Truth, History, and Politics

A few thoughts before the U.S. midterm elections

It seems the (2020) election deniers are out in force in advance of the midterms. They are running for office, gathering crowds, and seemingly preparing the ground for 2024 and possible efforts to overturn the next general election. I am reminded of the old story told by Hannah Arendt.

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“During the 1920s, so a story goes, Clemenceau, shortly before his death, found himself engaged in a friendly talk with a representative of the Weimar Republic on the question of guilt for the outbreak of the First World War. “What, in your opinion,” Clemenceau was asked, “will future historians think of this troublesome and controversial issue?” He replied “This I don’t know. But I know for certain that they will not say Belgium invaded Germany.”

Hannah Arendt recounts this story in her 1967 essay, “Truth and Politics” an examination of the relations between truth, lies, fact, opinion, and power, one that has gained new relevance in the era some now describe as ‘post-truth’. And although she does not contend that historians or archivists alone have the power to alter received truths about the past, she does imagine the possibility of such alteration occurring:

“It is true, considerably more than the whims of historians would be needed to eliminate from the record the fact that on the night of August 4, 1914, German troops crossed the frontier of Belgium; it would require no less than a power monopoly over the entire civilized world. But such a power monopoly is far from being inconceivable, and it is not difficult to imagine what the fate of factual truth would be if power interests, national or social, had the last say in these matters.”

Hannah Arendt, 1944

These days, we haven’t far to look. There are numerous examples of the strained relations between facts, fictions, and power. Historians, I contend, are relatively well-equipped for this, even as it worries us as much as anyone else. This is partly because we bear regular witness to the vagaries and unreliability of evidence; we have also documented and analyzed the capacity of historical actors to lie to themselves and others. We struggle with our own ‘truths’. Then, it is partly because knowledge of the past tends to make the present less shocking. But mostly, it is because you cannot study history and remain unaware of the workings of power.

So, in truth, the status of truth has always been worrying. If Derrida’s theory of the archive privileged a psychoanalytical reading, it also attended to matters of political power by reminding us of the Greek origins of the term. As the residence of the archon (magistrate), the archeion was where all official documents were filed. In the beginning, therefore, the archive was located at the seat of the law, at the legal source and legitimation of political power: “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not memory.” (Derrida, Archive Fever)

Our mal d’archive, then, is not only a feverish search for origins, but it is implicated in the legitimation and maintenance, or contestation, of power. Only the most naïve of historians, even before the postmodern turn, would have staked her reputation on the absolute truth or finality of archives and the written histories derived from them. Indeed, Carolyn Steedman has rightly pointed out that historians – fully aware that the past is gone and the archive, however helpful, is always troubled - were far better prepared for deconstruction and postmodernism than we’re given credit for:

“So there is a double nothingness in the writing of history and in the analysis of it: it is about something that never did happen in the way it comes to be represented (the happening exists in the telling or the text)…We should be entirely unsurprised that deconstruction made no difference to this kind of writing. The search for the historians’ nostalgia for origins and original referents cannot be performed, because there is actually nothing there: she is not looking for anything but silence, the space shaped by what once was; and now is no more.” (Steedman, Dust)

Yet we keep going. All of us. Each person seeks something of her history, her ancestral past, her place in time and space. And each historian seeks essentially the same thing together with the conscientious practices of her trade: research, findings and analysis, representation of the past. We are all out there trying to forge something honest from little to (in Steedman’s account) nothing. Because the past is, by definition, past. Gone.

If we borrow from Hayden White, it is, therefore, the historian’s moral obligation to put away old notions that historians are only allowed to speak about this past which is past, without reference to the present and future. To the contrary, in White’s vision, the historian’s task is to impress on her readers “an awareness of how the past could be used to effect an ethically responsible transition from present to future.” (Hayden White, The Burden of History)

For White, history is above all, ‘human-made.’ It is how people (individually/privately and collectively/politically) choose, create, and relate to our past. It concerns the present, the questions we are asking about the world in which we find ourselves, and the world we hope to bring about in our lifetimes and beyond.

Therefore, for all we know that truth is a troubled and vulnerable thing, we seek it and defend it. Arendt’s old First World War story is a stark reminder that historical truth will always be politically urgent and precarious. What we can say in one time/place, we cannot assume will remain ‘sayable’ in another. Perhaps few working historians saw this more clearly than Foucault who theorized the archive as a discursive practice, as the “law of what can be said”:

“[By archive] I do not mean the sum of all the texts that a culture has kept upon its person as documents attesting to its own past, or as evidence of a continuing identity; nor do I mean the institutions, which, in a given society, make it possible to record and preserve those discourses that one wishes to remember and keep in circulation… The archive is first the law of what can be said… It does not have the weight of tradition; and it does not constitute the library of all libraries, outside time and place… [rather] it reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification.” (Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge)

Arendt’s essay on truth and politics can now be read as an anticipation of the ways in which these questions would be taken up by historians in the postmodern era. And they are good questions. But make no mistake, Arendt adhered to the critical importance of truth, to what she called the ‘fate’ of truth. And so should we.