History, Modernity, and Counterfactuals: Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’

Historical explanation is the explanation of outcomes in terms of causal antecedents. All too often however the causal account becomes indistinguishable from a vindicatory narrative, the tale of outcomes told as a version of winners’ history, especially rampant in ideologies of modernity and modernization. Counterfactual thinking–the sphere of the might-have-been–is, in suitably rigorous and disciplined a form, a check on that kind of triumphalism. Benjamin’s Theses of the Philosophy of History offers one valuable way into that space. There are also potential spin-offs here for the discipline of literary history, especially as a counter to recent attempts to re-think literary history on the model of evolutionary biology.
Sponsored by the UCSB Series in Contemporary Literature, the Dept. of History, the Dept. of German, Slavic and Semitic Studies, the Program in Comparative Literature and the IHC.

hm 9/24/10