Theses on the Philosophy of History

In the essay, Benjamin uses poetic and scientific analogies to present a critique of historicism.^[4]

One interpretation of Benjamin in Thesis I is that Benjamin is suggesting that despite claims to scientific objectivity, the historical materialism of vulgar Marxists is actually a quasi-religious fraud or conversely that theology is an essential and ultimately unavoidable backdrop to philosophic, scientific and economic discourse. As a parable, the meaning of this theses is ambiguous according to the nature of parables. Benjamin uses the Mechanical Turk, a famous chess-playing device of the 18th century, as an analogy for historical materialism. Presented as an automaton that could defeat skilled chess players, The Turk actually concealed a human (allegedly a dwarf) who controlled the machine. He wrote:

One can envision a corresponding object to [The Turk] in philosophy. The puppet called "historical materialism" is always supposed to win. It can do this with no further ado against any opponent, so long as it employs the services of theology, which as everyone knows is small and ugly and must be kept out of sight.

Importantly, the Marxist author Michael Löwy points out that Benjamin puts quotation marks around 'historical materialism' in this paragraph:

The use of quotation marks and the way this is phrased suggest that this automaton is not "true" historical materialism, but something that is given that name. By whom, we ask. And the answer must be the chief spokesmen of Marxism in his period, that is to say the ideologues of the Second and Third Internationals.^[5]

One key to Benjamin's critique of historicism is his rejection of the past as a continuum of progress. This is most apparent in thesis XIII:

The conception of the progress of mankind in history is inseparable from that of the process of history as passing through a homogeneous and empty time. The critique of the idea of this process must form the basis of the critique of the idea of progress as such.

His alternate vision of the past and "progress" is best represented by thesis IX, which employs Paul Klee's monoprint Angelus Novus (1920) as the "angel of history," with his back turned to the future: "Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet [...] That which we call progress, is this storm." Benjamin thus inverts Marxist historical materialism, which was concerned with predicting a revolutionary future, to assert that historical materialism's true task ought to be, in the words of political scientist Ronald Beiner, "to save the past."^[6]

 

According to Benjamin, "Historicism depicts the 'eternal' picture of the past; the historical materialist, an experience with it, which stands alone" (Thesis XVI). Benjamin argues against the idea of an "eternal picture" of history and prefers the idea of history as a self-standing experience. Thus, Benjamin states:

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was". For historical materialism it means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. The danger which threatens both the tradition and its recipients. The danger of allowing themselves to be the tools of the ruling class. The tradition must always be won anew from conformism. The Messiah will also come as the conqueror of the Antichrist, not only as a redeemer. (Thesis VI)

Just like Scholem, who had seen in the "Angelus Novus" the "baroque concept of history" as unstoppable decay, so too Margaret Cohen sees the kabbalistic concept of the tikkun, i.e. the messianic "restoration and mending" of all things in their original integrity, which is clearly indicated in thesis IX with the phrase: "awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed" (German: "die Toten wecken und das Zerschlagene zusammenfügen").^[7]

In Thesis XVIII, he highlights a scientific perspective of time only to follow it up with some provocative metaphors:

'In relation to the history of organic life on Earth,' notes a recent biologist, 'the miserable fifty millennia of homo sapiens represents something like the last two seconds of a twenty-four hour day. The entire history of civilized humanity would, on this scale, take up only one fifth of the last second of the last hour.' The here-and-now, which as the model of messianic time summarizes the entire history of humanity into a monstrous abbreviation, coincides to a hair with the figure, which the history of humanity makes in the universe.

Benjamin's colleague Gershom Scholem, who is quoted in Theses, believed that Benjamin's critique of historical materialism was so final that, "nothing remains of historical materialism [...] but the term itself."^[1][8]

Scholem^[6] also suggested that the cryptic essay's seemingly definitive rejection of Marxist historical materialism in favor of a return to the theology and metaphysics of Benjamin's earlier writings came after Benjamin recovered from the deep shock he felt following the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, previously bitter rivals, announced a non-aggression pact.^[9]

More broadly in terms of the work's implications, and more specifically in terms of the circumstances in which work on the essay takes place, "On the Concept of History" is written during a period when Benjamin is hiding out with Hannah Arendt after the Second World War has begun and the shadow of the Third Reich is expanding across the map of Europe.^[10] In this essay, Benjamin speaks as a Jew with Socialist, Bolshevik, Stalinist and formerly Stalinist, Trotskyist, and otherwise communist or Marxist friends and connections, and as a sympathizer and fellow traveler in these groups, from within the darkening scene during the early days of the Second World War as the continent fell under the control of Hitler's Wehrmacht.

Many of the ideas and phrases composing critical passages of Benjamin's theses appear half-formed, but are also lifted almost word for word in places, from Benjamin's slightly earlier essay on the eccentric 19th century art collector, Eduard Fuchs. Thus the theses are partly a reduction to pure hermeneutic formula of ideas he broached in this earlier piece, and partly an expansion of this set of hermeneutic principles that he'd been exploring for quite some time in his work.^[11]

The winter that he drafted his theses on the concept of history Benjamin read, in a pairing or book discussion group with Hannah Arendt and her lover Heinrich Blücher, an early draft of Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism as the three of them of were holed up at Benjamin's sister's house in Lourdes, France.^[10] This reading, and much of Benjamin's composition of the theses, come after Benjamin's imprisonment at an internment camp in Nevers in 1939, but before Hannah Arendt's imprisonment at the concentration camp in Gurs in the midst of the Fall of France as they are reading Scholem's introduction to the Kabbalah together in the winter of 1939-1940. The "philosophy of history"--which is the guiding theme of these meditation--acts as a kind of code word for 'Kabbalah' between Scholem and Benjamin.^[12][13] It is a kindred discipline to Kabbalah in their shared understanding. They'd read Franz Molitor's Philosophy of History (which is a book about the Kabbalah) together in 1916, when Scholem was just embarking on his study of the Kabbalah,^[12][13] a canon of mystical literature that he reintroduces and to some extent resurrects in his Major Trends shortly after Walter Benjamin's death--which is the book, once again, whose manuscripts Benjamin was reading as he wrote the Theses.^[10] They'd consulted together on this subject terrain for years (Scholem expertly as a librarian of ancient manuscripts, and Benjamin somewhat free-associatively).^[14]

The book Major Trends was dedicated to Walter Benjamin's memory, and started hitting shelves in the spring of 1942 even as the Aktion Reinhard camps commenced with the industrialized form of mass-execution by gassing characteristic of the Nazi Final Solution in the already ongoing genocide of the European Jewry carried out by the Third Reich during the war.^[15]

Benjamin mailed a copy of the essay to the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who passed it on to Theodor Adorno. Benjamin asked that the essay not be published,^[1] but it was first printed in a mimeographed booklet entitled Walter Benjamin zum Gedächtnis (In memory of Walter Benjamin). In 1947, a French translation ("Sur le concept d'histoire") by Pierre Missac appeared in the journal, Les Temps Modernes no. 25.^[16] An English translation by Harry Zohn is included in the collection of essays by Benjamin, Illuminations, edited by Arendt (1968).^[17] Hannah Arendt read a draft of the work to fellow refugees fleeing the Third Reich in Europe on the ship organized by the Emergency Rescue Committee that smuggled her and other Jewish emigrés to the United States. She published her major essay under the title "The Concept of History" in 1957, partly in homage to this work by Walter Benjamin, whose work was still not yet well known.^[18]

• Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History"