On the Judgment of History

Joan Wallach Scott critically examines the belief that history will redeem us, revealing the implicit politics of appeals to the judgment of history. She argues that the notion of a linear, ever-improving direction of history hides the persistence of power structures and hinders the pursuit of alternative futures.

Joan Wallach Scott is professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Her Columbia University Press books include Gender and the Politics of History, thirtieth anniversary edition (2018), and Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom (2019).

Gary Wilder, author of Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World:
Scott offers a forceful and persuasive critique of the modern Western tendency among liberals and orthodox Marxists to justify normative political projects on the grounds that they will be authorized by the 'judgment of history.' Challenging residual assumptions about linear, progressive, or teleological history, she questions any political logic which assumes that the rightness of current struggles will be ratified by future observers or that present harms will be redeemed by subsequent outcomes. Scott underscores how such problematic assumptions are grounded in both an attachment to national states and to a fixed boundary between the past and the present. Echoing throughout is a crucial question: what happens to politics when history no longer provides a secure ground for orienting action? This intervention demands the attention of historians, political theorists, and legal scholars.

Andrew Zimmerman, author of Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South:
On the Judgment of History is a stunning and timely meditation on history, both as a field of inquiry and as the broadest arena of human activity, and on justice, both as an ideal and as a state institution. This book will provoke intellectual excitement among a wide range of readers.

Judith Surkis, author of Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930:
This book is a poignant and timely intervention that speaks to urgent questions in and of our present. It brilliantly enacts its own self-critical reassessment of widespread contemporary incredulity that virulent racism and nationalism are ‘still’ possible. Joan Wallach Scott turns to contemporary debates over the question of reparations for slavery in order to imagine alternative understandings and avenues for historical reckoning—and politics.