In the Name of History

Joan Wallach Scott is professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

• Introduction: The Historical Operation, Chapter 1. The Nuremberg Tribunal, 1946, Chapter 2. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1996, Chapter 3. The Movement for Reparations for Slavery in the United States, Epilogue: The Lessons of History, Endnotes, Bibliography, Index

"Scott, by contrast, takes as her subject not truth but ethics. Specifically, she is concerned with how the act of representing the past—or the “historical operation,” as she calls it, borrowing from Michel De Certeau—advances the cause of justice. The opening claim of In the Name of History is that the historian, by engaging in this particular “operation,” is always also defining the relationship between what is no longer and what lies ahead. The history we produce may reveal our consistent fallibilities as humans but, even more, it establishes as past what we want to leave behind, premised on the assumption that we can do better and will. That is particularly so in the case of historically focused tribunals, the subject of two of Scott’s three major examples in this short but intense book."