Palti 8/26/05 2:04 PM Page 431

History and Theory 44 (October 2005), 431-440 © Wesleyan University 2005 ISSN: 0018-2656

HISTORICISM AS AN IDEA AND AS A LANGUAGE

POLITIQUES DE L’HISTOIRE: L’HISTORICISME COMME PROMESSE ET COMME MYTHE.

By Jeffrey Andrew Barash. Paris: PUF, 2004. Pp. 256.

The emergence of historicism allegedly opened a breach in Western thinking,

which continues to the present and separates two mutually incompatible intel-
lectual horizons. In opposition to the atomistic view that conceives of societies
as formed by originally free, autonomous, and equal individuals linked exclu-
sively by contractual and willingly accepted ties, historicism imagines societies
as organic wholes articulated by objective links independent of the will of their
members and anterior to them.
This opposition, which traverses the entire historiography of “ideas,” eventu-
ally acquired ethico-political connotations. Initially, however, historicism did not
appear to bear a univocal political sense. Instead, throughout the nineteenth cen-
tury and the first decades of the twentieth century, its fundamental intellectual
achievements were highlighted, promising a way to overcome the abstract social
perspective inherited from the Enlightenment, which ignored the historical
nature of human social groupings and thus missed the particular conditions deter-
mining each specific form of collective life. After World War II, this view, which
reached its most systematic formulation in Friedrich Meinecke’s Historism,1 was
rapidly and drastically displaced by a much more negative and crude perspective
on the legacy of historicism, which emphasized the perverse consequences of its
anti-rationalist outlook. Various authors claimed to see “the Hitlerian theory of
Blut und Boden”2 prefigured in the thinking of Herder (the alleged “founding
father” of historicism). A double equation between historicism (or organicism)
and authoritarianism versus Enlightenment (or atomism) and democracy then
became firmly established.3
Once an ethical connotation was attached to these terms, they ceased to be
seen as categories that designated discrete currents of thought in intellectual his-
tory and became projected as kinds of transhistorical principles whose opposition
articulated the entirety of Western thinking. The terms changed into what

1. Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook [1936], transl. J.
Anderson (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1972).
2. Max Rouché, La Philosophie de l’histoire de Herder (Paris: Faculté de Lettres de l’Université
de Strasbourg, 1940), 25.
3. Although a different line of interpretation persisted, at the extreme of which is Theodor Adorno
and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), and which resisted plainly identifying his-
toricism with authoritarianism—and, conversely, the Enlightenment with democracy—this did not
lead historians to question such a dichotomous view, which became imposed on the discipline as a
kind of undisputable truth.
Palti 8/26/05 2:04 PM Page 432

432 ELÍAS J. PALTI

Reinhart Koselleck calls asymmetrical counter-concepts, one of which is defined

by opposition to the other, as its negative counter-face.4 The two terms now
exhaust the conceivable universe of politics. All systems of thought should be
defined either as Enlightened–rationalist–atomistic (oriented toward a democrat-
ic horizon), or historicist–organicist–irrationalist (driven by authoritarian
impulses), or, eventually, as a mixture, in variable doses, of historicism and
rationalism. The whole of modern intellectual history thus became legible from
top to bottom: organicist historicism and atomistic Enlightenment were the two
poles around which all of it gravitated. The only debates that this interpretive
scheme permitted refer exclusively to where to place the ideas of a given author
(that is, how Enlightened or how historicist he or she is).5
Behind this perspective lies a characteristic intellectual procedure that is prop-
er to the tradition of political philosophy, and that also imbues the entire histori-
ography of ideas. As Quentin Skinner remarked, the assumption implicit in it is
the presence of some perennial questions that horizontally traverse politico-intel-
lectual history and articulate diverse currents of thought corresponding to differ-
ent epochs as if weaving a sub specie æternitatis dialogue.
This intellectual procedure has been criticized mainly by the so-called
“Cambridge school,” the most important representatives of which are Skinner
and J. G. A. Pocock, and the German school of the history of concepts or
Begriffsgeschichte, whose main lines were established by Koselleck. These
approaches definitively undermined the dichotomous perspective on which that
model was founded. The “new intellectual history” thus departed from the frame-
works forged in the old tradition of the history of ideas. As Pocock remarks:
The change that has come over this branch of historiography in the past two decades may
be characterized as a movement away from emphasizing history of thought (and even
more sharply, “of ideas”) toward emphasizing something rather different, for which “his-
tory of speech” or “history of discourse,” if not unproblematic or irreproachable, may be
the best terminology so far found.6

The transition from a history of “ideas” to a history of “discourses” or “polit-

ical languages” involved a truly methodological revolution in the discipline,
redefining its very object. In effect, a political language cannot be reduced to any
given set of ideas, principles, or values, since it is a kind of device to produce
them. A history of language thus leads us to a second order of discourse, the
mode of production of ideas. Finally, it is its form (the argumentative apparatus
or structure that underlies the ideas displayed on the textual surface) that histori-
cizes and identifies each particular kind of discourse. Unlike ideas, which can
appear in the most diverse intellectual contexts, political languages are thor-

4. Reinhart Koselleck, “The Historical-Political Semantics of Asymmetric Counterconcepts,” in

Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1985), 159-197.
5. As, for example, Isaiah Berlin affirmed, “for Herder, all groups are collections of individuals;
his use of the ‘organic’ and ‘organism’ is purely metaphorical” (Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two
Studies in the History of Ideas [London: The Hogarth Press, 1976], 198). However, it is clear that this
perspective still hinges on the basis of the opposition between rationalism and historicism, which thus
remains intangible.
6. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press,
1991), {au: need p. ref.}.
Palti 8/26/05 2:04 PM Page 433

HISTORICISM AS AN IDEA AND AS A LANGUAGE 433

oughly historical entities. They rest on a number of contingently—and, therefore,
precariously—articulated assumptions. Hence, the sense of their core categories
cannot be transposed beyond the particular discursive universe in which these
assumptions maintain their efficacy, without trivializing them (that is, without
reducing them to a series of more or less obvious maxims that can, in effect, be
discovered within the most diverse conceptual frameworks).
The demand for conceptual frameworks that the “new intellectual history”
brings about was not alien to the old history of ideas. Yet, this latter could never
meet that demand because of the nature of the objects that it dealt with, which
were built through ahistorical procedures. The temporality of discourses
becomes visible only insofar as we transcend the surface level of its referential
contents and refer it back to the particular argumentative apparatus on which it
hinges.7 What the “new intellectual history” now looks for is not only to under-
stand what an author said (the manifest contents of his or her discourse) but also,
and fundamentally, how it was possible for him or her to say what he or she
said—to trace the categorical soil and the set of assumptions underlying a given
order of discourse and to observe how they shifted over time, thus paving the
way for the emergence of new intellectual constellations.

I. HISTORICISM AS AN IDEA

Jeffrey Andrew Barash’s Politiques de l’histoire is a genealogy of historicism,

from its origins to its recent derivations, that seeks to underline the discontinu-
ities in its trajectory. Basically, the author intends to show that there is not a
straight line connecting historicist thinking and the authoritarian trends that
imbued it in the course of the past century. These trends were the result of a slip-
periness (dérapage) produced by the introduction of a certain theory of truth that
was ultimately incompatible with the foundations of nineteenth-century histori-
cism. From this perspective, Barash reads historicism’s path retrospectively, try-
ing to specify how that politico-conceptual deviation took place.
The book has two parts, each one consisting of five chapters, many of which
were originally written as separate articles; nevertheless, they are tightly inter-
connected. As a whole, they narrate the vicissitudes of historicist thinking, begin-
ning with Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt and ending with Cassirer,
Heidegger, and Strauss (and, beyond, Arendt).
In the opening chapter, Barash discusses the interpretations that point to a gap
separating Herder’s early work in Bückeburg from his later production in
Weimar. According to this interpretation, Herder’s work in Bückeburg, which is

7. “Ideas” are, in effect, ahistorical by definition. Their meaning can be established independent-
ly from the particular context of their enunciation. In any case, what historicizes ideas is a circum-
stance that is exterior to them: their appearance or not in a given context. They themselves, howev-
er, are not properly historical entities. Hence, when considered in themselves, systems of thought (the
ideal types) appear as logically integrated and self-contained (and, as a consequence, a priori defin-
able) realities. Contingency is something that comes to them from without, from their “external con-
text.” On the difference between ideas and political languages, see Palti, “On the Thesis of the
Essential Contestability of Concepts, and Nineteenth-century Latin American Intellectual History,”
Redescriptions, forthcoming.
Palti 8/26/05 2:04 PM Page 434

434 ELÍAS J. PALTI

best represented by Also a Philosophy for the Education of Mankind, endorses

the idea of the irreducible particularity of the different cultures and nations; in his
Weimar work, which reaches its peak with Ideas of a Philosophy of Universal
History, in a more clearly Enlightened vein he realigns that cultural diversity
toward the realization of universal values. As Barash remarks, the interpreters of
Herder’s thinking thereby miss the presence in his early work of a providential
design secretly weaving together the diversity of cultural manifestations. His
later philosophy, which emphasizes the unity of history, should thus not be
understood as a relapse into a mechanicist approach, but as merely a delving into
the universal spirit intrinsic to the historicist concept in its original format (and
which only much later would fade away). The differences separating the two
moments in Herder’s intellectual career were merely a matter of emphasis.
Chapter Two, which is dedicated to analyzing the work of Friedrich von
Gentz, the German translator of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French
Revolution, intends to underline the originality of Gentz’s historical thinking
insofar as he parts ways from his source (Burke’s thought) and introduces into it
a completely alien premise. To the historicist postulate that dominates Burke’s
entire philosophy, one that affirms the essential unity and continuity of the natu-
ral course of events resulting in a static view of history, Gentz superimposes the
idea, of an Enlightened matrix, which conceives of historical course as moving
forward, in the sense of progress. As Barash remarks, this confers a paradoxical
character upon his thinking—at the same time conservative and progressive.
Chapter Three analyzes the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt to introduce the
problematic core that, according to Barash, underlies the historicist concept: the
issue of relativism. Here, he says, a distinction is also in order. Facing the epis-
temological naïveté of the Enlightenment’s “abstract rationalism,” historicist
thinking emphasizes the limitations of human reason. Nineteenth-century his-
toricist relativism finds its most precise formulation in the work of Humboldt.
The search for the roots of relativism no longer refers us back, as in the case of
Burke (who, on this point, followed the Enlightenment tradition), to an anthro-
pological assumption—the power of passions to obfuscate reason—but to an
objective premise: the complexity inherent in every historical reality, which
makes it necessarily irreducible to abstract and generic concepts. This results in
a more acute awareness of the specificity of historical phenomena, including
what constitutes Reason, without renouncing it. Humboldt's historicism seeks
only to dismount the teleological perspectives of history and to recover contin-
gency and change as dimensions intrinsic to it. Humboldt’s relativism and sense
of historical contingency underlines the limitations of reason, thus seeking to
counter the pretensions to omnipotence of the State and to preserve individual
freedom.
We thus reach the central chapter in the book (the fourth), which is dedicated
to comparing the historicist concepts of two fundamental figures in this tradition:
Leopold von Ranke and Heinrich von Treitschke. For Barash, between these two
figures lies a crucial turn in the ways of conceiving of German national identity,
in the center of which is placed a conceptual shift occurring at the heart of his-
Palti 8/26/05 2:04 PM Page 435

HISTORICISM AS AN IDEA AND AS A LANGUAGE 435

toricist thinking. This turn leads us back to the issue of relativism. For Ranke, in
consonance with nineteenth-century historicist tradition, the relative nature of all
historical judgments springs from the complexity and singularity of historical
processes. Human reason can gain access to the derived principles, never to the
ultimate coherence linking them. Yet this view entails the idea of some deeper
unity, which, although ungraspable by reason, provides the premise for their
intelligibility. We can say, although Barash does not say it exactly in these terms,
that Ranke’s is an epistemological relativism, not an ontological one, as is
Treitschke’s. In effect, with Treitschke, historicism takes a turn from which it
exits converted into a form of radical relativism, which rejects all reference to
transcendent values, that is, to a realm of norms placed beyond factual reality.
Having lost the universal instance underlying particular phenomena, historicist
thinking could not prevent the relapse into what Hannah Arendt called “tribal
nationalism.” Historical writing thus is reduced to a merely instrumental task;
what justifies it is its practical efficacy. Every historical consideration is then
subordinated to national interests; rhetoric, finally, displaces the search for truth
from its center. Chapter Five, the final one of the first part, illustrates this instru-
mental appeal to the past that is proper to this form of historicism with Carl
Schmitt’s “captious” reading of Hobbes’s work. As Barash shows, in trying to
find in Hobbes the foundations of his own concept of sovereignty, Schmitt sim-
ply ignores the core notion articulating Hobbes’s entire work: natural law.
Part Two analyzes the consequences of the above-mentioned turn in the his-
toricist tradition and some of the reactions it generated. For Hermann Heller, the
historicist instrumentalism of history, which in the twentieth century imbued the
thinking of both the revolutionary left and the reactionary right, only hides its
ideological void. It is unable, by definition, to serve as a foundation for a com-
munity of values. In the last instance, this instrumentalism only continues, in an
exacerbated manner, liberal-positivist formalism. It is the liberal-positivist oblit-
eration of the normative aspirations of the state of right that eventually opens the
doors to the most arbitrary theoretical elaborations built on the bases of some his-
torical peculiarity, of which fascism is only its most pathetic expression.
In Meaning in History, Karl Löwith moves forward, for Barash, in a similar
direction as Heller’s argument. As Chapter Seven shows, Löwith’s idea of mod-
ern politics as a merely secularized version of Christian eschatologies, which he
takes from Schmitt, is aimed, unlike the latter, at revealing the modern degrada-
tion of the original Christian spirit. Schmitt’s decisionism is, precisely, the best
example of such a degradation taken to the limit of irrationalism. Leo Strauss, in
turn, discovers behind the authoritarian drift of historicism the problematic sta-
tus of modern relativism, in which the ideal of the good life that oriented ancient
relativism is completely lost.
The final two chapters are dedicated to a criticism of Heidegger’s thought. The
polemics between Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos enable Barash to illustrate
his own idea of the two opposite ways of conceiving of the continuity and func-
tionality of the mythical dimension in modern, rationalist thought—that is, as a
means of consolidating social ties and as merely a form of manipulation, respec-
Palti 8/26/05 2:04 PM Page 436

436 ELÍAS J. PALTI

tively. In its intention to give meaning to the world, modern science for Cassirer
only expands the implicit contents in magical thinking. Despite the opposite pro-
cedures of myth and science, there is an essential continuity between them that
is given by the fundamental anthropological determinations that define man’s
nature as a symbolic animal.
For Heidegger, Cassirer’s appeal to a generic consciousness only makes man-
ifest the neo-Kantian (that is, metaphysical) substratum of his philosophy, mak-
ing one unable to grasp the radical temporality of Being. However, as Arendt
remarked, in this fashion Heidegger misses the distinction between the meta-
physical idea of eternity and the political search for stability (the paradigm of
which Arendt places in the pre-classical world and, more specifically, in Homer’s
anxiety for constancy in a changing and unpredictable world). For Barash,
Heidegger and Arendt illustrate the two opposite outcomes to which the histori-
cist awareness of the radical temporality of historical phenomena lends itself:
one, at the terminal point of which he places Heidegger, according to which all
public life appears as necessarily inauthentic; another, that culminates in Arendt,
ends up, in opposition to both the teleological perspectives of abstract rational-
ism and historicism’s relativist slipperiness, giving ontological priority to action.
As we see, the tracing of the two-century-long trajectory of historicist think-
ing allows Barash to dismantle the double equation (historicism=authoritarian-
ism / Enlightenment=democracy) on which the entire tradition of the history of
ideas rests, and to reveal some of the historical simplifications to which this
dichotomous scheme leads. Politiques de l’histoire thus represents an important
contribution to intellectual history. It still is, however, a text of the history of
ideas. As a matter of fact, however subtle and sophisticated Barash’s perspective
is, it inscribes itself within the frameworks of the system of oppositions that
founds this tradition. Ironically, the very strengths of Barash’s book allow us to
see more clearly the limitations intrinsic in its history of ideas approach. Thus the
shortcomings in Barash’s book ultimately lead us to problems of a more gener-
al, epistemological nature.

II. HISTORICISM AS A LANGUAGE

Barash's analysis of Herder's thought already reveals an inherent problem in the

history of “ideas.” As he emphasizes, the affirmation that in Ideas Herder aban-
dons his initial historicism to relapse into a mechanicist concept of history (the
only alternatives that the history of ideas may recognize) is plainly untenable. Yet
this does not mean that there were not fundamental displacements in Herder’s
conceptual horizon. However, to discover them we have to transcend the level of
the explicit contents of his historical discourse (how universalistic or how rela-
tivist it was) and analyze how the categorical substratum on which it was found-
ed became reconfigured.8 If Barash does not find in Herder’s intellectual career
anything but differences of emphasis, this is because his own interpretive scheme

8. See Palti, “The Metaphor of Life: Herder’s Philosophy of History and Uneven Developments
in Late-Enlightenment Natural Sciences,” History and Theory 38 (1999), 322-348.
Palti 8/26/05 2:04 PM Page 437

HISTORICISM AS AN IDEA AND AS A LANGUAGE 437

permits him only to observe distinctions in degree (except, of course, for the
highly improbable case of an author whose ideas moved from one pole to the
other in the antinomy that organizes that scheme).
This limitation has a precise epistemological foundation: the approaches that
focus on “ideas” lead one to take for subjective attributes what actually is a set of
collectively shared premises, since they organize and define a definite kind of dis-
cursivity. The consequent inability to find at this level the marks that identify the
thinking of a given author, at the moment of trying to establish distinctions, which
are not reduced merely to differences in degree, forces one to magnify differences
that are, in actual fact, truly subtle. Barash’s opposition between Burke and Gentz
is an example. It is not true that Burke rejected every idea of historical progress.
He only refused the Jacobin vocation for sudden ruptures, endorsing, instead, a
view of history as a natural, evolutionary process following a gradual and pro-
gressive sequence (which is also, as a matter of fact, the assumption that guided
Gentz’s historical philosophy). As Burke said in his Reflections on the French
Revolution, “By a slow but well-sustained progress, the effect of each step is
watched; the good or ill success of the first gives light to us in the second.”9
On the other hand, there is nothing paradoxical in the will “at once to preserve
and to reform,” as Burke said.10 This is nothing other than the very definition of
the evolutionary concept that presided over Western historical thinking in the
nineteenth century, until the moment in which the crisis of the fin-de-siècle came
to dismantle the teleological assumptions lying at its basis. Ultimately, the same
kind of approach that, on the one hand, leads to missing the displacements occur-
ring at the level of the fundamental assumptions that articulate a given type of
historical discourse, on the other hand makes one see contradictions that actual-
ly are merely apparent. Again, this does not mean that there were not fundamen-
tal differences or real contradictions in the thought of the authors Barash dis-
cusses. The point is that, to discover them, we must transcend the surface of the
manifest contents of discourses and penetrate the logic that articulates them (as
well as those points of fissure that would eventually dislocate them).
Here we find the basic methodological problem that led the history of ideas to
its crisis, and that also affects Barash’s approach: the confusion between ideas or
ideologies and underlying political languages. The confusion of levels of lan-
guage leads to incorrect conclusions, inferring transformations of a conceptual
order, which, as such, send us back to the plane of the categorical soil of a dis-
course (the modes of its production), from the changes in the occasional forms of
its articulation. Barash’s analysis of Treitschke’s thought clearly shows this. As
he says, Treitschke certainly marks the emergence of a new way of conceiving of
German national identity. In this sense, his thought indicates a shift with crucial
consequences. Yet, in his attempt to account for this transformation, Barash refers
it back to a plane on which, in order to discover a precise intellectual foundation

9. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution, Vol. XXIV, Part 3 (The Harvard Classics
[New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909–1914], paragraph 280); Bartleby.com, 2001.
www.bartleby.com/24/3/ (accessed June 2, 2005).
10. Ibid.
Palti 8/26/05 2:05 PM Page 438

438 ELÍAS J. PALTI

for this political shift (that is, to relate it to the emergence of a given concept of
truth), he must inflict violence upon the analytical categories at stake.
First, Treitschke’s historical relativism keeps no common measure with his
extreme nationalism. He merely raised a point that was part of the common wis-
dom of his time: that although the human sciences are obliged to a follow a rig-
orous method, they cannot aspire to the same degree of exactitude as the natural
sciences. This is so for the simple reason that, while the object is given to the lat-
ter, the former must construct it, that is, practitioners of the human sciences have
to fix criteria for discerning which among the mass of events bear historic mean-
ing. As Treitschke stated in his lessons published in 1897–1898 under the title of
Politik:
The student of politics, therefore, must follow the method of scientific history and draw
deductions from empirical observations. But these methods are far more complicated than
the simple straightforward manner of reaching conclusions which is proper to the Natural
Sciences. The time will soon come when the absurd rivalry between the moral and the
physical sciences will be at an end. The former have the higher and more ideal office to
perform, and for that very reason must always remain inexact. They can never do more
than approximate to truth. The scientific historian must work backwards from results,
which are indeed the very elements of his craft. Here lies his great difficulty. In his nar-
rative he must make the later appear to follow from the earlier, whereas in reality the
process is reversed. He is neither able nor willing to set down all the events which have
actually happened, therefore before he undertakes the description of a period he must be
clear in his own mind which of its occurrences have importance for posterity, a meaning
for the time to come. If history were an exact science, the future of governments might
stand revealed.11

Regardless, it is not true that historical relativism, even in its most extreme
versions, has necessarily authoritarian political consequences. As we will see,
there is no strict connection between historical perspectives and political pos-
tures. This leads us to another problem proper to the history of ideas with which
Barash’s text confronts us: the normative trends that imbue the historico-intel-
lectual analysis in that tradition.
The composition of Politiques de l’histoire revolves around two hypotheses.
The first, as we said, is the idea of an inextricable link between historical rela-
tivism (in the strong, ontological, sense of the word, that is, that the impossibil-
ity of perceiving any definite sense in the march of history has to do not with our
intellectual limitations but with an objective, historical condition), and an instru-
mental view of historical writing, which opens the doors to political authoritari-
anism. The second springs from the former: in order to avoid relativism and the
consequent relapse into authoritarianism, we need to refer the myriad of particu-
lar events back to universal values that transcend them as such and confer unity
to their sequence. Now, albeit from an opposite political perspective, what
Treitschke stated was something not very unlike this.
In effect, for Treitschke, the primary goal of the study of history was the dis-
covery of the objective laws presiding over its course. Actually, that was the
meaning of his maxim that politics is “applied history.” As he said:
11. Heinrich von Treitschke, Politics, ed. Hans Kohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.,
1963), xxi.
Palti 8/26/05 2:05 PM Page 439

HISTORICISM AS AN IDEA AND AS A LANGUAGE 439

The task of Politics is threefold. It must first seek to discover, through contemplation of
the actual body politic, what is the fundamental idea of the State. It must then consider
historically what the nations have desired in their political life, what they have created,
what they have accomplished, and how they have accomplished it. This will lead on to the
third object, the discovery of certain historic laws and the setting forth of some moral
imperatives. Thus understood, Politics becomes applied history.12

Far from being an instrumental use of history, the values he set forth were, for
him, the result of an empirical corroboration; they were not merely a postulate,
but rather were rooted in objective evidence.
If, after all this, the historian finds himself constantly compelled to admit that truths are
only relative, he finds also that there are, fortunately, a few absolute truths on which he
may rely. Thus he can deduce from political history that power resides in the State, that in
the civil community there must be distinction of classes, etc.13

As some of the authors Barash himself quotes affirmed, historicism was, ulti-
mately, the typically modern way of the historical denial of politics, that is, the
masking of political postures under the veil of an objective Truth. For some of
them, it is indeed not relativism but this striving for Truth that is the basis for the
totalitarian phenomena that erupted in the twentieth century (an affirmation that
shows how difficult it is to establish unequivocal relationships between histori-
cal perspectives and political ideologies).14 In any case, Treitschke’s statement
reveals that, beyond his nationalism, he was still a man of the nineteenth centu-
ry. Behind his historicist concept still lay a teleological view of history (the idea
that it spontaneously moves toward the realization of some universal values),
which was typical of his time. This leads us back to the realm of underlying polit-
ical languages.
The break with the teleological assumptions that were implicit in evolutionary
views of history (including Treitschke’s) was not related to any given particular
ideology, but was a transformation that occurred at the level of the categorical
soil defining the conditions of the articulation of ideas.15 Indeed, given that he
himself is situated after this transformation, Barash cannot share these teleolog-
ical assumptions either. Such a break with the teleological assumptions implicit
in nineteenth-century evolutionary views of history expresses itself in Barash’s
own work in the fact that he is not able to explain how the two abovementioned
hypotheses he endorses can be connected.
As a matter of fact, there is no way of drawing substantive normative orienta-
tions from the objective unfolding of events without reintroducing at least a
weakened form of teleologism; that is, without stating the presence of some val-

12. Ibid., xix.

13. Ibid., xxiv.
14. Insofar as languages are semantically undetermined, one single language may eventually make
room for very different, and even opposite, political ideologies (and, conversely, the same ideology
may, nonetheless, eventually respond to very different languages). Hence the need for distinguishing
between levels of discourse, since changes on the level of the ideas of political actors may hide the
persistence of underlying political languages; the continuity of ideas may also mask changes on the
level of the conceptual assumptions on which they are founded.
15. See Palti, “The ‘Return of the Subject’ as a Historico-Intellectual Problem,” History and
Theory 43 (2004), 57-82.
Palti 8/26/05 2:05 PM Page 440

440 ELÍAS J. PALTI

ues presiding over historical evolution and transcending particular contexts as a

kind of regulative principle of reason, an a priori condition for the intelligibility
of history and, at the same time, a moral imperative, since only this postulate pre-
vents the instrumental use of history with anti-democratic ends. But, in such a
case, the historiographical endeavor would not make any sense; it would become
a kind of huge tautology, which would find at its endpoint merely what was
already present at its starting point as its premise. If Barash intends for history to
be an objective enterprise and thereby to avoid its relapse into relativism, he can-
not discard a priori that it may eventually lead to a different conclusion from the
one he expects from it; that is, if historical analysis eventually discovers, in
effect, the presence of some principles presiding over its evolution, these may not
be the values of democracy and political pluralism, as he affirms, but rather
authoritarianism, class distinctions, the will to power, and so on, as Treitschke
believed. Regardless, the point is that, having the teleological assumptions bro-
ken, the two hypotheses (the connection between relativism and authoritarianism
and, as a consequence, the a priori need to postulate an ethical framework for
historical research) can no longer be held together.
Beyond the inconsistencies that the slipperiness from the factual terrain to the
normative realm generates, the problem, from a strictly historiographical point of
view, is that, as we saw, it forces one to dislocate the objects under study in order
to make them fit the binary grid on which the history of ideas rests. Historical
understanding thus becomes subordinated to the object of finding the conceptu-
al bases of modern totalitarianism (the old game of finding the serpent’s egg). As
Barash remarks, again in connection with Treitschke, this latter “finds the dis-
tinction between historiography and politics unacceptable” (131). However, this
confusion of spheres is related less to Treitschke’s political ideas than to a typi-
cal intellectual procedure of political philosophy that the historiography of ideas
has received from it as its legacy (and that, ultimately, also founds Barash's
view). Hence, insofar as Barash’s approach remains at the level of the manifest
contents of discourse, and that his criticism unfolds strictly on the surface layer
of discourses, which is proper to the history of “ideas,” he cannot discern these
two spheres either, thus making his historiographical analysis indistinguishable
from ideological critique. Thus, he replicates in his own text the same kind of
conceptual slipperiness he questions in Treitschke. In the last instance, this
shows that it is not sufficient to question the dichotomous frameworks of the tra-
dition of the history of ideas in order to overcome them and to avoid the relapse
into its very type of binary logic, but that we must penetrate the series of episte-
mological assumptions that founds these conceptual frameworks and critically
undermine them.

ELÍAS J. PALTI

UNQui / UNLP / CONICET,

Buenos Aires