On the Judgment of History

Reviews / Votes

This book is a poignant and timely intervention that speaks to urgent questions in and of our present. It brilliantly enacts its own self-critical reassessment of widespread contemporary incredulity that virulent racism and nationalism are 'still' possible. Joan Wallach Scott turns to contemporary debates over the question of reparations for slavery in order to imagine alternative understandings and avenues for historical reckoning-and politics. -- Judith Surkis, author of <i>Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930</i> On the Judgment of History is a stunning and timely meditation on history, both as a field of inquiry and as the broadest arena of human activity, and on justice, both as an ideal and as a state institution. This book will provoke intellectual excitement among a wide range of readers. -- Andrew Zimmerman, author of <i>Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South</i> Scott offers a forceful and persuasive critique of the modern Western tendency among liberals and orthodox Marxists to justify normative political projects on the grounds that they will be authorized by the 'judgment of history.' Challenging residual assumptions about linear, progressive, or teleological history, she questions any political logic which assumes that the rightness of current struggles will be ratified by future observers or that present harms will be redeemed by subsequent outcomes. Scott underscores how such problematic assumptions are grounded in both an attachment to national states and to a fixed boundary between the past and the present. Echoing throughout is a crucial question: what happens to politics when history no longer provides a secure ground for orienting action? This intervention demands the attention of historians, political theorists, and legal scholars. -- Gary Wilder, author of <i>Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World</i> Scott has done her part to dismantle naive metanarratives of progress, yet she was harboring one, all the same. The argument of On the Judgment of History aims right at that ambivalence, which has its roots in the commonplace desire to believe in the possibility of secular theodicy: that is, an account of the existence of evil that nonetheless assures us some good will come of it. The yearning is understandable but problematic. A belief that the long moral arc of the universe bends toward justice can be inspiring. But it also runs the risk of turning into complacency. -- Scott McLemee * Inside Higher Ed * This is a book of reflection, deep reflection, not new research. The rewards of reading come from Scott's penetrating analyses of familiar historical materials and her dialogue with other analysts, from Hannah Arendt to Michel de Certeau to Ta-Nehisi Coates * Critical Inquiry *