Luisa Passerini is committed to a method that looks at ‘the silences and the oblivions of history’ as closely as, or more closely than, the manifest continuities. Her response to my review of her book Europe in Love, Love in Europe, like the book itself, is fascinating and illuminating as much for what it omits as for what it states explicitly. The clarification that she offers of the methodological assumptions of her style of cultural history is very welcome, and I am glad to have this opportunity to respond to it. Passerini is an authentic and rigorous scholar; her theoretical consistency is unquestionable, as demonstrated in her reply above; and her refusal to wrench the subjects of her research violently out of context is irreproachable. Scholarly propriety is, in fact, the principal theme of her response; thus her ‘puzzlement’ at my quotation of Burckhardt from a secondary source should certainly be read as a polite reproach.
Less nuanced is the charge that I have ascribed to the author views held by the objects of her study. Interestingly, I am not the only reviewer of Europe in Love to have been criticized by Passerini for this.footnote1 Furthermore, she claims, I have ignored the importance to her work of psychoanalysis, which enables, indeed obliges us to read historical phenomena less in terms of cause and effect than as symptoms of metaphorical ‘illness’. Finally, she objects to my use of the terms ‘historicism’ and ‘ahistoricism’—in particular, to my suggestion that her diligence in treating historical traces with ‘the utmost philological attention to them and their contexts’ is pursued with such excessive rigour that it leads, in effect, to ahistoricism, that is, to the presumption to speak from a position outside history. Such an idea, Passerini intimates, testifies to ‘the breakdown of a common tradition’ which, with characteristic generosity—or is it excessive historicism?—she attributes to the ‘diaspora of languages’ within different generations of the Left.
The term ‘historicism’, as is clear from her response, is indeed used by Passerini and myself in quite different senses. Raymond Williams distinguishes (at least) two usages: the first, positive, denotes ‘a deliberate emphasis on variable historical conditions and contexts, through which all specific events must be interpreted’. This is the sense in which I have used it, in relation to cultural history in general and what I take to be Passerini’s methodology in particular. The second, hostile sense, associated with Karl Popper’s assault on Marx and Hegel, refers to ‘forms of interpretation or prediction by “historical necessity” or the discovery of general “laws of historical development”.’footnote2 As Passerini notes, it is the opposite of this that I criticize in Europe in Love. Thus—si parva licet etc.—I am not at all sure that the ‘discontinuities’ between Passerini and myself, a generational break and/or different intellectual traditions, are as significant as she thinks they are.