'On the Concept of History' revisited
Some thoughts on Benjamin's classic
This essay grew out of my presentation on Walter Benjamin’s On the Concept of History at the Platypus Affiliated Society’s reading group in London, 28 May 2025.
On the Concept of History is Benjamin’s critique of historicism. But what is this ‘historicism?’ It is the ideology of a world where the revolution is defeated,—a world of victorious Reformism, Stalinism and Fascism—apparently, our world.
For all three of these regimes—and with Horkheimer and Pollock we saw that really, they are ultimately the same—history is a march of ‘progress.’
The past is one long chain of ‘rosary beads’ leading up to the present and into the far future—one bead inevitably following the previous one—where perhaps there remains some Utopia to be realised. But the transition to any Utopia will also be seamless; maybe we won’t even notice it. Between us and Utopia there stand dozens of unrealised economic and social preconditions, which necessitate the indefinite continuation of the current state of affairs: the Race, the Nation, Socialism in One Country. ‘The movement is everything, the goal nothing,’ as Bernstein said. This is what Benjamin calls the notion of ‘progress’, which corresponds to ‘humanity’ moving through ‘empty homogenous time.’ (Theses XIII, XIV, Addendum A)
In contrast, Benjamin raises historical materialism—Marxism.
We read in Marx’s 1844 manuscripts that the notion of ‘humanity’ in bourgeois society is a mere abstraction—an unrealised potentiality. History as the march of humanity could only really begin if this present condition of prehistory were finally overcome.
Why is Marxism compared to the mechanical Turk? (Thesis I) And is it or is it not a favourable comparison?
The mechanical Turk wins all chess games, but only by enlisting an unsightly grandmaster who always remains hidden.
Benjamin says that similarly, Marxism can only survive its latest defeat by admitting that its seemingly mechanical apparatus—concepts of economic necessity, class struggle, modes, forces, relations of production—were really animated by something it would rather keep hidden—theology.
But also the metaphor is not entirely favourable to Marxism, nor theology. Is Benjamin talking about the regressive Marxism of the reformists and Stalinists, when he—seemingly ironically—says it can ‘always win’ by enlisting theology? What he points out is the contradiction between the theological undercurrent of Marxism and the overtly scientific presentation of it. Reformism and Stalinism would banish the theology—even though they only make their theories work in a quasi-theological framework. This ends up being dishonest theology and dishonest Marxism. So the mechanical Turk that ‘always wins’ by a cheap trick is a metaphor for reformism-Stalinism. How can we take up honestly—dialectically—Marxism as theological, as opposed to the flat prophetism of the Bernsteins and Stalins, promising a long march to a guaranteed Canaan?1
Why does Marxism need theology—and why should it not be ashamed of it?
Because Marxism is a response to an essentially normative (but perhaps not moral) call or desire: an urge to redeem the past (VII) and we might add: a drive towards freedom. It is history not as a dry (or celebratory) recounting of events, but as memory, as remembering, encountering a crystallised image of the past and truly ‘experiencing’ it—and at the same time experiencing the present as historical (XVII). History could only be celebrated, ‘cited in all its moments’ if it was redeemed.
Historicism’s imperative is this: list all events and their causal connections. No minute of the day must pass unrecorded. Marxism’s imperative is: experience the past so that you may redeem it. In this way, like the Turk, it will always win, because via ‘theology’ (the belief in the necessity of redemption) it is capable of taking even its own past failures as an object. It is not merely another theory of social evolution—it is an attitude, or perhaps a Pascalean wager. As Lukács wrote, ‘It is not the “belief” in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a “sacred” book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method.’
The past ‘flashes up’ in a moment of danger, it ‘crystallises’ into a ‘monad’—like days of remembrance in the calendar. The past is not sought out by us as diligent chroniclers, but imposes itself on us, and the question is how we deal with this imposition. It could only become ‘citable in all its moments’ (that is: affirmed) on ‘Judgment Day’—retrospectively, at the time of its final overcoming. Not yet, not as the historicists would have it. Historicism’s attitude to the past is both archaic and premature.
The passage that perhaps lends itself most easily to misreading at our time is this one:
‘Whoever … emerges victorious, marches in the triumphal procession in which today’s rulers tread over those who are sprawled underfoot. The spoils are, [as ever], carried along in the triumphal procession. They are known as the cultural heritage. [W]hat [the historical materialist] surveys as the cultural heritage is part and parcel of a lineage which he cannot contemplate without horror. It owes its existence not only to the [work] of the great geniuses, who created it, but also to the nameless drudgery of its contemporaries. There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism.’ (Thesis VII)
This can superficially read as the academic orthodoxy of our time—decolonisation, postmodernity, suspicion about any claims to historical importance. But on closer inspection our time merely exchanges the valorisation of one triumphal march of victors—Romans and Greeks, let’s say—with that of another—the Umayyads or the Ming. And let’s not forget that the bourgeois revolution starts out as the revolt of the oppressed Third Estate—the first revolt for universal emancipation of society, which for the first time reproduces servitude as a condition that points beyond itself.
‘Universal histories are not inevitably reactionary. But universal history without a structural principle is reactionary’ we read in the Paralipomena.
This is the way in which history is read ‘against the grain’—we encounter the past as crystallised, experience it as memory, and reveal that it contains an unrealised task, a cry for redemption, a Messianic secret—that freedom is possible right now, though it remains unaccomplished.
What is redemption?
Benjamin writes: ‘The kind of happiness that rouses envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.’ (Thesis II)
How on Earth are these the same thing in different words?!
The first sentence means: the kind of happiness we can envy is only that which is plausibly of our time. If only we had what our neighbour has — we would finally be happy. In other words, then: our notion of happiness looks a lot like redemption—if some conditions are met, we are redeemed from unhappiness.
What would the alternative be?—a sort of non-striving, Buddhist happiness, like that depicted in the Wim Wenders film Perfect Days, where the main character seems to live in an already-redeemed nibbana state, redeemed not because he achieved what he strove for, but because, it is suggested, he escaped the cycle of striving and disappointment, and instead became content with the bare unchanging substance of his life—working and ‘killing time’ (Adorno) with repetitive activities. A pre-bourgeois happiness of a ‘rounded’ life in a ‘rounded world’ (Lukács)—really, inaccessible to us.
‘I know the hatred and envy of your hearts. Ye are not great enough not to know of hatred and envy. Then be great enough not to be ashamed of them!,’ Nietzsche wrote in Also Sprach Zarathustra.
We choose our objects of desire based on what our present world has to offer—immanently, as it were. We imagine the attainment of these objects as happiness, and the attainment of happiness as redemption. This open-ended process is the condition of bourgeois society, which is actually a progressive condition of freedom as Becoming—though in a self-contradictory way.
For Benjamin, ‘the past is referred to redemption,’ meaning that past suffering demands redemption through realising our own present happiness. In the Paralipomena he writes that the historian finds the messianic promise in the past as if by performing ‘spectrum analysis.’ We are one with the past in a way we are not one with the future—this is why we cannot envy the future. The past is us, it constitutes us. ‘Are we not touched by the same breath of air which was among that which came before?’ It might appear that present becomes future, but really, it becomes past.
‘Therefore, if the present, so as to be time, … passes into the past, … the cause of its being is the fact that it will cease to be’—said St Augustine.
Historicism (meaning: Reformism, Fascism and Stalinism) feels no urgency to attain redemption because it promises the redemption of the future rather than the past and the present: it ‘content[s] itself with assigning the working-class the role of the savior of future generations. It thereby severed the sinews of its greatest power.’ (Thesis XII).
The ‘greatest power’ was the arrest of time. Revolution as the ‘emergency break.’ Maybe the endless ‘progress’ of prehistory—the present that continuously becomes past wreckage—can be stopped in its tracks. Benjamin uses the image of firing at the clocks in the 1848 revolution in Paris. In revolution humanity can enter the mystical nunc stans, or Jeztzeit, presence outside of time, the eternal presence of God—a Singularity where anything is possible, where the chains of cause and effect are broken, and individual human actions gain cosmic significance (XVIII).
To quote Augustine again: ‘if the present were always present, and would not pass into the past, it would no longer be time, but eternity.'
The theological imagery (the angel, monastic life, the Messiah, the Antichrist, Paradise, redemption, resuscitation of the dead, nunc stans, rosary and the Torah) is there to focus in on the existence and reification of Marxism as itself a revelation. The fact that it is now possible to comprehend capital as the last stage in the unfolding of bourgeois freedom, as the transitory stage between traditional civilisation and something higher, Humanity itself, is a signal (the εὐαγγέλιον) that this possibility is is already present. Right now.
And this remains so, in spite of the victory of Fascism, Stalinism and Reformism. It is just more difficult to recognise—perhaps requiring a sort of ‘monastic’ discipline. The victors too, occasionally glimpse the image of the past flashing up. They too sense the moment of danger. But their acedia (= sloth, weariness of heart, ‘intellectual laziness’ [Paralipomena]) and their instinctual empathy with past victors makes them poor students of it, and leaves them only with melancholy (VII). From the Paralipomena: ‘Eternal recurrence is the punishment of being held back in school, projected onto the cosmic sphere: humanity has to copy out its text in endless repetitions.’ Consider the final lines of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land:
These fragments I have shored against my ruins Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih
We as ‘historical materialists’ are like the Angel of History, oriented towards the past, registering it as a wreckage, blown into the future by the winds of a lost paradise. We are filled with desire to redeem it all, and we can expect no consolation, no signal nor hope from the future, as it is hidden behind our backs. All we have to sustain us is the experience of past and present as the simultaneous unfolding of progress and barbarism. This is all that we have to work with—this is already a moment of emergency, a moment of danger, there is nothing else left to wait for.
As Benjamin writes in Addendum B, the Jews were forbidden from studying the future because in a way, there was nothing of importance there. The Messiah might arrive any moment. One must be ready to welcome him at all times. The tasks are laid out—anything that might happen between now and then is irrelevant.
According to Marxism, socialism becomes a possibility the moment the crisis of bourgeois society is registered as capitalism, and history appears as ‘the history of class struggles.’ All of the preconditions are already met, and not hidden in some distant future.
That this insight is unrecognised and unactionable means that the Left is dead. Benjamin forces us to consider that the Left may live again only if it comes to believe that the moment to end prehistory is here, and to see the task of ending it as its own. From the Paralipomena: ‘A conception of history that has liberated itself from the schema of progression within an empty and homogenous time would finally unleash destructive energies of historical materialism which have been held back for so long.’
And in Marx’s words: ‘It will then become plain that the world has long since dreamed of something, of which it needs only to become conscious … to possess … in reality.’
This paragraph was added retrospectively to clarify my interpretation of the Turk metaphor.