François Hartog


François Hartog is a French historian. He is noted for his "regimes of historicity" theory as well as his analyses of presentism and the contemporary experience of time. Hartog is also an academic and author of several works including The Mirror of Herodutus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History.

Biography

Hartog was born in 1946. He studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris and was part of a group of Hellenist scholars who studied under Jean-Pierre Vernant. Later, Hartog became an assistant to the German historian Reinhart Koselleck. The two collaborated on several works, which included a project that described how the problems of modern time schema are not limited to an imperialist past or present. Hartog would later challenge what he perceived as Koselleck's Eurocentric reflection of the present and the past.
Hartog's works can be classified into two: his early works that focused on the intellectual history of ancient Greece; and, his recent publications, which emphasized the subject of temporality.
Hartog is currently the director of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales for ancient and modern historiography. He is also one of the 60 historians who founded the Association des Historiens in 1997. Hartog is a member of the Center Louis Gernet de recherches comparées sur les sociétés anciennes.

''Regimes of Historicity''

Hartog explored the relationship of the past, present, and future as understood at moments of crisis in history. Like other thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Kosseleck, Hartog maintains that there is no difference between past and present since all history is "actually contemporary history". Drawing from a broad range of sources, he published his analysis in the book Regimes of Historicity Presentism and Experiences of Time. For instance, he used texts such as the Oddysey to demonstrate the threshold of historical consciousness.
According to Hartog, there are three regimes of historicity: the history of exemplary lives; the modern history that dates back from the French Revolution; and, the regime focused on the present as the primary referent for historical interpretation. The "regimes of historicity" has been understood in two ways. The first asks how society treats its past and what it says about it while the second approaches the notion as the "modes of consciousness of human community".
In his analysis of the different "regimes of historicity", he described the modern period as "presentist" - that the present turns to the past and the future only to valorize the immediate. This "presentism" concept has been interpreted as that regime wherein the present is dominant. It implies an approach to temporality, which rejects the linear, causal, and homogeneous conception of time characteristic of the modern regime of historicity. "Regimes of historicity" is also considered a heuristic tool for further research concerning experiences of time.

Publications