Joan Wallach Scott

On her book On the Judgment of History

Cover Interview of June 02, 2021

In a nutshell

We hear a lot these days about the judgment of history. In the face of political conflict, corruption, and sheer lies, we sometimes comfort ourselves by saying that “history” will right the moral and factual wrongs of the present. At some future time, the record will be set straight, evil condemned, and “legacies” established for posterity. This is a vision of history (a fantasy, I argue) that imagines a story of inevitable progress; that expects we can count on the future to be an improvement over the past. It is the vision expressed by Martin Luther King Jr., citing the abolitionist Theodore Parker: “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” My book is an extended reflection on this idea, rejecting its Enlightenment optimism and suggesting a different vision entirely. It’s not judgment we should look to in history, but a record of processes of contention and conflict, a story of successful and unsuccessful struggles against and for power that may serve present actors as caution or inspiration.

An additional focus is on the idea—dating from the Enlightenment as well—that the state is the highest instrument of historical progress, the institution best placed to deliver the justice that constitutes the judgment of history. I suggest that we should be skeptical of the state’s ability to do that since it is above all a political institution, an arena of necessary conflict, a place where balances of power are always in play. We should look neither to a reified idea of history nor of the state, but to human actors in their diverse and complicated movements to appreciate what counts as history.

history / united states / justice / germany / nationalism / slavery / enlightenment / south africa / king jr martin luther / apartheid /

[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