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which the unifYing forces of modernity, the progress of the means of
communication and of the world market, condemned to disappearance.
Their predictions were based on sound arguments, and those people
would certainly be astonished if they could see the powerful rebirth of
nationalism in our time. But the same impulse that gave energy to the
Romantic mind was operating in the socialist movements as well: not in
the sense that the socialists praised the glory of the national tradition or
the beauty of the idealized spiritual unity of the Middle Ages, but in that
they deplored the loss of natural human solidarity in the market
economy and the domination of egoism, and dreamed about a society in
which a spontaneous and disinterested identification of everyone with
humankind would assure eternal harmony. If some remnants of the ar–
chaic historicity, that is, the belief in the happy life of primitive, classless
tribes, have survived in socialist ideologies, this belief was not supposed to
be, of course, a validating principle of the present society but rather an
abstract, nonhistorical image of the Golden Age; consequently, it was
not properly an example of archaic historicity. And the most powerful
theoretical expression of the socialist idea, the Marxian doctrine, origi–
nated in an entirely different kind of historicism, which was, of course,
associated with the name of Hegel.
The point is not to interpret Hegelian thought or to ask whether
or not this reaction to the anti historicism of the Enlightenment was itself
unambiguous and coherent. It seems that two varieties of a new his–
toricity, incompatible with each other, grew out of the Hegelian legacy
- no matter whether legitimately or not. The historical man I'm talking
about was shaped by one or both of these forms of historicism. And it
was Hegel who taught us - directly or indirectly - that we live in history
and contribute to its march, that history includes what occurs here and
now.
This widespread feeling that we shape history is probably of
Hegelian origin; it invaded our language and settled so well in it, with
its pathos, that it appears ' unquestionable. Earlier history was either the
chronicle of past events or - in the Augustinian approach - the succession
of divine interventions in human affairs. But no longer. I eat breakfast, I
have a lecture at the university, I view an exhibition of paintings, I
converse with friends; in all those circumstances not only am I surrounded
by "history" as a kind of invisible environment, but I contribute to its
movement. Sometimes we internalize history as our own life form,
sometimes we interact with it in an
intime,
quasi-erotic contact, as if
His–
taria
were a lady one could seduce. I'm not simply doing this or that -
eating breakfast or visiting an exhibition, I am making history.
For what did or do people need this strange and unnatural, philo–
sophically concocted feeling? Once the Enlightenment had sentenced to
