5/18/2021 Regimes of Historicity

Regimes of Historicity
María Inés Mudrovcic

Marı́a Iné s Mudrovcic is a Full Professor at the National University of Comahue and Principal
Researcher at CONICET-IPEHCs, Neuqué n, Argentina

10.5040/9781350970854.055

Introduc on
François Hartog coined the term “regimes of historicity” in a critical note entitled “Marshall
Sahlins et l´antropologie de l´histoire” (1983) on Marshall Sahlins’s lecture that was
published in the American Anthropological Journal. This notion was born from the
encounter between history and anthropology. Hartog and Gé rard Lenclud de ined it for
the irst time in 1993 as “the type of relation that every society has with its past, the way
that it is treated by it and how she treats it to use it and build this thing that we call
history” and subsequently added that the regime of historicity “refers to the modality of a
self-consciousness of a human community” (Hartog and Lenclud 1993: 26, my
translation). In 2003, Hartog developed this concept in his key book on this topic Régimes d
´historicité: Présentisme et experiences du temps, and he de ined it as “the ways in which
these universal categories or forms we call ‘the past’, ‘the present’, and ‘the future’ are
articulated,” namely, the ways that societies in different times and in different spaces
organize the past, present, and future. These categories “partake both of thought and of
action, actualized at different times, and in different places and societies, … make possible
and perceptible a particular order of time” (Hartog 2015: 17). Although the concept has
circulated in France for almost a decade, Lenclud credits Hartog with the inventor’s patent
(le brevet d´inventeur).

Following the text that he wrote with Lenclud in 1993, Hartog gave the notion a broad
meaning of the “relations of men with time … [and] the modalities of self-awareness of a
human community” and a more restricted sense that refers to “how a society treats its
past” (2003: 19, my translation). In an interview conducted in 2009, Hartog de ined the
regime of historicity as “the passage from the individual and plural experiences of time to
an elaboration of them” (Delacroix, Dosse, and Garcia 2010: 154, my translation), and in
the Preface to the English translation of Régimes d´historicité in 2015 as “a category
(without content), which can elucidate our experiences of time … nothing restricts it to the
European or Western world alone” (Hartog 2015: xvii). As Jacques Revel recognized, in
the French context, “regimes of historicity” is a “plastic notion” that is not at all stabilized
(2000: 16).

Why the concept of “regime” rather than an “order,” “modality,” “way,” or “form” of
historicity? In the text that Hartog wrote with Lenclud, he noted that a “regime” can be
understood in many ways or have many registers: (1) in the sense of a Constitution
(politeia), (2) in the sense of a lifestyle or diet (diaita), and (3) in a mechanical sense (the
regime of a motor) (Hartog and Lenclud 1993: 22). In the Preface of the English
translation of Régimes, despite some criticism, he con irms his preference for the concept
of “regime” over other concepts because “it reveals the idea of degrees, or more or less, of
mixtures and composites, and an always provisional or unstable equilibrium” (Hartog
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2015: xv). Similarly, why “historicity” rather than “temporality”? Despite the objections by
Claude Calame and Lenclud, among others, that it would be better to speak of temporality
than historicity, in the Preface of 2015, Hartog af irmed that the notion of temporality has
the disadvantage “of referring to an external standard of time” (2015: xvi), while
“historicity” refers directly to a human temporality; it expresses the relation of humans
with time[b-9781350970823-026]. Originally, the notion had a strongly epistemological
and methodological objective; that is, it was conceived as a tool to analyze how different
societies organize the past, present, and future. However, although Hartog always insisted
on this heuristic function, by pairing it with the hypothesis of presentism, it acquires an
ontological quality with regard to the human historical condition. Presentism is the term
used by Hartog to characterize our present “throughout, and primarily in opposition to
futurism which had long dominated the European scene.” It is a “disoriented time, marked
by greater uncertainty” (Hartog 2015: 196). In any case, the publication of Regime in 2003
crystallized into two concepts—regimes of historicity and presentism—two ideas that
were loating in the air around historians: (1) different cultures, different temporalities
and (2) the hegemony of the present, at least in Western societies.

Background
The concept of “regimes of historicity” was born in France from the con luence of various
factors: (1) the encounter between history and anthropology, (2) the exhaustion of the
quantitative, serial and “longue durée” history that led to the “critical turn” of the Annales’
research program, (3) the in luence on the French context in general and on Hartog in
particular of Koselleck’s work, and (4) the impact of Pierre Nora’s and Paul Ricoeur’s
works during the “memorial turn” in France during the 1980s. Until the publication of
Hartog’s book in 2003, the notion was used mainly in a methodological or heuristic sense.
However, since Hartog strongly correlated “presentism” with the “regime of historicity”
that we are supposed currently going through and opposed it to “futurism” or the
“modern regime of historicity[b-9781350970809-010],” the notion has acquired a
historicist tint that many scholars are unwilling to accept (for example, Jordheim 2014;
Lorenz 2019; Stewart 2016; Tamm and Olivier 2019). Maurice Mandelbaum stated that
“essential to historicism is the contention that a meaningful interpretation or adequate
evaluation of any historical event involves seeing it as part of a stream of history” (1971:
43). From a historicist perspective, an adequate understanding of presentism as a regime
of historicity is to be gained “through considering it in terms of the place which it occupied
… within a process of development” (42), namely, as a successor of and opposed to
“futurism.”

In a distinguished lecture given to the American Anthropology Association in 1982,

Sahlins noted with regard to Fiji culture that “different cultural orders have their own
mode of historical action, consciousness and determination—their own historical practice.
Other times, other customs” (1983: 518). In this lecture, he quoted the work of the
anthropologist Jørgen Prytz Johansen, who contrasts the Maori’s temporal experience with
the historical meaning of the “unique event” in the West. “For Maori … events are hardly
unique or new” (Prytz Johansen 1954: 518). He concludes, “We should be wary, as
Johansen cautions, of imputing to Maori our own ideas of the individuality of event and
experience” (528). For Sahlins (1983), the time had come to leave behind the theoretical
differences that divide anthropology and history. Anthropologists are often as diachronic
as historians are synchronous, and it is necessary to “explode the concept of history by the
anthropological experience of culture.” Historians must realize that other cultures, even in
past times, have other experiences of time that should not be seen through a Western lens.

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Sahlins named this encounter between anthropology and history and between the
synchronic and the diachronic “historical anthropology.”

“Regimes of historicity” are these different experiences of times or, in Hartog’s words,
the idea that “each cultural order has its own historicity” (1983: 1258). In the critical note
on Sahlins’s lecture, Hartog states that it is a “working misunderstanding” (malentendu
productif) that an “event” in Maori culture would be understood with the same meaning as
an “event” in l´histoire événementielle. Western modern history establishes a rupture
between the past and present, as Michel de Certeau has stated, that does not exist in Maori
culture, in which it is more appropriate to speak of the “coexistence” or “reabsorption” of
the past within the present (Hartog 1983: 1259). For Hartog, the different status of the
notion of “event” in different cultures shows the differences in “ways of living and thinking
(historical consciousness)” (1261), namely, different regimes of historicity. The same idea
is developed again in his review of the French translation of Sahlins’s book (Hartog 1989).
There, he recognizes that Sahlins “makes the concept of history explode: not to destroy it,
but to make it more complex … through the tragic interference between two different
cultural logics … the meeting of Europe and the peoples of the South Paci ic” (Hartog
1989: 1362, my translation).

A decade later, the historian Hartog and the anthropologist Lenclud wrote the chapter
“Regimes of Historicity” in a section devoted to reviewing the “new objects and methods of
history” in a book compiled by Alexandru Dutu and Norbert Dodille (1993). History is
anthropologized, and the concept of “regimes of historicity” is offered as a “common
place” between anthropologists and historians. It is a “key-concept” that helps to open the
“common-locks” of history and anthropology (Hartog and Lenclud 1993: 18). “Regimes
of historicity” is a concept that, for the authors, comes to confront, on the one hand, the
“structural anthropology” in force at those times, which relied on the “longue duré e” and
“immobile time,” and, on the other hand, the classi ication of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel´s “people without history” or “without writing” (20). In opposition to
structure/event or synchronic/diachronic, Sahlins’s notion of the “conjuncture structure”
makes it possible to compare an événementiel society with another that is stagnant (21).

Likewise, for Hartog and Lenclud, regimes of historicity also attempt to overcome the
division between myth/history and myth/memory. For Hartog and Lenclud, Nora’s,
Ricoeur’s, and de Certeau’s works contributed to overcoming the opposition between
myth and history. History is not a product of science and stands in some truth sphere and
myth is not a kind of iction of “primitive” people. Both history and myth are discourses of
social identity. In relation to the opposition between memory and history, authors such as
Henry Rousso, Jocelyne Dakhlia, and Pierre Joutard, among others, help to explain that
history should not be de ined against memory. Since the 1970s, works from different
disciplines began to address, from different perspectives that have not always converged,
issues such as the role of collective memory in the present and in the constitution of
collective identities, memory and forgetfulness as political phenomena, and the incidence
of memory in the reconstructions of the past. In France, the historian Nora conducted the
ambitious project of reconstructing the history of French collective memory in Les Lieux de
mémoire (1984–92). Comparable works were conducted by sociologists and historians in
the United States, Germany, Great Britain, Belgium, and Israel, both in the study of national
history and in the study of social groups such as native peoples and sects within these
nations (Agulhon 1981; Baram 1991; Bodnar 1992). Much of this literature emphasizes
the socially constructed nature of memory and its current political, historical, and cultural
uses. Likewise, in the middle of the last century, the history of the present erupted, forcing
a revision of the presupposition of the rupture between the past and present that de
Certeau had so clearly exposed. The history of the present is “the historiography in which
objects are social events or phenomena that are memories of, at least, one of the

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generations that share the same historical present, [and it] reveals the complex and
con licting relationship between the historian´s present and the very recent past”
(Mudrovcic 2014: 16–17). Thus understood, this historiography’s ield is especially
consolidated in France as well as in Spain, Italy, and Latin America. The creation of the
Institut d’histoire du Temps Pré sent in 1978 under François Bé darida´s direction, Nora’s
seminar on the “Histoire du Pré sent” at the l’Ecole des hautes é tudes en sciences sociales
(EHESS) and the publication of the Journal Ayer by the Asociació n de Historia
Contemporá nea called into question the separation that historians had established with
the past. This “climate of time” affected Hartog and Lenclud, who suggest that the notion of
“regimes of historicity” allows a place for these oppositions—myth/history,
memory/history—“without the risk of eliminating them” or “freezing them in large
divisions” (1993: 22). Likewise, this notion helps to express the idea of the “event
differential” (différentiel d´événementialité) articulated by Claude Lé vi-Strauss and to better
organize the conceptual oppositions between “cumulative history” and “stationary history”
that are typical of anthropology (24). The regime of historicity determines the “project of
historicity,” the index of événementialité, and the proper temporality of a society. In other
words, it expresses “the relationship that every society establishes with its past, the way in
which it treats and is treated by it and constitutes that kind of thing called ‘history’.” In a
narrow sense, “the regime of historicity would de ine a culturally delimited, although
conventional, way of relating to the past; historiography would be one of those forms, and,
in a broad sense, it is a symptomatic element of the regime of historicity that encompasses
it” (26, my translation). In this way, a regime of historicity and a regime of historiography
are not placed on the same plane (27).

In their 1993 work, both authors acknowledged that Ricoeur’s work had been a great
contribution to the debate on the regimes of historicity and the modalities of temporality.
Ricoeur pointed out the importance of stories received for the constitution of
communities’ own identities, the set of which anthropologists call “tradition.” In other
words, there is a relationship between the fabrication/reception of these stories and the
self-awareness of a society (“regime of historicity”); the story is the conjunction between
temporality (or historicity) “lived and acted” (Hartog and Lenclud 1993: 32). Temporality
can only be grasped through the story, so both anthropologists and historians have access
to the temporality “experienced” by other cultures through their stories. In turn, the
reconstruction by history and anthropology of other cultures supposes a hermeneutic
undertaking that involves the temporal experiences of historians and anthropologists
themselves. Sahlins’s work on the peoples of the Paci ic is an example of this. Cultures have
different characteristics and have a different openness to history: “The regime of
historicity would then be de ined as a way of carrying out in the bosom of a human
community this ‘symbolic dialogue of history’ … between the categories received and the
contexts perceived” (36, my translation). The chapter ends by presenting Nora and his
Lieux de mémoire as a diagnosis “on the historical moment and a historiographic response
to this moment,” which is considered a symptom of a new regime of historicity. This
constitutes a preamble to the diagnosis of “presentism” that, since 2003, Hartog has
conducted. However, in the 1993 text, the notion of a regime of historicity is the dominant
axis that is understood in a heuristic sense.

The strength that this concept acquires among French historians is re lected in an
editorial written by the Editorial Committee of Annales in 1994 when it presented its new
subtitle, “Histoire, Sciences Sociales,” instead of the tripartite division of “Economies,
Societé s, Civilizations.” At this moment of historiographical renewal and openness to other
social sciences such as anthropology and sociology, the editorial board, chaired by
Bernard Lepetit, af irmed that history, “without losing its identity or forgetting its
methodological references … must preserve and amplify its sense of diachrony and their
ambition to understand regimes of historicity in their diversity” (Préface 1994: 3, my

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translation). The notion of “regimes of historicity” in the context of Annales is the concept
that would de ine, from this point forward, the speci icity of history in relation to the other
social sciences. This change was preceded by a diagnosis of the exhaustion of quantitative
and serial history, the growing dif iculties of the history of mentalities in renewing its
objects and the challenge presented by micro-history in those years. All these issues had
been discussed in the publication of a special issue called Le Tournant Critique (the critical
turn) published by Annales in December 1989. The change in the name of Annales in 1994
con irms this diagnosis. Until then, history had been one more dimension among the social
sciences; in the words of Fernand Braudel, “all the sciences of man, including history, …
[spoke] the same language” (Braudel 1958: 18, my translation). The notion of regimes of
historicity gave speci icity to history in an attempt to “broaden its approaches and
integrate more diversi ied re lections on temporal or social processes.” The editorial ends
by af irming that the intersection of economics, sociology, and anthropology, on the one
hand, and history, on the other, would allow a better understanding of current times and
modernity.

Reinhart Koselleck´s book Futures Past was translated into French in 1990 and was
edited by the EHESS. Koselleck had been known in the ield of French historians since
1985 through Ricoeur and his Temps et Récit. Ricoeur was a philosopher who circulated in
the ield of historians. In Jacques Guilhaumou’s review of Futures Past published by
Annales in 1991, Koselleck’s contribution to the ield of conceptual history and its tensions
and differences in relation to social history are emphasized. However, in Hartog and
Lenclud’s text, Koselleck’s notions of the “space of experience” and “horizon of
expectations” are put in tension with the concept of “regimes of historicity”: “Thanks to the
categories of experience and expectation, Koselleck can see historical time as a product of
the tension that is established between the two categories” (Hartog and Lenclud 1993:
29, my translation). However, both authors immediately note that it is the “modern regime
of historicity” that takes place among “other regimes of historicity.”

Faced with the metahistorical and universal character that Koselleck gives to the
categories of the “space of experience” and “horizon of expectations” as a condition of the
possibility of the temporality of history, irst Hartog and Lenclud and then Hartog prior to
the publication of Regimes in 2003 supported the operative and heuristic nature of the
notion of “regimes of historicity.” In this regard, Lenclud maintains that Hartog “clearly
separates himself from Koselleck … [since] Hartog does not use the notion as a universal
key that would open particular historical locks; this is a key that is used to identify the
locks to be opened. Its function is entirely heuristic” (Lenclud 2006: 37, my translation).
According to Lenclud, although Hartog “feeds” on Koselleck´s enterprise, his program is
quite different: “Koselleck hopes that semantics will lead him to the heart of the theory of
history; … Hartog hopes that the notion of a regime of historicity will be put more at the
service of historians and anthropologists in a broad sense; ‘Regime of historicity’ is only
grasped in plural” (32, my translation). Likewise, he inds a difference that he considers
notable in the in lection toward the present between Koselleck and Hartog: “the principle
according to which, for the former [Koselleck], each historical present articulates the past
and the future; the way in which the past, the future and the present are related to
different historical presents for Hartog” (32, my translation). Koselleck’s work was
translated in France at the moment when historians began to wonder about time. In the
introduction to Regimes, entitled “Ordres du Temps, Ré gimes d´historicité ,” Hartog
dedicates a paragraph to the work of Krzysztof Pomian (1984), who was a pioneer in the
discussion of historical temporality in the French sphere. Footnote ive of the same
introduction presents the question of the debate on temporality in the French sphere.

If the conception of regimes of historicity had remained within the limits of “temporal
or historical orders” to address the diversities of historical experiences in different

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cultures, then it would be correct to understand it as a heuristic tool. However, Hartog’s

diagnosis of “presentism,” namely, that our current experience of time would be
commanded by the present and that we would ind ourselves transiting a different regime
of historicity from the modern one commanded by the future, gives the concept a strong
imprint of ontology of the historical condition that exceeds epistemological and
methodological limits. The relationship between “presentism” and the regime of historicity
is clearly expressed in a 1995 text that Hartog dedicates to Nora’s work. Les Lieux (1997)
are, for Hartog, a “symptom” since they “pretend to be a history of the present, in the
present, that respond to a crisis of the present, since the present, as Nora maintains, has
‘become a category for understanding of ourselves’” (1995: 1233, my translation). Our
current experience of time or the regime of historicity has passed from “futurism to
presentism”: “a present that is, itself, its own horizon,” a present without a past and
without a future (1224). This relationship between both concepts is deepened in the
Prologue to the English translation of Regimes in 2015. Hartog states, “My hypothesis
(presentism) and my methodological instrument (the regime of historicity) belong
together. The notion of a ‘regime of historicity’ helps shape the hypothesis of presentism,
and the latter helps lesh out the notion of a ‘regime of historicity.’ The two are
inseparable, at least in the irst instance” (2015: xv). This inseparability triggers a
rede inition of the notion of regimes of historicity from the perspective of presentism: “a
tool for creating this distance, with a view to having a iner understanding at the end of the
process of what is close by” (xv). The distance that Hartog refers to is the result of
historians’ works. Historians, “by taking a step back,” discover “something other than this
mesmerizing present” (xv). Historians are those who, by their profession, have the
necessary perspective to realize that the actual experience of time is a different regime of
historicity than the modern one in which the future commanded. In the Prologue of the
English translation, Hartog established a strong relation between “presentism” and the
“regime of historicity”—as two sides of the same coin—that was absent in the irst French
edition of Regime.

The hypothesis of presentism has been present since Hartog’s early works. First, the
concept appeared in the form of question: “Would not there be today a link between the
vague idea that there is no future, neither ahead nor behind (without future, living in the
present) and the hypertrophy of the event?” (Hartog 1983: 1262, my translation). Second,
it was a diagnosis of the “historiographical situation”: “The quick rise, then the primacy of
‘contemporary’ or ‘present’ as the dominant category would be the irst feature of this
conjuncture … present, memory, identity, genocide, witness, responsibility would de initely
igure there. The contemporary is an imperative” (Hartog and Revel 2001: 20, my
translation). Finally, “presentism” is the concept that characterizes the regime of historicity
we entered around approximately 1989: “To characterize our present, I have used the
term ‘presentism’ throughout, and primarily in opposition to futurism, which had long
dominated the European scene. When it disappeared, there emerged a disoriented time …
presentism, understood as a con inement to the present alone and to the present’s 'vision
of itself” (Hartog 2015: 196–7). Hartog coined the term “presentism” to indicate the
hegemony of the present of the actual regime of historicity. This concept gained popularity
in others’ proposals. Jean Chesneaux (1996) proposed the term “presenteeism,” Hans
Ulrich Gumbrecht (2014) discussed the “broad present,” and Paul Virilio (2009) used the
term “instantaneism.” “A number of authors have spoken of the ‘ideology’ or even the
‘tyranny of the present,’ ‘the grip of the present,’ ‘the redirection of expectation toward the
present’ … in other words, of ‘presentism’ as the ‘ethos of the contemporary moment’”
(Bantigny 2013: XI, my translation).

Importance Today
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“Regimes of historicity” is a concept that has begun to gain strength among historians.
When Hartog af irms that this concept must be understood as a “heuristic tool,” he means
that “regimes of historicity” can be an operative term to compare different “orders or
forms of temporality” of different cultures, whether diachronic or synchronic; that is,
different societies might have different ways of experiencing time, and Western society is
only one among others. Chris Lorenz calls “presentism n° 2” when the term is considered
as an “order of time,” namely, from a heuristic point of view, “a particular view on the
relationship between past, present and future, in which one of them is dominant—and
‘presentism’ represents the regime of historicity in which the present is dominant” (2019:
23). Before Hartog published Regimes, several historians, mostly French, undertook a
comparative approach using this concept. Revel de ines this “plastic notion” as “a
relationship—or rather, a set of relationships—that a social actor or social practice
maintains over time and, eventually, with a history, as well as the way these relationships
are embedded in a present, which may be that of memory but also that of action” (2000:
16, my translation).

Marcel Detienne, for example, warned us to “be wary of history.” In “Setting a Variety
of Regimes of Historicity” (2000), he invites us to reject positions that propose a
distinction between societies with “historical consciousness” and those that supposedly
lack it. For a society to have a temporal experience of time, it does not need to construct a
model of linear time or think that the past is different from and “something else” than the
present. When the descendants of pre-Columbian societies became aware that the Yankees
had taken possession of their lands, they took the United States to court. They “were then
required by the judges to provide ‘historical evidence’ of their rights over more or less
extensive territories,” namely, they “were under obligation to explain how they belonged to
a history that they not necessarily lived or thought through” (Detienne 2000: 41). To
demand “historical evidence” from them was to place them in a “temporal order” or
“regime of historicity” that is typical of Western societies that rely on archives and
documentary evidence that, in turn, are accepted by the state. These societies were led “to
create for themselves a historical identity according to new criteria” (41, my translation).
To illustrate the variety of regimes of historicity and their differences from the Western
one, Detienne used examples such as Chinese and Roman cultures, among others. In the
same vein but without using the term “regimes of historicity,” James Clifford noted that
professional anthropologists and historians played a major role in the Mashpee trial, but
the American court found their claims about the past unconvincing. For Clifford, there was
a collapse between the historicist perspective of the court underlying assumptions such as
a narrative continuity of history and identity and the Mashpee culture. “The Mashpee were
trapped by the stories that could be told about them. In this trial ‘the facts’ did not speak
for themselves. Tribal life had to be emplotted, told as a coherent narrative” (Geertz 1988:
204).

In “Les ré gimes d´historicité : un outil pour les historiens? Une etude de cas: la ‘guerre
des races’” (2002), Patrick Garcia also tested the heuristic value of the notion. For him, the
regime of historicity is “the social value assigned to each time period
(past/present/future)” (2002: 43). He analyzed the “war of races,” which extended from
the seventeenth century to the irst half of the nineteenth century in France. This “war of
races” involved the dispute begun by historians such as Henri de Boulainvilliers, Jean-
Baptiste Dubos, François Dominique de Reynaud, Comte de Montlosier, François Pierre
Guillaume Guizot, and Augustin Thierry about the origins of the nobility, the foundations of
their prerogatives, and their legitimacy. In other words, the term “race,” in this context,
should not be understood in a biological way but refers to the distinction between Francs
and Gaulois, victors and losers (Garcia 2002: 3). For François-René Chateaubriand, for
example, the French Revolution was one among many others: “There is nothing new under
the sun” (14). By “revolution,” he intended the astronomical meaning that died out at the

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end of the eighteenth century. In contrast, for an author such as Boulainverlliers, the
French Revolution was a rupture. In reality, the treatment of the French Revolution
involved a confrontation between absolutist historians—the “continuators”—and the
defenders of the Third State—the “breakers.” The continuators fought for the installation
of the “race” of the Franks and did not consider the Revolution a milestone that separated
the past and present. Tierry, on the contrary, saw in the Revolution an “abyss” that
separated the world of the Restoration from the Old Regime. After analyzing the works of
those historians, Garcia concludes that a new regime of historicity, a new historicity, was
installed in France after the “force of the revolutionary event.” However, Garcia is careful
not to generalize. He has only “read the work of some historians and not of the population
as a whole.” In this sense, he indicates the imprudence of including the rest of the
population, in which different modalities and temporalities may coexist according to social
groups (39).

Ten years after the publication of Regimes, a French historian of religion, Christophe
Lemardelé , taking the term from Detienne, compared the biblical and Aztec regimes of
historicity. He understands regimes of historicity to indicate a tradition that was
transformed into historiography through writing, that is, a written temporality. This written
tradition sought to legitimize an identity through a founding story. Lemardelé is clear
about the dif iculties of comparing such dissimilar cultures. However, he maintains that it is
important to know what is being compared, in this case, regimes of historicity. As a “simple
tool,” regimes of historicity is more than a “plastic” term, as Revel baptized it. Used in a
heurist way, namely, as a tool to compare different temporalities between different
cultures, the notion of “regimes of historicity” has wide semantic dispersion. Multiple
temporalities are the common places that cross through the notion. Another example of
this is Alain de Libera, a medieval philosopher:

When referring to “medieval worlds,” … he stated that “the

Baghdad of the third century of the Hegira and the Aix of the ninth
century of the Christian era are contemporaries, but they are neither
in the same time nor in the same world or in the same story.” For the
historian of medieval philosophy, there is “a multiplicity of durations:
a Latin duration, a Greek duration, an Arab-Muslim duration, a Jewish
duration.”

(Revel 2000: 15–16)

Each cultural world has its own peculiar time. “A multiplicity of times coexisted in medieval
Europe that also coexisted with the peculiar times of American or African peoples with
whom they had no interaction” (Mudrovcic 2019: 463). This is the same idea expressed
by Sahlins in 1985: “Different cultures, different historicities” (Shalins 1985: x).

This beginning of the recognition by historians of temporal plurality (time in plural)

between different societies and cultures was condensed in the heuristic use of the term
“regimes of historicity.” In the 1980s, history found temporal multiplicity in anthropology.
Hartog’s reading of the work of Sahlins and his company and friendship with the
anthropologist Lenclud led many historians and, with them, philosophers and theorists of
history to discover multiple temporalities in cultures rather than only in language, as had
happened with Koselleck. “Regimes of historicity” as “tool” alludes to this multiplicity of
temporalities that includes Western societies as one among many others. This notion is a
means of communication between anthropologists, historians, philosophers, and theorists
of history when the “time of history” “explodes into crumbs,” in François Dosse’s terms.
The time of history did not suffer the same fate as the encounter that took place a few

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years earlier between history and sociology in the dispute between Braudel and Georges
Gurvitch. Until then, the question of temporality was a matter almost exclusively for
philosophers.

In 1949, Braudel published his irst book, La Méditerranée et le Monde méditerranéen a

l´époque de Philippe II (1949). It was not organized chronologically but thematically: (1) the
role of the environment; (2) collective destinies and general trends; and (3) events, politics,
and people. The irst part contains an “almost immobile story”; the second part contains a
“slow-paced story” of group and groupings; and the third presents a “traditional” story of
events, “é vé nementielle,” of “brief, fast and nervous oscillations.” The three parts
correspond to the three times that Braudel distinguishes in history: a “geographical time,”
a “social time,” and an “individual time.” Almost ten years later, in 1958, as Director of
Annales, he published his famous article, “Histoire et sciences sociales.” The “longue duré e,”
which includes his re lections on the time of history and the time of sociology, installed the
binomial longue durée/événementiel. The event is “explosive”; it is better to use the term
“short time” tailored to individuals and everyday life. However, the “short time” is the most
deceptive of durations (Braudel 1958: 728). Economic and social history, unlike political
history, needs longer durations. The time of history, the long time, is measured, as the
economic cycles governed by the low and re lux of material life are measured or as the
social structures that must be located according to concomitant structures are measured
(749–50). History is not a science of the idiographic, of the event, of the “short time.” The
science of history is concerned only with “all things that can be recorded in relation to the
uniform time of historians, the general measure of all phenomena, and not to the
multiform social time, a particular measure of each of these phenomena” (750, my
translation). The “long duration” is the “most useful” line of research for common
re lection in the social sciences. Braudel, in response to the challenges presented by
structuralism, Marxism and the renewal of anthropology and sociology, attempted, through
the long duration, to establish a common ground that transforms history into a true social
science that leads the others (Maillard 2005). This undertaking led him to discard the
“multiple temporalities” that Gurvitch proposed from sociology. If each “social reality hides
its time or its time scales, like vulgar shells … [w]hat would historians gain from that?”
(Braudel 1958: 750).

Gurvitch answered Braudel in a course he taught at the Sorbonne in 1958 entitled La

Multiplicité des temps sociaux (1963) and in the Dialectique et sociologie (1962). As early as
1955, his irst re lections on time appeared in Déterminismes sociaux et Liberté humanaine
(1955), in which he recognized a time scale of eight genres ranging from the long duration
to the explosive time of creation. If for Braudel all social reality is historical, Gurvitch
distinguishes and separates them: historicity is a socio-temporal dynamic that is
characteristic of industrial societies.

“The” historical reality, which certain authors call “historicity,” is

a privileged sector of social reality …. It is characterized, in effect, by
the collective and individual consciousness of human freedom whose
action can succeed in turning or to modify the structures and to
rebel, to a certain extent, against tradition, … the historical reality is
opposed … to the so-called archaic societies and also, with some
reservations, to the patriarchal or traditional societies.

(Gurvitch 1962: 209, my translation)

For Gurvith, “historicity” is not universal; the “cold societies” of Lé vi-Strauss ignored it and
had other types of temporalities. At that time, Gurvith denounced the danger of the

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historian reconstructing the temporalities of other cultures from an “ideological” point of

view, projecting his own time to the detriment of others: “It is for this reason that the great
temptation that weighs about the science of history is the ‘prediction of the past’ that often
becomes a projection of this prediction in the future” (Gurvitch 1962: 210).

The classi ications of temporalities proposed by Gurvith were abandoned by

sociologists who continued with the idea of multiple time. In 1996, the sociologist William
Grossin proposed the idea of “temporal ecology” to name a “science of times.” In Pour une
science des temps: Introduction a l’écologie temporelle, Grossin (1996) proposed a series of
concepts as instruments of both empirical and theoretical research on time: “milieux
temporal” (“set of nested and intersected times”); “temporal regime” (“speci ic social
construction arising from human decisions”); “temporal culture” (“set of models, norms,
values that have to do with the social theme”); “socio-temporal frames” (“set of collective
beliefs about time historical and cultural changing”), and so on. The research program of a
“temporal ecology” as a science of times must be undertaken by psychologists,
anthropologists, and sociologists. In 1984, Grossin created the Temporalistes, a bulletin
that was, for eighteen years, an instrument of dissemination that brought together the best
specialists on individual or social temporal issues. In 2004, the Bulletin was transformed
into Temporalité, Revue des Sciences Sociales et Humaines, which aimed to favor all
interdisciplinary initiatives around the issues of temporality. As he says in his editorial, the
journal addresses the foundations of temporal distinctions, the articulation and con licts
between temporalities, the confrontation of various uses and languages of time, the modes
of historicity of the disciplines, and the confrontations of philosophical categorizations in
empirical works. Claude Dubar, the editor in chief of the journal, published a review in
2004 of Hartog’s Regimes (Dubar 2004). Although he begins with praiseworthy terms, he
then makes harsh observations of the term “regimes of historicities” in terms of
presentism. Despite the long tradition of the Temporalists on the insistence of multiple
temporalities, in the review, Dubar focuses on the choice of the term “presentism” as the
regime of historicity that would succeed the modern regime. His criticism failed to detach
the heuristic version of the term “regimes of historicity” from its historicist version.

In a recently published article in the ield of anthropology, Charles Stewart refers to

the expression “regimes of historicity” used for Hartog in its heuristic meaning: “to denote
the various combinations of past, present, and future orientation, which form the prism
through which a society views its ‘historicity’ (in the historians’ sense of actual
eventuation)” (Stewart 2016: 86). The most important problem for anthropologists is with
the concept of “historicity.” For anthropologists, “historicity” refers to a framework for
approaching time as linear; therefore, it is dif icult to make it a suitable concept to deal
with other temporalities that are not only Western. At irst, the concept seemed
appropriate for anthropologists along with the concepts of “materiality,” “sociality,” and
“environmentality” because these concepts served to overcome old oppositions such as
“persons-things,” “individuals-society,” and “people-environment.” However, its full
adoption has been hindered for two reasons: (1) “the original formulations of historicity
are pitched at a philosophical level that requires adaptation to anthropological research,”
and (2) “the constant presence of competing usages of the term historicity has caused
confusion” (81). Born in a post-Enlightenment thought complex, the use of the term may
also lead to the belief that ideas such as chronology, temporal progression, and pastness
must be human universals and are presuppositions of the intellectual baggage of the
anthropologist that makes him neglect other temporal forms to experience the past. The
point is whether the concept of “historicity” can be re-signi ied as a cross-cultural analytic
term that allows the study of all the diverse ways in which the past may be construed (83).
For Stewart, the concept “regimes of historicity” used by Hartog involved small steps
toward building a conception of plural times. However, the author concludes that despite
these small steps, the sense of “historicity” remains unclear because the greatest danger is

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to associate it to “historicism.” The same diagnosis is shared by Helge Jordheim, who

af irms that Hartog´s concept considers the diachronic succession—not the synchronic
coexistence—of “regimes of historicity” (Jordheim 2014: 509).

Understood as a diachronic succession, a “regime of historicity” de ined as

“presentism” sits too irmly within the paradigm of “historicism,” which holds, among other
things, that the present succeeds the past and that anachronism is impermissible
(Chakrabarty 2000b: 248). It is what Lorenz calls “presentism n° 1,” “according to which
presentism basically means our ‘present,’ ‘contemporary’ period, … a chronological ‘block
of time’ that its in the linear and progressive time conception of modern history” (Lorenz
2019: 1). Hartog is unclear about these two different senses of the regime of historicity as
“presentism.” In his anthropological stage, namely, when Hartog read Sahlins, Lé vi-Strauss,
or Claude Lefort and worked and wrote with Lenclud, we can ind a looser use of
presentism as a regime of historicity or order of time that would characterize the
contemporary epoch. One could then agree with Hartog that regimes “are not supported
by any teleology, in the manner of the old phases or modes of production, and do not
claim to give the key to history” (Delacroix, Dosse, and Garcia 2010: 153, my translation).
In other words, presentism was intended to be more a “diagnosis” or “symptom” of the
“temporal order” that was being crossed (Hartog 1983, 1993). In the text written with
Revel in 2001, the authors offer some “brief notes” on the “historical situation,” “taking as
support the French situation” (Hartog and Revel 2001: 19). They observe an increasing
supremacy of the “present” or of the “contemporary.” “If there are no more great stories,
great “master names” circulate in revenge, … although they do not form a system, at least
they constitute a network, … present, memory, identity, genocide, testimony, responsibility,
they are the ones who would surely appear” (20, my translation). Hartog recognizes the
imprint of the diagnosis of “presentism” in the works of Nora and Pomian, and by the late
1980s, he had marked the beginning of the presentist regime of historicity, the order of
time in which the present is dominant.

Hartog consistently rejected a historicist or teleological reading of “presentism” as a

historical regime, acknowledging that “the construction of the neologism” presentism “was
made above all with respect to the category of futurism” (Delacroix, Dosse, and Garcia
2010 158). Unlike the modern regime of historicity in which the future commanded, in our
presentist regime of historicity, the “future is perceived as a threat, not a promise. The
future is a time of disasters, and ones we have, moreover, brought upon ourselves, … [we
are living] in a world governed solely by an omnipresent and omnipotent, in which
immediacy alone has value” (Hartog 2015: xviii). By the late 1980s, Hartog marked the
beginning of the presentist regime of historicity, the order of time in which the present is
dominant: “the Present has become omnipresent” (Hartog 2005). The present is the only
horizon but with a particularity: “the present, in the moment it is being actualized, wishes
to be considered as historical, as past.” It is as if the present turns on itself to predict how it
will be considered in the past, anticipating how it will be seen by the past. As Lorenz has
noted, this diagnostic of presentism as a way of periodization its in a linear and
progressive conception of time, which he calls “presentism n° 1” (Lorenz 2019: 1). Dubar’s
(2004) review is an example of this. Dubar calls “presenteeism” the “fourth regime of
historicity.” The others are the “heroic regime,” that of “la Communauté ” and its “history of
kings and battles”; the “Christian regime,” in which “the articulation between the past,
present and future is based on eternity”; and the modern or, better, “futuristic regime,”
founded on “optimism of progress and the future.” The latter enters into crisis and gives
birth to the presentist regime of historicity. His criticism of Hartog has nothing to do with
the historicist presupposition of his own reading of the regimes of historicity; that is,
Dubar is “blind” to this linear developmental temporal framework. His criticisms point in
two directions: (1) questioning the “baptism” of the present time as “presentist” and not,
for example, as “post-modernist” and (2) showing that the concept of “identity forms” is

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more satisfactory because “contrary to Hartog’s regimes, identity forms do not disappear
when they cease to be dominant at any given time” (Dubar 2004: 132). The ambiguity that
Lorenz identi ies between a historicist version (presentism N° 1) and a version “as an
instrumental concept to pluralize the notion of time” (presentism N° 2) is maintained
through the work of Hartog.

Hartog’s diagnosis that at least Western societies are living in a new order of time is
widely shared. First, as a shift to the past that has been described as a “memory boom”
(Runia 2007; Winter 2006), a “surfeit of memory” (Maier 1993), a “world (that) is being
musealized” (Huyssen 2000; Lübbe 1983), or a “desire to commemorate” (Runia 2007).
The diagnosis seems unanimous: we are living in a period in which the present lives off the
past, in a kind of “a present past” (Huyssen 2000). This past that lives in the present has
been called “traumatic” (Ankersmit 2005), “sublime” (Ankersmit 2005), and “spectral”
(Bevernage 2008), among other things. Several theories stress the presence of the past in
the present (Bevernage 2012; Domanska 2006; Kleinberg 2017; Lorenz and Bevernage
2013; Runia 2006; Tamm 2015). Others, such as Assmann (2013) and Gumbrecht (2014),
attempt, like Hartog, to conjugate the past, present, and future in a new order. Finally,
Simon (2018, 2019) attempts to rede ine temporality by stressing the future. “Shifting
notion of time” (2019), Tamm and Olivier’s introduction to a very recent book, is really a
state of affairs about current trends in the discussion of temporalities. The pertinence of
Hartog’s analysis is widely recognized by the editors considering the book’s subtitle, “New
Approaches to Presentism.” The irst part of the book is titled “Presentism and New
Temporalities.” Both editors note in the introduction that because the “ambiguous use of
the term has created a certain confusion … our use of the term in this introduction,
‘presentism’ is to be understood only as a regime of historicity (what Lorenz calls Hartog’s
‘presentism n° 2’).” There is a recognition of the methodological dimension of presentism
as a regime of historicity to pluralize temporality but a strong criticism of every historicist
interpretation of the concept understood as a successor of futurism or as a “block of time”
in Lorenz’s words.

Criticism of the term “regime,” as with “historicity,” continues. The anthropologist

Calame recognizes the relevance of the “semi-empirical” category of the “regime of
historicity,” elaborated in “a rare collaboration between a historian and an anthropologist
[Lenclud].” For him, it would be convenient to replace “historicity” with “temporality”
because the term historicity restrictively refers only to the con iguration of the past.
Likewise, he prefers the term “logic” (logique) instead of “regime” since it is better
interwoven with the correlation between the nunc and the hic; that is, a logic of temporality
would also imply a regime (or a logic) “of spatiality” (Calame 2005: 59, my translation). In
the same vein, Lenclud suggests that we should speak of “temporality” rather than
“historicity” (Lenclud 2010). However, according to both Hartog and Lenclud, Ludivine
Bantigny suggests that the term “regime” refers to a composition that includes different
levels, oppositions, and contradictions; the notion of “regime” is disturbing “because—no
matter how cautiously scholars approach it—it tends to freeze a period in its relation to
time and history, to crystalize its domination, to reify its essential traits” (Bantigny 2013:
III, my translation). Although Jordheim prefers “temporal” instead of “historicity,” he agrees
with the term “regime” because it is primarily employed as a political term, “mostly in a
slightly pejorative and negative sense …. Transposed into the analytics of multiple times,
the term serves to remind us that time is also a question of power, the power of control
movements, to decide about beginnings and endings, to set the pace, to give the rhythm”
(Jordheim 2014: 510).

Undoubtedly, the notion of “regimes of historicity” has had a great impact, especially
in the English-speaking world after the English translation of Regimes in 2015. As Peter
Seixas recognizes in his review, the concept of regimes of historicity “is itself an important

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contribution.” Hartog’s work was vastly known in Latin America before the Spanish
translation of Regimes in 2007. The translation was carried out by the Universidad
Iberoamericana of Mé xico, where Hartog was invited to lecture several times. The concept
was used to think of the multiples experiences of time in a multicultural nation such as
Mé xico (Hernández Reyna 2016), the relation between regimens of historicity and
regimens of historiography (Mudrovcic 2013), the link between the cultural heritage and
presentism (Aravena 2014), among other things. The enthusiasm with which this category
was received in the international academic sphere is re lected in a recent book including
renowned Western researchers in philosophy, anthropology, curatorship, archaeology,
theories of history, history, cultural geography, and humanities in general (Tamm and
Olivier 2019). In the conclusion, Assmann sharply notes the “irritation” that “resonates
through all the essays of this volume” (2019: 208). Western researchers have suddenly
discovered that universal and linear time—which has been taken for granted—not only
turned out to be contingent and debatable but also has the same epistemological and
normative values as other times in other cultures. In her analysis of the foregoing
chapters, Assmann cannot avoid a historicist reading of the notion of “regimes of
historicity.” The time regime of modernity “collapsed, … when the past became sticky and
resisted being shed and left behind like the skin of a snake … the past, the present and the
future have not only dramatically changed their valence and meaning, but also the ways in
which they have been connected” (208). She recognizes that for (Western) people, there is
a “new regime” of temporality that must coexist with the multiplicity of cultural
temporalities and that “implies coming to terms and living together with multiple time
regimes in a global culture” (218). Neither she nor the other contributors to the book (or
most Western researchers) question the three temporal dimensions of past, present, and
future. This threefold division of time as self-evident and universal is one of the
presuppositions that underlies most Western re lections about multiple times.

In the Future
Hartog’s expression “regimes of historicity” in its methodological use has undoubtedly
contributed to pointing out the plurality of ways in which past-present-future ordering is
applied across different cultures. The concept is one, among others, which Western culture
uses to consider other forms of temporalities. It was particularly illuminating to some
historians and theorists and philosophers of history. However, the idea of multiple
temporalities that the concept involves in its heuristic or methodological version was not
such a surprising point to postcolonial approaches or to linguistic studies.

In a very well-known article, the American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf claimed that
“the Hopi language is seen to contain no words, grammatical forms, constructions or
expressions that refer directly to what we call time, or to past, present or future, or to
enduring or lasting … the Hopi language contains no reference to time, either explicit or
implicit” (1950: 67, emphases in the original). His study was an example of his “linguistic
relativity hypothesis,” the idea that the language one speaks in luences the way one thinks.
He found it “gratuitous” to “assume that a Hopi who knows only the Hopi language and the
cultural ideas of his own society has the same notion of time and space we have, and that
are generally assumed that are universal” (67). This Whorf¨s controversial claim
originated a debate about “Hopi time” and what is known as the theory of “linguistic
relativity.” In the same vein, researchers at various universities have challenged the
paradigm of conceptual metaphor based upon claimed universal cognitive processes that
has led to the assumption that the analysis of linguistic space-time mapping are universal.
“Time as Space is a deep metaphor for all human beings. It is common across cultures,
psychologically real, productive and profoundly entrenched in thought and language”

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(Fauconnier and Turner 2008: 55). Some researchers challenge this Universal Mapping
Hypothesis. Chris Sinha, Vera Da Silva Sinha, Jö rg Zinken, and Wany Sampaio have shown
that in a culture such as Amazonia, people do not have an inventory of terms to express
temporal relations as known by Western culture (Sinha et al. 2011). Various
contemporary approaches from cognitive sciences question our tripartite version of time;
there are cultures that experience time without distinguishing between the past, present,
or future.

Multiple temporalities have also been a central concern of subaltern studies and
postcolonial historiography. Dipesh Chakrabarty shows how the intellectual reach of
subaltern studies exceeds that of the discipline of history and refers to how postcolonial
theorists have taken an interest in subaltern studies. One of the common points is the
“contemporary critiques of history and nationalism, and of orientalism and Eurocentrism
in the construction of social science knowledge” (Chakrabarty 2000b: 9). He recognizes
that multiple temporalities as well as religious, supernatural, and miraculous terms have
challenged Marxist methodological/epistemological approaches because they “have not
always successfully resisted historicist readings.” The peculiarities of the indigenous
peoples of America or Indian people resist being caught by what Chakrabarty calls a
“transition narrative” to which terms such as “development,” “modernization,” and
“transformation,” among others, are applied. “The British conquered and represented the
diversity of Indian pasts through a homogenizing narrative of transition from a medieval
period to modernity. The terms have changed with time. The medieval was once called
‘despotic’ and the modern ‘the rule of law.’ ‘Feudal/capitalist’ has been a later variant”
(Chakrabarty 2000b: 32). In these sorts of narratives, “Indian” was always “a igure of
lack.” For Chakrabarty, to think in terms of this sort of narrative is to “think a history
whose theoretical subject was Europe”; the “transition narrative” will always remain
“grievously incomplete.” He concludes, “So long as one operates within the discourse of
‘history’ produced at the institutional site of the university, it is not possible simply to walk
out of the deep collusion between ‘history’ and the modernizing narrative(s)” (41). For
Chakrabarty, it is not about producing new concepts to be able to capture the diversities
regarding temporal issues or other nature since in that way historians will continue doing
European history with non-European archives. Instead, it is about writing another form of
“history” grounded in a profound critique of “Europe” as a transcendental subject. This is
the project of provincializing “Europe” that still did not exist when he wrote the book.

The challenge is open to the future. If we radicalize temporal differences to the

extreme, it would be impossible even to build bridges of meaning. How, then, can we
understand the radical “other”? This is a problem that has been central to all
hermeneutics. If the multiplicity of temporalities is a conception that is born when we
associate time and culture, is there a risk of reproducing cultural relativism? Is cultural
relativism truly a risk, or is it the result of an epistemological reading in terms of
“objectivity,” “truth,” and “universality”? To put it in Chakrabarty’s terms, if one operates
within the discourse of history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and any other post-
Enlightenment discipline, is it not possible to leave hegemonic categories to “read” the
world in a different way?

In another sense, an author such as Zoltá n Boldizsá r Simon, for example, considers
that the presentist regime of historicity helps “to gain an understanding of the altered
historical condition of Western societies by articulating and conceptualizing it in the shape
of a more or less comprehensive theoretical account” (2019: 1). However, for Simon, the
sense of debt to the past that characterized Hartog’s concept does not help to “open” the
future. The problem for Simon is that a presentist regime of historicity understood in these
terms obscures the emergence and future possibilities in the technological and ecological
domains (5–6). To address the complexity of the present moment, he coins the concept of

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an “epochal event” to re lect the emerging societal experience of time in which actual
changes are occurring around us (Simon 2020). In the same vein, Ewa Domanska af irms
that “[the] main challenge for today’s historical research lies … in applying a future-
oriented position” (2020: 183).

Conclusion
The concept of “regimes of historicity” is indeed a Pandora’s box. The concept was one
that helped “the West” to wake up from its “dogmatic dream” about a single, universal, and
linear time. Although many other concepts and different principles from a variety of
disciplines show potential for further analysis of time, the notion regime of historicity is
currently at the center of the scene. The great impact it had when it was coined in the
1980s in the French sphere was consolidated when Regimes was translated into English. It
is one of the most powerful concepts between all the shifting notions of time. It is a
concept that, even in its ambiguity or, perhaps, for its own sake, captured the climate of
our times.

The preoccupation with the question about time is so central to our present that it has
even contributed to the emergence of a new ield: “time studies.” This new ield tries to
“track how time is conceptualized in our own moment.” The scholars who participated in a
collection of essays attempted to construct a “vocabulary of the present.” Time studies
involves parts of what the anthropologist David Scott has recently described as “a new
time-consciousness” (Burges and Elias 2016). The regime of historicity is perhaps
another way to name the same idea.

bibliography

Further Reading and Online Resources

[monograph][b-9781350970854-055-0000072] André J. ed. (2010), Les Récits du
Temps, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

[monograph][b-9781350970854-055-0000075] Burges J. and A.J. Elias, eds. (2016),

Time: A Vocabulary of the Present, New York: New York University Press.

[monograph][b-9781350970854-055-0000078] Chakrabarty D. (2000),

Provincialinzing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.

[monograph][b-9781350970854-055-0000081] De enne M. (2000), Comparer L

´Incomparable, París: Seuil.

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