracy, Rome for the legal tradition of Europe, Charlemagne for a unifed Europe that respected diferences. The iconography of the euro banknotes is a good example of the articulation of the canon with the concept of heritage and identity at the turn of the twentyfrst century. (Liakos 2013b, 328) *** Reinhart Koselleck, who forged such efective heuristic images for history, employed in some of his essays a few very suggestive metaphors for memory. Basically two: one – burning lava – referring principally to personal and internal memory; the other – the sluice gates of memory – appears to allude more to the collective, external dimension. While under normal circumstances, language – understood here as a proxy of memory – functions as a storehouse of experiences that are shared – or, at least, shareable – between speakers, certain exceptional experiences, personal and non-transferable, says the German historian, thinking of his own experiences during the Second World War, fow

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into the bodies of those who live them “like a mass of lava” where they remain, indelibly engraved. This terrifying fguration of a burning fow that penetrates the subject who sufers such experiences and remains forever lodged in their interior (Koselleck 2018, xiv, xxvi–xxvii, 240, 2020; Pernau and Tremblay 2020) is one of the most powerful images coined by someone who frmly maintained the “inexchangeability” of primary experiences and never concealed his mistrust of the simple idea of a “collective memory,” which he considered to be an ideological construction. This immediate shift from liquid – a river of fre – to solid state recalls Plato’s classic metaphor referring to the imprint made by a burin on a slab of wax, except that, in this case, it is human beings who receive the mark on their own fesh. Certain intense experiences would remain engraved upon the bodies of those who sufer them, intimate and inalienable to the point of being almost inefable. The second Koselleckian metaphor is very diferent. This is the metaphor of the “sluices of memory.” The theorist from Bielefeld presents this image in one of the essays compiled in his Zeitschichten to explain the abrupt modifcations of experience as a consequence of the impact of particularly dramatic events, such as world wars. The fuctuation from the solid state of sediments of experience (Erfahrungsschichten) to the liquid state of sluices of memory (Erinnerungsschleusen) (which, naturally, presuppose a fow of memories that have to be regulated or redirected via a system of dams and foodgates) ofers in this case a more accentuated societal tenor than in the metaphor of currents of lava. While in the latter it was the burning liquid – the dreadful events experienced – that congealed in the veins of the victims, in the image of the sluices more or less the opposite occurs: the sediments of experience (made of solid matter and basically static) liquefy, and thereby transformed into collective fuid memories, are handled over time by the different nations of Europe according to a variety of factors.55 Sluices bear a certain resemblance to strata but are softer and more malleable, since the body of water can be stopped, widened, narrowed, raised, lowered, and circulated by means of foodgates. The lived events are carried along in memory, where they stop short at diferent stages, at diferent levels, like barges in a lock. The work of memorization entails selections, repetitions, deformations, sometimes even errors, memories submerged under other memories or the memories of other people, etc. (Bouton 2021, 532) So rivers of lava and sluices refer to two ways of understanding the transformation of the experience of war into memory of war and, correlatively, to two very diferent ways of conceiving of and managing the memory – individual and collective – of totalitarianisms and of the great wartime traumas of the frst half of the twentieth century.

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Notes 1 Scepticism as to the real existence of a thing called time culminated with J. M. E. McTaggart (Unreality of Time, 1908) and his followers. More recently, Patrice Dassonville (2017, 94, 168) has contended that neither time nor space exists as “physical phenomena,” and therefore, Einstein’s invention of the category of spacetime in 1905 suggests that we might be witnessing “the end of the age of temporality, the end of the Chronocene, or the end of the age of spatiality, the end of the Topocene.” 2 An overview of recent studies on time can be found in Burges and Elias (2016, 1–32), although, given the frenetic pace at which this feld expands, review essays like this seem to become out of date within a few years of being written. An update in Fareld 2021. 3 I shall mention a couple of revealing testimonies. In his novel Austerlitz (2001), W. G. Sebald has his protagonist say that time is “by far the most artifcial of all our inventions.” “Historical time,” wrote Ankersmit in 1983, “is a relatively recent and highly artifcial invention of Western civilization.” 4 Another cleavage of a cultural nature, no less schematic and simplifying, is that which contrasts a traditional time – the lived, qualitative, concrete, local, imprecise, and organic time of past societies and groups removed from Western civilization – with a modern time – the measured, quantitative, abstract, uniform, exact, and mechanical time of clocks (Burke 2004, 619, 622–3). 5 The tendency to ontologize time and space clashes permanently, however, with our inability to perceive them directly. According to Augusto de Carvalho (2023), the past helps us to “see” time in a similar way that light helps us to perceive space. Neither time nor space can be experienced, but thanks to the past and light, we obtain an idea of what they are. 6 Both verbs – ser and estar – can be combined in many ways. In the end, as Ortega y Gasset suggested, the being of man (“el ser del hombre”), immersed in time as it is, consists in “estar siendo” (to be being). This is not the only singularity of Iberian languages with regard to temporal expressions. Gilberto Freyre devoted several essays to the analysis of modern “Hispanic time” – a notion that places the emphasis on the vital dimension of temporality rather than a measurable and commodifed time. According to the Brazilian anthropologist, there is a long Iberian tradition of refections on temporality that is clearly differentiated from the mainstream of the Western Protestant vision, an essentially economistic attitude focused on the “monetization” of chronometric time. For Iberians, in contrast to Anglo-Saxons, “time is the servant, not the master of men” (Freyre 1963, 420–1). This is, of course, a very debatable stereotype on both ends of the contrast. 7 Jorge Luis Borges said it in another way: “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fre which consumes me, but I am the fre” (Nueva refutación del tiempo [A New Refutation of Time] 1946). The enigma of time has always been a favourite subject of poets. Federico García Lorca wrote a surrealist poem titled La leyenda del tiempo [The Legend of Time], part of a play premiered in New York in 1945, which began with the following verse: “El sueño va sobre el tiempo / fotando como un velero. / Nadie puede abrir semillas / en el corazón del sueño.” (“The dream goes over time. / Floating like a sailboat / No one can crack open the seeds / In the heart of the dream”). 8 It is interesting to note that the etymology of both the Greek word Κρόνος (which an extensive tradition has tended to confate with the god Χρόνος, the personifcation of time) and the Latin word tempus – and, for that matter, English “time” too – allude, on the one hand, to the action of cutting – Cronus would be “the cutter”:

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Janda 2010, 54–6 – and, on the other, to a specifc and fractionated notion of time that is far removed from the abstract and absolute sense of this term as duration. Very occasionally, Clio and Chronos appear to converge into the same fgure. Thus, a certain allegorical engraving represents History as a three-faced matron, contemplating at the same time the past, the present, and the future (Cristoforo Giarda, Bibliothecae Alexandrinae icones symbolicae, 1628) (fg. 3.1). Something similar happens when Auden, in his “Homage to Clio” (1955), invokes the “Muse of Time.” Sixteenth-century Spanish literature abounds with references to Time as the “inventor of things,” “true sage,” “master and discoverer of the truth” (Maravall 1986, 587, 603, 607). On top of that, the passage of time also contributes to peace among nations. In the preface to his Corona gótica (1646), Saavedra Fajardo writes that the “tribunal of time” – that is, long possession – has the virtue of legitimizing conquest and thus ensuring peace, since, thanks to prescriptive rights, domains, borders, and kingdoms are recognized by rival states. The 17th century, however, saw the emergence of another interpretation of aphorism that, rather than celebrating the authority of the past, focused more on the value of innovation and the historical character of truth (Kemp 1991, v–vi). According to Kemp, this reinterpretation involves a new conception of time that would have propitiated entry into a “supersessive history” and, with it, a fundamental change of “historical system.” Given that Clio represented not only History but also the epic poetry that celebrated the glory (κλέος) of heroes, for centuries the muse Clio was frequently likened to the goddess Pheme (see Chapter 1, n. 37). Occasionally, “Herodotus himself was referred to as Clio” (Warner 1985, 235; Steedman 2018, 77–81). According to Nikulin (2017), it is precisely the human desire to preserve memory and combat oblivion that since time immemorial has been behind “the historical.” Poets have been painfully aware of the inseparability of the two faces of Chronos. Allow me to quote two examples taken from 20th-century Anglophone literature, written at almost the same time: “Time the destroyer is time the preserver” (T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets”); “Time is the school in which we learn, / Time is the fre in which we burn” (Delmore Schwartz, “For Rhoda”). A certain image from Father Time, from the front page of vol. 2 of the book Scriptores rerum Germanicarum (Frankfurt am Main, 1718), by Johann Peter von Ludewig, as well as the title page that Rubens designed for the frst volume of Hubert Goltzius’s Opera omnia (1645) and the frontispiece of Joachim von Sandrart’s Iconologia Deorum (1680) seem to represent a very similar idea. Numerous examples of allegories alluding to the deep enmity, but also to the collaboration, between Chronos and Clio in Kintzinger (1995) and Palumbo (2012). A Baroque allegorical engraving from Jesuit Giambattista Riccioli’s Chronologia (1669), reproduced by Rosenberg and Grafton (2010, 67–9), perfectly illustrates Clio’s long subservience to the dictates of Chronology, and the latter’s connection with astronomy – whose muse, Urania, let us not forget, is the partner of Clio, the latter responsible for earthly things and the former for heavenly things – just at a time when biblical chronology began to be questioned. A century later, Kant called “for chronology to follow the lead of history instead of the reverse, history following chronology” (Koselleck 2018, 227; Jordheim 2012, 161). But the emancipation of chronology today, in a polychronic world, has gone much further: there are those who propose a history without chronology (Tanaka 2019). Zerubavel (2003) assembled an extensive collection of instances of metaphorical conceptions, fgures, and representations of time – arrow, branch, candelabra, chain, circle, family, ladder, leap, relay race, river, rope, tree – with very diferent implications, at the service of certain “social shapes of the past,” whether of the

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Conceptual metaphors for history history of the species or of national memory, which give rise to diverse communities and mnemonic traditions. In early India too, there appear to be records that evidence links between a cyclical, cosmological time, and another historical time, linear in nature (Thapar 1996). For example, a few linguists, following Saussure, have used the adjective “panchronistic” to refer to certain linguistic structures or theories that, beyond synchronic and diachronic levels, may be applied to all languages at all stages of their development. Apparently, some indigenous communities in Colombia conceive of time as a spiral, similar to a snail shell (Rappaport 2003, 326–7). Spiral metaphors, which can be ascending or descending (Eisenstein 1966, 41), abound in philosophies of history since the end of the 18th century (Koselleck 2012, 168–9). The Archbishop of Paris’s proposal suggests two of the main uses made of the metaphor of the wheel applied to history and temporality, depending on the aspect being highlighted – on the one hand, turning on its axis in a rotary movement without displacement (following the model of the wheel of fortune), and on the other, movement forwards (or backwards), with or without dragging efect, which involves the more or less fast change of location of a mobile object. The contrast between the temporal and the eternal, a typically baroque theme, has continued to obsess intellectuals and poets to this day. See in this regard a beautiful poem by Joseph Brodsky and the apposite comments by Svetlana Boym (2001, 297–8). “Every historical sequence contains linear as well as recurrent elements. After all, every so-called cycle must also be conceived of teleologically, for the end of its movement is from the outset its predetermined goal: cyclical movement is a line directed back into itself” (Koselleck 2018, 3–4). The metaphor soon took on an existential dimension. One of the most popular elegiac verses of the Spanish literary tradition begins thus: “Nuestras vidas son los ríos / que van a dar al mar, / que es el morir” (“Our lives are like the streams / That fow into the sea / And terminate,” translated by Alan Steinle. Jorge Manrique, Verses on the Death of His Father 1476). Republics too are fnally destroyed by the torrent of time (see, for instance, Eugenio Narbona, Doctrina política civil escrita en aphorismos, Madrid, 1621). A sonnet by Francisco de Quevedo, titled “Rome Entombed in its Ruins,” suggests that, while the solid – the temples and walls of ancient Rome – crumbles and becomes a pile of ruins, the liquid endures: the current of the Tiber continues imperturbably, century after century. The last two verses of the poem read: “Huyó lo que era frme, / y solamente lo fugitivo permanece y dura” (“All that stood frm has fed, and nothing save / What runs in transience remains to last,” translated by A. Z. Foreman). This is an old topos of which there are numerous literary examples and a rich intertextuality, which includes Janus Vitalis and Du Bellay. From the phenomenological perspective, there would be insistence upon the manifest similarity between the stream of water and the fow of consciousness, as when Husserl describes retention and protention as inseparable aspects of the living present. This increase contrasts with the gradual eclipse of other naturalist metaphors associated with time, such as those of growth and ageing – for example, that of the ages of man – which entered into crisis in the 18th century with the change of mentality and the new conception of an open-ended time. Interestingly, time shares the liquid metaphor of the river with consciousness, which is very often described as fowing. As William James (1890, I, 239–43) already noted, “stream

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of consciousness” and “stream of thought” are two classic expressive devices of philosophers and psychologists (and novelists). This metaphorical-conceptual coincidence is evident, for example, in the Husserlian phenomenology of time consciousness. And, by the way, with the discovery of the unconscious, the metaphor of the strata would also be widely used by psychology and psychoanalysis. “To comprehend temporal succession means to think of it in both directions at once, and then time is no longer the river which bears us along but the river in aerial view, upstream and downstream seen in a single survey” (Mink 1970, 554–5). The passage from Horace (book III, ode 6) reads, Hoc fonte derivata copia in patriam popvlvmque fvit (i.e. “[Wealth, drawn from this spring,] fows forth unto our country and our people”) and might allude both to the benefcial efects of the spring – the recently created Royal Academy of History – to the country, and to the fuvial metaphor – the river – that would symbolize the passing of the historical time that has shaped the Spanish nation. This latter meaning – associated with the longitudinal view of the current – is even more explicit on the frontispiece of the book Epigramas latinos con su versión castellana (Madrid, 1771). Some examples of historical maps that contain “rivers of time” are in Rosenberg and Grafton 2010, 108–11, 146–9, and Bowden 2017, 10–11; in the image from J. H. Colton’s stream of time, published in 1842, each nation is represented by a stream. “Language is the ocean in which we all swim – and whatever our dreams of rigorous science, we are fshes, not oceanographers” (Kelley 2002, 300). David Armitage (2023, 68) seems to be responding to Kelly when he writes: “A fsh may not be able to analyse the medium in which it swims, but humans – especially critically trained humans, like historians and other historically minded scholars – certainly can do so.” In the discursive context in which he writes, Armitage, however, appears to refer more to temporality than to linguisticity – specifcally, to the historians’ possibility of distancing themselves from their own present. “In fact,” writes Gadamer (2004, 278) in a concise fashion, “history does not belong to us; we belong to it.” Although the geological metaphor of strata applied to history and language was already present in 19th-century literature (Stitt 1998, 40–4), in Marx’s work (Morfno and Thomas 2018, 9), and even fnd it in so unlikely a place as Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution (1867) – “Great communities are like great mountains – they have in them the primary, secondary, and tertiary strata of human progress,” we read in the frst pages of this classic work – the linear time of historicism blocked the reception of temporal stratigraphy (Jordheim 2018, 307). The contextualist intellectual history of Quentin Skinner and the Cambridge school could grosso modo be said to belong to this conception that presupposes a strong notion of era and “an idea of temporal belonging,” an approach that has recently been criticized by diverse authors, including Peter E. Gordon and Rita Felski (Fareld 2022, 25–6). In the last decade, however, diverse agents, including some German historians, have striven to include the Holocaust within a long series of genocides – connected above all with the abuses of colonialism – thus relativizing the historical singularity of Nazism as a conceptual rupture and scaling down its function as a watershed between two eras (for a historiographical review, see Kühne 2013). “The waves of history, with their whispers that reverberate in the sun, roll on a continuous, deep sea, immensely deeper than the foam that undulates on a silent sea whose deepest depths the sun never reaches. Everything the daily newspapers write, all the history of the ‘present historic moment’ is nothing but the surface of the sea, a surface that is frozen and crystallised in books and records, and once

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Conceptual metaphors for history crystallized that way, becomes a hard layer. . . . The newspapers say nothing of the silent lives of the millions of people without history, who, at all hours of the day and in all countries of the globe, arise at the orders of the sun and go to their felds to continue the dark and silent, daily and eternal labor. . . . That intra-historic, silent, and continuous life, like the same bottom of the sea, is the substance of progress, true tradition, eternal tradition, not that false tradition that can be found interred in books and papers and monuments and stone” (Unamuno 1996, 62–3). This maritime trope, like that of the strata, might have been inspired by a literary tradition that tended to contrast the superfcial, supposedly less important, with the profound, generally regarded as more decisive (as in the Marxist base/superstructure contrast). Braudel was certainly not the only historian who saw in the plurality of times a threat that could lead to the fragmentation of history, as would later be denounced by a well-known representative of the fourth generation of Annales (Dosse 1987). “If time is a river, then it is like the Nile delta, with its hundreds of tributaries branching out in every imaginable direction” (Lilla 2016, 12). The locus classicus of the multiplicity of times is an oft-quoted fragment from Herder (Metakritik, 1799), where the Prussian philosopher declares that “no two things of the world have the same standard of time.” Herder also employs the image of the current but does so precisely to pluralize it: “the fow of a single river, the growth of a single tree is no meter of time for all rivers, trees, and plants” (Koselleck 2018, 163–4). In the introduction to his L’An Mil (1952), the art historian Henri Focillon ofers an early example of the gradual leap from the metaphor of the river to that of geological strata, passing through the image of a plurality of currents. The image of the strata of time can also be interpreted from an archaeological or architectural perspective. Thus, Krzysztof Pomian (1984, 323–48) combines the logic of architecture with stratigraphy to indicate the temporal specifcity of each historical process. Some authors have suggested that a syncline or an archaeological site resemble a book in which we read the history of the earth or of cultural remains, patiently digging through its pages-strata. Using the same metaphor, other authors (Schorske 1998, 193 and 201) have pointed to the fundamental similarity between the tasks of the historian, the archaeologist, and the psychologist. Gennaro Imbriano (2022) argues, however, that Koselleck too, through his theory of history (Historik), was seeking to guarantee a certain “univocal time of history” beneath the plurality of times and histories. Koselleck published his volume Vergangene Zukunft in 1979 (English version: 2004). By then, some concerned historians, dissatisfed with homogeneous time and with their colleagues’ lack of interest in the subject, demanded that “the objectivist time of history . . . be replaced with a ‘history’ of times” (Hall 1980, 131). Particularly in his work “Erfahrungswandel un Methodenwechsel” (1988), translated into English in 2002 (45–83), where Koselleck refects upon the “temporal multilayeredness of modalities of experience” and, specifcally, ofers three modalities, corresponding to “short, middle, and long-term time spans.” I take this English version of the German original Zeitschichten (2000, 9) from Jordheim (2014, 507). Among the many historiographical metaphors dependent upon that linear and teleological vision, frequently associated with a ladder-like progression, I shall mention, by way of example, the Scottish Enlightenment four stages theory; the Sonderweg theory (for German history); the image of derailment or of dérapage, employed by François Furet in reference to the French Revolution; and, last but

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not least, the metaphor of “history as a waiting room” used in a critical sense by Chakrabarty in the context of his postcolonial approach. Geographical exploration, especially the discovery of the Americas by the Europeans, was accompanied by important changes in temporal awareness: spatial and temporal horizons expanded simultaneously (Hartog 2020, 177–8 and 185; see quote from Vieira given earlier in Section 3). Notions of allochronism and diferences between temporalities do not refer only to remote cultural worlds. In more adjacent spheres too, such as Europe, there is emphasis upon the non-contemporaneity of some seemingly coeval societies (for instance, the diference in mentality between certain countries in Eastern and Western Europe). Jürgen Habermas has applied a hermeneutics of this type to the crisis of international relations triggered by the invasion of Ukraine (“Krieg und Empörung” [“War and Indignation”], Süddeutschen Zeitung, 28 April 2022). The notion of chronotope, launched by Bakhtin (1981) to address forms of time in the novel, has the virtue of combining, beginning with its very etymology, the dimensions of space and time (a masterful historiographical use of this notion, applied to the spatio-temporal knot Moscow 1937: Schlögel 2008). This term has been revisited by Gumbrecht and other authors to refer to a certain way of understanding and articulating temporality on the part of a human group or particular historical culture. In his book Lebenszeit und Weltzeit (1986), Blumenberg (2007, 244) provides several seductive metaphors – for example, the image of a packet of macaroni, that is, a tubular system of diferent times, each related to the life of a diferent organism – with which he attempts to thematize the scientifc discovery of the plural temporality of living beings, which nuances Husserl’s idea of Lebenswelt and ofers another facet, in this case biological, of the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous (see n. 37). In fact, many tools for remembering have become conceptual metaphors or even semantic nuclei that articulate theoretical development. Thus, the metaphors most commonly used for memory since antiquity (wax tablet, aviary, storehouse, theatre, palace, loom, wood, labyrinth, cave, treasure chest) were renewed in the 17th century with mechanical analogies (including spiritus animales and the homunculus, which were proposed as solutions to the intractable problem of regression or of the body-mind connection, which Descartes had already detected). The 19th and 20th centuries brought new visual and acoustic metaphors associated with technical advances such as photography, the phonograph, cinematography, or the holograph. “After the Second World War the computer became the dominant metaphor for the human mind” (Draaisma 2000, 230–1), a trend that has perhaps even been accentuated during the frst quarter of the 21st century, although today the most prevalent are a handful of terms mainly connected with the digital revolution, robotics, and bioengineering. Among the most popular items from these vocabularies are, apart from electronic memory, big data, algorithms, DNA archives, artifcial intelligence, virtual reality, and metaverse; circuits and neural networks; hybrids, cyborgs, and interfaces that connect the inner to the outer, as well as men and machines. Ironically, Derrida, who provides sound arguments against the gift of writing in his essay Plato’s Pharmacy, in relation to his own (written) work, declared in an interview that his “frst desire is to preserve memory” (cit. Warren 2015, 269) – a response, incidentally, reminiscent of old Herodotus. “Memory,” wrote Todorov (2015, 18), “is one of historians’ sources, but not the only one, because it is unfaithful.” On the interpenetration between history and memory see also Joutard 2013.

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51 The vocabulary of the mind, especially in relation to memory, is largely metaphorical. Words like impression, picture, inscription, imprint, stamp, mark, trace, etching, fading, efacement, erasure, obliteration, applied to processes of remembering and forgetting, have been lexicalized to such a degree that they are not even perceived as tropes. Much of this psycho-tropological vocabulary has automatically been transferred from individual mental processes to the terrain of the collective. 52 Aleida Assmann (2016) devoted one of her works, originally published in 2006, to the study of the dynamics of the individual and collective memory of the Germans “in the shadow of a traumatic past.” In a review of this book, Susanne S. Cammack (2016) considers that “physical and media objects such as photography and flm, and landmarks such as memorials, evoke the larger collective memory. It is a continuation of Proust’s contemplation of the madeleine but on a much larger scale.” 53 Oblivion, which has often been compared with a dark well, a black hole, or an endless abyss, is also sometimes positively metaphorized on account of its hygienic and organizing capacity. “Active forgetfulness,” writes Megill (1998, 49) quoting Nietzsche, “is ’like a doorkeeper, a preserver of psychic order, repose, and etiquette’.” However, it is not always voluntary: “Alzheimer’s disease has become a metaphor for contemporary fears about collective as well as individual amnesia” (Hutton 2013, 360). 54 Modern mass culture, which came hand in hand with new technologies of reproduction, introduced from the beginning of the 20th century onwards a new type of memories (of second order, so to speak). Such technologies, cinema in particular, “made it increasingly possible for people to take on memories of events not ‘naturally’ their own.” This “new form of public cultural memory,” which A. Landsberg called “prosthetic memory,” “emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site such as a movie theater or museum” (2004, 2 and 18). To illustrate this type of vicarious memory, Landsberg chooses the following metaphor from Michel de Certeau (1984, 88): “Like those birds that lay their eggs only in other species’ nests, memory produces in a place that does not belong to it.” Not only that: images that have deeply penetrated the minds of many viewers do not actually correspond to the events they represent, but to their artistic recreation, often for propaganda purposes. The famous scene of the storming of the Winter Palace by the Bolsheviks is not real footage of that event but a scene from Eisenstein’s flm October (1928). 55 “Despite similar and hence comparable kinds of sufering, constraints upon the formation of a common war consciousness among the European nations are placed by sluices of memory that are regulated at diferent paces and diferent thrusts of experience. In terms of its historical efects, the transformation of war experience through the direct consequences of the war cannot be overestimated.” “Opening up the sluice gates for a range of new alternatives” (Koselleck 2018, xiv, xxix, 215 and 236).

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Pasts, presents, and futures

In the previous chapter I mentioned our innate struggle fully to understand time and outlined some metaphorical devices, spatial in the main, used in an attempt to comprehend it. In this chapter, I will address the parts into which we usually divide time – past, present, future – the relationship between the three and their respective metaphors. At the beginning of the last century, the theory of relativity – ratifed shortly afterwards in this respect by quantum mechanics – redescribed time as an illusion, linked spacetime to motion and categorically rejected the existence of anything similar to the universal and absolute time imagined by Newton. Yet however hard theoretical physics strives to convince us that, as Einstein wrote in one of his letters, “the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion,” the fact is that the normal performance of life and historical thinking would be inviable if we disregarded this distinction, which for these purposes we could consider a necessary fction. This common-sense distinction enables us to attribute to time a directionality, which we still tend to imagine via the well-worn metaphors of the arrow or the fux of time fowing from the past to future, feetingly passing through the present. Modern timelines, a type of diagram popular from the mid-19th century onwards, has contributed to naturalizing this chronologically oriented way of conceiving of and representing historical time to the extent that the timeline can be regarded as a genuine visual metaphor (Rosenberg and Grafton 2010, 14–15, 20).1 Acknowledging that the temporal structure of the human world is comprised of pasts, presents, and futures does not imply subjecting oneself to an absolute Newtonian time to one single seamless sequence of events and processes (although it must be acknowledged that “the practice of historical research in the modern era is closely linked to Newtonian time”: Wilcox 1987, 4). On the contrary, historians’ order of time has been enriched in recent decades with various tools that help us to conceive of temporal hybrids – past presents, future pasts, past futures, and so on – stratifed and overlapping one another in diferent areas and ways. Moreover, given that the past, the present, and the future are cultural and therefore historical categories, it is possible to trace the origins of these concepts and describe their DOI: 10.4324/9781032736358-5

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transformations into diferent moments and societies. The ways of thinking about time and the relationships between the three members of this triad, the forms of temporality, have shown themselves to be changing in diferent cultures and at diferent moments, a discovery that has prompted the creation of various notions to grapple with these changes. Among them, I highlight those of regime of historicity (Hartog) and chronoference (Chronoferenze), the latter a category that Achim Landwehr has designed to grasp the culturally specifc diferent ways of weaving webs of timings that include references to absent times. As usual, in this chapter I will examine some of the tropes most frequently employed to represent the sub-divisions of time. First, it is worthwhile pointing out that in the West, the schema underlying many tropes presupposes that the past is behind us, the present here and the future in front. Thus, when Søren Kierkegaard states that “life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards,” his readers infer that in this aphorism “backwards” means “looking towards the past,” while “forwards” means “facing the future.” This implicit guiding schema explains that we spontaneously accept that the metaphor of the horizon is commonly applied to the future, while if we speak of past or present experiences, we more often than not encapsulate them in a familiar and delimited space in which we move. This is the case of Koselleck’s two major categories for his semantics of historical times, based on a mobile and unstable equilibrium between space of experience (Erfahrungsraum) and horizon of expectation (Erwartungshorizont).2 The union of the three times, operating simultaneously in the present, is an Augustinian insight periodically evoked by diverse writers, historians, and philosophers. Spanish literature, from the Baroque to Modernism, is particularly well endowed with these kinds of refections, which usually have a personal and subjective tone but are almost always applicable to historical experience. In one of his sonnets, poet Francisco de Quevedo reasons as follows on the inexorable passage of time and the coalescence of its three faces in the ephemeral present: Yesterday has gone; tomorrow has not arrived; Today is going away without stopping for a moment; I am a “was”, and a “will be”, and a tired “is.”3 3.1

The essential triad

Whatever the case, the triplicity of time is a highly internalized motif that, despite the relative novelty of the emergence of “the past,” “the present,” and “the future” as historical concepts, appears to have profound cultural roots (a novelty that is evinced by the strict non-correspondence between the grammatical tenses and temporal zones of various European languages and in the late appearance of the future tense: David 2014). Philosophers like Husserl, after exploring internal time consciousness, have reasserted its threefold

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structure, which makes it possible however to break down the stream of experience into smaller temporal unities that interweave and overlap. So the clustering of three temporal dimensions is valid for every present moment but also in every past and every future.4 From another perspective, Ortega y Gasset (1962, 42–3), setting forth his idea of generations, insisted that “every historic present . . . involves three distinct times, three diferent ‘todays’” in which three diferent ages – youth, maturity, and old age – are articulated. We all have an instinctive sense of the extremely close interweaving of the three times, each of which gradually becomes another by dint of the simple passage of time. “The past is a previous future and a recent present, the present is an impending past and a recent future, and fnally, the future is a present and even a past to come” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 445). This phenomenological approach, conveniently transferred to sociology and history by authors such as Luhmann and Koselleck, has recently been explored by a plethora of historians and theorists eager to fnd solutions to the historiographic and existential challenges of our time. Thus, Hölscher (2014, 588–90) stressed that the past-present-future triad is the most important collection of basic historical concepts, and any theoretical approach to the semantics of historical times should be based on the latter (later, when addressing the future, I will return to this question). It seems difcult to deny that this trichotomy is frmly and anthropologically anchored in human experience. Whether in the feld of theology, science and philosophy, art, or simply in everyday life, we fnd numerous examples of this ternary classifcation that attempts to encompass the relational structure of time, a fabric woven from memories, certitudes, and hopes. Before, now, after; memory, attention, wait; yesterday, today, tomorrow; historically, these and other temporal triplets have given rise to a torrent of tropes, images, and symbols of the past, the present, and the future – images that are not always easily separated from some important cultural patterns and commonplaces of religion, art, and literature. From the mystery of the Trinity to the metaphor of the three ages of man, from the Eden-Fall-Redemption sequence to the triadic model of Hegel’s dialectics, via the historiographical schema origins-rise-and-fall and the three classic parts of a literary work or three-act structure – introduction, core, and denouement – from the schema of the three worlds (celestial, terrestrial, and infernal) to the cosmological cycle creation-preservation-destruction (personifed in the three deities of trimurti: Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva), there is plenty to choose from in the cultural traditions of humanity that have, in the triangle and the number three, the key fgures of their proposals. In some discourses not unreminiscent of the concepts of translatio studii and translatio imperii, each of the three segments of historical time is associated to a geocultural region or a continent. Therefore, a certain romantic view of history envisioned Europe as the present, inheritor of a past that was connected to Asia, and seeking young America as a refection of its future (Duque 1997, 132).

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However, if we consider the rich iconography referring to history and time, we observe that artists have seldom depicted this temporal triad in their works. One of the best-known images of this kind is the enigmatic three-headed Allegory of Prudence, in which Titian, drawing from some earlier examples of three-faced busts (vultus trifrons) which represented prudence as a compound of memory, intelligence, and providence, successfully combined the theme of the three ages of man with a three-headed image allusive to the past, the present, and the future. A few medieval representations of the tricephalous Trinity, to which were added in the 12th century the apocalyptic interpretations of Joachim of Fiore – who for so long had such an infuence upon millennialist and utopian movements – in particular his theory of the three ages (some have included in this line of the three ages Comte’s theory of the theological, metaphysical, and scientifc stages, as well as Lessing’s invocation in The Education of Humankind), grosso modo equivalent to the three great temporal segments. Later, history itself, personifed, would in some cases come to embody the three dimensions of time. A certain allegory included in a 17th-century volume of symbolic images (Icones Symbolicae) represents an unusual triple Janus-faced matron (Clio?) capable of simultaneously scrutinizing the past, the present, and the future (Figure 3.1). From the time when, during the frst decades of the 19th century, modern chronosophy became common sense, the rhetoric of the three times shifted very efectively to the domain of politics. While during the early modern age, the ideal of prudence was understood as the ability to “link together times,” this is like that wisdom of present things informed by the knowledge of past things (precedents) and by the sagacity that anticipates the future, with the vulgarization of progressive philosophies of history, three major political parties or tendencies took shape, each of them supposedly associated with one of the times. In Spain, for instance, from the 1830s onwards, journalists commonly distinguished between a party of the past (absolutists, reactionaries, nostalgic for the old regime), a party of the present (conservative or moderate liberals, supporters of stability and order), and another of the future (progressives, fghting to implement major reforms) (Semanario Pintoresco Español, 1845; Fernández-Sebastián 2016, 123). At a more theoretical level, writer Nicomedes-Pastor Díaz (Los problemas del socialismo, 1848) advocated eclectic, centrist politics, a virtuous middle ground between the two opposite, backward and revolutionary, extremes. Similar politicaltemporal schemas, compatible with the emerging right-left topological axis, are to be found in one way or another in almost all the countries of Europa and America. This triadic temporalization of politics, which owes much to the imaginary of the mixed government, was applied to the doctrine of the separation of powers, in the works of diverse representatives of conservative thinking. While Edmund Burke employed the image of a contract “between those who are dead, those who are living, and those who are

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Figure 3.1 Allegory of History. Cristoforo Giarda, Bibliothecae Alexandrinae icones symbolicae (Milan, 1628). Source: Courtesy of Diözesanbibliothek München und Freising, DBF 121 268.

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to be born” and Tocqueville lamented the breakdown of “the tie which unites one generation to another,” Oakeshott (1990, 388) aptly summarized this position by advocating “a difusion of authority between past, present and future” that would guarantee freedom, making politics “a conversation in which past, present and future each has a voice; and though one or other of them may on occasion properly prevail, none permanently dominate.”5 In costumbrista literature and caricatures in 19th-century Europe, there is an abundance of textual and visual metaphors that compared the past, the present, and the future of societies undergoing swift transformation. The formula “yesterday, today and tomorrow” appears to have been a particularly efective means of comparing three moments of recent history that tend to be separated and diferentiated increasingly quickly. Spanish writer Antonio Flores, for example, wrote a best-selling work on the mid-19th century titled Ayer, hoy y mañana [Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow] in the subtitle of which he used the triple metonymy “Faith, Steam and Electricity” to symbolize respectively the past Spain of 1800, the present of 1850, and the future Spain of 1900. Some French caricaturists of the July Monarchy and Spaniards in the midcentury would employ a similar graphic technique to criticize contemporary politics. Along with various French vignettes (for instance, “Le passé – Le présent – L’avenir,” La Caricature, 9–1–1834), a satirical drawing titled “Yesterday – Today – Tomorrow” (Cascabel, Madrid, 20–5–1866) contrasts the rotund and powerful Spain of yesteryear – when, in the 16th century, the Spanish monarchy enjoyed hegemony in Europe – with an increasingly squalid and decadent in the hands of the corrupt politicians of the day and envisages that, unless something changes, Spain is heading towards death by consumption. And, beyond politics, in the feld of popular science and science fction, some cartoonists liked to juxtapose the progress of the past and the present with the often fanciful predictions for the near future. Figure 3.2 shows a drawing from the late 19th century in which the author attempts to capture some discoveries and technical inventions distributed into three bands corresponding to the three great “regions” of time, prominent among which is a future brimming over with expectations. This special interest in the future is congruent with its European boom at the turn of the 20th century, one of the most marked peaks in the successive waves of optimism and pessimism towards the future in recent centuries (Hölscher 2018, 22–4). As far as historiography is concerned, rather than simultaneous or parallel visions of the three coordinates of our temporal triad, we should carefully examine their binary combinations. I will focus on two key pairs: that of the present and the past, and that of the past and the future, although, as we shall see, it is impossible to consider one of the duos without alluding at each step to the third, excluded element.

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Figure 3.2 The past, the present, and the future of science, according to British illustrator Harry Furniss (late 19th century).

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3.2

Past and present

The raison d’être of modern historiography is the umbilical cord that connects, and at the same time separates, the present and the past. The present/ past pair – an odd couple, inseparable but mismatched – is, in this sense, the cornerstone of history. The tropes that liken the past to a dark, inaccessible and impenetrable place; to an untidy chest or storeroom; to an unfathomable abyss; to a mirror that refects the future; to the roots of the tree that we are; to the subsoil or substrata of the present; and to several more that we regularly encounter in literature – all of these tropes pale alongside the master metaphor of modern historiography. This is none other than the metaphor that equates the past with a foreign country. I shall consider this fundamental image in a moment. Before doing so, it is pertinent to address two or three preliminary issues. To indicate, for instance, that English is far from the only language that in modern times has established a partial, reductionist synonymy, between past and history. In fact, the word “history,” in common parlance, very often simply means the past. Since the end of the 18th century, the incipient awareness of the irremediable heterogeneity of pasts and presents prompted in historians the desire to overcome that gap and build bridges that might be crossed in both directions. In his Discurso sobre el modo de escribir la historia de España [Essay on How to Write Spanish History] (1787), Juan Pablo Forner considers that history has a double obligation: faithfully to represent “the human beings who no longer exist” without fantasies or anachronisms, but, at the same time, to seek in the past help with understanding the present. In the event of not doing so, asserts Forner, the historian “will ofend both the living and the deceased; the latter, by not expressing what they were like, the former because they will see their origins adulterated.” However, during the last two centuries, a multitude of authors have emphasized in one way or another that what really matters for history is not so much the past itself but, in Huizinga’s words, “the signifcance that the past has for us.” The tense past/present relationship has known a plurality of formulations and proposals, some of which have become commonplaces (for historians at least). Most of them seek to combine consciousness of the alterity of the past with acknowledgement of the fact that the driving force behind their research is the relevance of its study for the present. They also acknowledge a sort of existential presentism, since historians are frmly anchored in their present (Gangl 2021, 515–16). Droysen (1897, 55) argued that in his or her exposition, the historian “takes the total result of the investigation, gathers all its rays as in a concave mirror, and turns them upon some defnite point of present interest, throwing light upon it thus in order to ‘set it clear’.” Burckhardt and Croce famously wrote, respectively, that history is “the record of what one age fnds worthy of note in another” and that “all history is contemporary history.”6 Ernst

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Troeltsch thought that the main aim of historical research was to understand the present. George Herbert Mead (1929) highlighted that “the character of the past is that it connects what is unconnected in the merging of one present into another.” Ortega y Gasset (1961, 83, 212–13, 223) insisted time and time again that the past and the future only exist in the present. The present would be the knot that ties in a bundle the other two dimensions of time (Safranski 2015, 227) in such a way that history would be “a science of the present” (Ortega 1962, 198–9). One of the most recent formulae in this respect is Nikulin’s (2017, 174): “History is about the past for the sake of the present.”7 Along with the metaphors of the bridge, the tunnel, and other engineering images, the most hackneyed trope in relation to this complex interplay between then and now is perhaps that of “the dialogue between present and past.” Edward H. Carr (1990, 29–30) uses this image to refer to “the reciprocal process of interaction between the historian and his facts” and attempts to fnd a balance “between a view of history having the centre of gravity in the past and a view having the centre of gravity in the present” (1990, 30), in other words, as he presents it, between the facts and the historian’s interpretations. This problem has always obsessed historians and theorists. As Michel de Certeau, Hans Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricœur, among others, have highlighted, the writing of history is inevitably a liminal activity between past and present, and historians fnd themselves faced with the tension between two largely incompatible attitudes. They are often torn between two very diferent logics and epistemological positions. If they prioritize the present, they will easily fall prey to anachronisms and presentisms.8 If, by contrast, they opt for the pole of the past and seek to understand the latter in its own terms, they will be accused of antiquarianism. Some of the most repeated historiographical tropes – for example, that of the “centre of gravity” of which Carr spoke or the image of a rope with two ends called present and past that needs to be handled with skill – fuctuate between these two perspectives and attempt to fnd a suitable balance between both, which – while still recognizing the “essential tension” between past and present that characterizes historical knowledge (Gangl 2021) – does not take the past as a “hostage of the present” or the present as a “hostage of the past.”9 In recent decades, there have been numerous turns, notable changes of emphasis, and new approaches that have afected relations between the two members of our past/present pair in both categorical and tropological terms. Some of these changes of approach have already featured in these pages; others await us. At the turn of the century, leaving behind the so-called linguistic turn and the renewed attention paid to problems of historical narrative (A. Danto, H. White, P. Ricoeur), to concepts and discourses (R. Koselleck, Q. Skinner), and to metaphors (H. Blumenberg), there were several waves of interest, more or less ephemeral or sustained, in particular focuses of attention such as memory (P. Nora, J. Assmann, A. Huyssen, A. Confno), presence

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(H.-U. Gumbrecht), the historical experience and the aesthetic representation of the past (F. Ankersmit), images and visual culture (W. J. T. Mitchel, G. Boehm), great historical discontinuities (E. Runia, Z. B. Simon), global history, big history, or the history of emotions, to mention just a few. Several of these lines are still in full force today, and it is not possible here to provide a comprehensive analysis of the metaphors that underlie each of these approaches (some basic tropes referring to temporality are in fact shared by several of them). As far as our perspective is concerned, I would highlight Herman Paul’s ambitious theoretical proposal (2015), which, rather than a new topic for history, posits a substantial broadening of its scope. His attempt consists in thematizing and systematizing our relations with the past. He bases this on a change of metaphor that is fully consistent with the major signifcant shift in the metaphorization/conceptualization of historical time which I dealt with in Chapter 2. “The past,” writes this author, “is not a procession of epochs, but an accumulation of layers, some of which are already completed at a point when others continue” (Paul 2015, 22). From this point of view, which has been revisited by other authors, history would only be the main pipe through which are channelled our epistemic relationship with the past (i.e. our consideration of the past qua past essentially as an object of study). Over the last two centuries, historians have developed specifc theories and methods that have proved themselves to be reasonably efective means of achieving reliable knowledge and interpretations vis-à-vis events and processes of the past, but they are not alone in expressing an interest in the latter. Cultivators of disciplines such as ethics, literature, art, or law consider a variety of perspectives and links – moral, aesthetic, legal – with the past, which has led some theorists to speak, more than of historical studies, of past studies, even of “pastology” (White 2014, 100), in the widest sense. The present, argue some, is a smokescreen that conceals the past. And, just as the walker sees the landscape better from a mountaintop perspective, historians use hindsight as a controlled interpretative anachronism that enables them “to see farther than any of their historical actors could have” (Gangl 2021, 513, 529). 3.2.1

A foreign country

Conceiving the past as a foreign country is not just one more trope of historiography. Since the celebrated adoption of this title, taken from the opening of L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between (1953), by David Lowenthal (2015) in his classic book on the subject, the phrase has been repeated on an infnity of occasions. This is without a doubt the foundational metaphor of the discipline, for it is worthwhile recalling once again that “modern Western history essentially begins with diferentiation between the present and the past” (De Certeau [1975] 1988, 2).

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Koselleck’s refections upon Altdorfer’s painting The Battle of Alexander at Issus (1529) at the beginning of his book Futures Past aptly summarize the core of the question. While the German painter, creating his work, is guilty of several anachronisms common to his epoch, enclosing in his painting “the present and the past . . . within a common historical plane” (Koselleck 2004b, 10), the mismatches between the times of the battle represented, those of the painter and those of the spectator, only became conspicuous when it was possible to diferentiate between the diferent temporal planes involved. Modernity would be, among other things, the era in which the present no longer recognizes itself in the past and, consequently, the latter begins to be contemplated as an other-time. The past is a foreign country, and, as Hartley wrote, “they do things diferently there.” However, as striking as it might appear to our modern consciousness, this metaphor popularized in the fnal decades of the 20th century could only have been conceived and understood, at the earliest, from the late-18th century onwards. Until then, in most people’s opinion, be they cultured or illiterate, as was the case of Altdorfer and the princes who contracted his services as a painter, “the past seemed not a foreign country but part of their own” (Lowenthal 2015, 3–4; Schifman 2011). In this metaphor, of which there are several variants, lies the gist of the modern idea of history, which acknowledges the existence of a deep cut between the present and the past and at the same time constantly strives to suture it. The leading literati of the 18th century, including respected historians such as Gibbon and Hume, believed that humanity was more or less the same in every time and place and that situations repeated themselves: in the words of Ch. Duclos, “the theatre of the world supplies only a limited number of scenes” (Lowenthal 2015, 89). This momentous shift in historical consciousness that amounts to the birth of the past (Schifman 2011), which some have called the historicist revolution, occurred hand in hand with other no less decisive changes in the cultural, economic, and political realms – Romanticism, Industrial Revolution, French Revolution – changes which, by very quickly rendering objects, customs, and institutions obsolete, contributed to the gradual appearance of a new, properly historical mentality that brought about a surprising discovery: the otherness of the past.10 The trope of the past as a foreign country involves various additional advantages. The geophysical basis of the metaphor, which again spatializes time, combines well with a rich vocabulary – perspective, planes, levels, dimensions, borders, horizons, distances, and the like – that enables us to attempt to cope more intuitively with temporal issues related to the writing of history. In addition, if this cultural transformation entailed a change of paradigm in historiography, the difusion of the image of the past as “foreign country” made it possible, moreover, to highlight the similarities between history and anthropology, since “historians writing about the past and anthropologists writing about far-away present-day societies face exactly the same problem” (Munz 1997, 844, 846).

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The crisis of modernity and, with it, that of the modern historiographical paradigm, has been accompanied by diverse criticism of the metaphorics upon which this paradigm is based, among them, notably, that of the past as foreign country. On the one hand, rampant presentism and the politics of memory, in particular those related to the Holocaust that advocate the perpetuity of an irrevocable past, have introduced into the conscience of some the idea that, as shocking as this pretension may prove for our everyday experience, perhaps we should conserve forever the everlasting memory of the most heinous collective crimes of the 20th century – usually epitomized by the names Auschwitz and the Gulag, although the list would be considerably longer – with a view to preventing anything similar from ever happening again. Faced with deep historical wounds like these, we would fnd ourselves contemplating a past that does not end. Yet if it is never left behind and remains indefnitely in the present, that obviously means that this would never – or should never – be a foreign country. However, a past that, as William Faulkner wrote, is never dead and therefore “it’s not even past” could become in any case a “haunting past,” a “past that won’t go away” ever (Bouton 2019, 318–19) or gradually vanish in the distance, as is usually the case with all (other) pasts. A past, in short, that would belong more to the irascible collective memory than to the dispassionate realm of history.11 In addition to those in the ranks of activists of memory, there are also numerous critics of this trope among scholars of periods usually vilifed by modernist arrogance, as is the case of specialists in the Middle Ages and the early modern age (disdainfully labelled ancien régime by revolutionaries and subsequently by historians). Medievalist Catherine Brown (2000) is not fond of the model generated by the metaphor of the foreign country, mainly because of the submetaphors that accompany it and, basing herself on the medieval image that likens reading to the act of eating or drinking a text, maintains that it would be much better to conceive of the past as a food. I do not know whether the challenge to this tired trope from diverse angles will succeed in unseating it. It seems reasonable to surmise in any case that its defnitive abandonment would represent the end of history as this intellectual endeavour has been understood during the last two hundred years. 3.2.2

The living and the dead

The disquieting images that conceive of the past as a necropolis could be seen as a radicalization of the metaphor of the “foreign country,” where foreignness has been transformed into the supreme strangeness that is death. The past is truly a very strange country – so much so that all its inhabitants are dead. There is a long tradition of varied metaphorics that establish some kind of parity between the past and the afterlife.12 Their ramifcations and connexions with other tropes have given rise to a huge quantity of images, some

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opposite in meaning. One thinks, for example, of the historical-literary topos of the voices of the dead and the possibility of conversing with them, where the historian generally appears as a medium that establishes communication between both worlds (Chartier 2008; Fernández-Sebastián 2021c, 31–55).13 Also in the metaphor that conceives of the past as a dark night in which, not without difculty, we succeed in illuminating certain areas (Droysen employs this image more than once); in the past as an unusual landscape, peopled with ruins and corpses; as an impenetrable place, hard to understand, “almost like the fossil skeletons of another order of beings” (Lowenthal 2015, 212, 363–4), and so on. The deontological rule that historians, in the interests of impartiality, must set aside their prejudices and political leanings when analysing the events of earlier times, has sometimes been illustrated by invoking the respect due to the past as a sacred graveyard.14 Just the comparisons historically established between the past, on the one hand, and the circumstances that surround death, funeral rites, mourning, and burial, on the other, would provide sufcient material for a long essay (on history as a practice of mourning, see Bevernage 2011, 147–67). In this sense, the past is frequently thought of as something valuable that is buried and concealed that the historian is tasked with disinterring, even bringing back to life. Michelet claimed nothing less than to “resuscitate” the past and, as we know, Collingwood contended that history essentially consists in the re-enactment of past experience in the historian’s mind. Without reaching the extreme of resuscitation of the past, as we saw in Chapter 2, history has traditionally been conceived of, in part, as Clio’s struggle against death and oblivion. Part of the allegorical iconography of the early modern age depicts the combat between the pen of History and the scythe of depredatory Time (De Certeau 1980, 43, 58). However, the metaphor of unearthing also has its detractors. Some have claimed, on the contrary, that historians would be undertakers who, with their actions, would make it possible for the living to rid themselves of their deceased and confront a period of mourning. Given that Plato observed that writing can be a form of forgetfulness, it has been said that the historian writes in order to bury actions and events, so that they may be forgotten without a guilty conscience (Kasabova 2008, 337). And indeed, De Certeau (1988, viii, 2, 46–7) acknowledges that in a way, history is a tomb for the corpse past, insofar as it allows society to “draw a line between what is dead and what is not” and separate the latter from the former, “calming the dead who still haunt the present, .  .  . [by] ofering them scriptural tombs” (De Certeau 1988, 2). More recently, Gabrielle Spiegel (2009, 3–4) has suggested that a slightly diferent task might correspond to the historian: that of performing an autopsy on the corpse of the past. Victoria Fareld (2016) goes further and, in the name of memory’s duty to the victims of the Holocaust, proposes a porous border between the living and the dead. Fareld rebels against archivistic history understood as a morgue where the corpse of

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the past hibernates while it waits for the historian-medical examiner to perform the autopsy. Rather than the binary logic that contemplates the present and the past as mutually exclusive terms, Fareld favours a search for an equilibrium between the living and the dead. Instead of the metaphor of past-dead, she recommends that the past should continue living in the present, albeit in ghostly form. In fact, among recent trends in management of the past, including the boom of memory, there is an abundance of ghosts and zombies that rise from their graves to pester the living (Scott 2020, 71–3). While half a century ago John H. Plumb (1969) prematurely celebrated the depoliticization of history (what he called “the death of the past”), in many places and collectives today, politics of memory prevail that reactivate at will pasts à la carte in the service of diferent goals of identitary reinforcement. Along with this selective resuscitation of the dead15 and the spurious use of history as a vehicle of indoctrination, a more sophisticated theoretical approach summons ghosts – an allegorical way of referring to the presentness of the past – to, in the wake of Derrida’s famous text Spectres of Marx (1993), the inspiration behind other movements in other felds of culture, develop a hauntology in the terrain of historiography too (Kleinberg 2017).16 The possibility of the weight of the past becoming so overwhelming that it would be advisable to shed such a burden had already been noted by a number of 19th-century authors. As we saw in Chapter 1, Nietzsche subverted the common interpretation of the metaphor of the burial of the past by pointing out that extreme historical monumentalism would result in the dead burying the living. In a very diferent tone, Marx had advised revolutionaries to rid themselves of “the tradition of all the generations of the dead [that] weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living,” rather than “anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service” (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, I). This train of thought on the part of Marx lends continuity to the conception of past – typically enlightened, and then revolutionary – as an obstacle to be removed, or as a corpse to be buried (thus, the bourgeoisie, according to the Communist Manifesto, produces its own grave-diggers), and would have its prolongation in Trotsky’s diatribes against those who, in his opinion, deserved to be swept up and thrown into the dustbin of history.17 The old Soviet joke according to which, under that regime, “the future is certain; it is only the past that is unpredictable” has often been recalled to indicate the falsifcation of the past by totalitarianisms. As George Orwell wrote (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) “who controls the past controls the future.” These kinds of literary, dystopian refections and historical experiences have their close equivalents in the theory of history. Arthur Danto, in his analysis of historiography, challenged the ingenuous supposition that, as Peirce believed, unlike the future, conceived of as something “living, plastic, and determinable,” the past is “absolutely

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determinate, fxed, fait accompli, and dead.”18 “Peirce’s statement,” contends Danto (1965, 143, 145), is false. We are always revising our beliefs about the past, and to suppose them “fxed” would be unfaithful to the spirit of historical inquiry. . . . Actually we are sometimes more certain about the future than we are about the past. Another rich source of images related to the past is that of ruins, an ancient literary topos connected with our subject, since Cicero had already likened ruins to corpses. The stratigraphic succession of ruins upon ruins has been compared to a heap of corpses piled one on top of the other by history, in similar fashion to when historians state that the present sprouts vigorously from the humus of many sedimented pasts. Halfway between historiography and fctional literature, essayist George Dangerfeld (2012, 25) vividly describes in a passage from The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935), the extraordinary fertility of 18th-century English soil: Far beneath its surface, the struggles of history, long dead, worked their powerful chemistry: here were the corpses of feudalism and absolutism, in various stages of decay; here were the ashes of heretics, the blood of rebels, the nourishing mineral relics of ignorance and patriotism. There was scarcely an institution, political or social, which did not fourish in this earth and grow fat. One of the most radical and poetic versions of this argument is that which says that you can never leave behind your entire past – whether personal or collective – given that it is inside you and accompanies you everywhere. In 1838, in one of his lectures in the Madrid Athenaeum, Spanish politician Antonio Alcalá Galiano maintained that we cannot completely rid ourselves of our ancestors, as something of their minds and their blood fows through our veins (Fernández-Sebastián 2021c, 139), and Marcel Proust wrote: “however you try, ‘you can’t put the past behind you’, concludes a scion of slavery. ‘It’s buried in you; it’s turned your fesh into its own cupboard.’” “To be,” adds Lowenthal (2015, 2), “is to have been, and to project our messy, malleable past into our unknown future.” 3.2.3

Distances and dimensions

The uses of the metaphor of historical distance are inextricably intertwined with those of other spatial notions applied to time, particularly with the metaphor of perspective, as Ginzburg saw. And they have been since the beginning of modern history. The analogy that Wilhelm von Humboldt established two hundred years ago (The Task of the Historian, 1821) between historical insight and the perception of the shape of clouds, which can only be appreciated from a distance (Lowenthal 2015, 341), is highly persuasive in this

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respect. The present, while it lasts, seems like a hazy mist. The passage of time, however, gradually makes it possible, as the distance increases, to discern certain profles until, now transformed into the past, the shapeless mist of that time lived eventually becomes a cloud. Applied to the writing of history, this metaphor supports Eric Hobsbawm’s view that “retrospectiveness is the secret weapon of the historian” (Fareld 2021, 559–60). The retrodiction involved in hindsight – by defnition, the narrator is in the future of what is narrated – however, is not without risks and is more complex than at frst appears to be the case. As Friedrich Schiller elucidated in his famous Jena lecture What Is, and to What End Do We Study Universal History (1789), “the real succession of events descends from the origin . . . down to their most recent ordering; the universal historian ascends from the most recent world situation, upwards toward the origin of things” (this latter movement recalls, incidentally, the behaviour of salmon swimming upstream). Later, after noting the order of the most important events and of their hypothetical concatenation, would come the moment “to retrace his steps on the path thus prepared, and to descend, unhindered and with light steps, with the guide of those noted facts, from the beginning of the monuments down to the most recent age.” The chronological distance generated by the passage of time is both a given and an epistemological tool (Phillips 2013, xi). It provides an advantage over the actors of the past that enables the historian to interpret past events. The main risk is that this narrative construction ex post factum to which Schiller referred in his lecture might acquire a teleological slant and shed a deceptive light upon events. The end illuminates the beginning and therefore the fnal say is always in the distant future, which is the focal point of perspective. Thus, his famous aphorism is better understood: “The history of the world is the day of judgment” (Löwith 1998, 316). We understand then that the historian’s “secret weapon” is a doubleedged sword. Retrospectiveness is certainly an advantage, but it involves the risk of misinterpreting past events and inadvertently incurring in that kind of presentist arrogance that E. P. Thompson memorably labelled “the enormous condescension of posterity.” Additionally, perspective has frequently been associated with subjectivity, and distance with objectivity, especially when cold and detached intellectual evaluation is contrasted with closeness understood as emotional identifcation with historical actors. Yet it is important to distinguish carefully between afective empathy and cognitive empathy, aimed at recovering the meaning that people who lived in the past gave to their actions (Retz 2018).19 But the elaboration of these heuristic metaphors would take us too far away from the subject matter of these pages. *** As far as the dimensions of the past are concerned, the impact of the vast expansion of the time of the world by scientists upon the minds of

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philosophers and thinking historians of the last three centuries is hard to exaggerate. The gigantic leap from the 6,000 biblical years to the over 13 billion years currently estimated to be the age of the universe, via discoveries and speculations in relation to the age of the Earth in the 19th century, subjected scientifc and religious beliefs to considerable stress. The expansion of the temporal scale made a lifetime appear as something increasingly minute in comparison with the times of the world. And even if historical time was afected later and less than the times of physical sciences by such dramatic changes, the fact is that the questioning of religious chronology and the growing awareness of the true chronology of human presence on the earth eventually shook the consciousness of historians too, incapable as they were of remaining indiferent to the problem of the temporal connection between human beings and nature. The past was stretched further and further back, almost beyond imagination, which signifcantly infuenced the refections of social theorists, who wondered about the precarious position of the ephemeral human being submerged in this overwhelming, endless current. A very illustrative example of this impact – and of its associated metaphors – can be seen in the changing response ofered by Ralph Waldo Emerson to the challenge launched by the discovery of deep time of nature, and his successive attempts to project a new vision of the individual, politics, and the social world more in line with the contingency, the mutability, and the endless transformations of the natural world (Allen 2008, 187–216).20 The awareness of the insignifcance of historical time in the context of the physical universe contributed to relativizing even further the capacity of historiography to encompass the entire past. That history omits much of the past and that there is an enormous diference in volume between what occurred and what is remembered, recovered, and recounted is an idea expressed in many ways over the last two centuries, from Flaubert’s famous phrase “writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful,” to Constantin Fasolt’s observation that “history only scrapes the surface of the past.” As Lowenthal notes (2015, 336–7), after mentioning these and other metaphors, “no historical inquiry can retrieve the virtually infnite sum total of past events.” And it goes without saying that the coining of the concept of Anthropocene at the beginning of the 21st century, combined with the development of emerging disciplines such as big history, has reformulated this theme upon new foundations. Some well-known works by Bruno Latour and Dipesh Chakrabarty – who has advocated a new regime of planetary historicity – have redefned the concept of historical time, demolishing the traditional barriers between human sciences and natural sciences and superimposing the diferent chronological scales of the times of the cosmos, of the earth, of life, and of humanity. And, given that, on the one hand, it has been shown to be as absurd as it is impossible to recount everything that actually happened and, on the other,

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the dimensions of the past are literally unfathomable, maps – to represent both spatial and temporal landscapes – have become more necessary and indispensable than ever (Christian 2004). The very writing of history can be considered “a kind of mapping” of past reality, that is, “a packaging of vicarious experience” in which certain information and patterns have been distilled but declining to include “everything it’s possible to know” (Gaddis 2002, 33–4). Recently, other types of visual metaphors have been invented, which seek to represent the past, the present, and the future by means of diverse iconographic devices, such as scale sets and diagrams. Some of them graphically represent, for instance, past, present, and future humanity in three blocks, with one fgure per 10 billion inhabitants. The frst diagram symbolizes the total volume of human beings that have existed from their origins until the now; the second, the generation living now; the third, the number of human beings that, given a predetermined scenario, it is possible to speculate might live from now until the Earth’s extinction (some of these diagrams can be seen in MacAskill 2022, chap. 1, and in https://ourworldindata.org/longtermism). The fedgling literature on so-called long-termism proves, moreover, that the extraordinary stretching of the past that began early in the 18th century has been counter-balanced in our era from the other end of the temporal arc by a substantial lengthening of the future (or at least by the desire to ensure its viability against all kinds of threats and dangers). 3.3

Present and future

In the unlikely event of anybody being surprised by the fact that, in a book of historiography like this, I also address, albeit briefy, metaphors for the present and the future, I would remind them of two things. First, that the modern notion, the most abstract and comprehensive notion of history – that conception that begins to be perceived in historical-philosophical works of the early decades of the 19th century – not only refers to the past but encompasses the entirety of events and processes of importance to humanity in the past, the present, and the future. Second, that modernity is essentially a future-centric temporal regime,21 based on the constitutive futurition of the modern human being (in this sense, the Age of History “discovers” the past but focuses on the future). If Enlightenment historiography dealt with the past, aiming at a “future promise for social perfection” (Kelley 2005, 230), and one of the declared objectives of 19th-century philosophers of history was to predict the direction of “historical movement” and accelerate the march towards that coveted goal, quickly leaving behind the ills of the past,22 in the 20th century there were legion philosophers, following in Heidegger’s footsteps, who proclaimed that “in a way, having-been arises from the future” (Being and Time, § 65). One should not be surprised, therefore, that the romantic theology of history was accompanied by a true “apotheosis of the future” (Duque 1997, 5, 156), and that since then, this has been the dominant dimension of historical

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times. Nonetheless, one is struck by the sharp contrast between Hobbes’ description of the future as “a fction of the mind” in the mid-17th century (Leviathan, I, iii) and the absolute faith in a splendid future expressed by ideologues of very diverse political leanings barely two centuries later. John O’Sullivan and Karl Marx, for example, ofer their respective forecasts with regard to the destiny of the United States and in relation to socialism, as if it were an ineluctable future. At the end of the day, as Albert Hirschman shrewdly observes, the crux of progressive rhetoric lies in stating that one has history on one’s side. If we consider its etymology, the term “present” (praesens, which comes from the Latin particles prae- and esse) in principle means “being there” and refers to what lies ahead in sight. In European languages, it originally has a spatial meaning and subsequently developed a temporal meaning related to the present time, that is, that which one experiences hic et nunc, in the very place where and at the very moment when one speaks.23 However, as Landwehr has insisted, the present, the only time that is lived immediately, is systematically associated with another far less tangible type of time, which we can call absent time. This other unpresent time, whose degree of reality is necessarily very diferent, is divided into two main modalities or temporal projections, which we call past and future and which essentially are no more than other “present’s own various modes of existence,” the former referring to times gone by and the latter to yet to be (Tamm and Olivier 2019, 13).24 The ontological status of each of them – past and future – would however be markedly diferent, for, as Hobbes inferred a long time ago (Leviathan, I, iii) and Koselleck confrmed (2002, 132) “past events are contained in our experience and are empirically verifable. What is to come is fundamentally beyond our experience and, as such, is not empirically verifable.” Among the many tropes that have been applied to the historical present – besides that of a foggy place in which one cannot clearly distinguish one’s surroundings – are, of course, that of the vantage point, for example a permanently open window in a moving vehicle or a watchtower on a mountaintop but also that of the eye of the hurricane, that of a kind of blind spot from which you cannot see your own eyeball, that of the eye of a needle through which the thread of time passes (Safranski 2015, 327), but also that of a trap, tie, or prison, as when it is said that, just as nobody can jump upon their own shadow, one is inescapably anchored in the present. Several of these images have been perceptively discussed by David Carr (2018), and it is interesting to note that while some extoll the present as a privileged vantage point, or as a simple place of transtemporal passage, others lament its intrinsic limitations. When it comes to underlining the inevitability or the contingency of the present, metaphors have been drawn from two classical, alternative, and incompatible visions of the evolution of the species: one, pyramidal, and the other, arborescent. The former is consistent with the presentist, teleological, and chronocentric interpretations that liken the present to the apex of the pyramid of the past. The latter turns the image around and contemplates the

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present as just one more of the numerous branches of the arborescent structure of the past. In similar fashion to a person wandering through a maze full of bifurcations and fnding themself at a given moment at a relatively random point of their route, our here and now would refer to some of the possibilities selected, while many others were left behind. As Spanish historian Luis Díez del Corral wisely wrote over half a century ago, “the past does not operate upon the present by pointing it in a specifc direction, but by placing it at crossroads” (Fernández-Sebastián 2021c, 51). At the other extreme, we would fnd that misconception that Raymond Aron called l’illusion rétrospective de la fatalité (“the retrospective illusion of inevitability”). On occasions, chronocentric hubris is not content with contemplating the present from an embryological perspective that renders the latter the necessary culmination of all the past, its ineluctable telos, but regards the present as “the very hinge of history.” According to some contemporaries, their own time would indeed boast absolute temporal primacy over the course of the centuries. Full of transcendental events, the present in which they live would be the pivotal period of all times, the great divide, “the crux of the human enterprise” (Fowles 1974, 66). It is perhaps more important to point out a decisive change in the position of the present, that is, in its relationship with the other two panels that make up the triptych of time. With modernity, the present ceased to defne itself principally via counter-position with the past and focused on the future (Gumbrecht 1978, 114–23). From seeing itself as the result and outfow of the previous time, it came to see itself as the threshold and, above all, the fountainhead of the time to come. Henceforth, instead of seeing itself as the culmination of a “completed past,” it would perceive itself more and more frequently as a platform for a “projected future” (or, in other words, as the past of that future). The present would now conceive of itself, in short, more as an ante- than as a post-: it would be more a pre-future than an ex-past. And from another point of view, while in the cyclical time model, the present was no more than the lethargic waiting room for a recurrent future that did not deliver major surprises,25 in the linear model of irreversible time, it would be understood as a feld of activity, a laboratory where an open future is diligently constructed (Landwehr 2018, 259). A future so laden with expectations that it was necessary to discard some of them: the future became “an overstocked storehouse of possibilities from which we can choose only by means of negation” (Luhmann 1982, 272). However, rather the moderns’ exaggerated emphasis upon the future, living the present, instead of yearning for the past or sacrifcing oneself for the future, continued to be an ideal characteristic of certain vitalist minds. A few revolutionaries were of the same opinion. As Alexander Herzen wrote, in the mid-19th century, “man ‘wants to be neither a passive grave-digger of the past, nor the unconscious midwife of the future.’ He wants to live in his own day” (Berlin 1994b, 95). Late-nineteenth- and early-20th-century Western European culture evidenced an extraordinary interest in the present as the

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true “time on a human scale” (Wright and Fryxell 2021). And, although it is debatable whether or not our time is particularly characterized by presentism, there is little doubt that the contemporary period is a voracious, insatiable, cannibalistic, and omnivorous time that, like Saturn, devours the times that precede and follow it (praesens edax temporum). Yet, on the other hand, the present “has become one of the key conceptual tools for synchronising multiple temporalities in the contemporary Western world” (Tamm and Olivier 2019, 13). However, bearing in mind that “the present” is an elastic notion, which can designate a very short or relatively long lapse of time, for all those who strove to understand and diagnose their own age, the question they immediately asked referred to the duration of the present. When did the present begin (i.e. the era in which one lives or thinks one lives)? And how long will it last? The early refections by a number of 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century intellectuals on the Enlightenment and later on modernity are inseparable from their acute consciousness of the present. In fact, the word modernus was at frst basically a synonym of present, and when diverse European authors – from the German romantics to Valéry, and from Zola to the avant-gardes, as well as numerous philosophers, politicians, and historians – refect upon this theme, they often seek retrospectively to delimit a short time span or a founding event for the beginnings of modernity or opt to signal a landmark experienced by themselves that would allegedly open a new present of as yet barely defned profles (Gumbrecht 1978, 114–20). It is especially relevant for the historian, as this time frame would underpin contemporary history. However, as I was saying, the range of durations and qualities of the present – or rather, of the presents – is enormous. In Western history it would fluctuate between the in-stans (instant) which is obviously a spatial metaphor, and the nunc-stans, standing now or eternal present, although strictly speaking, eternity should be understood as the absence of time or rather its antithesis (tempus fugit, aeternitas manet). “The Present of the thinking ego” has historically been conceived of in different ways, from the medieval hodiernus (of this present day) to Bergson’s présent qui dure (enduring present) or William James’s specious present (Arendt 1977–78, II, 12), passing through other traditional or no less fundamental notions, such as the Greek Kairos (occasio or right moment), reinterpreted in 19th- and 20th-century Europe as Augenblick or decisive moment (it is also worth mentioning here the peculiar Benjaminian conception of Jetztzeit or now-time, that instant in which memory flashes up, the past is reactivated and merges with the present). 26 The historical, psychological, philosophical, and literary representations of the epiphany of the instant as a punctual present, in other words, as a very brief transition between past and future, include images such as the razor’s edge, the eye of the needle, and the edge of a stream rushing from the top of a waterfall. However, from the end of the 19th century onwards, William James, Henri Bergson, George Herbert Mead, Edmund Husserl, among

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others, fatly denied that it was possible to reduce the present to a knife’s blade27 or the unmoving brink of a waterfall and advocated an extended present. William James thought that our experience of the present possesses a certain breadth, “as if we were sitting on a saddle from which we look at two temporal directions, forwards and backwards.” Bergson employs musical metaphors – some of which recall those of Augustine of Hippo – to explain the duration [durée] and the complexity of time based on fusion and coexistence between pasts, presents, and futures. The phenomenology of Husserl’s temporality is based, as we know, on his notions of retention and protention. Didi-Huberman (2017, 30) opted for a textile metaphor: “the present is woven from multiple pasts.” As for Mead, in his The Philosophy of the Present (1931), he contends not only that “the unit of existence is the act, not the moment” and that, therefore, “the present is half past and half to come” (in a similar vein, Randall Collins compares the present to a saddleback on which the past and the future merge imperceptibly: Collins 1998, 858), but also that history has to be renewed and rewritten in the light of successive presents. With good reason, the living present is “the locus of reality,” whence are permanently created and recreated new pasts and new futures. That the moderns’ visions of the past are usually subordinated to the strategic needs of the moment and to their expectations is an observation made by diverse authors, with diferent emphases and using a variety of tropes (among others, the image of the writing of history as a palimpsest periodically updated in successive presents). In his book on historism, Meinecke (1972, 62) noted that, after Voltaire “the battle about the interpretation of universal history in the past would always go hand in hand with all the controversies about the shape of things to come, and the one could not be carried on without the other.” Benjamin expressed a similar idea in his own way shortly afterwards: “as fowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history” (Theses on the Philosophy of History, IV). The extraordinary weight of expectations in interpreting the past is already evident in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, for, as Löwith (1949, 6) wrote, “in the Hebrew and Christian view of history the past is a promise to the future; consequently, the interpretation of the past becomes a prophecy in reverse, demonstrating the past as a meaningful ‘preparation’ for the future.” With time, this idea has become a commonplace among social scientists. Alberto Melucci (1996, 12) summarized it thus: While we remain aware that the future is born of the past, it is equally true that the past is also continuously shaped by the future. Whenever we confront the possible – as in planning for the future – when we make a decision that anticipates the action to come, the past is re-examined, amended, and given a new meaning. We thus continually rewrite our own pasts and that of the world. Our memory is selective and reconstructs history and biography according to a project for the future. . . .

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This bond between past and future can only be forged in the realm of the present: presentness is the place where past and future meet in a circular relationship. Niklas Luhmann (1976, 145–6) also believes that the present is the crucial place that integrates the three modalities of time, as it is there where the future and the past occur. Moreover, returning to the question of the duration of the present, he observes that social imaginaries have varied considerably over the last two centuries. The lengthy, slow present of traditional societies would have experienced a narrowing and a substantial acceleration in modern times to widen again recently in an accordion-like movement.28 Indeed, if we heed the theories of various cultural critics of our time, the present would have extended again, annexing the adjacent past and future by means of a series of absorbent concepts and social practices such as memory, heritage, indebtedness, climate change, and futurology. With the contemporary experience of “our broad present” (Gumbrecht 2014), a monstrous present or “dictatorship of the immediate” (J. Baschet) that invades neighbouring territories, “a permanent, elusive, and almost immobile present” would have been produced, “which nevertheless attempts to create its own historical time. It is as though there were nothing but the present, like an immense stretch of water restlessly rippling” (Hartog 2015, 17–18; Bouton 2022, 114, 134). Nevertheless, the new ways of wrestling with social time, propitiated by, among other factors, the eclipse of utopias, the concern over the future of the human race, and the discovery of the Anthropocene and Great Acceleration demonstrate that the presentist “regime of historicity” is neither unique nor homogeneous. Various authors have insisted, in this sense, that the plurality of temporalities or polychrony composed of diverse scales, rhythms, and overlapping and sometimes discordant articulations between the present, the past, and the future is a better description of the current situation from the temporal point of view than that provided by a single label such as presentism (Bouton 2022, 365–73). For his part, Zoltán Simon (2019) has argued that a new historical sensibility is emerging, characterized by the disconnection of past and future. In relation to the future, numerous voices have maintained that it has to be approached obliquely via the past and the present. And, beyond the apothegm historia magistra vitae, shared by so many authors since antiquity, the idea that expectations are necessarily nourished by experiences has been expressed by means of diferent poetic and tropological formulae. “Tomorrow is the Gorgon; a man must only see it mirrored in the shining shield of yesterday. If he sees it directly he is turned to stone,” wrote Chesterton (“The Fear of the Past,” 1910). Ortega argued that when, by virtue of our condition as human beings who are always projecting themselves into the hereafter, we are “shot toward the future, we recoil from it as from a greased slide [the original Spanish is that “rebotamos en el futuro”: “we bounce into

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the future”] and fall back into the past” – as “the past is the only arsenal where we can fnd the means of making our future real” – to then “take a fresh start into the future” (Ortega 1962, 120). Recently, Lucian Hölscher (2022, 33) compared the complex relationships between times, particularly those that give rise to past futures and future pasts, to the ricochets of billiard balls, movements that the player attempts to control by aiming at a specifc target: the present.29 3.3.1

Lights

The changing relations between the past, the present, and the future have often been metaphorized as a play of lights and shadows, dawns and dusks. Thus, while Lamennais considered in 1825 that “the past is like a lamp placed at the entrance to the future, to dispel some of the darkness that covers it,” 15 years later, his compatriot Tocqueville (La Démocratie en Amérique, 1840) observed that the past had ceased to throw its light upon the future, and consequently the mind of man wandered in obscurity. François Hartog (2020, 225, 276, 2022, 98–102) has evoked such images on more than one occasion and skilfully used them to characterize the successive regimes of historicity.30 While in the premodern world, light undoubtedly came from the past, in the modern world, the source of light had been radically displaced: now it was projected from the future onto the present and the past. Later, as, with the failure of utopias, the future weakens and ceases to be a source of irradiation, a brand-new presentist regime emerges. According to Hartog, in the fnal decades of the 20th century, the present would have taken over as dominant time, casting a deceptive light – some would say projecting its long shadow – upon the future and subjecting the past to one-sided judgements based on its own values and criteria. Now, in this century, with the growing concern over global warming and the posited entry into a genuinely planetary age, the future seems to be taking over once again, although it is now a dark and crepuscular light, which warns us of the unmitigated catastrophe for which we would be destined if the tyranny of the present led us to ignore the extremely serious consequences of some current policies for future generations.31 It is highly symptomatic in this respect that the future is sometimes metaphorized as a dead star – the guiding star of enlightened and positivist modernity would have ceased to shine (Ruiz 2022, 11–12) – even as a black hole for which history, at best, could only provide some weak illumination (van Eijnatten and Huijnen 2021, 80). Yet, if we leave aside lights, there are two most frequently employed specifc metaphors for the relations between present and future: that of germination or vegetal growth and that of the horizon. While behind the former is a long tradition that dates back to antiquity, the latter is considerably more recent.

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Seeds

Among the most commonly used metaphors employed to refer to the engendering and organic growth of an idea, movement or political, spiritual or aesthetic current, are those agricultural images that implicitly compare these processes with the sprouting and development of a plant, especially in its initial phase. Judging by the frequency of their appearances in sources, naturalistic metaphors that point towards the future would have been indispensable in historical writing. Nineteenth-century texts, in particular, are brimming with allusions to fowering and the springtime sprouting of plants, to buds that bloom, chrysalids that turn into butterfies, embryos that take shape, and eggs from which emerge chicks that will soon grow. Tropes such as these are very common in historiography, poetry, and political rhetoric, when authors seek to draw their readers’ or listeners’ attention to a more or less splendid future that is about to arrive. Historical prose also admits a retrospective vision of such processes, particularly well suited to the brewing of revolutions. Thus, in any school history book, we can read that “the revolutionary ideas germinated in the salons of the French Enlightenment.” But in activism and engagé literature, the norm is for this kind of biological languages to be applied not to a future past but to a situation that is occurring or has yet to arrive. “Every century carries in it the seed of the events that will unfold in the ensuing century,” wrote, for instance, South American revolutionary Bernardo de Monteagudo in an essay Sobre la necesidad de una Federación General entre los Estados Hispano-americanos y plan de su organización (Lima, 1825). In the fnal lines of his novel Germinal (1885), the title of which was sufciently eloquent, Émile Zola described the slow but inexorable germination in the fertile furrows of late 19th-century France, of a combative working class that, like a good seed, announces the imminent harvest of an avenging army of workers that will soon lead a great victorious revolution.32 Like an old mole, Chronos quietly grows underground before hatching as a transforming Kairos. Another similar image, to be found above all in militant literature, but also in historiography, is the spark needed to light the revolutionary fre (or that sets of the powder keg, which presupposes that the powder was already there beforehand). It seems logical for revolution, as a promise of future, to don this metaphorical fnery, particularly in an age of boom of natural sciences. However, the images that show how from something small and fragile can sprout something big and strong are old. We can fnd them in both biblical tradition and the Mediterranean classical world. Sufce it to recall the Aristotelian theory of potentiality and actuality, and his teleology of fnal causes, developed centuries later by scholasticism. In addition, the parable of the mustard seed and the leaven (Matt. 13:31-3; Mark 4:30-2; Luke 13:18-21), which announce that the Kingdom of Heaven, like a tiny seed sown in fertile ground, will grow and become a thriving tree or, like leaven, will ferment, in a short time,

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a great mass of dough. Both parables show how a powerful kingdom can emerge from small beginnings. (The metaphor of the seed is very present in Asia, for example in Buddhist doctrines: Collins 1998, 224.) Later, when history was temporalized and became more abstract, the present would appear as the seed, the seedbed, or the early sprouting of a better future. Thus, Herder, trusting in the gradual refnement of nature and society, states in his Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (1800) that “our Humanity is only preparation, the bud of a future fower.”33 Thereafter, the political-botanical rhetoric of the maturing of conditions necessary to reap the desired fruits would be the order of the day in 19th-century political and social history. Some frmly believed that even the plagues of society of their day might serve as compost for an excellent future harvest. Spanish revolutionary Francisco Pi y Margall was fully convinced that “under corruption, future good will germinate, as good seed germinates under manure” (La reacción y la revolución, 1854). The advantage of referring to natural phenomena, easily understood by most people, when speaking of the future, is apparent too in the use made by various philosophers and writers of the image of pregnancy and of all the terminology associated with its diferent stages, from insemination to birth. And it goes without saying that evolutionist theories, very soon transferred from natural to historical and social sciences, contributed decisively to the expansion of these and other organic analogies. Again, this is a long-standing metaphorics, the origins of which can be traced back several centuries. Leibniz employs this biological image when, in the introduction to his Nouveaux Essais, he notes that “the present is big with the child of the future, and flled with the life of the past.” This Leibnizian dictum and other similar formulae would often appear in the press and pamphlets of the Atlantic revolutions at a time when hearts appeared to be flled with high hopes of an open future (I am referring to that kind of hope, related to utopia, whose conceptual particularities were analysed by the philosopher Ernst Bloch in the middle of the 20th century in his work Das Prinzip Hofnung [The Principle of Hope]). The phrase “le temps présent est gros d’avenir,” which had been used as a motto by Louis Sébastien Mercier in his book L’An 2440 (1772), was heard again during the French Revolution (Luhmann 1976, 132–3). It was also to be found in the Iberian Atlantic, especially in the wake of the political crisis of 1808. In a Brazilian newspaper of 1822, and in 1830, Seville’s Alberto Lista, Central American José del Valle and Colombian José E. Caro wrote, with diferent nuances, that “la edad presente está preñada de la futura” (“the present age is pregnant with the future age”) (Fernández-Sebastián 2021c, 456–7). When gestation ends, the birth of the future society is expected to involve a painful delivery. This idea, indeed, is present in the work of various utopians and ideologues of modern revolutions, who obliquely allude to violence, implying that undergoing temporary sufering is unavoidable in order to reach the longed-for paradise on earth. Marx contended that “force is

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the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one” (Capital I, 31), and, against the advocates of gradual reforms, Karl Kautsky stressed that “the revolutionary act of birth” is a necessarily sudden and abrupt event (Paulin-Booth 2023, 199). In this case too, we fnd signifcant precedents in Christian tradition. In one of his epistles (Romans 8:22), Paul had written that, awaiting the imminent Second Coming, “the whole creation that been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now” (in a similar vein, John 16:21-2).34 3.3.3

Horizons

Another fairly common biological metaphor referring to the future is that of the child, whether in relation to their gradual conversion into an adult or accompanied by the emphasis on fliation relationships. However, the trope par excellence for the future, used progressively since the 19th century by philosophers, historians, and theorists, and vulgarized by journalists and businessmen to such a degree that it is almost no longer perceived as a form of fgurative language, is that of the horizon. The allegorical use of this geographical concept was only possible from the moment when the future in abstract form began to be conceived of as an open inner-worldly period, capable of encompassing everything that might happen to an individual, a society, or an entire world in times ahead (Hölscher 1999). This could only occur after a signifcant part of the human race – with the age of discoveries and the building of the frst great transoceanic empires – began gradually to imagine themselves immersed in a space-time continuum that encompassed the entire globe. With the advance of modernity, the unstable equilibrium between the three faces of time clearly tilted in favour of the future – a future that appeared to be increasingly mouldable by human action (in this sense, we would see a proliferation of “constructionist” images, such as the blank page or the screen upon which desires were projected). The phenomenon can be observed on many levels (for the Iberian worlds, see Fernández-Sebastián 2016), from the expansion of a specifc vocabulary in relation to the future to the cult of progress, the futurization of the writing of history (philosophical history in particular), the boom in utopianisms and the characterization of politics and philosophy as two spheres of thought and action specialized in planning the future, a trend that would reach paroxysm with the aesthetic currents that accompanied the fascist movement and the futurist explosion that followed the Russian Revolution (Ruiz 2022, 91–2). In this new political and intellectual environment, philosophers like Heidegger and Ortega y Gasset insisted on the notion of “project” and on “futurition” as a fundamental structure of human life. The Spaniard frequently used the images of archers and seafarers to illustrate the peculiar situation of modern man, striving to hit the target with their arrows and reach their port of destination with their ships. “Living,” Ortega would say, “is feeling oneself propelled towards

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the future” (Pasado y porvenir para el hombre actual, 1951) (in Spanish, as in French, Italian, Portuguese, and other romance languages, there are two diferent words for the future: futuro and porvenir, two terms that are not strictly synonymous: David 2014, 849–50). And in the second half of the 20th century, the long, slow agony of faith in progress – epitomized perhaps in Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot – did not preclude a steady increase in interest in scrutinizing and controlling the collective future (let us recall that the neologism futurology began to be disseminated in the media from 1960 onwards). It was in this modern context of concern about the future that the notion of horizon adopted a temporal aspect and a sense of opening. Along with the habitual uses, linked to visual experience and everyday geography, referring to the line where the sky appears to meet the earth, and also the spherical section of the world globe delimited by that circumference, the word “horizon” began to be used fguratively in certain contexts to denote the mobile frontier – which the triumphant vision of progress believed was permanently advancing towards an open future of increasing improvement – between the real, the existing, the experienced, and that which did not yet exist but could materialize in the short, medium, or long term. In parallel fashion to what occurred with other spatial terms of this nature – utopia or progress, for example – the temporalization of the word “horizon” made it possible to subsume under it the set of possibilities and scenarios that might be anticipated in any given situation or area, thus signifying not only a physical limit or insurmountable barrier but also and principally a range of more or less achievable hopes, expectations, intentions, and forecasts (in fact, when the cultivators of Begrifsgeschichte invoke the horizon in an explanatory context, they usually do so to emphasize the performative dimension of concepts as factors of social praxis, though it should not be forgotten that they constitute “limits to possible experience and to conceivable theory”). This semantic broadening towards the temporal therefore involved adding a new dynamics and expansive meaning to a word that had previously alluded almost exclusively to the maximum scope, thinking essentially of spatial and closed terms (ὅρος means boundary).35 And, as the reading of an expressive passage by Portuguese António Vieira on the horizons of time quoted in Chapter 2, Section 3) has enabled us to guess, it was geographical and scientifc discoveries that, by connecting in unusual fashion spatial expansion and temporal progression, rendered possible this semantic extension by metaphorical means. This semantic trend, typical of modernity, which consists in temporalizing spatial concepts, would have begun with the notion of present, upon which the concept of horizon largely depended. For if we think of the primitive present-here as present-now and we conceive of its temporal dynamics as an incessant movement forward, the horizon will almost automatically come to refer not only to the line where the land or sea seems to meet the sky but also to what might happen in the future and, more abstractly, to a permanently expanding range of possibilities. Yet, as Mannheim saw (1960, 178–80; see

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the comments by Pickering 2004, 278–9), this range of possibilities in turn entails two very diferent horizons: frst, an ordinary horizon of expectations that encompasses the foreseeable, although it always leaves a gap for unforeseen facts. However, especially in times of turmoil, it is also possible to think of an anomalous, disruptive, and unfathomable horizon, in which genuinely unimaginable things could occur, including major structural alterations that would imply a systemic change. There is, in this respect, another facet of the horizon, as yet little explored by historiography, that I should like to mention. Curiously, as it acquired semantic breadth and was temporalized (a process that only appears fully to have developed after the Second World War), the horizon partly lost its horizontality. From the mid-19th century onwards, the horizon ceased to be only horizontal and became a vertical concept too. First in the feld of geology, and then in archaeology, the term “horizons” began to be applied to the diverse strata, layers, or levels superimposed below the earth’s surface. Thus, people began to speak of stratigraphic, edaphic, and archaeological horizon (later it was also applied to stadial or developmental disciplines such as embryology or psychology). And, with the transfer to the theory of history via metaphors, these new meanings made it possible easily to criss-cross the two meanings in both directions: the diachronic extension of the temporal horizon and the depth of a specifc synchronic horizon. Thanks to these novel uses of the word “horizon,” historiography in general and the history of concepts in particular had at their disposal an invaluable theoretical tool, consisting above all in a privileged point of articulation between synchrony and diachrony that helps us to think about the simultaneity of the non-contemporary (the truth is, however, that to date, these new dimensions of the trope have seldom been explored by scholars). So, when Gadamer or Koselleck, in Husserl’s footsteps, employs in their theories the heuristics of the horizon – which has, among others, the advantage of its implicit perspectivism, for one always looks out over the horizon or performs an excavation from a given point – thus undertaking the spatialization of time, they are really making the return journey. Figuratively temporalized in the modern period, the concept of horizon can easily be (re) spatialized by means of a regressive (counter)metaphor that returns it to its original literality. Playing with both dimensions, time can be imagined as a horizon because previously the horizon was obliquely thought of as time. Of course, what is then most noticeable about the horizon is not so much its (traditional) facet of limit as its productive and plural aspects, since each horizon of meaning, which can be crossed, provides one of various contexts of interpretation. Moreover, two of Koselleck’s most celebrated historical categories – horizon of expectation [Erwartungshorizont] and layers of time [Zeitschichten] – both unequivocally modern (I am sure that neither of these expressions would have been fully understood by speakers three centuries ago) point towards a unifed metaphorics: none other than that of the horizon, understood either

126 Conceptual metaphors for history in its primary defnition – horizontal, geographical, linear – in the frst case or in its secondary meaning – vertical, geological, tridimensional – in the second.36 Meanwhile, the Gadamerian poetics of the fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung), by pluralizing points of view, situating them in time and creating a dialogue between them, points to the inescapable historicity of comprehension. This image (to which Pickering has retorted (2004, 276), on the basis of Bakhtin’s alternative proposal, which makes it possible to preserve distance), helps us, in my view, to understand the complex dynamics of historical times and, in particular, the hermeneutics of changing horizons of pasts, presents, and futures. And I do not believe it is an exaggeration to say that all historical semantics pivot on the dialogical link between these ephemeral horizons of present pasts, withered presents, and past futures that we have to translate, retranslate, and rewrite as they all sink inexorably into the abyss of time. In his famous lecture on the task of the historian, read before Prussian Academy and to which I referred earlier, Humboldt was correct in articulating – without mentioning – horizon, perspective, and distance to suggest that the chaos of the present is only clarifed as that moment recedes and is silhouetted against the horizon of the past. Thereafter, the use and abuse of the horizon metaphor by German historians and philosophers underwent ups and downs during the 19th century. On the threshold of the last quarter of the century, Friedrich Nietzsche (On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 1874, § 1 and 9) warned against the harmful consequences of the excess of history. A continuous displacement of horizon-perspectives, he said, weakened the spirit of the young: “every living thing can become healthy, strong and fruitful only within a horizon.” The metaphor of the horizon is more or less harmoniously associated with a network of tropes with which it has an undoubted afnity, such as the poetics of terra incognita and of the frontier. The former is closely linked with discoveries and the challenge of the unexplored but also with the spirit of conquest and utopian imagination (we will examine this issue a little more closely in Chapter 5). As for the frontier, if there is a country where this trope has so captured people’s imagination that they have made it an emblem of their nation, that is without a doubt the United States. A not insignifcant contribution in this respect was that made by the “Frontier Thesis” launched by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893. Turner is known to have regarded American history essentially as a westward expansion. Half a century earlier, the coiner of the idea of Manifest Destiny, John O’Sullivan, combined spatial with temporal language, mixing a vulgarized progressive philosophy of history with fedgling nationalism. In one of his articles in the Democratic Review (“The Great Nation of Futurity,” 1839), O’Sullivan wrote, for instance: “The expansive future is our arena, and for our history. We are entering on its untrodden space” (Allen 2008, 17). The Hegelian-like metaphor that identifes certain individuals, cities, or nations with the prow or ram of history, and later of the avant-garde, is

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obviously closely related to the metaphorics of the horizon, where History is understood, in the modern way, as humanity’s voyage on the ocean of time. Needless to say, with incredulity towards metanarratives, much of this metaphorics has grown obsolete. 3.3.4

Shards

The crisis of the future, evident from the 1980s onwards, could be seen as a corollary of the general crisis of time which I dealt with in Chapter 2.8. The growing awareness of the serious dangers the future might hold (Risk Society) – there has even been talk of “the death of the future” (Hartog 2022, 316) – and shattered time, transformed into a pile of shards, has fragmented times to an almost unimaginable degree. This profound cultural change, which accompanied the decline of the idea of progress, has pluralized pasts, presents, and futures to the point of threatening the continuity of the three great collective singulars – in this case “the future,” which appears to have disintegrated (Hölscher 1999, 226). And, naturally, the multiplication of alternative scenarios, many of them disquieting,37 is bound to have consequences for the writing of history. In the concise terms of Zoltán B. Simon (2018, 199) “new future means new history.” In the light of this fragmentation and uncertainty, the understanding is that those who seek to avoid unwanted futures such as the dire consequences of climate change are battling to reunite these disperse fragments under the slogan “one planet, one humanity” (Ruiz 2022, 110). Yet, even if it were possible to recompose the unity of the future, the result would be very diferent, for, as Bruno Latour wrote (2017, 245), “we cannot continue to believe in the old [modern] future if we want to have a future at all.” As regards historians and theorists, all sorts of historiographical experiments have been proposed recently combining the three ekstasis of time, thought experiments, and speculative history – of which counterfactual history, “what-if?” scenarios, possible pasts, and virtual futures are only the best-known part – that oblige historians to sharpen their sense of historicity, adopting sometimes contrived perspectives that play with times and demand of historians complicated foreshortenings and torsions. Among the most original and systematic proposals for an alternative history, sensitive to the new exploded futures, I would highlight Hölscher’s (2022) commitment to a virtual historiography prepared to transcend the horizon of the present moment and open up towards the future. And, among the nine second-order times (see n. 4), “two in particular deserve our attention in the context of historical futurology: past futures and future pasts” (Hölscher 2022, 33).38 Ewa Domańska, meanwhile, in the context of a debate over “anthropocenic historical knowledge,” has suggested practising “what might be called the ‘depresentifcation of historical knowledge’,” as a type of “anticipatory knowledge” aimed at historicizing the present, “distancing from it and looking at the present as if it is already past” (Simon et al. 2021,

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424–5). These are just a couple of examples of a burgeoning theoretical feld in which there is a proliferation of attempts and proposals to write a diferent kind of history in keeping with the crisis of the future through which we are passing. The “excess” of future provoked by the gloomy current awareness that to a large extent the game is over and the generations to come will pay the price may result in two contrasting attitudes. One can choose to prioritize the improvement of the long-term future by putting an end to the present tyranny while taking advantage of the current period of fexibility (MacAskill 2022). Alternatively, defeatism can take over. Such individuals believe there is no further action to take, including those sufering from pathological eco-anxiety and invincible solastalgia, who are caught of guard by “the irruption of too much future at once, like a wave that breaks and sweeps the deck of a ship struggling in heavy weather” (Hartog 2020, 331). Notes 1 Implicitly, this diagram seems to refer to an absolute, empty, homogeneous, linear, unidirectional, and irreversible time. This essentially Newtonian time scheme would be challenged by various thinkers and approaches. Among the alternatives that posit other models of time – relative, hybrid, non-linear, revocable, lacking a defnite direction – are the consideration of several temporal currents advancing simultaneously in diferent directions, the image of a plurality of superimposed temporal strata, the variable rhythms of a time that is sometimes accelerated and sometimes retarded, and so on. (For a proposal of several successive timelines at diferent scales, see Christian 2004, 493–504.) 2 Pickering (2004, 277), however, has suggested inverting both images and has spoken in principle in a counter-intuitive fashion of horizon of experience and space of expectation, once again demonstrating the malleability of tropes, even of those that are seemingly more consolidated. 3 “Ayer se fue; mañana no ha llegado; / hoy se está yendo sin parar un punto: / soy un fue, y un será, y un es cansado.” English version at www.spainthenandnow. com/spanish-literature/quevedo-ah-de-la-vida. 4 The possible combinations for each of the dimensions of time would give rise to a total of nine second-order times, namely past-past, past-present, past-future; present-past, present-present, present-future; and future-past, future-present and future-future. 5 In his essay La Notion de l’Autorité [The Notion of Authority] (1942), the French philosopher Alexandre Kojève also speculates on the times of politics, which he relates to the three classical powers and three corresponding forms of authority. He associates the past with the fgure of the judge (judicial power), the present with that of the master (executive power), and the future with the fgure of the leader (legislative power). 6 Traditionally, the standard position of many historians has been to search in the past for what interests the present, but now something quite diferent is beginning to happen. Those who write in the present do not always recognize that past as their own past: a new past emerges that has been labelled dissociated past (Simon 2019c, 68–9), and that in this theoretical construction has to be complemented by disconnective futures (Simon and Tamm 2021, 7–8).

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7 In a recent essay, David Armitage (2023) identifes several kinds of presentisms and, in line with certain prevailing trends in a broad sector of academia, favours not only ontological but also epistemological and ethical presentism. Subsequently, in a round table, I have countered this approach, which I believe to be mistaken (Fernández-Sebastián 2023a). 8 Sociologist Jib Fowles (1974) coined the term “chronocentrism,” specifcally referring to the egotistical belief that one’s own times are on the cusp of history. His article is a denunciation of the subjection of the future to the present on the part of chronocentrists, but he barely mentions the past. The most extreme position would be that of those who insist that only the present exists and actually deny the existence of the past (Rufel 2018, 176). 9 The tension between the present and the past generates some peculiarities in the German language, where there is a double present (Gegenwart/ Anwesenheit) and a double past (vergangen/gewesen) (David 2014, 847–9). 10 Odo Marquard (2001, 75) has compared the past with which we are familiar in times of accelerated changes with a teddy bear onto which one obsessively clutches when the world changes very swiftly and becomes uncertain and alien. The same issue has been addressed from another point of view by Fritzsche (2004). Before the all-encompassing and diferentiating concept of the past as a time other was available, the adjective “preterite” (Lat. praeteritus, plural praeterita) referred to things and events that have gone, that have passed away, that have been put aside. 11 Burckhardt referred to the modern transformation of the lived past into historical knowledge in these poetic terms: “What once was joy and misery, must now be transformed into knowledge” (quoted by Ankersmit 2005, 327). 12 The overlapping of allegorical elements in visual representations of death and time, such as the skeleton or the scythe during modern times, and the metaphorical use of death to refer to the fall of empires are two examples of the traditional connections between both concepts. 13 “I began with the desire to speak with the dead” (Greenblatt 1988, 1). “History feeds on death. History begins in the grave” (Domanska 2005, 398). 14 Brazilian liberal Francisco Inácio Marcondes, at the beginning of a historical report presented on 4 October 1863 on the Constituent Assembly of 1823, expressed it with these words: “The historian should not enter the night of the past, that venerable necropolis of extinct generations, without frst shaking of the dust of the passions of the day” (Revista Trimensal do Instituto Histórico e Geográfco Brasileiro, LXIV, Rio de Janeiro, 1901). 15 These rhetorical strategies have given rise to a collection of images ranging from the religious feld – allusions to the raising of Lazarus recounted in the Gospel of John – to scientifc, such as the case of “Jurassic Park” as a metaphor to describe historical culture (Liakos and Bilalis 2017). 16 The vocabulary belonging to this semantic feld – which includes spirit, spectre, ghost, geist, phantom, soul, and the like – is relatively large and varies considerably not only between languages and language families but also within the same language. The roots of several of these words refer to volatile elements such as breathing, respiration, wind, breeze, vital principle, often related to verbs such as “breathe,” “blow,” “shine,” “look,” “observe,” “appear,” “fy.” Several of these terms are connected – either morphologically or semantically – to Greek and Latin terms such as ψυχή [psychḗ] and πνεῦμα [pneûma], anima and spiritus, and have a long and intricate history as termini technici of religion and philosophy. 17 A slightly more pleasant tropology belonging to the same metaphorical-visual feld is that which we could call “museums of the future.” Those who use this rhetoric invoke imaginary museums located in the future that would contain objects or institutions common in the present converted into remote relics.

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According to Friedrich Engels, with the arrival of communism, the state would be relegated “into the museum of antiquity, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe.” Some examples of this metaphorics referring to Spain in FernándezSebastián (2022, 226–9). The idea that the past is irrevocable and cannot be changed is pervasive in literature. We read in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem The Past: “What’s done cannot be undone,” Lady Macbeth muses. “Not the gods can shake the Past; / . . . None can re-enter there . . . / Alter or mend eternal Fact”. In a poem of the same title (“El pasado”), Borges adopts a more distanced and sceptical attitude in refecting on a “plastic yesterday,” which today seems irrevocable: “Those things may not have been / . . . We imagine them / In a fatal, inevitable yesterday / . . . They are in their eternity, not in memory.” The most common uses of the word “empathy” – Greek ἐμπάθεια, from the root πάθος (feeling, passion, sufering), a term borrowed in the early 20th century from the German Einfühlung – were for many years mainly linked to psychology and aesthetics. These etymological and disciplinary origins probably hinder the purely cognitive applications of the term. “Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and feeting.” This sentence by Emerson, written in 1850 (Allen 2008, 214), very representative of his opinions during that stage of his life, under the infuence of new scientifc discoveries, vaguely recalls the classic description of aesthetic modernité proposed by Baudelaire a few years later. Friedrich Schlegel formulated the following diagnosis in 1828: “Never before was there a time so deeply, so directly, and so exclusively and universally directed toward the future as ours” (Brinkmann 2000, 17). The vilifcation of the past, and of the recent past in particular, has been, along with the glorifcation of a marvellous future, a trait characteristic of nearly all 18th-- and 19th-century progressive intellectuals. Thus, two South American writers of the romantic generation, Esteban de Echevarría and Francisco Bilbao, eager to abolish a loathsome past and welcome a radiant new world, would contrast in their writings the “ocean of blood” of history with the “ocean of life” of the future (Fernández-Sebastián 2021c, 470–1). The etymological roots of past and future also reveal their spatial origins. Past alludes to what is gone, which passes because it has gone. Future refers to what is going to be, which “comes” towards us, has yet to arrive. “No man has ever lived in the past, and none will live in the future; the present alone is the form of all life,” wrote Borges in the footsteps of Schopenhauer (“A New Refutation of Time,” in Historia de la eternidad, 1936). Note that in Figure 3.2 the central band, that of the present, is the only one that is illuminated, while both the upper – the past – and the lower band – the future – are dark, as corresponds to absent times. In the words of Ibn Khaldun: “The past resembles the future more than one drop of water resembles another.” The peculiar Benjaminian connection between past and future (which I have already discussed in Chapter 2), that is, his vision of the past as a great reservoir of experiences useful for a future of complete freedom recalls the proposal of a conservative Catholic like Chesterton, who claims the value of some old ideals that never materialize, “splendid failures” that could inspire early 20th-century Europeans to fuel their expectations for the future (G. K. Chesterton, “The Fear of the Past,” in What’s Wrong with the World, 1910). This metaphor, however, is employed nowadays above all for the future (or, more precisely, for the contact zone between present and future). Thus, in techno-scientifc jargon, it is traditional to refer to avant-garde research as the cutting edge of innovation.

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28 Luhmann (1976, 145–6) notes that older societies thought of themselves as living in an enduring or even eternal present, while the modern times were accompanied by a shortening of the time span of the present. 29 “Both times [the past future and the future past] are focused on the present, which they target as a billiard player targets the ball when making a cushion shot” (Hölscher 2022, 33). 30 It is paradoxical that the future in this image is associated with light, while most metaphors underline, by contrast, its dark and unknown aspect and therefore refer to the enigma or the arcane of the future, to the mysterious night of the future, to the curtain of time that conceals from us what will happen, and so on. Curiously, in antiquity, the knowledge of the future provided by prophecy tended to metaphorize more as a long shadow (in umbra futuri) than as a light (Augustine of Hippo, De civitate Dei, XVII, xiii). 31 In this sense, one of the metaphors that have been reactivated and completely reversed – to the extent of almost becoming a literal expression – is that of the dustbin. If in classical modernity the past was seen by many – in the footsteps of Voltaire, Condorcet, Sièyes, and other philosophes who essentially saw it as a remora and as a burden to be shed – as something of little value deserving of being thrown into the “dustbin of history” (Trotsky), now it would be a question, on the contrary, by dint of a minimum principle of intergenerational solidarity, of ceasing to colonize the future, which means, among other things, preventing the future from becoming the dustbin of the present. In fact, the images of ruins, rubble, debris, dumping, and waste – from Walter Benjamin to Winfried and from Theodor Adorno to Svetlana Boym – are abundant in contemporary literature and thinking. 32 “Des hommes poussaient, une armée noire, vengeresse, qui germait lentement dans les sillons, grandissant pour les récoltes du siècle futur, et dont la germination allait faire bientôt éclater la terre” [“Men were springing forth, a black avenging army, germinating slowly in the furrows, growing towards the harvests of the next century, and their germination would soon overturn the earth”]. 33 In fact, the metaphor of the seed is in the subsoil of historical and social sciences of our time. “Sewell [in his book Logics of History] explains how social transformation became the central concern of the social and historical sciences. He also uncovers the corollaries of the teleology which was immanent in this concept of transformation. Past events were actually explained through events in the future, by being categorized according to backward- or forward-looking historical trends. Society and history were divided between the modern and the traditional; the term modern acquired an anticipatory meaning, as the seeds of the future in the present” (Liakos 2007, 41). 34 “The agony which the South endured that a nation might be born.” This sentence, which appears in the flm The Birth of a Nation (1915) about the American Civil War (directed by D. W. Grifth), indicates that the same image can be applied to very diferent historical processes, not necessarily utopian or revolutionary. 35 However much, in its technical defnition enshrined by phenomenology, a visual horizon or specifc threshold may be transcended by marching forward or simply by moving from one observation point to another higher one, the word “horizon” appears to retain almost by defnition, a certain nuance that alludes to the inaccessible, like that imaginary line on the earth’s surface that recedes as one advances towards it and that, therefore, we can never reach (see in this respect Luhmann 1976, especially Luhmann 1982, 278, and the political joke told by Koselleck 2004, 261). 36 To the best of my knowledge, Koselleck rarely or never used in his works what I have described as the “vertical sense” of the term “horizon,” despite what one might expect of a theorist who elaborated two such efcient metaphorical tools as

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Erwartungshorizont and Zeitschichten, which could easily criss-cross and complement one another via a stratifcation of horizons. 37 The catalogue of a recent exhibition (The Great Imagination. Histories of the Future, Madrid, Fundación Telefónica, 3 November 2021–17 April 2022) recounts some of these scenarios, which Jim Dator grouped into four archetypes of the future, namely growth, collapse, discipline, and transformation. 38 In the end, as the same author has pointed out, “the present future and the future past are linked to one another.” Despite the prevailing presentism, both in the feld of technology and in cultural, environmental, and social policies, ethical considerations about the potential disruptive efects of new technologies, as well as discussions about issues of solidarity and intergenerational justice concerning pension systems, the preservation of nature or heritage, are increasingly making themselves heard (Hölscher 2018, 27).

Part II

Metaphorical concepts in historiography

4

Sources, events, processes

In this second part, I will analyse a number of concepts and categories to which historians regularly recur for research and for the writing of history. We will see that much of this conceptual outillage has an intrinsically metaphorical origin and structure. And within the fundamental analytical tooling of historiography, I will focus in particular upon a handful of notions that are indispensable to the work of historians, starting with the basic concepts of source, process, and event. In Chapter 5, I will analyse three fundamental concepts of Western historiography – modernity, crisis, and revolution – whose presence signifcantly transcends the historical discipline, since it pervades diverse spheres of public debate: politics, sociology, economy, arts, and sciences. Finally, in Chapter 6 I will address another trio of temporal concepts – progress, decline, and transition – that have shown themselves to be indispensable for the writing of history in both the empirical and the philosophical sense. 4.1

Sources and traces

As any native speaker knows, the word “source,” which usually refers to a current of water that springs from the earth and also to the fountainhead of a river, has several fgurative meanings, which have referred since antiquity to the origin, beginning, or frst cause of something. This underlying idea has resulted in the fact that both in the Bible and in numerous ancient and modern literary and philosophical works, mentions of sources and fountainheads are frequently interspersed throughout passages and discussions referring to principles, origins, and foundations and also to causes and generative forces. Since the late 18th century, moreover, the word sources would designate documents, people, and texts that supply information about something, as well as references used to write reports, scientifc texts, and historical accounts. The roots of the words used to designate historical sources in various European languages – Lat. fons; Fr. source; Ger. Quelle; Sp. fuente; It. and Port. fonte – reveal that present in all of them in one way or another is the idea of a fountainhead or natural spring that issues from (surgere) the earth and fows. The metaphor of the source – and even more so that of the DOI: 10.4324/9781032736358-7

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primordial source (Urquelle) – suggests origin, fuidity, and continuity (Barash 2019, 115, 117). And, given that any study or historical research has to be based on sources, it is inevitable that some characteristics attributed to natural sources and their attendant circumstances are transferred by analogy to the documents used in the dominion of historiography. For instance, historians supposedly drink or feed from historical sources, sources that, as the case may be, might be abundant and inexhaustible but also insufcient, drying up, and disappearing. Yet, above all, it is supposed that whoever is supplied by uncontaminated and crystalline sources – that is, whoever has original and reliable evidence – will almost automatically produce undisputed masterpieces, as if the purity of the sources guaranteed the veracity of the assertions deriving from them.1 As a consequence of this analogical reasoning, from the Renaissance onwards – it was no coincidence that the return ad fontes (“back to the sources”) was one of the humanists’ favourite slogans – and, later, with the development of philological methods of textual criticism and of dating of original documents and manuscripts, from Mabillon’s Diplomatique to Ranke’s Quellenkritik (Wimmer 2013, 118–22), scholars sought to check and flter sources in an increasingly strict fashion with a view to evaluating the authenticity of texts and their correct dating, thus discarding false documents and forgeries. In The Emergence of Probability (1975), Ian Hacking showed how witnesses were replaced as a source of evidence by documents, the credibility of which began to be seen in part as a question of probability (centuries later, the reliability of sources, and not only their fdelity, would become a particularly important issue for journalists). Eventually, even fragments, medallions, inscriptions, ruins, and remains were considered to be more reliable than oral or written traditions that deform the narration of events to the extent of transforming them into legends – hence the paradox that, as some enlightened authors observe, the best “‘speaking’ witnesses are silent monuments” (De Certeau 1980, 63; images as historical testimony are also often referred to as “mute witnesses”). The inductive evidence of things based on distanced analysis of documents, records, and monuments replaced testimonies, the evidence of witnesses and of authorities.2 (On the rhetoric of evidence see Guillaumin (2005); on the contributions made by new monumental and archaeological sources to historiography and the diferent value of truth that was attributed to monumenta in comparison with writings or documenta, see Palumbo (2012, 140–1, 288–9).)3 In the feld of historiography, the gradual development of philological techniques, followed by the positivist cult of “the facts,” saw some fall into a sort of fetishism of documents so that at the end of the 19th century, the so-called historical method was almost reduced to the criticism of sources. This reductionist identifcation generated a misleading equivalence between the authenticity of sources and the transparency of the historical facts/events to which they referred. Documents, it was said, “spoke for themselves.”4

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Aware of the dangers of this excessive identifcation, as if facts were drawn from documents in the same way that clear water wells up from sources, ready for drinking, Collingwood (1994, 105, 278) writes that the professional researcher should leave to one side “his dry-as-dust attitude towards the bare facts which are the dry bones of history” and that “for ‘source’ we must read ‘evidence’.” This terminological caution, however, does not resolve the problem, since evidence is far from being an innocent metaphor. From the Latin evidentia, a derivative of videre (to see), evidence refers to pieces of information and documents that prove something is true. Proofs are supposedly so irrefutably obvious that they settle the issue forever. The word “evidence” – employed in the worlds of both justice and history, and which seems to return us to primitive Greek history based on the eyewitness (ἱστορ) – is therefore as saturated with truth as is source, if not more so (Ritter 1986, 143–6). Maybe because the concept of source never entirely shed its original connotations, and also given the ease with which connections could be established with other liquid tropes such as the river of history5 or the ocean of time, certain attributes, implications, and commonplaces normally associated with the aquatic medium would be transferred to historiography. Moving smoothly from source to rain, to the river, to the sea, to navigation, to fshing, and so on, historiography abounds with images in which these motifs are articulated and combine in myriad ways. Droysen, for example, emphasized in a passage of his work the inexhaustible, perpetually renewed nature of sources: The primitive “source” does not consist in the dreary maze of contemporary opinions, accounts, reports. This is only the daily repeated atmospheric process of ascending and self-precipitating vapors from which the true sources or springs are replenished. (Droysen 1897, § 34, 24) A hundred years later, Edward H. Carr (1990, 9, 23) criticizes the common-sense view of historical events – of the documents that serve to ascertain them – supposedly at the disposal of the researcher like fsh on the fshmonger’s slab, ready for the historian to take home and cook to his liking. Carr proposes a more complex image. The historian would be the fsherman who strives to catch facts-fsh in the vast ocean, and his catches would depend partly on chance, “but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fsh in and what tackle he chooses to use.” In various passages of his book, the British author insists on the indispensability of the theory (which, in his fgurative discourse, would be likened to the nets with which the fsherman trawls). If the historian lacks suitable theoretical bases, the plethora of documentary sources is more of a threat than a help. Quoting Werner Sombart, Carr (1990, 60) suggests that, in the absence of a hypothesis, we “feel like drowning in the ocean of facts until we fnd a new foothold or learn to swim.”

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In fact, sources rarely constitute a perfect and complete set of documents that faithfully refect a piece of the past. On the contrary, they tend to be fragmentary in nature, often conceal as much as they reveal, and cover a tiny fraction of the past. As Droysen observed (1897, § 6, 11), historians barely seek to illuminate with their work a few things in “the empty darkness of the past.” “The memory of the world,” wrote Butterfeld a century ago, “is not a bright, shining crystal, but a heap of broken fragments, a few fne fashes of light that break through the darkness” (Lowenthal 2015, 337). Some scholars, however, continue to believe that the incompleteness and fragmentariness of historical sources, as landmarks in the mist, do not prevent us from reconstructing a reasonably accurate picture of the past (see, for example, for intellectual history, the conclusions of Collins 1998, 890–2). In this vein, the banal metaphor of the pieces of the puzzle that has to be assembled – closely associated with the inductive-interpretative approach that we shall soon see – would become another commonplace of historiography. Another image penned by a number of writers speaking of historical sources is that of raw material. We have already seen that Carr suggested something similar when he critically described task of historians as that of cooking raw fsh – sources and facts – which they obtain in the archive-fshmongers (but archives and archival practices, like fshing and fshmongering, also have their history; see, for example, Moore 2008). The archive, as is indicated by the Greek root of the word, also refers to the beginning, to the origin (ἀρχή). In fact, to think of sources as being the raw material of history is a well-established cliché for positivist authors. In this sense, Collingwood (1994, 127) criticizes Comte for arguing that historical facts should be used as the raw material of fedgling sociology. Lucien Febvre, meanwhile, preferred to compare the historian’s tasks with those of the bee, which needs fowers – raw data, written documents – to make the honey of historiography (Combats pour l’histoire 1959). The most transcendental change in this feld began to occur in the mid20th century, when Dutch historian Gustaaf Renier, in his work History, Its Purpose and Method (1950, 97–104), suggested replacing the metaphorical concept of sources with that of traces. Renier understood by trace (Lat. vestigium) any kind of imprint, scrap, relic, or remnant that remains of something that existed or occurred once and that one attempts retrospectively to check, track, or clarify. As well as manuscripts, they would be traces or vestiges of all the fragments or remnants of the past: buildings, ruins, movables, writings, printed matter, and all kinds of images. In short, this would be the wide range of historical evidence that C. I. Lewis called “marks of pastness,” material remains that recall a vanished reality. This change of metaphor, accompanied by a criticism of the notion of source, entailed signifcant methodological repercussions, the deepest and most lasting consequences of which can be explored in some theoretical works by Carlo Ginzburg (1989, 2012). When explaining his paradigma indiziario (“evidential paradigm”), based on careful symptomatic-detective analysis of evidence, tracks, and clues, the Italian historian did not hesitate to compare it with the methods of Freud and

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Sherlock Holmes and even acknowledged that he had found the inspiration for his conjectural model in the novels of Proust. In addition to considerably extending the source material to include nonconventional documents (such as literature), the metaphor underlying the new historiographical paradigm – which actually recovered an old theme, as the language of traces (Spuren) and remains (Uberbleibsel) had already been used by German historian Chladenius in the mid-18th century, and also since the late 19th century by diverse French and British scholars – represented a major epistemological shift from the previous imaginary: rather than drawing historical truth directly from the transparent water of written sources, historians should strive henceforth to follow murky and seemingly insignifcant clues that, suitably questioned and interpreted, would enable them indirectly to clarify enigmatic events and obscure processes from the past.6 The leap is more than considerable: from the quest for the Holy Grail of the truth, we pass to a plurality of partial, debateable, and relative interpretations that are inferred, reasoned, and tested. It is an approach, incidentally, close to hermeneutics, as is demonstrated by Gadamer’s analogy (2004, 334) between the tasks of the judge and the historian, when both strive to establish facts and interpret relevant events for justice and for history respectively. And, given that the dated objects that we use as sources are also, in the words of Krzysztof Pomian (1999, 47–8), “intermediaries between our present and the past,” sometimes, the analysis of tracks, imprints, and images of ghostly past presences – revenants, genies, jinns – lead to spectral history or hauntology (Derrida 1994; Kleinberg 2017; Taneja 2017). Moreover, sources and texts often convey a surplus of meaning and even impose its direct presence upon us on a more emotional than intellectual level. For, as Eelco Runia has suggested (2014, 81), the vestiges of the past contain historical material that escapes the intention of the historian: “One might say that historical reality travels with historiography not as paying passenger but as a stowaway.” And it may be the case that some sources, initially discarded as irrelevant, reappear years later to be reinterpreted in a new context, and on occasions even pose a serious challenge to the prevailing system of interpretation (De Certeau 1988, 9). Iconographic sources, and photographs in particular, despite their appearance of immediate truth (Barthes’ famous “reality efect”), are open to very diverse interpretations, since, according to Boris Kossoy, photography is “a diabolical mirror that greets us from the past.” This constitutive ambiguity of visual sources calls for the development of an ad hoc criticism. And all this without forgetting that, as Peter Burke shrewdly observes (2005, 47), “many historical sources might be described as ‘snapshots’, taken from a certain viewpoint at a certain moment.” Nonetheless, and however open sources are to multiple interpretations, it appears clear that not all readings will be equally plausible, and some should even be ruled out beforehand, or historians will fnd their hermeneutic imaginations constrained by the content of the sources. In this respect, what is particularly opportune is the Koselleckian

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metaphor of the “power of veto” of sources (Koselleck 2004b, 151), which the German theorist began to use as early as the 1970s, as an insurmountable barrier against the potential arbitrariness of partisan historians.7 I believe it is no coincidence that this paradigmatic shift – from sources to traces – began to come to the fore more or less when other metaphoricalconceptual transformations with major theoretical-methodological consequences were appearing, such as the boom of memory, the gradual replacement of the metaphor of the river with that of the strata of time or of that of the mirror with the metaphor of construction (this last change is of great importance in the emergence of the distinction between the notions of event and historical fact) (see Chapters 1 and 2). Some of the implications of these metaphorical transformations are obviously related, which allows us to speculate that these semantic moves, which might refect a change of basic mentality vis-à-vis the complexity of the real, may very well have mutually reinforced one another.8 The emphasis that historians like Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (2004) or Eelco Runia (2006) placed at the beginning of this century on the notion of presence, to the detriment of the more traditional notions of meaning and knowledge, also represented a signifcant change in the consideration of traces of the past. In this case, instead of using sources as evidence from which to infer a more substantial historical reality, physical remains themselves are elevated to the ontological category of a present past. Thus are described phenomena or situations that lead to an almost physical contact – more emotional, immediate, and metonymic than intellectual, metaphorical, and distanced – with a past that takes over the present. From another point of view, the huge increase in the range of sources employed recently by historians augurs a forthcoming renewal of the corresponding metaphorics. For instance, some of the latest developments in the felds of world history (Jarrick et al. 2016)9 and climate history invite historians not only to improve source criticism and to renew their imaginaries (the residues, debris, and fossils of the past lose their metaphorical character and often recover their literal meanings in the service of what some call “superhistory”) but to make intelligent use of new non-textual sources, including physical, chemical, geological, and biological analyses of a variety of objects and materials that make up the rich and as yet barely explored bio-archives (including genetic data) and geo-archives of the earth. As can be seen, from the perspective of sources too, we are witnessing a blurring of the borders between natural and human sciences. *** Before concluding this section, I would like to point out that the metaphorics of life and death, which, as we have seen, has been used extensively for relations between the past and the present (Chapter 3, Section 2.2), has also been applied on occasions to sources, especially to written sources. I refer to a crucial distinction between two kinds of sources. We would have, on the one

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hand, “dead” sources, which have ceased to have any efect upon the present and defnitively belong to the past. This archive material speaks to us of transcended historical horizons, which have been abandoned forever. On the other hand, however, historians are also frequently confronted with sources that are still “alive.” This occurs when they have to deal with documents, concepts, and discourses from the past the efects of which continue to be operative, at least partially, at the moment when they write (a moment that would in turn form part of a “living” past and of an “unfolding present”: King 2000, 36–40; Bevernage 2011, 84–5). It is this latter type of source, the resonance of which still prevails today, which causes most problems and dissonances for historians, who are obliged to position themselves with one foot inside and one foot outside the situation being analysed. In these cases, professionals of history should step up their refexivity and make an extra efort carefully to diferentiate between their own concepts and categories and those of the actors they are studying. For example, at the conceptual level, “the notion of modernity designates, at the same time, the most innovative and radical dimension of the Enlightenment and our own theoretical situation” (Lilti 2018, 177, 188). And it is very possible that the great difculty we have in historically understanding certain aspects of early modernity are precisely due to the fact that, three or four centuries later, the late modernity in which we fnd ourselves has not sufciently distanced itself from its babbling origins. 4.2

Events and facts

If documents are for many the raw materials of historical research, events would be the “raw material of the narrative” (Munz 1997, 837; see, however, Mink 1978, 145), given that, ultimately, history deals with change and “all change enters the feld of history as a quasi-event” (Ricoeur 1988, II, 224). In historiography, event and narrative are two correlative notions: it is difcult to refer to the latter without mentioning the former and vice versa (incidentally, the tie that links both notions renews, from another point of view and employing updated terminology, the old relationship between res gestae and historia rerum gestarum). And, notwithstanding Louis Mink’s resounding phrase (1970, 557) “stories are not lived but told,” which places events and stories in two very diferent ontological spheres, among the numerous commentators, gainsayers, and exegetes of that phrase, a good many would argue that events are both lived and told. For if, as MacIntyre (1981, 212, 216) argues, man is “a story-telling animal,” and even tells stories to himself, in a way, “stories are lived before they are told.” In common usage there exists a certain confusion between the terms “event,” “fact,” “occurrence,” and “action,” terms that sometimes are also confated in historical works. Hobbes wrote that “the register of knowledge of fact is called history,” which in his day included natural and civil history, the latter being “the history of the voluntary actions of men in commonwealths” (Leviathan, I, IX). Since then, particularly in recent times, several

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theorists have made a considerable efort to attempt to undo false synonymies between the aforementioned and other similar terms. Throughout the 20th century, theoretical debates seeking to diferentiate between events and facts generated copious literature (Ritter 1986, 153–60). A historical fact, we are told, is not the same as an unpolished occurrence or past event. And it is not true, as Maurice Mandelbaum thought, that “the facts of the past are fxed, as dead fies on fy [sticky] paper”; it is more a case of them being “true [descriptive] statements about past events [that] can and will change, as other events occur” (ibid., 156). Nowadays, a genuine event is usually considered to be an occurrence of certain signifcance, and it is thought that in order to become recognized historical facts, events need to be subjected to a specifc methodological and linguistic protocol (but there are other theoretical proposals, of course, such as those who consider that facts do not afect the basic relational structure, while events have the capacity to change the structure). This historiographic operation includes processes of interpretation and “packaging” of the occurrence, such as colligation (Kuukkanen 2015, 97–115), causation, and periodization. And all of this always on the basis of evidence, for the function of the event, in Goldstein’s words (1962, 181), is to “make intelligible the grouping together of some particular constellation of historical evidence.” In his article “The Historical Event,” Hayden White (2008, 13), after assuming that “a fact is an event under a description,” famously arrived at the conclusion that “events happen, facts are established.” The basic concept of fact (Lat. factum = a deed, a thing done; Fr. fait; Sp. hecho; Ger. Tat; It. fatto; Port. fato), common to historians and jurists, appears to have originated in the sphere of Roman-canonical law. From the practice of juries tasked with evaluating the truth of facts tried in court (facta), the notion was metaphorically transferred to other, extrajudicial domains, especially to history, whose leading practitioners sought to test the reliability of documentary evidence in relation to what actually happened. As of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, along with legal facts, we start to fnd increasingly frequent references to historical facts, and, almost at the same time, in the realm of natural philosophy, there began to be talk of scientifc facts (Shapiro 1994).10 Early uses of the phrase “historical fact” show that those who employed it wished to underline that these were true facts, which had really occurred, as opposed to certain “invented facts” or “fabulous events.” Over time, the question of truth or fction would become one of the bones of contention of the methodological controversies in relation to the historical discipline, a question that very soon began to overlap with the contrast between “facts” and “interpretations” (a question that obsessed a number of historians and philosophers, in the wake of Nietzsche’s famous antipositivist phrase “there are no facts, only interpretations”). Although we are far from reaching consensus on this thorny issue – which for decades has confronted advocates of objectivist and subjectivist positions, realists and “relativists,” positivists

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and hermeneuts – many historians could perhaps accept today Lynn Hunt’s minimalist formulation (2018, 43) according to which “historical truth is two-tiered: facts are at issue in the frst tier, interpretations in the second.” The frst level, that of facts, is the easier to elucidate (although the rhetoric of solid foundations on hard facts, in a time of fake news and “alternative facts,” is considerably less efective than in the past), while the second, interpretations, insofar as we are speaking of disputed statements about past events, is far more complex, contested, and provisional, permanently open to debate. As for the event, the roots of the words used in diferent languages to designate it give us a clue as to its primitive meanings, which are usually related to something that arrives – as is the case in English, in French, in Spanish, in Italian, and in Portuguese (event, événement, evento, all from the Latin verb venire) – to something that is seen, appropriated, or shown, as is the case of the German word Ereignis (from the verb eräugen, derived from Auge, eye), or even to something that may or may not occur (Sp. acontecer), as in the Spanish word acontecimiento, derived from the Latin verb contingere (to happen). And, although it is true that the phenomenology of the event has for a long time been a matter for philosophers (names that spring to mind include Husserl, Heidegger, Benjamin, Agamben, Derrida, Deleuze, Vattimo, Žižek, and Badiou), in recent decades, a handful of historians (Pierre Nora, Jacques Revel, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Andreas Suter, Hayden White, William Sewell, Arlette Farge, François Dosse, and many more) have posited more or less substantial methodological approaches to the historical event. Before summarizing their principal metaphorics, however, it is worthwhile noting that much of this literature agrees that not all that happens is an event. The latter concept is usually reserved for those occurrences that interrupt a process, break continuity, and deviate from the expectations of actors/observers (hence the application to them of disruptive metaphors: earthquakes, fractures, tears, whirlwind, storms, lightning, eruptions, explosions). Key events, it is said, tend to be abrupt and cataclysmic. As do the metaphors that underline that the traumatic event shatters the intelligibility of what happens. According to this, an event would be a “black hole” of meaning, as the Holocaust has been referred to (Rüsen 2008, 189), or a dike that holds back the fow of time. However, it is not unusual, as Nietzsche once observed, for the greatest historical events to make their entrance, on doves’ feet, like a mortal illness that soundlessly infltrates the body. Sometimes these invisible events are only “discovered” many years later, when historians, with the beneft of hindsight, can measure their consequences.11 “It remains an irrefragable law of history,” wrote Stefan Zweig in The World of Yesterday, “that contemporaries are denied a recognition of the early beginnings of the great movements which determine their times.” Jorge Luis Borges, meanwhile, dedicated one of his short essays, The Modesty of History, to a refection upon certain decisive occurrences that were not

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perceived as important when they occurred and considered that the essential dates of history were secret for a long time until their outcomes were fnally visible to all. The singularity of the event is often underlined but without leaving aside its inclusion within some kinds of larger and more signifcant structures that are usually characterized by continuity (for, from the mid-19th until well into the 20th century – let us say, from Karl Marx’s historical materialism until Carl Hempel’s so-called covering law model – many historians and thinkers strove to identify regularities and repetitive patterns in the course of events with a view to formulating “historical laws” and causal explanation comparable with those of natural sciences). One of the most common representations of that continuity is the one that imagines events as linked to one another in a continuous series, like a string of beads. This is not mere contiguity or chronological succession of a row of events but cause-efect connections. In fact, for a long time, history has generally been understood as a collection of events forming causal chains. And professional historians – who had plenty to choose from in an era as rich in events as the Western modern age, particularly in the era of revolutions – did not tire of declaring, in opposition to the speculative philosophy of history, that facts should be left to “speak for themselves” rather than be submitted to a more or less rigid “system” of thinking. This model of mechanical causality began to be questioned during the so-called crisis of historicism. Throughout the 20th century, numerous critical voices championed diferent alternatives to that causative-continuist model, several of which highlighted the crucial role of discontinuity in history. Collingwood, as is known, maintained not only that historians have to re-create (re-enact) events “inside their own minds,” but that, in history, “actions have an inside and an outside; on the outside they are mere events, related in space and time but not otherwise; on the inside they are thoughts, bound to each other by logical connections.” Lucien Febvre distanced himself from “the notion of an event as a visible and tangible historical ‘atom’ that is given meaning by its chronological situation beside other historical atoms.” Walter Benjamin, in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, challenged the historicist model and strongly criticized the metaphorics on which it is based – sequences of events as if they were the stringed beads of a rosary – proposing an alternative approach that dialectically links the present with the past and creates evocative and condensed historical images through montage and assemblage (Tamm and Olivier 2019, 6). Comparisons of the relations between events and contexts, or between facts and interpretations, to a series of pieces in a jigsaw puzzle are a productive tropological alternative to the rigid schema of mechanical causality. Yet, if for a long time it seemed axiomatic that history was made of events – or rather, of facts, as the positivists contended – the growth of structuralism in the 1960s–1970s represented a frontal attack on this default position of historians, an authentic “diseventalization” of the writing of history. The

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disdainful metaphors employed by the Annales second-generation historians to refer to events – regarded as superfcial, feeting, and insignifcant – are highly revealing of the new theoretical climate. In various parts of his work, Fernand Braudel states that events are nothing but frefies, foam of time, ephemera, and fotsam of history. He likens them to small, intermittent points of light whose capacity to illuminate, for a moment, the vast darkness of the historical landscape is quite limited (Braudel 1972, II, 901). Braudel posits that these events serve as mere “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.” It is clear that for Braudel, genuine history, what really matters, is not exactly l’histoire événementielle of those rapid, nervous fuctuations (Braudel 1972, I, 21), but rather the profound history of structures that barely undergo variations, only perceptible in the long term.12 (In this sense, the only events that succeed in capturing historians’ interest would be the critical events that change the texture of time and reveal underlying structures or rather those that generate new structures.) In the last quarter of the 20th century, a new strike of the theoretical-methodological pendulum would radically transform this metaphorical landscape. The badly buried corpse of the event returned to mainstream historiography, courtesy in part of the new political history, as a reanimated ghost capable of arousing, as the case may be, questions and doubts, enthusiasm, and rejection. Where structuralists had depicted foam, jetsam, slag, and dust, this shift introduced completely diferent images. In the work of historians, the event was now dressed in far more becoming and fattering garments, only partly coinciding with the fashions it exhibited in the phase prior to its displacement by structuralism. Here are some: sphinx (in the early 1970s, Edgar Morin dedicated an article to what he called l’événement-sphinx), black box, drum roll, fash, boiling point, turning point, tipping point, page turning, crystallization, catalyst, window of opportunity, watershed, fracture line, border,13 anchor point on the timeline, stuf of history (Bensa and Fassin 2002; Jung and Karla 2021). Recent historiography and essay writing provide magnifcent examples of each of these metaphors, which lack of space prevents me from analysing in detail here. These and other images make it possible to interpret certain events as challenges to knowledge, shocks, or enigmas, as decisive moments of transformation, suitable occasions for action or sudden swerves, as elements that accelerate the development of a process, as watersheds or hinge points of historical periodization, even as the inner fabric and building blocks of history (the latter not so distant from the traditional images that described events as landmarks or the raw material of history). However, although a few metaphors recall those used to underpin the old positivist cult of facts (like bricks in a history-wall), most of them demonstrate the enormous distance that separates both theoretical positions. Among the most notable diferences vis-à-vis consideration of the event in the 19th century, we fnd further emphasis that those who recovered it at the end of the 20th century placed

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on its surprising and transformative character, on its contingency (it is no coincidence that the return of the event coincided with the advent of the risk society), on the plurality of possible readings, on its enigmatic nature, and on its constructability. In this latter aspect, it would now be stressed that the event is manufactured by the historian, who names it, attributes to it a duration, and above all, assigns it a narrative-interpretative form, without which the event would not exist (Ricoeur). In this respect, the recent evolution of gaming metaphors for history – from the metaphor of chess for political and military history to that of games of chance – is illustrative of the changing perception of the role of human agency, and of the growing weight attributed to contingency and hazard in historical processes (Brantly 1997, 298–305). Logically, such momentous events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the USSR and, in this century, the 11 September attacks in New York, the 2008 global fnancial crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, facilitated the return of the event to the foreground of historiography and thinking (a historiographical phenomenon observable since the early 1970s: Bouton 2023). The irruption of the unexpected and its impact upon the lives of millions of human beings were accompanied by the return of the old rhetoric of the force of circumstances. Several commentators then recalled the celebrated verses of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “things [i.e. events] are in the saddle, and ride mankind.” This most recent return of the event also aroused renewed theoretical interest in the consequences of events, which were classifed according to diverse criteria, such as size, their degree of defnition or certainty, and their disruptive power, without excluding pseudo-events analysed by Daniel Boorstin (1992) six decades ago. Theorists and researchers devoted particular attention to transformative, game-changing events (sometimes called “worldevents,” even “monster-events”), capable of precipitating truly epochal mutations. For centuries, the paradigmatic case of historical hyper-event was the discovery of America, considered in the 18th century by Voltaire, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Raynal, and many others to be the single most momentous and memorable event in history.14 In the last two centuries, however, alternative visions have emerged. On the one hand, philosophers and historians have designed diverse metaphoricalconceptual instruments to describe epochal breaks of greater or lesser dimension, signifcance, and intensity (from Karl Jaspers’s Axial Era to Dan Diner’s “temporal thresholds”: see earlier, Chapter 2, Section 5). On the other, in the historiography of recent decades, a handful of socio-economic and cultural events/processes – industrial revolution; globalization; the expansion of technology, and communications – some of them in progress, have taken centre stage. Yet, via the contributions of Ankersmit and Runia, the theory of Western history has recently insisted above all on a certain type of sublime/ traumatic events that represent a leap into de unknown. According to these authors, a radical experience of this kind would have been lived through

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during the French Revolution, a paradigm of this sort of identity shift. Possessed by a kind of vertigo, the collective subject of such changes would emerge from such a dizzying experience transformed into a diferent subject, into a new “we” (Simon 2019b, 48–9). It is now also recalled, in line with ancient traditions, that even small, dark events can have signifcant consequences. Literature abounds with causal concatenations to show that tiny changes can have momentous efects. Metaphorical expressions such as “chain reaction,” “domino efect,” “snowball efect,” or “ripple efect,” widely used in historiography, economics, sociology, chemistry, computer science, psychology, international relations, etc., can be seen as diferent variants of this kind of causal concatenation, often somewhat mechanical (see in this respect n. 11). The old proverb “For want of a nail”15 is only one of several fables that tell how, beginning with a minor absence, a cascade of failures turn this into a major issue that has catastrophic results. Various 19th-century historians were aware of this sort of history butterfy efect. Spanish writer Joaquín Costa, refecting in his Historia crítica de la Revolución española (1875) upon the infuence of some revolutions upon others, emphasizes the interdependence that characterizes History; that if in Nature the leaf of a tree does not tremble without its movement being communicated to the whole planet, in the same way in humanity, no word is uttered or deed executed that does not have immediate resonance throughout History, even if it comes from the most insignifcant individuality, much more so if it comes from an entire people. This option of a comprehensive vision of the past based on the connection between everything – which seems to suggest a universal panoptic determinism, capable of making the past and the future present, in the style of Laplace’s demon – has been reformulated by those who associate microhistory with global history. As Giovanni Levi (2001, 100) wrote, “even the apparently minutest action of, say, somebody going to buy a loaf of bread, actually encompasses the far wider system of the whole world’s grain markets.”16 To the repertoire of paradigmatic transformative events, of archetypal situations, and of historical analogies inherited from the past – the road to Damascus, the crossing of the Rubicon, the lesson of Munich, the Thucydides trap, and the like – have recently been added new more abstract metaphors such as that of “trigger events” that in turn unleash an avalanche of events, accelerate history, and cause perplexity and anguish (Remaud 2014), and thereby provide considerable scope for the exploration of alternative scenarios for counterfactual history. Some recent, process-based metaphorics have adopted the symbolic form of certain animals. Prominent among them, that of the Black Swan (Taleb 2007), a rare and unexpected event that comes as a surprise but retrospectively is regarded as predictable. In addition, a Gray Rhino – the term was coined by Michele Wucker – designates a highly

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probable, high impact yet neglected threat, in spite of the evidence and warnings in relation to its imminent arrival.17 One of the main novelties is that the event – and therefore the historical fact – is now seen above all as a complex temporal phenomenon – “a temporal focal point” – in which many diferent times converge (Jung and Karla 2021). Of course, it can be studied both as the result of a previous process and as the starting points of subsequent processes and situations. With regard to the former perspective, diferent authors have underlined that historical facts only exist as retrospective reconstructions. And in relation to the latter, if we leave aside the aspect of the consequences of the event, which particularly interested Weber, one of the conceptual metaphors that has served to explore this dimension from the perspective of mnemohistory is the “afterlife of events,” a formula popularized by Marek Tamm (2014) inspired by the notion of Nachleben (survival), which had generally been applied to the posterity of artistic objects and cultural products. Moreover, various authors have pointed to the paradoxical capacity of certain events retroactively to create – post eventum – their own precedents, their own conditions of possibility. Not very diferently from the way in which, as Borges saw, Kafka gave rise to “the Kafkaesque,” thereby creating his precursors, these events have the capacity to produce virtual pasts.18 As early as the late 18th century, Kant had observed that there is an order among our representations, in which the present one (insofar as it has come to be) points to some preceding state as a correlate . . . of this event that is given, which is, however, determinately related to the latter, as its consequence, and necessarily connected with it in the temporal series. (Critique of Pure Reason, Pt. II. Div. I. Bk. II. Ch. II) However, the temporal complexity of events – which not only come in sequences but can overlap, cross over, or run in parallel – does not end there. It has been imagined in the form of a time knot that binds together the multicoloured threads of diverse times, with diferent rhythms, beginnings, and ends. This image has been used by some historians to illustrate the intersection of circumstances at certain historical junctures.19 However, the rehabilitation of the event – a category, according to Sewell (2005, 102), “in need of theoretical work” – in no way constitutes the return to discredited conceptual schemes of old 19th-century political history. The fundamental change implicit in this novel event would be the abandonment of the notion of history as a unifed, all-encompassing process protagonized by a single subject that unfolds and moves from the past to the future via the present (Simon 2019c, 44–5). Some theorists have taken their interest in the times of the event – including the exploration of that eventful temporality which recognizes the power of events to transform structures and even cultural categories (Sewell 2005,

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100–3) – to the extreme, changing their initial inquiry for its mirror image. They have proposed a refection upon temporality itself in view of the new conception of the event as a radical break with all that preceded it. Historian Zoltán B. Simon (2019) has developed this approach and identifed a type of temporality that he refers to as evental. This would be the emerging awareness of a specifc, genuinely Kairological time, which springs from the unexpected. This saltatory temporality – in which the new would seem to arise from northing or, at least, without a direct connection to the state of things that preceded its appearance – would be defned in contradistinction to modern, chronological, and future-oriented (processual temporality). In recent years, continues Simon (2019, 101–3), we would be witnessing in the Western world a fundamental change in temporal schemas, the emergence of a “new historical condition.” Developmental temporality would be left behind, to be largely replaced by an evental temporality, characteristic of the times of unprecedented change in which we are living. That said, this alternative movement substantially modifes the landscape of history (in the twofold sense of the word, as course of human afairs and as historical writing) and makes it possible to imagine a post-historical world. Not content with studying past events, some historians are also interested in future events (which, as we have just seen, would not necessarily arise from the past). There have even been proposed typologies for these kinds of events, such as that which distinguishes between routine, relative, and radical future events, each corresponding to a very diferent attitude, namely assumption, expectation, and adumbration (Jung 2021). It goes without saying that interest is focused above all on the third kind of events, which have the capacity radically to change the rules of the game. Among the range of mega-events or accelerated processes of an eco-technological nature that appear to be on a not-so-distant horizon, only a few, in principle, present a positive complexion (technologies of human enhancement, artifcial intelligence, transhumanism), while the majority are clearly pessimistic, dystopic, if not catastrophist (in some cases these are perfectly foreseeable deferred events, such as the mass extinction of species). And needless to say, the source of most concern are the major events – nuclear war, climate apocalypse, ecological collapse, technological singularity, planeticide – that could lead to the end of human life on earth. 4.3 Processes and structures As I have shown earlier, the event alone is not sufcient. In order to make sense, each event – “a segment of the endless web of experience” – has to be connected with others, forming some kind of organized whole. Friedrich von Schiller, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, and Wilhelm von Humboldt advocated at an early stage, the former in his lecture on universal history (1789), the second in the Preface to his Roman History (1811) and the latter in his essay on the task of the historian (1821), arguing the need for a “philosophical

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understanding” of history, one that joins the fragments “together by artifcial links” (Bowden 2017, 17), with these fragments understood as building blocks or stepping stones. The three insisted on “the general connectedness of events,” since, as Humboldt says, “a historian worthy of the name must represent every event as part of an entirety.” Of course, this “entirety” can adopt very varied forms (we have already seen that one of the most elementary forms of that totality of meaning used to be imagined as a simple necklace of beads). Musical metaphors have also been employed quite often to highlight the necessary integration of events-notes into a melody-process.20 The advantage of these images, compared with those of the rosary, is that they show that it is not events that make sense of the process, but rather the other way round: it is the whole process that makes sense of fragments events. Not even “the most complete aggregation of events [can] build up the larger units of historical understanding.” What is necessary – in this respect structuralists and narrativists coincide – is to broaden the horizon to make sense of a collection of events (Jung and Karla 2021, 77). From the rich vocabulary referring to the historical event in context, which encompasses a large quantity of terms,21 I have chosen the word “process,” as I believe it to be by far the most important for historiography. And the articulation of events and processes is far from a simple matter. For, to begin with, there is an enormous diference between a holistic approach like Spengler’s in The Decline of the West, where the interpretation of the process as a totality imposes a place and a meaning on the events that make it up, and an inductive approach like Huizinga’s, which rather infers from the relations between events the general meaning of the process (Hundert 1967, 108). Generally speaking, the event has tended to be associated with the singular, with discontinuity and the short term, while the process presupposes some commonality to various events that unfold over time and is related more to continuity and the long term. But this general impression, which is indeed endorsed by numerous historiographical works, is subject to a number of exceptions, and I would say that in recent decades, the border between event and process has been blurred, becoming increasingly porous (mainly due to the fact that the notion of event, which today is used in very diferent areas of knowledge, has become very broad and diversifed).22 In fact, the contemporary concept of historical event frequently designates a process. As Collingwood (1994, 163) observed, “the historical fact . . . is always a process in which something is changing into something else.” Not by chance, the rhetoric in relation to the gestation of an event, which is seen as the fnal result of a long process, has for a long time been one of the argumentative and narrative resources most frequently employed by historians. And, by contrast, some processes, even some of long duration, may legitimately be regarded as events. Have the French Revolution or the Second World War not been described as both events and processes? (in both cases, we would be contemplating two “portmanteau terms for lots of smaller facts” and each would be a label for “a summary narrative, rather

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than as a simple fact”: Munz 1997, 838).23 Is it not true that even a simple event – the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, for instance – can be broken down into a large number of minor sub-events? Is there not a current debate over whether the Anthropocene should be interpreted as an event or as a process? (Hartog 2021, 437). And, furthermore, is it not evident that in the same temporal segment, one can detect the overlapping and intersection of multiple desynchronized events and processes? As a consequence of the temporalization/futurization characteristic of the Enlightenment, various concepts that initially referred to a specifc event or objective were loaded with expectations and came to designate an ongoing historical process. Koselleck cites the example of the gradual replacement throughout the French 18th century of the term “perfection” with “perfectionnement” (improvement), that is, of a more or less fxed ideal with a process-based movement. “Progress” itself is also an unmistakeably processual concept (Prozessbegrif), while other processual concepts/events – such as emancipation – are characterized by their vast horizon of ever-expanding expectation (Koselleck 2012, 104–5, 118–19). The word “process” (Latin processus, from procedere, go forward) originally meant advance, march, and progress.24 Hence the use of the term “process” too for a natural phenomenon marked by gradual changes that lead towards a particular result or a series of actions conducing to an end. The term covers, thus, a wide gamut of meanings that encompasses methods, procedures, systematic actions, and even the course of time itself (processu temporis).25 Yet, in the context of historical writing, the process serves as a binding agent for a set of actions that lead from one thing to another and therefore confers a meaning and purpose upon actions that in isolation lack the latter. In ecclesiastical Latin, the term “processus,” used in the context of canon law, commonly referred to a trial or legal procedure and also to a process of investigation. And this legal sense entered several indigenous/vernacular European languages. In fact, in Spanish (proceso, previously processo), French (processus/procès), Italian, and Portuguese (processo), this term is both historical and a legal concept. This lexical-semantic coincidence has given rise to a certain relationship between History and Justice, as if both shared the capacity to deliver unappealable rulings. The fact that in German too, Der Prozess can refer to both a trial and a process surely has something to do with the tendency of various philosophers and historians to liken history to a court of justice (to the extent that, in some representations, Clio occupies God’s position in the fnal judgement).26 *** In 19th- and 20th-century historiography – especially in the heyday of structuralism, in the 1960s – another of the classic partners that accompanied the event, almost always in a relationship of mutual opposition, was structure. And, although in this school of thought structure was of

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course the dominant trope, many other images – architectural, organic, connective, reticular – and some quasi-synonyms of structure such as model or system, even frameworks, networks and links, flled page after page of social science texts during those years. In this literature, the defnitions of several of these terms frequently referred to one another in an inextricable tangle. Structure could be defned as a system of relations; the system, as a structured set of interrelated elements; the model, as a system of recurrent patterns, and so on. When, in his classic work on the Mediterranean in the era of Philip II, Fernand Braudel tries to explain the relations between event and structure, he cites Benedetto Croce, who implicitly recognizes the primacy of the latter concept over the former: “history [understood here as structure] is the keyboard on which these individual notes [i.e. the events] are sounded” (Braudel 1972, II, 1243). However, the most common solution to describe the interaction between both poles was recourse to dialectics. Thus, Braudel himself (1972, II, 903) suggests elsewhere that “the metaphor of the hourglass, eternally reversible” is a ftting image for the two-way causation between structure and events (Paul Ricoeur and Edgar Morin, among others, have subsequently insisted on this structure-event dialectic: Bouton 2023, 29). Over time, diverse authors realized that structures are not static. Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanfy, whose work was probably familiar to Braudel, equates the notions of process and structure when considering that the latter, structures, are actually “slow and prolonged processes.” Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (1985, 77, 89), in his infuential work Islands of History, speaks of “diachronic structures” and acknowledges that “structure is processual.” William H. Sewell (1996, 844), meanwhile, defnes the event as “a ramifed sequence of occurrences” that “results in a durable transformation of structures.” Koselleck (2004, 105–10) repeatedly underlines “the interrelation of event and structure,” two levels that “are related to each other without merging” and can only be explained in their reciprocity. He accepts “that ‘events’ can only be narrated, while ‘structures’ can only be described” but immediately adds that structures are processual by nature. Koselleck’s most elaborated refections upon this question would appear in his fnal years, when he published his work “Structures of Repetition [Wiederholungsstrukturen] in Language and History” (Koselleck 2018, 158–74). In this work, the German historian showed that innovation and repeatability are perfectly compatible. Moreover, if historical change is real and we can create novel experiences, it is precisely thanks to certain structures of repetition that remain relatively stable and make possible the succession of unique and contingent events, in the same way that grammatical rules permit multiple formulations, train timetables determine railway trafc, or the same laws can provide the basis for very diferent verdicts (Bouton 2022, 51). Structuralism soon became a source of dissatisfaction for philosophers and scholars of human sciences. When historical movement is approached from the structural point of view, like the action of millions of anonymous people,

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observes Hans Blumenberg (1985, 102), “history then becomes a process in nature, a sequence of waves, a glacial drift, a tectonic fault movement, a food, or an alluvial deposit.” Overwhelmed by “the indiference and endlessness of historical reality,” the individual subject resorts to setting a series of temporal milestones, of beginnings and ends, which allows for the establishment of “a relationship to the large-scale structures that reach far beyond him” (Blumenberg 1985, 100). What springs to mind here is Elias Canetti’s aphorism in Die Fliegenpein [The Agony of Flies]: “Mankind’s most perfectly terrifying work of art is its division of time.” The fact is that both events and processes lack clear beginnings and ends, and it corresponds to the historian to set and connect those limits. “Events,” wrote Paul Veyne (1984, 37), half a century ago, “have no natural unity; one cannot . . . cut them according to their true joints, because they have none.” As for periodizations, eras and chronologies are basically “artefacts of historical consciousness” that help us to situate and orient ourselves on the maps of time. Droysen, in the mid-19th century, had already “recognized that eras have as little reality in history as the lines of longitude and latitude leave traces on the Earth’s surface. They are primarily useful fctions” (Remaud 2014, 68). After him, Croce made similar afrmations with regard to the production of facts by historians; according to the Italian philosopher, it is “the mind that thinks and constructs the fact.” This is, therefore, an evolution parallel to the abandonment of the Rankean interpretation of historical events as solid bricks, and their replacement with an alternative, increasingly constructionist vision, paradoxically came to see events, in the words of Carl Becker, rather as generalizations or symbols – in the broadest sense attributed by Cassirer to this term (Ritter 1986, 154–6). *** Before continuing, let me dwell for a moment on a crucial issue. I refer to the paramount importance of the concept of process for history in any of the senses of the word. It is Hannah Arendt (1961, 63–4) who has insisted most that “the modern concept of process pervading history and nature alike separates the modern age from the past more profoundly than any other single idea.” (I might add, at this point, that also the modern concept of event, widely used both in philosophy and in the social and natural sciences, is a transversal concept of great importance.) It is hard to exaggerate the signifcance of this concept for “our modern way of thinking.” Invisible processes have engulfed every tangible thing, every individual entity that is visible to us, degrading them into functions of an over-all process. . . . The process, which alone makes meaningful whatever it happens to carry along, has thus acquired a monopoly of universality and signifcance. (Arendt 1961, 63–4)

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Several other authors have maintained that modernity, which involves the historization of all that exists and the inclusion of all kinds of events in an underlying current of temporal continuity, is based on the idea of process (an idea that, for Collingwood, is “the life of history”). For “historization” and “temporalization” are two terms (two processes!) that are largely equivalent to “processualization.” According to Arendt herself (1961, 28), one of the main reasons for this fundamental transformation is that modernity, breaking with tradition, placed the emphasis on the continuity and coherence of history. “The thread of historical continuity was the frst substitute for tradition.” Odo Marquard (2001, 44, 76), meanwhile, notes that “the shaping of the sense of history,” which consists above all in an afrmation of continuity amidst incessant changes, is a “specifcally modern compensation” to counteract the ahistorical view that characterizes the modern attitude towards the world. It would have been Hegel “who for the frst time saw the whole of world history as one continuous development” directed towards one goal, and in his wake, many others organized their systems of thought upon the basis of this new processual-teleological approach to the past. Agamben (1993, 96–7) recalls that, critically, Nietzsche had already grasped the fact that “the idea governing the nineteenth-century concept of history is that of ‘process’. Only process as a whole has meaning, never the precise feeting now.” “Under the infuence of the natural sciences,” he adds, “‘development’ and ‘progress’, which merely translate the idea of a chronologically orientated process, become the guiding categories of historical knowledge.” And Collingwood (1994, 226) would insist, in Hegel’s footsteps, on the heuristic and self-refexive nature of this notion: “The historical process is itself a process of thought, and it exists only in so far as the minds which are parts of it know themselves for parts of it.”27 For Gadamer (2004, 347), experience itself should be understood as a process. History, then, can be seen as a complex of interconnected processes and subprocesses by virtue of which some things cease to be and others come into being, or even as one great unitary process of becoming that advances inexorably in one particular direction. The champions of the great 18th- and 19th-century philosophies of universal history believed so, thus providing an intellective framework capable of making sense of the past, the present, and the future. According to Hans Blumenberg (2007, 195–6), the raison d’être of the speculative philosophy of universal history, from Bossuet to Voltaire, would be none other than the discovery/invention of a common thread that would make it possible “to substitute the discretum of ‘events’ with the continuum of historical movement.” Philosophical history, in short, would have been born to accommodate events – in particular, certain occurrences of major impact – in an all-encompassing current of events to which is attributed a continuity and a defned direction. Sociology too, interested as a discipline in the analysis of social change, has consistently focused on the idea of process, albeit sociologists have generally been careful to distance themselves from the teleological visions of

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philosophers of history. Distinguished sociologists have identifed diverse types of process. Thus, Norbert Elias addressed “unplanned processes” and long-term historical developments that, as is the case of The Civilizing Process (1939), far from following a preconceived trajectory, can change direction depending on unfathomable situations and circumstances. Before him, Weber had devoted his eforts to analysing the processes of secularization and rationalization associated with the rise of modernity. In this respect, the striking proliferation of concepts ending in -ization in the modern world – a marked tendency throughout the 20th and early 21st century – is a simple corollary of the spectacular expansion of the notion of process. Note that great historical-sociological theories and interpretations – I do not refer solely to the classics: one thinks of the standard bearers of the modernization theory of the 1950s and 1960, and some 1980s’ works on historical sociology in the style of the book Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons, by Charles Tilly – are usually known by one of the terms ending in -ization (Sp. -ización; It. -izzazione; Fr. -ization; Ger. -ierung; Port. -ização) that designate a macroprocess: “modernization,” “secularization,” “democratization,” “globalization,” and so on. Several of these processes – whose denominations frequently have a metaphorical origin – are of a non-deliberate nature or, at least, are not necessarily the direct result of intentional human action. This absence of intentionality is a feature that contrasts with the desire for change that characterizes supporters of modern ideological-political -isms (Fr. -isme(s); Sp., It. and Port. -ismo(s); Ger. -ismus, -ismen), the concepts of movement typical of the 19th and 20th centuries.28 Another of the concerns of various theorists, above all in the feld of the philosophy of history, has been identifying the engine of history, that is, the driving force – the quest for freedom, equality, or emancipation, the class struggle, major economic and technological transformations, the struggle between races, the demand for inclusion and recognition, or another similar objective, ideal or mechanism (including time itself!) – supposedly capable of setting historical processes in motion and driving transformations, advances, and progresses (we will return to this issue in Chapter 5). And, given that some of these “engines” are structural in nature, while others refer more to human action, both the cultivators of social sciences and the members of diverse socio-political movements (e.g. the advocates of diferent branches of Marxism have participated in endless debates and controversies in relation to the weight of “objective” and “subjective” factors in the dynamics of historical processes – structure vs. human agency, determinism vs. voluntarism). Once again, some of the most frequently employed metaphors to refer to historical processes – along with the aforementioned: chains, threads, or sequences of events forming causal series – are usually of a spatial nature. They generally speak of paths, routes, trajectories, itineraries, tracks, journeys, voyages, and peregrinations (which normally include stages and halts). But also of turns, winding roads, and turning points; of forks, crossroads,

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and bifurcation points; of ups and downs, roller coasters, and labyrinths; of vicissitudes, accidents, setbacks, and dead ends, which makes it possible easily to include in the process, understood as a displacement in space, certain critical events that have the power to alter its trajectory, to accelerate or decelerate its rhythm, or even derail the entire process. Others refer to phenomena observed in nature, physical transformations, and chemical reactions. If one seeks to underline the continuity over time of a subject that is constantly changing while essentially remaining identical to itself, it is possible to liken the succession of generations to a relay race or torch relay, with a development in stages, with a Proteus that endlessly changes. If the goal is to highlight changes during a process, one can turn to a physical process of changes of state (boiling, efervescence, consolidation), and biological transformations can be employed. Organic, biological, medical, and genetic vocabulary spread from the late 19th century onwards, as the theory of Darwinism extended to historical and social sciences. Western historiography during the second half of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century would be incomprehensible if we eliminated the organic language with which it is impregnated. Notions such as birth, growth, evolution, decay, degeneration; mutations, metamorphosis; health, disease, infection, contagion, epidemic, cancer, crisis, germ theory, death; and seed, bud, blossom, fower, fruit, and many more are everywhere. Biological analogies lend sense to its narrative and its arguments in line with an essentially genetic, naturalist, and evolutionist conception of historical processes. According to this logic, societies and institutions “are born,” “grow,” “evolve,” “age,” and “die.” Within this metaphorical universe, the notion of historical origin was one of those that caught the attention of historiographers, perhaps as a legacy of the mythical foundation time or time of origins described by Mircea Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane. And despite the fact that various historians (from Marc Bloch to Roger Chartier) have dedicated some classic works to combatting “embryogenic obsession,” it has to be admitted that still today the “Chimera of the origin” that “justifes an endless quest for beginnings” continues to obsess a number of politicians, journalists, and historians (we have seen some recent examples earlier in n. 11), who boast of knowing the genetic code or the DNA of this or that entity, historical process or collective actor, a very common teleological approach that projects a dangerous biological determinism upon the social world. Earth science too, as source domain, has contributed quite a few materials to processual metaphorics (from geological subdisciplines like stratigraphy or sedimentology to geophysics, which focuses on seismic activity, to hydrology and atmospheric sciences). An interesting example of historiographical colligatory concept of a naturalistic nature – geological-climatic, in this case, since it suggests ice ages and interglacial periods – well analysed from post-narrativist positions (Kuukkanen 2015, 101–12), is the notion of “thaw,” “which has been used to describe the period of Soviet history from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s.” During that historical period, the cultural

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atmosphere of the Soviet Union would have “warmed from the ‘freeze’ of Stalin to Khrushchev’s ‘Thaw’.” Indeed, the birth of the concept of “Cold War” at the end of the Second World War is no less interesting (Kuukkanen 2015, 122, 174–5) and demonstrates not only that causal-processual logic is an interpretation constructed by the historian but that many colligatory concepts are of an unmistakably tropological nature.29 When the objective was to evidence the speed of changes or the greater density of events in a given historical period (while, in the opposite sense, it is impossible to think of a time absolutely devoid of events), the metaphorics of celerity would be revisited. Thus, the second post-war period saw a strong return of the theme of acceleration, which French historian Daniel Halévy (Essai sur l’accélération de l’histoire, 1948) reinforces with other tropes, such as the suggestive image of the turbulent torrent that fows increasingly quickly as it nears the precipice, dragging people with it into the abyss (Bouton 2022, 80). But currents, whether accelerated or not, do not have to lead to catastrophe, and are often gratifying for those whom they sweep along. Sociologists and social psychologists have shown that the mere fact that a group of people see themselves as forming part of an ongoing process inspires in members comforting feelings of identity and trust. However, historians can play with the scales of time and, if they so wish, focus their magnifying glass upon key dates, as did Georges Duby in his book Le Dimanche de Bouvines (1973). Whether via a thick description, via a kind of slow motion applied to history, or by means of a combination of methods and techniques, they can produce accurate, multiscale descriptions of certain events, processes, and key moments from the past. *** In truth, several of the metaphorics that we have seen in reference to history and time (Chapters 1 and 2) have also been applied to the idea of process, and unsurprisingly, if we understand history as “a universal world-historical process,” both concepts are practically interchangeable. History would be nothing more than a developmental process. In Hegel’s work, “Progress [Fortschritt] and History [Geschichte] converge in the category of Process [Prozess],” while, for Marx, history is both a movement [Bewegung] and a process (Koselleck 1975, 403, 418). If we bear in mind the centrality of the idea of a movement-in-timedivided-into-phases in order to understand historical processes, it should come as no surprise to fnd that the visual metaphors employed by publicists to represent these processes have a signifcant spatial and stadial component. Thus, for instance, during the French Revolution, the fundamental episodes of the initial revolutionary process were represented in a didactic, politicized board game, comprising a chain of 63 segments in chronological order, from the storming of the Bastille to the promulgation of the 1791 Constitution (Reichardt and Kohle 2008, 224–9). In the Iberian worlds, we also fnd various kinds of games and graphic representations of historical processes

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imbued with political propaganda, such as the decks of cards with scenes of the Spanish Liberal Revolution and the traditional aleluyas or auques, a graphic-narrative genre – similar to comics and cartoons – that combines a number of strips arranged in chronological order on a broadsheet with explanatory verses below each picture.30 Among other examples of these types of visual metaphor allusive to historical processes represented as ladders, processions, and mass movements of people, works by Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros stand out. The gigantic mural titled The March of Humanity on Earth and Toward the Cosmos, which Siqueiros painted and sculptured in the Siqueiros Polyforum in Mexico City (1966–1971) is a good example of this visual rhetoric.31 Some engravings from the American Civil War era are also graphic representations of historical processes, an efect usually achieved by contrasting past and future (see in this respect Chapter 3, Section 1). This is the case of the print titled “Emancipation: The Past and the Future,” inspired by a drawing by Thomas Nast, contrasting African American life during and after slavery.32 The 20th century, and its fnal decades in particular, was accompanied by profound changes in the modern concept of process rather than the unilineal teleologism typical of the previous century, there was a gradual move towards a diferent conception of temporality that emphasized heterochrony, contingency, and on the role of the event. In parallel to the difusion of new metaphors, such as path dependency, a very productive heuristic instrument based on the notion that, owing to a certain institutional rigidity, past events or decisions constrain later events or decisions, temporally heterogeneous causalities have come to illuminate changes in social relations with a new light (Sewell 2005, 102). Whereas the historical process in the 19th century was usually considered to be necessary, continuous, and teleological, today social processes tend to be regarded as “inherently contingent, discontinuous, and open-ended” (ibid., 110). *** But the changes do not end there. Beyond the profound transformation of conceptions of process, some theorists have posited nothing less than the possible decline of this notion. In the early decades of the 21st century, we would be witnessing – in Simon’s (2019) opinion at least – a swift eclipse of the concept of process. Note, however, that this author strives to avoid the continuity-discontinuity polarity, fully aware as he is that this dilemma, insofar as any discontinuity can only be perceived against a background of continuity, leads to an epistemological dead end. Given that “even discontinuity belongs to the order of continuity” (Simon 2019c, 100) – a discontinuous process is still a process – when it comes to understanding the ruptures that substantially afect the subject of the changes, it is preferable, he suggests, to speak of “unprecedented change” rather than mere discontinuity. In such a way that the novel notion of event to which I referred in the previous section

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should be accompanied by an even more radical farewell to the concept of process, tantamount to an abandonment of the notion of history as a unifed, all-encompassing process protagonized by a single subject that unfolds from the past to the future via the present (Simon 2019c, 44–5). In my opinion, however, the “unprecedented change” of which Simon speaks is not absolutely lacking in precedents. For, although there has been frequent reference to the weight of Judeo-Christian tradition in the great narratives of modernity, the new non-processual sensibility that appears to have emerged in recent decades would connect in similar fashion with certain facets of the Christian pattern of history, characterized not only by a linearteleological vision but also by “crises, cataclysms, and right-angled changes” (Abrams 1973, 35). What is not at all clear is whether or not history can survive without the concept of process. “History as a process without a subject,” declared Louis Althusser (1976, 99) provocatively in the 1970s from his peculiar antihumanist Marxism. In the new temporal order of the Anthropocene, we are now told, for all the recognition that human beings have become a geological force, “the protagonist of Earth system history is . . . the Earth system itself, not humans” (Chakrabarty 2018, 25). Paradoxically, then, the discovery of the Anthropocene – with the plethora of discordant processes of which it is composed – would have put an end to the typical anthropocentrism of modernity while questioning the very idea of process. If to the refections of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Bruno Latour, and many others we add Zoltán Simon’s plea, looking towards the future, vis-à-vis the emergence of a new historical (?) sensibility, there are reasons to doubt whether or not this humanistic discipline we call history, as we have known it over the last two centuries, can survive the overwhelming new challenges it nowadays faces. In the absence of a unitary historical process – since it would no longer be possible to speak of the development of one single subject over time, but in any case of the leap to novel, potential posthuman subject – the question is inescapable: can we legitimately continue to call history that alternative conception of change that stems from a dissociative relation to the past and rejects “any ‘from-to’ confgurations of change”? As Simon himself wondered (2019, 188–90), without giving himself a conclusive answer, that hypothetical history without process, would it still be history? Notes 1 “Traditionally, historians have referred to their documents as ‘sources’, as if they were flling their buckets from the stream of Truth, their stories becoming increasingly pure as they move closer to the origins” (Burke 2001, 13). 2 Spanish historian Jerónimo de San José (Genio de la Historia, Zaragoza, 1651) identifed at an early stage the researcher’s advantage over the witness, the beneft of controlled, mediated observation compared with direct vision. To judge and know the truth, said San José, it is advisable for the historian carefully to collate the documents, often contradictory, that recount events in which one has not been

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involved, since if the author has directly witnessed “with his eyes what he writes with his pen,” this often leads to partiality and self-delusion. The Latin roots of the words document and monument show that the former is related to teaching (docere, to teach), while the latter is connected to memory (monere, to remind). In fact, the empiricist history-speaking-for-itself approach is still popular in certain milieux (Martinez 1995, 28). A glance at Figure 2.1 of this book is enough to grasp the very close relationship between the two tropes. The new paradigm, however, had numerous antecedents, and everything suggests that it gradually made inroads. From the etymology of the word “investigate” (in-vestigare) to the comparisons between the fgures of the historian and the hunter, both experts in the art of tracking, or between the historian and the doctor, who diagnoses on the basis of symptoms, we fnd many statements of this kind throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. It is true that, between the mid18th century and the late 20th century, the semiotic value of the track – Fr. trace; Ger. Spur; It. traccia; Sp. huella; Port., vestígio – was usually restricted either to the imprint (associated with a “reconstructionist” vision of the past) or to the origin – in semantic continuity with the source – rather than to the clue (Morsel 2016). The indirect logic of historical traces was already suggested in the work of Ranke, Lord Acton, Seignobos, Langlois, and Simiand. And one of the founders of Annales, Marc Bloch, wrote in his Apologie pour l’histoire (1942) that the study of the past is a “connaissance par traces” (“track-based knowledge”). Some representatives of the German historicist school also used in their writings the metaphor of “the ashes of what had happened” which, in the manner of Christian theology, holds that “the dead relics of the past can come to life again” (Van Norden 2022, 220). Some critics have used similar metaphors – “the sovereignty of the sources,” “the tribunal of the documents” – to counter the speculative excesses of some historiographical works with little respect for information drawn from sources (Evans 1999, 213). Another oft-quoted Walter Benjamin excerpt in reference to sources states that “there has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism.” This afrmation follows his earlier considerations regarding the triumphal procession of history’s victors “in which today’s rulers tread over those who are sprawled underfoot” (Theses on the Philosophy of History, VII). Note, for example, that the frst signs of passing from the metaphor of the river to that of strata, and from that of the mirror to that of construction, also date from the mid-20th century (see n. 37 to Chapter 2) and, in other words, more or less coincide with the publication of Renier’s aforementioned book. In the introduction to this volume, its editors write that “the past, always a foreign country, is growing more foreign to text-based historians” (Jarrick et al. 2016, 20). According to Lorraine Daston (2005, 682), in the 17th century, the usual meaning of the word “fact” – which at that time was moving semantically to mean, as well as the result of an action or an event, a discreet fragment of experience, a scrap, or piece of knowledge – was generally closer to the Latin res (thing) than to its root factum. For my purposes, it is very revealing that the crucial distinction between facts and interpretations comes from the legal diference between de iure and de facto questions. This provenance is clearly indicative of the extraordinary weight of legal logic in the origins of the modern scientifc mentality. The origins of modernity, for instance, have been attributed by diferent authors to diverse events, major or minor. From time to time, a historian claims to have

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discovered an important event, text, idea, or crucial moment in the past that for one reason or another would have remained hidden or unnoticed and would represent an authentic catalyst of change of era. In one of his last essays (The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, 2011), Stephen Greenblatt maintained that the recovery of a copy of the Roman poet Lucretius’s De rerum natura, in the 15th century, was the decisive fact that sparked the modern age. Alessandro Baricco, in his book The Game (2018), argues that the tipping point towards the digital era was 2002, “when somebody digitally stored a fragment of the world.” And it goes without saying that, today, one of the most hotly debated points among specialists in the Anthropocene is the exact dating of its beginnings. On invisible events, imperceptible to contemporaries, which come to light thanks to the work of historians, see Foucault 1994, 277–8. Even “resounding events are often only momentary outbursts, surface manifestations of these larger movements and explicable only in terms of them” (Braudel 1972, I, 21). The metaphor of the disruptive event as frontier has the advantage of drawing a line between two worlds of meaning. On either side – that is, before and after – the macroevent that broke time, as if the present resulting from such a transformative event and the past that preceded it were two foreign countries in which two mutually unintelligible languages were spoken. And, although the Koselleckian metaphorical concept of Sattelzeit – saddle time – is not strictly speaking an event, there is no doubt that it can be imagined as a border, limit, or threshold between two eras. It goes without saying that, for Christians, the most signifcant macroevent, which breaks history into a before and an after, was the incarnation of Christ. From the beginning of the 19th century, the French Revolution became the epitome of a great transformative event in modern historiography. One of the most popular versions of this topos is as follows: “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; / For want of the shoe, the horse was lost; / For want of the horse, the rider was lost; / For want of the rider the battle was lost; / For want of the battle, the kingdom was lost; / And all from the want of a horseshoe nail.” That the smallest detail may prove very costly is ratifed by a multitude of similar experiences and literary works. Think, for example, of Richard III’s desperate cry in Shakespeare’s play: “My kingdom for a horse!” More recent is Zalasiewicz’s (2010) attempt to narrate the deep (geological) history of a simple pebble. The diference between both types of events – black swan and gray rhino – lies in the possibility of preventing their consequences. The advent of the Covid-19 pandemic (2020), for example, according to Niall Ferguson, was more a grey rhino than a black swan. Following an insight of Bergson’s, Žižek (2014, 77), writes that “when something radically New emerges, this New retroactively creates its own possibility, its own causes/conditions.” An analysis of the fgures and times of late 16th-century Spanish hegemony, where the metaphors of the knot and traces are brilliantly combined, in Ruiz Ibáñez (2022, I, 15–75). In his defence of the idea that history is a system, José Ortega y Gasset (1962, 122) writes: “Human destiny is a kind of melody in which each note takes on its musical meaning when it is placed in its proper position among all the others. Therefore the song of history can only be sung as a whole.” The event can be paired with various broader concepts, each of which supposedly integrates a certain number of signifcant events. Terms such as “process,” “structure,” “system,” “juncture,” “context,” “narrative,” and “plot” form part

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of this vocabulary, in which could be included temporal notions such as progress, development, or evolution, as well as diverse termini technici employed by theorists of historical writing, including, for instance, temporal wholes, narrative sentences (A. Danto), metahistory, modes of emplotment (H. White), grand narrative (grands récits) (Lyotard), historical representation, narrative substances (F. Ankersmit), and so on. Within this vocabulary, a distinction should be drawn between those terms that refer above all to the modern concept of history understood as the ensemble of human vicissitudes over time and those others that are more related to research and the writing of history. One of the authors who have contributed most to expanding the concept of event is Michel Foucault. In his text “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” he inserts the following unconventional defnition of event, at once processual and discontinuist: “An event . . . is not a decision, a treaty, a reign or a battle, but the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary that turns against those who had used it, a weak domination that poisons itself as it becomes lax, the entry of a masked ‘other’” (Foucault 1977, 154). “We can see now that the distinction between a fact and a story is not absolute. . . . Every fact is a mini-narrative; and, equally, any narrative can, summarily, be described as a fact” (Munz 1997, 838). Until the early modern age, the Latin term procursus (del verbo procurro, that is, run forth) was also used to indicate a more rapid advance. See Byung-Chul Han’s (2015, 30–1) refections on some items of modern terminology derived from the Latin procedere, including process, procession, and processor. In any case, the double leap from the legal concept to the eighteenthcentury temporal concept of process and from this to the computer concept of processor is surely revealing of the accelerated times of modernity. As Wimmer (2022, 1240–1) has noted, “the notion of history-as-process in German implies the double meaning of process and trial,” a linguistic fact that links History and Justice. In Schiller’s famous dictum, repeated by Hegel and several others, “Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht” [World History Is the Last Judgment], the word Weltgericht “designated both secular jurisdiction and divine judgment over the mundane world.” And despite the fact that Ranke, in the most quoted fragment of his work, expressly declines to “judge the past,” limiting himself “to say how it actually was,” it is telling that the vellum document Ranke received on the occasion of his honorary citizenship of Berlin (1885), a diploma full of allegorical images, contained not only representations of Clio and Themis side by side but a curious (and perhaps unique) representation of Schiller’s motto, in this case attributed to the Muse of History, who appears seated majestically, in the place of God, judging a group of great historical fgures (ibid., 1229). This idealistic formulation of Collingwood’s inevitably brings to mind some very famous afrmations by Hegel in Die Vernunft in der Geschichte: “History is the process whereby the spirit discovers itself and its own concept” (“Dieser Prozeß, dem Geiste zu seinem Selbst, zu seinem Begrife zu verhelfen, ist die Geschichte”). A cursory comparison between processual concepts such as modernization, secularization, democratization, and globalization and their corresponding -isms (modernism, secularism, democratism, globalism) clearly show the contrast between the ideological-activist implications of the latter movement concepts (whether aesthetic, philosophical, economic, or political) and the greater degree of automatism and anonymity of the former. From a temporal point of view, it is clear that concepts ending in -ization are more analytical and generally look to the past, while -isms look mainly to the future. “A good example [of metaphorical historiographical interpretation] is Christopher Clark’s (2019) portrayal of the main players in the development towards the Great War as ‘sleepwalkers’” (Kuukkanen 2015, 175).

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30 Such as, for example, the Aleluya sobre la Constitución (c. 1820), conserved in the Madrid History Museum. 31 One of the most popular and widespread images of this kind is the illustration titled The Road to Homo Sapiens (originally published in the volume Early Man, 1965), later known as The March of Progress, reproduced and parodied on multiple occasions, which represents a sequence of primate species from Pliopithecus to Modern Man. More on visual narratives in Burke 2001, 140–56. 32 This drawing, originally published in Harper’s Weekly, New York, 24 January 1863, led to various versions and re-issues in ensuing years. Shortly afterwards, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (14 February 1863) included another vignette titled “Lincoln’s Dream; or There Is a Good Time Coming,” under the words “The Future – the Past.” The technical challenge posed to illustrators is to “translate” time into space, that is, to represent processes by contrasting two scenes separated by an allegedly decisive change that would mark a decisive break between a “before” and an “after” (Burke 2001, 143, 151).

5

Revolution, crisis, modernity

The three basic concepts grouped together in this chapter have been the subject of so many works and debates that it is no exaggeration to say that they are among the most frequently discussed historical notions in recent decades. All three have metaphorical origins and strong temporal implications. Revolution alluded initially to a rotatory movement; crisis, to a decisive moment; modernity, to a recent time. The Greek and Latin roots of the terms that designate these three concepts are ancient, but their emergence in political language took place in that more or less recent period to which we sometimes refer, not always in very precise fashion, as modern times. An era fond of diagnosing itself that is often regarded as revolution- and crisis-ridden. Each of the items in this triad is frequently presented as associated with the other two. If one examines all the possible combination of the three terms taken two at a time, one fnds that almost all the combinations work, though of the three, it is probably “crisis” that combines best. Modernity has been characterized as an endemic crisis. Revolution, as a critical period. Crisis, as a revolutionary moment. The most modern modernity – which begins at the end of the 18th century – has been called, among other denominations, age of history, age of revolutions, and fnally, age of crisis. In many texts, revolution is nothing other than a “total crisis”1 that gives way to a new age, namely the late-modern period (known in some Latin countries as contemporary age). All this, and what is to follow, shows the degree to which the three concepts are interlinked. In fact, they share tropological domains, and in a number of metaphors, one of the three concepts exercises in turn as source and as target. 5.1 Revolution As is the case with most of the concepts I am examining, the beginnings of revolution were metaphorical. Its move from the domain of astronomy to that of politics has been traced on numerous occasions, and I am not going to do so again here. It is worthwhile, however, highlighting the curious mutation of the meaning of the prefx re- that this word contains in its Latin root (re-volvere), which, from suggesting a return to the starting point (revolutio), DOI: 10.4324/9781032736358-8

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changes to mean exactly the opposite: radical innovation that generates an entirely diferent order – from the repetition of the past according to a cyclical principle to the invention of an open future. This spectacular semantic leap took place in the main European languages during the so-called era of revolutions and was accompanied by a rich and varied metaphorics and by a vocabulary that includes Latin expressions like tabula rasa, ex nihilo, ex novo, and more common expressions such as birth, dawn, new beginning, or start from scratch. Much of this tropology refers to the rupture with the past and to those situations or moments of supposed absolute creation, in which something appears to come out of nowhere as if by magic. The relationships of complementarity, opposition, or partial synonymy between revolution and other adjacent concepts, such as civil war (a clarifying comparison between revolution and civil war as two political paradigms of the event in Hulak 2023), evolution, reform, progress, crisis, regeneration, and several others have been examined and interpreted in each argumentative context, although the reiteration of certain metaphorical walkways between specifc items of this vocabulary points us towards the semantic similarities and diferences between these notions (Chapter 6 will include more on the relationships between the concepts of revolution and progress). Here I shall limit myself to showing some aspects related to the close connection between modernity and revolution, and their respective metaphorics. The links between both concepts are plain to see if we bear in mind that the latter only assumed this conceptual form at the end of the 18th century, that is, at a crucial moment when, with the peak of the Enlightenment, the modern world attained a certain degree of maturity. “There are few words so widely difused and belonging so naturally to modern political vocabulary as the term ‘revolution’,” whose new meaning “is itself a linguistic product of our modernity” (Koselleck 2004b, 43–4; Koselleck 2012, 161f.). Moreover: “revolution,” or rather the revolution, can be seen as the threshold of fullyfedged modernity and even as “the essence of modern time regime.” With good reason, along with the fction of a new beginning capable of breaking up time, the fundamental semantics of revolution consists in an oxymoronic notion that has left the deepest of marks upon the last two centuries: creative destruction. The proliferation of images and metaphors used to describe revolution since the fnal quarter of the 18th century might be attributable to the need to counter uncertainty and make sense of the avalanche of unexpected events that began to occur at an unbelievable pace. In troubled times of revolution, when every path is erased, there is barely time for refection, and events are accelerated, fgurative language is an essential cognitive resource. Metaphor would then be, above all, an action at a distance upon the world (actio per distans) and of production of meaning in conditions of uncertainty (Fernández-Sebastián 2021c, 284, 317–18). Whatever the case, the volume and variety of its metaphors would confrm the exceptional importance this concept has come to acquire in modern times. The semantic history of revolution is

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complex and multilayered. In this history, it is not always easy to distinguish between the conceptual, the visual, and the metaphorical. Some aspects have already been addressed in Chapter 1, as in certain highly ideologized political and intellectual spheres in the 19th and 20th centuries, revolution and history – two concepts based essentially on movement2 and were almost synonymous notions. There is no doubt that it was in the wake of the French Revolution that this word underwent its decisive transformation at both semantic and evaluative levels. This transformation involved a substantial expansion, in space and in time, of its feld of application. In the writing of authors such as Joseph de Maistre or Mme. de Staël, the word “revolution” moved from designating a local event to referring to an entire age (and later became “the authentic, world-historical signature of our era,” as Friedrich J. Stahl observed: Clark 2019, 128). “Meta-historical concept,” “regulating principle,” “founding event” are some of the epithets that have been applied to it (Hulak 2023, 180–1). And what was initially designated as a fact was soon redescribed as an act and shortly afterwards as an actor (Bell 2015). In similar vein to, as we have seen, what was happening with History, Revolution – often with a capital letter – began to be treated as a hypostatized subject, endowed with agency – an agent capable of rapidly extending its radius of action from a city to a country, to a continent, and even, insofar as the term revolution was the object of a process of rhetorical infation, to the entire world (Koselleck 1984). The liberals of the Hispanic world and other countries of Europe and the Americas frequently referred in their writings and manifestos to a “general revolution” and to a “universal revolution.” And all this while, in certain spheres, the term and its cognates, such as “revolutionary,” underwent a radical transvaluation: what had traditionally been seen, since Aristotle, as a social pathology, a danger to be avoided – civil discord and armed confrontation between citizens – began to be considered by some as something positive, even as a desirable remedy for greater ills. And it would soon become a genuine myth. In the mid-century, it had already become – thanks to Marx, among others – a historical-philosophical category, and by the beginning of the 20th century – courtesy of Lenin, among others – “a concept denoting the duty of activism” (Koselleck 2004b, 53–4; Osterhammel 2014, 514–17). The metaphorical feld of debts and obligations – moral but also economic – would come to acquire great relevance in explaining revolutions. Marx himself would apply the analogy of debtors and creditors to the revolutions of 1848: the revolution is a debt that the bourgeois have contracted with the proletariat and are obliged to pay of (Edelstein 2020; this trope could be tributary to the Judeo-Christian imaginary of sin as debt: Anderson 2009).3 However, far from settling in the feld of history and politics, the concept continued its process of expansion (which in fact had already begun when, from designating a violent and brief change, it also came to denote a major long-term transformation). Over time, revolution would expand its feld of

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application by means of metaphor to many other spheres, including society, economics, morality, science, technology, art, and culture in general. Heine, for instance, in 1834, established an analogy between the “material revolution in France” and “a mental and spiritual revolution” that would have taken place a little earlier in Germany, referring to Kantian philosophy (Nirenberg 2014, 387; see also Brinkmann 2000, 2–5). In a way, one might say that the circle closes when the word is applied to the very writing of history. Two centuries after the French (political) Revolution, Peter Burke appositely chose the title The French Historical Revolution for one of his best-known books, referring to the Annales School. Classifying the main metaphors for revolution in perfectly coherent fashion is not an easy task, since a number of tropes employed to represent it overlap, intersect, and hinder one another and, on occasions, blatantly contradict each other.4 Furthermore, while some images seek to exalt revolution, others clearly attempt to denigrate it, and there are also others that, depending on the pragmatic contexts, may transmit both a positive and a negative evaluation. A sizeable group of metaphors take as their source domain natural events, atmospheric phenomena, and natural disasters in particular. These rhetorical devices – previously used by some historians to describe the popular uprisings of the 17th century (Aurell et al. 2013, 145, 151) – highlight the imposing power and the inevitable and irresistible nature of revolution (the causes of which no longer need to be explained, as they occur as natural phenomena). The broad range of events employed cover the four classical elements: water, earth, fre and air. Revolution can be seen as a food, as an earthquake, as a fre, or as a hurricane (Christina Morina (2023) has emphasised that the metaphor of revolution as an earthquake was shared by all the early propagators of Marxism). These kinds of images, meteorological metaphors of angry nature in particular, which traditionally were used to extoll the power of God or of the prince, would now be employed to emphasize the power of the people and their capacity to subvert the traditional order. Let us consider some examples, which I shall take in the main from the Hispanic revolutions of the frst half of the 19th century (for which I shall refer to the wealth of information contained in the lexicon elaborated by the Iberconceptos (DPSMI) research team, especially Volume 9 of the second part (DPSMI II-9), devoted to the concept of revolution). Many of these images respond to a philosophy of history that take it for granted that revolution – an umbrella term under which some publicists do not hesitate to harbour numerous disruptive historical incidents that have taken place since the last quarter of the 18th century in North America, in France, and in the Iberian worlds – correspond to an imaginary march towards freedom – a great march that would advance inexorably along a path described by some as nothing less than world revolution (DPSMI II-9, 43, 44, 52, 101, 141, 197, 209). On occasions, they even suggest that this path is pre-established in “the great book of revolutions” (El Triunfo de la Nación, Lima, 2–3–1821;

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DPSMI II-9, 175). However, a number of commentators ofer diferent evaluations depending on the revolution in question (see notes 5 and 9) and, above all, distance themselves from the French Revolution, which they usually condemn. There are those who stress, for instance, that the atrocities committed during the latter should have served as a warning to other nations not to repeat the same errors (El Conciso, Cádiz, 10–1–1811; DPSMI II-9, 202). The sources of the time abound with hydraulic, electrical, magnetic, and volcanic images: raging torrent, ebbs and fows of an unstoppable tide, terrifying storm, withering bolt of lightning, electrical spark, magnetic force,5 volcanic eruption, terrible fre (DPSMI II-9, 35, 53, 89, 110, 117, 157, 160, 174, 185, 190; DPSMI II-10, 157). On other occasions, revolutions take the form of a devastating, but necessary, earthquake (La Aurora de Chile, Santiago, 13–8–1812; DPSMI II-9, 110). Very present in these images is the “creative destruction” that I mentioned earlier, an idea that is often expressed via an architectural simile. Revolution, they insist, has to demolish frst in order to rebuild afterwards: the ruins of the past will be the foundations of the future, or, in agricultural overtones, “revolutions devastate to render more fertile the soil” (DPSMI II-9, 43, 88, 174, 178, 191, 209–10).6 And long before historians and analysts began to propose complex interpretations in causal terms, some journalists and political activists of the age were fond of underlining the fact that, despite appearances, revolutions are political phenomena that respond to profound causes, and though they are triggered in an instant and take everyone by surprise – maybe when a certain incident acts as a tipping point in the style of the straw that broke the camel’s back – in truth they have been developing in subterranean fashion over a lengthy period of time (DPSMI II-9, 101). This idea is often accompanied by the image of fermentation. The metaphor of the “old mole,” which Marx borrowed from Shakespeare and Hegel and adapted to his argumentative needs, operates in a similar vein: revolutionaries, like moles, have patiently to excavate the subsoil for many years before they can fnally bring down capitalism. Argentinian politician José Ignacio Gorriti noted in 1826 that a sudden revolution like that of Río de la Plata was not the result of a conspiracy but rather “its origins lay in very remote and distant times and circumstances” (DPSMI II-9, 53). Nevertheless, revolution “arrives when you least expect it, like a thief in the night” (Lilla 2016, 170).7 Another block of metaphors is formed by all those that promote the pedagogical usefulness of revolution. Revolution is a school in which everybody learns, a strict teacher,8 and a book that teaches useful lessons – someone spoke ironically of a new “revolutionary science” (Chaparro 2019, 230) – since, among other things, it enables its pupils to learn from the mistakes of others (DPSMI II-9, 94, 146, 216).9 If the twilight of the paradigm of history-master, which coincided with the rise of the model of revolution-master, involved a certain eclipse of the supposed assumption of the iterability of historical events, it was very soon clear that revolutions could be repeated

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and in fact were repeated with slight variations, which made it possible for various politicians and theorists to establish more or less systematic comparisons between ancient and modern revolutions and then between successive modern revolutions. In this way it was feasible to combine the primitive meaning of the word “revolution” as cycle, which it never completely lost, with the new meanings of radical change. And all of this in the context of an increasingly accelerated world. In Brazil, in the mid-19th century, there were still those who believed that there could spontaneously occur “social and political renewal without upheaval,” as naturally and smoothly as “the change of seasons” (O Libelo do Povo, 1849, DPSMI II-9, 75), while others acknowledged that, albeit revolution may be considered the hardest of winters, without it, “it is impossible for spring and summer to blossom” (Idade d’Ouro do Brasil, 22–2–1821; DPSMI II-9, 69). Even more so when, as Spanish socialist Sixto Cámara wrote in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution, “all beliefs have been abolished” and “revolutions take place at terrifying speed, with nobody capable of closing the abyss” (La cuestión social, 1849), the outlook grew ever darker. These and other similar declarations provide a glimpse on the horizon of the spectre of nihilism. Some writers and intellectuals in the Iberian and Latin worlds began to suspect that, since upheavals occurred and were never quelled, perhaps one could speak of a type of anacyclosis of revolutions, even of one single, interminable revolution. “The endless string of revolutions, like Penelope’s cloth, is always weaving and unweaving itself,” wrote Spanish liberal politician Nicomedes-Pastor Díaz in a moment of despondency (A la corte y a los partidos, 1846). As a result of the events of February 1848 in Paris, Alexis de Tocqueville (1864, XII, 87) wondered whether the revolution that began in 1789 – because he was sure that in essence it was the same revolution – would enable the French fnally to reach “that solid ground we have been seeking for so long,” or perhaps “our destiny is eternally to sail the seas.” However, it was not only a case of France and Spain: in the frst part of La démocratie en Amérique (II, 5), the French jurist wrote that “the turmoil of revolution is actually the most natural state of the South American.” Victor Hugo also believed that revolution always returns and that its real name is Progress, or rather, Tomorrow, since the modern world permanently has its sights set on the future (“the meaning of today’s life is to be found in tomorrow’s”: Chiaromonte 1970, 16). Decades later, the revolutions of the 20th century would continue to contemplate their refections in the mirror of earlier revolutions, as if they formed a part of a long chain of events, and each new revolutionary outbreak had to fnd its inspiration in previous explosions. Thus, as Badiou observed, 1968 sought to fulfl the promise of 1917, which in turn found its justifcation in the precedents of 1789, 1848, and 1871 (Lilla 2016, 112). A large number of metaphors forged during the era of revolutions are related to movement, speed, and, in particular, acceleration. Several of them – including some that allude to natural phenomena such as foods or volcanoes10 – lend themselves to artistic representation, and, in this way, a few

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Figure 5.1 “The revolutionary torrent.” Engraving published in Le Charivari (Paris, 1834). Source: Carnavalet Museum.

also became visual metaphors (Figures 5.1 and 5.2 ofer two examples of very distant moments and slightly diferent meanings; the frst, revolution as an irresistible torrent; the second, as a tsunami).11 The most powerful of these nature metaphors, “images of great and overwhelming natural phenomena, are also characteristic of defnitions of the sublime in contemporary aesthetic theories,” such as those of Burke, Kant, or Schiller, and endow certain “political events with the force of destiny” (Brinkmann 2000, 7). These textual and visual images have their acoustic translation in musical metaphors such as Beethoven’s Third Symphony (Brinkmann 2000). But the correspondences to which historians, thinkers, politicians, and publicists resort in order to explain or visualize historical processes as if they were natural developments are not limited to this kind of sublime phenomena of an overpowering turbulent nature (turned in this case into caricatures). Physics has long provided numerous analogies between the laws of mechanics and those governing the political and moral world. Jean Starobinski (2003) devoted an extensive monograph to analysing the historical vicissitudes of the action/reaction duo. In his account, the lexical couple revolution/ reaction occupies a place of honour (Starobinski 2003, 322–52). It is not by chance that the terms “counter-revolution” and “counter-revolutionary”

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Figure 5.2 Revolution as a tsunami. Cartoon by Bill Mauldin (USA, 1962). Source: From Latin America in Caricature, by John J. Johnson (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1980). Reproduced with permission Bill Mauldin Estate, LLC.

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Figure 5.3 The Russian Revolution of 1905, as seen by a cartoonist for Philadelphia Inquirer (15 July 1905).

will soon become almost synonymous with reaction and reactionary.12 The typical comparison when speaking of reaction is with “the mechanical efect of a spring suddenly released” (Starobinski 2003, 324, 333; see n. 21), or with an elastic band, pendulum swing, or backward movement in return. And, since the third law of motion in Newton’s Principia (1687) states that “to every action, there is always opposed an equal reaction” (Starobinski 2003, 37–48), the revolution itself can be seen as a reaction. In Figure 5.3 we see Tsar Nicholas II of Russia receiving a severe blow to his head from the gigantic hammer of the revolution, as a backlash against the harsh repression of the workers’ insurrection in Lodz. The pain caused by this hammer forces him to accept a constitutional monarchy represented by the stars of liberty, freedom, constitution, and parliament. As with other interrelated concepts, such as “fall”/“decline” in relation to “rise”/”progress,” the word “reaction” has an anaphoric and “secondariness” relation to the antecedent – action, revolution – that triggers it, which makes it possible to imagine a social order subject to “the workings of mechanical chains of cause and efect” (Starobinski 2003, 360, 370). Lucian Hölscher (2018, 22), for his part, recently compared the wave of pessimism

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following the French Revolution to the blow of a wrecking ball that destroyed many people’s utopian dreams. Apart from the mechanical logic of the interplay of opposing forces, the other major modern metaphor for reaction has to do with the temporalization of politics and makes reaction a signifcant tool for interpreting history as a whole. According to this view, which takes hold after the French Revolution and will be endorsed not only by liberals but also by most historians, reaction would imply a kind of backward movement in the opposite direction to the “great march of history.” Reactionaries – the word will immediately carry a strong pejorative charge – are backward-looking, stubborn traditionalists who go against the march of ideas (Starobinski 2003, 330), turn their backs on the future, and seek to turn back the hands of the clock of history. Hence they are compared to crabs and are usually seen as failures, losers, parasites, outsiders, exiles of their time, and castaways of history, condemned in advance to the dark place where modernity throws the debris of the unstoppable historical process. One of the most frequent similes compares revolution to a great leap or to a collective march forwards – whether of one society in particular or of humanity as a whole – which on occasions confates with the process of emancipation, with the advance of freedom and equality, or even – in its more mild versions – with the “race of civilization” (a lithograph by Spanish engraver Vicente Urrabieta titled “The People on the March for Freedom” (1855) would be a good example of the latter). However, it is also frequently identifed with a big wheel, with an engine or, more frequently, with a working animal, vehicle, or specifc means of transport – horse, cart, railway. Midway between allegory, symbol, and caricature, since the end of the 18th century we fnd graphic representations of some of these metaphors. The wheel, in particular, an ancient symbol with a multitude of readings, lends itself to diverse recreations and interpretations. If it revolves around itself like a waterwheel, it connects not only with the old meaning of revolution but also with the age-old tradition of the wheel of Fortune.13 If the wheel moves swiftly forwards, let alone with the aid of wings, it symbolizes the dynamism of a revolutionary process that is often described as unstoppable – an image, indeed, that seems to have been employed as much or more by the adversaries of revolution as by its advocates.14 It was no coincidence that the “wheel of history” is an expression repeatedly found in Lenin’s and Trotsky’s work, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn chose the title The Red Wheel for his cycle of novels referring to the Bolshevik Revolution. Of course, this rotary movement may be perfectly pointless, as in the case of a hamster wheel. Thus, a Spanish cartoon from the second half of the 19th century represents revolution – a woman, taciturn in appearance, with a sword in one hand and a torch in the other – striving to march forward, when in truth the wheel is revolving in the opposite direction, and she is making no progress whatsoever (Figure 5.4). Pure futility and impotence.

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Figure 5.4 “March, in giant strides, of the September Revolution” by Francisco Ortego. Gil Blas, Madrid, 12 May 1870. Source: Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional de España.

This is the polar opposite of the impression of inexorable power transmitted by Figures 5.1 and 5.2. More common is the representation of revolution as a galloping steed, ridden on occasions by a maiden sporting a Phrygian cap, torch in hand, which may personify both revolution and freedom or republic.15 The possibility of the rider losing control and the horse running amok – that is, of the revolution skidding – would be fully exploited by cartoonists, eager to infuse their sketches with a dose of drama (Fernández-Sebastián 2021c, 432–4). The carriage is another rhetorical, iconic, and scenographic device frequently used by revolutionaries from 1789 onwards. The ambiguity of the images attests to the fact that some of them may serve diametrically opposed

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purposes. This occurs, for example, with the triumphal chariot, a practice that dates back to the ceremonies of imperial Rome, including Petrarch’s I Trionf and countless allegorical engravings on this theme, since triumphal chariots were a regular accessory of European monarchies between the 16th and 19th centuries. The revolutionaries appropriated this monarchic-imperial tradition, seeking to give it a new meaning, but their adversaries did not renounce its use. We know, for instance, that prominent in the great revolutionary procession organized in Paris in April 1792, replete with lightrelated symbolism, was a huge chariot of Liberty, drawn by 24 horses, while a drawing by caricaturist James Gillray, published in England three years later, showed William Pitt guiding the solar chariot of the English constitution, which is putting to fight the dark powers of revolutionary fanaticism (Gombrich 1979, 198, 204).16 Henceforth, the carriage became a very common iconographic motif in 19th-century political caricatures, a visual metaphor of revolution (Le Triomphe, a coloured engraving that represents the triumph of the 1848 Revolution, is an excellent example; reproduced in Capellán 2021, 210).17 The Hispanic world alone contains numerous examples. A Barcelonan vignette of 1837 celebrates the recently proclaimed liberal constitution, represented as an open book bathed in radiant sunshine which, in the style of Phoebus, arrives aboard a magnifcent chariot drawn by two winged horses. Shortly before, the anti-clerical newspaper El Sancho Gobernador (13–11– 1836) had distributed a lithograph among its readers that featured an iron carriage, with spiked wheels designed to rip open innocent victims as it proceeded. This bloody carriage of counter-revolution, driven by a fearsome female fgure that symbolized the Inquisition, and drawn by a group of friars, carries various instruments of torture. In mid-century Spain, however, the literary image of the carriage was already associated above all with the radical political changes that had accompanied the revolution. From 1808 onwards, wrote an observer, “we jumped aboard the carriage of the revolution, and dragged from precipice to precipice, in a few hours we completed the journey that should have taken many years” (Flores 1968 [1853], 18–19, 265; Fernández-Sebastián 2021c, 432–3). Nineteenth-century satirical press was full of engravings and vignettes that portrayed carriages and chariots of every style, size, signifcance, and political intent – sometimes drawn by a group of politicians and transporting a pile of constitutional texts, driven on other occasions by an allegory of revolution itself while some individuals struggle to accelerate and other to apply the brakes (as some believe it is moving too slowly and others too fast). Pushed and acclaimed by a crowd (in the manner of the “bandwagon efect” that the German political scientist E. Noelle-Neumann masterfully describe in her work The Spiral of Silence, 1982), stranded on rocky terrain full of insurmountable obstacles, the carriage of revolution, in its diverse versions, fuctuating between the heavy, solemn hearse, the swift quadriga, the urban barouche, and the rustic cart, became a familiar fgure for readers during

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those years.18 As with disappointment with the meagre tangible results of revolutions accumulated, an increasingly less enthusiastic tone was apparent, which would culminate in defeatism. The so-called Revolutionary Sexenium in Spain is a case in point. A glance at Spanish satirical press between 1868 and 1874 reveals, instead of triumphal chariots, rustic carts that struggle to advance before being blocked by the multiple impediments that prevent their progress. Very prominent among the latest technological advances in means of transport was the railway, to which I have already devoted some attention in Chapter 1. Marx’s vision of revolutions as “locomotives of history” – in clear allusion to their inimitable capacity to abbreviate time, precipitating certain kinds of events and hastily transporting the working class or humanity towards its longed-for goal of emancipation – is anything but an isolated idea.19 Trains, in fact, are one of the quintessential emblems not only of revolution but of history, of progress, and of modern civilization. Of course, after the powerful images, both graphic and literary, of steam and later electric and diesel power, news and fateful metaphors soon spread in allusion to catastrophes involving these inventions. Just as horses could run amok, and chariots skid and plunge into the void, trains ran the risk of crashing or being derailed. The list of rail accidents is indeed a long one, and as speed increased, it grew longer. It is not surprising that some of those unhappy with modernity began to miss a more leisured pace. Half a century before Walter Benjamin challenged Marx, proposing the emergency brake as a more suitable metaphor for revolution, Friedrich Nietzsche (1996 [1878], 378) had already noted that “sometimes a culture is in the greatest need of a brake: namely, when it is going too fast downhill or, as in the present case perhaps, too fast uphill.” For decades, the railway was the epitome of the metaphorical application of the languages of industry and technology to history and politics. This is hardly surprising if one bears in mind that, in the eyes of some witnesses of the era and for a number of historians too, the transformation that gave rise to capitalism – labelled as industrial revolution, an expression coined by Blanqui at the end of the 1830s – was even more important and decisive than the political revolutions. The train – “roue conquérante” [“conquering wheel”], “triumphal car into the unrolling future” (Bouton 2022, 77) – appeared to symbolize like no other invention the Zeitgeist of an age that had left behind the horse of fesh and bone to replace it with the much faster and more efcient steam horse.20 Techno-scientifc vocabularies, however, were not a novelty within political language. They had been accompanying revolutionary rhetoric since the end of the 18th century or earlier. If in times of the rise of mesmerism, of mechanics and thermodynamics, electrical or magnetic metaphors had predominated, as well as those related to springs,21 efervescence, and boiling, as the century progressed, industrial terminology evocative of factories, machines and tools, gearboxes, propellers, and hammers,

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entered the imagery of the revolution, even in places far from Europe. At the beginning of the 1840s the ofcial newspaper of Guatemala observed that not only Central Americans but also the French, Spanish, and Portuguese kept going through the “revolutionary screw” without managing to reach a stable situation (DPSMI II-9, 99). Some years later, European democratic associations and clubs subsequent to the revolutions of 1848 were referred to in a Costa Rican newspaper as “workshops of anarchy” (DPSMI II-9, 102). Although the case of the railway is certainly not the only witness to the symbolic refection of the gradual substitution of animal-drawn by self-propelled vehicles, in the fgurative language of modern revolutions, the cult of the train as symbol of progress and of history as in motion stands out from among all the metaphors of the age and merits a refection. “More than any other technical design or social institution, the railway stands for modernity,” observed Tony Judt in a posthumous article (Judt 2010). The development of rail transport, noted the English historian, resulted in a profound transformation of urban life and in the mid-decades of the 19th century produced a rapid transition of the “pre-modern space-bound world” to “its modern successor, time-bound.” The allure of the steam train transcends the liking for kinesis and speed and undoubtedly has to do with the deep psychic drives of the people of the 19th century. On the one hand, this impressive machine and the scientifc concept of energy developed in parallel to its deployment evoke a poetics of rails that merges the natural and the artifcial, giving rise to an extremely original hybrid of nature and culture, even though “[the steam engine] is our faithful and obedient servant . . . in the struggle against the forces of Nature” (Sternberger 1977, 17–38). And neither should one ignore homo faber’s Pygmalionic fascination with his own work. For this revolutionary means of transport, which in the feld of locomotion supersedes mere imitatio and makes a clear commitment to inventio, would give a defnitive boost to the Promethean consecration of man the maker as alter deus. Another well-stocked arsenal of revolutionary images is that of weapons and machines of war, at a time when military technology also underwent major advances. Revolutionaries of every persuasion were very fond of artillery metaphors. In exhortations and ballads of revolution, from Napoleon to Mao Zedong, via Bakunin, Engels, and many others, bombs, guns, bullets, and cannons occupied a place of honour.22 It goes without saying that this rhetoric is inseparable from revolutionary violence, which has its own metaphorics – blood as the unavoidable sacrifce for the sake of freedom and revolution as “midwife of history” are two of its most popular clichés – and is in turn linked with the speed the revolutionaries sought to introduce in the changes to which they aspired.23 Spanish jurist Gumersindo de Azcárate was certainly neither the frst nor the last person to express, in 1893, his preference for the “slow change of reforms, to avoid the violence of revolutions” (DPSMI II-9, 145). In fact, the notions of “revolución sin sangre”

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[“bloodless revolution”] and “revolución desde arriba” [“revolution from above”] – the latter a very popular slogan in Spanish political life at the turn of the 20th century – specifcally suggest that revolutionary violence should be unnecessary. “Revolutions from on high,” Joaquín Costa had written in 1898, “are lightning rods to avert revolutions in the streets and in the felds” (Fernández-Sebastián and Capellán 2019, 165). And there is no doubt that one of the great attractions of the peninsular revolutions of 1820 and of those that followed their example during those years, in Mediterranean Europe in particular, was their bloodless nature (something similar could be said of the so-called velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia in November 1989). As various international observers eulogistically commented at the time, Spaniards had “proved to the world that a people may procure Liberty without bloodshed” (speech in Calcutta Town Hall by Ram-Mohan Roy, Calcutta Journal, 28 August 1820). Without claiming to be exhaustive, as metaphors for revolution are never-ending, I should like to mention at least two other spheres of inspiration: medicine and morality. Both medical and moral metaphors applied to collective life, with a lengthy lineage in Western tradition, were the order of the day in speeches during those decisive decades. In the heat of the moment, revolution was described by its detractors as sickness, virus, plague, fever, vertigo, convulsion, wound or cancer, even as a sin or as sacrilege (DPSMI II-9, 146, 148) but also, mainly by its advocates, as an unavoidable surgical operation or as a thorough cleaning of social ills (be they corruption, arbitrariness, fanaticism, immorality, superstition, or inequality). The elimination of these social and political scourges is represented on repeated occasions by the synecdoche of the broom. The last two centuries abound with representations in which an allegorical fgure or a charismatic individual resolutely wields a broom in order to cast from the country, or from the whole world, the evils that afict it. In view of this proliferation of brooms, I would say that this humble cleaning utensil became a true symbol of revolution.24 However, if revolution was capable of generating great hopes, it also aroused great fear. Indeed, because of its destructive, deadly power, revolution almost presents a threatening nuance that adopts diferent personifcations – fury, hydra, spectre, devil, all-devouring monster (Fillafer 2022) – that have in common their capacity to instil terror in their potential victims. The frst and last sentences of the Communist Manifesto are sufciently revealing in this respect: “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. . . . Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution.” Cartoonists and publicists took advantage of this facet of revolutions. Two graphic examples will sufce. In the frst (Figure 5.5) we see the Gorgon Revolution, with torch in hand and a belt of serpents, knocking at the door of a Spanish conservative politician in 1865, three years before the September Revolution dethroned Isabel II. Figure 5.6 shows Tsar Nicholas II, who notes

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Figure 5.5 “Revolution is knocking at the door!” Gil Blas, Madrid, 18 February 1865.

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Figure 5.6 “The Fisherman and the Genie.” Cartoon by E. F. Hiscocks, from New Zealand Graphic, 28 January 1905. Source: Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections NZG-19050128–0001–01.

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with apprehension how, in January 1905, the terrible genie of revolution emerges from the bottle of the Russian-Japanese War. Countless texts from the era of revolutions abound with images by means of which the authors seek to inspire in their readers feelings of enthusiasm or horror in the face of the extraordinary events they are witnessing, events of which on occasions they were active or passive protagonists. Let us consider one relatively atypical example. In his Discurso sobre la insurrección de América [Report on the Insurrection of America] (1813), Colombian Dr Quijano, who had participated actively in the rebellion against the mother country but now claimed to regret having done so, accumulated in 20 or so pages a string of metaphors to denigrate revolution: cancer, pestilence, plague, volcano, source of evils, poison, raging torrent, storm, hurricane, blaze, abyss, gloomy labyrinth (Fernández-Sebastián 2021c, 270, 329). Each of these metaphors draws the reader’s attention to one or various specifc aspects of the calamities and disasters that would accompany the revolution: its deadly efectiveness and its destructive potential, its rapid spread and enormous disruptive capacity, the uncertainty of the destiny to which its unpredictable trajectory might lead – a deposit of negative images that is quite familiar to anyone who has ever glanced at counter-revolutionary literature. On the other side, the metaphors employed by the revolutionaries underline the positive aspects of a forward march – dawn, awakening, eruption, new beginning – which would enable society to progress towards levels of freedom and equality impossible to attain in the previous framework (immediately vilifed as “old regime”). In any case, it is worthwhile highlighting the ambiguity and polyvalence of the majority of these tropes, which can easily be turned against their own creators (as when the horse, the carriage, or the train of revolution lose control and the travellers are hurled into catastrophe). If one looks carefully, one sees that many images were soon contested and redescribed by their adversaries, drastically changing their positive value to negative and vice versa. And each metaphor has its counter-metaphor. Thus, revolution and counter-revolution could alternately – sometimes simultaneously25 – be considered sickness and remedy, poison and antidote, cancer and surgical intervention to remove chronic ills such as slavery (DPSMI II-9, 89), happiness or plague, lightning and lightning rod, shipwreck and rescue, dreadful fire or timely extinction. Perhaps the most striking contrasts between metaphorical valuations are to be found when writers and journalists draw on religious language to exalt or condemn revolutionary events. The same revolution, which for some is a mortal sin,26 sacrilege or divine punishment, for others, is a gift from on high (DPSMI II-9, 68) and reflects the “voice of God” (El Comercio, Lima, 27–01–1855; DPSMI II-10, 181). While, according to the editor of the Semanario Católico Vasco-Navarro (7–12–1867), the Spanish revolution was a sacrilegious “protest against the sovereignty of God,” for Portuguese writer Antero de Quental, revolution was simply “the

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Christianity of the modern world” (Causas da decadência dos povos peninsulares, 1871; DPSMI II-9, 146 and 148). *** Analysis of these various metaphors tells us much of their contemporaries’ perception of the revolutions through which they lived but also, upstream, of a rich cultural and tropological inheritance employed by the revolutionaries in pursuit of their objectives. That patrimony of allegories, myths, images, and metaphors, fattened and transformed by the propagandists of the revolution, was transmitted, downstream, to writers and historians. These adapted some of the most persuasive fgures and motifs from this legacy and flled their writings with them over the next two centuries. Indeed, it is interesting to note that some of the most efective rhetorical weapons forged in the heat of ideological disputes during the peak of the revolutions were adopted years later by philosophers and historians who incorporated them into their texts, conferring upon them academic dignity and heuristic aspirations. The result is an entire repertoire of underlying metaphorical schemas to make sense of the revolution. Thus, it is possible to discern a volcanic model of historiography, a medical model, an igneous model, a mechanical model, and so on. Crane Brinton, in his work The Anatomy of Revolution (1938), turns to the metaphor of fever to explain revolutions. “Barrington Moore, on the other hand, prefers explosive and combustive metaphors to evoke the desired atmosphere” for his historical narrative (Aya 1979, 93). Hannah Arendt (On Revolution, 1963) drew attention to the revolutionaries’ obsession – evident in many of their metaphors – with new beginnings and made this aspect one of the keys of her analysis of revolution. Hartog (2015, 11, 66), meanwhile, in the wake of Chateaubriand, characterizes the French Revolution as a “rift in time” (“brèche du temps”). A subject as hackneyed since the end of the 18th century as the carriage of revolution has also been the object of interesting refections and historiographical uses. It is perhaps worthwhile dwelling on this point for a moment, since it is revealing not only of a feature of the awareness of the actors who experienced those extraordinary events but also of the later endorsement by some theorists of this way of seeing things. In his Considérations sur la France (1796, chap. 1), Joseph de Maistre, after a series of comments on the irresistible force of the “revolutionary torrent” and on who really drove le char révolutionnaire, observed that “men do not lead the Revolution; it is the Revolution that uses [mène] men.” This is an interesting and opportune observation, for since the beginnings of the revolutionary process there had been various polemics between those who sought to steer the revolution and those who were of the opinion that it was the revolutionary chariot that was dragging them forward. In his last poem, written in 1822, Shelley describes time, depicted as the Chariot of Life, moving so swiftly that it crushes and mocks human purposes. Even the greatest philosophers and most eminent politicians appear in the poem chained to

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the chariot of time, like leaders of defeated peoples in a triumph of imperial Rome (Quinney 2021, 188). The fact is that the metaphors that underline the voluntary, provoked nature of revolution are far less frequent than those which point in the opposite direction. Apart from the conspiracy theories typical of certain reactionary authors like Augustin Barruel, revolution is rarely seen as the intentional consequence of planned human action. It seems that the idea that history is made and can be readily shaped and constructed by human beings, especially by revolutionaries, is far less common than is generally believed.27 In Section 2 of Chapter 1, I touch upon this question when I refer to Bolivar’s impression that he was nothing more than a weak straw at the mercy of the revolutionary hurricane.28 At a moment when the theories on the unintended consequences of human actions had attained a certain prestige among the élites, all the evidence suggests that very few believed in the unlimited ability of human beings to set a course for history and steer the “carriage of revolution” at will. I would say that until well into the 19th century, these were clearly minority opinions. Although there is an overwhelming amount of documentary material from the time of the revolutions within which it is undoubtedly possible to fnd all kinds of counter-examples, what analysis of the sources ofers, broadly speaking, is a vision of history, an extremely powerful roller that is hard to resist.29 This did not prevent some observers from soon making so bold as to posit certain patterns in the functioning of revolutions, in the style of “laws,” which would eventually become common places. Thus, a witness of the Revolution of May 1810 in Buenos Aires, drawing upon mythology, observed retrospectively that those events demonstrated the tragic destiny of revolutionaries: they had opened Pandora’s box; Saturn was devouring his children. There was confrmation of the apothegm that “the person that opens the door to revolutions is not the person that closes it” (Wasserman 2019, 205). Conservative politician Lucas Alamán also echoed Mallet du Pan’s famous phrase in a Mexican newspaper (El Universal, 5 December 1849): like Saturn, the Revolution devoured its children. In the frst half of the 20th century, fear of the Moloch of the revolution intensifed to a degree that can barely be exaggerated. There were good reasons for this. The experience of totalitarianisms – let us not forget that frst communism and then fascism presented themselves as revolutionary movements with utopian aspirations – and the devastating wars and massacres triggered by these movements led a number of theorists and analysts to suspect that enlightened modernity was having catastrophic consequences. However, after some terrible years, the second post-war period heralded a period of economic prosperity that has been described as the Golden Age of Capitalism. Unfortunately, the last two decades of the century would bring new fears and threats. “Risk society,” “climate change” and “fear of the future” became characteristic clichés of advanced modernity. Curiously, the pregnant metaphor of the carriage was applied by some social theorist to

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totalitarianisms, environmental risks, and other ills of late modernity. Yet, two centuries later, the image of the carriage returned in a tone far removed from that of the heroic and triumphalist visions of the times of the French Revolution. I shall give two graphic examples. In one of her essays, Hannah Arendt (2005, 341) speaks of the fearsome capacity of totalitarian ideologies to transform History and Nature into “supra-gigantic forces whose movements race through humanity, dragging every individual willy-nilly with them – either riding atop their triumphant car or crushed under its wheels” (Arendt 2005, 341). This disturbing vision of the revolutions of the 20th century would later extend to modernity, which Giddens (1991, 139) describes in one of his works as an uncontrollable juggernaut that we struggle in vain to ride, threatening to smash us to pieces. We know, however, that the metaphor of the carriage was not the only one to be radically modifed by the impact of the events of the 20th century. Benjamin’s speculations in his Theses on the Philosophy of History are to a large extent woven upon a weft of counter-metaphors related to progress, history, or revolution itself, mixed with his insights into a Messianic, Kairotic time, in which every second is “the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter” (Theses XVIII, B). But Benjamin was not the only Marxist who, having lived through traumatic situations, adopted a heterodoxical stance in this regard. Disenchantment with the revolution and its results led various intellectuals brutally to redescribe some of the best-known tropes of the Marxist Vulgate. Thus, while many continued to deposit all their hopes in revolution, which they continued to see as a “historical necessity” but also as a “leap of faith” (Koselleck 2012, 169), young French philosopher Simone Weil, who strove to combine her activism with Christianity, chastened perhaps by her own revolutionary experiences, irreverently paraphrased Marx’s famous afrmation early in the 1940s, saying that “revolution, not religion, is the opium of the people” (Eilenberger 2021, 275). 5.2 Crisis Like revolution, crisis is an old word but a modern concept. The term has very deep roots, but its irruption into political and social language dates back barely three centuries. “We are approaching a state of crisis and the age of revolutions,” wrote Rousseau in Émile (1762). “Our time is dominated by the concept of crisis,” declared Pope Francisco in a recent address (24 March 2017). “Everything is in crisis, and all the time” (“Il y a crise de tout et tout le temps”), François Hartog (2013) had written shortly before. Crisis is probably an apt “absolute metaphor,” perhaps the absolute metaphor, for our age (Revault d’Allonnes 2013, 196). What is beyond doubt is that the presence of this word in public discourse today is overwhelming. So omnipresent that nowadays it is difcult to fnd one single sphere of human activity to which this concept has never been applied.

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The history of the word in its early stages is well known. From the Greek verb κρίνειν (sieve, separate, discriminate), the term κρίσις – rendered into Latin as iudicium and Latinized as crisis – initially referred to the trial, the decision or sentence that settles a dispute. It was also, by analogy, applied to the decisive stage in the evolution of a serious illness, to the moment of disjunction between recovery or death. The metaphorical migration of this eminently medical and legal notion to other spheres in the principal vernacular languages of Europe reached astrological and literary terrain by the early modern age and thereafter continued its fgurative expansion into a multitude of spheres until it attained the overwhelming prevalence it enjoys today. The historiographical uses of the word “crisis” and its metaphors date back to the mid-19th century, although Mark Lilla (2016, 61) has argued that, given that “beginning with Herodotus, the urge to write history has been bound up with the need to explain the seemingly inexplicable reversals of fortune sufered by nations and empires,” one might say that “crisis is the mother of history.”30 We have already seen how Rousseau, at the dawn of enlightened modernity, anticipated the arrival of a “state of crisis” that he associated with “the age of revolutions.” A few decades later, when the revolutions did break out, the afnity between revolution and crisis was once again patently obvious. Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, Louis de Bonald, and many others highlighted this during the times of the Atlantic revolutions, particularly once the word had been incorporated into the vocabulary characteristic of the philosophy of history (Nisbet 1969, 131; Masur 1973, 591–2; Koselleck 2006a, 369–81). This also occurred when, at the end of the frst decade of the 19th century, the Iberian worlds began to boil over. In a manifesto which the Junta Central organized by the insurgents addressed to the Spanish nation in the autumn of 1809, the situation was described as a “terrible crisis” that initiated a new constituent phase. In this, as in other similar cases, the concept of crisis was mobilized by actors above all to accentuate the dramatism of a crucial, potentially revolutionary moment. In this sense, the concept of crisis is close to the notion of Kairos or right moment, supreme moment of truth when an individual or a nation has to handle matters with dexterity in order to emerge unscathed from difcult circumstances. After all, Kairos and crisis (Hartog 2020, 31) – occasion and decision – refer to an opportune time when normality was suddenly interrupted by a caesura that required the urgent adoption of exceptional measures. However, as we shall see, the transient and dramatic aspect of crisis lost momentum over time and was replaced by a more permanent and mundane understanding of the concept. Little wonder then that many of the medical or naturalistic metaphors that we have seen employed for revolution have also been applied to crisis. A crisis may easily be imagined as storm, as an earthquake, or as a hurricane, and of course, as an illness or a fever. Nevertheless, with regard to historiographical uses, some meaningful diferences of emphasis are detected. Revolution is generally seen as a dynamic, fery phenomenon, possessed of a dragging

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capacity. Crisis, by contrast, usually presents transitional connotations and a gloomy tone that rarely accompanies revolution. While crisis lends itself to revolutionary, stagist, or developmental schemas, often organic in nature, revolution, as we have seen, is more prone to the dazzling metaphorics of absolute beginnings and to a varied imagery of objects, persons, animals, or vehicles in movement, a type of fgurative language almost completely absent in the case of crisis. Many of the 19th-century writers who sought to comprehend their own era characterized it as a critical period in which one regime ended and another began and constantly used expressions like “political crisis” or “social crisis.” Labels such as “critical century” and “century of transition” soon became journalistic commonplaces. Diplomat Martínez de la Rosa wrote in his work El espíritu del siglo [Spirit of the Age] (1835) that the French Revolution, far from being a strictly French phenomenon, was in fact “the announcement of a social crisis common to all European nations.” Quoting the Prussian historian Ancillon, he added that the 19th century “carries with it the seed of all revolutions”; “there reigns a constant principle of disquiet, of caprice and unrest, which forms the characteristic and dominant feature of this century.” By then, countless European authors of every orientation took for granted the existence of “a great crisis” that Comte referred to in 1844 as “la grande crise moderne,” while Marx and Engels understood the concept as an economic eventuality that returned periodically for structural reasons (Koselleck 2006a, 377, 393).31 Each author would describe crisis in their own way, but, judging by the infammatory use of the term in the public sphere and its constant presence in debates, generation after generation, one would say that it evinced a clear tendency to become a quasi-permanent condition. In the 20th century, essayists and novelists made intensive use of the concept of crisis, particularly during the period between the wars and, later, in the second half of the century. From Paul Valéry to Edmund Husserl and José Ortega y Gasset, from Paul Hazard to Johan Huizinga, all spoke of crisis, although not all were referring to the same thing. On the contrary, there can be little doubt that “la crise de l’esprit” [“the intellectual crisis”] of which Valéry spoke, Husserl’s “the crisis of European civilization,” Ortega’s “the contemporary consciousness of crisis,” and Hazard’s “la crise de la conscience européenne” [“the crisis of the European mind”] are quite diferent things (Koselleck 2006a). Whatever the case, insofar as much of this literature associated the notion of crisis with modern times, and most authors usually underline the state of unease, volatility, and uncertainty characteristic of their age, it is clear that the link between the concepts of crisis and modernity emerged stronger from these discussions. During the Romantic period, we fnd numerous examples of metaphors that liken crisis to a metamorphosis or a temporary biological stage, which contributed to the conception of a certain synonymy between crisis and transition. Goethe declared that “all transitions are crises” (Koselleck 2006a, 367). One of the most celebrated journalists in 1830s Madrid, Mariano José

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de Larra, compared the crisis of Spanish society of his time, understood as regeneration and as a leap forward towards the triumph of liberalism, to an “apparent death” to be born again and to the “eforts of the chrysalis to shake of its previous casing and proceed to the next phase.” “Spain is in the critical moment of transition and is going to take the defnitive step forward,” wrote Larra in 1835, “with one foot still in the past and the other in the future,” but warns that it is not possible “to build without frst destroying and that for the day to begin it is imperative for the night to end.” Shortly afterwards, German philosopher Arnold Ruge wrote that a crisis is none other than “the attempt to break through and discard the shell of the past . . . a sign that something new has developed” (Die Zeit und die Zeitschrift, 1842; Koselleck 2006a, 384). This transitional metaphorics – which includes other fgures such as the threshold, the hinge, the bridge, or the watershed32 – would be recovered by some eminent historians during the second half of the century. Droysen, after declaring apodictically in Ranke’s wake that “continuity is the essence of history” (Gadamer 2004, 204–6, 211), described the European crisis of his time in this manner in 1854: We stand in the middle of the kind of great crisis that bridges the gap between one epoch and another, a crisis that resembles that of the Crusades, . . . that of the era of Reformation, when America appeared on the horizon of history. (Martin 2010, 316; the sentence is partially reminiscent of another that Friedrich Schlegel had pronounced in 1810) Two decades later, in the frst essay in length dedicated by a historian to the theme of crisis in history, Jacob Burckhardt did not hesitate to state that “all spiritual growth takes place by leaps and bounds, both in the individual and . . . in the community. The crisis is to be regarded as a new nexus of growth” (Burckhardt 1943 [1873], 158). Some years earlier, in one of his lessons, Burckhardt had already announced that he was preparing a “theory of storms” (Sturmlehre), that is, a “theory of crises and revolutions” intended to shed light on “the accelerated movements of the whole process of history” (Martin 2010, 307; the idea that storms and revolutions are as necessary for the human being “as the waves to the stream, that it become not a stagnant pool” was already enunciated by Herder: Nisbet 1969, 122). An important detail worth recalling is that both Droysen and Burckhardt conceive of crisis as a great leap or rupture and, at the same time, as a connection that “bridges the gap” between two eras; an accelerated breakup which at the same time constitutes “a nexus of growth.” A case, therefore, of a fracture paradoxically joins together the two pieces created by the split. In short, as a paradoxical form of continuity in discontinuity. Something that, incidentally, suited both novelists and writers of fction (Lukács 1989, 29, 37).33

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Over time, this crossing of two incompatible metaphors – rupture and union – led to a compromise solution, thanks to the image of the strata. As had occurred earlier with historical time, crisis would eventually shatter until it appeared to be composed of layers of heterogeneous composition and variable duration, a rhetorical move that helped to think of continuity and discontinuity together. “Thus we arrive at a genuine geological representation of crisis: as there is no longer one single time, there is no longer one single crisis” (Hartog 2020, 243). With regard to the semantic connection between crisis and revolution, we have seen that both notions share certain features. Some authors like Burckhardt underline that they have in common the condition of accelerators of history.34 Hence, the Swiss historian proposes subsuming them under the umbrella-metaphor “historical storms.”35 These similarities do not preclude, however, the existence of signifcant diferences between both concepts. In my opinion, from this point of view, the main diference between revolution and crisis has to do with a certain specialization particular to each concept when it comes to illuminating diferent aspects of historical changes. Let us see. The notion of revolution is usually said to present, like Janus, two faces, one negative – pars destruens – and another positive – pars construens. The rhetoric of revolutionaries, without ceasing to look to the future, towards the longing expectation of the dawn of a new era, continued to reiterate its burning desire to break with the past (this destructive facet of the revolutions would be felt with particular intensity in Stalin’s USSR and Mao Zedong’s China). Perhaps that is why, in philosophical and scholarly parlance, discussions of revolution have centred on the aporia of absolute beginnings (Arendt).36 The notion of crisis, on the other hand, places the focus more on transitional aspects, and one might even say that it concentrates in particular on the twilight of an exhausted age, rather than on the dawn of a new time. Ortega y Gasset (1962, 85f.) probably provided the best analysis of this declinist facet of historical crisis. In a 1933 essay, the Spanish philosopher insisted that genuinely decisive social and cultural changes are characterized more by the eruption of a feeling of contempt for what begins to be perceived as obsolete than by the emergence of a political and intellectual alternative that might be proclaimed as new. The essence of crisis would then lie principally in the collapse of a world – or, perhaps more accurately, in the decline of a world-view – not so much in the construction of a new alternative reality, that slowly and laboriously was taking shape. During periods of crisis, “there are no new positive beliefs with which to replace the traditional ones”; “man holds only negative convictions,” and “this is a terrible situation.” Disoriented, “crisis man has been left without a world.” Then, “like the albatross on the eve of a storm, the man of action appears on the scene at the dawn of every crisis” (Ortega y Gasset 1962, 86–8, 96–7).37 This picture is not far removed from Gramsci’s formula: “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.”38

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These kinds of refections on hesitant attitudes at the end of one era and the beginning of another have more to do with the question of continuity and discontinuity between historical periods than with the exciting revolutionary prospect of the establishment of a new order. And, although most historical narratives situate crisis immediately before revolution, often as its trigger (according to the classic Koselleckian schema that goes from critique to crisis), we know of some cases in which this order is inverted. Thus, Hispano-American intellectuals Andrés Bello and Simón Rodríguez, shortly after the countries of South America became independent of their Iberian motherlands, extolled the social value of criticism but believed, contrary to Koselleck, that it was crisis that had triggered critique.39 Even, sometimes, that crisis had a direct impact upon revolution and brought it to an end. In a sermon delivered in Buenos Aires Cathedral in 1817, liberal priest Julián Segundo de Agüero declared that “fortunately .  .  . revolution has already reached its crisis,” implying that its destructive power had begun to decline and that it was high time to start building again (DPSMI II-9, 55). However, as I say, the use of the concept of crisis by historians as analytical category or as colligatory historical concept has for a long time been included within a basically continuist conception of history according to which every age and particular history were strung together in universal history like the beads on a necklace. Historical time was imagined fundamentally in the form of a continuum. The discreet segments into which it was usually divided – periodizations – were but stages during an uninterrupted metamorphosis in which, despite the evidence of the revolutions, there would be no real hiatuses. Analysis of historiographical discourse from this perspective reveals that the notion of crisis, as well as its advantages as interdisciplinary bridge concept, fts like a glove within that imperative of continuity in discontinuity to which I referred earlier. Various characteristics generally attributed to crises, such as their variable duration, the lack of clear demarcation of their beginnings and their ends, the plurality of spheres and territorial ambits they could afect, and above all, a certain paradoxical mixture of disorder, disturbance and reorganization, uniqueness and repeatability, of the descriptive and the evaluative, make this concept-metaphor a hugely attractive heuristic and narrative tool for the writer of history. Although at frst sight it appears to involve disruption, by emphasizing the transitive aspect of crises and their capacity to give way to new situations that succeed in overcoming difculties and in some way indicate progress in relation to the previous state of things (not for nothing does all change involves crisis: Nisbet 1969, 282), this is undoubtedly a rhetorical device of high performance for historians. Hence, for example, the often unanswerable question posed by many historians with regard to how much is new and how much is repetitive in a given historical situation may be, if not resolved, at least navigated thanks to the notion of crisis. There is nothing surprising then about the intensive use that professional historians have made and continue to make of the concept of crisis to combine

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in their writings, in more or less harmonious fashion, rupture and continuity. Many of them use the concept of historical crisis by way of deus ex machina which enables them to bridge the chasms that separate one era from another (including the rifts of the very age in which they themselves live or lived). From the inter-war period onwards, the steady increase in the use of “crisis” has made this star-term a kind of wild card for most writers, theorists, and historians. Among the latter, many began systematically to employ “crisis” – even in the titles of their works – where a few decades earlier they would have used a substantially more varied terminology (Eisenstein 1966, 38). Some historians maintained that history should focus above all on the study of crises. One of them (Dhondt 1971, 57) highlighted the explanatory power of crisis as “moment of change which sheds light on all the elements of social formation, and all the levels of reality,”40 while Le Roy Ladurie (1981, 281–2, 288), although he believed that “of all the metaphors used of crises, those drawn from geology have always appealed to me most,” preferred to compare the long and profound crisis of 17th-century Europe not with an earthquake or a geological fault but with a giant snowball that would have grown in size due to a multiplicity of factors.41 All in all, the proliferation of the word to describe both the past and the present would indicate “an awareness of crisis as a salient feature of contemporary consciousness” (Masur 1973, 589). From the early 1970s onwards, however, there was ever-increasing criticism of the historiographical abuses of the concept (compare, for instance, Starn 1971, 2005). In the latter work, this author notes “the depletion of the term as an all-purpose slogan or a banal cliché.”42 One of the most obvious symptoms of the devaluation of crisis as an analytical tool is the disproportionate breadth and versatility of the concept, applied to all kinds of troubles and problematic situations in any sphere and of any duration. It covers a broad spectrum ranging from its original meaning, that of decisive moment – a notion that, at a philosophical and artistic level, has an interesting counterpoint in the elusive metaphorical concept of Augenblick (Ward 2008) – to the complete opposite, that of deadlock or indecision. From crisis as a transitory phenomenon, temporarily delimited – including the supreme Krisis of the Final Judgement, according to Christian eschatology – we have passed to the endemic, unending, multiform crisis of the world in which we live; crisis has become chronic, one more component of Chronos (Hartog 2020, 241, 254). Or perhaps, as Foucault believed, saying “crisis” is another way of saying “perpetual present” (Hartog 2021, 215). In recent decades, although it continues to be employed extensively, the disregard for this notion in social sciences has grown. A recent essay refutes the incessant talk of crisis – or “Cassandraism” in Stefan Collini’s formula – in relation to the decline of humanities that has been an integral feature of modern humanities since their beginnings (Reitter and Wellmon 2021). Proposals range from purifying the concept, peeling away its semantic excrescences to reinstate an acceptable range of technical meanings that would permit its

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continued correct use, to abandoning it defnitively, as has been suggested (Roitman 2014). The latter option is probably unrealistic, as it appears diffcult to write history without reference here and there to more or less lengthy crises. If, as we saw in Chapter 3, modern historiography emerges from the awareness of a clear break between past and present, but at the same time its narratives are based on continuity, one understands how difcult it is for historians to reconcile both requirements in their writings. “Crisis” seems to be an indispensable rhetorical pillar in order to sustain their narrative fabric and give an appropriate account of abrupt transitions and turning points. Moreover, as has been suggested (Jordheim and Wigen 2018), the notion of crisis, having displaced the concept of progress, is currently playing a fundamental role, which is difcult to replace, as an instrument for synchronizing temporalities on a global scale. 5.3

Modernity

Modernity is an intractable concept that is the subject of a vast literature. The difculty lies in the fact that the range of meanings attributed to this word, which was introduced into most European languages at the end of the 19th century, is so wide, the theories so numerous, and the perspectives for its analysis so diverse that the possibility of reaching a defnition acceptable to all appears to be out of the question. Thus, the theoretical and academic uses of the concept are hampered by an unavoidable ambiguity. In this section, I do not seek to ofer the reader an anthology of theories on modernity. Far from that, I shall confne myself to presenting a sample of some of the metaphors most commonly used to describe it. I trust that this way of proceeding will help us to approach some of the aspects of the concept of modernity, the breadth and blurriness of which is itself an eloquent symptom of the variety of questions involved in its mere utterance (a fundamental concept is, among other things, a bundle of problems concentrated in a polysemic word). The uses of this keyword by philosophers and theorists of culture are, as I say, extremely ambiguous, open to multiple interpretations. Unlike the concepts of revolution and crisis, whose semantic perimeter is in principle more discernible, modernity is a multidimensional cluster-concept, from which many other lesser concepts hang. The complexity of this cluster of concepts, depending on whether the focus is placed on political, social, economic or aesthetic aspects, is therefore much greater than in the other two conceptual items I have just analysed. Proof of this is that, in spite of the fact that in one of its facets this is a colligatory term of periodization, there is not even agreement on when modernity begins historically.43 Sociologists and historians usually strive, not always successfully, to confer upon the word “modernity” a more manageable range of meanings, which are normally materialized in a short list of concatenated macroprocesses. Osterhammel (2014, 904), for example, mentions a series of these – economic growth, rationalization, class society, growth of political participation, constitutionalism and principle of

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legality, increase of destructive capacities, a shift in the arts and aesthetic norms – without deciding on a precise defnition, which he considers impossible.44 When it comes to characterizing the Iberian modalities of modernity that took shape in the early 19th century, I myself opted in a recent book to highlight four essential features, namely a new symbolic framework and a new social bond, an alternative political legitimacy to the one in force at the time, and a diferent way of being in time45 (Fernández-Sebastián 2021c, 168). However, there are of course many other more or less plausible descriptions by well-known authors, adapted to a considerable variety of theoretical proposals. It is ironic that the label used to name an age that prides itself on its novelty and singularity is in fact an old mobile marker. Well, bearing in mind that the new is continually becoming old and that the modernusantiqui counter-position has existed for 15 centuries, the modern would always coincide, by defnition, with nostra novissima tempora, whatever these were. Our “modern modernity” would have preceded by a medieval and Christian modernitas, which would have been followed, depending on one’s point of view, by several successive modernities that are not necessarily equatable with each other (some of them were born specifcally to be diferentiated from the previous modernity): Renaissance, Baroque, Enlightened, Romantic, and revolutionary modernity (Zermeño 2002, 43–56; Zermeño continues and qualifes in his exposé H. R. Jauss’s approach in this respect). Our modernity, however, in the broad and difuse meaning usually given to this word in public discourse, is essentially chronocentric. Whether future-centric or present-centric, the usual idea of modernity assumed by default in the West over the past three centuries would endorse the opinion expressed by Perrault during the famous Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes: the best time is the last, most recent time; that is, by defnition, our time (Lanceros 2006, 17–26).46 If we think, as is customary among historians, that the beginnings of modernity date back fve centuries, such a long period can hardly be considered a monolithic block. Since the era of discoveries, the Renaissance and the Reformation, attitudes towards history, to mention just one criterion of comparison relevant to our inquiry, have undergone too many changes for it to be viable to capture them all in one still image. And if we wished to perform a fne-grained analysis of the metaphorics of modernity, we would have to establish numerous internal counter-distinctions or, in other words, several successive modernities, as in Zermeño’s aforementioned proposal (2002). But the space available does not permit such a thorough analysis. So I shall limit myself to proposing an elementary division of modern times and to a broad summary of some of the recurrent motifs among the vast stream of images associated with this theme that have accompanied us in recent years. Among the many possible periodizations, I hope not to add to the confusion if I say that, for didactic purposes, we could speak of four partially

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overlapping: (1) a fedgling modernity (from the late 15th to the mid-18th century); (2) a conquering modernity (from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century); (3) a triumphant modernity (from the mid-19th century until 1914); and fnally (4), a disenchanted modernity (from the First World War onwards, especially the last 50 years).47 Strata 2 and 3 would correspond to what is sometimes known as classical modernity, while the fourth could in turn be subdivided into two or three consecutive strata, the last of which would begin with the advent of the postmodern condition, as defned by Lyotard in 1979, and would extend until the present day, generally dubbed “late modernity.” That said, I would underline a series of features – beliefs, ideals, processes – that have been present in many of the discussions in recent decades on the subject of modernity and its distinctive characteristics. Not all of them emerged at the same time, nor do they have the same weight in all the debates. It has been more a case of their gradual appearance, partially overlapping each other. In highly schematic fashion, some typically modern attitudes, behaviour and processes would be the following: openness to new discoveries and advances in knowledge, ideal of complete dominion over nature, faith in the possibility of reaching some kind of virtuous equilibrium, rationalization and secularization, desire for power, creative destruction, individualism and contractualism, globalization and acceleration. I shall now attempt to order some fragments of the most signifcant metaphors, restricting myself as far as possible to this outline. 5.3.1

Revelation, discovery, disappointment

With regard to the frst feature mentioned, it is clear that, since their beginnings, one of the most characteristic drives of modern times was the quest to discover new lands and new knowledge, periodically overstepping the limits established frst by the ancients and later by successive generations of moderns. This is a typically modern attitude – referring to both geographical exploration and scientifc advances – which the motto and columnar device Plus Ultra, used by Emperor Charles V and subsequently incorporated into Spain’s coat of arms, encapsulates perfectly (Fernández-Sebastián 2021a). The political and intellectual ambition always to go further (semper plus ultra) would signal the threshold of the frst modernity and fts in well with the Baconian desire to articulate science and empire, knowledge and power. The historical analysis of the two metaphors of the modern relationship to the world – terra incognita and “incomplete universe” – performed by Hans Blumenberg (2010, 80–93) evinces a clear connection with this topos. Discovery and creation are two key fgures in this respect. Discovering essentially means unveiling, undressing their truth. In this sense, discovery, through geographical and scientifc exploration, complements and enriches divine revelation. Meanwhile, “the ‘incomplete universe’ legitimates the demiurgic will of

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mankind” (Blumenberg 2010, 86–7). To the awareness that time brings with it important novelties (“Time is the greatest innovator,” said Bacon) is now added the certainty that the creation of the world was not an isolated act but an ongoing process. Since, as Kant wrote, “creation never ends” (Lanceros 2006, 23; Hölscher 2018, 19), and in the words of Marcel Proust, “[the creation] did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day” (Blumenberg 2010, 92).48 The imaginary of discovery fts well with a time that Heidegger, in a famous 1938 essay called The Age of the World Picture, an age in which the subject explores, discovers, and represents the object-world before them, and also with the typically Renaissance will to decipher the book of nature – a book that, according to Galileo, is written in mathematical language. If some scholarly philosophers, following Augustine of Hippo, and Bacon after them, said that God had really produced two books – the Holy Scripture and the world – now it was a question of deciphering the second of these books, the liber naturae. From this point of view, modernity would signify the entry into a new “era of truth history characterized by a particular style in the production of obviousness.” Along with the Christian revelation and the Greek αλήθεια (alḗtheia), “with the dawn of the Modern Age, truth itself seems to have made the transition to the age of its artifcial uncoverability” (Sloterdijk 2013, 94–7). Scientifc advances, however, had an important backlash. As Blumenberg showed, as human beings learn more about the universe surrounding them, their position therein becomes increasingly of-centre and marginal. Thus, progress in knowledge saw arrogance turn into humiliation. The Lübeck philosopher insisted that the central metaphor of modernity is the Copernican turn, which was accompanied by enormous disappointment. The historical reception of Copernicus’s theories and the subsequent cosmological discoveries deprived the universe of its metaphysical content, transformed it into an immense silent and indiferent galactic desert, and obliterated the cosmic importance that had traditionally been attributed to human beings and to their privileged home, planet Earth (Blumenberg 1987).49 Over time, the conviction would even spread that the alleged readability of the world concealed a disappointing paradox: the pages of the codex of nature looking to be deciphered would be blank, open to their readers’ diferent interpretations. The book of the world, then, would be empty (Wetz 1996, 68–77, 107–8). Thereafter, authors like Darwin, Nietzsche, or Freud, to name but three of the many possible candidates, would land further blows on the battered self-confdence of Homo sapiens (Blom 2020). And the diverse theoretical proposals that nowadays openly suggest the need to abandon anthropocentrism (see, for instance, LeCain 2017) would represent a turn of the screw, defnitive perhaps, in this process of radical decentring of mankind’s place in the cosmos.

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Action and mastery

If for Sloterdijk (2013, 46) “the central epistemological and political word of the Modern Age” is discovery, and for Bauman (2000, 110) it is creation, according to Blumenberg the keyword would be beginning (Anfang) (Fragio 2018, 31). In principio erat Verbum [In the Beginning Was the Word]. If, in the frst verse of the Gospel of John, we replace the Word with the Deed (die Tat) as Goethe’s Faust proposed, to transfer God’s protagonism to the human being, the resulting formula would perhaps be an appropriate synthesis of the modern spirit, characterized by its violent energy, its cult of action, and its willingness to start from scratch (Fragio 2018, 31). This attitude is indissociable from the modern subject’s aspiration in line with the biblical mandate (Gen. 1, 26-30), to mastery and possession of nature. This quest for dominion has in Bacon and Descartes two of its most fervent propagandists but can also be detected in other authors and in diferent felds. Machiavelli understood political action essentially as a technique by means of which to dominate fortune. And what is constituent power (pouvoir constituant) if not a big bang or rather a political fat capable of suddenly generating a new order out of nothing? Another great metaphor representative of new times, particularly since the dawn of the so-called scientifc revolution, is that of the machine. Among the most widely used mechanical devices in modern Europe, the clock soon became the favourite metaphor of theorists and treatise writers, when they applied this imagery to both the universe – God being the great clockmaker – and politics, with the king in the role of grand overseer of the complicated machinery of state. It is a continental imaginary that would contrast with a liberal alternative order, which Mayr (1986) associated with the imagery of balance and equilibrium characteristic of self-regulated automatic systems (the metaphorics of the machine and of the scales, incidentally, is amply represented in the social and political discourses of the Iberian worlds during the 19th century: Fernández-Sebastián 2021c, 340–7). In other contexts and from other angles, the clock has acted as an emblem of diverse aspects of modernity, though it has been the quintessential representation of the time of capitalism. Thus, Pierre Bourdieu describes how the Kabile people in Algeria did not conceal their hostility towards the clock, which they referred to as “the devil’s mill.” But many other inventions and technological devices, from the compass and navigational instruments to gunpowder and frearms, from the printing press to etching techniques and the reproduction of images, from the loom to the textile industry powered by the steam engine,50 from optical devices like the camera obscura, the telescope, and the microscope to cinema, television, and digital images, as well as spectacular developments in transport systems, all these inventions and many more have on occasions served as rich deposits from which to extract new more or less efective metaphors to represent, extoll, or deplore certain aspects of modernity. And there is no doubt that the engine and movement,

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as we saw when examining some metaphorical felds of revolution, are among the most common techno-tropes of the modern world, always eager to identify a prime mover that will play a similar role in history to that which the discredited concepts of primum mobile and primum movens (in Greek, ὃ οὐ κινούμενος κινεῖ, “that which moves without being moved”) had played in classical astronomy and metaphysics. Let us not forget that, for Marx, “class struggle is the motor force of history.” However, along with the exaltation of motion and progress, the imagery of pre-set balance is very present in a variety of discourses. This is found not only in Newtonian physics and in the self-regulating harmony so highly praised by classical political economics but in many other spheres of the thinking and the praxis of recent centuries. Indeed, from the cosmic balance implicit in Newton’s law of universal gravitation to the balance of power doctrine in international relations, including the different versions of checks and balances, the spontaneous balance of interests that underlies the Smithian theory of the “invisible hand” or Montesquieu’s separation of powers, there are numerous examples of this recurrent motif in diverse discursive universes. New ideas, associated with modernity and progress, which could however have distant precedents or at least very ancient counterparts. “Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’, Kant’s ‘ruse of nature’, Hegel’s ‘cunning of Reason’, . . . Marx’s ‘dialectical materialism’,” and other similar notions would be, according to Arendt (1978, II, 153–4), “nothing more than the secularization of divine Providence.” 5.3.3

Rationalization and secularization

Whatever the case, there is no doubt that one of the most common ways of defning modernity is to identify it with the period par excellence of selfassertion of human rationality. Modernity, or at least this is how it likes to see itself, would be the era of the triumph of reason. To the aforementioned classic metaphors of the philosophy of history, we could add others, no less celebrated, such as the “light of reason” (Descartes), the Enlightenment understood as Reason undressing Truth, as is represented allegorically on the frontispiece of the Encyclopédie or as “man’s emergence from his selfincurred immaturity” (Kant). This supposed victory of reason also explains Hegel’s admiration for the French Revolution, based on the fact that, according to him, those extraordinary events signifed recognition of “the principle that thought ought to govern reality.” For Ortega y Gasset (1962, 212–17), the essence of modern activity before the world consists in thinking that man can project his future and change, even radically, the order of things, instead of regarding that order as fxed and, fundamentally, is not subject to human will or design. This stance leads to diverse forms of planning and, at the extreme, to the utopian social engineering characteristic of utopian states (Popper).

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The self-refexive mechanism that triggers the arrival of new times will result in, after philosophy, social and historical sciences constituting the preferred means for modernity’s observation of itself (a process that becomes even more intense in the fnal stage, known, not without reason, as “refexive modernity,” when modernity “becomes its own theme”). In the 19th century, while ideological politics were obsessed with the struggle between rival -isms, nascent sociology and part of history would specialize in the description of major social processes, normally named via a specifc type of abstract words ending in -ization: rationalization, secularization, modernization, industrialization, democratization, and the like. Each of these processes, with its corresponding retinue of academic debates, would be guided by its own master metaphors. “The path,” “the machine,” “the ladder,” and “the take-of” are some of the most popular metaphors for modernization and development. As for rationalization and secularization, some of the most successful metaphors – “iron cage” and “disenchantment of the world” – we owe to Max Weber. Theories on secularization – Comte’s law of three stages could be one of their frst drafts – have given rise to long, intricate debates, during which numerous tropes have come to light, which are deemed to have a certain explanatory capacity (starting with the word “secularization” which, as is well known, is a religious metaphor). Two of the most prolifc sectors of this tropology have death and confict as source domains. The death of God, which in Nietzsche refers to the advent of nihilism, has to do, of course, with the modern displacement of Christianity and its moral values by scientifc rationality. This death of the Christian God, unique and omnipotent, would have given way to the “polytheism of values” and the subsequent struggle between gods. For, as Weber explained in Science as a Vocation (1917), the impossibility of “scientifcally” settling the debates over what are the preferable objectives in the political or moral order has led human beings to “the perpetual confict of diferent gods with each other.” Yet, from the moment when Nietzsche announced that God is dead, not only has this demise been proclaimed and confrmed on repeated occasions and, as some sociologists have argued, has religion died in Western Europe, but the lesser gods that came to fll that vacuum, their secular substitutes, and surrogates – philosophies of history, nationalisms, political religions, the grand narratives of the 19th and 20th centuries – would eventually have sufered the same fate. We would then have entered into a post-secular age. In the fnal decades of the 20th century, there was even discussion of “the death of man,” a debate initiated by Foucault with the famous concluding metaphor of his The Order of Things (1966), which augured that very soon perhaps “man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” Recently, the very debate over secularization has been declared dead and buried (Dutton 2008). The disenchantment of the world of which Weber spoke – and which, according to Marquard, would be partly compensated by the fne arts, by

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way of re-enchantment of some of its areas – would subsequently have led to the disenchantment of modernity itself, which has emerged from this pluralized process. Its founding categories would begin to be seen not as universally valid representations but as culturally specifc frames of understanding, peculiar to Western modernity. 5.3.4

A perennial gale

As opposed to the Aristotelian mimesis based on the principle of ars imitatur naturam applicable in the Western world for two millennia, the pathos of modernity is characterized by continuous innovation and by the invention of artifcial objects lacking models in nature. The idea of the creative human being gradually made headway, under the impact of the Jewish-Christian imaginary of God the creator, and made invention “a signifcant act in the modern world” (Blumenberg 2020, 319). In the specifc feld of economics, the metaphor I employ as a heading is one of the most elegant formulations of the dynamics of capitalism, characterized by an endless cycle of innovation and obsolescence, production and consumption (think of so-called planned obsolescence). But Schumpeter’s expression, “creative destruction,” has the virtue of capturing a considerable variety of dimensions and aspects, contradictory even, of modernity. It serves both to construct a theory of capitalism and to explain the objectives of some of the bitterest enemies of this system. Judging by some passages from the Communist Manifesto and other Marxist texts that inspired the frst part of Schumpeter’s work Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), as Marshall Berman perceptively observed (1988, 98–105), Marx and Engels would not have hesitated to endorse the expression. And, a hundred years before the publication of Schumpeter’s book, Bakunin had described the passion for destruction as “a creative pleasure” (Assmann 2013, 44–7). Nietzsche expressed similar views, albeit with greater subtlety, in several of his works. For example, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, we read: “Whoever should like to be a creator for good or ill, he must frst be a destroyer and transgress values” (Blumenberg 2020, 324). But, of course, in the political realm, the systematic destruction of the past in order to build a splendid future that would turn out to be more of a nightmare would reach its paroxysmal level with the totalitarianisms of the 20th century (Hölscher 2018, 24). If however, as is often said, modernity basically consists in an increasingly accelerated process of continuous innovation that leads to ever newer innovations,51 it is logical that, as last Nietzsche quotation suggests, applications of the creative destruction formula far transcend politics and economics. In fact, this principle – for which we could fnd numerous precedents at diferent times and in diverse cultures52 – has left a deep mark upon the modern world in almost all its spheres, from the study of nature to the arts. The theory of evolution, for instance, is perfectly compatible with this interpretative framework. The substitution of the static schema of scala

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naturae or great chain of being by the alternative metaphors of “natural selection” and the “survival of the fttest” entails a replacement dynamic of some species by others analogous grosso modo to processes of creative destruction (the parallelisms between Darwinian theories and the functioning of the capitalist market are well known). “Extinction of old forms is the almost inevitable consequence of the production of new forms,” wrote Darwin in On the Origin of Species (1859). And, in a very diferent philosophical tone, Henri Bergson extended this same logic to the entire universe, permanently capable of creating the new, although it is impossible to anticipate the direction and the goal of these incessant novelties (Creative Evolution, 1907). The intellectual world found itself submitted to the constant pressure of new ideas that came to replace earlier ones at a rate of knots without giving them time to settle. Mariano José de Larra complained in 1836 (v–vi) that the frenetic rhythm of “opinions that events continually modify” to the point of “preventing their complete development” exposes readers to a “plethora of theories that printing casts on a daily basis into the maelstrom of systems shared by the modern world.” In the artistic feld too it has been noted that one of the most conspicuous tendencies of its evolution during modern times – especially since the romantic notion of originality exalted to the extreme the capacity of genius to create something from nothingness – has been a “shift in the arts away from imitation of tradition to the creative destruction of aesthetic norms” (Osterhammel 2014, 904). Without resorting to extreme examples, such as those of Marinetti or Le Corbusier, a good example of this ironic “tradition of the new,” to use Harold Rosenberg’s expression, is Picasso’s oft-quoted sentence: “Every act of creation begins with an act of destruction.” Baudelaire’s classic defnition of modernité53 was an early way of recognizing historicity and by extension the transience of beauty, while still ofering a glimpse therein of a transhistorical component. For, according to the French poet, “in order that any form of modernity may be worthy of becoming antiquity,” the artist must be able “to distil the eternal from the transitory” (Meschonnic 1988, 112–20). Despite their shared backdrop based on creative destruction, it is worthwhile recording at this point that the terms “modernity,” “modernization” and “modernism” are far from interchangeable. The former and the latter have even been mutually contrasted, particularly if the word “modernity” is restricted to its socio-economic meaning. Without abandoning the sphere to which I referred in the previous paragraph, Anson Rabinbach (1992, 85) observed that, at the aesthetic level, modernism meant “a sustained rebellion against rationalization and commodifcation.” For a critic belonging to the Frankfurt School, like T. W. Adorno, “art represented the powerless victory of the unhappy consciousness of modernism over modernity.” Let us not forget that anti-modernism and counter-modernism are also modern. However, it was only after the Second World War, and with renewed intensity since the early 1970s, that the questioning of the concept of “the modern” in

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its full extent and, consequently, the debate on modernity and its faws was unleashed. Some of the metaphors related to processes of creative destruction refer to certain works that never end and are always starting again or are done by day and are undone by night, like Penelope’s famous shroud.54 Others have more to do with images of regeneration and palingenesis, like the phoenix, which has been adopted as their emblem by some institutions that succeeded in being reborn from their ashes. Recently, however, the critics of capitalism and modernity who lead public debates usually draw attention to the many victims that Schumpeter’s gale leaves in its wake. Impossible then not to recall the powerful metaphor of Benjamin’s Angelus Novus and the pile of debris that the storm of Progress accumulates at its feet. 5.3.5

The pile of sand and the contract

The socio-political aspects of Western modernity have often been described as a combination of liberal and democratic principles. Individual autonomy, legal equality, freedoms and civil rights, expansion of political participation, and rule of law are some of the points most frequently invoked when one speaks of modernity or political modernization. Of the sizeable pool of metaphorical resources used by theorists and publicists that have addressed these themes, I will focus on only two images: that of society as a pile of sand and that of the social contract. This choice is not totally arbitrary. I have chosen these two fgures, frst, because both were very present in the early debates on modern politics, and second, because they bring into play the opposite poles of a cleavage around which the discourses revolve. I refer, of course, to the modern concepts of individual and society and to the dialectics between the citizen’s personal autonomy and state power. Moreover, in the frst phases of political modernity, each of these metaphors circulated in the main on one side of the political spectrum. The pile of sand, among the conservatives. The social contract, among the liberals. Likening post-revolutionary society to a pile of sand is a classical theme of thinking in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Rather than the supposedly natural order that characterized the “social edifce” prior to the revolutions, these – metaphorically conceived as devastating hurricanes – would have brought nothing but disorganization and chaos. Reactionary thinker Louis de Bonald turned to this image on several occasions – reminiscent, though diferent, of Schumpeter’s and Benjamin’s respective gales – to regret that the revolutionaries had torn apart the society of the ancien régime, reducing it to a shapeless heap of individuals without any links between them. With diverse nuances, various authors throughout the 19th and 20th centuries would protest against the atomistic vision of the society that emerged from the revolutions and insist on the need to (re)establish solid organic

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bonds between individuals and thus create an alternative order. The concept of society that appeared at the end of the 18th century can be understood as an indispensable intellectual construction in order to set up an interaction pattern to replace the old order and legitimize the new institutions. Rejection by conservatives and traditionalists, even by some liberals, of the exaggerated individualism adopted diverse forms in the 19th century, depending on whether emphasis was placed on the respect for old customs and traditions, on Volksgeist, on public spirit, on the new social hierarchies, on the theory of intermediary bodies (corps intermédiaires), or on some other organizational principle, but all concurred in recommending the preeminence of the common good over the selfsh interests of isolated individuals. This explains the coincidence on this point of authors like Burke, Hegel, Fichte, Bonald, Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and others. In a review of La Démocratie en Amérique, by Tocqueville, Mill wrote that “the members of a democratic community are like the sands of the sea-shore, each very minute, and no one adhering to any other” (Edinburg Review, 1840). The classics of late 19th-century and early 20th-century sociology would also express their concern at certain ills of modern societies – social disarticulation, individualism, anomie – similar to those denounced years earlier by the French counter-revolutionaries – which has led some antimodernist critics to regard themselves as pioneers of sociological thinking. And some metaphors employed by both groups are certainly very similar. For Émile Durkheim, in the absence of a common goal capable of engaging all the individuals of which it is comprised, society “is no more than a pile of sand that the least jolt or the slightest puf will sufce to scatter” (Moral Education, 1902–3). John Dewey’s concern about individualism in the United States was in tune with this sensibility. In one of his early works, the American philosopher praised “the theory of the social organism” that “has wholly superseded the theory of men as an aggregate, as a heap of grains of sand needing some factitious mortar to put them into semblance of order.” And the metaphorical comparisons of the masses with a pile of sand,55 with specks of dust that foat in the air, or with particles that vibrate within a liquid, a gas, or another mouldable substance like plasma have been reiterated on many occasions in political and academic discourses since then (above all in a time like ours when left-wing criticism of hyper-individualism seems to converge with that voiced by French reactionaries over two centuries ago). Some, like Norbert Elias (The Society of Individuals, 2010), have emphasized that society should not be understood as “an additive and unstructured collection of many individuals” or as “an object existing beyond individuals” but rather as a plexus of interdependencies between people. In the face of the turmoil provoked by the crushing efciency of modern revolutions, theorists ofered a handful of alternatives. The coming into being of an entirely new object of thought called “society,” which was made up of individuals and the study of which would be undertaken by social scientists,

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rendered necessary recourse to a panoply of metaphors. Thus, Spanish jurist Toribio Núñez (Ciencia social, 1835) claimed that, given that society was a previously unknown “new character” that had just burst onto the political stage, it had to be carefully studied from every possible perspective. However, apart from the generally empirical fedgling social science, since the 17th century, political philosophy had at its disposal diverse theoretical instruments that, when the time came, proved enormously useful to nascent constitutionalism. Prominent among these instruments was a conceptual metaphor inspired in private law, which contains a theory in nuce. I refer to the idea of a supposed “social contract,” which made it possible to imagine society as a voluntary association created for some specifc purpose – in the style of a trading company – capable of organizing itself, endowing itself with political power and constituting a polity by means of a series of hypothetical covenants between its members. And, among all the available versions of this imaginary pact, the individualist models of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau would be the most successful. The frst modern constitutions appeared to realize the fantasy of a nation giving itself a contract. This solution, of course, did not satisfy the traditionalists, who continued to cling to their organic conception of society. For them, a contract between individuals was not enough to form a genuine society.56 In any case, the dichotomy between modernity and anti-modernity (or, at least, a conservative version of modernity), the former based on voluntary associationism and the consent of the governed, the latter understood as a more or less “natural,” historical and transgenerational organic community, can be traced through various metaphorical models, the detailed analysis of which I shall not develop here. Nonetheless, the most frequently used societal metaphor continued to be the organic one, with a long tradition in the West, updated in the 19th-century courtesy of a handful of concepts borrowed from the natural sciences. Both the organic and the contract metaphor became naturalized and enjoyed a theoretical status as fundamental legal-political concepts that explained the consistency of society as a whole and legitimized the power of the state. 5.3.6

Globalization and Great Acceleration

The two conceptual metaphors that I examine in this section at frst sight have an essentially spatial complexion. The frst alludes to the global dimension of specifc relationships and trends, and the second, to the speed of certain movements. However, when we look at things a little more closely, we are immediately aware that both have a process-based, spatial-temporal background. Globalization and acceleration refer to characteristic processes of the modern world; both terms have been employed to characterize some of the most recent phases of modern times. And acceleration, of course, refers in this context to the intensifcation of the pace of social changes, which has given rise to a basic historical-sociological category – according to Hartmut

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Rosa, the fundamental category of modernity – that some theorists have labelled “historical acceleration” (Bouton 2022, 13, 109–10). As a concept, globalization is much more recent than acceleration, since while the acceleration of history had already been thematized by various historians and essayists in the 19th and above all the 20th century – Henry Adams, Daniel Halévy, Reinhart Koselleck – the term “globalization” and its equivalents, including the French mondialization, only made headway at the turn of this century. But, as tends to occur with some important concepts, once coined they have retrospectively been attributed with a long trajectory. So today, specialists are a long way from consensus when it comes to dating the origins of the processes of both globalization and acceleration. Yet, although the beginnings of both can be placed in relatively remote periods, both processes are usually said to coincide with modern times, especially with their critical and more recent phase (although the beginnings, in the case of so-called early globalization, are not infrequently situated in the European Age of Discovery). And of course, both processes present diferent facets – material and ideational, objective and subjective, descriptive and normative, positive and negative – and discursive dimensions that the diferent metaphors used can highlight or downplay. The wide range of tropes used for globalization (Kornprobst et al. 2008) makes it possible to focus attention on very diverse aspects. And their variable evaluative connotations generate genuine struggles over metaphors. A quick recap of a few uses of the adjective global, which nowadays can be attached to almost any noun, shows that the resulting expressions can prompt consideration of the advantages arising from the process of world integration but also of its risks and drawbacks. Global fnance, global empire, global apartheid, global terror, and global warming do not sound the same as global democracy, global trade, global ecosystem, global reduction in famine, and global migration. While some of these formulae and the second-degree metaphors, objects, vocabularies, and symbols associated with them57 suggest fear, hierarchy, and exclusion, others call for a joint efort to correct inequalities and face the future with optimism. Both the advocates of globalization and its detractors have a rich arsenal of images from which to choose and a growing specifc vocabulary. Among the metaphors that frst sought to refect this process is the famous and controversial expression “global village,” referring to an emerging electronic age, characterized by multiple interconnections, which as Marshall McLuhan anticipated as early as 1962 (The Gutenberg Galaxy) would succeed the era of typography. Three decades later, sociologist Saskia Sassen would popularize the term “global city” in a diferent sense, referring to a few major cities that play a crucial role in the world of business.58 Economic and fnancial aspects, which were the most conspicuous in the origins of the concept of globalization, would soon expand to embrace a variety of political and cultural facets. Nevertheless, the economy would continue to call the shots in many contexts, as evidenced by the spread of a repertoire of

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catchwords, like “fat world,” a term popularized by journalist Thomas L. Friedman, alluding to a “fatter and fatter” planet as a consequence of the compression of space and time and the demolition of all kinds of barriers. It goes without saying that one of the main currents of this type of neoliberal globalization is formed by the apostles of deregulation policies. Some have pointed out that the idea is not new and that the expansion of the markets was already evident in the 19th century. Kittsteiner, basing himself on Marx’s work, likens modernity to capitalism and, qualifying Hegel, suggests that the world market is the true world spirit (Wimmer 2021, 414).59 Meanwhile, however, there has also been a globalization of discontent, and the anti-globalization or alter-globalization movement, in its various branches, has not renounced the use of global networks to organize itself. Without any doubt, the two most common and ubiquitous metaphors for the increasing level of inter-dependence between countries, individuals, cities, companies, and major regions of the world are fows and networks. Talk of fows corresponds perfectly with a phase of modernity that has been described as liquid – for Bauman, fuidity is the key metaphor of the world today – and its logic can easily be combined with networks. The latter topic, which began its career early in the 19th century60 and gradually developed in diverse felds – canal systems, roads, railways and telegraphs; anatomic and neuronal; geographical and fuvial; institutional and interpersonal; urban and commercial (Sternberger 1977, 24–7; Friedrich 2009, 2012; Gießmann 2016; Fernández-Sebastián 2021c, 206–9) – has in recent decades become the most pervasive cultural trope of the stage of modernity in question, to the extent that it has shaped what counts as reality in a diversity of felds (each one of which had developed its own theories and methods of analysis). As Hartmut Böhme has noted, although the semantic core of this imaginary presents two facets in English: one biological – the spider’s web; the other, more artifcial and technical – the fshing net – the fact is that both have interacted in such a way that in the course of their evolution, nature, and culture they have fed of one another (Friedrich 2009, 293). The difusion of this metaphor acquired new momentum in the last decade of the 20th century, when concepts such as network society were popularized while the technical foundations were laid for the world wide web, understood as a gigantic network of networks of interconnected computers forming a global system (“the nervous system of the 21st century,” as some have called the Internet). Other in-vogue expressions such as “social networks,” “the Connected Age,” or “human web” corroborate the extraordinary success of a metaphor that is no longer perceived as a metaphor but rather as a cardinal aspect of the reality that surrounds us. In this respect, it may be worthwhile recalling that the etymological root of words like “net” (English), “Netz” (German), or “nodus” (Latin) ultimately refer to the meaning of knot, the implications of which in relation to ties, bonds, and togetherness need no emphasizing. The metaphor of the network, the epistemic functions of which are invaluable at this point in time, refer to a type of structure with “medium”

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consistency, neither as lax as a chance relationship nor as solid and stable as a consolidated institution. These are relatively fragile structures constituted by dint of repetitive interaction that at a personal level has contributed to the redefnition of human bonds, even romantic ones, in terms of connections and disconnections (Osterhammel 2014, 710; Bauman 2003). With regard to the metaphor of the network – understood as either a constitutively monocentric organic web or a technical polycentric network – specialized vocabularies, theories, and research methods have been developed, such as social network analysis, as well as a range of graphic representations (graphs, diagrams, sociograms, grid structures) that are applied to the study and implementation of an array of practices and disciplines. The second omnipresent feature when considering modernity and globalization is acceleration. Techno-social acceleration and the acceleration of history are already two classical themes of sociological and historical analysis and the subject of extensive literature in relation to both their objective and their subjective aspect. The phenomenon of acceleration, to which I briefy referred in Chapter 1, was perceived by diverse 19th-century authors and was the object of numerous studies in the second half of the 20th century. For Hartmut Rosa, acceleration is the most important category of modernity. It has inspired a series of second-order metaphors. I shall mention just a few. Among the most consolidated signs of acceleration I would highlight, on the one hand, two geometrical fgures – the exponential curve and the spiral – and, on the other, a very specifc notion taken from aeronautics: take-of. The exponential curve is an extremely efective graphic-statistical representation when documenting the rapid growth of a variable of any quantity that experiences geometric growth. It has been widely used to evidence the existence of a Great Acceleration or anthropogenic acceleration (Stefen et al. 2004; Bouton 2022, 300–8). This is an acute phase of modernity that was frst spoken of in the middle of the frst decade of the 21st century, which tends to blur the border between nature and culture, and according to some interpretations would coincide with the Anthropocene. Another ancestral semiotic fgure that efectively captures the dynamics of modernity is the spiral. In fact, the image of an ever-increasing acceleration spiral is what Rosa (2013) uses to explain the dynamism of modern societies and has also been employed by other authors.61 By means of this trope, the German sociologist seeks to imply that acceleration is a manifold process – there is technological acceleration, social acceleration, and acceleration of the pace of life – which is self-propelled by means of feedback loops that constantly turn efects into causes and causes into efects. Ironically, however, hyper-acceleration would have led in recent decades to a strange condition, a sort of “frenetic standstill” (H. Rosa) or “frozen time” (P. Virilio). Everything is moving at full speed but without a precise evolutionary direction, since, unlike classical modernity, in this last phase we have lost faith in progress and history is devoid of telos (if we were to increase its rotational speed, the hamster wheel in Figure 5.3 could roughly illustrate this

206 Metaphorical concepts in historiography situation). A case, therefore, of frenetic activity against a backdrop of stagnation, as institutions are no longer capable of directing society and become “desynchronized” from the rapid social change. What prevails is more “a sense of directionless, frantic motion that is in fact a form of inertia” (Rosa and Scheuerman 2009, 101). Another image frequently employed to describe acceleration at its most crucial moment is take-of, popularized by W. W. Rostow more than six decades ago to clarify the crucial stage of the economic development of a society, a short period of intensive growth, after which the industrialization of a country might be said defnitively to have taken of. If we passed from the 19th-centuty train of progress – which was sometimes represented as winged – to the airplane and the rocket of the 20th century, it is easy to see how the concept of take-of could be applied to the increasing acceleration of the modern world. Yet, just as globalization can be seen as a continuation, partly a replacement, of previous categories like universal history or capitalism, acceleration could be a radicalization of the metaphor of progress and other related concepts referring to social change, such as perfectioning, growth, modernization, or development. It is not surprising, therefore, that some of the second-order tropes applied to development and progress have been transferred with ease to acceleration. Furthermore, as is deduced from the title of one of his works (The Take-Of Into Self-Sustained Growth, 1956), the Rostovian image of the take-of is inseparable from the idea of sustainable development and of sustainability, an economic-ecological notion that gradually began to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s has recently assumed considerable importance in prevailing discourses. Finally, acceleration has also been metaphorized and symbolized on occasions by recourse to certain types of clocks and instruments that measure time. Just as the clock, prototype of the machine metaphors, served during the early modern age to signify the time of capitalism but not acceleration, since the second post-war period, some clocks and calendars – like the Doomsday Clock (1947), Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar (1977), or the Clock of the Long Now (under construction) – have served to emphasize that on the scale of universal time, the presence of human beings on earth represents a tiny fraction and to warn human beings of the dire threats looming over humanity. 5.3.7

Perverse efects and counter-metaphors

At the end of the 20th century, modernity’s obsession with self-diagnosis intensifed considerably and, as a result of this self-examination, some of its defects, failures, and shortcomings came to light. This chain of errors would involve serious risks, which in the most critical case could endanger the survival of the human race as a consequence of a man-made global catastrophe. Meanwhile, the nomenclature of the era has been enriched

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with new labels such as risk society, post-industrial society, postmodernity, information age, Anthropocene, Great Acceleration, and refexive modernity, to name but a few. I shall obviously decline to discuss this varied nomenclature here. Its mere existence proves, in my opinion, that the modern period has already lasted so long that its moment of glory has been left behind and diverse social theorists feel the need to distance themselves from some of their premises, weigh up their achievements and their mistakes, and even propose alternative denominations – like the plural “multiple modernities,” an expression coined by Shmuel Eisenstadt in 2000 – to singularize our contemporary world. As usual, in the following paragraphs I shall confne myself to selecting some of the tropes uttered by critics of the most recent phase of modernity. From a sociological perspective, authors like A. Giddens, Z. Bauman, N. Luhmann, and U. Beck have shown diverse negative side efects of late modernity. Collateral damage and harmful consequences that in recent years have come to the fore. “Risk,” “contingency,” “indetermination,” “ambivalence,” and so on are recurrent terms in their analysis (which in some aspects echo Adorno, Horkheimer, or Arendt’s critique of instrumental reason and its devastating consequences).62 And, as I highlighted earlier with reference to the classics of sociology, in this case too one observes how some of their criticism coincides with that voiced two centuries ago by a handful of reactionary authors regarding the consequences of the French Revolution (I refer above all to the perversity thesis, a line of reasoning well analysed by Hirschman in his book The Rhetoric of Reaction, 1991). In this respect, perhaps one should speak more of counter-metaphors than of metaphors, as it is quite common for critics of late modernity to return in their diagnoses to some tropes from classical modernity to reverse them and turn them against the intentions of their coiners. From this angle, prosperity can be seen as corruption, and progress as decline. After all, these kinds of redescriptions are children of modernity itself. If criticism is inherent to this historical period, modernity itself inevitably became a target of criticism and a controversial issue, open to divergent assessments. All the more so now that modernity is already tradition and “critique of modernity [and of postmodernity] is our modernity” (Meschonnic 1988, 142). I have already said that one of the most frequent ways of representing the harmful efects of modernity is to present it as a runaway vehicle, out of control. Anthony Giddens revisits the metaphor of the carriage, which we have seen applied to the revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries, to describe the current phase of modernity. In one of his best-known works, Giddens (1991, 139) proposes substituting the Weberian image of the “iron cage of bureaucratic rationality” and Marx’s image of modernity as a monster with that of an unmanageable juggernaut, “a runaway engine of enormous power which, collectively as human beings, we can drive to some extent but which also threatens to rush out of our control and which could rend itself asunder” (see also Hickel 2021, 106).

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The collapse of the optimism about the modernist project is even more patent when one takes into account the totalitarian experiences of the 20th century. Bauman, in his Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), makes the history of the Shoah the supreme test of the process of rationalization of modern society studied by Weber. “However, the metaphor of modernity is no longer the ‘iron cage’ but the ‘gas chamber’” (Delanty 2000, 52). The resounding failure of communist utopia has generated a number of counter-metaphors. Thus, Marx’s words in relation to the events of the Paris Commune, a revolution that the German theorists praised as “storming heaven” (den Himmel zu stürmen) would be countered by various observers and victims of the deployment of Soviet communism in the 20th century as a descent into hell. Several of the images and motifs that I am discussing recall Goethe’s poem “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” about an inexperienced magician who activates forces beyond his control. And indeed, this and other similar stories, like the same author’s Faust, and Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, and the fgures of Prometheus and Icarus, genuine mythological metaphors – or better perhaps, metaphorical myths – of modernity, describe processes that have more than one point in common. AI takeover, robot uprising, and other fears characteristic of late modernity are clearly related to these old tales and legends. Even the metaphor of the terra incognita, which spurred the imagination of the discoverers, has now become a dire warning sign for an unknown future that inspires more dread than hope (Bouton 2022, 317). The case of Prometheus is particularly telling. The image of the titan – whose name in Greek [Προμηθεύς] evokes a forward-looking, future-oriented character – who stole fre from the gods to give it to men changed meaning in the 19th century, turning rebel into liberator. From cautionary parable against the excesses of human arrogance and vanity, Prometheus – “the one myth of the end of all myths” (Blumenberg 1985, 584) – came to embody the courage and intellectual curiosity that drives humanity to continuous achievements and progress in every sphere (Ginzburg 1989, 64–6).63 With good reason, Prometheus unbound symbolizes like few others the fantasies of omnipotence, technological acceleration, and industrial development in Western Europe. In these late-modern times, when the veneration of Prometheus appears to have been abandoned and there has been a revival of misgivings over human hubris, we see a return to some old themes, including a certain literary similarity – visible for instance in Baudelaire – between the modern and the Luciferic. Still, as Landes notes (1969, 555) in the conclusion of his book on the industrial revolution, although no one can be sure that mankind will survive the enormous Promethean force unleashed for good and evil, eternal hope will always remain as the last item in Pandora’s box of gifts. As a matter of fact, most of what is written about modernity today has a markedly gloomy, if not catastrophic, tone. Many use grim comparisons for (hyper)modernity, such as a shipwreck, a maelstrom, or a mega-machine

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(some believe, however, that the modern world is not a machine but a complex adaptive system). Others prefer melancholic metaphors such as “insatiable Moloch”, or “time bomb”, while our “oscillating present” is compared to a “constant fbrillation” (Chignola 2020, 529). Some have even equated the rampant growth of our society with the metastasis of a terminal cancer. These bleak comparisons are only countered by a few optimists who, against all odds, maintain that scientifc progress will enable us to tackle all challenges and overcome this apparent impasse. Technology, the cause of many of the problems we face – such as global warming, weapons of mass destruction, and new diseases – they argue, could also be the solution to these existential dangers and lead to their resolution. Paradoxically, while the warnings against modern inanities and excesses multiply, the “discovery” of the Anthropocene in recent years has pushed human beings a step closer to self-infatuation. Not content with making history, we humans would make and unmake nature! The tremendous changes in the Earth system as a result of human actions, so worrying and unpleasant, would make it possible, on the other hand, to ofset the monumental blow inficted upon human pride by the Copernican turn and all that followed in its wake. While Copernicus’ discovery, followed by the increasingly accurate calculations of the true age of the Earth, Darwin’s evolutionism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and so on, had gradually reduced the signifcance of man’s role in the cosmos, the “Anthropocenic turn” would now show that the human race not only could shape the course of history but is a formidably powerful biological force capable of deciding no less than the very future of the planet (MacAskill 2022). Humanity, humiliated since the dawn of modern times at the hands of new science, now appears to have been transformed into a geological superpower (Bouton 2022, 317). This unexpected shift enables today’s human beings to reconnect with the early-modern world-view, albeit with a view to combatting some of its perverse efects. It would be a question of seeking to mitigate the unintended consequences of past abuses without abandoning the Promethean dream of control over nature. While homo faber of the frst modernity blindly believed in science’s capacity to dominate the world, some new prophets, researchers, and disseminators of cutting-edge bioengineering and geoengineering, halfway between natural and social sciences, have doubled the stakes. They now propose astonishing solutions that seek to redress global warming and include such startling expressions as “making climate,” “producing environment,” and “planning and managing of the earth” (Bouton 2022, 320–6). The anxiety caused by a probable existential catastrophe and the urgent need to avoid it have prompted the appearance of diferent movements that opt for imaginative solutions with highly diverse objectives. While some argue that capitalism has to speed up in order to win the race against the self-destructive tendencies by which it is threatened, others, like the

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signatories of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics (2013), advocate overcoming neoliberal acceleration with (more) techno-social acceleration that would propitiate the implantation of a new, Marxist-inspired, system; its goal would be to stimulate innovation using the existing infrastructure as a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism. Other philosophical and ethical movements, like transhumanism, long-termism, or the Long Now Foundation – or, for that matter, global collaborative endeavours such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault or the Rosetta Project –64 respond to similar concerns. All of them share an extremely loose conception of history that strives to broaden temporal horizons and foment long-term thinking and to combine as harmoniously as possible the (shallow) temporal scale of human life – even if we refer to the life of the species – with the incomparably more profound times corresponding to life, the Earth, and the universe.65 Once again, times are turbulent, and one might say that the strict separation between sciences and humanities – between natural scientists and “literary intellectuals,” in the words of C. P. Snow – has been suspended. Einstein helped us understand that there is no such thing as an absolute now, and it is therefore impossible to synchronize the entire universe. However, with the scissors of time more open than ever, I like to imagine the two blades – nature and culture, history of the universe and human history – pivoting on their axis for a feeting instant. Notes 1 This is asserted, for example, by Joaquín Costa in an 1875 text referring to the Spanish revolution early in the 19th century (Fernández-Sebastián and Capellán 2019, 165). 2 It is signifcant, incidentally, that the metaphor of movement was lexicalized in the 19th century in most European languages to the extent of referring as “movements” to defnite forms of collective action organized to promote certain political, social, religious, or aesthetic ideas. 3 A very diferent line of historical-political argumentation, also based on the idea of debt, emerged strongly after the Second World War, when the victims of the Holocaust, most notably Primo Levi, demanded a “duty of memory” (“duty” comes from the Latin verb debere, to owe). Subsequently, the metaphor of debt began to be used rhetorically, especially in the context of the so-called Victimhood Culture, to demand material advantages in order to compensate, even fnancially, for injustices sufered by certain groups in the past. In the latter case, the debt is understood more as an obligation of restitution than as an ethical commitment to never forget. 4 To begin with, one should distinguish incarnated abstractions, allegories, and revolutionary symbols from metaphors alluding to revolution per se. For the case of the French Revolution, among the former are the torch of truth, the phrygian cap, the all-seeing eye, the goddess of Reason, the altar of the fatherland, or the tree of liberty (Gombrich 1979). 5 Nevertheless, not all revolutions are equal. For Portuguese writer Almeida Garrett, while the French Revolution fared up like a violent and destructive “electric detonation,” the southern European revolutions of the 1820s would have been more a moderate and calm “magnetic force” (DPSMI II-9, 190). In fact, one

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of the great attractions of the Spanish revolution of 1820, which was quickly adopted as a model by liberals in various countries, was its bloodless success. An even more extreme version of this argument maintains that revolution is nothing other than “the dissolution of the existing body politic, and the formation of a new one” (La Indicación, Bogotá, 19 October 1822; Chaparro 2019, 233). This sentence is taken from one of Paul’s epistles (I Tess. 5, 2-3) referring to the imminent Second Coming of Christ. In the 5th century bc, Thucydides had already written (Peloponnesian War III, 82) that “war is a violent teacher” (ὁ πόλεμος βίαιος διδάσκαλος). Spanish poet Manuel José Quintana compares the French Revolution to “the wreckage of ships destroyed in the shallows that warn navigators to steer clear of dangerous reefs” (Semanario Patriótico, Madrid, 3 October 1808). In 1820, liberal Juan de Olavarría recommends heeding the “cry of the French Revolution that, like the voice of the Eternal One in the Sinai, emerges from the midst of time for the education of peoples,” while Mexican José María Luis Mora considers that it is rather “a torch that has appeared in the middle of darkness” (FernándezSebastián 2021, 332–3, 420). Representation of revolution as an erupting volcano is primarily a metaphorical (see, for example, a very expressive text in this sense by the German writer Ernst Moritz Arndt written in 1814, quoted and commented by Brinkmann 2000, 1–2), and then a recurrent iconographic motif in 19th-century European satirical press, at least from 1830 onwards. See, for instance, the lithograph “Troisième éruption du volcan de 1789” (La Caricature, nº 135), which may have been inspired by some of the views of erupting Vesuvius painted in the 1770s by Joseph Wright of Derby. In Spain, the image of the volcano was used above all after the September 1868 Revolution (El Padre Adam, 8 January 1869; El Ermitaño, 8 July 1869). Two examples of 20th-century North American press, the frst in relation to the Mexican Revolution of 1910 in The Evening Star, 10 February 1913, the second, a drawing by Richard Q. Yardley on the subject of the Alliance for Progress in Baltimore Sun (1962), show the persistence of this imaginary. Regarding the image of the avalanche, either a “torrential and overfowing stream of ideas gushing forth” or “the surging food of people” in the streets of Paris, compatible with that of the volcano, through the image of a “food of lava” inundating the whole of Europe, see the excerpts from two other German authors contemporary to the French Revolution, Johann Heinrich Campe and Georg Foster, reproduced by Brinkmann 2000, 5, 6. Two historians recently used a similar metaphor – “historiographical tsunami” – to refer to the absolute prevalence of what they call the “revolutionary paradigm” in the interpretation of revolutions (Rújula and Solans 2017, 1). As a visual metaphor, the tsunami has also been used by political cartoonists to denounce various social problems. I know of at least two cartoons by Tanzanian illustrator Popa Matumula, one referring to globalization and the other to the wave of migration unleashed by the fnancial crisis, both published so far this century, which are very reminiscent of the image in Figure 5.2. There is little clearer evidence that reactionaries are from very early on seen pejoratively as defeated, rebels, and losers, as opposed to revolutionaries, seen positively as victors, than an early German translation of the French term contre-révolutionnaire, which in a book published in Berlin in 1800 is rendered as “enemy of the state” (Staatsfeind) (Koselleck 2012, 164, 2006b, 302). Generally speaking, “those who oppose the spirit of the modern age typically resort to circle metaphors and set out to renew their validity” (Blumenberg 2010, 231). Both types of movement, rotation and roll, can be combined in various ways. For example, it is possible to imagine a complex movement that spirals, rotates,

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and advances at the same time. In fact, the metaphor of the spiral is one of the favourites of nineteenth-century philosophers of history (Koselleck 2012, 166–8; Brinkmann 2000, 11). From a very diferent ideological perspective, a certain illustration that appeared in Barcelona in 1856 (in a re-edition of the old book by Jesuit Juan E. Nieremberg Diferencia entre lo temporal y lo eterno (1640)) represents history as a huge winged wheel hurtling down a steep slope. On the one hand, in the style of the reverses of Fortune, but under God’s providential eye, the turning wheel hurls from on high and handful of historical fgures who fall from grace after climbing and enjoying power for a few years. On the other hand, this winged wheel, in its unstoppable downward progress, claims victims who, revolution after revolution, are crushed in its path. A decade later, the Catholic newspaper El Ermitaño (24 June 1869) included a caricature titled “Political wheel,” which combined both movements, although in this case it is a diabolical female fgure that symbolizes the revolution who turns the crank on the wheel, while she advances with great strides. Two lithographs that identify the horse of revolution with democracy and with the republic respectively in the weekly journals El Tupé (Barcelona, 27 February 1881) and El País de la Olla (Málaga, 23 July 1883). Gillray would title “Presages of the Millennium” (1795) one of his celebrated caricatures against the French Revolution, in which he appears to respond to these kinds of allegories. This is a scene based on the Apocalypse, in which an emaciated woman named Destruction, mounted on a white horse, wields a sword of fre and, escorted by Death and Hell, leaves destruction in her wake. It is interesting to note that the moral image of the horse, generally negative in Antiquity, had acquired in modernity an eminently positive tone (Brague 2018, 156). Employing the traditional imagery of the monarchy, Gillray responds to the visual metaphors most characteristic of revolution. He did this with the images of the horse and cart (see n. 15). He also manages to turn around the classic lumièresténèbres contrast, revived during the French Revolution. One of his drawings, published in the Anti-Jacobin Review (1–9–1798), represents the light of Truth and the torch of monarchic Liberty revealing the hidden intrigues of the conspirators of France (Capellán 2022, 15–16). In the revolutionaries’ imaginary, the light of reason was always dangerously close to the torch of revolution. “Reason is a light. Nature wishes to be illumined by reason, but not set on fre by it,” warned Leopardi (Brague 2018, 213). Gillray, Cruikshank, and other famous British caricaturists played a fundamental role in the denunciation of the crimes of the French revolutionaries and contributed en passant to a redefnition of the monstrous and the grotesque (Fillafer 2022). Another large etching distributed by La Caricature (20 December 1833) plays with the image of the sun chariot driven by Apollo and with the goddess of Freedom, driving the chariot of the Revolution while a group of counter-revolutionaries attempt to halt its progress. Spanish newspapers during the fnal decades of the 19th century, such as El Padre Adam, El Ermitaño, La Flaca, Gil Blas, El Charlatán, La Hormiga de Oro, La Broma, La Tramontana, and El Motín, Mexican newspapers such as El Gallo Pitagórico, or El Hijo del Ahuizote, published cartoons and lithographs of the chariot of the revolution. Predictably, in the 20th century, when it was a case of exhibiting the intimidatory power of the triumphant revolution, rather than the ancient chariots, the 19th-century steam engines and wagons, we fnd armoured vehicles, battle tanks, and, above all, planes, rockets, and missiles. According to a German newspaper, with the 1848 Revolution, “the history of the world has suddenly awoken and is crossing Europe from side to side like a steam

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locomotive” (Die Reform, 6 April 1848; Bouton 2022; note the family resemblance between this sentence and the frst words of the Communist Manifesto, that same year). Trotsky explains in his biography (My Life) that “Revolution is the inspired frenzy of history” led by the vanguard, that is, by the “conscious expression of the unconscious historical process” (Runia 2014, 172). Following the Bolshevik Revolution, this political-railway rhetoric reached a climax in the Soviet Union (not by accident had it all begun with the arrival of Lenin’s sealed train at the Finland station!) (Traverso 2021, ch. 1). While – more or less in the same years as when Buster Keaton was starring in The General (1926) – posters represented Stalin as the driver of a revolution which was advancing at full throttle (see Figure 6.3), by 1928 the Russian writer Platonov believed however that the locomotive was beginning to lose momentum at an alarming rate. While in 1917–18, “history was racing like a locomotive pulling up the weight of despair, misery and inertia of the whole world,” ten years later it appeared to have come to a virtual standstill (Andréi Platonov, Sokrovennyi chelovek [The Innermost Man], 1928; direct translation from the Russian by Kirill Postoutenko, for whose help I am very grateful). German scientist Adelbert von Chamisso wrote a poem in 1837 titled Das Dampfroß [The Steam Steed] to sing the praises of the locomotive, that triumphant modern carriage on rails (Koselleck 2018, 79, 99). Just as freedom or revolution, personifed, had often been represented defeating their enemies astride a spirited charger, from the mid-19th century onwards, those same images appear in many caricatures driving a powerful locomotive that crushes the reactionaries in its path, as can be seen in the Madrid newspaper Don Quijote (4 September 1892) or in Barcelona’s La Campana de Gracia (25 April 1903). Popular uprisings were sometimes construed as the automatic response to oppression by the powerful. “The people is a spring that, forced beyond its elasticity, breaks, destroying the reckless hand that compresses and holds it,” wrote, for instance, José de Baquijano, Rector of the University of San Marcos (Lima), on the subject of the Great Rebellion of Tupac Amaru, early in the 1780s (FernándezSebastián 2021, 330) (see Figure 5.3). The trail of gunpowder is a classic motif of the rapid expansion of the revolutionary spirit. A Spanish satirical journal of 1870, anti-clerical and republican, published in Mahon, was called La Bomba [The Bomb]. It referred to its issues as estallidos [explosions], and the frst issue (12 June 1870) did not conceal its intention to “bomb everything opposed to Civilization and Progress.” Spanish writer Francisco de Paula Canalejas deplored the fact that, since progress is usually achieved by means of revolutions, “iron and fre [are] its propagators and the blood of its baptism” (Revista Hispano-Americana, 1865; FernándezSebastián and Capellán 2019, 154–5), but numerous revolutionaries underlined the need for violence to ensure the triumph of revolution. In a letter written in 1787, Thomas Jeferson commented, for instance, that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” “Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one,” famously wrote Karl Marx in Capital (I, 31). During the Paris Commune (1871), the petroleum used by some communards to set fre to ofcial buildings in Paris became a threatening metonym for revolution, in the same way as the guillotine during the days of the 1789 Revolution. In 1913, Futurist writer Giovanni Papini horrifcally invoked the historical need for violence. Blood, he wrote, “is the wine of strong peoples, and blood oils the wheels of this great machine that fies from the past to the future” (“La vita non è sacra,” Lacerba, 16 October 1913). There are countless examples of this rhetorical strategy, and they are also evident in the visual realm. One might say that, for many, revolution – of one

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type or another – basically consisted of a good sweep-out. However, it is worth remembering that revolutions too can be swept out: a caricature published in the Düsseldorfer Monatshefte, August 1849 shows Bismarck, broom in hand, casting the 1848 revolutionaries out of Europe. One of the most striking cartoons – published in the New York magazine Puck, 11 December 1889 – represents the world globe ridding itself with a large broom of all the elements averse to the triumph of democracy. Some examples of Spanish caricatures of the broom in action, in La Escoba (1861), Gil Blas, 15 October 1868; El Ermitaño, 5 June 1873; La Madeja, 16 October 1875; La Campana de Gracia, 6 April 1889 and 11 April 1903. Yet it would be in the frst third of the 20th century when the ideological battle saw this iconographic motif reach its apex in communist and fascist propaganda posters. In the present century, it has frequently been employed by populist national movements of every kind. As when General Prim acknowledged that the revolution of September 1868 was a bitter, but necessary, remedy in Spain (DPSMI II-9, 147). One Colombian journalist described revolution as felix peccatum (fortunate sin) (El Defensor de las Libertades Colombianas, 28 October 1827; Chaparro 2019, 241). This cultural change was probably not fully perceived until the end of the 19th century. By then, Ernest Renan, for instance, was declaring that the French Revolution marked “humanity’s frst attempt to take control of its destiny and lead itself” (Hartog 2020, 244–5). One of the most expressive images of this Promethean vision of history is Diego Rivera’s mural originally titled Man at the Crossroads (1934) (renamed Man, Controller of the Universe), which is preserved in the Palace of Fine Arts in the City of Mexico. Bolívar himself, however, in a letter written in 1826, celebrated the fact that he had been presented with the unusual privilege of drafting a constitution to his liking and thus of in some way modelling the future of a country like Bolivia, which not by accident is named after him (Fernández-Sebastián 2021c, 315). The desire to model from above a new man, in line with the ideology of philosophers, was already present in the radical Enlightenment – and, of course, in the Hegelian imagination – (Brague 2018, 131, 169–70; Mishra 2017, 100). This vision would have its prolongation in the endless debates over the role that would correspond to individual human action on the stage of history and to the vexata quaestio that contrasts historical voluntarism with determinism in any of its versions (social, economic, scientifc, or any other kind). Thucydides, the other author traditionally regarded, along with Herodotus, as the “father of history,” employed the word κρίσις several times in the Peloponnesian War, essentially in its judicial meaning (Starn 1971, 3–4). Before Marx and Engels became interested in the periodic crises of capitalism, the economic facet of the concept of crisis had been addressed by the Swiss historian and economist Sismonde de Sismondi, although it was not until the inter-war period that interest in economic crises increased dramatically. The infation of the use of the concept throughout the 20th century and so far in the 21st century, and the mutual reinforcement of its political, cultural, and economic aspects, would spread among broad sectors of the population the feeling of being faced with an almost permanent crisis. Here too, by the way, the concept of crisis resembles that of revolution: the notion of “permanent revolution” is already in Marx before it was theorized by Trotsky (Edelstein 2020). In various passages of his work Apuntamientos para la historia política y social de la Nueva Granada (1853), José María Samper refers to “feverish unrest” and “imminent storm” to characterize the “decisive crisis” that would be triggered in Bogota in August 1828 on the occasion of Bolívar’s return to the city. Semper

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writes: “Societies, like the ocean, have their ebb and fow, their storms and their calms. The storms break out in the fts of rage of the oppressed people, when they are a prey to the wind of freedom; and then the feverish crisis often becomes a drama of blood and desolation.” One criticism of this transitional approach is that it presupposes that all crises would have a positive outcome and does not sufciently heed the fact that a crisis can also lead to a regression, a decline, or a dead end. Along with this, it is worth emphasizing the fact that both – crises and revolutions – usually serve as historical landmarks to establish periodizations, within the schema of linear time oriented towards the future of the modern conception of historical temporality. Gerhard Masur (1973, 592) argued by contrast that the general term is “crisis,” which would also encompass revolutions as a particular example of crisis. From the perspective of the pathos of absolute novelty, modern art has more than once been equated with revolution. While Hannah Arendt argued that “revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning,” the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (2010, 99) suggests that “every artistic gesture . . . puts us in direct communication with the creation of the world.” Let us not forget that, at the beginning of the frst issue of his American Crisis (1776), Thomas Paine had written: “These are the times that try men’s souls.” The young Juan Donoso Cortés, in his Lecciones de derecho político (1837), appealed to the urgent need for society, at truly critical moments, to turn to exceptional measures and exceptional men in order to survive the shipwreck. Various 19th-century writers and poets, like Chateaubriand or Matthew Arnold, portrayed themselves as subjects torn between two worlds, one that had disappeared or was about to, the other unborn. Arnold, in his Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse (1855), described himself as “wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born.” In his Estudios sobre Virgilio (1826), Andrés Bello observes, contrary to Koselleck, that crisis has triggered critique: “Crises awaken the interest of the human spirit;. . . and the habit of thinking . . . leads to perfection of the art of lending strength to the word. Political events. . . [have] broadened among us the sphere of knowledge; . . . and everybody, via the lessons of experience, has learnt to judge for themselves.” Two years later, Bolívar’s other master wrote: “All that is good in Society is down to criticism, or rather, Society exists thanks to critique. Criterion is the same as discernment. To criticise is to judge with rectitude. Crisis is the case or the moment of judging correctly, or the decisive judgement” (Simón Rodríguez, Sociedades Americanas, 1828). For the second generation of the Annales School, a crisis is “the privileged moment in a system’s operation when an event reveals the structure” (Burguière 2009, 108). The keys to understand the development of a crisis and of a revolution in time, both forwards and backwards, are not so diferent. The idea that a crisis – like a revolution – is gradually prepared by a large number of factors before suddenly bursting forth can be found in Hegel, in Marx, and in many other authors. Common too is the idea that crisis, like revolution, can be destructive at the moment when it occurs but benefcial in the long run. Edgar Morin, meanwhile, concluded his 1976 essay “Pour une crisologie” claiming that “the crisis of the concept of crisis is the beginning of the theory of crisis.” For some, modernity begins in the late 15th century, with the Age of Discovery; for others, in the 17th century, with modern philosophy and the Scientifc Revolution; for others, at the end of the 18th century, with the Age of Revolutions.

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44 Understandably, depending on their particular perspective, the various authors tend to highlight in their descriptions certain aspects of modernity. Thus, philosophers tend to underline the importance of Cartesian cogito; historians of political theory, the contributions of Machiavelli and Hobbes; political scientists, liberalism, and democracy; economists, capitalism; historians of science, the so-called “scientifc revolution”; historians of art and of culture, modernism, and so on. 45 A properly historical way of being. Hayden White, in his foreword to a collection of Koselleck’s texts (2002, xiv) in English, stated that modernity consists basically in “the discovery of history’s concept in our age,” in other words, in “the belief that we exist in history understood as a process of progressive development in which both society and our knowledge of it are historical in nature.” 46 It must be admitted, however, that this form of temporal narcissism, the typical self-sufciency of exultant modernity, has been increasingly questioned since 1980 (Lanceros 2006, 23). 47 For the frst three strata, I drew on Kittsteiner’s proposal (1996, 50f.), which subdivides the period between the mid-17th century and the First World War into three phases: stable modernity (1650–1750), evolutionary modernity (1750– 1850), and heroic modernity (1850–1914). 48 Many modern essayists, philosophers, and scientists would subscribe to this idea. Darwin, for example, insisted that “species had not been separately created” and that “natural selection had been the chief agent of change” (Sternberger 1977, 85–6). 49 Ironically, however, our blue planet, “in the midst of the disappointing celestial desert,” would deserve to be considered an exceptional place. “The cosmic oasis in which man lives”, the only inhabited islet in the immense ocean of a silent universe, would give humanity a stellar role as a bestower of meaning in a universe devoid of signifcance (Blumenberg 1987, 685). This paradox, that of the special signifcance of the (apparently) insignifcant, was noted in another way by Paul Ricoeur (1983–85, 3, 147). 50 The epic of motors, including the idea of the human motor, plays a central role in this history of industrial modernity (Sternberger 1977, 18–22; Rabinbach 1992; Sloterdijk 2013, 224–6). 51 “Modernity . . . is just another word for renovation and innovation combined” (Calinescu 1993, 17). Revault d’Allonnes (2013, 52), following Habermas, speaks of a renouvellement continu (continual renewal). 52 Let us think, for instance, of the Hegelian dialectics and the classical fgure of Chronos, Father Time, both inventor and destroyer. But also of homologous fgures of other cultures far removed from the West, as is the case of Shiva, one of the most prominent deities of Hinduism. 53 “Modernity is the transient, the feeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable” (The Painter of Modern Life, l863). However, Baudelaire immediately recognizes that “there was a form of modernity for every painter of the past.” 54 Among the multiple interpretations of this episode of the Odyssey, some are directly connected to our subject. See, for example, the ingenious combination of metaphors of the invisible hand and of Penelope’s cloth proposed by Sloterdijk (2013, 202). 55 According to communist intellectual Victor Serge, in the early years of the Soviet regime, without the leadership of the Bolshevik party, “the mass would have been no more than a heap of human dust” (Year One of the Russian Revolution, 1930). 56 “As opposed to the liberal, atomistic notion of a society, i.e., a sum of individuals who form a contract with one another, the conservatives insisted that society was an organic unifed whole” (Zeitlin 1968, 296).

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57 I am thinking, for example, of metaphorical expressions coined by scholars and widely disseminated, such as “clash of civilizations” (S. Huntington), “Jihad vs. McWorld” (B. Barber), “Tourist and Vagabonds” (Z. Bauman), and “Fences and Windows” (N. Klein), to mention a few familiar turn-of-the-century expressions. 58 Georg Simmel had already identified in the metropolis and in the rapid circulation of money two core metaphors for modernity (Rosa and Scheuerman 2009, 21). 59 Some writers and intellectuals have used various architectural tropes to symbolize modern Western civilization. Several of them have seen in certain iconic iron-and-glass buildings the perfect symbol of the modern consumer society and the Baal cult. Let us recall, among others, Walter Benjamin’s Parisian arcades (Passagenwerk), the Chrystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, which Dostoyevsky turned into a metaphor for capitalism, and the Rockefeller Center, built in New York in the 1930s, which was the subject of several controversies. 60 The metaphor of the net did not emerge at the end of the 18th century as if by magic. Irrespective of the important role that the incipient European textile industry and old fshing tackle may have played in its creation, since Ancient Greece there have been countless myths and literary fgures related in one way or another to the arts of weaving, spinning, fshing, and connecting. It will sufce at this point to mention the names of Zeus and the Moirai, Athena and Arachne, Ariadne and Theseus, Penelope and Odysseus, Electra and Orestes. 61 Referring to the rapidly evolving bio-geophysical context in the Anthropocene, and to the way in which “humans changed the environment, and the changing environment changed humans,” McNeill and Pomeranz (2018, 80) have recalled that this interaction “is as it always has been, except lately it acquired an ever greater intensity and speed, like a spinning fgure skater in an ever tighter spiral.” 62 For example, in the prologue of the frst edition of her The Origins of Totalitarianism (1950), Hannah Arendt unreservedly condemns “the totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination” associated with modernity. 63 Blumenberg (1985, 584) believes that, just as “the act of philosophizing about history has itself become part of the making of history,” the myth of Prometheus would eradicate all myths. 64 Two projects, by the way, that are metaphorically inspired by historical-mythical events, such as Noah’s Ark and the rediscovery and decipherment of the Rosetta Stone by Jean-François Champollion. 65 The thousands of millions of years that we need to express the age of the universe (13,787 billion years, according to the most reliable calculations), particularly when compared with the few hundred thousand years of human presence on earth, could be seen as “a type of surrogate for vanished eternity” or, if you like, as a “new empirical eternity” (Sternberger 1977, 99).

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In this last chapter, I will review three concepts of great relevance for modern history, as well as a number of related notions and their respective metaphorics. All three have multiple links to one another and to those in the previous chapter. Not surprisingly, all these concepts, which intertwine with each other to form a tangled web, belong to a semantic feld of crucial importance for historians: that of the notions related to change. Progress is genetically linked to modernity and modernization (also to process, civilization, and revolution); transition with revolution and modernity; decadence and decline are often associated with crisis, but on occasions with the dark side of modernity, civilization, and progress. In summary, starting with any of these conceptual nodes, we can jump from stone to stone and thus address all the temporal notions covered in this second part of the book. The frst two – progress and decline – necessarily carry a comparativeevaluative content and involve a value judgement of the past and an assessment that sometimes projects into the future (Lévesque 2008, 87–111). It is assumed that whoever enunciates any of these concepts, after comparing – albeit implicitly – an earlier and a later moment, has concluded that the changes observed are either for the better (progress) or for the worse (decline). The relationship between both concepts can be oppositional or successional. In the frst case, it is conceivable that the two could occur simultaneously in the same period of time. Progress in one area or from a specifc point of view may coincide in time with declines in other areas or from other perspectives (for instance, in the 20th century it has been quite common to contrast substantial advances in the scientifc-technical feld with feelings of decadence in the artistic and literary felds). In the successional model, on the other hand, although overall there may be a dominant direction that indicates either improvement or deterioration, it is perfectly conceivable that there may be fuctuations, phases of progress, and regression that occur over time. And the passage from one stage to the other is often the result of some kind of transition. By now, the reader is undoubtedly aware that all temporal historical concepts are metaphors, generally of a spatial nature, almost always referring to movement. Those addressed in this chapter are no exception. Before DOI: 10.4324/9781032736358-9

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examining in some detail the main tropes associated with the historiosophic and historiographic uses of the terms “progress,” “decline,” “decadence,” “transition,” and “tradition,” I shall therefore briefy mention the metaphorics inscribed within their etymological roots. All these terms derive from a handful of Latin verbs, namely progredi (walk forward), clinare/declinare (to bend; to bend downward), cadere/decadere (to fall), transire (to go across), and tradere (to deliver, hand down). In light of these roots, we observe how difcult it is to conceive of temporality without the aid of the imaginaries of movement of bodies and objects, as if change in time and motion were the same thing (Nisbet 1969, 242–3, 271–2). In fact, in the 19th century, many authors went from afrming the universality of motion to afrming the universality of change, as if both clauses had the same meaning. Moreover, in most cultures what is in front of and elevated is positive, while what is behind and below tends to have negative connotations. Hence, changes for the better and changes for the worse are identifed respectively with a forward/upward movement and with a fall/ descent/reverse. As usual, our exploration of second-degree metaphors that “translate” or clarify the meaning of other metaphors – such as, after all, the concepts we shall consider here – will help us to discern the uses of original concepts-metaphors on the part of historians, philosophers, and politicians and to gain an insight into their objectives, concerns, expectations, and intentions. The historical-conceptual literature available for the three main notions I am going to analyse shows a strong imbalance in favour of the former. While progress – and, to a lesser extent, decline, and decadence – have aroused considerable interest among theoreticians and we have a relatively large bibliography that includes some well-known books, the same is not true of transition, a much less studied concept, or even of tradition, which, although in recent decades it has been the subject of a few monographs, continues to fall short in terms of historical and theoretical treatment. 6.1 Progress, advancement, development In opposition to the thesis of J. B. Bury’s classic work The Idea of Progress (1920), which fatly denied that there was any hint of progress in antiquity, a few scholars have subsequently amended those assertions, showing that the history of the concept is much more tortuous than previously believed. If, as we saw in Chapter 2, the radical substitution of the cyclical model by the linear temporality model is a simplistic and inaccurate description of a much more nuanced and complex transition, neither can it be argued that prior to the invention of the modern concept of progress, the dominant image of historical evolution – when some began to conceive of such a thing – was declinist, and there was no trace of a speculative thought in terms of improvement. On the contrary, it seems clear that for centuries, in the minds of celebrated thinkers and literati, ideas of both advancement and degeneration

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could perfectly well coexist. Moreover, the topological representation of progress – and of some earlier related concepts, such as advancement, increase, improvement, or refnement – was not necessarily that of a straight line or an upward spiral. It was also thought of as a undercurrent that governs the course of history and emerges sporadically only to submerge and re-emerge at diferent points in time. And, later on, instead of interpreting changes en masse, from a categorical framework of progress or decline, people began to speak, in a more qualifed way, in terms of gains and losses in certain aspects, places, and times. These nuances do not prevent us from recognizing that Bury was right in one essential aspect: the fundamental change came with Western modernity, when the temporalization of a handful of terms that had hitherto referred to displacements in space revealed a fundamental mutation in the perception of historical dynamics.1 For, as has often been pointed out, the cult of the future and faith in progress came hand in hand. And while it is true that since antiquity some thinkers, looking back to their past, glimpsed some partial progress in diferent domains, and of course the contribution made by philosophers such as Turgot or Condorcet was decisive in forging a general theory “of the progress of the human mind,” progress in the singular, of a universal and prospective nature – Koselleck and other authors have probably exaggerated in locating its advent as a collective singular in the 18th century – was only enshrined as a concept-guide of modernity well into the 19th century, especially with the popularization of some of the ideas voiced by Comte and Spencer. The fact is that – shortly after Kant suggested “a possible direction of history” (Starobinski 2003, 321) – “progress” would become the most important of the modern concepts of movement, concepts that, unlike earlier naturalistic notions and metaphors, such as that of growth, would refect a fundamental change in the experience and consciousness of time, which led to the emergence of a properly historical temporality. The new kind of time consciousness had to be endowed with its own temporal categories, substantially diferent from those of natural, merely chronological time (Jordheim 2012, 161). Historical time began to be not only measurable but, above all, a meaningful time. This denaturalization of the way of perceiving time, evidenced by the new concepts of movement – progress, history, development, revolution, among others – was brought about not only by the political revolutions but also by the great technical advances associated with the industrial revolution. Whereas, as we saw in Chapter 4, Hannah Arendt wrote that the most decisive concept that sharply separates the modern view of nature and history from the preceding world-views was that of process, Robert Nisbet (1980, 4), for his part, declared that “no single idea has been more important than . . . the idea of progress in Western civilization for nearly three thousand years.” With all due caution, this might be considered valid, especially for the philosophy of history and for political rhetoric – it still is to a certain

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extent – but not for historiography (for, despite its supposed “scientifcity,” the concept of progress is essentially speculative and, as far as the future is concerned, obviously cannot be empirically corroborated). In fact, a few of the most renowned historians and theoreticians of history – including Ranke in the 19th and Collingwood in the 20th century – advised historians completely to dispense with the concepts of progress and decadence, which, in their eyes, lacked heuristic capacity and had a pernicious efect upon the writing of history. In fact, these kinds of macro-concepts, which some philosophers and theorists boldly apply to abstract entities, evolutionary universals, and major reifed processes, such as society, humanity, capitalism, and the like, are of little use when one undertakes empirical work on the concrete changes that afected particular entities in a specifc timespan (Nisbet 1969, 267–8). Consequently, their use has fallen into disrepute in academic circles over recent decades.2 However, for more than a century, a number of historians – F. Guizot, T. B. Macaulay, H. T. Buckle, J. G. Droysen, H. von Treitschke, even F. Meinecke, to name but a few – have assumed a genealogical vision compatible with the philosophies of history and with evolutionary sociology, sometimes confused mere succession with causality, and even embraced with enthusiasm the belief in a “law of progress” (Iggers 1965, 7) so that, as Siegfried Kracauer shrewdly observed, “what the philosophers impose from above, the historians try to achieve from below” (Kracauer 1966, 66). Beginning with Butterfeld’s classic text (1973 [1931]), criticism of Whiggish historiography multiplied, and in general, criticism of what some have called “quest-for-freedom narrative,” as if the past, systematically judged in light of the present, were a one-way street towards freedom, equality, or any other similar value. For some time now, such teleological and triumphalist visions of history have been called into question. The impact of evolutionism on the meanings of the words “progress” and “evolution” (from the Latin verb evolvere, to unroll), and in particular on the relationship between them and their respective tropes, was very important. The relatively neutral sense that the two terms had for centuries – “progress” and “evolution,” like any movement or change, could be for the better, for the worse, or neither – dissolved as both became overloaded with ideological connotations, generally positive, as one and the other concept became embedded in new philosophical, scientifc, and sociological theories. And while each was initially used primarily in certain specifc spheres – progress, in the philosophy of history and in political language; evolution, in biological theories and then also in sociology – the late 19th century saw a certain confuence and confrontation between the two terms, which began to be used in a complementary way, at a time when science seemed to ofer theories that allowed the philosophy of history to be recast in a new way. For example, the French socialist Charles Rappoport, in his book La Philosophie de l’histoire comme science de l’évolution (1903), refects on the compatibility of the “historical laws” of progress and those of evolution (see the comments

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of Paulin-Booth 2023, 195–6). The underlying question revolved around how to mesh the action of workers with the blind evolutionary processes of nature. Looking back into the distant past, we could say that one of the oldest tropes for increase, development, and expansion – roughly for everything that in the course of time will be encapsulated by the word “progress” –3 is based on an organic analogy that, albeit with fuctuations, has been present ever since; I refer to growth. Any increase, advancement, or improvement in any feld used to be compared to biological growth (Nisbet 1969) and, when, at the beginning of the 17th century, Francis Bacon translated one of his best-known works into Latin, he preferred to use the word “augmentum” (growth, from augere, to increase) to refer to the advancement of learning. The analogy that since time immemorial had compared the evolution of a city, a kingdom, or an empire, and later on of a society, a nation, a civilization, and even of the whole of humanity, with the ages of life – childhood, youth, maturity, senescence – had to corrected, and subsequently abandoned, to make way for the notion of unlimited progress. Insofar as natural growth implies fnitude and the inescapable decay associated with the ageing of the world (mundo senescente), those who advocated continuous and indefnite progress on the horizon of an open future had no choice but to move away from the metaphor of the stages of human life. While it seems plausible that the analogy of certain types of social changes with the life cycle of an organism was a simplifcation necessary in order to achieve an integrative vision of those changes, the abandonment of the image of the succession of ages to account for collective transformations represented a fundamental metaphorical change. When Francis Bacon reversed the naturalistic metaphor of the ages/epochs of history by contending that the ancient centuries were the youth of the world, whereas “the old age of the world” and “the true antiquity” were “our [his] own times” (Novum Organum, LXXXIV), he took a frst step in that direction. But the decisive step would be taken at the end of that century by Fontenelle, when he stated forcefully, in the context of the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, that the imaginary man who “contains, so to speak, all minds of preceding centuries . . . will have no old age” (Nisbet 1980, 155). The idea that mankind as a whole, evolving over the centuries, might be regarded “as the life of a single man who persists forever and learns continually” had been suggested by several ancient philosophers. Augustine would occupy a prominent place in the genealogy of the idea. The phrase “the education of the human race” (recta eruditio humani generis) was already in the work of the bishop of Hippo (De Civitate Dei X, 14). However, the frst to state it clearly was Pascal, and thereafter we fnd it in Leibniz, Lessing, and other 18th-century authors. Many of them accepted that, as Fontenelle had written at the end of the previous century, humanity, that colossus that advances and learns incessantly, would never experience decrepitude.4

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For much of the Middle Ages, the predominance of the religious conception of the world meant that profectus (from profcere, to go forward) had an eminently spiritual meaning, very diferent from the worldly progressus understood as unlimited improvement. Even so, Averroist reception of Aristotle in the 13th century signifed a major transformation in the temporal conceptions that, by emphasizing the benefcial aspects of the passing of time (veritas flia temporis) rather than the negative ones (its terrible destructive potential), laid the groundwork for the development of an incipient idea of progress (Kantorowicz 1957, 273–313). The difusion at that time of the expression “We are dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants” (Nisbet 1980, 86–8), in Bernard of Chartres classic formulation, also indicates that, although those medieval “moderns” undoubtedly revered the ancients, a certain confdence was beginning to spread that, thanks to the gradual accumulation of knowledge, they could see farther than their predecessors. In this regard, it is interesting to note that one of the most compelling metaphors used by René Descartes in his Discourse on the Method (1637, Part 6) is a kind of replica or inverted image of that of the dwarves and giants. The French philosopher asserts that “just as the ivy on a tree cannot go higher than that on which it climbs and often grows downward after it has reached the top, the followers of Aristotle often end up with less understanding than their master.” Instead of climbing higher and seeing farther, like the dwarves on the giants, ivy descends when it reaches the top and thus loses its ability to scan the horizon with respect to the top of the tree/giant on which it grows. In the fnal decades of the 18th century, while the coining of the concept of civilization overlapped to a large extent with the notion of progress, the succession of generations was metaphorized in several ways. Little by little, “the history of man” as a whole came to be imagined as “an uninterrupted chain of facts and observations” (Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, 1795). By then, the concept of progress had already combined the six features that usually accompany this notion in its maturity, understood as a linear, continuous, necessary, cumulative, irreversible, and indefnite process of steady advances. In the middle of the following century, Argentine writer and politician Domingo F. Sarmiento, in the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio (4 April 1841), described progress as “a ladder on which mankind runs” climbing rung after rung towards a better future. Time itself was forcibly enrolled by the liberals into their ranks, rhetorically transformed into a powerful ally, an agent of historical change under the banner of progress. Thus, MP Joaquín F. Pacheco declared in the Spanish Parliament in 1840 that “el tiempo es progresista” [“time itself is progressive”]: its simple passage would ensure “social progress” (Fernández Sebastián 2021, 454, italics added). When the modern concept of revolution burst onto the scene, there were soon endless debates about the extent to which the notion of progress was compatible or incompatible with revolution. How to reconcile the straight

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line of progress with the broken line of revolution? (Azúa 2019, 286). Needless to say, if for the supporters of the revolution, this was the optimal way to accelerate progress (an early example in Brinkmann 2000, 8), their opponents saw things quite diferently. Spanish jurist Gaspar M. de Jovellanos wrote in 1794 that “progress is a graduated chain” and, if, instead of following the linear order of the links, the revolutionaries promote a violent movement, as was happening in France, it ceases to be true progress.5 Half a century later, radical politician Francisco Pi y Margall, in his prologue to the Spanish edition of Proudhon’s Philosophie du progrès, considers on the contrary that progress is achieved “in leaps, by force,” and real advances only occur by dint of the sword of revolutions (Capellán 2006, 50, 67; Taguief 2001, 96, 169). Even more radically, after comparing the material conditions of the new world that emerged from the industrial transformations driven by the bourgeoisie with the “geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth,” Marx argued that, in the absence of a Socialist revolution, progress would resemble “that hideous pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain” (New York Daily Tribune, 8 August 1853). At the same time, Engels, in his essay Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany (1851), wrote that revolution “is a powerful engine of moral and political progress” (Koselleck 1972, II, 419). And in the literary feld, some of the fery speeches of the revolutionary Enjolras, the character in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, are perhaps the best synthesis of the religion of progress characteristic of the 19th century: the collective leap of the human race towards a splendorous future in this world, says Enjolras, will be achieved thanks to the ongoing revolution. Needless to say, by that time, progress had become an attractive political slogan linked to a ferce principle of legitimacy and an ideology – understood by various authors, notably K. Löwith, as a secular substitute for divine providence. The debates between reformists and revolutionaries had to do above all with the desirable pace of change, a variable largely dependent on the degree of violence needed to bring about change more or less rapidly (it goes without saying that, in this context, for many, the fundamental diference between revolution and civil war is that the former is inscribed in a line of progress, while the latter lacks a precise historical-philosophical telos: Hulak 2023). In this context, at the end of the 19th century, the complementary or antagonistic terms of progress and revolution were joined by a keyword in the historical culture of the time: evolution. On the one hand, we have those who advocated a peaceful transition to socialism, such as the German social democrat Eduard Bernstein, whose book Evolutionary Socialism (published in English under that title in 1909) was harshly criticized by the advocates of revolutionary socialism. On the other hand, the anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus, who, in addition to dealing with progress, gave a famous lecture in Geneva in 1880 titled “Évolution et Révolution” in which he understood society as an evolving organism, which made it possible discursively to reconcile

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evolution and revolution – Charles Péguy and Jean Jaurès would soon invoke the oxymoronic idea of “revolutionary evolution”, rupture and incremental change, individualism and collectivism (Paulin-Booth 2023, 197–8). Be that as it may, it was obvious to any observer that since the last decades of the 18th and the frst decades of the 19th century, history had tightened its grip. And in the light of the dramatic acceleration resulting from the political revolutions and the industrial revolution, the old analogy of growth seemed too narrow a jacket to refect the explosive transformations that were occurring. Among the alternative metaphors designed to underline the dynamism of the new century, the railway metaphor, in its many versions, was undoubtedly the most successful in the public sphere. As we saw in the previous chapter, as well as an efcient means of transportation – with the railroads, it was said time and again, space and time had been annihilated (Schivelbusch 2014 [1977], 49) – and an exponent of capitalism on the rise, the train proved to be a powerful symbol of the times, a true emblem that captured modern historical imagination. Literary allusions, similes, journalistic descriptions, drawings, photographs, paintings, poems, and flms about trains in the second half of the 19th century and the frst decades of the 20th century are innumerable, and there is a vast body of literature on this subject. Creators, philosophers, economists, writers, and artists have detected a multitude of parallels between the train and modern life. Wheels, gears, locomotives, carriages, and rails; drivers, switchmen, passengers, and freight; steam, noise, smoke, tunnels, and viaducts; stations, platforms, clocks, departures, and arrivals; and so on – each and every element of the experience of train travel could easily be compared to the amazing transformations of the modern world and its historical imaginary. Movement, forward momentum, breakneck speed, acceleration, circulation, fow of goods in all directions, networks, agitation, timetables, trajectory, pre-set stops, destinations, and so on – the opportunities to establish associations of all kinds between rail transport and the feverish modern urban experience amply explain why the railroad became the metaphor par excellence for 19th-century progress and modernity. It is interesting to emphasize the dramatic leap that involved the replacement, even partially, of such an ancient metaphor as growth with a no less powerful alternative image: that of self-generated and swift movement. A qualitative leap that in a certain way led to the replacement of a naturalistic and gradualist conception linked to the life of plants and animals by a much more energetic, artifcial, and saltatory conception. It seems logical that in the age of mobility, a new visual, topological, and kinetic imaginary, that of progress, should replace the slow and parsimonious imaginary of vegetative growth. A technical invention as important as the steam locomotive reinforced this change (change, incidentally, which was accompanied by other equally decisive semantic transformations discussed in Chapter 5, such as the one that turned the old metaphor-notion of revolution-rotation into a brand-new revolution-forward movement). For, unlike a plant, an animal, or

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a human being, the railroad is a machine that is not only manufactured but driven and accelerated at will by the humans themselves, to the extent that train travel was often described in terms of “fight,” the locomotive was compared to a bullet or a projectile, and the symbol of several European railway companies was a winged wheel (Schivelbusch 2014 [1977], 112, 351). If for Saint-Simon the great urban railroad stations were the cathedrals of the 19th century, and for Proudhon the idea of progress was “the railway of liberty,” it is easy to glean from the newspapers of the time a bouquet of images that depict “the steam steed” as a triumphal carriage towards the future, that invite passengers to board the train of history, and describe the trains as winged iron horses that run swift as time in the race to progress. French writer Gustave Flaubert, always attentive to the air du temps, ironically mentions in a chapter of his novel L’Éducation sentimentale (1869) a certain allegorical painting representing “the Republic, or Progress, or Civilization, under the form of Jesus Christ driving a locomotive.” However, it should not be thought that during the railway boom all was celebration and praise. Along with its benefcent and irenic facets – the Saint-Simonians, for example, were convinced that, thanks to the railroads, the unity of the human race was just around the corner – the opponents of the train branded as “iron monsters” these “diabolical machines” that caused new diseases, drilled through mountains, caused accidents and shattered the peace of the countryside. Fear of the consequences of new technologies also spurred the literary imagination. A character in Émile Souvestre’s dystopian novel Le Monde tel qu’il sera (1846) named John Progrès (Figure 6.1), a sort of genius protector

Figure 6.1 M. John Progrès, astride his Steam Horse, by Octave Penguilly L’Haridon. Source: Émile Souvestre, Le Monde tel qu’il sera, Paris, 1846.

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of modern times arrived from the future aboard an outlandish “locomotive,” shows contemporaries that the imaginary technifed France of the year 3000 will be far from an ideal society.6 But the prevailing tone was clearly favourable. It was a metaphor of broad spectrum in which technical, economic, social, political, and cultural aspects converged, which allowed it to be seamlessly applied to a vast network of interconnected terms – progress, of course, but also civilization, freedom, future, modernity, revolution, utopia, emancipation, and several others – temporalized concepts whose frame of interpretation is always the modern epic of history, which has a structural afnity with the motif of the train. Not for nothing did the century of history – which was also the century of progress, the century of the revolution of speed, and the heyday of the philosophies of history – coincide almost perfectly with the so-called era of the railroads. “It was in the year of Hegel’s death that the railway was born,” observed Agnes Heller (1993, 216), and thus the German philosopher could not incorporate this metaphor into his work. All in all, it can be said that his philosophy of unilinear history fts so well with the railroad imagery that “the physical railway and the metaphysical railway are fused in the images of social phantasy,” a history-centric fantasy comparable to that of the railway (ibid. 216 and 222–3). It has even been speculated (Traverso 2021, 157) that, if Hegel had written his work a hundred years later, instead of identifying the spirit of the world with the fgure of Napoleon riding on a white horse, it might have been seen on an armoured train, in the fgures of Pancho Villa or Leon Trotsky. In fact, during the Mexican and Russian civil wars, physical trains were so present in the theatre of war that the locomotive became a metonymy rather than a metaphor for revolution. But of course, revolutionary propaganda did not renounce the use of the railroad as a visual metaphor. If Marx had written, referring to the revolutionary wave of 1848, that revolutions were the “locomotives of history,” a poster of the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution (Figure 6.2) shows the train of socialism moving full steam ahead towards the radiant communist future, crossing a bridge of time spanning from 1917 to 1921.7 As can be seen, the railroad metaphor covered the complete cycle of progress in the long 19th century: it began by symbolizing the great advances of industrial capitalism and ended up personifying its antithesis, Soviet communism (and, incidentally, while in the West the idea of progress faded away, in the East, communist governments kept it artifcially alive: Iggers 1965, 10). From the middle of the 20th century onwards, however, after the Gulag and Auschwitz, “the canonical image of the train of time” and of the locomotive ceased to be operative for those purposes (Remaud 2014, 63). Even more explicit is another poster from 1939 (Figure 6.3) in which the engine driver Stalin can be seen at the controls of a locomotive christened with his own name and decorated with the portraits of four heroes of communism – Stalin, Lenin, Engels, and Marx – which traces the history of Russia in the 20th century. The frst four chronological sections of this timeline,

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Figure 6.2 “October Revolution – to a Brighter Future.” Russian Communist poster from 1920.

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Figure 6.3 Chart depicting the rise of Bolshevism, from the founding of the newspaper Iskra (1900) to the establishment of communism at an undetermined date. Poster from 1939. Lithograph by Pavel Petrovich Sokolov-Skalya (1939).

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marked by successive milestones in the history of the Communist Party before the triumph of the revolution, cover the period from 1900 to October 1917. The last section (on the upper right), which points to a hypothetical future of progress, will lead from socialism to communism. In fact, this crucial stretch, which would lead Soviet society to the terminus station, communism, would correspond exactly to the dictatorship of the proletariat, described by Marx, in the wake of Robespierre, Babeuf, Bounarroti, and other 19th-century revolutionaries, as a “transitional period” whose legitimation lies precisely in the extraordinary expectations of the perfect future – a reign of eternal justice – to which it would eventually lead (Edelstein 2020). As early as the mid-19th century, the constant appeals to “historical movement” and the “general movement of the world,” linked to philosophies of history, were very present in political rhetoric. It is signifcant in this respect that Auguste Comte, in his Physique sociale, distinguished between a “static” sociology and a “social dynamics” – another way of calling history. A little drawing in a book titled El universo en marcha [The Universe on the Move] (1838) by the soldier Celestino Galli is very revealing of how the accelerated upward movement is perhaps the one that best symbolizes the emancipatory aspirations of the liberal revolutionaries of the time (Figure 6.4). It is a plea for progress that depicts the winged terrestrial sphere, crowned by a small, winged hourglass, rising and breaking the chains that bound the globe to a black cloud representing the darkness of obscurantism. The drawing is complemented by a quotation from Virgil (Aeneid 4, 174) invoking the supposedly autopoietic dynamics of movement, which would feed back through acceleration. Since progress – which advances, says Galli, “in giant steps” – is a law of nature, “the stationaries and reactionaries go against God’s law” and “to stop progress would be to stop time” (Fernández Sebastián 2021, 426–7). As well as the links of a chain and other similar images that often serve to imagine the succession of events or generations, the idea of development – like those of evolution and civilization – is often fed by an imaginary that describes steps forward, successive stages, or rungs of an ascending staircase. And, since this latter imaginary combines well with that of the stages of an individual’s life (with the caveat, already mentioned, that the latter stages tend to be more of a decline and fall), we will again often fnd parallels between development and natural growth. Alongside the well-known stadial theories of the great luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment, as well as Turgot, Condorcet, Comte, Hegel, and Marx, the organic metaphor returned in the second half of the 19th century with Spencer’s evolutionary theory.8 And in the 20th century, the modernization theory presupposes a kind of development ladder, a sequential approach that states that underdeveloped countries must necessarily pass through a series of phases if they want to reach the apex of development. In the economic sense, the ladder metaphor had already been used in the mid-19th century by the German political economist Friedrich List to refer to British capitalist development, and we will also fnd

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Figure 6.4 Engraving inscribed in the book El universo en marcha, o Ensayo flosófco-político sobre las leyes del progreso racional [The Universe on the Move, or A Philosophical-Political Essay on the Laws of Rational Progress] by “Un ofcial del Ejército” (Lérida, 1838).

it in the stages-of-growth analysis proposed in 1960 by W. W. Rostow, who was able to combine it with the take-of metaphor. Politicians and activists have also made use of this kind of rhetorical devices, which often include historical-philosophical and literary fgures, but also visual metaphors capable of giving shape to the mental landscapes of

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observers. Some of these icons are related to the stadial and teleological conception of progress. Thus, a drawing by American sufragette Blanche Ames (Figure 6.5) shows a woman climbing the ladder of Progress to True Democracy, while the demons of Injustice and Prejudice seek to prevent her from reaching the top. 6.2 Decadence and decline As we saw earlier, implicit within the ancient metaphors of organic growth was the notion that decay, old age, and death inevitably followed vigour and splendour, so that the conceptualization of change for the worse has been present in mythology and literature since the dawn of writing, if not earlier. Polybius and other classical authors – and their successors from the 15th to the 18th centuries, such as Leonardo Bruni, Machiavelli, Harrington, Montesquieu, or Rousseau – had shown how difcult it was to avoid the historical and political decline of commonwealths. And in the early modern age, the traditional Latin terminology – declinatio, decandentia, lapsus – was transmitted via a long series of traditional metaphors: the coming of autumn, the setting of the sun, the waning of the moon, the ebbing of the sea,9 the ruination of a building,10 the shipwreck of a vessel, the exhaustion of a oncefertile soil; or, in the fgurative language of medicine: sickness, degeneration, decrepitude, corruption, and demise (Burke 1976, 138). Judeo-Christian tradition, for its part, contributed a few infuential schemata, such as the Fall (Gen. 3:9-24), the Flood (Gen. 6–9), the prophecy of four successive empires (Dan. 2:37-44), and the apocalyptic scenes from the Revelation of Saint John (Burke 1976, 145). The basic plotline underlying countless concrete histories was woven from these strands. For centuries, the theme of the decadence and ruin of states, which has given rise to a voluminous historiography, had its best mirror and archetype in the fall of Rome.11 And in this terrain, the publication of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89) was a fundamental milestone, setting the coordinates of the debate for a while.12 In this work – in addition to some old clichés that associate vice and corruption with luxury and riches, clichés that go back to Sallust and other Roman historians – we fnd ideas and tropes oft repeated since then, such as, for instance, “the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable efect of immoderate greatness”: having grown so much, “the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.” Neither would Gibbon forget to signal the gradual loss of civic virtue and contrast the slow and laborious process of construction and advancement with the very rapid collapse of a civilization.13 The most common schema to warn of imminent collapse limits itself to stating that, as political thinker Saavedra Fajardo wrote, remembering that nothing is permanent and imperishable, “the sooner it rises, the closer it is to its fall” (Political Maxims, LX, 1640). Thus, although the emblem that

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Figure 6.5 “The Next Rung.” Political cartoon by Blanche Ames. Source: Woman’s Journal (20 November 1915).

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Figure 6.6 “O subir o bajar” [“Either Up or Down”]. Source: Diego de Saavedra Fajardo. Idea de un príncipe político cristiano representado en cien empresas (Milan, 1642, LX).

accompanies Saavedra’s text (Figure 6.6) represents an arrow just after being shot from a bow, the observer knows that before long he would see it falling swiftly, pointing downwards. Note that, while progress could be topologically represented by a forward line (→) or an upward arrow (↗), to visualize decline, it is almost obligatory to include in the image the stage of ascent preceding the descent. For this reason, the iconography of decadence often conforms, rather than to a simple downward arrow (↘), to the profle of a vertical parabolic curve (↷). The rise and fall of rulers and states – which admits a number of variants, including the anacyclosis of constitutions and the simple biological cycle birth-acme-death – has often been graphically depicted in allegories, paintings, and engravings. Among the most efective visual metaphors of this type are various German caricatures of 1814 that describe Napoleon’s glory and misfortune as the gradual ascent of a staircase, followed by a rapid and uneven fall (Figure 6.7).14 As for the evolutionary cycle of the rise and decline of a polity, one of the most elaborate visual representations we know is the series of fve paintings by North American Thomas Cole titled The Course of Empire (1833–36),

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Source: Commons Wikimedia.

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Figure 6.7 Buonapartes Stufenjahre [“Buonaparte’s Step Years”]. German print from 1814.

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each one of which refers to a state of civilization, namely the Savage State, the Arcadian or Pastoral State, the Consummation of Empire, Destruction, and Desolation.15 It goes without saying that for quite a few thinkers – paradigmatically, we recall here the corsi e ricorsi of the work of Giambattista Vico and the 19th-century notion of evolution (Liakos 2007, 35) – the end of one cycle was linked to the beginning of the next one. Zigzag narratives (Zerubavel 2003, 19–23), with their turning points and their watersheds, allow for easy transition from a rise-and-fall narrative to a fall-and-rise narrative.16 The diferent theories of cyclical crises – Sismondi, Marx, Juglar, Kondratiev, Schumpeter – and the long and short waves of business cycles conceive of these ups and downs in terms of periodic intervals of expansion and recession ( ), and the contrast – established by Saint-Simon and developed by Comte – between organic and critical periods in history forms part of this waving pattern (it is no coincidence that the wave trope is the most commonly used to refer to these kinds of oscillations, including economic fuctuations).17 The lengthy persistence of the idea of historical recurrence in Western (Trompf 1979), and not only Western thought – Arab Ibn Khaldun’s universal history (14th century) is also based on the alternation of phases of growth and decline – enabled historians for many centuries to combine with varying degrees of success in their accounts the cyclical model with the linear development model, and there were even attempts to reduce those recurrences to genuine “historical laws” (Dhondt 1971). For what concerns us here, perhaps the moment of maximum interest in the evolution of the concept was when the discourse of decadence began to be counterposed to the discourse of progress until it eclipsed it (these are obviously two relational concepts). While it is true that even before 1914 there were already a few critics – leaving aside the fn de siècle decadentists, such names come to mind as Rousseau, Malthus, Baudelaire,18 Burckhardt, Nietzsche,19 or Sorel – who denounced faith in progress as a misleading idea, an idol, a mere illusion, a myth or a superstition, it was the outbreak of the Great War that dispelled all doubts and caused most intellectuals to rebel against what they then began to describe as the catastrophic consequences of progress. And it seems no coincidence to me that the abandonment of the religion of progress coincided with the beginning of the end of the golden age of the railroad, an icon that no other mechanical artefact succeeded in replacing on a symbolic level. Let us note that the appearance of the airplane, the new technical device that could have occupied in the 20th century a place equivalent to that of the railroad in the 19th century, failed to replace the symbolism of the train (Heller 1993, 222–3): after Guernica, Coventry, and Hiroshima it could hardly become a metaphor for progress (Traverso 2021, 163).20 It was during the inter-war period when, as we have seen in previous chapters, Walter Benjamin turned around some central metaphors of modernity and revolution, redescribing progress as a destructive gale that accumulated

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victims and debris at the feet of the Angel of History. Before that, Henry James sensed “the possibility that the much-vaunted progress of the nineteenth century was a malign illusion – ‘the tide that bore us along was all the while moving to this as its grand Niagara’” (Mishra 2017, 32). So few were surprised when Oswald Spengler, revisiting some well-worn organic, astronomical, and mythological imagery, published his acclaimed essay The Decline of the West (1918–22), which ironically he was writing at about the same time that John Bury was drafting his The Idea of Progress (1920). It is worth noting that the analogy that underlies Spengler’s book – presented by the author as a Copernican Revolution in the writing of history and described by E. Cassirer as “an electric spark that set the imagination of Spengler’s generation afame” (Hundert 1967, 109) – is none other than that of the twilight of a world. The original German title (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), which could be translated into English as The Downfall of the Occident (or, even more literally/metaphorically, The Sunset of the Western Lands), is in a way redundant, since, as we know, “the Occident” comes from the present participle of the Latin verb occidere (fall down) and (like Abendlandes) refers precisely to the setting of the sun. But Spengler’s essay includes other biological metaphors, the most important of which, that of culture as an organism that evolves like a living being – “the marvellous waxing and waning of organic forms”: growth, blossoming, and wilting (Hundert 1967, 104) – had already enjoyed a long trajectory and would be severely criticized by Collingwood in his The Idea of History.21 Another piercing metaphor used by Spengler – described as a prophet, magician, and visionary by Lucien Febvre – was the conceptualization of world history as “the fortune and end of Icarian man” (Farrenkopf 2001, 216). This is a traditional image of Promethean overtones – remember Michelet’s famous phrase: “man is his own Prometheus” – that would be included in the traditional dialectics hubris-nemesis. Versions of the book published in other languages have slightly diferent titles,22 a fact that gives me cause to dwell for a moment on an issue that is far from irrelevant, namely the diferences and nuances that metaphorical concepts referring to change for the worse – and also for the better – present in diferent languages. For it is clear that the vocabulary of decline, which depends on the historical experiences of speakers, varies from one language to another. Sufce it to say that in French and Spanish over the last two centuries the terms déclin and declive have been used much less frequently than décadence and decadencia, while in English the exact opposite is true (“decline” is used much more than “decadence”). These interlinguistic differences extend also to the -isms belonging to this lexical feld. Although I cannot go into this subject in depth here, I will merely point out that progresismo was a political-ideological label coined early in Spanish in the frst half of the 19th century, whose equivalents in other languages (for instance, the English progressivism) are considerably rarer and later; regressista and regressismo, as far as I know, exist only in Portuguese and Italian; declinism,

238 Metaphorical concepts in historiography although recent, is a relatively common term in the Anglophone world (Herman 1997); décadentisme is a peculiarly French word, less frequent in other languages; and there are even idiosyncratic -isms as exclusive as the Italian crepuscolarismo, referring to a literary movement at the beginning of the 20th century, or even criminologist C. Lombroso’s degenerazionismo. This very brief overview should be complemented by a careful semantic analysis at the intralinguistic level. Just think of the major diferences in the use of the English terms decadence and decline. According to Morley, only the latter, which is usually quantifable and which is used extensively by social scientists as an analytical tool, “is generally acceptable in historiography” (2005, 574–7). Decadence, on the other hand, is “primarily an aesthetic term, focusing above all on the late nineteenth century.”23 Moreover, it is suspect in the eyes of history professionals because of its obvious metaphorical character and its tendency to appear in grand historical-philosophical narratives. Some of the most substantial criticism of the interpretative progress-decline framework has come from historical theorists like R. G. Collingwood. For the British philosopher, any historical process, properly analysed, usually presents both creative and destructive aspects and “every decline is also a rise” (Collingwood 1994, 164).24 Hence, most historians prefer to approach comparisons between the levels of two points in time in relative terms of gains and losses in this or that aspect, rather than in absolute talk of progress and decline. Moreover, even if we focus on the analysis of the vocabulary of declines, a long slide down is not the same as a sudden collapse. Theorists also often distinguish between endogenous and exogenous processes of decay and several other classifcation criteria. After the enormous shock of the First World War, which is also the moment when the concept of crisis – which is closely related to those of decline and decadence – exploded, a large part of the European intelligentsia reacted against the idea of progress and sometimes against the historical discipline. Paul Valéry’s diatribe against history – “the most dangerous product ever to have been concocted by the chemistry of the intellect [that] intoxicates whole peoples” – which I have already mentioned in Chapter 1 falls within this atmosphere of generalized hostility towards the manipulation of history by nationalisms (Hundert 1967, 112). Thus, the malaise of modern civilization and the decline of faith in progress is largely coextensive with the crisis of historicism and the collapse of belief in purpose in history. One might say that “with the death of meaning in history, the idea of progress died too” (Iggers 1965, 5–10). It is worth remembering that the traditional metaphors of decline, especially the medical-sociological imaginary that sees the decay of manners as an alarming sign of social pathology (one of whose exponents is French essayist Paul Bourget’s description of decadence as “the symptom of the disintegration of the social body”: Gluck 2014, 354), were complemented by some discoveries of physics. Specifcally, the successive reformulations of the second

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law of thermodynamics, according to which the entropy always increases (which would inexorably lead to the end of the universe), would be received by the apostles of decadence as an endorsement of their positions. Some came to think that his theory of decadence fitted like a glove with the material laws of the universe. In fact, several social scientists – from Henry Adams in the United States to the Frenchman Pierre Chaunu a century later – thought that this physical law could be extrapolated to the historical process. In his book Entropy: A New World View (1980), Jeremy Rifkin argued that the concept could well be applied to a variety of social-historical spheres, including economics and politics, making entropy a counter-paradigm to progress.25 In any case, as hard as a few historians, most notably Edward Carr (1990 [1961]) and Georg Iggers (1965), strove to restore a certain respectability to the concept, it was clear that, after the two world wars, “progress” had become an old-fashioned category, although it is no less true that during the so-called Glorious Thirty “development”, “economic growth,” and “modernization” performed some of the semantic functions previously attributed to the notion of progress. Decadence, on the other hand, seemed to capture more and more the attention of the public and intellectuals. In the France of the 1970s and 1980s alone, several titles were published on the subject by prominent sociologists and historians such as Raymond Aron, Julien Freund, or the aforementioned Pierre Chaunu. But it would be from the 1980s onwards in particular when, with the advent of the risk society – a concept, that of risk,26 which increasingly appeared as the flip side of development – and of a second, more reflective modernity (U. Beck) in which the processes of radicalized modernization would have revealed themselves as formidable dangers for human societies, bringing the whole world to the brink of collapse, when the debates on progress and decadence returned with increasing momentum. Progress at all costs, advancement without limits, it is now said, is a doubleedged sword with very negative consequences. It is even compared to a cancer that grows uncontrollably until it destroys the patient. However, these contemporary theoretical debates “are genealogically related to the problematic concept of decadence that Europeans first articulated and debated during the 25 years between 1880 and 1914” (Gluck 2014, 351). Nevertheless, it is surprising to note that the word “progress” and its derivatives are still rhetorically very much alive in the daily political wrangling of political parties, even though the concepts of sustainability and human development – even others that are hardly compatible, such as decrease27 and permanent crisis – have moderated, or at least seek to mitigate, their most disruptive consequences. In any case, there is no doubt that the gloomy language of decline is much more in vogue lately than the glittering language of progress.28 If Eric Hobsbawm, in the general framework of his short 20th century, described as the “age of extremes,” identified the period 1914–59 as the “age of catastrophe,” today certain environmental activists use even more depressing epithets and do not hesitate to refer to our time as the “age of collapse.” Among the

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varied literary ofer of prophets of apocalypse – who today enjoy much more success among the public than the prophets of progress – we also fnd other forms of catastrophism not necessarily focused on environmental problems. Engineer Dmitry Orlov, for example (Five Stages of Collapse, 2013), prefers to place the focus with irony on the fnancial, commercial, political, and cultural aspects of the, as he sees it, impending collapse of the United States and the Western world as a whole. 6.3 Tradition and transition Decline is not the only counter-concept to progress. So, historically, was the concept of reaction (Starobinski 2003, 318–22). Another principle allegedly opposed to progress, especially in sociological literature on modernization, is tradition. Indeed, according to the modern vulgate, tradition and progress would be two diametrically opposed iconic words. The former would correspond to the old premodern world, which looked obsessively to the past; the latter is the emblem itself and the battle cry of a forward-looking modernity.29 And the transit between the two “states” would be efected precisely by means of a “transition” that would serve as both a changeover and a solder between them. The familiar sequence would be as follows: traditional society (dominated by tradition) → transition → modern society (under the sign of progress).30 Paradoxically, however, modernity has been one of the most generous fountainheads of new traditions, some of which, as Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger showed three decades ago, may have been “invented,” although a broad sector would describe them rather as “elective traditions” (Fernández-Sebastián 2021c, 115–51; more than one commentator has identifed modernity with “the tradition of the new,” to use art critic Harold Rosenberg’s label). By virtue of these chosen traditions, various ideological or identity groups proceed to manufacture à la carte pasts from a retrospective selection of those elements from the past – major events, historical fgures, authors, works – that best suit their needs and projects, elements of which they declare themselves heirs to (although in truth those alleged “ancestors” did not include them in any will or testament). And, since “tradition” comes from tradere (hand down) – it is no coincidence that the great metaphor of tradition is inheritance – nothing more absurd than the static, rigid, and unchanging image with which modernism has caricatured it, as if tradition and innovation were radically incompatible. Tradition implies a process of permanent change – transmission and translation (or rather succession of translations) – in which something changes and something remains. This dialectic between (illusory) continuity and discontinuity can be clarifed by means of a metaphor of Wittgenstein adapted by Michael Freeden (2003, 44) for use in intellectual history. This is an analogy with the practice of spinning: “as in spinning a thread we twist fbre on fbre. And the strength of the thread resides not in the

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fact that one fbre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fbres” (Philosophical Investigations § 67), so too a tradition does not refer to any fxed and imperishable element but rather to a succession of discrete overlapping fragments, small interwoven portions that, although they are renewed over time, produce the illusion of continuity; in a similar way to how history – in particular the quantitative history (histoire sérielle) of the 20th century – appears, according to Foucault (1994, 279–80), rather than as a continuity made up of discontinuous stratifed events, as a lattice of overlapping tiles of diferent lengths that constitute an apparently homogeneous roof. Not surprisingly, among the most common metaphors to illustrate the concept are those of the rope, thread, or chain – for example, E. Burke’s “chain of generations” – and when this continuity is interrupted, we say that the thread of tradition has been broken. Other frequent tropes for tradition tend to emphasize either its static and cumulative aspects – storehouse of resources, sediment of wisdom, slow-growing tree – or even the subjection of those who are subjected to it – ballast, anchor, bondage, hindrance, prison – or, on the other hand, its dynamism. In this case, for example, when we resort to the Gadamerian metaphor of changing horizons, to that of a continuous stream, or, more radically, to the turbulences or whirlpools, forgettings and rediscoveries of afterlife (Nachleben) of artistic creations (A. Warburg, G. Didi-Huberman), what is highlighted is not so much the perdurance of heritage, as the movement of transmission (as is the case with the celebrated phrase, attributed to Gustav Mahler, according to which “tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fre”), leading on occasions to the reviviscence of extinct traditions, as in the image of the phoenix. And the activist dynamism involved in this transmission presupposes a renewed efort in each generation that modifes the legacy received: “What you have inherited from your forefathers, it takes work to make it your own,” advised Goethe. In this regard, A. MacIntyre (2007, 222–3, 260), in contrast to E. Burke, observes that “living traditions” are those that are “sustained and advanced by its own internal arguments and conficts.” However much there is, to use Thomas S. Kuhn’s words, an essential tension between tradition and innovation, often presented as antithetical terms in a rigid bipolar scheme,31 in reality both notions are mutually implicit (Fernández-Sebastián 2021c, 134–43). To quote the famous aphorism of Spanish writer Eugenio D’Ors: “Outside tradition there is no place for true originality, everything that is not tradition is plagiarism.” In other words, the power of tradition, understood by some as the power of culture-in-time, lies in the fact that the most efective innovations – literary, artistic, political, legal, or any other kind – however original they may claim to be, are normally inscribed within some tradition which, in turn, they contribute to strengthen and swell (but also to modify).32

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The long chain of intergenerational transmissions from teacher to pupil of certain themes and webs of belief, observes Mark Bevir (2004, 204), produces continuous extensions of these themes, as well as modifcations that move them further and further away from their origins. Consequently, when intellectual historians trace a historical line from the start of a long tradition to its fnish, they should not ignore the fact that the earlier and the most recent exponents of the same tradition may have nothing in common apart from their temporal link. The sociological approach to the history of thought advocated by Randall Collins (1998), with its characteristic hybridization of the metaphorics of intellectual networks, social ties, and generational chains, insists that philosophical traditions involve complex processes of transmission, intensifcation, disagreement, and ramifcation. The problem of change and continuity has occupied thinkers and philosophers for centuries. Thus, jurist Matthew Hale, writing in the 17th century (History and Analysis of the Common Law of England, 1713) on the mysterious fact that the English common law statutes could be considered essentially the same in their time as they were six hundred years earlier, in spite of the countless changes and alterations they had undergone, draws a couple of interesting analogies with the Argonauts Ship and with a human body. Just as, says Hale, invoking a version of the so-called Theseus paradox already commented on by Plutarch, the legendary Greek ship “was the same when it returned home as it was when it went out,” despite the many repairs it underwent during its voyage, and the fact that on its return there were hardly any remains of the materials with which it was built; and in the same way, he adds, that a man continues to be the same now as 40 years earlier, despite the fact that doctors tell us that his material substance has been completely transformed over these four decades. As in these two cases, Hale concludes, the laws of England would remain the same laws as six centuries earlier, despite their many variations and alterations. For his part, Umberto Eco (1995, 14) returns to the Wittgensteinian theme of “family resemblance” and observes that in the sequence of four imaginary political groups (1-2-3-4), each of which is characterized by three peculiar features (1: abc – 2: bcd – 3: cde – 4: def), we note that the frst and the fourth do not share any trait, although the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities would lead us to think otherwise. All these analogies and paradoxes, some of which could be traced back to antiquity by virtue of the very mechanism we are discussing, attest to the complexity of the phenomenon of tradition. *** Another indispensable instrumental concept in most historical narratives is that of transition, a word that, unlike tradition, no longer alludes to the transmission of an object but to the passage from one state, place, or condition to another. Although the presence of this word in the lexicon of Romance languages can be detected as early as the Middle Ages, its intensive use is a thing of the last two centuries. First the 19th and then the 20th centuries

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have been described countless times by writers, historians, philosophers, and politicians as an “era of transition.” In the middle decades of 19th-century Europe, the statement “we are living in an age of transition” became a trivial cliché, repeated over and over again in speeches, books, newspaper articles, and all kinds of printed materials and, with greater or lesser emphasis, has not ceased to be heard since then. Whether talking about politics, culture, economics, technology, art, literature, or philosophy, transition seemed a relevant category for any area of human activity. It is curious to note that certain historical moments that had traditionally been characterized as phases of decline have subsequently come to be redescribed in a more neutral way as periods of transition. This would be the name most commonly used to refer to the leap between two epochs or between two civilizations. Thus, most historians of the later Roman Empire have long since abandoned the concept of “decline,” enshrined by Gibbon, in favour of “transition” (Morley 2005, 577). And the same is true for other transitions: from antiquity to the Middle Ages and from the Middle Ages to the modern age, from feudalism to capitalism, and so on. The weakness of historians and philosophers for the concept in modern times is evident, and it does not seem necessary to present many arguments to prove it. It will sufce to mention a few quotations from various philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries, from among the myriad of examples that we could transcribe. Hegel, in his Phenomenology of Mind (preface, § 11), insisted that “our epoch is a birth-time, and a period of transition,” a transition that is metaphorically described in the same paragraph by means of a succession of images: the birth of a child, a sunrise, the sudden bolt of lightning that illuminates for an instant the ruins of the old order, and the structures of the new world that begin to take shape. In one of his Cartas a un escéptico en materia de religión (IV, “Filosofía del porvenir” [“Philosophy of the future”], 1846), philosopher Jaime Balmes refects on the much-discussed notion of transition and on the changes and crises of all kinds that afect both ancient and modern societies. The Spanish clergyman downplays the importance of the drastic transformations of his time, which seem to be dissolved in the historicity of the world: I am inclined to think that this transition, far from being characteristic of our age, is, in a certain sense, general to the whole history of mankind; for it is evident that the human race is continually passing from one state to another. (italics in the original)33 A hundred years later, Ortega y Gasset (1964b [1942], 378) reafrmed the idea that “transition is everything in history, to the point that history can be defned as the science of transition.” A decade earlier, Herbert Butterfeld (1973 [1931], 33) had written that history “is the study of efective mediations genuinely leading from something old to something which the historians must regard as new. It is essentially the study of transition.” And

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Jaspers (1953 [1949], 243–6) also expressed himself clearly about the constitutive “transitionality of history” and the crucial importance of boundaries between epochs. Thus “the greatest phenomena in the history of man’s spiritual evolution are, as transition, simultaneously conclusion and commencement . . . and the basic feature of history therefore is . . . transition.” Randall Collins (1998, 860–2) resorts to the metaphor in medias res to underline that any narrative in intellectual history begins in the midst of things – times, spaces, discourses, authors – so “the search for precise borders and for outer limits” is highly problematic. Part of the appeal of the concept for historians lies in its fexibility and ambiguity, as the word “transition” fts well with both Kairos and Chronos. It can refer to an abrupt shift as well as to a gradual process; to a short phase or a long development; to a segment that smoothly connects a previous situation with a later one; and to a fracture between two radically diferent stages. The concept, therefore, can be used in both a narrative that emphasizes continuity and one that emphasizes discontinuity. It was in the 19th century that the concept emerged (it is revealing that the adjective “transitional” was coined at the beginning of that century), although it would only really take of in the last decades of that century. In the Spain of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, particularly in the capital, it is difcult to fnd a publicist who does not attempt, with greater or lesser success and insight, to describe the political and social “metamorphoses” taking place before his or her eyes. The main representatives of costumbrista literature use a wide range of metaphors to portray the great changes in the customs and mores of Madrid and Spanish society. Authors such as Larra (Panorama matritense, 1836) and Mesonero Romanos (Escenas matritenses, 1837) complain about the difculty of capturing such volatile scenes with their pens amidst the instability of the world around them. The writer’s position, they say, is as uncomfortable as that of a painter striving to portray with his brushes a child whose features change from one day to the next, a bird as it fies or a spinning wheel. In the 1826 edition of Chateaubriand’s Essai historique, politique et moral sur les révolutions anciennes et modernes [An Historical, Political, and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and Modern], we fnd one of the passages that best expresses the anxiety generated by this unusual situation: I often had to erase at night the picture I had sketched during the day: events were moving faster than my pen: the revolution we were experiencing was constantly invalidating all my comparisons; I was writing on a ship in the middle of a storm, and I was trying to paint as fxed objects the shores that passed and sank feetingly over the gunwale!34 Transitional metaphorics, extraordinarily abundant in historiography – meteorological tropes, such as the seasons; physical, such as crystallization; biological, such as pregnancy, and many more – tend to emphasize the

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transient aspect of the situations they describe. The idea is to draw attention to a more or less brief moment in time, a barely defned intermediate state between two very diferent states (in the manner of a rite of passage or the brief but elusive lapse from sleep to wakefulness). Of course, this temporary situation may last for a certain period of time, as when crossing a river, a bridge, or a tunnel (even a desert or an ocean), which, as we shall see, tends to blur the conceptual boundary between transition and period. On other occasions, by contrast, the focus is concentrated precisely on a boundary point, threshold or border line, an epiphanic moment that ideally would clearly mark the almost instantaneous passage from one state or period to another. In such cases, historians usually speak more about turning points, watersheds, hinges,35 axes, or pivots of historical time. The same metaphor, however, can be used for very diferent purposes, and the emphasis can be placed on very diferent aspects. Such is the case of the image of twilight, which refers to an intermediate state between the darkness of the night and the dawn, or between sunset and full night, and is therefore perfectly suitable for transition and is often also used for decline (as we have already seen in the case of Spengler). And, as regards the image of the axis, usually thought of as a straight line around which a fgure rotates, which ordinarily refers to the brief moment in which a historical turn occurs, the truth is that it can refer both to a swift one-of event – the incarnation of Christ is the axis of universal history, according to Hegel – and to a relatively long period (remember that the Axial Age, according to Jaspers, would have lasted fve or six centuries). The emergence of contingency as a consequence of revolutions prompted many European and American politicians and writers in the middle decades of the 19th century to refect on chronic instability as a salient feature of modernity, which many described as an endless transition. French authors such as Constant, Chateaubriand, Musset, or Tocqueville; Spanish writers such as Balmes and Donoso, Martínez de la Rosa and Larra; and others of diverse nationalities, have left us some very suggestive pages on this question (Blix 2006) – pages that speak of the decline of a world and the dawn of a new society, employing images as plastic as swimming across a river to an unknown shore. We also fnd everywhere the powerful metaphor of light in all its variants. What some describe as a splendid “dawn of freedom” is interpreted by others as a depressing sunset. Thus, in the romantic atmosphere of the disenchanted youth of post-Napoleonic France, Alfred de Musset (1993 [1836], 31) sings wistfully to “the spirit of the age, angel of the twilight, which is neither night nor day”36 – a confusing moment, that of transition, in which it is not clear whether one is present at the creation or at the end of a world and where the “diference between decay and rebirth becomes undecidable” (Blix 2006, 63, italics in the original). It is no longer the optimistic spirit of the Age of Enlightenment but a feeling of disenchantment in the face of what is perceived as a prolonged transition between an era and a regime that is coming to an end and another that has not yet been born.

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Once the revolution – a concept that, like progress, is sometimes equated with transition and sometimes directly opposed to it – has begun, two opposing positions emerge, that of the moderates and that of the radicals of one or the other sign. In mid-19th-century Spain, conservative politician Joaquín F. Pacheco suggested that the transitional times of “the present age” demanded eclectic, transactional solutions, a middle way between the old and the new world. In his Lecciones de Derecho Político [Lectures on Political Law] (1845), he recommends a lukewarm English-style constitutional system of “mixed government.” Far more radical progressive authors, such as poet Espronceda or journalist Larra, on the other hand, abhor half measures; they would like to shorten the transitional period to a minimum and thus ensure the triumph of the revolution as soon as possible. The former laments that he still lives in “an undecided and transitional society . . . made up of remnants of the old and the frst pieces of the new” and calls for an acceleration of “the universal movement” towards the emancipation of the working classes (José de Espronceda, “Política y Filosofía. Libertad. Igualdad. Fraternidad,” El Español, 15 January 1836). The latter advocates in 1835 that the “the critical moment of transition” be left behind once and for all, since “for the day to begin it is imperative for the night to end.” Neither is the intransigent Donoso Cortés (1946, II, 826), from the opposite side of the political chessboard, at all fond of shades of grey and intermediate positions. The transition strikes him as an ephemeral and inane time, which should be shortened as much as possible: “I read in the [Holy] Scriptures that God made night and day, but I do not read therein that He made twilight . . . because this phenomenon does not exist by itself and must cease when day triumphs over night.” Central American intellectual and political leader José del Valle, in an article published in the Gaceta del Supremo Gobierno de Guatemala (February 1825), imagines the transition to independence as an empty and undecided space of time: Any movement that terminates the existing social bond and replaces it with another, leaves in the middle of the operation an empty space of time in which society exists more by moral bonds than by political bonds. Old law ceases, yet to be replaced by the new. Valle’s words bring to mind other similar refections concerning the emptiness of those critical moments when a society undergoes a transitional period (Blix 2006, 64) but also others that are generally inscribed within some theory of progress, such as those of John Stuart Mill. Mankind as a whole, wrote Mill (1963–1991, XXII, 230) in the mid-19th century, “have outgrown old institutions and old doctrines, and have not yet acquired new ones.” In the even more emphatic words of Alfred de Musset (1993, 43), “the whole sickness of the present century comes from two causes. . . . Everything

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that was is no more; everything that will be is not yet. Do not look elsewhere for the secret of our ills.” However, what is peculiar to the last two centuries is the “chronifcation” of that poignant feeling of transition, which, judging by the frequency with which it appears in the sources, seems to have obsessed some of the best thinkers and publicists. I do not refer only to the ad nauseam reiteration of assertions about the era itself as a “time of transition” but to the anguish at the possibility that such a transition – often metaphorized as a journey but usually laden with overtones of turbulence and instability – might never end. While the Duke of Rivas declared in the Spanish Senate on 13 May 1840 that the European nations of his generation “sail in a shore-less ocean” and shortly afterwards, writer José M. Quadrado openly expressed his fears in a certain Mallorcan weekly newspaper (Palma, 4 October 1840) that the pilgrimage of his generation would be so prolonged that he would expire “in the desert before he saw the proclaimed promised land,” Tocqueville (2016, 177) confessed in his Souvenirs: I cannot say and have no idea when this long journey will end. I am tired of mistaking deceptive mists for the shore and often wonder whether the terra frma for which we have so long been searching actually exists, or whether our destiny is not rather to ply the seas forever. But, above all, there were an increasing number of declarations concerning this chronic instability, which, it was said, would never be completely overcome. Much of what I said in Chapter 5 concerning the notions of crisis, revolution, and modernity – including the vivid impressions of so many writers, philosophers, and poets of very diferent sensitivities and ideological orientations – understood as uncomfortable and fuctuating situations, characteristic of an in-between time in which “the old gods are growing old or already dead, and others are not yet born” (Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1915), or as a series of revolutions that appears to have no end, is perfectly applicable to the concept of transition, which, in the opinion of many restless spirits, seems to be prolonged in time far beyond what is reasonable. One of the great advantages of having transition in the historian’s toolkit is obviously the ability of this concept to mark the changeover from one type of government, civilization, or historical stage to another. In this regard, the major epochal changes I mentioned in Chapter 2 when addressing temporality – let us say the Axial Era or Sattelzeit37 – are “historical transitions” of utmost importance. However, the new periodizing/transitional thinking that emerged in the 19th century has paradoxical edges. Among others, the distinction between mere transitions and true periods is far from clear (which is why expressions such as “transitional period” or “Axial Era” sound somewhat oxymoronic).38 If it lasts long enough, any transition could become a period of its

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own (which is striking, since, etymologically, transition refers to crossing a boundary and leaving a previous place or situation behind, whereas a period [Gr. Περίοδος; Lat. periodus] is a cycle, a circuit, a “circular path”). Given that the identifcation of periods, styles, and movements will always perversely require the production of new gray zones that are themselves subject to becoming new periods that require yet another transitional period, . . . every moment might be construed as the radiant center of a potential period – but could also simultaneously be the pivot of an endless transition. (Blix 2006, 56) All of which undoubtedly contributed to strengthening people’s consciousness of historicity in a century fascinated by change, movement, and speed, which willingly gave priority to becoming over being. A century in which, as Renan wrote (1890, 380), “the human mind has moved from the absolute to the historical; it now considers everything under the category of becoming.” Moreover, in congruence with a unilinear view of history, epochal transitions, especially when they manage to insert themselves into a tradition, sometimes serve to underline the fundamental continuity of a historical process, over and above the evidence of discontinuity. At the entrance of the Sun Yat-Sen museum in Cui Heng a certain monument in honour of the founder of the Kuomintang makes the individual “a part of the long-lasting Chinese tradition.” In that museum, “Sun Yat Sen does not represent the rupture in Chinese history between Empire and Republic but the continuity of its essentials” (Rüsen 2012, 48–9). In any case, the considerable distance between the retrospective historiographical uses of the transition trope and the political, moral, and literary uses of the actors involved in a transition in progress is evident. Unlike those who experience a transition frst-hand, the historians are generally in a privileged position, since they already know the outcome of a process that, for those who lived through it, was full of uncertainty. In this sense, there is an important diference between the use of the word “transition” in the past tense, as “a necessary device in the new grammar of history” (Blix 2006),39 and as an experiential category to describe in hesitant fashion, in present tense, the predicament one is faced with. One thing is the experience of transition in the making, and another quite diferent the ex post facto narrative of a transition once it is complete. Chateaubriand’s or Tocqueville’s metaphors on the uncertain transition they witnessed frst-hand, and those used years later by historians to analyse with hindsight the same transition period once it had concluded, are often very diferent from one another. And of course, it is the historical discourse that is most likely to project a teleological view of transitional periods with a beginning and an end, as well as the use of “transition,” accompanied by one or another qualifcation, as a colligatory

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term. In fact, active politicians who were at the same time historians, such as France’s Constant or Guizot, occasionally made use of the concept as a historiographical category. The former, for example, writing on religious history, spoke of “the transition from fetishism to polytheism” and the latter of the “transition from nomadic life to sedentary life” (Blix 2006, 53). However, some physical analogies that serve for crisis and transition – crystallization, compression, liquefaction, inter alia – were already in use in the 19th century (see a small sample of tropes recently used by historians in Clark 2019, 290). And the average tone tends towards a rather pejorative assessment of transitional periods as a chaotic, confusing, and insubstantial time. Jurist Gumersindo de Azcárate, for instance, in a speech on “the social problem” at the Madrid Athenaeum in 1893, complains that modern society has not yet managed to crystallize “again on a diferent basis than the old one” (Fernández-Sebastián 2002, 369–70). The concept of transition would take on a new lustre in the last third of the 20th century as a consequence of several parallel processes. The economist Kenneth Boulding (1964) devoted a book to “the Great Transition” – the spread of the industrial revolution to the whole world – which, according to him, would mark a transformation comparable to the invention of agriculture, the frst great transition in the state of mankind. Shortly afterwards, the term came to the forefront as a result of its intensive use in the social sciences, in particular in Marxist debates on the transition between modes of production, in theories of modernization (including the dissemination of the technical term “demographic transition”) and particularly in studies of the transitions to democracy that accompanied the “third wave” of democratization (S. Huntington). The shift from authoritarian regimes to democratic political systems in countries such as Portugal, Spain, and Greece in Europe and later in various Latin American countries and, in the 1990s, in Eastern Europe, lent this issue prominence in the media. The Spanish transition, in particular, closely studied and analysed by politicians and political scientists, became a model for transitions to democracy in numerous countries (Fuentes 2008). The notable presence of the word transition in public discourse and the coining in the late 1990s of the term “transitology” for the systematic study of the processes of political and economic transition that took place in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union did not prevent the specifcally historiographical concept of transition from becoming the object of sharp criticism. The main criticism of the concept is that it is frequently rooted in teleological conceptions of history. Growing sensitivity to energy issues and alarm at global anthropogenic emissions have popularized the term “energy transition,” which, coined in the 1970s, in recent years has become a key objective for a variety of social and political actors. In the 21st century, concern for the environment and the existential risks afecting our planet seem to have displaced other more conventionally political issues. Certainly, the process of transitioning from

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a fossil fuel-based economy to a renewable energy-based economy involves not only technological changes but also social and political changes, such as changes in policy, governance, and public perception. The systematic transgression of planetary boundaries, many experts maintain, threatens the stability of the Earth system and could lead to the disappearance of the human race in the short term. The most common metaphorical projections for persuasive purposes, to disseminate the concept of energy transition, usually propose such a transition process – which some have expanded under the name “ecological transition” – as a vehicle that has to travel a road to reach its destination. We are therefore talking – just as when we speak of digital transition or, more commonly, of digital transformation – about projective transitions, oriented towards a telos in the future. Political leaders and journalists also frequently resort to warlike language and pose the debate as a battlefeld on which certain weapons – clean and renewable energy sources – would ensure victory. In public discourse we fnd a climate change lexicon, which includes scientifc-political expressions, many of them are metaphorical, with which the public is more or less familiar, such as global warming, greenhouse gas efect, carbon budgets, environmental sustainability, circular economy, ecological humanities, and several others. So here too, actors – politicians, environmentalists, journalists – rely on the potential of metaphors to drive transformative change and far-reaching societal transitions. Lately, the Covid-19 epidemic has been a very signifcant and extraordinary event that has had far-reaching consequences worldwide. And, given its enormous impact on virtually every aspect of human life – health, economics, education, social interactions – a few philosophers and scientists have gone so far as to argue that epidemic – which has been metaphorized in the media with the usual images for this type of catastrophe: war, storm, earthquake, fre, tsunami, and the like, as well as new ones, such as the Great Confnement – has initiated a transitional phase or epochal change for humanity: according to some, we are entering an era of global plagues and de-globalization. In a quite diferent register, political rhetoric has also recently given rise to a number of such transitional notions. In relation to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the end of February 2022, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared – and he was not alone – that this aggression represented a Zeitenwende, that is, a turning point that marks the end of an era and the beginning of a new time. *** Has the Covid-19 virus really brought us an epochal change? And the invasion of Ukraine? These and other major events have triggered important changes that could be conceptualized as the entry into a new historical period. It is, however, too early to provide a categorical answer to these questions. The sensation of living in a time of epoch-making innovations and paroxysmal crises is not reason enough to answer in the afrmative. We need time to

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assess the consequences of such events. Temporal distance will allow us to contemplate what is happening today from a diferent horizon, and we will then be in a better position to judge whether or not we are/were entering a new epoch.40 The tendency to overestimate the present and to attach much more importance to the things that happen during the time in which one lives than to what happened in earlier times is a human tendency that has been detected since ancient times. As far as the guild of professional historians is concerned, Thucydides and Livy already noted that historians tend to magnify their own times. And, without underestimating the magnitude of the transformations we are witnessing in our contemporary world, it must be recognized that the conviction of being protagonists of an unrepeatable moment of transcendental changes is too widespread in today’s literature. Whatever the case may be, one thing at least seems certain: we live in an age of transition or, if you prefer, in a transitional period. Only that is not saying much. In fact, we have been hearing this same refrain insistently for two centuries. Notes 1 Very revealing in this respect is the passage from the concept of perfection to that of perfectionnement throughout the 18th century (Koselleck 1972, 2002, 218–35). 2 It is worth noting, however, some meritorious attempts to rescue this notion of progress for empirical research, from the quantitative studies on long-term historical processes, such as so-called Cliodinamics, to essays based on statistical series by authors such as Johan Norberg and Steven Pinker. The latter, from a neo-Enlightenment stance, responds to what he calls the “progressophobia” of most intellectuals (Pinker 2018). Recently, Tyson Retz (2022, 37–47) has shown that the crisis of the totalizing concept of progress is compatible with other, more banal forms of belief in progress. 3 However, if in the vocabulary that precedes the invention of the modern concept of progress we were to include all those words that allude to change for the better – for example, renaissance, reformation, and a handful of Latin terms employed during the early modern age referring to revival (renovatio, restauratio, restitutio, regeneratio, reparatio, and so on) – the terminology to consider would be almost unmanageable (Burke 1976, 137). 4 The historian Luis Cabrera de Córdoba (De historia. Para entenderla y escribirla, Madrid, 1611, I, ix) states that he who studies and knows history is like “a man who has lived many centuries and travelled many provinces.” This idea will be revived at the end of the 19th century, reformulated and invigorated by Darwinism, when various thinkers and political activists will understand society, and humanity as a whole, as a collective organism analogous to a single evolving natural individual (Paulin-Booth 2023, 196–7). 5 Over a century later, J. Ortega y Gasset (1974 [1921], 130) wrote something similar about the need to preserve what is most valuable from the past when reforms and improvements are undertaken: “Progress consists, not in the annihilation of yesterday by today, but in keeping that essence of yesterday which had the strength to create this better today.” 6 Technophobic critics of modern civilization were quick to produce some eyecatching cartoons, most of them related to transportation, speed, and the steam engine. Thus, a graphic satire titled “March of Intellect,” printed by William Heath

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(London, 1829), under the sentence “Lord how this world improves as we grow older,” shows a complicated design in which various futuristic gadgets are depicted. See, ten years later, the allegorical poster by Yury Pimenov reproduced in Traverso 2021, 159. For Herbert Spencer (Progress: Its Law and Cause, 1857), each culture is an organism growing, maturing, and decaying, and progress is essentially a process of evolution of complexity, that is, “the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous.” This type of naturalistic metaphor, unlike those that point to a more or less defnitive fall, fts well with a cyclical view of history, as the seasons follow one another, the sun comes out again in the morning, the moon rises again, and the tides come in again. One thing is the recurring cycles of growth and decline and another, defnitive decline. There is a long tradition in the West of the poetics of ruins – metonymy, metaphor, and symbol of decadence. A poem by Francisco de Quevedo (17th century) clearly conveys the feeling of desolation before them: “Miré los muros de la patria mía, / si un tiempo fuertes, hoy desmoronados, / de la carrera de la edad cansados, / por quien caduca ya la valentía” (“I looked upon my native country’s walls, / if once they were strong, now they were decayed, / fatigued by time’s inevitable race, / by which their former valor now must fade.” English version taken from https:// albalearning.com/audiolibros/quevedo/salmo-sp-en.html). At the end of the 18th century, Constantin Volney’s meditations before the ruins of Palmyra (Les ruines, ou méditation sur les révolutions des empires, 1791) constitute one of his most famous literary testimonies on this subject. See Fritzsche 2004. “La décadence, c’est Rome,” said Pierre Chaunu (Morley 2005, 578). However, let us not forget Montesquieu’s work Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1734), nor the refections on the decadence of the Spanish monarchy, particularly abundant between the mid-17th and the end of the 19th century. In the Spanish case – which has been the subject of both light essays and major studies – to political decadence was added moral, economic, and military decline (Burke 1976, 139, 141, 147–8). Many of Gibbon’s arguments continue to be applied today by various authors to other processes of decline, as in the case of Niall Ferguson’s book, Civilization (2011), in reference to the decline of the West, in particular of the European Union. There are several slightly diferent versions of this drawing. All of them show that, as the emperor himself recognized, the war in Spain was the turning point and the beginning of his downfall. The symbolism of the set is accentuated by the parabolic arrangement of the fve scenes, which correspond to three phases of the solar movement throughout the day. The frst two stages, on the left, correspond to the rising sun; the culmination, in the centre, to the zenith apogee; and the last two stages, on the right, to the setting sun. In those same years, journalist John O’Sullivan, from the pages of The Democratic Review (see, for example, his article “The Course of Civilization,” vol. 6, September 1839, 208–17), projected a far more optimistic outlook concerning the fate of the United States. “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from” (T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding, 1942). Business cycles have their own technical vocabulary consisting of a succession of expansion and recession intervals. The word “recession” (from Latin re – cedere, to go back) came into use in 1929, at the beginning of the decade known as the Great Depression. The etymology of the word “depression” (from the Latin verb deprimere, to press down) reveals the essential connotations of sinking or

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dejection that have accompanied the term since its origin. In its economic sense, it began to be employed as early as the 19th century, although it was not until the 20th century that it became widely used. The psychological and moral sense, as a pathology of the mind and a psychiatric disorder, is mainly a 20th-century thing. As early as 1855, Baudelaire had already disavowed the idea of progress, that “invention of modern philosophism,” which he describes as a “dark lantern,” “casts darkness over all objects of knowledge.” In his characteristic style, Nietzsche’s critique overturns the value of progress, redescribing it as decadence (Starobinski 2003, 353). By contrast, artists such as Anselm Kiefer looked to aviation as a source of inspiration to denounce its deadly and destructive capacity in the wars of the twentieth century. Arnold Toynbee would also use in his A Study of History a wide assortment of metaphors – challenge and response, seeds of decay, and many more – to explain the rise and fall of civilizations. Le Déclin de l’Occident, in French; La decadencia de Occidente, in Spanish; Il tramonto dell’Occidente, in Italian. The latter is probably the title most faithful to the original meaning in German. Decadence (décadence in French), a term with physiological, ethical, and aesthetic resonances whose meaning is close in certain contexts to degeneration, began to be used with insistence by some fn de siècle artists and intellectuals (such as French novelist Joris Huysmans and Zionist critic Max Nordau) over a hundred years ago, while cultural pessimism spread in philosophical and literary circles. At the beginning of our century, French historian Jacques Barzun attempted to rescue the term and neutralize it as a technical label for historiographic use: From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (2000). What is undeniable in any case is that the decadence of the West has become a cliché since the turn of the century – laden with derogatory axiological connotations related to individualism, hedonism, and nihilism – that has recovered its attraction from a section of the public, as is evidenced by the success of, among other cultural products, Niall Ferguson’s book Civilization (2011), Michel Houellebecq’s novels, and the series by Australian flm maker Pria Viswalingam (in particular, his documentary Decadence: The Decline of the Western World, 2011). Ralph Waldo Emerson (1907, 112) had already observed a century earlier that “society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other.” From a very diferent perspective, the cultivators of big history insert human history into a vast cosmic scenario in which the notions of energy and entropy have great explanatory power (Christian 2018). The cultural history of the concept of risk (Mairal 2020), closely intertwined with notions such as future, fortune, danger, crisis, contingency, or failure, is of great interest, as it has a complex genealogy in which religious, geographical, commercial, and natural factors intersect. See, recently, the book Less Is More by J. Hickel (2021, 144), who has not failed to point out the great dangers associated with the “powerful metaphor,” the “false analogy” of unlimited growth. The strategic choice of some sectors traditionally classifed as “progressive” in favour of economic degrowth and technological caution has somewhat complicated the political “map.” In a way, these progressives are currently “conservatives” (in favour of deceleration and no further growth), and a part of the conservatives are “progressives” (in the sense that they continue to advocate indefnite growth). In parallel, the theories of transhumanism and post-humanity have recently suggested the obsolescence of the traditional left-right political divide and the convenience of replacing it with the dichotomy between those in favour of advancing decisively along the path of technological

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innovations (proactionary principle) and those who, on the contrary, advocate avoiding their possible dangers as much as possible (precautionary attitude) (Simon 2019a, 110). Ironically, the bitterest metaphors of decadence and death have been applied to progress itself since the inter-war period. In 1937, Lucien Febvre referred to “the corpse of the god Progress” (Hartog 2021, 150). A brief summary of some recent discussions are on the tradition-modernity binomial in Delanty 2000, 42–6. Cross-fertilization between the concepts of tradition and transition has also given rise to a few works, such as: Legrand and Munday 2003. The tradition/modernity dichotomy as a heuristic tool for the study of social change has been questioned with good reason since the end of the 1960s; see, among others, Gusfeld 1967; Eisenstadt 1973. Although, as is well known, the Kuhnian model of the history of scientifc revolutions responds rather to a triphasic pattern – anomaly → transition → paradigm shift – a kind of mutual incompatibility between innovation and tradition has often been posited. The locus classicus of this antinomy might be the beginning of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, where Karl Marx advises revolutionaries to rid themselves of the “nightmare” tradition of the generations of the dead that weighs on their brains. In the history of literature and political thought, it is easy to see that some great innovators develop their own notions that partially or totally contradict the tradition in which they are inscribed. This is the case of Machiavelli with respect to the genre of mirrors for princes, Hobbes with respect to jusnaturalism, or Cervantes with respect to chivalric romance. That the transition had begun to cease to be a transitory state and had become the rule rather than the exception was perceived by several contemporaries. “It is superfcial to see history as consisting of periods of stability and periods of transition. It is transition that is the usual state,” states for instance Ernest Renan in L’Avenir de la science (1890, 376). “Souvent il fallait efacer la nuit le tableau que j’avais esquissé le jour: les événements couraient plus vite que ma plume: il survenait une révolution qui mettait toutes mes comparaisons en défaut; j’écrivais sur un vaissau pendant une tempête, et je prétendais peintre comme des objets fxes les rives fugitives qui passaient et s’abîmaient le long du bord!” For philosopher J. Ortega y Gasset (El tema de nuestro tiempo [The Modern Theme], 1923: 1964c, III, 157), “generation, dynamic compromise between mass and individual, is the most important concept of history, and, so to speak, the hinge on which it executes its movements.” “L’esprit du siècle, ange du crépuscule, qui n’est ni la nuit, ni le jour.” It would be interesting to compare some features of De Musset’s transitional “angel of dusk” – “half mummy, half foetus” – with the crepuscular Benjaminian Angel of History. The phase of entry into full modernity, lasting about a century, which Koselleck christened Sattelzeit (saddle period) or Schwellenzeit (threshold period) has been designated as the Second Axial Age by S. N. Eisenstadt (Pombeni 2016, 6–10). The category of “axiality” presents, however, considerable complexity in the study of civilizations, complexity that transcends the transitional aspects we are dealing with here (Árnason et al. 2005). The epistemological problems involved in distinguishing periods and transitions are not too diferent from those that arise when one wants clearly to discriminate events and processes, as we saw in the previous chapter. In his article, Blix employs diverse luminic and chromatic (twilight, gloom, gray zone), spatial (gaps, emptiness, interstitial zones, thresholds, crossing, passage,

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bracket), physical (bufer, clash), biological (pregnancy, birth), temporal (interval, wait, interim, pregnant-time), geographical (techtonic shift, ocean, wasteland, stretch of desert, no-man’s land), and grammatical metaphors, including this one: “As key concepts in the modem grammar of history, transitions are the commas or spaces that make periods possible” (Blix 2006, 53). 40 In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis, Spanish journalist Rosa Belmonte acknowledged in a Bilbao newspaper (El Correo, 17 August 2020) that she “would like to fast-forward ten years to fnd out . . . what the hell is going on.”

Part III

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Final thoughts

A world ends when its metaphor has died. (. . .) Invent the age! Invent the metaphor! Archibald MacLeish, “Hypocrite Auteur” (1952)

Throughout the preceding chapters I have explored the metaphorical bases of discourses about history, as well as the categorical apparatus upon which the discipline has historically been built in the modern era (although without forgoing some forays into earlier times). When one closely examines the theoretical-methodological foundations upon which an intellectual structure as complex as modern historiography is constructed, one cannot but notice – and the same could be said of other sciences and branches of knowledge – that its conceptual pillars were originally little more than feeting poetical fashes produced to provide guidance and attempt to capture and suggest by intuitive means that which their authors would have struggled to grasp or communicate in another way. Gradually, the most efective of those bold and hesitant images of the past that enabled our ancestors to venture down unknown paths were repeated and naturalized, to become nothing less than the basic categorical repertoire of history understood in the broadest sense not only as a specifc subject and profession but also of the philosophical-political and didactic uses made of it by very diverse actors whose voices have been heard particularly clearly in the public sphere. Over time, with the confrmation of the irreplaceable heuristic function of these sub-structures of thought, a few images would become fully consolidated so that historians, politicians, philosophers, professors, writers, journalists, and social scientists would talk quite naturally about history as a mirror, a teacher, a court, a construction, a path, or a current; of sources and processes; of progress and decline; of crisis, transitions, and revolutions. At the end of our journey, we are in a better position than at the beginning to afrm that a few dozen great metaphors, those capable of condensing what is to be understood by history at some stage of its evolution – as a literary genre related to morality and politics, as inquiry, as a course of events, DOI: 10.4324/9781032736358-11

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as a discipline with scientifc pretensions – should not be imagined as a kit of tinted lenses that, as one replaces another, tinge the historical landscape we see through them with one colour or another. Their role is even more decisive. These fundamental metaphors – which characteristically emerge as non-concepts – are not mere rhetorical aids to concepts, nor should they be understood simply as terms transferred by analogy from one taxonomical category to another (Aristotle, Poetics 1457b.7). Their epistemological function is crucial because, contrary to popular belief, thought in general and historical thought in particular do not only draw on concepts. In fact, as we have seen, a few central metaphors that have changed over time hold the upper hand in this game. They do so, in the frst place, because of their generative power, that is, because of their proven capacity to engender new translational meanings, on occasions propitiating the leap from the unconceptual to the conceptual. The most successful ones end up being invisible and cease to be perceived as tropes because between the metaphorical and the conceptual there is a constant two-way fow, and there is no impassable barrier between the two spheres. Anonymous processes and collective forces that shape language do their work and, by the time we realize this, what began as a risky poetic fgure of speech has become an accepted scientifc category. After all, scientifc concepts – and historical ones are no exception – often emerge from the imagination of a keen observer, a researcher, or a group of researchers who trigger a mental spark that shines a new light on the problems at hand. And the imagination, in its early stages at least, likes to play with striking resemblances and with analogies inspired by the immediate environment, rather than with cold abstractions, removed from the lifeworld. This is how the most important concepts of the subject have been formed, and, from a Nietzschean-Blumenbergian perspective, it is precisely these – the concepts – that often end up occupying an ancillary position by emanating from a few master metaphors and, above all, by making sense primarily by being placed within the coordinates established by the most powerful metaphors. The rudimentary fgurative knowledge sketched by the imagination and based on immediate experiences tends, at frst, to have a purely indicative value; it often precedes conventional knowledge and prepares the ground for reason subsequently to perform its intellectual tasks. But it would be a major mistake to think that history, or for that matter any other historical discipline, is built exclusively upon a framework of “clear and distinct” concepts and that metaphors play a subordinate and ornamental role. I would go further: today the fundamental historiographical debates are more about the founding metaphors of the discipline than about its concepts. In fact, insight into the crucial role of metaphors in the advance of knowledge did not have to wait for Nietzsche’s essays. As early as the 18th century, the Swiss philosopher and mathematician Johann Georg Sulzer argued that the progress of reason depended to a large extent on perfecting the metaphorical side of language (Konersmann 2011, 17–18), and early-19th-century

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Spanish politicians such as the liberals Agustín de Argüelles and José de Urcullu were well aware that conceptual language was clearly insufcient and that metaphors were indispensable in politics above all because of their capacity to generate new worlds thanks to the power of imagination (Fernández-Sebastián 2015, 38, 2021c, 321–2). *** In no way, of course, do the metaphors discussed in this book exhaust the numerous tropes employed over the centuries to refer to history, to historical time, and to fundamental historiographical concepts. All those to which I have devoted an epigraph, without exception, can be regarded as crucial, although the specifc use of each metaphor always has a pragmatic, contextual dimension that, for obvious reasons, is beyond the scope of this research. The sample of fgurative expressions I have selected, however, is far from random. My selection is the result of the systematic exploration of a large number of sources, of which I quote only a part, as the list of references consulted could be much longer. And, although I could certainly have included other concepts and metaphorical felds in my research, it should be pointed out that the number of key metaphors for history, as for philosophy, politics, or any other feld of human activity and speculation, is not overly large. By way of an indication of the breadth of the list of fundamental tropes for a specifc area of knowledge, Konersmann’s Dictionary of Philosophical Metaphors (2011) has 40 entries. Among the tropes I have examined, there are several types, and depending on the criteria used, various alternative classifcations could be established. A few source domains, such as the feld of organic growth and movement; of nature, animals, and plants; of the atmospheric phenomena, seasons of the year, and phases of the day; of the ages of man; and of the elemental relationships between the human body and its immediate environment (inside/ outside, above/below, near/far), have been providing images in uninterrupted fashion since time immemorial. Most of these traditional images seem to have fulflled an eminently orientational function in both space and time. Other semantic felds, on the other hand, especially those related to technology, although in some cases also quite old, are generally more variable, innovative, and ephemeral. The textile arts, painting, the wheel, books, clocks, railways and telegraphs, photography, and cinema have been fundamental sources of inspiration for historiography and for the philosophy of history. Many of these images, however, are dated. Insofar as they depend on certain technological advances and industrial progress that arrive, develop, and often fade away to make way for more modern ingenuity, they inevitably have a birth date and an expiry date (or, at least, certain phases of apogee and others of decline). We could therefore speak of an essential repository made up of a few almost perennial founding tropes, albeit subject to permanent variations, and of other trending metaphors linked to inventions and fashions that

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come and go. The former are usually – but not always: think of two such persistent areas as theatre and justice – natural, biological, and physical images, while the latter are usually artifcial, socio-cultural, and technical. I do not mean to suggest that the latter are of little importance. In their heyday, some of these technological tropes – think of the train or the photograph – have become primordial nuclei of interpretative schemes of unusual scope, relevance, and complexity. Both types of metaphor, basic and technical, are intertwined, and neither of them escapes historicity. Make no mistake: neither is the stock of cardinal motifs, of long duration, in any way timeless. The fgures of the mirror and of fabric, for example, have been with us since ancient times; however, the refnement and proliferation of mirrors and looms at certain moments in medieval and early modern Europe lent the corresponding tropes a notable boost at very specifc times (and something similar could be said of the cross between the mechanical and the organic, of the graphic representation of spatial, and then temporal, depth, thanks to the development of pictorial perspective and other similar examples). Nevertheless, the most decisive changes in this feld do not seem to emanate solely or even mainly from technical innovations. Rather, intellectual history tells us that such changes are related to the obsolescence and reinvention of the major interpretative frameworks of social worlds. We know that these exhaustions and emergences, these paradigm shifts, to use Kuhn’s expression, occur sporadically, sometimes unpredictably, although it is debatable to what extent some surprising Gestalt-switches that alter people’s perception of history, the past or time, are the cause or perhaps the consequence of basic metaphorical transformations (for certain metaphors, like certain fundamental concepts, both activate and record historical-cultural changes: they are at the same time indicators and factors of these changes). The fact is that, when we look back to the past, we see a number of metaphors that today seem withered and weak, despite the fact that in a not-sodistant time they were full of vitality. Moving from what we now consider premodern times to our late modernity, passing through classical modernity, in previous chapters we have witnessed some important changes in fgurative language. And our journey has been punctuated by a host of faded tropes that have been left behind. We saw, for example, that the classic fgures of history as a teacher and as a mirror of the past – and others associated with the latter, such as painting, photography, and cinematography – became less attractive and gave way to alternative images, such as that of life as a true teacher or that of construction (which in turn could be combined with other related themes, such as perspective, distance, and interpretation). We observed that the fuvial image of time was giving way to a diferent fgure with a geological favour: that of temporal layers. We have seen how the appeal to (historical) sources was partially displaced by the invocation of remnants and traces. We have seen that the emblems of the arrow, the train, and the locomotive, so widely used until a few decades ago to glorify the speeding up of historical

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time, proclaim the achievements of progress and the hopes of revolution fell into disrepute. After the First World War and totalitarianisms, we saw some well-known intellectuals hastily replacing the metaphors of progress with those of decline or wielding the battering ram of their counter-metaphors to storm the fortress of modern philosophies of history. (It goes without saying that many of these nonconformist imaginaries were intended to counter an arrogant modernity that would have led humanity to catastrophe.) And while in some cases the shift in metaphor occurred rapidly, in others – for example, in the transition from river to strata – the transformation appears to have been more the result of a gradual evolution from one image to the other. But it is not only a question of conceptions of time, representations of the past, and historiosophies. At the level of historiographical praxis, too, the impact of certain conceptual metaphors has in many cases proved to be decisive. In Chapter 5, Section 1, I mentioned that several authors – Crane Brinton, Barrington Moore, Hannah Arendt, François Hartog – have resorted in their texts on the revolution to tropes once used by the revolutionaries themselves, tropes to which they have attributed not inconsiderable heuristic capacities. In various passages of this book we have seen that historians have made intensive use of a wide range of tropes in their empirical research and in their narratives. And it is not unusual for the great metaphors that tacitly shape their arguments not even to be acknowledged as such. One example will sufce to illustrate this. Among the various styles of practising intellectual history, it is well known that for half a century the traditional approach, the “history of ideas,” has been largely relegated by an alternative approach, which has been more or less accurately labelled “conceptual history.” This is the diference between A. Lovejoy and Q. Skinner in the Anglosphere, and F. Meinecke and R. Koselleck in the Germanspeaking area. The frst theoretical approach leads naturally to the study of the difusion and infuence of certain ideas of some authors on others, while the second model, beyond the diferences in dissimilarities between schools, invites researchers to concern themselves more with the reception of certain concepts in specifc contexts. Well, without delving into a rather complex issue, in my opinion the metaphorical roots of both approaches, which are rendered transparent by the respective etymologies of their key terms – ideas and concepts; infuence and reception – are in themselves sufciently expressive. In this, as in other cases, it is enough to dig a little into the subsoil of the concept to reach the hard rock of the underlying metaphor. While infuence ultimately refers to the Latin verb fuere (to fow) and thus connects with the traditional conception of time fowing like a river, reception comes from the verb recipere (to take back) which is a special form of capere (to grasp), a root, incidentally, similar to that of concept (from concipere, which also comes from capere). It is clear, therefore, that in the latter case the focus is on the action of the consumer of texts or other cultural products, who is at the same time an autonomous political actor and is not

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limited to contemplating ideas (Greek ἰδέα, shape, from ἰδεῖν, to see) nor to being passively infuenced by this or that author (for to speak of infuences is to refer to a weakened form of causality or soft power of the “infuencers” over the infuenced) but is himself a transforming agent who adapts his readings to his needs and purposes. The shift in focus from ideas to concepts and from infuence to reception thus emphasizes the human agency of those who handle notions in a pragmatic sense. If it is a question of analysing the formation of such basic concepts for the study of history as the past and the future, it is interesting to note that two of the researchers who have devoted most attention and efort to the two concepts have chosen two very diferent metaphorical approaches for their respective works. When German historian Lucian Hölscher titled his book on this subject Die Entdeckung der Zukunft [The Discovery of the Future] (1999), instead of resorting to the trope of invention, as was common at the time, he opted for the word Entdeckung [discovery]. By this, he probably meant to underline that the future as a concept, that is, as a collective singular of enormous abstraction, is a newly “discovered” novelty that is only a few centuries old. In any case, in choosing this metaphor, Hölscher was following a long-standing tradition, for since the geographical explorations of Europeans from the end of the 15th century onwards, it was customary for Spanish and Portuguese writers, sailors, and chroniclers of the Indies to associate in their writings spatial expansion and temporal progression, equating geographical and temporal horizons: arriving in the New World opened unheard-of future expectations. Five centuries later, the futurist rhetoric surrounding space travel followed a similar pattern.1 Hölscher’s book shows that the conceptual historiography about the future has continued this tropological tradition. By contrast, when the American historian Zachary S. Schifman devoted a monograph to the appearance on the scene of the past, instead of using the trope of discovery, he deliberately opted for a much more conclusive metaphor: that of birth. His book is titled exactly thus: The Birth of the Past (2011) – a crucial birth, for in the absence of a strong idea of the past, history as a discipline is not possible. For the purposes of this book, what is important to note is that when Schifman (2011, 1–2) explains the reasons why he has chosen this title for his book, he makes it very clear that what he wants to emphasize is that the past, which we normally take for granted as if it were a common-sense notion, had an identifable origin and did not exist beforehand.2 To stretch the metaphor, we could say that if, as Schifman explains, the past began to be conceived in the Renaissance, developed throughout the modern age, and broke its waters in the 18th century, it was the French Revolution that, with its emphasis on historical rupture, defnitively severed the umbilical cord through which the past was nourished by the present. However, it is very diferent historically to approach an object of study that is at the same time a category of thought – “the future,” “the past” – in terms of discovery than in terms of birth. While in the frst case it is assumed that

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the future already existed before its discovery, in the second case, it is implied that the past did not exist until it was brought into existence at a certain place and time. Neither is it the same to approach the study of a revolution in the form of a fever, a fre, a new beginning, or a rupture of time. Nor is analysing the difusion and infuence of certain political ideas the same as analysing the reception of certain concepts in context. And so on and so forth. Thus, as I was saying, some of the metaphorics that were once key to history seem clearly outdated today. Most modern-day historians would probably agree with Herman Paul (2015, 22) when he states that “the past is not a procession of epochs, but an accumulation of layers.”3 Historical processes and the events that triggered them also tend to be compared today with “the indefnite movement of clouds” more than with “the rectilinear trajectory of a billiard ball propelled along by an initial stroke” (Remaud 2014, 67). This trend indicates a paradigm shift from a causalist/teleological model of history to one that is more open to the experience of the actors and thus more random and unpredictable.4 These are just a couple of examples of professionals’ common sense with respect to some of the dominant tropes and those now considered obsolete. What is not at all clear is that this obsolescence is so obvious to the average person beyond the specialist circles. It seems rather that some classical metaphors remain latent and have not entirely disappeared from the popular mentality. It may be that the analogy of history as a teacher of life has lost most of its prestige and appeal among historians (see, however, the recent book Genealogies of the West, the author of which extolls “the function of history as Magistra Vitae, history as learning”: Aurell 2023, 6). Nevertheless, there is no doubt that most people admit the possibility that the present can learn something from the past (Delanty 2018, 7). A century ago, Oakeshott (1978, 86–112) diferentiated between a historical past (i.e. the kind of knowledge that scholars acquire from the questions they ask of the remains that have been handed down to us from the past), and a practical, essentially political, past, which would still seek “to teach by example.” Hayden White (2014) argued that it is rather such practical pasts that live on today, while the historical past of professional historians would have little or nothing to teach us (ZimmerMerkle 2022, 183). In these times of the rise of the politics of memory and the re-politicization of history by various identitary political actors, it is hardly surprising that historiography as a regulated and professionalized activity is under increasing attack, often labelled as elitist and accused of being detached from the struggle for the interests of various groups (particularly those who see themselves as victims of colonial wrongdoings and historical injustices). In this context, while identity politics activists openly assert their own practical pasts in order to advance their political agendas, in the public debate we once again hear stale metaphors that confuse history with agitprop. The long-standing persistence of certain basic tropes that, despite having been abandoned several decades ago by historians, refuse to disappear is

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an easily verifable fact. Certain turns of phrase and very common expressions attest to this. A handful of catchphrases, most of them metaphorical in nature, present in the media and in ordinary language bear witness to what Suman Gupta (2022, 285–6) has called the “common sense of history,” and I would prefer to call “banal historicism” – historicism, because in these clichés there are echoes of some typical propositions of 19th-century historiosophy; banal, because, far from constituting an articulate, fresh, and coherent system of thought, when one examines such phrases, the whole seems to be a heteroclite mishmash of the wreckage of those philosophies of history. Whatever the case, these expressions, often tributary to various tropes examined in this book, seem to indicate a certain socially shared sense of history and include hackneyed preconceptual phrases such as “lessons of history,” “learning from history,” “making history,” “tide of history,” “right/wrong side of history,” “history will show/judge,” “go down in history,” “the historical record,” and “annals of history.” The massive presence of these and similar phrases in the public sphere would indicate that there is a very stable tropological substrate in the historical imagination of ordinary people – a trend recently strengthened by sectors of academia associated with public and popular history – where an entire panoply of overused political, moral, and naturalistic tropes, such as masterhistory, mirror-history, judge-history, or unstoppable process-history, are kept in hibernation. Ancient and modern stereotypes that in the context of a certain militant historiography would hardly have been afected by the devastating criticism of historians and theorists. The huge gap between this banal historicism and critical history – in the noblest sense of the term – is a good indication of the gulf that has opened up in our societies between the level of complexity achieved by the bestinformed theory of history and the crudeness of a considerable part of the most widely circulated historical literature. On the one hand, we constantly hear recommendations for a rapprochement between the physical and natural sciences and the socio-hermeneutical sciences. This is a necessary but very demanding directive for historians, who will have to make a considerable efort to familiarize themselves with certain types of sources and specialized knowledge that are far removed from their professional comfort zone (McNeill 2016, 19–20). Yet, on the other hand, it is claimed – in line with Carl Becker’s famous address to the American Historical Association, titled “Everyman His Own Historian” (1931) – that anyone can be a historian, and there is a proliferation of novel ways of knowledge co-production (citizen humanities, popular history, public history), a trend that has become even more pronounced in recent years with the rise of digital history and the memorialization of history, history wars in social networks, and so-called historical cyberculture (not to mention the increase in cinematography and historical series, and in the gamifcation of history, at a time when many young people access history more through television series and video games than through books).

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The contrast between the super-specialization and theoretical and methodological sophistication of professional history and the extreme simplifcation of a largely black-and-white, simplistic and emotional non-academic history could not be greater and has often forced academic historians to face hostile audiences (Liakos 2008, 87–8) – a situation that cries out for quality historiographical works accessible to the general public: what has sometimes been called “good dissemination.” Moreover, it is sad to note that the ofcial historiography that is disseminated through schools and the media in several European and American countries – not to mention in those areas where nationalist ideology has been hegemonic for many years (in the Spanish case I am thinking of regions like Catalonia or the Basque Country) – a narrative that is ideologically marked by nationalism and by the bluntest positivism, scarcely difers from 19th–century historiographical production (Vörös 2017). Among the critical tendencies that have shaken some of the basic pillars of modern historiography in recent years are those that have questioned the crucial diferentiation between the present and the past (De Certeau 1988, 2), an ontological contradistinction that can be considered “the founding principle of history” (Fasolt 2004, 4). In this sense, as I maintained in Chapter 3, Section 2.1, that of the past as a foreign country is the foundational metaphor of the discipline. In recent years, however, this trope has come under the crossfre of formidable opponents from supporters of the politics of memory and of the imprescriptibility of certain heinous political crimes – genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes – who advocate a past that remains perpetually present, to others who promote a blurring of the line that separates the living from the dead (Fareld 2016), and also from postmodern theorists who, via a deconstructionist approach to the writing of history, argue that historiography should be a liminal activity situated in a ghostly space, halfway between the absence and the presence of the past (Kleinberg 2017). More radically, there are those who advocate “the abandonment of the demarcation between past and present, those two parameters that underpin modern historical representation” (Rufel 2018, 175). And while some propose the erasure of this demarcation – in a context, let us not forget, in which the sense of historicity is diluted day by day under the instantaneism of the digital world in which we are immersed – others suggest disconnecting the future from the past (Simon and Tamm 2021). Indeed, like most tropes, the metaphor of the foreign country lends itself to all sorts of rhetorical uses and manipulations to the point of serving antagonistic purposes. Although David Lowenthal’s (2015) work was undoubtedly intended to underline the modern awareness of the otherness of the past, Frank Ankersmit (2006, 329) used this same image years ago to defend his theory of presence-representation: “the past can actually be carried into the present by historical representation, in much the same way that one may carry a souvenir from a foreign country into one’s own” (Ankersmit 2006, 329).

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Of course, not all who travel abroad do so as harmless souvenir collectors. Consider this rather more disturbing image, which we owe to Constantin Fasolt (2004, xviii): The past, as a familiar saying goes, is a foreign country. Historians are just as active in invading that foreign country, conquering its inhabitants, subjecting them to their discipline, and annexing their territories to the possessions of the present as any imperialist who ever sought to impose his power on colonies abroad. To call their activity a conquest is no mere fgure of speech. It is a perfectly accurate description of history’s political efect. The implications of this last simile are diametrically opposed to those of Lowenthal. Instead of advising the historian to make an efort to understand the “inhabitants” of the past on their own terms, Fasolt’s extended metaphor suggests that the historian’s own attitude is that of a brutal conqueror who unceremoniously imposes on the natives ideas and values that are totally alien to them: those of the invading power, that is, those of the present. However, I insist, the original, essentially anthropological sense of the metaphor of the past as a foreign country, was neither strictly speaking that of Ankersmit’s peaceful historian-tourist, nor, still less, that of Fasolt’s bellicose historian-warrior. The latter, by the way, can be read as a perfect illustration of historiographical presentism, that is, of the crude imperialism of the present over the past that – as with the most aggressive versions of the politics of memory – demolishes the cornerstone of a history based precisely on this distinction. Yet perhaps the presentist metaphor that most directly challenges the image of the past as a foreign country is that of the past as heritage, which implies an economic-legal conception of the historical citizen-agent as heir and owner. Just as one freely manages the property one has inherited from one’s elders, so today’s legislators and holders of heritage could dispose at will of the past, understood as the historical and cultural legacy of their ancestors, which they would certainly seek to preserve, but which, obviously, is always subject to the discretion of its administrators at any given moment according to their particular wishes and needs. As we know, who controls the present controls the past. If I have dwelt on this question, it is because I am convinced that the serious threats to the metaphor of the past as a foreign country are one of the most eloquent symptoms that we are currently undergoing a critical phase of profound transformation of historical consciousness and that we do not know exactly where it will lead us. And if this last bulwark – I refer to the qualitative diference between the past and the present – were to fall, the discipline of history would probably have changed so much that it would cease to be an enterprise intellectually recognizable as history. The death of the past – of that past which, according to Schifman, was born barely three

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centuries ago – would drag with it in its fall history as the institution charged with its research and custody. As I have argued elsewhere, although we are vaguely aware that we are crossing a new threshold in this area, the truth is that we do not know where we are heading (Fernández-Sebastián 2021c, 482–93). What is beyond doubt is that we are witnessing a far-reaching transformation in the way we see and understand historical times and, specifcally, the relationships between past, present, and future. And in all probability, the concept of history will emerge from this transition transfgured. What remains to be seen is whether the result of this transformation will be a reafrmation of the role of history in the concert of knowledge or, on the contrary, an eclipse of its lucky star. On the one hand, we observe a spectacular expansion of history, which seems to be moving impetuously towards the historicization of all sciences and disciplines, including epistemology (recently history has come to relativize the very idea of a transcendental cognizing subject that was long considered a kind of timeless ground that would supposedly serve as the unshakable basis of all knowledge). So-called big history has reinforced these expansive tendencies, quantitatively expanding the concept of history to unimaginable limits. It is no coincidence that the stated goal of its cultivators is to achieve “a unifed paradigm for the study of the past on a grand scale” that encompasses the entirety of human, biological, planetary, and cosmic history. Fred Spier, after noting that “in almost all branches of academic thought, the historical approach is gaining ground,” declared the need “to devise an overarching scheme unifying all these historical approaches.” And according to American historian William H. McNeill, “the meeting of hard and soft sciences” could “elevate history to the Queen of the Sciences” (Spier 1996, viii). In contrast to this celebration of Clio’s victories, other theorists persuasively contend that history as we know it today, based on continuist processualism, has its days numbered. In times of unprecedented hyper-accelerated changes such as the ones we are experiencing, we are told (see Simon 2019c), the discipline has to face a change of model capable of giving birth to a novel type of knowledge – a new science that, by adopting an evental temporality, has to focus on the analysis of cataclysmic changes rather than on gradualist processes. Along these lines, Marek Tamm (2022, 136–8) has argued that the radical developments that humanity seems to be heading towards, such as the impact of an intelligence explosion (I. J. Good) or technological singularity (R. Kurzweil), and foreseeable posthuman and transhuman futures, demand a “future-oriented history.” This alternative history, potentially multiscalar, multispecies, even multiplanetary, or cosmic history (Tamm 2022, 136–8), might mean abandoning history “as a specifc approach to the past” or at least involve rethinking the notion of history (Tamm 2022, 135). It is not possible to say at present whether history as a discipline is on the verge of an expansion of unknown magnitude or whether it is doomed to a rapid decline, perhaps absorbed into a constellation of emerging sciences. To

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make things worse, at a time when “we need to nurture knowledges equipped with a vocabulary of categories applying to the whole and not only to the respective social or physical elements” (Simon 2022, 127), according to the same author, the most transversal concept at our disposal, the great link that has amply demonstrated its interpretative potential in both human history and natural history – I refer to the category of process – would be invalidated or at least seriously questioned (Simon 2019c). This is certainly not the view of the pioneers of big history, who make intensive use of this trope. For David Christian and Fred Spier, champions of a kind of “hyperprocessualism,” it is precisely a matter of integrating into a unifed mega-process a myriad of cosmic, natural, and social processes of very variable extensions and speeds but which can be assembled with one another. But even if, instead of looking for a red thread in this continuous mega-process made up of minor processes (which is above all a problem of combining very diferent, separate scales), we choose to look mainly at the breaks, the usual way of proceeding in historiography tends to be to look for parallels and correspondences with other previous breaks. Everything occurs as if history were condemned to choose between either “narrating processes or narrating analogies” (Arlinghaus 2022, 195). Faced with this uncertain situation, historians and social scientists make no secret of their perplexity, while theoretical approaches to characterize the present moment abound. Uncertainty in almost every feld is certainly one of the hallmarks of this era in a world where the future almost always comes as a surprise and the unexpected is becoming the norm. In these conditions we fnd everywhere tentative neologisms related to history and its supposed overcoming, often thanks to their combination with other approaches and disciplines (I refer to compound terms such as “posthistory,” “biohistory,” “neurohistory,” “geohistory,” and so on). Nowadays, in a world where we are once again wondering whether or not time is out of joint (Assmann 2020) and maybe history out of control, the prevailing historical self-understanding (Delanty 2018, 13) in learned social groups has taken the form of an awareness of the irremediably situated and dated nature of historicity itself, a sort of second-degree awareness5 which, although not always very clearly, accepts the existence of a plurality of ways of experiencing and conceiving history and of relating to the past, as well as a multiplicity of temporal cultures (not in vain did the contributions of some anthropologists in this feld precede the refections of historians: tellingly, in 1983, François Hartog used for the frst time the expression “regime of historicity” to refer to non-Western societies). And to deal with this much more complex picture of historical time – historical time, in the singular, is now seen as a particular outcome of the modern Western regime of historicity – that we foresee in this 21st century, diverse theorists have considered it necessary to coin improbable neologisms such as polychronic present, plurihistoricity, chronocenosis, or heterochrony. Neither does the phrase “historical consciousness” – not even in pluralized form – satisfy all

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the experts any longer; there are those who prefer other expressions that are not exactly equivalent, historical thinking, historical understanding, historical sensibility, or even speak with increasing frequency of an emerging new historical condition. It is a new historical condition capable of addressing temporal heterogeneity and of perceiving various ways in which societies relate to their pasts. The very fact that this plurality of modes of historical consciousness – on both the synchronic and diachronic levels – is visible is a telltale sign that we are crossing a threshold between paradigms, moving towards another cognitive dimension. If we are able to historicize historicity itself, as well as to transcend and criticize some basic concepts and categories that for a while may have appeared as an unassailable cognitive horizon, our point of observation has shifted and today it is possible to see and imagine things – hetero-temporalities, post-anthropocentric visions – that for a long time were literally unthinkable. As for the abbreviated characterization of the epoch itself, a self-analytical practice that began in the Renaissance and was consolidated in the Enlightenment, there is also a generous supply of metaphorical designations that seek to capture the quintessence of the times in a catchphrase. If, as we have seen, in recent decades there has been much talk of Risk Society, Network Society, and Liquid Modernity but also the Era of Witness, the Victimhood Culture, the Age of Anger, the Transparency Society, the Burnout Society, or Infocracy – the last three formulae coined by Byung-Chul Han – and several others, currently, along with the terms referring to digital transformation (in the style of the Fourth Revolution), the names with most media presence are related to environmental concerns. And, although there is also a lot to choose from in this area, in recent years, labels have been all the rage that include the ending -cene (from the Greek καινός, new), typical for the most recent geological phases, various terms alluding to the perverse efects upon the Earth of human activity. Capitalocene or Age of Capitalism, Carbonocene, Wasteocene, Econocene, Technocene, and other similar terms have been proposed by diferent authors, although Anthropocene is by far the dominant label. Although the main international associations of experts in the feld have not yet ofcially recognized it as a geological epoch in its own right, the debate over the Anthropocene, beyond technical questions of stratigraphy and geochronology, has become a matter of interest to a wide section of the public, concerned with a narrative of natural history that warns of the serious danger that threatens human life on Earth. This term is now the basis of a whole late-modern chronosophy antagonistic to that of progress, according to which the keys to the future of humanity and the planet lie in the past – a past that, according to the grand narrative of the Anthropocene, would essentially consist of the impact of human actions on terrestrial ecosystems and would lead to a terrifying future. Hence, according to other authors, such as Libby Robin and Nitzan Lebovic (2021, 421–2), the Anthropocene is “an epoch that is not so much back-dated as forecast” and “suggests that

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the future is already determined.” From another point of view, however, the Anthropocene could also be interpreted as a presentist refection, insofar as it entails an interpretation of the past in the twilight of an apocalyptic time like ours. Once again, the past is of interest only to the extent that, whether we like it or not, we are directly afected by it. In spite of its many critics, beginning with those who dismiss this notion precisely as a sophisticated form of anthropocentric arrogance (LeCain 2017), “Anthropocene” has proven to be a very strong candidate to take centre stage among the various tropes that are vying to replace History in today’s world – here I obviously refer to the capitalized History of classical progressive chronosophy – as the great singular collective of modern times. In fact, the Anthropocene has begun to eclipse globalization, even climate change (which has largely replaced global warming), in the same way that “Planetary Age” gradually pushes towards the margins the brand-new label “global history” (which in turn displaced universal history and history of the world), and in academic literature on these issues, “planetary or Anthropocenic regime of historicity” (Chakrabarty) competes with the “presentist regime of historicity” (Hartog) and threatens to replace it in the short term. However, rather than the monopoly of a single all-encompassing trope that would cover the entire spectrum of our preoccupations, what is observed is that each discursive sphere or sector has its own favourite metaphors. If I suggested earlier that, in the context of cultural criticism, the word “heritage” is replacing “history” – thus Universal History would have given way to World Heritage (Roberts 2021, 63, 126, 137) – in other types of discourse, as we have just seen in the case of the Anthropocene, other metaphorical stars shine through. Yet however great the diferences between the Anthropocene and heritage discourses may be – at frst glance, the latter seems to look more to the past, and the former to the future – in the background it is not diffcult to see that in both cases everything seems to revolve around the same centre of gravity: the present – a presentism that is even more accentuated when situations of alarm and extreme emergency – epidemics, wars, natural catastrophes – and “breaking-news” follow one after the other,6 sometimes without it being possible to meet the contradictory requirements of several overlapping emergencies.7 Acceleration – and in particular the so-called Great Acceleration of recent times – has also become a fundamental metaphor of the times (Bouton 2022, 81, 269). Its force is even greater if we bear in mind that acceleration and (global) warming are in fact in many contexts two sides of the same coin. In contrast to the societal metaphors that prevailed half a century ago, when images of cold and freezing were predominant, often associated with images of solidifcation and crystallization, in recent decades the temperature of society has risen rapidly, and everything has become liquid, if not gaseous (Müller 2021a, 69). Elaborating to some extent on the classic Lévi-Straussian distinction between cold and hot societies, which equated the physical magnitudes of heat and speed, “overheating is a way of talking about accelerated change,”

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especially when we speak of “the kind of change that can be depicted as exponential growth” (Eriksen 2014, 9–10). Such hyper-acceleration – which brings to mind the image of efervescence, often repeated to describe social unrest in the age of revolutions – would have warmed society further and further to a melting point that dissolves the old distinction between nature and culture (Bouton 2022). A historians’ manifesto that achieved a certain circulation a decade ago (Guldi and Armitage 2014, 1) linked from its opening sentences the concepts of crisis, acceleration, and short term and called for long-term historical thinking: “A spectre is haunting our time: the spectre of the short term. We live in a moment of accelerating crisis that is characterized by the shortage of long-term thinking.” As far as historiography is concerned, there are specifc areas with their corresponding metaphorics. We saw this earlier with respect to intellectual history, and we could refer, to take another example, to the metaphors associated with the rise of transnational and global history with its characteristic insistence on networks, interweavings, entanglements, constellations, connections, nodes, and so on. But the general feeling of uncertainty and disorientation to which I alluded a moment ago fnds perhaps one of its most appropriate tropological expressions in the metaphor of the kaleidoscope,8 which manages to convey two features of recent historiography: the superabundance of methodological twists and turns and the perplexity of one who knows that at any moment the panorama can suddenly change because of a new twist (i.e. due to a new academic fad, more or less frivolous and passing), which has given rise to many jokes among historians. An infuential collective of history theorists recently wryly referred to those who see “theory as one more turn (a wrong one) in the ever-turning kaleidoscope of historical investigation” (Kleinberg et al. 2022, 97).9 Another powerful metaphor that has already appeared in the chapters on temporality, sources, and events is that of fragmentation (which can take on a number of variants) – explosion, archipelago, galaxy, jigsaw puzzle, patchwork, mosaic, fold, collage – each with its own implications and peculiarities, depending on whether or not it afects, for example, dispersion or the possibility or not of grouping the disjecta membra. Historiography has crumbled so much that the desire to reunite the scattered fragments has inspired several recent historiographical currents. In the second half of the 20th century, notes D. Brauer (2018, 402), “fragmentation of the history feld – like a cracked mirror into multiple topics and problems” led some historians to “attempt to reunify that diversity around a main theme and to establish as far as possible a general perspective,” which gave rise to global history. And although a few theorists have resorted to the musical metaphor of polyphony in allusion to the articulation of diferent historiographical approaches and schools of thought into a harmonious whole, the general impression is more that of a cacophony of discordant proposals. At the theoretical level, too, fragmentation is more the rule than the exception. According to Agnes Heller (1993, ix), today it is only possible to write

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a philosophy of history in a fragmented way. The artistic avant-gardes partly constructed their proposals by recycling and combining waste and fragmentary second-hand materials. Even rubbish has been transformed into art. More recently, Lisa Regazzoni (2021), commenting on an artwork of Man Ray’s titled Collage ou lʼâge de la colle, suggested that perhaps we are living in the age of paste, which presupposes a collection of fragments and separate works ready to cut and paste.10 Virtual worlds and the digital environment also contribute to this fragmentation, which afects our sense of time in particular. According to Anne Fuchs (2019, 60): Digital serfdom, dictatorship of speed, stagnation at top speed, point time, atomization of time, timeless time, the broad and never-ending present, the cult of immediacy – these metaphors not only capture the profound impact of digital technologies on our daily lives but also stage a deep crisis of historical time. In the era of globalization, world history appears to have become more volatile, fractured, and unpredictable than during the Cold War. Thus, continues Fuchs (2019, 39) citing Byung-Chul Han, by ofering countless arbitrary options and links, the internet intensifes . . . the atomization of time: it favors browsing and surfng and such directionless movement. Net space and net time are discontinuous and as such imprisoned in a now without duration. However, that “atomization of time in the age of dyschronia” is not new. At the end of the 19th century, recalls Fuchs (2019, 40), Ernst Mach (Die Analyse der Empfndungen, The Analysis of Sensations, 1897) described the modern self in terms of a feeting Elementenkomplex (complex of elements) without the Kantian unity of apperception. The disintegration of the grand historical narratives and the experience of an atomized time without an integrative horizon already characterise much of the literature of classical modernism. What would be new now is that historical time, according to Han (in an approach that, incidentally, is not without points of contact with the positions of Zoltán Simon on evental temporality), could dissolve in a “point time” lacking a unitary sense, as if we were again turning our back on Wilhelm von Humboldt’s prescription two hundred years ago on the task of the historian, consisting in inserting events into narratives endowed with meaning and continuity. This would require, according to Fuchs (2019, 218), that this new state of hyperculturality dispense with the ties that bind it to the past

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and the future, thus abandoning “prevailing notions of fulflled time and narration in favour of what he [Han] calls ‘point time’ or ‘event time’.” Luciano Floridi (2014), meanwhile, in his book on the Fourth Revolution, instead of hyperculturality, speaks of hyperhistory. This scholar of the digital society revisits an old botanical metaphor to afrm that, in our hyperhistorical condition, “we need to look carefully at the roots of our culture and nurture them, precisely because we are rightly concerned with its leaves and fowers” (Floridi 2014, ix). From another point of view, fragmentation, or rather disintegration, is also behind an extreme version of the metaphor of the heap of sand that I analysed in the section on modernity in Chapter 5. But in this case it is a diagnosis or self-examination of the present time, along the lines of what Foucault called “ontology of the present” and Agamben (2009) described as “the contemporary.” I refer to the gloomy description of atomized contemporary society ofered by David Roberts (2021, 76–8). A society, says Roberts, quoting Houellebecq, composed of monadic and clonal individuals – “[e]lementary particles” that form anomic crowds detrimental to the social body, as occurs with the “disorderly and destructive growth of cancerous cells.” Contemporary ultra-individualism would thus result in something worse than a heap of sand, namely a fatal social cancer. But to return to the positive metaphors most commonly used today for historiography, I would say that in quite a few discourses the tasks of the historian are compared and likened to those of the translator (Alonzi 2023a); the dilemma has even been posed between two strategies for translating the language of the past into the language of the present: one that prioritizes faithfulness to the past (foreignization) and another that chooses to give more importance to intelligibility in the present (domestication) (Alonzi 2023b, 9). In fact, translation has often been considered one of the best metaphors for explaining the tasks of historians and anthropologists. Ultimately, the epistemological relations between the present and the past would require a kind of back-and-forth translation capable of leaving the “native speakers” of both cultures/ages reasonably satisfed. If translation arises from the need to overcome obstacles to mutual understanding between languages and cultures, history would similarly serve to connect two epochs – let us say, conventionally, “the present” and “the past” – without ever completely abolishing the tension between the two poles (just as the translator never manages to achieve perfect transparency). Especially if we bear in mind that “every translation is at the same time an interpretation” (Gadamer) and, therefore, like historiography, must remain indefnitely open to further revision. But, as is clear to everyone, the validity of the analogy of the historian-translator requires, as a sine qua non condition, the maintenance of the vision of the past as a foreign country. It will have been noted that the metaphorics that have the epoch as their target domain are almost indistinguishable from those that refer to history and society in the more abstract senses of both terms. Hence, as has been

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seen, those images that evoke fragmentation, uncertainty, and unrest predominate in all three domains. *** While writing this book, I have often wondered about the dissonances between the most important metaphoremes relating to our subject in different languages. In fact, this question, which has incidentally cropped up in some passages – for instance, in Chapter 7, Section 2 – is not confned to the level of the metaphorical, for linguists, translatologists, and philosophers of language have devoted many pages to analysing the fact that diferent languages, even very close ones, conceptually capture the world in diferent ways. As is well known, the concepts, semantic felds, and categories of each language map the world from a certain perspective, and this has given rise to a copious and ramifed literature that cannot be addressed here (on untranslatables, see Cassin 2014; on the cultural variability of metaphors, see Kovecses 2005). However, returning to our metaphorological perspective and after refecting on some of these idiomatic variations, I have come to the conclusion that in the most widely spoken languages of Western Europe the dissonances in this area are relatively minor.11 It strikes me that in all of them the basic repertoire of images and topoi – a repertoire which, as Demandt (1978, 2–3) found, is already outlined in the Bible and in the Greco-Latin tradition – and the fundamental metaphorical felds do not vary substantially from one language to another (although, of course, a compilation of untranslatable metaphors could be made, in the style of the dictionary of concepts edited by Barbara Cassin). And to the extent that what we call “Western tradition” is not self-contained and draws from extra-European, mainly Eastern, sources, perhaps there is truth in Vico’s insight that there are a few enduring archetypal images (immagini) that underlie languages of all times and all places (Konersmann 2011, 7).12 In order to verify this, it would be necessary to carry out a vast empirical comparative investigation of the imaginaries and metaphorographies of numerous languages. It should be recalled at the outset that, as with the concepts of colours and emotions, recognition of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic diferences is no obstacle to the existence of commonalities and indeed universals (Wierzbicka 1999, 306). Basically, there are reasons to believe that, thanks to the ubiquity and comparability of tropes, conceptual history and metaphorology have a cosmopolitan dimension (in the case of the mirror image and some others, we have seen that these are tropes widely shared in East and West, which have an undoubted cross-cultural appeal). Both could help us to overcome some problems related to understanding between human beings in a culturally very diverse world, which we should no longer conceive from the tunnel vision of an old-fashioned eurocentric universalism, in the style of the French Enlightenment (Delanty 2018, 13–14).

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Nevertheless, far from constituting a universal and timeless repertoire, most metaphors are used pragmatically within a given cultural, spatial, and chronological framework, and the same basic metaphor can undergo signifcant changes, depending on various circumstances, to the point of becoming almost unrecognizable if we compare it with its earlier or later meanings in other contexts. In any case, certain basic metaphors make it possible to reach some shared basic meaning – as far as we are concerned here, on the question of what history consists of – over a certain period of time. And everything seems to indicate that the tropological disparity between one period and another is far more signifcant than that which occurs synchronically between the various languages, at least between the various branches of Western culture. *** The proliferation and dematerialization of sources and data of all kinds – textual, genetic, geological, to name but a few – that have increased exponentially with the digital revolution, as well as new historiographical practices that increasingly analyse social and natural systems together, mixing the cultural with the physical-biological, generate an imbalance between our enormous capacity to store information – and the consequent overabundance of stored information (which has led some to dream of the utopia of the total archive) – and the shortage of concepts and categories to handle, classify, and interpret them. In this hyperhistorical condition, we sufer, Floridi (2014, ix) observes, from “a huge conceptual defcit.” Accordingly, most theorists believe that it would be necessary to invent new concepts and new theories to analyse and understand the world. Again, however, they difer on the role that history should play in the emerging virtual world.13 While some argue that historical studies are more necessary than ever to investigate the antecedents that have led us to this situation, others think that a new kind of knowledge should be explored to analyse unprecedented disruptive change. Luciano Floridi and Zoltán B. Simon would be respectively two good academic exponents of one or the other position. Be that as it may, it is clear that our conceptual defcit calls for illuminating metaphors that serve to found new worlds. Some believe that what we social scientists need are above all “‘connective concepts’ that build bridges to the sciences” (Simon 2020, v–ix). And experience teaches us that it is precisely in the interstitial zones between one subject and another, between diferent types of discourse, between one order of things and another – including the thresholds between the human and the non-human (Liakos 2013a, 69–70) – that some of the most promising metaphorical notions might emerge. If we are looking for concepts that bridge the natural and social sciences, we should also remember that “metaphor is the meeting place of the human with the natural” (Lambourn 2015, 293). And the tropological drift of a few nomadic concepts that jump from one feld to another and become more and more

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interdisciplinary as they change felds is one of the most productive means of semantic construction (Christin 2010; Müller 2011). A vast wealth of tropes of scientifc-technical provenance are now being used in the historical and social sciences as well as in science fction. We resort to many of them to deal with the intractable problems of space-time and its inconceivable paradoxes. Not to mention the usual spatial metaphors used for the virtual world, cyberspace, the cloud, and the infosphere, among the numerous techno-tropes taken from engineering is, for example, the suggestive image of the time tunnel. Cosmology, astrophysics, and quantum mechanics have provided a number of metaphorical images (for an interesting application of the metaphor of quantum mechanics to modern-day politics, history, and society, see Cebalo 2022), from big bang, wormholes, and black holes to the uncertainty principle, parallel universe, string theory, and quantum entanglement. Other metaphors, as is the case of the rhizome – Mills (2011, 7) for instance, following Deleuze, states that globalization is “far more rhizomatic than arborescent” – or of chronocenosis, are drawn from biology and ecology. Theories from mathematical logic are also sometimes applied to the historical sciences, such as Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Alongside these brand-new scientifc images, some old metaphors return. We have already seen that 19th-century historicism is not dead and that some of its most common motifs are still perfectly acceptable in certain political and social circles. The return of the metaphors of which I speak at this point is, however, a quite diferent and dissimilar phenomenon, for they are rather old tropes recycled by academic literature and now made to say something quite diferent – even the opposite – from the messages they were intended to convey decades ago. The old arrow of history, for example, no longer has a target to aim at and fies out of control (Cruz 2017). The once majestic river of time has of late been transformed into a turbulent and chaotic torrent with many branches, full of rapids and eddies, in which, to top it all, we are asked to be able to swim against the current if we really want to innovate.14 Disorder and turmoil have also taken hold in the air: the winds of history have fanned out into maelstroms, hurricanes, and erratic tornadoes. The classic fgure of terra incognita, which set so many hearts racing during the age of discovery, also returns, applied today to those who dare to speculate on the possible establishment of human beings on other planets (Bouton 2022, 317). As we have seen, the metaphor of mirrors has been recovered, transformed into a kaleidoscope, or used to denounce the multiplication of distorting mirrors that partisan historiographies ofer of the same facts. Even the hackneyed metaphor of the train, with its unmistakably modernist and revolutionary favour, has been recycled for other uses. In her A Philosophy of History in Fragments, Agnes Heller was able to take advantage of the railway station to oppose her disenchanted absolute present head-on to Hegel’s absolute spirit, so often represented by the railways and locomotives of history: “The railway station . . . is the metaphor of the absolute present.

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To speak in the spirit of this metaphor, living in the railway station is the resolve to live in the present” (Heller 1993, 223; see Roberts’s apt comments 2015, 283). *** When one takes stock of the key metaphors used for history in recent centuries, and discounting the tropological legacy inherited from antiquity, it is clear that philosophers, especially philosophers of history in the broad sense, have been the great forgers of tropes, especially of those images that have become the most powerful symbols and myths. More sober and restrained, historians have generally limited themselves to applying metaphorical resources of a lower and more concrete methodological profle in their research. In their case, fgurative language is often used in the service of their narrative and the design of their plots, but they rarely refer to the march of History with a capital letter. And although some politicians and journalists have coined a few very successful metaphorical formulae in the last century, they have usually limited themselves to using and disseminating the most dazzling images handed down by tradition and forged by philosophers. The evolution of these images, and the predominance of one or another metaphor in a given period, author, or school of thought, tells us a lot about the ways in which the actors saw the world and in particular the aspects of the concept of history and its associates that were foremost in their minds – or that they wished to emphasize – at any given moment. In this sense, beyond argumentative strategies, the choice of one or other metaphor has repercussions on research. Obviously, it is not the same to conceive of time as a circle, as a straight line, or as a spiral, just as it is not the same to suppose that the role of the historian is more akin to that of the interpreter than to that of the realist painter. Each metaphor – by transferring knowledge acquired in one feld (explanans) to a diferent feld (explanandum) – highlights or selects certain specifc aspects, meanings, or qualities of the metaphorized object, which has consequences for the analyses derived from this particular selection of meanings. Moreover, the basic metaphors for history and its fundamental concepts are great organizers of discourse: their deep logic establishes certain patterns to which the arguments then adhere in the manner of an underlying matrix that structures conceptual combinations. Yet precisely insofar as the great metaphors tacitly structure the discourse, the persistence of some of them has sometimes prevented progress in a diferent direction. Therefore, a fundamental metaphor can also become a prison. And to escape from it, an alternative vision must be introduced that allows us to overcome the obstacle and see things with fresh eyes. For example, we were able to observe that the classical motif of vegetative growth was at a certain point displaced by the idea of self-driven movement. (Later, the very idea of unlimited growth had to be corrected when environmental concerns demanded limits to growth – at least as a desirable goal.) We have also seen that, to conceive of the idea

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of indefnite progress, it was necessary to correct, or rather to sidestep, the misleading metaphor of the ages of man, and later on, the metaphor of the railway or the time-river had to be abandoned so that a more complex historical temporality could be conceived that would allow the mythology of progress to be left behind. The sporadic insertion of a few visual metaphors along our journey has been aimed at proving that, in certain contexts, images and words maintain a close symbiotic relationship with each other. Just as concepts are often fossilized metaphors, so metaphors are verbal images. And, within the extensive family of images (Mitchell 1986, 9–14), some of them can become visual metaphors, which is why it is not uncommon for the graphic and textual aspects to feed of each other. It follows that conceptual history and historical metaphorology, far from being two incompatible approaches as some have claimed, are two mutually enriching and complementary perspectives. Moreover, the ideal of an integral historical semantics would involve adding the iconographic perspective, and more generally, the study of visual culture, to the focus on the history of concepts and metaphors.15 *** As I said in the introductory chapter, this work can be considered both a monograph of intellectual history sui generis and a contribution to the history of historiography. And, insofar as it is an attempt to historicize analytical tools, specifcally some of the major categories of writing and historical experience, I believe that it can also be a contribution to a critical theory of history (approached, in this case, from metaphorology). The truth is that we do not have an abundance of historical analyses of the operative concepts used by philosophers, politicians, and historians themselves, for paradoxically, as Pierre Bourdieu pointed out years ago, historians are not enough when they handle the instruments with which they think about history (and the social sciences in general), instruments that they often take for granted, instead of scrutinizing them with a historical-critical eye, as they are obliged to do by a deontological imperative. Therefore, we need historians to accustom themselves to subjecting their own tools to the strictures of their craft, and this book is intended to be an example of that kind of self-refexive history that takes the historicity of history seriously. Particularly at a time of epistemic crisis such as this, as discussions rage about the validity of Western historiological concepts for the experiences of other regions of the world (a recent proposal for an analysis of the notion of historical time through the prism of the fabric metaphor in Simon and Tamm 2023), I thought it might be timely to take stock of the evolution of the foundations of the historian’s craft in the West through its metaphorical subsoil and to ofer a succinct overview of some recent debates at a time of doubt and hesitation such as the present. In a passage from his essay Ideas y Creencias [Ideas and Beliefs] (1964b [1940]), José Ortega y Gasset contrasted the “solid ground” of beliefs with

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the liquid element of doubt, which is “the negation of stability.” In contrast to the solidity of stable beliefs, the doubtful is a liquid matter, a seascape in which one falls, fuctuates, and cannot hold on.16 And the intellect is the lifebuoy to which, in this desperate situation, the shipwrecked person clings (Ortega 1964, V, 392–4). From a diferent perspective, Karl Popper, in The Logic of Scientifc Discovery (1934), also resorted to an aquatic metaphor to emphasize that “science does not rest upon solid bedrock.” Its theories rise above a swamp and the piles supporting the building are simply driven into the mud to the required depth to carry the structure for a time (Popper 2002, 94). In short, “the empirical basis of our theories is far from frm; . . . it should be compared to a swamp rather than to solid ground” (Popper 1962, 387). I said at the beginning that the conceptual pillars that support the edifce of history were born from the imagination of a handful of visionaries. In fact, as we have seen, these pillars – whose relative solidity or fragility has nothing to do with their original metaphorical character – have had to be replaced several times over the centuries, and even in modern times they have been repaired, discarded, and replaced from time to time. We know that in this time of crisis these pillars will have to be renewed, although we do not yet know what the founding metaphor and overall design will be for the times that lie ahead. As for the possibility of anticipating where historiography will go in the coming decades, the reader will not be surprised if I bluntly confess that there is very little, almost nothing, that we can venture with a minimum of certainty in this respect (a situation that is not without negative heuristic potential, since, whether we like it or not, we are obliged to face the challenge). I have already said that we could be either on the verge of an enormous expansion or on the eve of a collapse or at least of a radical transformation of the discipline. And, as is often the case whenever we have to confront uncertainty in the midst of a voyage, we fnd nautical metaphors at every turn. As Lisa Regazzoni reports, Ethan Kleinberg said in a recent talk that the compass that renders us capable of “navigating the topography of historical knowledge . . . is now completely demagnetized,” and we are not in a position to guess what will become of history in the near future.17 Not only have we lost the compass, but we have also lost the logbook, and the ship is threatening to sink. If so, as Luciano Floridi writes (2014, x) quoting Otto Neurath, “drowning in obscurities is not an option,” so “we need to make a rational efort and build a raft while still swimming.” Floridi sets out these thoughts in the preface to his work The Fourth Revolution and expresses the wish that, in the worst-case scenario, his book would supply some timber for building the raft. But perhaps our situation is not so desperate. In the preceding chapters we have seen that the crew of the ship of history, like the Argonauts, have been replacing old, unusable frames and decayed hull planks with new ones during their long voyage to the point of completely changing the confguration of the ship, always under the Clio fag,

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on several occasions. It remains to be seen whether this time it will be enough to replace a few planks or we will lose the whole ship, in which case a new one will have to be built. For my part, having reached the end of our journey, I hope that I have provided readers who have embarked with me on this book with some retrospective material that will enable them to familiarize themselves with certain little-studied aspects of the history of historiography and thus become more aware of the situation that history is currently experiencing. It only remains for me to wish readers luck on their next voyage to unknown horizons. Notes 1 In its 3 January 1969 issue, the New York magazine Time honoured the Apollo 8 astronauts as “Men of the Year,” alluding to Christopher Columbus and singing the praises of the space crew who, with their “Promethean daring,” had in fact undertaken “a journey into man’s future.” Thanks to them, “the human race glimpsed not a new continent or a new colony, but a new age, one that will inevitably reshape man’s view of himself and his destiny.” 2 Schifman (2011, 138, 157) speaks incidentally in his book of the “rediscovery of the classical past” and “the discovery of antiquity” in the Renaissance, but he never deals seriously with the discovery of the past as such; rather, when he mentions this expression, attributing it to Montesquieu, he uses an ironic tone (Schifman 2011, 263). 3 The metaphor of the strata of time, however, could be under threat in a time where fragmentation is also at work at this level: temporal orders have multiplied and, in this new context, the metaphor of strata no longer works as well as it used to. 4 This shift in emphasis can be seen in the study of the French Revolution. In recent decades, we have moved from the analysis of its causes, from an etic perspective, to the study of the subjective experience – emic – of the historical actors (Benigno 2013, 229). 5 David Roberts (2021, 120) has spoken of a “historical consciousness of historical consciousness,” in other words, the fact of being aware that we have historical awareness. Roberts himself (2021, 137) observes that we are imprisoned “in the iron cage of historicity.” Agnes Heller (1993, viii) has written that “post-Moderns understand themselves as dwellers in the prisonhouse of our contemporary/ history/historicity.” 6 “Alarmist metaphors abound in the contemporary imaginary: according to many commentators, we are moored in an everlasting present without any future horizon; we are simultaneously fooded by pasts that we can no longer integrate into meaningful narratives. We are stagnating at top speed; our experience of time is fat, disembedded from context and without duration. Our sleep has been wrecked by the 24/7 imperative of uninterrupted standby. We have entered the era of the fragmented now, bereft of past and future” (Fuchs 2019, 5). 7 The need to respond to unforeseen situations and emergency management sometimes require the adoption of measures of extreme urgency that can be contradictory or counterproductive in other areas (as has happened with the return to polluting energies following the international situation created by the invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s Russia at the end of February 2022: Hartog 2022, 114). 8 This metaphor had already been used by Schopenhauer in his book Parerga und Paralipomena in a diferent sense, commented upon by Borges (1964) in a lecture he delivered in 1949. The German philosopher “compares history to a

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kaleidoscope, in which the fgures, not the pieces of glass, change; and to an eternal and confused tragicomedy in which the roles and masks, but not the actors, change.” Even the Anthropocene has its own turn: G. Dürbeck and P. Hïpkes (2020) have recently coordinated a volume titled The Anthropocenic Turn. According to Regazzoni (2021), “theory of history can, and indeed should, also operate as a continuous disturbance or alarm signal that wakes historians up or keeps them awake in their research work from start to fnish.” I will give one more example of these small divergences, in which even the grammatical infections specifc to each language can introduce noteworthy nuances. The Ciceronian conceptual image magistra vitae applied to history is probably better understood in Latin and in languages in which history has a feminine gender (Fr. maîtresse; Sp. and It. maestra; Port. mestra) than in English, where the corresponding term – teacher – has no gender and therefore can hardly convey certain connotations associated with the feminine fgure of Clio (hence Cicero’s dictum is sometimes translated as “directress of life”). On the conceptual level too, as I say, signifcant diferences can be observed: think of the nuances that terms such as the English “heritage,” the Spanish “patrimonio,” or the German “Erbschaft” convey, especially as regards their more or less direct connection with the metaphor-notions of inheritance and legacy (Delanty 2018, 14). G. Didi-Huberman (2017, 296), drawing on the work of W. Benjamin (and his notion of Denkbilder, thinking images) and A. Warburg, attaches great importance to images and metaphors as the basis of thought and calls for “une pensée par images” (“a way of thinking by means of images”). The dual reality in which we live – constituted by a variable combination of the “real world” and the “digital otherworld,” to use Baricco’s (2020) formula – makes it increasingly difcult to distinguish between the two. According to Floridi (2014, 94), “we are probably the last generation to experience a clear diference between online and ofine environments.” Luciano Floridi (2014, x) vindicates his right to introduce neologisms and reshape the language, paraphrasing Friedrich Waismann: “just as a good swimmer is able to swim upstream, so a good philosopher may be supposed to be able to master the difcult art of thinking ‘up-speech’, against the current of linguistic habits.” Although it does not refer strictly to the problem of images and concepts, it may be appropriate in this regard to recall the following passage from the Critique of Pure Reason (Second Part. The Transcendental Logic. Introduction, A50/B74B75/A51), by Immanuel Kant: “It is just as necessary to make the mind’s concepts sensible (i.e., to add an object to them in intuition) as it is to make its intuitions understandable (i.e., to bring them under concepts).” The idiomatic Spanish phrase “hallarse en un mar de dudas” [“foating on a sea of doubt”] shows that the metaphor of doubt is closely linked to the liquid element. Regazzoni (2022) alludes to the Koselleck Lecture that Ethan Kleinberg gave at Bielefeld University on 13 October 2021: “Temporal Vectors and the Compass of History. Politics and Ethics at the End-Time of Truth,” the text of which I have been unable to consult.

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Acknowledgements

In mid-2018, and without knowing each other personally, Robert Langham, History Research Senior Publisher for Routledge, contacted me to suggest the possibility of writing this book. Apparently he was already familiar with some of my work on this topic and graciously invited me to submit a proposal, after which I signed a contract with the publisher for the publication of a volume on key metaphors for history. More than fve years later, and after a number of vicissitudes that make today’s world in many respects quite diferent from that of 2018, this book fnally sees the light of day. It is only right, therefore, that my frst expression of gratitude goes to Rob Langham, without whose initiative, patience, and tenacity this book would simply not exist. I am particularly grateful to several colleagues and friends who read early versions of some chapters and made valuable comments that I have tried to take into account. Among these early readers and critics with whom I have had the good fortune to exchange messages and impressions while writing the book are Jefrey Andrew Barash, Gabriel Cid, Pablo Fernández Candina, Luis Fernández Torres, Juan Francisco Fuentes, François Hartog, Francine Iegelski, Gennaro Imbriano, John Christian Laursen, Maria Elisa Noronha de Sá, Daniel Henri Pageaux, Marcos Reguera, and Víctor Samuel Rivera. To all of them, many thanks. And although the content of the book is obviously my responsibility alone and, naturally, any errors are exclusively attributable to its author, I must acknowledge that not only have I had a select group of highly qualifed readers who have been kind enough to comment with me on some parts of the manuscript but also that, from an institutional and collective point of view, this work owes much to a group of academics linked to the Iberconceptos network, especially the dictionaries of political concepts in the Ibero-American world, a project in which more than a hundred researchers have participated over a fairly long period of time. And, furthermore, it is part of the tasks of the research project “Aproximación interdisciplinar a los lenguajes jurídico-políticos de la modernidad euroamericana. Dimensiones espaciotemporales” (HAR2017–84032-P), as well as the Grupo de historia intelectual de la política moderna (IT1663–22), funded respectively by the Ministry

Acknowledgements

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of Economy and Competitiveness of the Spanish Government – AEI/FEDER (European Union) and the Basque Government. In the pleasant atmosphere of our small group at the UPV/EHU – Javier Tajadura, Pedro Chacón, Iñaki Iriarte, Rafael Lasaga, Juan Olabarría, Janire Mimentza, Carmelo Moreno, Marcos Reguera – we have all been growing intellectually during the years we have been working together and sharing numerous seminars, almost always in the company of a few young researchers in training. This book has also been indirectly nourished by this permanent seminar, which we have been holding for two decades and which has been attended by numerous top-level academics. And I must not forget the exquisite professionalism in the management of María José García, from the secretariat of our department; the invaluable help of Eduardo Blanco and Aitor González whenever a computer problem made it difcult for me to move forward; or Itziar Remiro, who, from the Library of the University of the Basque Country, did everything she could to obtain several publications without which my research would not have been able to reach a successful conclusion. Since I started writing it, I have presented advances of some chapters in several universities and research centres, and a modifed version of a fragment on the metaphor of the horizon has even been published, with the technical support of Bettina Brandt and Jonathon Catlin, in the blog Geschichtstheorie am Werk [Theory of History at Work], organised by the University of Bielefeld in memory-homage to Reinhart Koselleck, on the occasion of the centenary of his birth. I put the fnishing touches to the manuscript during a visiting professorship at the University of Salerno in the spring of 2023 (for which I received a faculty mobility grant from the Department of Education, Universities and Research of the Basque Government). During those months, in the vibrant atmosphere of the Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici (Dipsum), led by Carmine Pinto, I was lucky enough to meet and get to know a good number of professors and graduate students with whom I exchanged refections that helped me to tie up some loose ends, and I was even able to present a frst draft of a future book, provisionally titled Clio in Motion, which will in a way be an extension of this project. Among the colleagues and researchers who made my stay in Salerno much more pleasant and easier, I cannot but mention Dario Marino (and his wife Rafaella), Alessandro Bonvini, Hernán Rodríguez Vargas, Alessandro Capone, Alice de Matteo, Giacomo Zanasi, Mario Migliaccio, Rosanna Giudice, and several professors from other universities with whom I had the pleasure of talking, such as Gian Luca Fruci, Laura di Fiore, Andrea Graziosi, Massimo Cattaneo, and Carlo Verri. At the last minute, Luigi Alonzi of the University of Palermo provided me with some of his recent publications, for which I am very grateful. This is also the appropriate place to express our gratitude for the generous permission to reproduce and publish various prints, cartoons, and images that we have obtained from various individuals and public and private

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institutions. In this regard, we cannot fail to mention Gonzalo Capellán and Andrés Rábago, as well as the heirs of Blanche Ames, Oakes, and Sarah Plimpton, for their generosity, as well as the Medieval Academy of America, the Diözesanbibliothek in Munich and Freising, the Spanish Real Academia de la Historia and the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Library of Congress, the Carnavalet Museum, the Bill Mauldin Estate, LLC, and the Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections. And, among my closest circle of friends, it is a pleasure to acknowledge publicly the priceless intellectual and personal debts I owe to Juan Francisco Fuentes and Gonzalo Capellán, with whom I have shared so many academic projects and life experiences over the years. Mark Hounsell, my regular translator for many years, has, as always, done an excellent job in taking care of all the idiomatic details and ensuring that the English of the book is up to the standard of a prestigious publisher like Routledge. My wife, Mercedes, devoted considerable efort to a task that was as necessary as it was time-consuming: the search for and classifcation of metaphors in a small corpus of selected secondary sources. Last but not least, this book owes much to my son Pablo, whom I have already mentioned earlier as one of the readers of the manuscript in its entirety. Pablo has helped me in many ways to improve the text, in both a technical and substantive sense. This book is dedicated to my dear son, who has been an excellent compagnon de route during the long journey of its writing.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate a fgure on the corresponding page. acceleration 28, 78, 129n10, 205–6, 225, 246, 272; anthropogenic 205; and crisis 274; and fgurative language 165; and globalization 202–3, 205; and global warming 272; historical-social 36–7, 41, 78, 114, 119, 147, 157, 187–8, 202–3; as metaphor 230, 272; and metaphors 169, 206; and modernity 198, 202, 205–6; neoliberal 210; of progress 224; revolutionary 36, 175, 225; and short-term 274; techno-social 205, 208; of times 70, 162n25; see also Great Acceleration; hyper-acceleration accelerationism 39, 210 acontecimiento 143 Acton, Lord 47, 160n6 Adams, H. 203, 239 Adorno, T. W. 74, 131n31, 199, 207 advancement 39, 151, 162n24, 167, 219–20, 222–4, 227, 230, 232, 239, 253n24 aesthetics 13, 21, 26, 106, 121, 123, 130n19, 191–2, 199, 210n2, 238, 253n23 Africa 211n11 African Americans 158 Agamben, G. 66, 154, 275 age: of anger 271; of capitalism 183, 271; of catastrophe 239; of collapse 239; of crisis 164; of discoveries 123, 203, 215n33, 278; of dyschronia 274; of Earth 123, 209; of Enlightenment 245; of extremes 239; of flm 28; of history 37, 114, 164;

of metaphors 9; of mobility 225; new 282n1; of paste 274; of railroad 236; of revolutions 38, 164, 184–5, 215n33, 273; of spatiality 90n1; of temporality 90n1; of transition 243, 251; of universe 113, 217n65; of world 222; of world picture 194; see also century; era ages of man 92n25, 99–100, 222, 261, 280 Aion 64; see also eternal; eternity airplane(s) 206, 236, 253n20 Alamán, L. 183 Alberti, L. B. 30 Alcalá Galiano, A. 111 Ali, Tariq 64 allegory 6, 9–10, 22–3, 41, 47, 79, 110, 123, 162n26, 173, 182, 226, 234, 252n7; of Chronology 91n14; of Chronos 91n13; of Clio 47, 63–4, 91n13, 91n14, 100, 162n26; of Death 129n12, 212n15; of History 26, 27, 48, 56n18, 63, 91n9, 100, 101, 109, 162n26; of Prudence 100; of Reason 196; of Revolution 39, 175, 178, 210n4; of Themis 162n26; of Time 56n18, 63, 109, 129n1; of Truth 14n1, 56n18, 196; of Victory 175 Alonzi, L. 275 Altdorfer, A. 107 Althusser, L. 159 Amaru, Tupac 213n21 Ames, B. 232–3 analogies 6, 9, 167, 222, 237, 240, 242, 260, 270; atmospheric 73;

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biological 156; cinematographic 26, 28; economic-religious 166; false 253n27; historical-temporal 25, 54, 66, 72, 111, 136, 139, 147, 265, 275; hydraulic 73; iconographic 25; mechanical 95n48, 170; organic 122, 222, 225, 251n4; photographic 26; physical 249; spatial 60; spatialtemporal 65; visual 25, 28 Ancillon, F. 186 Anderson, B. 33 Ankersmit, F. 10, 26, 71, 90n3, 106, 146, 162n21, 267 Annales school 31, 51, 72, 75, 94n35, 145, 160n6, 167, 215n40 Anthropocene 53, 80–1, 205, 207, 217n61, 271–2; concept of 113; dating of 161n11; discovery of 119, 159, 209; event or process 151; and globalization 272; grand narrative of 271; and history 272; new temporal order of 159; as singular collective 272 Anthropocenic: historical knowledge 54, 127; regime of historicity 272; turn 209, 283n9 anthropocentrism 159, 194, 271–2 Aquinas, T. 6 Arab 65, 236 archive(s) 138, 140–1, 277 Arendt, H. 153–4, 182, 184, 188, 196, 207, 215n36, 217n62, 220 Argentine 25, 79, 168, 223 Argonauts ship 242, 281 Argüelles, A. de 261 Aristotle 7, 46, 55n8, 60, 121, 166, 223, 260 Armitage, D. 93n28, 129n7, 273 Arndt, E. M. 211n10 Aron, R. 78, 116, 239 art(s) 12, 23–5, 38, 40–1, 52, 56n18, 63, 79, 84, 99–100, 106, 148, 167, 169, 190–1, 197–9, 214n27, 215n36, 216n44, 216n52, 218, 225, 240–1, 243, 253n20, 253n23, 261, 273–4 Asia 99, 122 Assmann, A. 61, 77–8, 96n52, 198, 270 Assmann, J. 67, 81, 83, 105 Auden W. H. 91n9 Auerbach, E. 24 Augenblick 117, 190 Augustine of Hippo 23, 26, 60, 64–5, 98, 118, 131n30, 194, 222 Aulus Gellius 56n18

Auschwitz (concentration camp) 39, 74, 108, 227 Auvergne, W. of 65 aviation see airplane Azcárate, G. de 177, 249 Bachelard, G. 71, 74, 76 Bacon, F. 2, 29, 83, 194–5, 222 Badiou, A. 143, 169 Bakhtin, M. 95n46, 126 Bakunin, M. 177, 198 Balmes, J. 243, 245 Baquijano, J. de 213n21 Barante, P. de 41, 57n27 Baricco, A. 161n11, 283n13 Barruel, A. 183 Barthes, R. 16n16, 26, 139 Barzun, J. 253n23 Baschet, J. 119 Baudelaire, Ch. 130n20, 199, 208, 216n53, 236, 253n18 Bauman, Z. 78, 195, 204–5, 207–8, 217n57 Bayle, P. 24 Beauvais, V. de 23 Beck, U. 84, 207, 239 Becker, C. 153, 266 Beckett, S. 124 Beethoven, L. van 170 beginning 130, 135, 143, 153, 156, 165–6, 181–2, 186, 188–9, 194–5, 215n36, 250, 252n16; see also origin(s) Bello, A. 58n32, 189, 215n39 Benjamin, W. 39, 49, 55–6n10, 66, 117–18, 130n26, 144, 160n7, 176, 184, 200, 217n59, 236–7, 254n36, 283n12 Bergson, H. 61, 67, 69, 72, 117–8, 161n18, 199 Berman, M. 198 Bernstein, E. 224 Bertalanfy, L. von 152 Bertolucci, B. 41 Betancourt, F. 2 Bevernage, B. 109, 141 Bevir, M. 242 Bilbao, F. 59n43, 130n22 biohistory 270 Bismarck, O. von 69, 214n24 Black, M. 8, 15n9 Blanqui, A. 176 Blix, G. 245, 248–9, 254–5n39 Bloch, E. 122

Index Bloch, M. 26, 72–3, 156, 160n6 Blumenberg, H. 3, 6–9, 15n8, 55n2, 74, 81, 95n47, 153–4, 193–5, 198, 208, 216n49, 217n63 Bodin, J. 23 Bogota 211n6, 214n32 Böhme, H. 204 Bolívar, S. 38, 43, 71, 183, 214n28, 214n32, 215n39 Bonald, L. de 185, 200–1 Boorstin, D. 146 Borges, J. L. 1, 8, 24, 67, 79, 85, 90n7, 130n18, 130n24, 143–4, 148 Boulding, K. 249 Bourdieu, P. 195, 280 Bourget, P. 238 Bouton, C. 36, 78, 89, 119, 146, 157, 203, 208–9, 272–3 Brahma 99 Braudel, F. 51, 61, 72–6, 94n35, 145, 152, 161n12 Brazil 65, 90n6, 122, 129n14, 169 Bréhier, E. 28 Brinton, C. 182, 263 Buchez, Ph. 43 Buckle, H. T. 221 Buddhism 25, 122 Burckhardt, J. 40, 104, 129n11, 187–8, 236 Burke, E. 57n24, 100–1, 170, 185, 201, 241 Burke, K. 4 Burke, P. 10, 16n20, 28, 31, 59n46, 90n4, 139, 159n1, 163n32, 167, 232, 252n12 Bury, J. B. 219–20, 237 Butterfeld, H. 58n31, 138, 221, 243 Cabrera de Córdoba, L. 251n4 Calcutta 178 Calvino, I. 79 Cámara, S. 169 Cambridge school 93n31, 263 camera obscura 56n11, 195 Camus, A. 49 Canalejas, F. de P. 213n23 Canetti, E. 153 Canguilhem, G. 71, 74 capitalism 168, 176, 183, 195, 198–200, 204, 206, 209–10, 217n59, 225, 227, 243, 271 caricature(s) 38, 40–1, 102, 158, 173, 234; of globalization 211n11; of History 26, 27, 45, 48, 59n41;

317

of memory 85, 86; of migration 211n11; of modern civilization 251–2n6; of progress 226, 233; of revolution 170, 171, 172–3, 174, 175, 178, 179, 180, 211n10, 212n14, 212n15, 212n16, 212n17, 212n18, 213n20, 214n24; of rise and fall 234, 235 Caro, J. E. 122 Carr, D. 11, 30, 115 Carr, E. H. 38, 105, 137–8, 239 cartoon(s) see caricature(s) Carvalho, A. de 90n5 Cassin, B. 276 Cassirer, E. 8, 153, 237 Castro, F. 44 century: of history 227; of progress 227; of revolution 227; of transition 186; see also age; era Cervantes, M. de 14n2, 34, 55n4, 254n32 Chakrabarty, D. 57–8n29, 81, 95n43, 113, 159, 272 Chamisso, A. von 213n20 Chartier, R. 78, 109, 156 Chartres, B. of 223 Chateaubriand, F.-R. 68–9, 182, 215n38, 244, 248 Chaunu, P. 51, 239, 252n11 Chesterton, G. K. 119, 130n26 Chile 59n43, 168, 223 China 25, 34, 41, 188, 248 Chladenius, J. M. 30, 139 Christian (religion) 32, 46, 72, 88, 166, 190; and history 38, 59n47, 118, 159, 160n6, 161n14; medieval chronosophy 65; modernitas 192; revelation 194; and time 64 Christian, D. 114, 128n1, 253n25, 270 Christianity 23, 182, 184, 197; see also Christian; Judeo-Christian tradition chronisms 80 chronocenosis 80, 270, 278 chronocentrism 115–6, 129n8, 192 chronoferences 80, 98 chronology 64, 67, 91n14, 112–3, 153, 220, 271 Chronos 63–4, 82, 91n9, 91n12, 91n13, 121, 190, 216n52, 244; see also Saturn chronoschisms 80 chronosophy 272; see also historiography chronotope(s) see regime(s) of historicity

318

Index

Cicero 8, 33, 35, 54, 55n4, 56n15, 111, 283n11 cinema: and history 26, 28, 261, 266; and memory 84, 95n48, 96n54 civilization(s): clash of 217n57; collapse of 74, 232; crisis of European 186, 238; critique of modern 238, 251n6; decline of 252n13, 252n15, 253n23; iconography of 38, 41, 173, 176, 213n22, 217n59, 226–7, 236; metaphors for 57n28, 58n35, 173, 222–3, 230; and progress 218, 220, 223; stages of 230, 236, 243, 247, 252n15, 253n21; and transition 254n37; Western 90n3, 90n4, 217n59, 220 civil war 25, 85, 131n34, 158, 165, 224, 227 Clark, A. 84 Clark, Ch. 69, 162n29, 166, 249 climate change 39, 119, 127, 149, 183, 209, 250, 272 Clio: anti- 50; and chronology 91n14; and Chronos 63–4, 82, 91n9, 91n13, 109; critique to 45; etymology of 58n37, 91n11; and God 151; and Herodotus 91n11; iconography of 38, 55n3, 100; from judge to accused 48; and Kairos 63–4; as magistra 283n11; from master to servant 49; and Mnemosyne 47, 83; and Napoleon 47; against oblivion 109; and Pheme 91n11; and polis 33; and Themis 42, 49, 162n26; transfgured 36–44; tyrannical facet of 38; and Urania 91n14; see also Lady History clock(s) 15n8, 65, 90n4, 173, 195, 206, 261 Cole, Th. 234, 236 collapse 132n37, 142, 149, 232, 238–40, 239 collective singular(s) 37, 42, 127, 220, 264 Collingwood, R. G. 109, 137–8, 144, 150, 154, 162n27, 221, 237–8 Collini, S. 190 Collins, R. 25, 118, 122, 138, 242, 244 Colombia 92n18, 122, 181, 214n26 Columbus, C. 282n1 communism 130n17, 178, 183, 208, 214n24, 227–30 Comte, A. 100, 138, 186, 197, 220, 230, 236

concept(s) 3, 9, 13, 151, 161n21, 191, 276; absorbent 119; academic 191; adjacent 165; afnities between 67; basic 55n2, 99, 135, 142, 164, 264, 271; and categories 141, 249, 271, 277; cluster- 191; colligatory 156–7, 189; of colours and emotions 276; and conceptions 22; connective 277; counter- 240; devastated 74; dictionary of 276; ending in -ization 155, 162n28; etymology of 263; fundamental 191, 262, 279; genealogy of 22; genesis of 8; historical 98–9, 260; historiographical 51, 156, 249, 261; and ideas 263–4; and images 166, 283n15; key 255n39; legal 151, 162n25; legal-political 202; macro- 221; meta-historical 166; of metaphor 6, 8; metaphorical 161n13, 190, 232; and metaphors 3, 6–7, 13, 22, 37, 74, 93n25, 164, 166, 218, 260–1, 263, 280; as miniature theory 3; modern 184, 200, 218, 220; of movement 155, 162n28, 220; new 277; nomadic 8, 277; non-concepts 260; normative 38; operative 280; performative dimension of 124; processual 151, 162n28; reception of 263–5; scientifc 177, 260; spatial 124, 218; teleological 39, 249; temporal 135, 162n25; temporalized 227; totalizing 251n2; transdisciplinary 3, 189; transversal 270; Western historiological 280; and words 87 conceptual: boundary 245; changes 78; combinations 279; defcit 277; language 8–9, 261; metaphors 80, 95n48, 148, 202, 263; pillars 259, 281; projections 15n9; routes 8; rupture 93n32; schemes 148; tools 117, 135, 242, 247, 255n39 conceptual history 125, 263, 276, 280; Begrifsgeschichte 124; and metaphorology 276, 283n15 conceptualization 3, 106, 232 Condorcet, N. 131n31, 220, 223, 230 conservative(s) 15n8, 35, 43, 100, 130n26, 200–2, 216n56, 253n27 Constant, B. 245, 249 construction(s) 30, 32–3, 61–2, 140, 160n8

Index constructionism 32–3, 55n6, 123, 153 contemporary 28, 75, 95n45, 104, 117, 164, 190, 207, 275, 282n5 Copernican turn 194, 209 Corneille P. 57n21 Costa, J. 147, 178, 210n1 Costa Rica 177 counter-revolution 170, 175, 181, 224 counter-revolutionaries 43, 170, 201, 211n12, 212n17 creation 55n9, 99, 165, 193–5, 198–9, 215n36 crisis 184–91, 214n30, 238, 273; of 17th-century Europe 190; accelerating 273; age of 164; as an analytical tool 190; and change 189–90; and Christ 64; chronic 190; concept of 64, 164, 184–6, 188, 215n42; consciousness of 186, 190; and continuity 187, 189–90; and critique 189, 215n39; as deadlock 190; and decline 188, 215n33, 218, 238; economic 214n31; endemic 190; epistemic 14, 280; epochal 7; etymology of 185; European 187; of European civilization 186; of faith in progress 45, 251n2; fnal Krisis 190; fnancial 126, 211n11; of future 127–8; geological representation of 188; and growth 187; historical 187–90; of historicism 144, 238; of history 2, 53; intellectual 186; and Kairos 185; as metaphor 184–5; metaphors for crisis 70, 185–8, 190, 249; of modern historicity 61; and modernity 18; of modernity 77, 108; as mother of history 185; pandemic 255n40; periods of 188; permanent 214n31, 239; of philosophies of history 44, 58n40; political 186; of representationalism 29; and revolution 164, 185, 188–9, 215n35, 215n37, 215n41; as rhetorical pillar 191; and risk 253n26; as rupture 187; social 186; state of 184–5; and structure 215n40; as synchronization instrument 191; talk of 190; theory of 187–8, 215n42; of time 78, 80, 274; time of 281; total 164; and transition 186, 188, 249 Croce, B. 104, 152–3 Cruikshank, G. 212n16

319

Cruz, M. 278 Cullmann, O. 64 Czechoslovakia 178 Danto, A. 76, 105, 110–1, 162n21 Darwin, Ch. 3, 58n39, 156, 194, 199, 209, 216n48, 251n4 David, J.-L. 41 decadence 102, 182, 218, 221, 232, 238–9; and crisis 218; and decline 237–8; and entropy 239; iconography of 234; metaphors for 238–9, 252n10, 254n28; and progress 236, 253n19; of Rome 252 n11; ruins as 252n10; of Spanish monarchy 252n12; of West 253n22, 253n23; see also collapse; decline décadentisme 236, 238 De Certeau, M. 2, 96n54, 105–6, 109, 136, 139, 267 decline 234, 237; and crisis 188, 218; and decadence 237–8; as downward arrow 234; and entropy 239; etymology of 219; and fall 172, 230, 232; and growth 236, 252n9; of humanities 190; of idea of progress 127, 238; metaphors for 238–9, 245; political 232; and progress 207, 218, 220, 238–40, 263; and rise 234, 238; of Roman Empire 232, 243, 252n21; of Spanish monarchy 252n12; and transition 243; as vertical parabolic curve 234; of West 150, 237, 252n13, 253n22, 253n23; of world-view 188; see also collapse; decadence declinism 188, 219, 237 degeneration 158, 219, 232, 238, 253n23 de-globalization 250 Delanty, G. 208, 254n29, 265, 270, 276, 283n11 Deleuze, G. 72, 143, 278 Demandt, A. 3, 50, 276 democracy 26, 27, 38, 43, 69, 73, 86, 88, 212n15, 214n24, 216n44, 232, 233, 249 Derrida, J. 16n21, 82, 95n49, 110, 139, 143 Descartes, R. 2, 24, 55n8, 95n48, 195–6, 223 destruction 63, 99, 165, 168, 178, 188–9, 198–200, 209, 212n15, 215n41, 236–8, 253n20, 275

320

Index

development 32, 55n5, 125, 154–7, 159, 162n21, 197, 199, 206, 208, 216n45, 219–20, 222, 230–1, 239 Dewey, J. 201 Dhondt, J. 190, 236 Díaz, N-P. 100, 169 Didi-Huberman, G. 72, 79, 241, 283n12 die Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen see simultaneity of nonsimultaneous Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht [“The history of world is the Last Judgment”] 42, 112, 162n26 Díez del Corral, L. 116 Dilthey, W. 71 discourse(s) 42–3, 81, 105, 141, 196, 206, 244, 272; academic 201; of decadence 236; fgurative 137; historiographical 189, 248; on history 4, 26, 99, 259, 275; of interdisciplinarity 52; and metaphors 277, 279; of modernity 24, 200; political 195, 201; of progress 236; public 11, 184, 192, 249–50; types of 16n18, 277; visual 41 discovery 30, 32, 61–3, 65–6, 80, 95n44, 95n47, 107, 113–4, 123–4, 146, 161n11, 193–5, 208–9, 216n45, 264, 281, 282n2 distance 6, 11, 30, 55–6n10, 111–2, 126, 136, 165, 207, 251 document(s) 10, 28, 136–9, 159n1, 159n2, 160n3, 160n7 Domańska, E. 127, 129n13 Donoso Cortés, J. 215n37, 245–6 Don Quixote 34, 55n4 D’Ors, E. 241 Draaisma, D. 82, 95n48 Droysen, J. G. B. 26, 34, 56n17, 104, 109, 137–8, 153, 187, 221 Duby, G. 157 Duclos, Ch. 107 Durkheim, É. 201, 247 Echevarría, E. de 130n22 Eco, U. 242 Einstein, A. 61, 90n1, 97, 210 Eisenstadt, S. 207, 254n30, 254n37 Eliade, M. 48, 66, 156 Elias, N. 62, 155, 201 Eliot, T. S. 91n12, 252n16 emblem see symbol Emerson, R. W. 113, 130n18, 130n20, 146, 253n24

emotion(s) 11–12, 42, 106, 108, 112, 139–40, 267, 276 empathy 112, 130n19 Engels, F. 38, 43, 129–30n17, 186, 224 Enlightenment 15n8, 42, 44, 79, 94, 110, 114, 117, 121, 141, 151, 165, 183, 185, 192, 196, 214n28, 230, 245, 251n2, 271, 276 era: concept of 73, 153; of deglobalization 250; of discoveries 192; of fragmented now 282n6; of globalization 274; of global plagues 250; new era of truth history 194; of railroads 227; of reason 196; of Reformation 187; of revolutions 144, 165, 169, 181; of transition 243; of typography 203; of witness 81, 271; see also age; century Ereignis 143 Espronceda, J. de 246 eternal 94n33, 117, 131n28, 199, 216n53 eternal return 12, 48, 66, 152 eternity 60, 64–5, 92n20, 117, 130n18, 217n65 etymology 16n13 Eurocentrism 276 event(s) 47–8, 112–6, 137, 142–57, 167–8, 184, 245, 274; and actions 109, 141; afterlife (Nachleben) of 148; and change 141; concept of 142, 144, 149, 152–3, 162n22; contemporary 28, 75; and contexts 144, 150; critical 145, 155; disruptive 66; enigmatic 139; epidemic 250; epoch-making 74, 117; etymology of 143; and facts 136, 140–4; founding 167; future 60, 149; and historical laws 144; and history 47, 64; hyper- 146, 161n14; and images 96n54; invisible 143, 161n11; major 38, 40, 74, 123, 143, 146, 149, 160–1n11, 161n12, 181, 240, 250–1; mega- 149, 161n13; and memory 88, 96n54; metaphors for 66, 121, 141–57, 161n13, 161n17; minor 147, 151, 160–1n11; and mirrors 29; and narrative 29, 136, 141, 146, 274; and painting 41; political 75, 170, 215n39; and processes 106, 146, 150–1, 154, 157, 161n21, 254n38; pseudo- 146; and revolution 165–6, 181–2, 196, 215n36; sequences of 21, 29, 37, 66, 72, 97, 112, 144,

Index 150, 155, 169; stratifed 241; and structures 67, 142, 144–5, 152–3, 161n21, 215n40; and time 275; transformative 147, 161n13, 161n14; traumatic 85, 89, 143, 146, 148; trigger 147; see also fact evental history 74 evental temporality 149, 269, 274 evidence 136–7, 142 evolution 115, 156, 162n21, 165, 198–9, 209, 216n47, 219, 221–5, 230, 236, 244, 252n8 expectation(s) 37, 42, 78, 102, 116, 118–9, 124–5, 130n26, 151, 188, 230, 264; see also horizon of expectation experience(s) 34, 46, 57n20, 88–9, 94n41, 98–9, 114–5, 130n26, 149, 154, 215n39, 251n4, 265, 282n4; see also space of experience Fabian, J. 55n5, 77, 80 fact(s) 9, 29, 73, 84, 112, 136–7, 141–51, 166, 278; and action 141; alternative 45, 143; chain of 223; concept of 142, 160n10; decisive 161n11; etymology of 142, 160n10; and event 136, 140–2; and historian 105, 137–8, 146, 153; and history 141, 223; and interpretation 105, 142, 144, 160n10, 278; invented 142; legal 139, 142, 160n10; metaphors for 137–8, 142–4; and narrative 150–1, 162n23, 248; positivist cult of 136, 144–5; and process 150; res factae 37, 48; scientifc 142; and sociology 138; and structure 142; and time 148; and truth 34, 142–3; unforeseen 125; the word 160n10; see also event(s) Fareld, V. 80, 93n31, 109–10, 267 fascism 123, 183, 214n24 Fasolt, C. 113, 267–8 Father Time see Chronos; time Faulkner, W. 108 Fazang 25 Febvre, L. 51, 72, 138, 144, 237, 254n28 Fénelon. F. 24 Ferguson, N. 161n17, 252n13, 253n23 Ferrer del Río, A. 25 flm see cinema Fiore, J. of 100

321

First World War 26, 27, 39, 47, 48, 162n29, 193, 216n47, 236, 238, 263 Flaubert, G. 113, 226 Flores, A. 102, 175 Floridi, L. 275, 277, 281, 283n13, 283n14 Focillon, H. 94n37 Fontenelle, B. L. B. de 56n18, 222 forgetfulness see oblivion Forner, J. P. 104 Foucault, M. 37, 53, 71, 74, 83, 161n11, 162n22, 190, 197, 241, 275 fragmentation 53, 79–80, 87, 94n35, 127, 138, 150, 241, 273–6, 282n3, 282n6 Frankfurt School 199 Freeden, M. 240 French Revolution: allegories and symbols of 210n4; and antirevolutionary caricature 212n15, 212n16; as both event and process 150; as destructive 210n5; and English Civil War 25; as an epochmaking event 74, 161n14; as European social crisis 186; Hegel on 196; and history-magistra 35; and its ideals 44; as identity shift 147; and metaphorics of fow 68–9; and metaphor of derailment 94n43; and plastic arts 40; post-revolutionary society and 200; Renan on 214n27; and rhetoric of reaction 207; as rift in time 182; and rupture with past 264; shift in its study 282n4; as visual sequence 157; as warning 168, 173; and word revolution 166; as wreckage 211n9 Freud, S. 82, 87, 138, 194, 209 Freund, J. 239 Fritzsche, P. 28, 129n10, 252n10 Fuchs, A. 274, 282n6 Fuentes, J. F. 249 Furet, F. 94n43 Furniss, H. 103 future(s) 38–9, 42, 60, 77, 84–5, 86, 98, 101, 114–28, 130n21, 130n22, 188, 192, 198, 221–3, 270–2; absent 130n24; apotheosis of 114; archetypes of 132n37; collective 124; communist 227, 228, 229, 230; concept of 98–9, 127, 264–5; crisis of 127–8; cult of 220; death of 127; disconnective 128n6, 267; and discoveries 65–6, 80, 95n44,

322

Index

113, 123–4, 208, 264, 278, 282n1; discovery of 264–5; distant 112; etymology of 130n23; expansive 126; fear of 183, 208, 271; generations 114, 120, 128, 132n38, 241–2; and historians 37; and history 33, 37, 43, 59n44, 65, 112, 114, 123, 127, 154, 159, 269, 281–2; long 114, 128; metaphors for 25, 34–5, 37–9, 42–4, 50, 65, 68, 77, 98–102, 104, 115–28, 130n22, 130n27, 131n30, 131n31, 131n32, 131n33, 168, 176, 187, 208, 213n23, 226–9, 282n1; modern 127; and modernity 192; museums of 129–30n17; and narrative 112; new 127; open 165, 222; and past 33–5, 55n7, 55–6n10, 57n19, 57n22, 59n44, 65–6, 80, 91n9, 97–100, 105, 110–1, 114–6, 118–20, 128, 130n24, 130n25, 130n26, 131n29, 132n38, 148, 158, 169, 267, 282n6; philosophy of 243; of planet 209, 271; and political parties 100; posthuman 269; and powers 102, 128n5; and present 55n7, 65–6, 79–80, 91n9, 97–100, 105, 115, 119, 130n24, 131n29, 132n38, 148, 282n6; and progress 220–4; projected 116, 196; and Prometheus 208; and revolution 188; and risk 84, 127, 183–4, 207, 239, 253n26; and science 102, 103; transhuman 269; virtual 127; visual 114, 158, 163n32 futurism 123, 213n23 futurition 114, 123 futurity 126 futurization 123, 151 futurology 119, 124, 127 Gadamer, H. G. 11, 31, 71, 93n29, 105, 125–6, 139, 154, 241, 275 Galileo, G. 194 Galli, C. 230 Gangl, G. 104–6 García Lorca, F. 90n7 Gast, J. 41–2 generation(s) 32, 36, 57n22, 73, 78, 99, 102, 110, 120, 128, 129n14, 131n31, 132n38, 156, 223, 230, 241–2, 254n35 geohistory 270 Gestalt shifts 12, 262 Giarda, C. 91n9, 101 Gibbon, E. 107, 232, 243, 252n13

Giddens, A. 184, 207 Gillray, J. 175, 212n15, 212n16 Ginzburg, C. 28, 30, 52, 111, 138, 208 global history 106, 147, 272–3 globalization 146, 155, 162n28, 193, 202–6, 211n11, 272, 274, 278 global warming see climate change Gödel 31, 278 Goethe, J. W. von 186, 195, 208, 241 Goltzius, H. 91n13 Görres, J. 36 Gorriti, J. I. 167 Goya, F. de 41, 56n18 Gracián, B. 14n2, 34 Grafton, A. 67, 91n14, 93n27, 97 Gramsci, A. 188 Great Acceleration 119, 205–7, 272 Great Depression 252n17 Great Transition 249 Greenblatt, S. 129n13, 161n11 Grifth, D. W. 131n34 grotesque 212n16 growth 94n37, 120–1, 132n37, 156, 187, 191, 205–6, 206, 220, 222, 225, 230–2, 236–7, 239, 252n9, 253n27, 261, 273, 275, 279 Guizot, F. 25, 41, 221, 249 Gulag Archipelago 39, 108, 227 Guldi, J. 273 Gumbrecht, H.-U. 11, 80, 95n46, 116–7, 119, 140 Gupta, S. 58n40, 266 Gurvitch, G. 75 Habermas, J. 24, 95n45, 216n51 Hacking, I. 32–3, 87–8, 136 Halbwachs, M. 83 Hale, M. 242 Halévy, D. 157, 203 Hamann, J. G. 9 Han, Byung-Chul 162n25, 271, 274 Hartley, L. P. 106–7 Hartog, F. 13, 29, 37, 39, 47–8, 69, 80, 95n44, 119–20, 128, 151, 182, 184–5, 188, 190, 270, 272 Hazard, P. 186 hearing 25, 58n37 Hegel, G. W. F. 35–7, 40–1, 43, 49, 57n22, 58n39, 99, 126, 154, 157, 162n26, 162n27, 168, 196, 201, 204, 214n28, 215n41, 216n52, 227, 230, 243, 245, 278 Heidegger, M. 61, 66, 71, 114, 123, 143 Heine, H. 167

Index Heller, A. 39, 227, 236, 273–4, 278–9, 282n5 Hempel, C. 50, 59n45, 144 Heraclitus 60, 67–8 Herculano, A. 31 Herder, J. G. 9, 94n37, 122, 187 heritage 81, 88, 119, 132n38, 241, 268, 272, 283n11 Herodotus 21, 29, 50, 63, 91n11, 95n49, 185, 214n30 Herzen, A. 116 heterochrony 62, 79–80, 158, 270 Hickel, J. 207, 253n27 Hinduism 92n16, 216n52 Hirschman, A. 115, 207 historian(s) 30, 32, 40, 44–5, 52, 56–7n19, 72, 104, 106, 112, 138, 189–90, 221, 236, 251, 265–7, 270, 274–5; and anthropologists 107, 270, 275; and archaeologists 94n38; as bees 138; and change 69; as conquerors 268; and crises 189–91; and decadence 239; etymology of 52; and events 141–50; as forensic surgeons 109–10; Greek and Latin 35; as guardians of change 69; as guardians of memory 28; historians’ dispute (Historikerstreit) 84; and historicity 71, 280; as hunters 160n6; as interpreters 52; as investigators 52; as judges 52, 58n36, 139; as magister 37; as medium 109; and metaphors 1–4, 10–3, 50–1, 54, 140, 182, 245, 263, 269; and nationalism 36, 57n22; as notary 52; as painter 26, 52, 56n11; partisan 139–40; and philosophers 40, 70, 279; as photographers 26, 28, 52, 56n11; and poets 47; and politics 57n27, 129n14; and progress 221, 238–9; as prophet 37, 41; and psychologists 94n38; as salmon 112; and statesman 34, 56n17; and time 61, 64, 67–8, 75, 79–80, 94n35, 94n40, 99, 127, 149; and transition 243–4, 247–9; as translators 52, 275; as travellers 52, 268; as witness 52; the word 22 historical consciousness 49, 56n17, 80, 117, 248; and chronologies 153; new 36, 268, 270–1, 282n5; plurality of modes of 80, 271; shift in 107 historical culture 11, 95n46, 129n15, 224, 262 historical cyberculture 266

323

historical epistemology 3, 74 historical experience 11, 16n17, 98, 106, 110, 237, 280 historical laws 144, 221, 236 historical narratives 11–12, 96n54, 105, 182, 189, 242, 274 historical representation 41, 162n21, 267 historical thinking see historical consciousness; historical culture historicism 57n26, 278; banal 266; causality of 66; and constructionism 32; crisis of 71, 144, 238; and linear time 93n30; and objectivism 31; and teleology 83 historicity 4, 13, 67, 127, 199, 267, 270–1; consciousness of 243; crisis of modern 61; of history 280; inescapable 71, 126; of metaphors 7, 262; peoples without 67; plurihistoricity 270; as prisonhouse 282n5; see also regime(s) of historicity historiography: 19th-century 267; 19th- and 20th-century 151; and categories 219, 249, 261, 280; conceptual 264; and conceptual metaphors 263; on debates in 260; decadence 232; discourse of 189; Enlightenment 79, 114; and fctional literature 72, 111; foundational metaphor 106; fragmented 273; future of 281–2; geological turn in 77; German 50; historiographic operation 142; and historiosophy 40; history of 7, 280, 282; limits of 113; mainstream 145; and metaphor 10; metaphorical models of 182; metaphorology and 4; modern 53, 104, 108, 161n14, 191, 259, 267; and nationalism 57n22, 267; paradigm shift in 107, 139, 282n4; partisan 266, 278; poetics of 2; positivist 29, 267; postmodern 267; presentism in 268; between processes and analogies 270; professional 265; recent 35, 64, 80, 145–6, 273; and romantic painting 40; theory of 79; tooling of 135; and translation 275; turns in 51, 53; virtual 127; Western 135, 156; Whiggish 58n31, 221 history: academic 40; acceleration of 188, 203, 205, 225; as accused 48; in action 39–42; Age of 37, 114,

324

Index

164; ages of 222; allegory of 91n9, 100, 101; American 42, 126; and analogies 270; Angel of 49–50, 237, 254n36; and anthropology 107; of art 79; from below 51; big 80–1, 106, 253n25, 269–70; and biography 118; butterfy efect in 147; and causality 144, 265; and change 141, 159; Chinese 248; Christian conception of 38, 59n47, 64–5, 118, 159; and chronology 91n14; civil 83; clichés about 266; climate 140; collapse of 269; as collective singular 42–3; concept of 22, 216n45, 269, 277, 279; contemporary 104, 117; and continuity 66, 187, 189, 241; cosmic 269; counter- 53; counterfactual 79, 127, 147; counter-metaphors for 45; crisis in 187, 190–1; crisis of 53; critical 46; cultural 51; current of 220; cyclical view of 252n9; and death 129n13; deconstructionist 267; deep 81, 161n16; depolitization of 110; digital 266; as discipline 83, 268–70; and discontinuity 144; Earth system 159; economic and social 75; of emotions 106; etymology of 54n1, 137; eventual 75; excesses of 45, 128; exemplar 36, 57n23; expansion of 269; and experience 33–4; as experimental politics 33; father of 214n30; and fction 40; and flm 28; founding principle of 267; fragmentation of 94n35, 273, 276; future 43; future-oriented 269; gamifcation of 266; and genealogy 83; global 106, 147, 272–3; grammar of 248, 255n39; heteronyms of 39; historical meaning 71, 238; historicity of 280; of historiography 280, 282; historiomania 41; Hobbes on 141; horrors of 48; human 210, 253n25, 269–70; and humankind 93n29; as human product 37, 183, 209, 217n63; iconography of 100; of ideas 263; of industrial modernity 216n50; and justice 42, 137, 139, 150; and life 46; linear 77, 227; living 28; made of events/facts 144; of man 223, 243; as map 114; meanings of word 21–2; and memory 47, 56n15, 81, 83, 86–8, 95n50, 108, 266; as memory 83; as messenger of antiquity 56n15; and metaphor 50;

metaphorical and metonymical 11, 16n16; as metaphysical subject 44; as mimesis 55n9; modern idea of 21, 36, 73, 107–8, 111, 127, 162n21; and modernity 216n45; movement of 42; multiscalar 157, 269; muse of 38; as narration 37; nationalist 57n22, 238; nationalization of 41; natural 83, 270–1; new 127–8; nonacademic 267; as orientation 31, 57n24, 97, 153–4, 188, 261, 273; and other disciplines 52–3; and other humanities 47; as past 104; and past 113; of PCUS 229–30; peoples without history 67, 94n33; and perspective 30–3; philosophical 37, 154; and philosophy 40, 55n8; and photography 26; of pictures 56n11; plurality of 270; and poetry 46–7; as poiesis 55n9; political 53, 122, 145, 148; and politics 33–4, 47, 48, 49, 55n17, 57n27, 176; popular 266; positivist 39; post-anthropocentric 271; between present and past 105–6; without process 159; as process 37, 148, 150, 153–4, 157, 159, 162n26, 162n27, 187, 216n45; and processes 197, 270; professional 267; professionalization of 37, 52; and progress 157, 205; Promethean vision of 214n27; public 266; as queen of humanities 52; as queen of sciences 269; as queen of times 34; religious 249; repolitization of 265; as resuscitation 109; and revolution 36, 166; and rhetoric 33; the right side of 43–4, 58n40, 115, 266; science of 43, 50, 105; as science of transition 243–4, 254n33; of sciences 71, 74, 76, 254n31; self-refexive 280; social 122; as social dynamics 230; and society 276; and sociology 99; the song of 161n20; Soviet 156; spectral 139; stadial 94n43, 230, 232; structural 75, 145; supersessive 91n10; as system 161n20; teleological 221, 249; temporality of 75; temporalized 122; as territory 53–4; theology of 114; theory and 25; and time 61, 63, 64, 82–3, 94n39, 94n40, 100, 109; total 31; as translation 275; and truth 56n18, 56–7n19, 194; of universe 210; and virtual world 277;

Index as warning for future 57n19; wars 266; see also biohistory; conceptual history; geohistory; hyperhistory; intellectual history; intrahistory; metahistory; metaphors for history; microhistory; mnemohistory; posthistory; superhistory; theory of history; universal history; world history; writing of history The History Manifesto 273 Hitler, A. 44 Hobbes, Th. 2, 14n1, 115, 141, 202, 216n44, 254n32 Hobsbawm, E. 32–3, 57n22, 112, 239–40 Hölscher, L. 79, 99, 102, 120, 123, 127, 131n29, 132n38, 173, 198, 264 Horace 55n9, 93n27 horizon(s): cognitive 271; defnition 31; epistemological 7; fusion of 31, 126; future 282n6; historical 141, 187; of meaning 7, 125; metaphor of 98, 123–7, 131n35; of time 65, 95n44, 124, 264; vertical 125–6, 131–2n36 horizon of expectation (Erwartungshorizont) 98, 125, 128n2, 151 Horkheimer, M. 207 Houellebecq, M. 253n23, 275 Hugo, V. 169, 224 Huizinga, J. 26, 104, 150, 186 humanities 5, 190, 210, 250, 266 Humboldt, W. von 111, 126, 149–50, 274 Hume, D. 107 Huntington, S. 217n57, 249 Hunt, L. 24, 33, 38, 143 Husserl, E. 6, 31, 61, 69, 87, 92n24, 93n25, 95n47, 98, 117–8, 125, 143, 186 hyper-acceleration 205, 269, 273 hyperculturality 274–5 hyper-event 146 hyperhistory 275, 277 hyper-individualism 201 hyper-modernity 208, 217n59 hyperprocessualism 270 Ibn Khaldun 130n25, 233 Icarus, Icarian man 208, 237 iconography 16n15, 25, 38, 41–2, 55n3, 56n18, 58n34, 59n48, 63–5, 88, 91n13, 100, 106, 109, 114, 129n12, 139, 158, 163n31, 175, 211n10, 214n24, 225, 234, 280

325

idea(s) 7, 15n9, 121, 173, 210n2, 211n10, 263–5, 280 identity 12, 81, 85, 88, 147, 240, 265 Iggers, G. 221, 227, 238–9 image(s) 6, 12, 28–30, 38, 40, 42, 55–6n10, 56n11, 65, 79, 96n54, 100, 101, 106, 163n31, 165, 170, 171, 176, 184, 186, 195, 211n10, 211n11, 212n16, 212n17, 213n20, 214n27, 226–7, 234, 280; agricultural 121; allegorical 162n26; archetypal 276; biological 122; constructionist 123; digital 195; dynamic 186; engineering 105; mechanical 65; and metaphors 283n12; of natural phenomena 170; organic and mechanical 15n8; of ruins 131n31; scientifc 278; and texts 42, 175–6, 280, 283n15; thinking - (Denkbilder) 283n12; and time 65, 91n13, 93n27 imagery: acoustic 56n13; balance 195–6; clock 195; fuvial 39; geological 72; geometrical 65; mirror 24, 29; mythological 237; railway 38, 227; revolutionary 177, 186; Saturnian 63; spatial 51; stratigraphic 51, 72; visual 56n13 imaginary 39, 100, 119, 139–40, 166, 194–5, 198, 204, 211n10, 212n16, 219, 225, 230, 238, 263, 276, 282n6 Imbriano, G. 94n39 India 92n16, 178 individualism 193, 201–2, 225, 253n23, 275 innovation 22, 66, 82, 91n10, 130n27, 152, 165, 194, 198, 210, 216n51, 240–1, 253–4n27, 254n31, 254n32, 262, 278, 283n14 intellectual history 28, 93n31, 138, 240, 242, 244, 253n32, 263–4, 273, 280 intelligence explosion see technological singularity intrahistory [intrahistoria] 75 invention 6, 8, 32–3, 57n22, 90n3, 91n10, 154, 177, 198, 240, 253n18, 259, 264, 277 inventionism 33 Iriarte, T. de 25 Jablonka, I. 2, 24 James, H. 237 James, W. 69, 92–3n25, 117–8 Jaspers, K. 31, 74, 146, 244–5 Jaurès, J. 225

326

Index

Jauss, H. R. 192 Jeferson, Th. 213n23 Jesus Christ 64, 161n14, 211n7, 226, 245 Jewish tradition see Judeo-Christian tradition John (Saint) 232 Jordheim, H. 77, 93n30, 94n42, 191, 220 Jovellanos, G. M. de 224 Joyce, J. 59n42, 72 Judeo-Christian tradition 25, 118, 123, 159, 166, 198, 232 Judt, T. 87, 177 justice 42, 44–5, 137, 139, 151, 162n26, 210n3, 265 Kafka, F. 148 Kairos 63–4, 117, 121, 185, 244 Kant, I. 24, 32, 40, 91n14, 148, 167, 170, 194, 196, 220, 283n15 Kantorowicz, E. H. 223 Kautsky, K. 123 Kelley, D. R. 57n26, 93n28, 114 Khrushchev N. S. 157 Kiefer, A. 253n20 Kierkegaard, S. 98 Kittsteiner, H.-D. 79, 204, 216n47 Kleinberg, E. 110, 267, 281, 283n17 Klüger, R. 79 Kojève, A. 128n5 Konersmann, R. 3, 260–1, 276 Koselleck, R. 10, 21, 35–7, 42–4, 61, 67, 74, 76–8, 88–9, 92n21, 94n39, 94n40, 94n41, 96n55, 98–9, 107, 125, 131n36, 139–40, 151–2, 165–6, 189, 203, 215n39, 220, 251n1, 254n37, 263 Kossoy, B. 139 Kracauer, S. 26, 28, 70, 221 Kuhn, T. S. 74, 241, 254n31, 262 Kuomintang 248 Kurzweil, R. 269 Kuukkanen, J.-M. 29, 142, 156 Lady History 26, 27, 47, 48, 59n41 Landsberg, A. 84, 96n54 Landwehr, A. 72, 80, 98, 115–6 Langlois, C.-V. 35, 50, 160n6 language(s) 29, 32, 55n6, 84, 88, 92n17, 93n28, 129n16, 237–8, 260, 275–6, 283n14; acceleration 165; allegorical 9; Ameridian 65; biological 121, 156; conceptual 8–9, 261; European 98, 115, 135, 143,

151, 165, 185, 191, 210n2, 276–7, 283n11; fgurative 2, 5, 8, 23, 25, 39, 50, 60, 83, 123, 165, 177, 186, 262, 279; Iberian 90n6; industrial 176; mathematical 194; medical 232; messianic 66; metaphorical 1, 8, 10, 260, 276; ordinary 266; philosophy of history 185, 221; political 164, 176, 221–2; religious 181; romance 124, 242; of sources 10; temporal 126; theatrical 57n27; war 250; see also vocabulary Lanzmann, C. 84 Laplace, P.-S. 147 La Popelinière, H. L. V de 23 Larra, M. J. de 69, 186–7, 199, 244–6 Latour, B. 54, 65, 72, 113, 127, 159 Le Corbusier, Ch.-E. 199 Le Gof, J. 28, 47 Leibniz, G. W. 122, 222 Lenin, V. I. 39, 166, 173, 213n19, 227 Leopardi, G. 212n16 Le Roy Ladurie, E. 51–2, 143, 190 Lessing, G. E. 47, 100, 222 Levi, G. 147 Levi, P. 210n3 Lévi-Strauss, C. 66–7, 272 Lewes, G. H. 47 Lewis, C. I. 138 Liakos, A. 46, 88, 129n15, 236, 267, 277 Liebknecht, K 42 Lilla, M. 69, 94n36, 168–9, 185 Lima 213n21 Lista, A. 122 List, F. 230 Livy 34, 251 Locke, J. 202 locomotive(s) 38–9, 50, 176, 212–3n19, 213n20, 227–8 Lodz 172 longtermism 114, 273 Lorenz, Ch. 16n16, 76–7 Lovejoy, A. 263 Lowenthal, D. 106–7, 111, 113, 267–8 Löwith, K. 42, 75, 112, 118, 224 Lucian of Samosata 23, 59n44 Ludewig, J. P. von 91n13 Luhmann, N. 99, 116, 119, 122, 131n28, 131n35, 207 Lyotard, J.-F. 162n21, 193 Mabillon, J. 136 Mably, G. B. de 38 MacAskill, W. 114, 128, 209

Index Macaulay, T. B. 221 Mach, E. 274 Machiavelli, N. 16n16, 58n33, 195, 216n44, 232, 254n32 MacIntyre, A. 141, 241 MacLeish, A. 259 Mahler, G. 241 Maistre, J. de 166, 182 Mallet du Pan, J. 183 Malthus, T. 236 Manifest Destiny doctrine 41, 126 Manifesto for Accelerationist Politics  210 Manifesto for History and Freedom 85 Manrique, J. 92n22 Marcondes, F. I. 129n14 Mariana, J. de 34 Marinetti, F. T. 199 Marquard, O. 129n10, 154, 197 Martínez de la Rosa, F. 186, 245 Marx, K. 24, 35, 37, 39, 43, 50, 56n11, 70, 93n30, 110, 115, 122–3, 157, 166, 168, 176, 186, 196, 198, 207–8, 213n23, 214n31, 215n41, 224, 227, 230, 236, 254n31 Marxism 43–4, 49, 51, 94n34, 155, 159, 167, 184, 210, 249 Masur, G. 185, 190, 215n35 Matumula, P. 211n11 Mayr, O. 14n4, 15n8, 195 McLuhan, M. 203 McNeill, W. H. 269 Mead, G. H. 105, 117–8 Meinecke, F. 56n12, 118, 221, 263 Melucci, A. 118 memorialization 11, 88, 286 memory 33, 82–3, 85–9, 100, 105; abuses of 81; activists of 108; afective 72; artifcial 84; boom of 81, 83, 85, 110, 140; collective 60, 82–4, 89, 96n52, 108; concept of 61, 82; cultural 81, 83, 96n54; damnatio memoriae 85; duty of 109, 210n3; electronic 95n48; external 82, 84, 87–8; fragmentation of 138; guardians of 28; historical 11, 16n19, 86; and history 47, 81–3, 86–8, 91n11, 95n50; hot and cold 67; internal 82, 84, 87–8; latent 84; laws of 85; living 84; manipulation of 85; as metaphor for history 83; and monuments 160n3; museums 84–5; national 92n15; painful 81; political 83; politics of 16n19, 47, 83–4, 105,

327

110, 265–8; presentist 87; prosthetic 96n54; selective 118; sites of 84, 88; and temporality 60; vicarious 96n54; of war 89; wars of 86; of world 138; as wounds 84; and writing 83, 85; see also metaphors for memory; oblivion; politics of memory Mercier, L. S. 122 Merleau-Ponty, M. 68, 71, 99 Mesonero Romanos, R. 244 metahistory 162n21 metaphor(s) 1–2, 5–10; absolute 7; alarmist 282n6; as an army 16n14; basic 277; as ceasefre 16n14; classifying 16–7n21; concept of 6; and concepts 3, 260; cultural variation 237–9, 276, 283n11; and discourse 279; etymology of 6, 15n10; faded 262; founding 13, 260–1; fundamental 260, 279; generative power of 260; great 259; master 260; as mental spark 260; metametaphor 8; for metaphor 8, 260; as prison 279; as selection of meanings 279; as subsoil of historical thinking 280; and translation 15n10; types of 261–2; ubiquity of tropes 276; as verbal images 280; visual 16n15, 42, 65, 97, 102, 114, 157–8, 170, 227, 231, 234, 280 metaphoreme 5, 12, 15n7, 22, 54, 276 metaphorical felds 7, 14, 166, 196, 261, 276; see also analogies; imagery; metaphorics metaphorics 1, 4–5, 7, 16–17n21, 54, 76, 265; for acceleration 157; of afterlife 108; agricultural 121; atmospheric 72; biological 156; of cancellation 85; of construction 32; of court 48; for decline 232–39; Earth science 156; engineering 105; for epoch 275–6; of fow 71, 73, 78; of fragmentation 273; of gardens 79; geological 72; for history as process 37; of horizons 125–7; for intellectual history 242; of life and death 108–11, 140; of liquids 67–8, 137; of machines 195; for memory 82; of mirror 24–5, 30, 45–6; for modernity 191–210; musical 56n13; of naked history 24; of natural phenomena 122; of networks 242, 273; for new beginning 165, 186; oceanic 75; of prints 84;

328

Index

processual 156; for progress 219–31; for revolution 164–83; of river 71; for sequences of events 144; of sight 25; of spiral 65; of strata 67, 74–5, 80; of symbolic animals 147–8; of territory 52; for theory of history 29–30; of thresholds 74; of trains 39; transitional 74, 187, 244–5; tropological tradition 264; visual 129–30n17; of weaponry 177; see also analogies; imagery; metaphorical felds metaphorization 3, 106 metaphorology 1, 3–4, 7, 276, 280 metaphors for epochal breaks 74, 146 metaphors for historiography 4, 94n43, 105, 121, 137–8, 147, 158, 162n29, 182, 211n11, 244, 261, 263, 273, 275 metaphors for history 22, 29–30, 78, 146, 259–63, 266, 279; arrow of 278; as book 34–5; as building 51, 281; as column 31; conquering 53–4; as construction 32–3, 52; as court 37, 44, 45, 48, 58n36, 151; the cusp of 129n8; as dangerous product 58n30, 238; dustbin of 43, 110, 131n31; as an empire 53; engine of 155, 196; as eyes of world 59n48; fabric of 145; as fever 41; fotsam of 145; foundational metaphor 269; for future of 281; gaming metaphors for 146; as gigantic force 183–4; as goddess 38; as great drama 57n27; as guide 57n20; as heap of ruins 111; as hearty nourishment 46; as judge 44–6, 50, 58n38, 59n44; as kaleidoscope 282–3n8; as keyboard 152; as knife 46; as light of true 56n15; locomotives of 38, 176, 213n19, 227–8; as malady 46; as march 44, 173, 279; midwife of 177; as mirror 23–9, 34, 49, 52, 55n4; as morgue 109; as mother of truth 34, 55n18; as mourning 109; as naked truth 14n1, 23–4, 55n3; as nightmare 59n42; as notary 59n41; as ocean of blood 59n43, 130n22; as oracle 37; as photographer 26, 27; photographic 52; as prisonhouse 282n5; prow of 126; as rearview mirror 25, 56n16; as religion 37, 44; as river 278; as road map 37; as school 33, 36; as sea 75, 93–4n33; as ship 281–2; as symphony 58n31; as

teacher, master and magistra 25, 33, 35, 50, 56n15, 57n21, 57n25, 168, 265, 283n11; as tomb 109; as torrent 69; as train 38, 58n31, 176–7, 226–7; as translation 275; as trial 45; as turbulent river 278; as vehicle 51; waiting room of 58n29, 95n43; wheel of 92n19, 173, 212n14; winds of 278; as witness of times 56n15 metaphors for memory 82, 87, 95n48, 96n51; acoustic 95n48; as birds 96n54; as broken fragments 138; as dark places 87; as fash 117, 138; as food 81, 83; as fow 89; as holes 97; as landscapes 87; as lava 88; as links 84; as magician 87; as places 84, 87; as prints 84; as secrets places 87; as sediments 87; as seeds 84; as shells 84; as sluices 88–9, 96n55; as soul 88; as spectres 87; stratigraphic 87; visual 95n48 metaphors for modernity 177, 183–4, 191–210; as an artifcial order 196, 200–2; as iron cage 197, 207–8; as carriage 183–4; and Chrystal Palace 217n59; circle 211n13; and circulation of money 217n58; as clock 195, 206; as complex adaptive system 209; as continuous innovation 198–9; and Copernican turn 194, 209; counter-metaphors 206–10, 236–7; as creation 198; as creative destruction 198–200; as cult of action 195; as death of God 197; as discovery 193–5, 208; as gas chamber 208; as global catastrophe 206; as juggernaut 207; as ladder 197, 230; as machine 195–6, 208; as maelstrom 199, 208; and metropolis 217n58; modern life as train 225, 278; modern society as fow 204; modern society as network 204–5; modern society as pile of sand 200–1, 275; modern society as social contract 202; modern society as web 204–5; as Moloch 209; as monster 207; as motor 196; and Parisian arcades 217n59; as pre-set balance 196; as prison house 282n5; as process of globalization 202–4; as process of historical acceleration 202–3, 205–6; and Promethean man 208; of quantum mechanics 278; as railway 177, 225, 227; as

Index rhizome 278; as runaway vehicle 207; as shipwreck 208; as sorcerer’s apprentice 208; as time bomb 209 metaphors for revolution 64, 121, 164–83, 186; as an agent 166 ; artillery 177; as backlash 172; biological 121; as birth 122–3; as bloodshed 213n23; as boiling 176; as book 167; as broom 178, 213–4n24; as cancer 181; as carriage 173, 175–6, 182–4, 207, 212n17, 212n18; as catastrophe 181; as change of season 169; as dawn 181; as debt 166; as earthquake 167–8; as efervescence 176; as electric detonation 210n5; as emergency brake 39, 50, 176; as engine 224; explosive 182, 213n22; as fever 178, 265; as fre 121, 213n23, 265; as food 167, 169; as geological revolution 224; as germs 121–2; as gift from on high 181–2; as Gorgon 173, 174, 178, 179; as hammer 172; as heaven 208; as horse 173–4, 212n15; as hurricane 38, 181, 183; as Janus 188; as juggernaut 184, 207; as labyrinth 181; as leap 173, 184, 224; as locomotive 39, 50, 176, 212–3n19, 213n20, 227; as machine 176–7, 213n23; as magnetic force 176, 210n5; as march 167, 173, 181; meteorological 167; as midwife of history 177; as Moloch 183; as monster 178, 212n16; as natural phenomena 169; as new beginnings 182, 188, 215n36, 265; as old mole 168; as opium of people 184; as Pandora’s box 183; as Penelope’s cloth 169; as plague 178, 181; as ploughing sea 71; as poison 181; as remedy 181, 214n25; as rescue 181; as rift in time 182, 263; as Saturn devouring his children 183; as school 169; as screw 177; as seeds 122, 186; as shipwreck 181; as sickness 178, 181; as sin 181, 214n26; as spark 121, 168; as spectre 178, 180; as spring 172, 213n21; as storm 181, 187–8, 213–4n32, 244, 254n34; as sweep-out 213–4n24; as sword 224; as teacher 36, 168; as thief in night 168; as tiger’s leap 66; as torrent 170, 182; as trail of gunpowder 213n22; as train 49, 94n43, 176–7, 212–3n19, 213n20; as tsunami 170, 171,

329

211n11; as vehicle 173; visual 170–1, 175, 211n11, 212n16, 227; as voice of God 181; as volcano 169, 181, 211n10; as washing machine 78; as waves 187; as weapons 177; as wheel 173, 174, 176, 211–2n14; as winter 169; as wrecking ball 173 metaphors for time(s): as an abyss 51, 126; as an arrow 97; as an atmosphere 72; as begetter of truth 82; as bomb 209; as book 44; as bridge 227, 228; as chariot 182–3; as city trafc 72; as clock 195, 206; as curtain 79, 131n30; as an enigma 60, 62, 90n7; as fabric 99, 280; as flmstrip 28; as fre 71–2, 91n12; as fat 282n6; as fow 62, 68–72, 76, 93n27, 242, 263, 278, 280; as garden 79; geological imagery of 72, 76–7, 80–1, 87, 94n38, 107, 188, 242; history-book 35; as horizon 65–6, 125; as innovator 194; as knot 148, 161n19; as layered 72, 76, 80, 125, 188, 242; as line 97, 227; naturalist 92n25; as ocean 127, 137; out of joint 78, 270; as packet of macaroni 95n47; as pool table 120; rift in 182; saddle time (Sattelzeit) 74, 161n13; as school 91n12; as seed 66; as spiral 92n18; as strata 94n38, 140, 282n2; as stream 68–70, 93n27, 94n36; as tapestry 78–9; as thread 115, 148; as torrent 92n22; as train 38, 227; as tribunal 91n10; as tunnel 278; as wheel 65; Zeitschichten (temporal strata) 76–7, 125, 132n36 metonymy 45, 85, 102; and decadence 252n10; and European canon 88; and history 11, 16n16, 16n19, 34; and revolution 213n23, 227; vs. metaphor 16n18, 88, 140 Mexico 80, 158, 183, 212n18, 214n27, 227 Michelet, J. 16n16, 26, 28, 41, 109, 237 microhistory 51, 147 Mignet, F. 41 Mill, J. S. 201, 246 mimesis 24, 30, 55n4, 55n9, 177, 198–9 Mink, L. 93n26, 141 mnemohistory (Gedächtnisgeschichte) 83, 148 modern: age 80, 97, 100, 107, 109, 144, 153, 160–1n1, 164, 192–6; chronosophy 100; civilization 176,

330

Index

251n6; classification of sciences 83; concept of 107, 131n33, 199–200; concepts 184, 200, 218, 220; and crisis 186; future 127; historical time 80; historicity 61; historiography 53, 104, 108, 161n14, 191, 259, 267; humanities 190; idea of history 21, 36, 73, 106–8, 111, 127, 162n21; man 123, 163n31; mass culture 96n54; medieval 223; modernus 117, 192; philosophy 61; political -isms 155; politics 200; positivist 120; revolutions 122, 169, 177, 244; science 81, 160n10; self 274; societies 40, 57n21, 61, 66, 131n33, 217n59, 243, 249; theory of metaphor 15n10; time 78, 90n4, 97, 119, 131n28, 149, 162n25, 164–5, 177, 186, 192–3, 203, 209, 243, 267; and tradition 240, 254n30; Western civilization 217n59; Western regime of historicity 80, 270; world 60, 120, 155; worldview 57n26 modernism 72, 98, 108, 162n28, 199, 216, 240, 274 modernity 10, 123–4, 155, 176–7, 191–210, 215–7; and acceleration 162n25, 205–6; advanced 183; catastrophic 208, 263; classical 2, 131n31, 205, 207, 262; concept of 141, 191–2, 199; conquering 193; and continuity 154; and crisis 18, 164; crisis of 77, 108, 200; critique of 207; and discovery 193–5, 216n45; disenchanted 193, 198; evolutionary 216n47; fledgling 193; full 35, 165, 254n37; and future 114, 116, 120, 124, 127, 149, 169, 186, 215n34; and global domination 217n62; grand narratives of 159; heroic 216n47; and history 216n45; and Holocaust 208; hyper- 208; and idea of process 154; industrial 216n50; and innovation 198, 216n51; and invention 198; late 70, 141, 164, 183–4, 193, 207–8, 216n46, 262; liquid 271; Luciferic 208; malaise of 238; and metaphor 10; and mirror reflection 24; modernitas 192; modernité 130n20, 199, 216n53; most modern 164, 192; multiple 207; as new era of truth 192; and nihilism 197; origins of 160–1n11, 191–2, 215n43; pathos of 198;

perverse efects of 206–10; phases of 192–3, 207, 215n43, 216n47; and process 220; and progress 218, 220, 253n18; Promethean 208; as rationality 196; reflexive 197, 206, 239; and revolution 165, 218; stable 216n47; successive 192–3, 215n43, 216n47; and time 123, 131n28; time regime of 77; and tradition 207, 240, 254n29, 254n30; and transition 240, 243, 245; triumphant 193; urban experience 225; and utopia 196; Western 200, 220 modernization 155, 162n28, 197, 199, 200, 230, 239–40, 249 Momigliano, A. 33, 64 Monteagudo, B. de 121 Montecassino, A. de 8 Montesquieu, Ch. L. de S. 146, 196, 232, 252n12, 282n2 monument(s) 49, 85, 94n33, 136, 160n3, 248 Moore, B. 182, 263 Morin, E. 145, 152, 215n42 movement(s): accelerated 187, 202, 230; the age of mobility 225; antiglobalization 204; autopoietic 230; backwards 92n19, 172–3; as concept 210n2; concepts based on 166; concepts of 155, 162n28; concepts of historical 220–1; cyclical 92n21; directionless 274; downwards 219; dynamics 51, 72, 77–8, 124, 126, 155, 176, 186, 198, 205, 220, 230, 239, 254n35; ethno-nationalist 57n22; fascist 123; forwards 92n19, 127, 211–2n14, 219, 225; and generations 254n35; historical 39, 114, 143, 147, 151–2, 154, 161n12, 184, 265; of history 42, 45, 157, 187, 230, 254n35; of independence 246; kinesis, kinetics 177, 225; mass 40, 158; as metaphor 42, 62, 70, 75, 92n19, 112, 119–21, 147, 153, 169, 186, 195–6, 210n2, 211–2n14, 219, 225, 261, 265; and periods 248; philosophical 210; and process 157; revolutionary 183, 224; rotary 92n19, 164, 173, 211–2n14; selfdriven 279; socio-political 45, 119, 155, 209, 210n2; and stillness 75; of time 62, 157; and tradition 241; types of 211–2n14; universal 246; upwards 219, 230; utopian 100; of world 230

Index Müller, E. 3–4, 272, 278 Muqaddimah 24 Musil, R. 39, 72 Musset, A. de 244–5, 254n36 myth(s) 48, 50, 58n33, 66, 232, 237, 279; biblical 23, 232; Greek and Roman 63, 208, 217n60, 217n63; and history 66, 217n64; and metaphor 7, 10, 208; and progress 236, 280; and revolution 166, 182–3; and time 50, 156 Namier L. B. 26, 56n11 Napoleon 41, 47, 110, 177, 227, 234, 235 Narbona, E. 92n22 Narcissus 30 natural and social-historical sciences 4, 81, 83, 113, 121–2, 140–2, 144, 153–4, 156, 167, 202, 209–10, 266, 270, 277 nazism 48, 79, 93n32 networks 152, 204–5, 225, 242, 266, 271, 273 Newton, I. 61, 97, 128n1, 172, 196 Nicholas II, Tsar 172, 178, 180 Niebuhr, B. G. 149 Nieremberg, J. E. 65, 212n14 Nietzsche, F. 8–9, 16n14, 22, 31, 45–6, 82, 96n53, 110, 126, 143, 154, 176, 194, 197–8, 236 Nikulin, D. 61, 91n11, 105 Nisbet, R. 189, 219–23 Noelle-Neumann, E. 175 Nora, P. 84, 105, 143 Norberg, J. 251n2 nostalgia 41; see also solastalgia Núñez, T. 202 Nuremberg trials 48–9 Oakeshott, M. 32, 102, 265 objectivity 26, 29, 31, 56n12, 87, 94n40, 112, 142, 155 oblivion 63, 82, 84–6, 91n11, 109, 210n3; metaphors for 96n51, 96n53 O’Gorman, E. 33 Ordax Avecilla, J. 73 order 100, 112, 148, 158–9, 277; chronological 157–8; linear 224; natural 200; new 165, 189, 195, 201; political 197; psychic 96n53; social 172; of things 196–7; of time 60, 97, 282n3; traditional 167, 201, 243

331

origin(s) 16n13, 76, 104, 112, 135–8, 156, 159n1, 160–1n11 Orlov, D. 240 Ortega y Gasset, J. 6, 28, 31, 90n6, 99, 105, 119–20, 123–4, 161n20, 186, 188, 196, 243, 251n5, 254n35, 280–1 Orwell, G. 110 Osterhammel, J. 166, 191, 199, 205 O’Sullivan, J. 41, 115, 126, 252n15 Pacheco, J. F. 223, 246 Padura, L. 79 Paine, Th. 185, 215n37 Papini, G. 213n23 Pascal, B. 57n22, 222 past(s) 45–6, 88, 97–132, 138, 153–4; absent 59n47, 130n24, 267; birth of 264–5, 268–9; cold 67; completed 116; concept of 98; death of 110, 268; dimensions of 112–4; discovery of 282n2; dissociated 128n6, 159, 267; distant 36, 222; emotive contact with 11; etymology of 130n23; as events 29; experiences of 34, 57n20; falsification of 110; as foreign country 106–8, 160n9, 161n13, 267–8, 275; and future 35, 55n7, 55–6n10, 59n44, 65–6, 80, 91n9, 97–101, 101, 102–5, 110, 114–22, 126–7, 128n4, 130n24, 130n25, 130n26, 131n29, 131n33, 132n38, 149, 158, 168, 187, 274–5; on grand scale 269; haunting 108, 110, 139, 267; as heritage 268; and historians 104, 106–7, 112, 265, 271; historical 265; and history 10, 104, 129n11, 191, 269; hot 67; inexistent 129n8; inhabitants of 268; intellectual representation of 11; irrevocable 108, 130n18, 142; lessons of 34–5, 56n16, 57n25, 265; lived 129n11; living 28, 141; lost 41; and memory 83, 85–6, 88, 108; as metaphor 35, 38; metaphors for 12, 16n19, 24–6, 28, 36, 45, 49–50, 57n19, 57n20, 57n24, 57n27, 58n32, 59n44, 65–7, 76, 78–9, 87, 91n15, 99–101, 101, 102–3, 103, 104–22, 126, 129n10, 129n14, 138–9, 160n9, 161n13, 162n26, 165, 168, 187, 262, 267–8; misinterpreting 112; multiple 118, 127, 240, 265, 270; and museums 85; and narrative 29, 86n54, 282n6;

332

Index

nationalist 57n22, 85; new 118; as an object of study 106; and oblivion 86; obsolete 46; otherness of 107, 267; and political parties 100; politics 33; possible 127; and powers 102, 128n5; practical 265; and presence 16n17, 267; and present 11–2, 16n17, 34, 36, 49, 55n6, 55n7, 55–6n10, 66, 80, 91n9, 97–102, 103, 104–6, 110–8, 126–7, 128n4, 130n24, 131n29, 139–41, 144, 264, 267, 272; as prophecy in reverse 118; and prudence 100; recent 28, 40, 48; reconstructionist vision of 160n6; records of 48; re-enactment of 109; relationships with 13, 106, 109, 270–1; remembered 83; remnants of 138–40, 160n6; resuscitation of 109; rupture with 165, 188, 191, 198; and science 102, 103; and time 38, 90n5; and translation 275; traumatic 85, 96n52; from vantage point 30; vilification of 59n43, 130n22, 131n31; virtual 148; visual 41, 58n34, 114, 158, 163n32 pastology 106 Paul (Saint) 123, 211n7 Paul, H. 13, 106, 265 Paulin-Booth, A. 222, 225, 251n4 Péguy, Ch. 88, 225 Peirce, Ch. S. 110–11 Pellizza da Volpedo, G. 41 periodization(s) 67, 73, 76–7, 142, 145, 153, 189, 191–2, 215n34, 247 Perrault, Ch. 192 perspectives 26, 28, 30–1, 56n14, 106, 111–2, 126–7, 262, 273 perspectivism 26, 30–1, 125 Petrarch, F. 175 Phillips, M. S. 72, 112 philosophical history 123, 154 philosophy of history 38–9; as bond 79; and crisis 185; crisis of 44, 58–9n40; and direction of historical movement 114; and era of railroads 227; fragmented 274, 278–9; and historical movement 230; metaphors for 30, 40, 196, 261; optical 29; as part of making history 217n63; the phrase 55n8; and political language 222; and revolution 167; and spiral images 92n18; as stained glass 58n32; as surrogate for religion 197; vulgarization of 100, 126; see also

metaphors for historiography; philosophical history photography 26, 28–9, 31, 52, 55n5, 56n10, 56n11, 96n52, 139, 262 Picasso, P. 199 Pinker, S. 251n2 Pitt, W. 175 Pi y Margall, F. 122, 224 Plato 2, 24, 60, 71, 82, 85, 89, 95n49, 109 Plumb, J. H. 110 Plus Ultra 193 Plutarch 242 Pocock, J. G. A. 28, 56n17, 70 political: action 195; agendas 85, 265; caricatures 27, 175, 211n11, 212n14, 233; concepts 202; crimes 267; crisis 122, 186; culture 15n8; decline 232, 252n12; discourse 195, 201; economy 196; events 50–1, 75, 165, 170, 215n36, 215n39; history 16n8, 34, 53, 62, 122, 145–6, 148; ideologies 37, 155, 162n28, 166, 197, 253n27; language 164, 176, 184, 221–2; leaders 25, 45, 250; legitimacy 192; memory 83, 108; messianisms 44; modernity 197, 200; movements 210n2; parties 100, 242; philosophy 202, 216n44, 254n32; progress 224; religions 197; rhetoric 43, 121–2, 220, 230, 250; slogans 224, 239; theory 216n44; transition 249; vocabulary 165 politics 33, 198, 239; accelerationist 210; chrono- 77; geo- 77; and historian 57n27, 109, 129n14, 170, 249, 265, 268; and history 33–6, 40–5, 47, 48, 49, 53, 55n16, 55n17, 85, 110, 123, 155, 157–8, 166, 176, 265; identity 265; of memory 16n19, 83–4, 108, 110, 265, 267; metaphors for 14n4, 38, 71, 73, 102, 121–2, 176, 195, 200–2, 230–1, 244, 261, 266, 278; modern 200, 278; and philosophy of history 221–2; and time 35, 100, 102, 113, 128n5, 173; transactional 246; and transition 243, 246, 250 Polybius 22, 33–4, 232 Pomian, K. 61, 94n38, 139 Popper, K. 196, 281 posthistory 270 posthuman 169, 253n23, 269; see also transhumanism

Index postmodernism 11, 32, 55n6, 79, 267 postmodernity 54, 193, 207, 282n5 Pottier, E. 59n43 presence 11, 16n17, 16n18, 25, 105, 139–40, 267 present(s) 46, 49, 93n33, 97–132, 192, 221, 251, 270, 275; absolute 278; age 122, 246; as blind spot 115; broad 119, 274; concept of 98, 117, 124; consciousness of 117; duration of 117, 119, 131n28; ephemeral 98; etymology of 115; everlasting 282n6; and future 55n7, 65, 91n9, 98–9, 102, 114–28, 128n4, 129n8, 130n27, 131n29, 131n33, 132n38; and historians 93n28, 105, 107, 268; as historical category 97–8; and history 33, 105, 116, 159; immobile 119; living 82n24; metaphors for 25, 34–5, 57n19, 65, 80, 98–100, 105–6, 109–12, 115–22, 126–8, 246–7, 278–9; and modern 117; monstrous 119; ontology of 275; oscillating 209; and past 11, 24, 34–6, 49, 55n7, 56n10, 65–6, 91n9, 98–9, 101, 102, 104–14, 128n4, 128n6, 129n8, 130n24, 131n29, 132n38, 139–41, 144, 147, 191, 264–5, 267–9, 275; perpetual 190; philosophy of 118; and political parties 100; polychronic 270; and powers 102, 128n5; and presence 16n17; and science 102, 103; slow 119; as time on human scale 117; tyranny of 120, 128; unfolding 141; as vantage point 115; visual 114 presentism 25, 87, 104–5, 108, 112, 115, 117, 119–20, 129n7, 268, 272 Priestley, J. B. 62 Prigogine, I. 61 Prim, J. 214n25 process(es) 7–8, 28, 32, 35, 87, 97, 114, 121, 142, 145–58, 173, 193, 197–200, 202–3, 208, 220–2, 260, 269–70; accelerated 149, 198, 205; civilizing 155; concept of 153–4, 158–9, 162n25, 162n26, 270; contingent 158; and continuity 153, 158–9, 162n22, 248, 269; and decline 252n13; etymology of 151, 162n25; and events 10, 12, 106, 146, 150–3; evolutionary 222; and experience 154; and historians 157; historical 28, 43, 67, 73, 77, 151,

333

154–7, 173, 213n19, 238–9, 251n2; as historical and natural category 270; and history 153–4, 157, 159, 162n26, 162n27; interconnected 154; invisible 153; large 155, 251n2; macro- 155, 191; and meaning 153–4; mega- 270; metaphors for 78, 87, 94n38, 106, 121, 131n34, 142, 147–53, 155–8, 170, 265; and movement 157; and narrative 29, 156, 270; one-directional 12, 154; ongoing 157, 194; and progress 252n8; representation of 163n32, 170; revolutionary 182; and structure 152; teleological 154, 158; and time 151; and tradition 242; and transition 244, 248–50; types of 155, 238; universal 37, 146, 153–4, 157, 159, 187, 216n45, 266; unplanned 155; the word 150–1, 157, 162n26 processual concepts 151, 162n28, 197 processualism 269–70 processualization 154 processual metaphorics 156 processual structures 152 processual temporality 149, 159 progress 218–32, 224, 227, 236–7, 251n5; acceleration 224; American 41; belief in 44–5, 49, 123–4, 220, 224; caricatures 226, 233; and civilization 213n22, 218, 226–7; concept of 151, 219–23, 251n5, 252n7; counter metaphors for 49–50, 79, 184, 200, 236–7, 253n18, 254n28; crisis of faith in 45, 124, 205, 227, 236, 238, 251n2, 254n28, 271; and decadence 236, 239, 253n19; and decline 172, 207, 218, 220, 237–40, 263; decline of idea of 124, 127, 236, 238–9, 251n2, 253n18, 253n19; and development 206, 239; and evolution 221, 252n7; and future 169, 220–4, 230; and historians 221, 238–9; and history 157, 205; human 93n30, 223; iconography and symbols of 38–9, 163n31, 176–7, 206, 220, 230, 231, 233, 234, 262–3; metaphors for 38, 49–50, 57n29, 200, 206, 219–33, 253n18, 263, 280; and modernity 218, 220, 240, 253n18; and myth 236, 280; philosophies of 43, 71, 80, 100, 126, 272; as political slogan 224, 239; and process 151, 154, 157,

334

Index

252n8; rational 231; and reaction 240; and revolution 169, 213n23, 223–4; scientific 209; social 223; theory of 220–1, 246, 251n2, 252n7; and time 53, 55n5, 57n29, 124, 155, 162n21, 223, 230, 280; and tradition 94n33, 240; and violence 224; vocabulary of 251n3; word 239 progressive(s) 43, 100, 115, 130n22, 223, 246, 253n27 progressivism 237 Prometheus and Promethean man 38, 177, 208–9, 214n27, 217n63, 237, 282n1 Proudhon, P.-J. 224, 226 Proust, M. 72, 84, 96n52, 111, 139, 174 providence 38, 100, 196, 212n14, 224 prudence 34, 100 Quadrado, J. M. 247 Quental, A. de 181–2 Quevedo, F. de 92n23, 98, 128n2, 252n10 railroad(s) see locomotive(s); railway(s); train(s) railway(s) 38–9, 41, 49, 58n31, 152, 173, 176–7, 213n19, 225–7, 236, 261, 278–80 Rancière, J. 72 Ranger, T. 33, 240 Ranke, L. von 24, 31, 33, 46, 49–50, 58n31, 59n44, 136, 153, 160n6, 162n26, 187, 221 Rappoport, Ch. 221 Ratzel, F. 65 Ray, M. 274 reactionaries 69, 211n12, 213n20, 230 Reagan, R. 43 reality efect (efet de réel) 26, 39 recession 236, 252n17 Reclus, E. 224 recurrence 25, 55n7, 57n25, 67, 107, 152, 168–9, 236, 282–3n8 reform(s) 100, 123, 165, 177, 224, 251n3, 251n5 Regazzoni, L. 274, 283n10 regime(s) of historicity 62, 80, 98, 120; Anthropocenic 272; modern Western 80, 270; phrase 270; planetary 272; presentist 119, 272 Rémond, R. 53 Renan, E. 214n27, 248, 254n33 Renier, G. 138, 160n8

retrospectiveness 25, 112, 116, 121, 147–8, 203, 240, 248 Revault d’Allonnes, M. 184, 216n51 revolution(s) 66, 164–84, 188; 1848 European 169, 177; 1905 Russian 172, 178, 180, 181; from above 178; and acceleration 36, 169, 175, 225, 244, 246, 254n34; age of 38, 144, 164–5, 169, 181, 184–5, 215n33, 227, 273; anacyclosis of 169; ancient 244; and artists 41; Atlantic 122; bloodless 177–8; Chinese 41; and civil war 224; Communist 178; concept of 164, 166, 211n6, 225, 246; counter- 181, 224; and crisis 164, 185, 187–9, 215n35, 215n37, 215n41; digital 277; disenchantment with 184; etymology of 164–5; European revolutions of 1820 210n5; and event 165–6, 181–2, 196, 215n36; and evolution 224–5; Fourth 271, 275, 281; and future 121, 169, 188, 227, 228, 229; Hispanic 167; historians and 182–3; historical 167; as historical necessity 184; historicist 36, 57n26, 67, 107; and history 36, 49, 166; industrial 107, 146, 176, 208, 220, 225, 249; of May 1810 in Buenos Aires 183, 189; Mexican 41, 211n10; modern 35, 122, 147, 169, 177, 201, 244; and modernity 165, 218; and movement 169, 183, 224; October 1917 Russian 41, 43, 96n54, 123, 173, 227, 228, 229; permanent 169, 214n31; and philosophy of history 167; and process 173, 182; and progress 169, 223–4; and reaction 170, 172; and reform 177, 224; scientific 74, 195, 215n43, 216n44, 254n31; September 1868 Spanish 174, 178, 180, 211n10; skidding 94n43, 174; socialist 224; Spanish Liberal 158, 181, 210n1, 210–1n5; spiritual 167; theory of 187; and transition 246–7; two faces of 188; universal 166; velvet 178; and violence 122–3, 177–8, 213n23, 223–4; visual representations of 157–8, 227; the word 165–6, 169; see also French Revolution; metaphors for revolution revolutionaries 40, 43–4, 59n43, 108, 168, 175, 213n23, 224, 230 Riccioli, G. 91n14

Index Ricoeur, P. 3, 10, 16n15, 63, 69, 84–5, 105, 141, 146, 152, 216n49 Rifkin, J. 62, 239 Rivas, Duke of 247 Rivera, D. 158, 214n27 river of time see metaphors for time(s) Roberts, D. 272, 275, 279, 282n5 Robespierre. M. 44, 230 Rodríguez, S. 189, 215n39 Roitman, J. 191 Roosevelt, Th. 47, 48, 59n41 Rorty, R. 3, 16n12, 24 Rosa, H. 61, 78, 202–3, 205, 208, 217n58 Rosenberg, D. 67, 91n14, 93n27, 97 Rosenberg, H. 199, 240 Rostow, W. W. 206, 231 Rousseau, J.-J. 56n11, 184–5, 202, 232, 236 Roy, Ram-Mohan 178 Ruge, A. 187 ruins 40, 79, 92n23, 109, 111, 131n31, 168, 232, 252n10, 262 Runia, E. 11, 16n17, 139–40, 146 Rüsen, J. 31, 143, 248 Russia 146, 172, 181, 213–4n19, 216n55, 227, 228, 229, 250, 282n7 Russian-Japanese War 178, 180, 181 Saavedra Fajardo, D. de 34, 57n20, 91n10, 232, 234 Safranski, R. 105, 115 Sahlins, M. 80, 152 Saint-Simon, H. de 226, 236 Sallust 34, 232 Samper, J. M. 214n32 Sandrart, J. von 91n13 San José, J. de 159n2 Santa María, J. de 34 Sarmiento, D. F. 223 Sassen, S. 203 Saturn 117, 183; see also Chronos Saussure, F. de 92n17 scale(s) 75, 81, 113, 117, 119, 128n1, 153, 157, 206, 210, 269–70 scenario(s) 114, 124, 127, 132n37, 147 Schifman, Z. S. 57n23, 107, 264, 268, 282n2 Schiller, J. C. F. von 42, 46, 48, 112, 149, 162n26, 170 Schlegel, F. 130n21, 187 Schlögel, K. 65, 95n46 Scholz, O. 250 Schopenhauer, A. 282–3n8

335

Schulz-Forberg, H. 77 Schumpeter, J. A. 198, 200, 236 Scott, W. 68 Sebald, W. G. 74, 90n3 Second World War 48, 84, 86, 95n48, 125, 150, 157, 199, 210n3 secularization 155, 162n28, 196–7 Seely, J. 33 Seignobos, C. 35, 50–1, 160n6 Serge, V. 216n55 Serres, M. 71–2, 78 Sewell, W. H. 131n33, 143, 148, 152, 158 Shakespeare, W. 130n18, 161n15, 168 Shelley, M. 208 Shelley, P. B. 182 Shiva 99, 216n52 sight 25, 58n37, 59n48 Simon, Z. B. 32, 61, 106, 119, 127, 128n6, 147–9, 158–9, 269–70, 274, 277 simultaneity of nonsimultaneous 76, 94n37, 95n47, 125 Siqueiros, D. A. 158 Sismonde de Sismondi, J.-Ch.-L. 214n31 Skinner, Q. 93n31, 105, 263 Sloterdijk, P. 194–5, 216n50, 216n54 Smith, A. 146, 196 Snow, C. P. 210 society: atomized 275; burnout 271; concept of 201–2, 221; and critique 215n39; and democracy 69; and future 42, 122–3, 181; and historians 41, 107; and history 57n21, 109, 131n33, 271; hot 67, 272–4; liquid 272; metaphors for 131n33, 200–2, 205–9, 215n32, 216n56, 217n59, 224, 243, 249, 251n4, 253n24, 272, 278; modern 40, 57n21, 61, 66, 131n33, 191, 217n59, 240, 243, 245, 249, 272; network 204, 271; and politics 53; post-industrial 207; risk 84, 127, 146, 183, 207, 239, 271; and time 61–2, 64, 66–7, 90n4, 95n45, 109, 131n28; traditional 240; transitional 246; transparency 271 solastalgia 128 Solzhenitsyn, A. 173 Sorel, A. 236 Sorel, J. 25 source(s) 29, 135–40, 168; concept of 136, 138; criticism of 136, 140; etymology of 135; evaluation of 31; and evidence 137; and facts

336

Index

138; fragmented 138; as metaphor 10, 69, 135–7; metaphors for 31, 68–9, 70, 77–8, 83, 95n50, 136–41, 160n7; power of veto of 140, 160n7; and presence 140; primary 10; proliferation of 277; secondary 314; textual 41, 139; and traces 138–40, 262; and truth 137, 159n1; types of 16n15, 140–1, 266; visual 41, 111, 139–40; the word 135–6 source domain(s) (of metaphors) 15n9, 16n14, 53–4, 156, 164, 167, 197, 261 Souvestre, É. 226 space 65, 77, 84, 90n1, 90n5, 95n44, 95n46, 97–8, 123–4, 144, 156, 163n32, 177, 204, 220, 225, 261, 278 space of experience (Erfahrungsraum) 98, 128n2 Spencer, H. 39, 220, 230, 252n8 Spengler, O. 42, 150, 237, 245 Spiegel, G. 109 Spier, F. 269–70 Staël, Mme. de 166 Stalin J. V. 157, 188, 213n19, 227, 229 Starobinski, J. 170, 172–3, 220, 240, 253n19 Stendhal 25, 55n4 structuralism 75, 144–5, 151–2 structure(s): arborescent 117; big 155; concept of 152; events and 142, 144, 148, 151–2, 161n21, 215n40; and future 25; graphic representations of 205; history of 145; and human agency 155; of human life 123; metaphors for 145, 151–2; modern reflexive 24; narrative 28; and network 204–5; and process 152; of repetition (Wiederholungsstrukturen) 67, 152; super- 51, 94n34; temporal 87, 99; as trope 152 sublime 146, 170 Sulzer, J. G. 260 Sun, Yat-Sen 248 superhistory 140 symbol(s) 38, 42, 58n34, 99, 114, 147, 153, 173, 175–6, 195, 203, 208, 226–7, 236, 279; of acceleration 206, 226, 230, 231, 262–3; of civilization 41, 176, 217n59; of decline 232, 234, 252n10, 252n15; of emancipation 230, 231; of eternity 65; of history 91n9, 100, 101, 114, 173, 176; of industrial capitalism 195, 227; of modernity 217n59, 225;

of national time 70, 93n27, 102; of progress 176–7, 230, 231, 262–3; of regeneration 200; revolutionary 173, 175, 178, 210n4, 212n14; of Soviet communism 227; of time 195 Tacitus 34 Taguief, P.-A. 224 Taleb, N. 147 Tamm, M. 54, 61, 117, 148, 267, 269 technological singularity 149, 269 technology 96n54, 130n27, 132n38, 146, 149, 155, 176–7, 195–6, 205, 208–10, 226, 250, 251n6, 253n27, 261–2, 271, 274, 278 teleology 39, 45, 67, 83, 92n21, 94n43, 112, 115, 131n33, 154, 156, 158–9, 221, 248–9, 265 temporal culture see regime(s) of historicity temporality 35, 61–2, 65–6, 71, 75, 79, 80, 90n1, 95n45, 95n46, 95n47, 98, 117–9, 148–9, 158, 219–20, 269, 271, 280, 282n3; see also metaphors for time(s); time(s) theory 14n5; of crises 215n42; of entropy 239; of evolution 156, 198, 230; of historical times 76; of historiography 79; and history 25, 55n8; and history of metaphors 3; of metaphor 15; miniature 3; modernization 155, 230; of nonconceptuality (Unbegrifichkeit) 6; political 216n44; of progress 220; of relativity 61, 97; of social contract 202; of social organism 201; of storms (Sturmlehre) 187; of thruth 29 theory of history 5, 29, 80, 110, 125, 137, 146, 266, 273, 281, 283n10; critical 280; Historik 94n39; postmodern 11; of presence-historical representation 267 Theseus paradox see Argonauts ship Thierry, A. 16n16, 41 Thompson, E. P. 52, 112 Thucydides 22, 33, 50, 59n44, 147, 211n8, 214n30, 251 Tilly, Ch. 155 time(s) 37, 61–2, 75, 97, 151, 223; absent 98, 115, 130n24; apocalyptic 272; atomized 274; birth-time 243; cannibalistic 117; of capitalism 195, 206; chronometric 90n6, 220; concept of 66; consciousness

Index 98–9, 220; crisis of 78, 80, 127, 187, 274; cyclical 64, 116; and death 129n12; deep 113, 210; as destroyer 82, 91n12, 109, 117, 216n52; directionality of 97; division of 153; Einstein on 90n1, 97, 210; empty 246; and eternity 65, 117, 199; etymology of 90–1n8; of event 148, 275; existence of 90n1; expansion of 112–3; Father 38, 63, 91n13, 216n52; filtered 72; flowing 69–71, 76, 97, 263, 278; fragmented 79, 127; frozen 205; full 66, 275; fullness of 64; Hispanic 90n6; historical 61–2, 64, 66, 68, 74–6, 79, 81, 90n3, 92n16, 97, 99, 113, 126, 189, 220, 269–70, 274; and history 63–4, 83, 94n40, 100, 109; history-book 35; in-between 247; Kairological 149, 184; linear 53, 64, 72, 92n16, 93n30, 116, 128n1, 215n34; maps of 153; messianic 66, 184; modern 90n4, 131n28, 162n25, 164–5, 186, 192–3, 203, 209, 243; muse of 91n9; mythical 156; narrated 69; national 70; natural 62; net 274; new 250; Newtonian 97, 128n1; of now (Jetzt-Zeit) 66, 117; open-ended 92n25; opportune 185; other- 107, 129n10; personifications of 63–4; phenomenology of 93n25; pivots of 245; planet-centric 81; plurality of 72, 76–7, 94n35, 94n37, 94n39, 94n41, 95n47, 98, 118, 148, 188; point- 66, 274–5; and politics 128n5; polychronic 79; pregnant- 255n39; as preserver 91n12, 216n52; progressive 223; public 70; quantified 66; reactionaries and 173, 230; ripeness of 64; rupture in 165, 182, 250, 265; scales of 75, 81, 113, 128n1, 157, 206; scissors of 81, 210; secondorder 127, 128n4; short term 273; social 62; and space 65, 77, 90n1, 90n5, 95n46, 123, 163n32, 177, 204, 225, 278; splintered 79; timeless 274; timetables 52; traditional 90n4; transitional 246–9; triad of 98–100, 102, 105–6, 116, 118; and truth 56n18; turbulence of 72, 77, 209, 278; universe-centric absolute 81, 92n16, 97; of unprecedented change 149; the word 61, 90–1n8; see also metaphors for time(s); temporality

337

timeline(s) 67, 97, 128n1, 145, 227 Titian 100 Tocqueville, A. de 35, 69, 73, 102, 120, 189, 201, 247–8 Todorov, T. 81, 85, 95n50 totalitarianism 39, 44, 89, 110, 183–4, 198, 208, 217n62, 263 Toynbee, A. 253n21 trace(s) 96n51, 138–40, 160n6, 161n19, 262 tradition(s) 110, 154, 199, 240–2; Aristotelian 7, 55n8, 121, 166, 223; biblical 121; Chinese 248; Christian 123; concept of 240–2; elective 240; eternal 75, 94n33; etymology of 240; Greco-Latin 276; Iberian 90n6; and innovation 240–1, 254n31, 254n32; intellectual historians on 242; invented 33, 240; Jewish 25; Judeo-Christian 25, 118, 123, 159, 166, 198, 232; legal European 88; living 241; metaphors for 240–1; mnemonic 92n15; and modern 240, 254n30; modernity 207; monarchicimperial 175; of new 199, 240; oral 58n37, 136; and originality 241; philosophical 242; and progress 240; Scholastic 55n8; and transition 240; tropological 87, 264; Western 60, 178, 202, 276 train(s) 38–40, 57n28, 58n31, 152, 176–7, 181, 206, 212–3n19, 225–7, 236, 262, 278 transgression 131n35, 198, 208, 250, 271; see also Plus Ultra transhumanism 149, 210, 253n23, 269; see also posthuman transition 69, 74, 177, 187, 194, 240, 242–51; age of 243, 251; century of 186; and Chronos 244; as colligatory term 248–9; to communism 229, 230; concept of 219, 249; and crisis 186, 188, 215n33; to democracy 249; demographic 249; ecological 250; endless 245, 248; energy 249–50; era of 243; etymology of 248; and history 243–4, 247, 254n33; and Kairos 244; metaphors for 187, 243–5; narrative of 248; and period 245, 247–8, 255n39; period of 246, 248; physical analogies for 249; and saddle/threshold period 254n37; to socialism 224; Spanish democratic 86, 249; times of 246–7; and

338

Index

tradition 254n29; transitology 249; see also Great Transition translation 15n10, 16n14, 52, 126, 170, 219, 240, 260, 275–6, 283n11 Traverso, E. 213n19, 227, 236, 252n7 Treitschke, H. von 221 Troeltsch, E. 104–5 Trompf, G.W. 236 tropes see metaphors Trotsky. L. 43, 58n38, 110, 131n31, 173, 213n19, 214n31, 227 truth 29, 42, 54, 55n4, 137, 139, 142, 159n1, 194, 210n4, 212n16; concept of 45, 55n2; and history 34, 37, 56n15, 56n18, 57n27, 91n10, 136, 142–3; naked 14n1, 23–4, 55n3, 193, 196; and perspective 31; and time 56n18, 63, 82, 91n10 Turgot, A. R. J. 220, 230 Turner, F. J. 41–2, 58n29, 126 Ukraine 95n45, 146, 250, 282n7 Unamuno, M. de 75, 94n33 universal history 35, 37, 40, 55n8, 70, 118, 154, 157, 206, 236, 245, 272 USSR 110, 146, 156–7, 188, 208, 213n19, 216n55, 227, 228–9, 230, 249 utopia(s) 39, 42, 100, 119–20, 122–4, 126, 173, 183, 196, 208 Valéry, P. 58n30, 117, 186, 238 Valle, J. C. del 122, 246 veritas filia temporis 42, 56n18, 63, 223 Veyne, P. 153 Vico, G. 9, 10, 32, 36, 236, 276 victim(s) 49, 77, 81, 85, 109, 175, 178, 200, 208, 210n3, 212n14, 237, 265, 271 Vieira, A. 55n7, 65–6, 124 Villa, F. 227 Virgil 215n39, 230 Virilio, P. 205

Vishnu 99 visual culture see iconography Viswalingam, P. 253n23 Vives, J. L. 14n2, 34 vocabulary: of decline 237–8; digital 95n48; economic 252n17; of future 123; ghost 129n16; globalization 203; historiographical 17n21, 150, 161–2n21, 270; of memory 96n51; metaphorical 15n9, 52; network 205; organic 156; political 165, 176; of progress 251n3; revolutionary 165; spatial-temporal 107; technoscientific 176; of temporality 62, 107, 161–2n21 Volney, C. 252n10 Voltaire, F-M. A. 118, 131n31, 144, 154 Vovelle, M. 51 Warburg, A. 241, 283n12 war memorials 49 Weber, M. 148, 155, 197, 207–8 Weil, S. 184 White, H. 10–11, 106, 142, 162n21, 216n45, 265 Wierzbicka, A. 276 witness(es) 12, 26, 30, 33–4, 52, 54n1, 56n15, 57n19, 81, 136–7, 159–60n2, 248, 271 Wittgenstein, L. 240, 242 Wolf, C. 55n8 world history 42, 59n41, 74, 112, 140, 154, 162n26, 212n19, 272, 274 writing of history 50, 59n47, 74, 78, 105, 107, 112–4, 118, 123, 127, 135, 144, 162n21, 167, 185, 221, 237, 267 Zedong, Mao 177, 188 Zemin, Jiang 25 Zermeño, G. 36, 192 Zweig, S. 73, 143