Theses on the Philosophy of History
Based on Wikipedia: Theses on the Philosophy of History
In the spring of 1940, a German Jewish philosopher sat in hiding in Vichy France, writing what would become one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic texts about time, history, and catastrophe. Within months, Walter Benjamin would be dead by his own hand at the Spanish border, fleeing the Nazis. The twenty short paragraphs he left behind—known as "Theses on the Philosophy of History" or "On the Concept of History"—read less like academic philosophy and more like fragments of a shattered mirror, each piece reflecting something urgent about how we understand the past.
This was not philosophy written from a comfortable study. It was philosophy written while running for one's life.
The Mechanical Turk and the Fraud of Progress
Benjamin opens his essay with a striking image from the eighteenth century: the Mechanical Turk. This was a famous automaton—a machine supposedly capable of playing chess well enough to defeat skilled human opponents. Audiences across Europe marveled at it. The device appeared to be a triumph of Enlightenment engineering, proof that rational mechanics could replicate human thought.
It was, of course, a hoax. A human operator (legend says a dwarf) was hidden inside the cabinet, actually making the moves.
Why does Benjamin begin with this story? He's making an accusation. Historical materialism—the Marxist theory that history progresses through inevitable stages driven by economic forces—presents itself as scientific, as mechanical, as objectively true as a chess-playing machine. But like the Turk, it conceals something. Benjamin suggests that hidden within this supposedly scientific framework sits theology, the dwarf behind the cabinet.
The Marxist scholar Michael Löwy noticed something subtle here: Benjamin puts quotation marks around "historical materialism" in this passage. Those quotation marks are doing a lot of work. They're saying: what passes for historical materialism among vulgar Marxists is not the genuine article. It's a performance, a trick.
But Benjamin's point cuts both ways. Perhaps theology is not the embarrassing secret that scientific materialism must hide. Perhaps it is, in some form, unavoidable—a dimension of meaning that no purely mechanical account of history can escape.
Against the River of Time
Most people, when they think about history, imagine something like a river. Events flow from the past into the present and onward to the future. Each moment connects smoothly to the next. Progress carries us forward.
Benjamin despised this picture.
In Thesis XIII, he attacks what he calls "homogeneous and empty time"—the idea that history moves through identical, interchangeable moments, like beads on a string. This conception, he argues, is inseparable from the myth of progress itself. If you want to criticize the idea of progress, you have to reject the picture of time that makes progress seem natural and inevitable.
But if history is not a river, what is it?
The Angel of History
Benjamin's alternative vision crystallizes around a painting. In 1921, he had acquired a small monoprint by Paul Klee titled "Angelus Novus"—New Angel. It shows a wide-eyed figure with wild hair and wings, seeming to stare at something just outside the frame. Benjamin kept this image with him for years, eventually seeing in it a vision of history itself.
In Thesis IX, he describes what he calls the "angel of history":
Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet... That which we call progress, is this storm.
The angel faces the past. He wants to stay, to wake the dead, to make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, catching his wings, propelling him backward into the future. This storm is what we call progress.
Notice the inversion. We imagine ourselves facing forward, moving toward the future, with the past behind us. The angel is oriented the opposite way. He faces backward, watching the wreckage accumulate, blown helplessly away from it.
For Benjamin, this is how we should understand history. Not as a march toward better things, but as an accumulating catastrophe. What looks like progress to us—because we face forward and see only what lies ahead—looks like disaster to anyone paying attention to what's being destroyed.
Seizing the Past in Moments of Danger
If history is not a smooth progression but a piling up of ruins, how should we relate to the past?
Benjamin's answer appears in Thesis VI:
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was." For historical materialism it means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
The phrase "the way it really was" comes from the nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke, who claimed that the historian's task was simply to record what actually happened, without judgment or interpretation. Benjamin rejects this entirely. We cannot access the past as a neutral object. The past comes to us charged with meaning, and that meaning changes depending on our present situation.
In moments of danger—and Benjamin was writing in an extremely dangerous moment—certain memories suddenly become urgent. The past is not a museum to be calmly catalogued. It is a resource to be seized, a flame that might illuminate our predicament or burn out forever.
The danger Benjamin identifies is twofold: both the tradition itself (the past that might save us) and we who inherit it are threatened. Threatened by what? By becoming "tools of the ruling class." By conformism. By forgetting what needs to be remembered.
History Versus Historicism
Benjamin draws a sharp distinction between two ways of relating to the past. "Historicism" treats history as a panorama, an eternal picture that can be surveyed from a comfortable distance. The historicist imagines standing outside time, viewing all of history spread out like a landscape.
Benjamin's historical materialist—the genuine kind, not the vulgar kind—has a different relationship to the past. In Thesis XVI, Benjamin writes that while historicism depicts an "eternal picture" of the past, the historical materialist has "an experience with it, which stands alone."
This is not contemplation but encounter. The past is not a painting on a wall but something that happens to you. Each genuine experience of history is unique, unrepeatable, standing alone.
The Messiah and the Repair of the World
Benjamin's close friend Gershom Scholem—one of the twentieth century's greatest scholars of Jewish mysticism—believed that these theses represented Benjamin's final break with Marxism and his return to theology. Scholem argued that after reading the essay, "nothing remains of historical materialism... but the term itself."
Benjamin might have disagreed. From the first thesis, he establishes that dialectical materialism is a "veiled form of theology." This could be a critique—exposing the hidden religious assumptions in supposedly scientific Marxism. Or it could be a rehabilitation—suggesting that some theological dimension is necessary for any philosophy of history worth having.
What's unmistakable is the essay's mystical undertones. The angel's desire to "make whole what has been smashed" echoes the kabbalistic concept of tikkun—the cosmic repair or restoration of a shattered world. In Jewish mystical tradition, divine sparks were scattered at creation and imprisoned in material forms. The task of redemption is to gather these sparks, to heal what was broken.
For Benjamin, this is what genuine historical consciousness might accomplish. Not prediction of the future, as vulgar Marxism attempted, but redemption of the past. Saving what was lost. Remembering what was forgotten. Making whole what history's catastrophes have smashed.
The Circumstances of Composition
Understanding when and where Benjamin wrote these theses illuminates their urgency. In 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had stunned the European left. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union—supposedly irreconcilable enemies—had signed a non-aggression agreement. For Marxists who had seen the Soviet Union as humanity's best hope against fascism, this was a shattering betrayal.
Scholem suggested that Benjamin's cryptic essay emerged partly from this shock. The confident historical materialism that promised fascism's inevitable defeat had been exposed as wishful thinking. A new way of understanding history was needed.
Through the winter of 1939-1940, Benjamin was hiding in Lourdes, France, at his sister's house. With him were Hannah Arendt—who would later become one of the twentieth century's most important political philosophers—and her lover Heinrich Blücher. Together, they read early drafts of Scholem's "Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism," his groundbreaking introduction to the Kabbalah.
Benjamin had been reading about Jewish mysticism with Scholem since 1916. For both of them, "philosophy of history" functioned almost as a code word for Kabbalah. The two disciplines were kindred: both concerned with time, redemption, and the relationship between human action and cosmic significance.
Benjamin had already experienced internment. In 1939, the French government, fearing German nationals as potential spies, had imprisoned him at a camp in Nevers. He was released, but the danger never lifted. Shortly after completing the theses, Arendt herself would be imprisoned at the concentration camp in Gurs during the Fall of France.
These were not abstract meditations. They were written in the shadow of catastrophe, by someone who could see the rubble piling up.
The Afterlife of the Essay
Benjamin explicitly asked that the essay not be published. He mailed a copy to Hannah Arendt, who passed it to Theodor Adorno—another member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Despite Benjamin's wishes, the essay first appeared in a mimeographed booklet titled "Walter Benjamin zum Gedächtnis" (In Memory of Walter Benjamin) after his death.
Benjamin died on September 26, 1940, at Portbou, on the Spanish border. He had fled France with a small group of refugees, crossing the Pyrenees on foot. When Spanish authorities threatened to return them to France—which would have meant capture by the Nazis—Benjamin took an overdose of morphine tablets. He was forty-eight years old.
Hannah Arendt, escaping on a ship organized by the Emergency Rescue Committee, read drafts of Benjamin's essay aloud to fellow refugees fleeing Europe. The words about catastrophe, about the angel watching rubble accumulate, must have resonated with terrible precision.
Scholem's "Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism"—the book Benjamin had been reading as he composed the theses—was dedicated to Benjamin's memory when it appeared in 1942. By then, the systematic extermination of European Jews had entered its industrial phase. The Aktion Reinhard camps began their operations that same year, implementing what the Nazis called the Final Solution.
The essay's first French translation appeared in 1947 in Les Temps Modernes, the journal edited by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. An English translation by Harry Zohn was included in "Illuminations," the collection of Benjamin's essays edited by Arendt in 1968. That collection introduced Benjamin to the English-speaking world.
Arendt herself returned to Benjamin's themes throughout her career. Her 1957 essay "The Concept of History" nodded directly to Benjamin's work, as did her exploration of conformism and its threats. Benjamin's ideas continued thinking through her, as if the conversation they'd begun in Lourdes never ended.
Why This Matters Now
Benjamin's theses resist easy summary because they are not an argument but an intervention. They try to change how you see, not just what you think.
The central insight is this: progress is not real. Or rather, what we call progress—the storm blowing from Paradise—is real, but it is not what it appears to be. From within the storm, we experience movement and change. We tell ourselves a story about improvement, about history bending toward justice. But the angel sees differently. The angel sees accumulating catastrophe.
This is not despair. Benjamin is not saying we should give up. He is saying we should change our orientation. Instead of facing forward and imagining a better future that will redeem the past, we should face backward, toward the past itself. The dead need to be awakened. What was smashed needs to be made whole. The tradition needs to be wrested from conformism, again and again.
For readers of Indian epics like the Mahabharata—with its cycles of time, its sense that the present age is a dark one, its attention to the ways wisdom gets lost and must be recovered—Benjamin's vision may feel surprisingly familiar. The wheel of time does not carry us forward into better days. It turns, and what was forgotten must be remembered, and what was destroyed must be mourned, and the task of making meaning begins again.
Benjamin wrote in a moment when the future looked like it belonged to fascism. The scientific Marxism that promised victory had proved hollow. What remained was not a prediction but a demand: remember. Pay attention to what is being destroyed. Refuse the conformism that makes us instruments of catastrophe. Seize the past in moments of danger, because those moments will not last.
The angel cannot stop the storm. But he can refuse to look away.