Regimes of Historicity

François Hartog explores crucial moments of change in society's "regimes of historicity," or its ways of relating to the past, present, and future. Our presentist present is by no means uniform or clear-cut, and it is experienced very differently depending on the position we occupy in society. Hartog shows us how the motor of history(-writing) has stalled and help us understand the contradictory qualities of our contemporary presentist relation to time.

A classical historian confronts our crises of time, radically calling into question our relations to the past, present, and future.

François Hartog is a professor at the École des hautes etudes en sciences sociales and holds the Chair of Ancient and Modern Historiography. He is the author of many works, including The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History and Croire en l'histoire.

Saskia Brown is an experienced translator of French works in intellectual history, philosophy, legal theory, and art.

Regimes of Historicity should be required reading for anyone interested in the past, present, and future writing of history.

François Hartog is perhaps the most important historian of historiography today.... Regimes of Historicity should be required reading for anyone interested in the past, present, and future writing of history.

Robert Morrissey, University of Chicago:
François Hartog's pioneering work on the concept of 'regimes of historicity' makes this book a must for scholars in both the social sciences and the humanities. A distinguished classical historian, Hartog uses specific, well-chosen examples to explain how understanding regimes of historicity will allow us to better understand the conditions of possibility for producing histories and, more generally, our own relationship to time.

Lynn Hunt, University of California, Los Angeles:
In a book that should be required reading for anyone interested in history's role in contemporary society, François Hartog shows how unexamined assumptions about the past shape our understandings of ourselves and our place in history.

Samuel Moyn, Columbia University:
Since his classic Mirror of Herodotus, François Hartog has emerged as the most significant theorist of history and chronicler of our changing relationship to our own past that France has produced. In this series of meditative chapters, he takes us from the Greeks to the present once more, emphasizing how the theory of history must move from diagnosing the modern gap between expectation and experience to confronting the exigency of historical crisis today. Hartog's reflections are valuable for all humanists.