Blasting the past: A rereading of Walter Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history

Abstract

The text offers a reappraisal of Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History (Über den Begriff der Geschichte; ‘On the Concept of History’) from the perspective of global politics today and its similarities with the socio-economic and political situation in Europe and the Americas during the 1920s and 30s; more specifically, the impact of crises on the erosion of trust in liberal representative democracy and the concomitant rise of mostly rightwing populist movements and their strongmen leaders, aided to a significant degree by the media, ‘old’ and ‘new’ alike. The purpose of the text is to draw lessons from Benjamin’s vision of materialist historiography for our current political predicament.

Keywords

• Walter Benjamin
• history
• historical materialism
• historicism
• progress
• Karl Marx
• allegory
• narrativity
• continuum of history
• Fascism