4 - Ghosts and intimations

Summary

Legacies are a matter of memory. Intimations concern the future. Modernists had perpetual encounters with both dimensions and much would disappear from their world if their location became at the hands of posterity little more than a checklist of received attributes. In our own day the recommendations of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Reinhart Koselleck urge the importance of ‘horizons of expectation’ in history: the need to give participants the sense of future (and therefore of past) that we readily give to ourselves. The whig understanding of history in the twentieth century cannot itself be understood without this procedure because it took its nature from acts of recollection and imagined futurity among those trying to preserve or relinquish it. There is a subconsciousness that matters and which sensitive historians can occasionally depict. That is why we must pause before considering modernist historiography in its own terms for, in the light of a century's perspective, its own terms concealed illusions and repressions, not least over the continuities that it was the point of a whig outlook to foster. The coupled characteristics of a whig legacy that we have been reviewing – constitution and nation, church and state, empire and war – formed the stuff of recollection and intimation when twentieth-century observers spoke of the whigs. But stuff is not form and the raw material of memory and received wisdom had to await its sculptor.