Ethan Kleinberg

Politics and Ethics at the End-time Herausgegeben von Lisa Regazzoni As truth and expertise come under question, how should we engage with the past? In his 2021 Koselleck Lecture, Ethan Kleinberg diagnoses a crisis in historical representation, arguing that conventional approaches fail to address today’s epistemic challenges. He introduces a new paradigm that views historical events as dynamic forces requiring a more flexible, ethically attuned historiography.

In this article, I suggest that our current relation to the sociopolitical future is one where we are blocked from changing our view of what that future is or could be. In this sense, we are trapped in a time loop wherein the challenges before us are continuously met with social and political solutions designed for futures past, old futures. These past possible futures are ones that failed to solve the problems they were offered to address.

This article investigates the enduring chronopolitics of Historicism. To do so, I work through two dominant understandings of Historicism: the view that “historicism” is a means to account for the historian's own standpoint or historical situation as the place from which they take up and interpret the past, which I call Historicism A, and the separate (though now more popular) understanding of “historicism” that is derived from Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism, which I call Historicism B.