Throughout the United States and in Western countries influenced by our media and politics, statues of supposedly racist figures are being brought down by mobs. This follows the vandalism committed against Confederate monuments in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests in the mid-2010s, and it likely precedes the destruction of an increasingly wide range of memorials in parallel with efforts by local governments to efface public references to historical figures deemed unacceptable by the ever more stringent standards of contemporary anti-racism.
It’s easy to think that the destruction of these memorials is part of a conflict between contemporary values and history. Those who are reluctant to see statues of Louis XVI or Cecil Rhodes brought down by jubilant looters (or ostentatiously virtuous officials) often argue that we ought not to impose “our” values on the past. The iconoclasts counter that public images ought to represent “our” beliefs, not historical misdeeds.
The conflict, however, is not between the past and the present. Rather, it is between those who wish to reactivate past conflicts and those who hope for an escape from the violence of history. The destruction of statues is only the most spectacular example of a form of politics that two of the modern West’s most brilliant political theorists, Thomas Hobbes and Michel Foucault, saw as a cause of terrifying conflict.
What we are in the habit of calling “identity politics,” and particularly political movements based on (somewhat contradictory) appeals to racial solidarity and anti-racism, depend on a “certain way of making historical knowledge work within political struggle.” So argued Foucault in Society Must Be Defended, a 1976 book based on a lecture series about “political historicism.” Many on the American Right hold Foucault, along with his French postmodernist contemporaries, partly responsible for the emergence of identity politics. It would be more accurate to say that Foucault was one of the first, and sharpest, analysts of the way identity-based political movements appeal to history and ignite what he called “race war.”
By “political historicism,” Foucault meant a way of seeing the present as a continuation of past struggles. Political historicism uses “tools of scholarship” to reveal that apparently neutral elements of our culture contain “historical contents” that record conflicts between oppressors and the oppressed. Anyone who has seen a Twitter post beginning with “historian here” or read an article on the surprisingly racist history of some everyday feature of American life has encountered political historicism.
This is not the only way of talking about history. Foucault observed that we can also find claims asserting, however implausibly, that today’s reigning values have always been “legitimate, uninterrupted and dazzling.” The chroniclers of medieval Europe, for instance, claimed their rulers were the descendants of ancient Trojans, the better to connect themselves to figures of Homeric legend. Today’s court historians insist that Europe has long been multicultural. This kind of history, according to Foucault, is “one of the great discursive rituals of sovereignty.” Elites use it to convince us that no world is possible other than the present one, dominated by their values.
Political historicism, by contrast, is a history of “race struggle and the call for its revival.” It shows a succession of conflicts through which one group has dominated, enslaved, and exploited another. Hiding their crimes with myths, the oppressors have made the oppressed forget who they are and what they have suffered. But the signs of that historical violence are all around us — in statues, place names, and everyday language. Purging the culture of these signs is not so much an ethical demand that the past conform to present values as it is a way of plunging the present back into past conflicts, which the oppressed now stand a chance of winning.
By calling attention to present-day traces of their historical oppression, the oppressed can “rediscover the war that is still going on” and get revenge for their defeat. This war is one “between races,” two groups that come to be imagined as utterly foreign to each other even though they have long lived together. Foucault defines racism as this process of “separating out the groups that exist within a population,” dividing people who have shared centuries of history. Indeed, political historicism’s narrative of “race war” insists that this shared history is in fact only a story of conflict, sometimes hidden and now overt.
Foucault did not offer any rebuttal to the discourse of race war. He did, however, point to the philosopher whom he considered the most lucid critic of how political historicism descends into violence: Hobbes. Hobbes, in Foucault’s interpretation, thought the violent European politics of his own day were obsessed with questions of history and identity. Seventeenth-century English radicals attacked the monarchy and aristocracy, for example, as foreign institutions that had been imposed on an egalitarian and democratic Saxon nation after the Norman conquest in 1066. The English Civil War, in Foucault’s view, was not so much an ideological or religious conflict as it was one of the first “race wars” inspired by political historicism, in which the English divided themselves into opposing races of Normans and Saxons.
Hobbes argued that looking into history in this way could only lead to violence. As he wrote in Leviathan (1651), “There is scarcely any commonwealth in the world, whose beginnings can in conscience be justified.” All states began with conquest and cruel hierarchies. To examine this past, and to explore the present for its traces, means reactivating these original conflicts. As Foucault told it, Hobbes was ready to “exploit every possibility,” even the “most extreme,” to contain the dangers of political historicism. His Leviathan justifies an authoritarian state whose legitimacy depends, crucially, not on claims about history or identity but on an argument about human nature.
Foucault, who feared giving the state “too much power,” was not optimistic about Hobbes’s authoritarian solution to the problem of political historicism. But he noted that Hobbes had signaled a grave danger. Leviathan woke “the sleeping philosophers.” The latter might fear Hobbes’s cynicism and acceptance of an omnipotent state, but they should be “grateful” that he confronted their “insidious and barbarous enemy,” political historicism. Those who, like Foucault, believe in limited government must also confront this enemy and find their own means of escaping the violence into which this perspective on history may lead us.
Blake Smith is a Harper Schmidt fellow at the University of Chicago, where he works on cultural ties between France and India.
