| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

On the Future of History: The Postmodernist Challenge and Its Aftermath. By Ernst Breisach. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. x, 243 pp. Cloth, $41.00, ISBN 0-226-07279-7. Paper, $16.00, ISBN 0-226-07280-0.)
Yet another book on the challenge of post-modernism to the writing of history! Is there anything new that can be said?	1
Ernst Breisach situates the adversarial image of modernity earlier than is the norm. He locates in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thinkers the critique of progressive development that Enlightenment-inspired historical writing supposedly rationalized with the interests of capitalism and Empire. Some of these thinkers are obscure, such as the mathematician-philosopher Antoine-Augustin Cournot (1801–1877), whom Breisach regards as suggestive of what he calls structural postmodernism. This implies recognition of historical modernity's end, a stasis marked by identifiable structures. The Soviet exile Alexandre Vladimirovitch Kojevnikov/Kojève (1902–1968) gained more notoriety with his Hegelian-Heideggerian affirmation of the domination and enslavement of humanity to the riskless attachment to self-preservation. Post-histoire freed men and women from the burden of fruitless struggle against this history of interminable conflict.	. . .

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