AHA president James H. Sweet’s September column for Perspectives on History, “Is History History? Identity Politics and the Teleologies of the Present,” generated controversy and discussion in venues ranging from social media to the op-ed pages of major newspapers and the academic press. Perspectives has invited two critics of the piece, Malcolm Foley and Priya Satia, to respond.
History as Love
Malcolm Foley
I’m glad that James H. Sweet wrote this column. It did what he intended it to do: it opened a particular conversation about how we “do” history, something that Sweet, in his apology, noted as his initial wish. There is much to reflect on from his piece, whether it is the continuing redefinition of “identity politics” away from its radical coining or its singling out of The 1619 Project as a point of critique. I’d like to widen the conversation, however, and make a suggestion about the relationship between history and politics—namely, that the relationship is a necessary one, and if we flee from it, we do our students and our world a disservice.
As someone who initially intended to do theological work about the influence of early Greek theologians on the Reformation theologian John Calvin, I had very little intention, when I embarked on the journey to become a historian, of uttering the words of the previous sentence. As I learned and imbibed historiographical methods, my own understanding of human activity continued to expand. I became aware of the ways in which religion, economics, and politics shape human and institutional action and change. But one thing that I found most interesting is that there is an idea that binds historians and theologians together: everyone is one, but not everyone is a good one. This also leads to significant academic anxiety: Wherein lies what makes us special? Is it in our language? Our guild is one that relies not on jargon but rather on intelligibility. Is it in our content? Who has the right to police what is or is not the historian’s content? As Norman Cantor and Richard Schneider said in their framing of the field for undergraduate students, “What a historian does is obtain information about the past and then make judgments about the significance, meaning, importance, and relevance of these bits of information.” The field is lively because we have so many people looking at the past while asking different questions. These historians also make different judgments. But central to the work is the understanding that the past matters today, a truth that every thinking human being assumes and regularly acts in light of. Yet this is also fundamentally a political act, insofar as politics are understood to be the exercise of power by groups and individuals. As Sweet stated, bad history does indeed yield bad politics. The opposite, however, is also true: just history yields just politics.
