Theses on the Philosophy of History by Walter Benjamin -- Summary

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This is a partial summary because I found this text very difficult.


Critique of Violence

Is violence a legitimate means to just ends? Natural law considers that men have a right to violence because such behavior is natural, as long as the means is just. The legal system follows natural law closely regarding violence and allows violence for moral means.

In contrast with natural law, positive law sees violence as the product of history. Positive law focuses on the means rather than the ends.


Theses on the Philosophy of History

I

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II

People are envious only of other people who live in their own time, and not in the future. People define happiness by achievement of "redemption". The past is linked to the present and the present to the future in that every generation feels they foresaw the coming of the next.

III

Historians who don't distinguish between major and minor events think everything is important and nothing should be lost.

IV

Historians reinterpret the past according to their own contemporary paradigm, in particular, that of "historical materialism" which is the assessing of history in financial terms.

V

The true nature of the past is revealed only in a present moment in which the past is extremely relevant to the present moment.

VI

History should not be practiced as an attempt to portray the past "the way it really was" but "to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger". The danger has to do with the ruling classes.


Walter Benjamin


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