The Boundaries and Constituencies of History

Abstract

“How Wide is the Circle of We?” historian David Hollinger asked a decade ago. 1 He was pointing out the decline of confidence since 1940 in species-wide generalization in the human sciences. But his phrase seems to speak directly to the question of the humanities and citizenship today, when many, including me, think that the exclusiveness of national citizenship needs to give way to more cosmopolitan affiliations. The question is whether the humanities—with their reference to the human—have a role in such a development. Can we expect the humanities to help widen the circle of we? Historically, the sponsor and constituency of the academic humanities has been the nation-state, not the whole of humanity. Though the humanities disciplines have spoken for the value of the human, they have never until our own time proposed to embrace all humans. The creation of the academic humanities as professional scholarly fields was intertwined with the making of the modern nation-state. Indeed, those peoples who were not organized into nation-states were beyond the ken for professional historians and were relegated to the discipline of anthropology. History as a discipline was in fact a key collaborator in the work of distinguishing those who considered themselves “civilized” from those they considered not so—for the reason of lacking a written literature and archives-based history. But this has changed in the past quarter century; moreover, the same move from parochialism to expansion and cosmopolitan inclusion is occurring in literary studies, art history, and musicology.

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