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From history to histories. Louis Althusser on the unity of the historical process
| The idea that historical reality is a singular and unified process has always been one of the central presumptions of modern academic historiography. As Hayden White points out, it is exactly this conviction about the essential unity and coherence of the past that explains the historians’ willingness to immerse themselves in the chaos of data and events that the historical record contains. However, the ‘unity of history’ has within ‘empirical’ historiography never transcended the status of a conviction or a presumption, and the explicit reflection on this theme has always been left to the ‘philosophers’ of history. Some of the most ambitious and sophisticated theoretical defenses of the thesis about the unity of history can undoubtedly be found in Hegel’s idealist philosophy of history and Marx’s materialist pendant of this philosophy. The idea that history is unified and singular has also been contested by some thinkers, however. In my paper I would like to focus on the radical rethinking of history and historical time that can be found in the work of Louis Althusser. According to Althusser a truly materialist concept of history has to break with the Hegelian and common sense idea that historical reality can be represented as a sequence of synchronic historical presents. Althusser’s criticism is interesting because it demonstrates the highly ideological and political features of the common sense notion of a unified historical process and a singular historical time. In order to integrate my paper into the broader theme of the panel I will compare Althusser’s ‘French approach’ on historical reality to the Post-War German debates on the unity of history by thinkers like Karl Löwith, Hans Blumenberg, and Reinhart Koselleck.
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