On his book Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism
Cover Interview of October 16, 2019
Lastly
As a cultural historian, I work to the ideal that cultural
history is ancillary to the complex history of freedoms. I also aim to write
what I call “cultural etymology,” by which I designate a practice of excavating
the present. The present is, if we are to be honest with ourselves, the place
where most historical enquiry most urgently and frequently starts. I myself
always start with the conditions of contemporary modernity, where “conditions”
also designates pathology. Many cultural historians would describe their work
as an act of discovery. My project is rather one of recovery, where one starts
from the present and recovers immanent histories by which the present is understood,
as if for the first time.
As a cultural historian, I write as, and for, both scholar
and citizen.
To the scholar, my appeal is to write cultural history with
long chronologies, as we try to evade the historiographical deformities imposed
upon us by the standard periodic divisions of cultural history. To write either
as “medievalist” or as “early modernist” is already to buy into many
prejudicial presuppositions. The standard divisions of cultural history are
designed so as neutralize most powerfully the interest of our fractured
histories.
As a citizen, I appeal not to the evangelical, since in my
experience that reader judges only from their convictions. If any evangelical
is prepared to engage with me, I will be delighted, but that has not been my
experience with previous books. As a citizen, I appeal instead to the liberal.
I ask her or him to understand the liberal tradition more deeply, as a precious
but fragile product of history. As Liberalism is in retreat worldwide, liberals
need to understand their opponents, and their intimate relation with their
opponents. They need to understand that they, as liberals, can be just as
intolerant as their evangelical opponents, and they need to understand
Liberalism less as a belief system and more as an instrument for managing
potentially violent belief systems.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
Lastly
As a cultural historian, I work to the ideal that cultural history is ancillary to the complex history of freedoms. I also aim to write what I call “cultural etymology,” by which I designate a practice of excavating the present. The present is, if we are to be honest with ourselves, the place where most historical enquiry most urgently and frequently starts. I myself always start with the conditions of contemporary modernity, where “conditions” also designates pathology. Many cultural historians would describe their work as an act of discovery. My project is rather one of recovery, where one starts from the present and recovers immanent histories by which the present is understood, as if for the first time.
As a cultural historian, I write as, and for, both scholar and citizen.
To the scholar, my appeal is to write cultural history with long chronologies, as we try to evade the historiographical deformities imposed upon us by the standard periodic divisions of cultural history. To write either as “medievalist” or as “early modernist” is already to buy into many prejudicial presuppositions. The standard divisions of cultural history are designed so as neutralize most powerfully the interest of our fractured histories.
As a citizen, I appeal not to the evangelical, since in my experience that reader judges only from their convictions. If any evangelical is prepared to engage with me, I will be delighted, but that has not been my experience with previous books. As a citizen, I appeal instead to the liberal. I ask her or him to understand the liberal tradition more deeply, as a precious but fragile product of history. As Liberalism is in retreat worldwide, liberals need to understand their opponents, and their intimate relation with their opponents. They need to understand that they, as liberals, can be just as intolerant as their evangelical opponents, and they need to understand Liberalism less as a belief system and more as an instrument for managing potentially violent belief systems.