February 2009 Abstracts

Historical Meaningfulness in Shared Action

STEVEN G. SMITH

History and Theory 48 (February 2009), 1-19

Why should past occurrences matter to us as such? Are they in fact meaningful in a specifically historical way, or do they only become meaningful in being connected to other sorts of meaning—political or speculative, for example—as many notable theorists imply? Ranke and Oakeshott affirmed a purely historical meaningfulness but left its nature unclear. The purpose of this essay is to confirm historical meaningfulness by arguing that our commanding practical interest in how we share action with other actors is distinctively engaged by presumed information about past occurrences. We recognize that past occurrences have determined the conditions of action sharing, constraining our practice with regard to which actors we share practical reality with and which compounding actions we may or must join in progress.

The Impact of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the Study of History

ANTOON DE BAETS

History and Theory 48 (February 2009), 20-43

There is perhaps no text with a broader impact on our lives than the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). It is strange, therefore, that historians have paid so little attention to the UDHR. I argue that its potential impact on the study of history is profound. After asking whether the UDHR contains a general view of history, I address the consequences of the UDHR for the rights and duties of historians, and explain how it deals with their subjects of study. I demonstrate that the UDHR is a direct source of five important rights for historians: the rights to free expression and information, to meet and found associations, to intellectual property, to academic freedom, and to silence. It is also an indirect source of three duties for historians: the duties to produce expert knowledge about the past, to disseminate it, and to teach about it. I discuss the limits to, and conflicts among, these rights and duties. The UDHR also has an impact on historians’ subjects of study: I argue that the UDHR applies to the living but not to the dead, and that, consequently, it is a compass for studying recent rather than remote historical injustice. Nevertheless, and although it is itself silent about historians’ core duties to find and tell the truth, the UDHR firmly supports an emerging imprescriptible right to the truth, which in crucial respects is nothing less than a right to history. If the UDHR is a “Magna Carta of all men everywhere,” it surely is one for all historians.

The Founding Abyss of Colonial History: Or “The Origin and Principle of the Name of Peru”

MARK THURNER

History and Theory 48 (February 2009), 44-62

The name of “Peru” and the entities and beings it names first appeared “in an abyss of history” on “the edge of the world” in the early 1500s. In this essay I ask what hermeneutical truths or meanings the strange event that made the name of Peru both famous and historical holds for—and withholds from—any understanding of the meaning of colonial history. By way of a reading of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s rendering, in Los Comentarios Reales de los Incas (1609) of “the origin and principle of the name of Peru,” I suggest that Peru’s name is itself an inaugural event that marks the founding void or abyss of colonial and postcolonial history, which is to say, of modern global history. This événemential void is not unoccupied, however. It is inhabited by another founding, mythopoetic figure of history: “the barbarian” whose speech is registered in the historian’s text.