Walter Benjamin's Conception of History

Abstract

According to the distinction Benjamin draws between the two aforementioned modes of history, and in light of his intellectual—and also political—commitment to the Frankfurt School's Marxist critical orientation, he asserts from the outset that the task of a genuine critique of history belongs exclusively to the historical materialist, namely the Marxist historian who interprets historical events through the lens of class struggle, drawing upon Karl Marx's well-known proposition that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Accordingly, one of the foremost responsibilities of the historical materialist is to dismantle the assumptions underlying the historicist historian's approach, chief among them the notion of progress. Benjamin contends that the idea of progress, which permeates all forms of historicism, is by no means an authentic concept. Rather, it is a deceptive construct adopted by the bourgeois philosophy of history to prolong the dominance of the "victor" and to perpetuate the ruling class's will to power over the "vanquished" or the oppressed Other.