Marx, l'histoire et les historiens. Une relation à réinventer

Abstract

Historians don’t seem to be concerned by the “back to Marx” trend observed in many fields during the last decade. After an initial, very limited breakthrough in the inter-war years, Marxism irrupted in the academy in the 1960’s, when it established its hegemony on historical studies, merging with a multiplicity of social sciences. This “golden age” was followed by an epoch of decline, the climax of which was reached in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin wall. Since this turning point, historiography has being shaped by the return to neoconservative tendencies (the paradoxical survival of cold-war anticommunism) as well as by the emergence of postmodernism, which marginalized the traditional Marxist paradigms. Instead of reducing this change to a theoretical battle, the author interprets the decline of Marxist historiography as the result of a political defeat. The absence of any utopian horizon at the beginning of the twentieth first century explains the persistence of this decline. Once liberated from both teleology and Eurocentric views – its secret tendencies from the time of its transformation into a “science” – Marxist historiography could reinvent itself and redefine its goal, which does not consist in the “application” of a preformed theory but, according to E. P. Thompson, in “recovering, explaining and understanding its object: real history”. Such a reinvention means, in the wake of W. Benjamin, to conceive the past not as definitely closed but as a totality of experiences and recollections to “reactivate” in the struggles of the present.