The Itinerary of an American Cultural Historian/Interview with Lynn Hunt by Avner Ben-Amos and Moshe Sluhovsky
Résumés
Lynn Hunt est une historienne culturelle de renom qui s’intéresse depuis toujours à la Révolution française. Elle s’est également penchée sur l’épistémologie et la méthodologie historiques. Parmi ses ouvrages, citons : Revolution and Urban Politics in Provincial France (1978) ; Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (1984) ; The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1992) ; The New Cultural History (1989) ; Telling the Truth about History, avec Joyce Appleby et Margaret Jacob (1994) et Beyond the Cultural Turn, édité avec Victoria Bonnell (1999).
Dans cette interview, elle évoque sa longue et fructueuse carrière, depuis ses débuts dans la recherche dans les archives françaises dans les années 1970 jusqu’à son dernier ouvrage, The Revolutionary Self: Social Change and the Making of the Modern Individual, 1770-1800 (2025).
L’interview a été initiée par la Société historique israélienne, à l’occasion de l’invitation de Lynn Hunt à participer à la série de conférences Stern au printemps 2025. Elle a eu lieu le 7 avril 2025, via Zoom.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés :
histoire culturelle, Révolution française, documents visuels, droits de l’homme, épistémologieTexte intégral
1Lynn Hunt is a major cultural historian whose abiding focus has been the French Revolution. She has also engaged with historical epistemology and methodology. Among her books: Revolution and Urban Politics in Provincial France (1978); Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (1984); The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1992); The New Cultural History (1989); Telling the Truth about History, with Joyce Appleby and Margaret Jacob (1994) and Beyond the Cultural Turn, edited with Victoria Bonnell (1999).
2In the current interview she discusses her long and productive career, since she began researching French archives during the 1970s, until her recent book The Revolutionary Self: Social Change and the Making of the Modern Individual, 1770-1800 (2025).
3The interview was initiated by the Israeli Historical Society, on the occasion of Hunt’s invitation to participate in the Stern Lecture Series in Spring 2025. It took place on 7 April 2025, via zoom. A Hebrew version of the interview will be published in Historia, the journal of the Israeli Historical Society. We are grateful to Lynn Hunt and to the Israeli Historical Society for their permission to publish the interview in the Revue d’Histoire Culturelle.
4Avner Ben-Amos and Moshe Sluhovsky
Avner: The aim of this interview is that the readership of this journal would know you better: your trajectory, the books that you published, your main interests, the main influences on your scholarship, to give these readers a sense of the formation of a major historian. But also, your personal attitude towards research and what has shaped it.
Lynn Hunt: Which is especially important for graduate students who, especially at the beginning of their study, think of the authors of books as some luminary, someone far off, who never had a moment of doubt and who never, ever worried about what their dissertation topic should be. They just were like, locomotives, full steam ahead, always. I remember when I was a graduate student having some “big name historian” come to campus and actually seeing a person made it quite different.
Avner: Being an author, it used to be something high up there in the...
Lynn Hunt: Yes, exactly.
Avner: So, the purpose here is also to make you a human being, a historian with doubts. And we should perhaps begin with some biographical information, I know that you were raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, which is not a center of intellectual activity. So, the question is, what made the young Lynn Hunt turn to French history?
Lynn Hunt: Right. There are many reasons why I got interested in French history. First of all, I was first really interested in German history, because my grandfather was an immigrant, actually, from Ukraine. We didn’t call it Ukraine because it was the 1950s and we called it either Russia or the Soviet Union because that’s what we thought of it as being. It was only much later that my sister did some research that we realized that he had come from the German speaking part of Ukraine and left when he was going to be conscripted into the Czar’s army because he left in 1905 at the time of the Russo-Japanese War. And, that now seems so, so far away, but my grandmother was born in the United States. These are my mother’s parents and they lived in St. Paul. My grandmother, though not an immigrant, grew up in a German speaking family on a farm outside of a farming village in western Minnesota. So, both of my maternal grandparents, who were the only grandparents I knew, spoke German as a first language. And therefore, I was first interested in German history. And in fact, I went to graduate school to study the Nazis and how they came to power. And I went to study with a very prominent German historian at the time, Gordon Craig [1913-2005, historian of diplomatic and cultural history of modern Germany], one of whose students was my teacher at Carleton College. But I had also studied French as a second language, alongside German in college, because at first, I was going to be a German major. I was very interested in the German language, and I studied German in high school. But I also took courses in college on French history, especially the French Revolution, and I had that classic charismatic college professor [Carl Weiner] who published no books, published very little, in fact, didn’t have a PhD, but was a charismatic teacher and gave absolutely spellbinding lectures about the French Revolution. All of us still remember his lecture on the fall of Robespierre, for which he brought a sword to class, because his wife was the theatre director at Carleton College, and he would pace back and forth across the stage, pounding his sword on the ground as the rain fell and Robespierre was arrested and tried to kill himself, and then was taken off and guillotined. So, I was interested in the French Revolution, and when I got to graduate school, frankly, I discovered that Gordon Craig, who was a great teacher and a great scholar, was not wildly interested in graduate students. He was also older at the time. He spent a few seconds signing my study list for my first quarter, and I was a little bit up in the air, and the guy who taught French history, Phil Dawson [1928-2010, legal historian of the French Revolution], was an assistant professor, and he was incredibly accessible and available to talk about things. So, it was easy to switch. I switched because I knew I needed more moral support to get through graduate school. It was 1967. It was a very, very difficult time in American history, very exciting, very full of revolution, and the French Revolution just seemed like: why not study a revolution that I considered a good revolution, instead of the bad revolution of the Nazis coming to power? But you know, in my age group, Avner, you’re probably very much aware of this, in my age group, lots of people went on to study the Nazis, and have become very, very good scholars. Many of them became my very good friends. Fewer people went in to study the French Revolution, but some did, and I had a great seminar on the French Revolution with Phil Dawson, which only had something like five people, one of whom was Timothy Tackett [b. 1945, historian of the French Revolution], who became a very prominent French historian, one of whom was James Clifford [b. 1945, anthropologist and a founding father of Cultural Studies], who then became a great writer about the history of anthropology, and one of whom went on to be a professor for a while and then became an IT specialist for history departments. So it was, it turned out to be a great coming together for me, because Tackett and I then became very good friends from that moment forward. I had the kind of cohort and support I needed to go on. And, to go back to St. Paul - it was the home of F. Scott Fitzgerald. And when I was a teenager, I read all the novels of Hemingway, all the novels of Fitzgerald, all the novels of Gertrude Stein and of Ford Maddox Ford. I was a big novel reader, and Paris just loomed large in the writings of all these major American modernist authors. I had never been to Europe when I went to do my dissertation research. So, for me, it was, where am I going to put myself? Paris, or Bonn, which is where you had to go to study Germany at the time.
Avner: To go back to Stanford in the late 60s, that was a very charged moment politically, the demonstrations and the sit ins. So, if I understand you correctly, that was also because of that atmosphere. Actually, two questions. Was it because of that? Did it have something to do with your choice of the French Revolution? And, the other question: did it help you understand better the French Revolution in terms of changing times and a very politically charged atmosphere?
Lynn Hunt: Yes. Being a graduate student in the late 1960s at Stanford, which was the only moment at Stanford where anything exciting politically as far as I can see ever happened in its entire history, but you know when you’re a graduate student, you don’t know these things. I mean, I came there in the fall of 1967 as all the Vietnam War protests were really in absolutely high gear at that moment already. We’d already had them at Carleton, as well as civil rights demonstrations, but Stanford was near Berkeley and San Francisco, it was a real hot point for these kinds of things. But as a graduate student, it’s just your experience, it’s a part of growing up. You don’t really think that other people are having that much of a different experience. It’s just what is happening. And it was just amazing. And it certainly solidified a tendency that was already there to study the French Revolution. But more importantly, it gave me an incredibly important insight, which stuck with me ever since, which was that we had not just demonstrations, but there were a lot of meetings in professors’ houses. And so there would be 20, 30 graduate students and some professors, because they were also anti-war. And the insight I gained from it was that your mind changes much more quickly when you’re with other people discussing a political issue that has a huge emotional kind of resonance to it. So, to me, the key thing about revolution is this sense that when you’re in a group, you come to think things that you would not have developed just on your own. That there’s something about the social interaction, the back and forth between people that changes you individually and changes the group because everybody is individually changing together at the same time. And in some ways, when I look back on it, this is what I have always written about. Over the decades, I have been just interested in how people can change their minds so quickly in certain circumstances, though not necessarily, I suppose, always for the good, but that things happen differently when you’re in conversation.
And this is also true for me about teaching. One of the things I think is a big problem about teaching online is that the bodily interactions don’t happen in the same way as they do in the classroom. Even standing in front of 250 students, which is something I did many times in a Western Civilization class, it made a difference that I was there, speaking to them directly, calling on students, looking at them. They’re looking at me. It’s a kind of a social interaction that leads to different ways of thinking, at least on the part of the professor, I hope on the part of the students as well. I also believe that reading has a kind of social interactive effect that’s extremely important, and that historians have tended not to want to think about or write about it explicitly because it’s so ineffable.
Avner: The next step in your biography was coming to Paris, and this might be interesting for many Israeli students who do research abroad. They might face the same problems that you faced, if you faced, when coming to Paris, a new territory, a new language, a new environment. What was the reception that you got? How did you feel at the beginning, doing research in Paris, in France?
Lynn Hunt: Oh, it was in many ways, awful. I mean, it was a bizarre combination for me of total elation, because the first day I arrived, this was back before there was, needless to say, the internet. You arrived, and there was what was called a bureau d’accueil at the airport, and they got you a hotel room, because you didn’t call in those days abroad, it was way too expensive. and I was assigned to a hotel that seemed in retrospect significant in my life. It was called the Grand Hôtel de Champagne, and it was in the first arrondissement of Paris, so it was basically just across the river from Notre Dame. I had never been to a cathedral. I had seen big churches, but I had never seen a cathedral, and I walked into Notre Dame, and I was absolutely, as the Brits would say, gobsmacked. I was just beside myself. But at the same time, when I had first arrived at the hotel, I was harassed by the bellboy taking my luggage up to my room in this incredibly, not fancy hotel. It was 25 francs a day, five dollars a day in those days, it was September 1970. My French was extremely rudimentary, I’d never been in Europe. The only foreign country I had ever been in was Panama, where I was born and lived until I was two, so I had no experience of foreign countries. And I was alternately kind of incredibly lonely and terrified because I had no idea how I was going to find an apartment. I didn’t know anybody, and I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to navigate my way through the archives, given the rudimentary nature of my French. So, I went back and forth between being incredibly elated and unbelievably depressed. But things worked out bit by bit. In those days, it was really not easy to do research in the archives, because the French in 1970s were not very used to foreigners. If you couldn’t speak French, they didn’t know quite what to do with you. And the usual French thing in those days, if they couldn’t understand what you were saying, was to be not very pleasant. I mean, they would sort of look at you with disdain and sort of be, it would be sort of asking, where are you from? For years, people used to say, are you from Belgium? Is that why you speak French in a sort of slightly strange way?
So, it was very hard at first. On the other hand, it was also staggeringly exciting. I was extremely lucky because I had the name of one person whom I had never met, who turned out to be a lifelong friend [Marion Bieber], an older woman who worked for the Ford Foundation. And I had her name. She had been at Stanford for a year. I hadn’t met her during that year, but a friend knew her and so gave me her name and she invited me over for a drink immediately. And she also invited over another graduate student who was just starting her dissertation, who turned out to be a very good friend, who was, this was so great because here it is, 1970, and this woman was a Cornell University political science graduate student working on North Vietnamese land reform. [Christine Pelzer White, b. 1942, political scientist] So, she was totally involved with the Vietnam War stuff. So, we spent our time going to anti-Vietnam War rallies in Paris. She had been in Paris many times. Her parents had lived there for years and she knew all the Vietnamese restaurants. She had an older woman, who was a very close friend, who sort of took me on and helped me with my French. So, it was a very exciting time because there was so much going on. It was difficult because no one had a telephone. You had to call from a cafe. You had to go into a cafe and get a jeton in order to make a phone call. There was no internet, but all kinds of things were happening, and it was a very exciting time to be there. So, in the end, I had a great time, but I also had moments of being like, “oh, my God, what am I…, what was I thinking?” But in the end, it was incredibly exciting.
In those days, the only way to rent an apartment was to look at the ads in the newspaper Le Figaro. And here is how Christ White and I found our apartment. One day, I met two friends from Stanford who arrived a month or two after I did, and we were walking, we were staying then in an even more ratty hotel in the 13th arrondissement. And the three of us were walking down the Boulevard des Gobelins, looking for a restaurant, we didn’t read books in those days to find restaurants, or look on the internet, needless to say, you went and looked at the menus that were posted outside the restaurant to see if you could afford to go there. So, we’re sitting there looking at this menu and this, what turned out to be Tunisian guy, Habib, comes up to us and says, I hear you talking about Stanford. Are you from Stanford? And he knew a well-known professor at Stanford who worked on Chinese history [Mark Mancall] for some reason. We ended up going out to dinner with Habib, and he turned out to be a political activist. He ended up having a cousin who had an apartment in the 9th arrondissement that he had bought with his workers’ compensation money in France, but could not live in it because the neighbors were so hostile to North Africans. So, he rented us his Paris walk-up apartment on the fifth floor. That was absolutely fantastic. Chris and I had a one bedroom apartment, but you could put beds in two different rooms and it was painted bright orange. And the best piece of cooking ware that it had was a fantastic couscousier because he was a North African. So, I was immediately introduced to Vietnamese restaurants and North African restaurants, which became my favorites, frankly, for the rest of my life. And that’s how things happen in those days because there was no internet. You met people looking at restaurant menus in the street. So, I learned about things I wouldn’t have learned about through these totally chance encounters.
Moshe: You’re talking about being introduced to antiwar activism first in the US and then in France and then being introduced to North African food and being introduced to Vietnamese food. In the early 70s, was there any sense of feminist activism in France at the time you’re describing?
Lynn Hunt: Yes, I mean this was coming, I can’t remember exactly what year this was, but yes, this was of course already happening because of course Simone de Beauvoir was still alive when I was there in 1970 and so was Sartre. And so, they were still very important figures, and Michel Foucault [1926-1984, French philosopher and historian] was emerging. I went to Foucault’s inaugural lecture.
Moshe: I plan to ask you more about it later.
Lynn Hunt: Maoism was very much in the air as a sort of revolutionary thinking and a debate about what was the right revolutionary position. There were the Trotskyites and there was the Communist Party, basically Stalinists, and there was a very important trend associated with Claude Lefort [1924-2010, French philosopher and sociologist who founded the Marxist, anti-Stalinist journal Socialisme ou Barbarie], and various people that thought about kinds of alternative leftism. There were all these competing magazines, and feminism was also part of that mix, although the tension between feminism and leftism was only starting to become apparent. While I was there, of course, I was madly reading all the French novels that I hadn’t read in the past, and also reading all the Simone de Beauvoir, including all the volumes of her memoirs as they were coming out. And it was just incredibly intellectually exciting, I have to say, because so much was going on at the same time. And because we, of course, didn’t have a TV or a telephone we read a huge amount.
Avner: And as for your experience in the archives – I know from my own experience that the first encounter with handwriting is…
Lynn Hunt: Oh GOD.
Avner: Very challenging.
Lynn Hunt: But I was fortunate enough to be working on the late 18th century because actually the handwriting in that period is much more like handwriting today, but as you know, they used all of these abbreviations for dates. So here I was working on the end of the old regime and the revolution, trying to figure out what makes places revolutionary. And there are all these documents with these abbreviations of dates, and I’m worrying about does 9bre mean November, or does it mean September? So I took notes, because of course, there were no computers in those days. I just copied exactly how it was written, because I wasn’t sure about these things. And so, there were these moments with handwriting that were really problematic but you just copied; you just transcribed as much as you could. And of course, the terrible problem in those days was that you weren’t sure what was going to matter in the long run and you sometimes copied the wrong part, which you discovered later. And photocopying was also expensive in 1970 and you were reluctant to do it. So I took notes. I had the advantage of doing a prosopographical study. In other words, I was studying the people who were in office at the beginning of the revolution. And so, I was keeping things on note cards. I had note cards with the name of the person, and then kept my information on these note cards. And of course, in those days one was absolutely crazed about losing a suitcase, so I always carried my notes in a very small suitcase that I carried on board with me when I went back from the archives, I did not put it in luggage. And I had, I still remember that suitcase, it had blue and yellow flowers, and it was a certain size, and I kept it very very close to me at all times, because there were friends of mine, one friend who kept his notes fortunately every night, are you ready? In the refrigerator, when he was writing his dissertation, which was a good thing because they had a fire in his apartment. And the notes survived. And then there was a famous case of, you probably even heard about it, the famous case of [b. 1949, American medievalist] Richard Landes, who had the suitcase with his notes in the trunk of his car in New York City, and his car was stolen. And, and he lost all of his notes.
Avner: That’s awful.
Lynn Hunt: Nowadays you would of course photograph everything so you could go back to it later. That has its own problems that we could talk about. But in those days, it had all to be written down by hand, or, if you had one, on a typewriter, and I had one in my apartment but it was too heavy to carry to the archives. So, I wrote things down by hand in those days.
Moshe: I want to ask a question about this first book that you’re describing now, Revolution and Urban Politics in Provincial France (1978), about the technique of collecting the information for it. I want to go into the content of this book. I think that the book represents an interesting moment, because it is political history of small elites in two French small towns during the revolution.
Lynn Hunt: Yes.
Moshe: But this political history and the way you analyze it is completely social, it’s social history of political elites, if I can call it like this.
Lynn Hunt: Absolutely.
Moshe: And I assume that in a way, one can say maybe it reflects the moment of the transition from traditional political history to new forms of social history. How did you come up with it? Do you agree with my way of describing it and where will you take it from here?
Avner: If I may, it seems to be also a non-Marxist approach, which, if I’m correct, it’s interesting because it’s social history, but it’s not a base/superstructure model.
Lynn Hunt: Right, although it wasn’t exactly anti-Marxist either, because I was very influenced by Marxist thinking in those days and the reason I did it that way was to find out what was the role of the manufacturers in manufacturing towns. I mean, what were the kinds of tensions that would come up in those kinds of towns. So, my plan was to do two towns that were sufficiently similar, that a comparison would work: I wanted to explain why revolution happened in some places and not in others. I did not want to choose towns that were too different socially and economically, expecting that everything would be explained by those obvious differences. So, I ended up picking towns that were relatively similar in size. They weren’t the biggest towns in France, but they were also not the smallest. They were sort of mediumsized manufacturing towns. One was a woolen manufacturing site (Reims) and one was a cotton manufacturing site (Troyes) and I was especially interested in Troyes because it was the sort of place where mechanized cotton manufacturing would eventually take root, but in this period was still in sort of the proto-industrialization stage of manufacturing. I was interested in why did one have a relatively calm revolutionary changeover and why did the other have one of the most violent incidents of the early revolution, in which the mayor of the old regime was killed in a riot. I was interested in why violence in one place and not in the other place. And what was the role of workers? What was the role of manufacturers? So, I wasn’t anti-Marxist, I was just interested in how did that work on the local level. And in those days, it was the heyday of provincial history, of getting away from just doing history of events in Paris and talking about the provinces, because, after all, you don’t have a revolution unless much of the country is involved and not just Paris. So, it was actually great and I also picked Troyes and Reims because they were about an hour train ride from Paris, so I wasn’t going to have to just go to a different part of the country, which for me at the time, since I was by myself, was very important because I was beginning to have friends in Paris. I just didn’t see myself being installed in a provincial town and having to start all over in terms of having people to talk to, having a social support network. Because again, with no internet and no phone, you could feel pretty isolated. So, I could go to Troyes or Reims, especially Troyes. Originally, I would go and stay in a hotel for the better part of a week because I had met a friend of a friend who had been teaching English for a year in Troyes. We overlapped only for a month or two, but we stayed in the same hotel during her time there. So here I am, 26 and single and I’m in this provincial French town, which does not see a lot of foreigners installing themselves in the hotel to do research in the local archives, trust me. There was one other woman staying in this hotel by herself and she was getting divorced. The other people staying in the hotel were traveling salesmen or people working to repair the telephone lines or set up the telephone lines that were going to Troyes. The hotel was run by Pieds noirs [Algerians of European descent who moved to France after Algeria’s independence], so that was super interesting, and it also served dinner. So, I think I went to dinner once and then I realized I just, I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t sit in this room with this kind of bizarre combination entirely of French people, and then there’s me, this 26 year old American who everyone thinks, what is she doing here? But the owners were extremely nice, and so I would stay in that hotel, and instead of dinner I would just, frankly, I would have cheese and cognac in my room, that would be my dinner in my hotel room while I was doing research. But I also commuted. I got a commuter pass, and I could go to either Troyes or Reims, because they were both in the east, and it was like 25 francs. So, it was actually cheaper to go back and forth and stay in my Paris apartment in the end, than to actually go out there and stay in a hotel. So that was great, and I had really great experiences in both of those towns. And I was glad I did it because it gave me a very different sense of France than just staying in Paris.
Avner: So, what was the conclusion of the book?
Lynn Hunt: Okay. I spent actually a very long time because I was so anxious about deciding which two towns to work on, because, originally, I was going to pick Blois and Orleans, but then it turned out all the records in Orleans have been destroyed in World War II. So, I had to pick two towns that actually had records of some kind. So, what I ended up concluding that the violence in Troyes had a lot to do with the nature of cotton manufacturing, because there was a huge crisis after the 1786 free trade treaty with England, which opened France to mechanized spinning products from England. The French thought that they would be able to catch up with this but it had an enormous impact on a place like Troyes. So, just in 1788, ‘89, tens of thousands of textile workers were laid off because there was an overproduction of cotton spinning of cotton thread, and of course, they had no protection whatsoever. So, you had at least 10,000 unemployed workers at the time that the revolution breaks out. So, you have a very, very volatile situation compared to Reims, which had woolen manufacturing, which was not affected by the free trade treaty because wool was not as volatile in its prices and the woolen trade was long established, and everything about it was more stable as an industry than cotton. Ironically, Reims was actually more hierarchical. There were more nobles in Reims, there were more clergy in Reims because it was, of course, the place where the holy oil for the coronation of French kings had been kept for centuries. It was a very different kind of town, whereas in Troyes there was less hierarchy, and, ironically, this made it possible for there to be more violence, because there was a sense that, you know, why are they not solving our problems? It was a very different kind of political atmosphere, and there was much more changeover in Troyes in terms of the revolution. Reims moved more slowly, things moved very quickly in Troyes. So, Troyes was more like Paris, actually, than was Reims. I had a great time doing that. It wasn’t the world’s greatest book. Daniel Roche [1935-2023, French historian of the Enlightenment] wrote a review that was quite correct in saying that I didn’t do enough with culture – which is ironic, given my future work – because at the time I was really interested in sort of the social history of politics, the sociology of politics. And only after that book would I become more interested in culture without losing interest in the social history of politics. I became more interested in the symbolic side in my second book.
Avner: We should move, then, to the second book, this shift from, I would say, from the social to the cultural, although in the second book, the second half, if I’m not mistaken, is also social history or political history, but the first half is cultural, symbolic. What made you do this shift?
Moshe: And I want to interrupt just to point out the title itself, which is Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (1984). So even in the title itself, we have this holy trinity.
Lynn Hunt: Right, exactly. So, two things happened: I did not lose interest in the social history part and I tried to broaden it after I finished the first book to include more cities, more different kinds of cities and the entire revolutionary decade, not just the beginning of the revolution. So, I was still going on doing research on that. But at the same time, while I was doing research in 1976, I saw an exhibition at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris of revolutionary prints. The museum had always had prints, but they now had a special exhibition. And it was the year, I believe it’s the year that Maurice Agulhon’s book on the symbolic figure of Marianne and La République came out. [Maurice Agulhon, 1926-2014, a French historian of modern France]. And I was absolutely, again, I was just like, oh my God, there’s this whole thing about visual representation that I didn’t really know anything about because I’d never had any kind of exposure to it.
In graduate school, I’d done much more on political theory, social theory, and had done nothing on visual representation. So, I went to this exhibit. And this has been true of my career ever since then, that often things happen because I see something in a museum exhibition that just galvanizes me. And so, I just got really interested, starting in 1976, in visual representations and their meanings. I started doing research in particular on the seal of the Republic. How was the Republic going to represent itself? And that got me interested in Hercules, who was represented on the seal, and that of course also fit in with the feminist things that were going on at the time, by which I mean comparing female representation and male representation. What is the difference and what does it have to do with the role of women in this time? I became much more interested in that.
And I was at the same time also very much influenced by being at Berkeley, which was my first academic job. It was a fantastic time to be at Berkeley. As soon as the academic journal Representations was founded, I was part of the original group of Representations. And that included a lot of people in literature and of course, Svetlana Alpers in art history [b. 1936, a specialist in Dutch art]. And so, I had all kinds of reasons to be interested in literary theory, because of Representations, which then fed into my interest in revolutionary rhetoric. Going back to that point, I was interested in what was the role of language. It’s not just that language represents something that is going on. It’s that the speechmaking and the talking and the use of new words was actually changing what people were thinking. So, I became very interested in the issue of language and its effects on people. And that fit in with what was going on in general with the different developments in literary theory and French theory of the time, which was of course also very important. And Foucault, of course, was emphasizing in incredibly pertinent ways the influence of language and systems of classification and how they had an effect on structuring ways of thought. They were not an effect, they had a causal relationship to things at the same time. So, everything was coming together, and being on the board of Representations was an enormous impetus in this. Not so much that I was discussing what I was doing with everybody, but I had a group that was interested in the same kinds of things. Of course, my closest friend at Berkeley was Thomas Laqueur [b. 1945, cultural historian and historian of sexuality]. He was also on the board of Representations, and we were talking about these things endlessly together. We had a fantastic group of friends. Berkeley was an incredibly exciting place to be at the time, even after Natalie Z. Davis [1928-2023, historian of early modern France and one of the founding mothers of history of gender] left for Princeton. There still were enough people around, it was a great place to be thinking through these things. So, I think I was absorbing a lot of different things from France, from my own experiences, and from being at Berkeley at that time, which was absolutely pivotal for me to be there.
Moshe: There was also a moment in which Berkeley produced amazing PhD students in French history, but not only in French history. The old school of Berkeley, I think we can call them in French history, like 40, 50 people.
Lynn Hunt: Right. And of course, I was involved with many of those students in various, in actually quite a lot of different fields. I had students in Chinese history, Jeff Wasserstrom [b. 1961, professor of modern China], Avner I knew from those days, obviously, and Martin Jay’s students, you were a Martin Jay’s student, right, Avner? I knew the Martin Jay’s students [b. 1944, an American intellectual historian of Europe]. I’m still quite good friends with Carolyn Dean [b. 1955, an intellectual historian of modern France] from those days. Martin Jay’s wife, Cathy Gallagher, [b. 1945, a professor of English Literature] was on the board of Representations, so this was our group. And of course, when Susanna Barrows [1944-2010, historian of 19th century France] came in 1981, we became very good friends, and we had a lot of students in common. Most of those students that you’re talking about, Moshe, were actually students of hers, but some of them were students of mine, too. So, it was an incredibly exciting time, but it was also, I must say, it was a very demanding time because I was getting tenure and then I was becoming a full professor, I was working on my own work, there was Representations, we had a lot of graduate students. And to be a good graduate student mentor, you really had to spend quite a lot of time doing that. So, there was a lot of pressure to do a lot of different things at once.
Avner: To continue – not only with Berkeley, but also with the cultural history project – you edited at that time, what was, I think, the first important collection of articles on cultural history, The New Cultural History (1989). We should talk about this project and the one you edited 10 years later, Beyond the Cultural Turn (1999). So, first, this collection on new cultural history, how would you define the new vs. the old cultural history? What was so important about the new cultural history that made you publish this edited volume?
Lynn Hunt: Yes, I thought there was a room for such a volume because, especially for graduate students, but even for young professors, there was a lot of uncertainty about how all these things work. For example, it wasn’t possible for graduate students to just keep up with everything that was going on in French Theory and exactly how it was going to influence the writing of history itself. So, I felt that it would be helpful to bring together a sort of discussion of what were the various strands coming together from anthropology, from literary theory, not necessarily from French Theory in some very broad way, but certainly Foucault. How all these things were coming together, and how they actually are going to impact what historians actually did. Well, there’s sort of a division in this volume. There are the articles that are about the influences, and then the articles about how this actually works out. So, for example, Tom Laqueur had a wonderful article on the treatment of the dead and humanitarianism which then led into a very important book later on. And Mary Ryan [b. 1945; historian of 19th century U.S. gender and culture] had a piece on parades in American history. So, it was just to show the variety of different things that people could do, given these influences and it didn’t mean that everybody had exactly the same influences upon them. That, you know, Dominic La Capra [b.1939, an intellectual historian with an interest in historians’ narratives] would represent one kind of way of doing things. Hayden White would represent another way of doing things. [1928-2018, an intellectual historian with an interest in historians’ narratives], Natalie Z. Davis would be doing things one way and Edward P. Thompson [1924-1993, a British social historian] was doing things another way… and they were each influential in different ways and the collection was a way of trying to show how it all worked together, so that students would not feel like, where do I go? How do I even get started thinking about this new thing called New Cultural History? It was confusing because there were so many different things going on at the same time. And calling it the New Cultural History was just to sort of say, well, it’s not the way people thought of cultural history in the style of Johan Huizinga [1872-1945, a Dutch historian of early modern Europe] or Jacob Burkhardt [1818-1897, a Swiss historian of the Renaissance] or even Carl Schorske [1915-2015, an American intellectual and cultural historian of modern Europe] or Martin Jay, where it was more related to intellectual history. And this was going to be cultural history that was more related, let’s say, to social history than to intellectual history, per se. Dominic La Capra obviously does intellectual history and so did Hayden White but of a certain kind. So, the collection tried to not say something like the New Cultural History is exactly this or that, but to say what are the influences and what are the possibilities.
Avner: Just to finish this sequence of cultural history. I had the impression that the next volume, 10 years later, was a kind of a statement that cultural history might have gone too far, perhaps, in terms of relativism or postmodernism and we have to return a little bit back to the social, the empirical reality. Is that true?
Lynn Hunt: Yes, of course, because that volume was done jointly with my friend Victoria Bonnell [b. 1942], who was in the sociology department but actually she did both history and sociology of Russia. She was a Russia specialist. So yes, I think that was a volume that was trying to say, well, okay, then now there’s a certain amount of dissatisfaction out there with cultural history as being too vague, as being just looking at interesting things for the sake of looking at interesting things. It’s too much micro history oriented. They’ve lost sight of the broader social and political theory kinds of questions that people used to pay attention to. I’m not sure how successful the volume was in making that point because I think it’s always more successful to talk about something entirely positive. So, The New Cultural History was much more a celebratory volume and Beyond the Cultural Turn was much more a kind of cautionary volume, but I think what it really registered was that cultural history was to some extent becoming part of the establishment and to some extent petering out. I mean, I think it was a combination of things in which there were going to be new interesting things coming up after that, which is why then there was much talk about, for example, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s volume on Provincializing Europe (2000) [an Indian historian, a leading member of the Subaltern Studies school], I think that helped galvanize an interest more in global history than in national history. Sort of getting away from the focus on Europe. Beyond the Cultural Turn, I thought had some very, very interesting essays in it. But I think it marked a kind of turning point more than a kind of opening up of a new perspective, because I don’t think there was a return to an interest in social theory exactly. The social theory interest appeared much more in the transnational, global turn of someone like Kenneth Pomeranz, whose book The Great Divergence (2000) [b. 1958, an American economic historian], was an attempt to talk about broader theoretical questions, while bringing in a transnational perspective to do it, which is very different from cultural history.
By then I felt sort of a need to defend cultural history, to a certain extent, against the global turn, because at the beginning, the global turn was very much occupied with broad data sets and big comparisons and total falling away of interest in women and cultural issues. I don’t think that’s true anymore. But I think there was a certain amount of that at the very beginning.
Moshe: There was this moment, maybe partly because that’s a moment when I went to graduate school, and therefore that’s the moment that shaped me, but beyond that, I think, this moment has its own revolutionary potential. Because if I look back at the new cultural history, let’s say in the late 1980s, one of the things that came across very clearly is a fragmentation. And you even, I think, say it in the introduction. There used to be Marxism, there used to be the Annales School as great unifying explanatory modes. Now we are totally fragmented, and there are all kinds of new names and influences and approaches appearing there. There is anthropology, and there is Gareth Stedman-Jones [b. 1942 – a Marxist British historian] and his interest in language, and there is E.P. Thompson, and there is Michel Foucault. And each article takes its influence from another place, and you show this immense new wealth and possibilities that really open up. And I think you’re right to point out that we’ve seen that in a little over a decade – histories of representations took over or overshadowed the other possibilities that were there during the ‘90s. And that’s the way I read the second collection, Beyond the Cultural Turn. As if you are basically asking: can culture or can representations in and of themselves play a role of causalities in history, if we look outside of a specific socio-political context? And I think the answer you give implicitly is “obviously, they cannot.” So, I think that the first collection represents an early realization that something refreshing is happening, and it’s dramatic, but the second volume represents the early realization, soon afterwards, that maybe it’s not enough, or maybe we have to fine-tune it. Together, both collections frame a decade that really was a decade of immense excitement. And I want to mention a guy whose name has already come up, and he appears in the New Cultural History often, and you’ve written about him, which is Michel Foucault. You mentioned that you went to his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France when he just arrived, 1970, and he appears and disappears from your writings, but he’s always there even when he is not there. And I would like you to say more about what you think of him, of his influence, about Foucault as an 18th century historian, or as a philosopher of the Enlightenment, take it wherever you want.
5Lynn Hunt: Right. Well, you know, of course, that Foucault was already looming large for me when I was first doing my research in Paris. But then, this became more so the case when I was at Berkeley, because on the board of Representations also was Paul Rabinow [1944-2021, an American anthropologist of North Africa], who became one of the major interpreters of Foucault, and who also, along with Hubert Dreyfus [1929-2017, an American philosopher] was responsible for bringing Foucault to Berkeley. I don’t think I went to any of his lectures at Berkeley because they were attended by something like 500 people. I mean, it was just this sort of mob scene that went on when Foucault came to Berkeley. For myself I found Foucault extremely interesting. And he raised incredibly important questions. But, in the end, I ended up being a little dissatisfied with the sense that I felt that for him – many people have talked about this – everything was so determined by these huge epistemic shifts that you didn’t have much sense of what people could actually do themselves. I think he changed his mind about it towards the end of his life, which was unfortunately cut short because he was obviously an incredibly, incredibly interesting and influential figure for all of us, because he just raised incredibly important questions that fit with the time in which we were all struggling with how much we had been shaped by the social forces around us that restrict us to think the way that we thought, and how could we ever think differently. Part of what went on in the ‘60s was an attempt to break out of that. People have different reactions to how successful that was. I thought it was incredibly successful in the sense of getting people to think in new ways permanently. And these are still, as we certainly know right now, are still being contested, the new ways of thinking. Foucault never really talked about women, he never talked about slavery, he never talked about things that are on people’s minds and are certainly more on people’s minds even today, but he showed ways of thinking that were so new, it’s hard to describe. It was kind of stunning to read him in the beginning because you were kind of like, oh my God, yes, of course, that is the way these things actually work. I mean, think of the influence of the book of Edward Said [1935-2003, a Palestinian-American literary critic] on Orientalism (1978), which is very much written under the influence of Foucault, although it’s about something very different from what Foucault talked about. I actually think that it is not a very great book, but it makes such an important point that it has had an enormous influence, but it’s had an influence because he took Foucault seriously. I don’t think he was right about many of the things that he said, but it started a whole conversation that’s incredibly important. So again, Berkeley was very instrumental and we talked about Foucault. I was very lucky because I was not just in Representations, but through Victoria Bunnell, I got to know people who are very important in sociology. Neil Smelser [1930-2017], who was one of the great sociologists of his time, and Reinhardt Bendix [1916-1991] who was one of the great political scientists of his time. Smelser organized a reading group of younger faculty, basically to talk about things like Foucault, to talk about the latest things in social theory. And we would meet in the faculty club, we would have dinner, and we would have a discussion of a book, and one of the books we discussed, I remember, was Foucault’s. And it was really interesting to talk about somebody like Foucault with someone like Smelser, who was a student of Talcott Parsons [1902-1979, an American sociologist], who represented the sort of classic trends in social theory of the mid-20th century. So I was very lucky to be in a place like Berkeley, talking to people who were these big deal older figures in their field.
Avner: Going back to the French Revolution, I think that it was at that period that you published The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1992), which is also quite, I would say, daring for its time. Maybe even now – this combination of psychoanalysis, anthropology, visual analysis, and gender studies. Would you say something about it, especially the psychoanalytical stuff? I think historians are usually reluctant to use these kinds of theories.
Lynn Hunt: Indeed, they are. It’s sort of interesting. Historians are always writing about individuals doing things in the historical record, but there is a kind of reluctance to talk about psychology at all for the fear that it will either be too universalistic or too particular. And therefore historians have always been very, very nervous about Freud. And again, being at Berkeley taught me that instead of wanting to follow Freud in some kind of orthodox fashion, you could read him as an important social thinker of his time and use him to raise important issues about what is the relationship between the individual and society, and how does that work. Because I was interested from the very beginning in how people’s minds change when they’re in a group, not just in the broader society, but when you’re in a room with 20 people, you’re discussing politics, and you come to think things that you didn’t think you would think ever because of these interactions. Well, this obviously has some psychological component, something is going on in the mind. So I was always interested in that, and what I discovered again at Berkeley was that there were literary theorists who were very interested in psychoanalysis. And so, I wanted to read in that area. And I did feel that the gender question in the French Revolution could be put in a more interesting and broader light if you thought in these broader terms about what Freud had called the family romance [Children’s fantasies that they are the children of parents of higher social standing than their actual parents]. And I still think that’s true. As you know, I got some testy reviews from very, very good historians who were horrified at the idea of using terms like the collective unconscious. But I think you can’t really explain, for example, some of the things that are happening in this country [USA], without taking into account the incredible psychological elements of these events. I mean, you have to ask yourself about the psychology of the man I consider a madman [President Donald Trump] who wants to be king of the country. But it’s also that, psychologically, you have to ask: what is it doing to people to create this level of upheaval? And what is going to be the consequence of creating this level of upheaval? So, in something like the French Revolution, it seems to me inconceivable that there aren’t all kinds of important psychological things going on in a period of upheaval like that. So, for me, the Family Romance was a way of bringing together some insights from Freud without being Freudian in some orthodox sense, but also incorporating evidence from art history that you could mobilize to talk about how people could express things that are going on unconsciously in visual forms when they couldn’t articulate it verbally, and I’m still very interested in that, how the visual can express things without it being the intention of the maker, and without people really understanding exactly what is happening. So, again, it goes back to that original interest and what happens to people to change their mind so quickly.
Moshe: And it’s not really only the unconscious because as you show so nicely in this book, they articulate it for us, they articulate it themselves. The pornography against the queen, the hatred of Marie Antoinette, the use of the term fraternity in and of itself tells us we have to think of it as a family romance.
Lynn Hunt: Exactly. As for the idea of fraternity, I really think the evidence is pretty overwhelming that there is unconsciously some effort to think of how can we articulate for ourselves what it is we’re doing here, if we’re going to get rid of the king. And what is a republic. It’s interesting because in the United States, at the same quarter century, things went in a slightly different direction. Instead of it being the Founding Brothers it was the Founding Fathers for the United States, that’s very interesting. It shows in some ways how the Americans wanted to keep this under control. Unlike the amount the French revolutionaries wrote about Fraternity, the Americans didn’t go out of their way to talk about founding fathers and I’m not even sure that the revolutionary generation actually talked about founding fathers. But there’s a very different sense, there’s a very different family romance going on there.
Moshe: They are giving birth to their own fathers because they did kill the father, they killed the father in England, and they’re taking themselves and making themselves their own fathers, they are fathering themselves.
Lynn Hunt: Yes, they are fathering themselves but I don’t think they actually kill the father in the unconscious of the Americans. They get independence from him, they declare their independence, they go their own way, they don’t need to annihilate the previous family. Whereas the French have to. The big thing with the French is why they have to kill the queen. I mean, she has no power. So, it’s clear, there’s something going on there.
Avner: Let us go back to more historiographical questions. In 1994, you published, with Margaret Jacob [b. 1943 – an American historian of early modern science] and Joyce Appleby [1929-2016, an American historian of political thought], a kind of a historiographical reflection, Telling the Truth about History. As with the edited books we have discussed, I had the impression that you try to find a middle way, so to speak, between being postmodernist on one hand, and a positivist, on the other hand, and you advance the notions of practical realism and pragmatism. Could you explain what it’s all about? What is your position?
Lynn Hunt: Right, I think that’s a perfectly fair and accurate characterization to say that I was looking for a middle way. That is to say that I have always tried to be as open as possible to new perspectives that are being introduced. And this included the interest in French Theory, which I read in extensively. But on the other hand, I agreed, and this was certainly the perspective also of Appleby and Jacob, that there was at that specific moment an issue, an anxiety that maybe history isn’t worth doing because it’s all just discourse within a given power setting of a given time. It has no independent standing, and there isn’t actually any truth in history at all. And that was a position I didn’t want to take, so it was a question of working it out. We wanted to talk about both what was really positive about all the new developments that had happened and why these theoretical issues were important to think about, and it was important to us especially because historians tend to write history without thinking much about what its status is epistemologically or philosophically. So, we wanted to talk about what the status was epistemologically and philosophically, but we did want to be able to say, okay, it’s true that every generation rewrites history. Does that mean it’s just the opinion of that generation? No, because there are documents we refer to and we make statements that people can check against the documents themselves. So, the truth may be provisional, we may expand what we think matters, we may think other documents need to be consulted, we may think the focus needs to change. That doesn’t mean that it’s just opinion. It’s the best we can do, and knowing that the people who come after us will have a different view. What I don’t like is the sort of rather smug view that, oh, now we can say history’s over. I don’t care for that. There has to be a reason, which I think is actually built into us, about why people read history, why people study history. It has partly to do with our own identities depending on our narratives about ourselves. And if you believe that there should be such thing as states, then nations need to have narratives about who they are. And they’re very important for thinking about the future direction of the state in which you live. History is incredibly important for that.
What we’re seeing now is an incredible reaction against that, especially in the United States, about telling the truth about what happened in the past. There are states within the United States that are basically prohibiting the discussion of slavery, which is insane, frankly.
This is insane because it’s not going to do any good to pretend that things didn’t happen in the past. It doesn’t mean that history is just horrible, an admission that we’ve got this terrible past, and our country is just a horrible place. I mean, what future is there in that approach? So there is tension here. There has to be, in that sense, a middle way between admitting to the things that are bad that have happened in the past, but also seeing things that were good that happened in the past that you can build on for the future. Let’s take, for example, most notoriously, the case of Native American history, which was for so long ignored, and it’s extremely important that it be told. But [do the past atrocities that were committed mean that] we then are to conclude that there should be no United States, because it’s all built on the land confiscated from the Indians? Well, that’s probably not a viable option.
Moshe: You wrote Telling the Truth about History really at an important moment, because I think you redrew the map, and it was extremely important. I was teaching it, and I’ve been teaching it ever since. And then you came back to these matters in History: Why it Matters, of 2018, and it was already the beginning of the age, not just of different or wrong or competing interpretations, but of fakeness, of lies, of fake news. Seven years later, it feels like fake news have taken over, and now with AI things could only get worse. What would be the means to claim that a document is original when, a few years from now, people would be able to reproduce or write ancient documents and fake them the way that the papacy did during the Middle Ages? We will very likely lose the ability to even have the tools to judge what is original and what is fake. When we have the regime itself saying to its own people that you have your facts but we have alternative facts or alternative truths, as Trump’s spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway said explicitly 8 years ago, where does it all take us? You said that history is a defense against tyranny, which was a wonderful thing to say back in 2018. But history can also serve tyranny, can be in the service of tyranny.
Lynn Hunt: Well, it can only be in the service of tyranny if there’s no one around to point out the lies. So, what AI does, I think, is show that we really need people who know how to determine what is fake from what is not fake. And so, for example, the example you’re giving, the AI will be able to make up documents from, let’s say, the 12th century, but those who know the 12th century will know that it is made up. So, for example, AI, I just put into my Google browser some question about somebody I’m working on, you know, tell me about Robespierre, and then I can tell immediately from it what is wrong with what AI is presenting and what is right about what it’s presenting. And similarly, for what goes on with the U.S. administration, who’s in power, that’s why journalism is so important. That’s why in my lectures I talked about the first thing Napoleon does is try to limit the press, get control of the press. But he has to have the press. He can’t get rid of it entirely. And that’s why Trump is suing all the news organizations that he doesn’t like – because he wants them to tell the news that he wants to be told. This will be resisted and there will be, no matter what happens, there will be journalists who will be able to publish things that point out what is wrong. There’s a bigger problem in places like China, where there is much more government control over all of the internet. So that’s much more worrisome, but I feel certain there are many, many, many people in China who are spending their time trying to figure out what is true and what is not true. So, this is why historians are, if anything, more important now than ever, precisely because people are trying to use history to make their points, and therefore, people need to say “that’s not true”. And nothing good will come of ignoring the truth in the end.
Avner: This brings us back to the question of human rights. I think you were one of the first to talk about it in historical terms. You first published a collection of documents about human rights in 1996, and then in 2007, you published the book Inventing Human Rights: A History. What made you turn, or maybe it’s not such a big jump, from the French Revolution to the history of human rights?
Lynn Hunt: Yeah, it’s a good question. I remember the moment but I don’t actually remember exactly what impelled me in this direction. I was approached to edit a collection of documents in a series at Bedford that specializes in collection of primary sources. The suggestion was that I write about the very important pamphlet by the Abbé Sieyès [1748-1836, an Enlightenment philosopher] What is the Third Estate? a document that was published in 1789 just before the French Revolution. And I think it was because I had been working on women in the revolution, and this had also brought me in touch with the question of what’s called the emancipation of the Jews, Jewish rights, and of course, slavery. The latter was beginning to be something that was on people’s minds. So, I said at the time no to editing What is the Third Estate? and instead I suggested to do a collection on rights during the revolution. And that’s what got me interested in the whole human rights question altogether because the more I looked into it the more I was intrigued: why is it that in the French case you have this interesting process? They’re having a meeting and the question is who’s going to have the right to vote, and the minute they say, for example, what is the rationale for not letting actors vote or what is the rationale for not letting executioners vote or what is the rationale for not letting Protestants vote, the minute such issues get raised, there starts to be this idea of a universal right.
Even the question of women’s right to vote comes up, and certainly the question of free black men comes up because they are free, and therefore are called free blacks. So if they’re free, why would they not vote? At the same time this, then, pushes on to the question of slavery itself, how can this be a possibility. So, I got very interested in, again, how it is that you have a certain kind of conversation and the conversation takes place, the debate takes place, and then other things come up ineluctably, so people change their minds about this or that, and they find themselves giving up what had been centuries of prejudice to move in a different direction, very quickly. I got interested in what makes it possible? And why is this happening at the end of the 18th century? Why is abolitionism happening at the end of the 18th century? There’s been a lot written about that. But I wanted to see it in a broader context of why do all these things come up when they did. So, it was a document collection that got me going. I didn’t know I was going to do something on human rights but then I decided to do the book. But it’s not that I was such a pioneer. For some reason, at that time other people were starting to write about this. And my book just happened to come out early enough that people were like, oh, that’s interesting. And it got a lot of attention because, as you know perfectly well, I made an argument that people didn’t expect to be made about novels and novel reading. I argued that reading novels about servants and ordinary girls created through the narrative process a broader sense of empathy with people not like yourself. And that sense of identification across class and eventually race and gender boundaries, made the notion of human rights imaginable where it was inconceivable before. But again, you see that the empathy question follows just from the thing I talked about that I had been interested already in 1970, which is, what is it about interaction that gets people to feel differently? That’s why I ended my lectures on Napoleon with Madame de Staël [1766-1817, A French writer and philosopher], because she actually wrote about how literature can change people. And people at the time did know that these things were having impact because I did manage to find a quote from Diderot, for example, about how these things have an effect on you. But the social effects of literature are something again that historians tend not to talk about.
Moshe: I think that the use of the term empathy is one of many jewels in this book because it takes us in a direction that we historians don’t tend to go and it also makes a claim that such basic affect or emotion as empathy has a history. This, in turn, opens a whole new field of what does it mean? Is empathy a psychological condition? Is it culture? Is it nature? It goes back to the big, big questions of what kinds of things change our human nature, how human nature changes over time. And I can also see the connection directly from this book about human rights and empathy to your very recent one The Revolutionary Self: Social Change and the Emergence of the Modern Individual, 1770-1800, (2025).
But another crucial thing that you present in this book is the Hutzpah, the arrogance of these philosophers. They are inventing universal rights, and at the very same moment they’re already claiming that these rights are self-evident. Which brings up the question where does this self-confidence come from? How dare they?
Lynn Hunt: Well, that’s what I was interested in. It had to be self-evident because they were making a claim in a particular historical moment for something being universal. And that’s what piqued my interest. How could a particular moment produce a universal claim like this? And I’m not sure I solved that to everybody’s satisfaction, but I think the virtue of the book was to raise the question. And also, I think, it’s been fascinating for me to see that, for example, to speak now of present day politics, Elon Musk is officially on record as being anti-empathy. He’s saying that empathy is what leads to the system of social security benefits. Empathy is what leads to universal health care. And these are the things that he and people like him don’t like. So, he’s been quite clear on this, that he is anti-empathy, as an argument. And I find this very interesting. I think in part for him and also for Trump, the problem is that they actually do not have social feelings in the same way as other people do.
Avner: And is it true that we can draw a direct line between the human rights book and the revolutionary-self book? Is there a connection?
Lynn Hunt: Well, the connection is the same one from much earlier, which is that social change means that individual minds have to change. But how do individual minds change? In my view, they change in social interactions. So, it’s a back and forth. The most recent book is, then, about the tension between the self and the social and the difficulty we have in figuring out what is the self and what is the social because they are tremendously interwoven. But the thing in the end that I found unsatisfying about Foucault or even French Theory more generally, is that it doesn’t explain how individual minds can change. And I’m interested in that, how individual minds can change in such ways that will actually create a broader social change. So, I’m trying to emphasize in the latest book, that this change has to take place inside an individual mind. Even though we can’t get at it very well now. The only individual mind that we have very much information about at all in the 18th century, who’s a real person, is Rousseau. But other than Rousseau, the most information that we have about individual minds in the 18th century, comes from novels, where writers try to imagine what goes on in an individual mind, because most people were very reluctant to expose themselves. There are some examples, but for the most part people are reluctant to talk about what goes on in their own mind, and they were certainly absolutely riveted by, and horrified in some cases by Rousseau that he talked about things that people would not talk about. He actually talked about things that people still would not talk about. But this, to me it’s just cannot be accidental that there is a Rousseau at the end of the 18th century, it has to do with the things that were going on at the time.
Avner: And talking about the individual, I think the next step, at least for you, if I understand it correctly, is going into what you call neurohistory, which is based on a biological concept of the mind. Would you tell us something about what do you mean by doing neurohistory? What does it all amount to? I mean, how does it relate to psychoanalysis, if at all? Because it seems to me you are interested in psychology, but from different angles.
Lynn Hunt: Yes, well, I have always been interested in psychology. But as you say correctly, from different angles. I don’t think I find a solution in psychology, but I feel that, as a historian, if I want to talk about individual minds, I should at least familiarize myself with some of the literature about what people think about individual minds. What is striking about most of the neuroscience, or psychology that’s oriented toward neuroscience, is that it tends to basically say that the self is socially constructed, which I think is not good enough. But that’s why the people that have interested me are people like Antonio Damasio [b. 1944- A Portuguese neuroscientist], who are interested in how is it that the self can act as an agent, and people like him have been very important in showing that people actually cannot act in the world if they don’t have a narrative sense of their self as having some continuity. If you don’t have that sense of continuity you are defined as actually a sick person because you can’t relate to the social world in a way that makes your own life one of thriving and development. So, where these things come together for me is that neuroscience intersects with psychoanalysis. Freud has three basic elements of the self which I think are correct. There is an Ego which is the ability to act as an agent. There is the Id, that is the unconscious, there’s all kinds of unconscious things going on. Neuroscience definitely shows that most of what goes on in the mind is unconscious to us. And this is so because it’s the brain and the body interacting with each other. And third what he called the Super Ego is to me simply a way of saying that somehow this ego and unconscious are able to relate to the social world and the super ego is this relationship to the social world. So, in that sense I think Freud was fundamentally right in saying that there are unconscious things going on. There are also conscious things that allow us to act, and there is the moral dimension, the thing that makes us able to relate to the social world.
My most recent book makes no theoretical pronouncements at all about this but says that people are able to act in the world in new ways in the period of the last part of the 18th century, in large part, because of the French Revolution, but not just. I also want to emphasize new habits of consumption, which changed the way people relate to the world. These are social, but they are internalized, and we have to pay attention to the internalization, even though we can’t describe it with any detail, because people do not talk about how they felt about drinking tea at a table. For the most part, we only have visual representations of it. People did not understand what their everyday gestures actually meant just as they don’t today. They aren’t sitting around thinking about it. But I’m interested in that because, again, I’m interested in how it is that minds can change, not how they remain the same.
Moshe: Neurohistory addresses universal processes that take place within the mind or in the mind-body-society context. This theoretical or scientific approach then is about being human in the most universal sense. How can we historicize this very general neuropsychological structure of operating within the world? And how do we connect it to another interest of yours, namely global history?
Lynn Hunt: Well, let me talk a little bit about the global part first. For example, in my field of the French Revolution for much of its history, up until the last 15 years or so, especially in France itself, the history of the French Revolution was written entirely in terms of what happened in metropolitan France. And writing the global history of the French Revolution completely transformed the field. Historians who asked about the causes of the revolution talked about the problems of financing the state. But they didn’t talk about the global competition that caused the problems of financing the state. Nowadays you could not ignore the global competition as part of the financial history of the revolution. And of course one cannot ignore slavery and how it was involved in the French Revolution. The colonial history of France used to be a separate topic in France while French history was only about the metropole. And now there’s much more of an attempt to bring these things together. It hasn’t totally happened yet but there’s much more of an attempt to pay attention to that. I am totally in favor of thinking in these more global terms, but I’m much more interested in how the global can help us explain better the French Revolution rather than just talking only about global processes in very broad terms. I will give you an example from The Revolutionary Self. The reason I have a chapter on tea, consumption, and civilization is that the Scottish writings about civilization is an important part of the ability, that developed later, to think about social science in general. Talking in the late 18th century about civilization was a way of talking about society in a very specific way and using comparative global histories to do this. And I argue that thinking about civilizations was the first step towards theorizing society. And interestingly, it foregrounds women and attitudes toward women in different civilizations. So, women should not be left out of this story. And I want to argue in that chapter that one of the reason women become more important in social thinking is because in the British case, tea changes the way women relate to their social space in ways that no one really understands at the time, because, again, we don’t understand our everyday gestures. So, I argue that the global context is important because patterns of consumption of Chinese tea and Chinese porcelain and how they come into the western world and the effects that they have that no one sees coming. People were worried about tea and how this changes our habits. But it also changes our way of theorizing the social, which becomes a western preoccupation.
One of the interesting issues now is, is social science western or can it be global? Is it inherently Eurocentric? Similarly, people are talking about history in that way. Is history inherently Eurocentric because the Europeans established it as a discipline which is now spread across the world, or is it now global? These are interesting issues. Where I part company with some of the theorists is when they want to argue that history is finished for this reason, that it was Eurocentric to start with and therefore is meaningless now. Or it’s meaningless now because of climate change and we’re going to face catastrophe and then history is not going to matter. I don’t think we have reached that point. I do believe in climate change. I’d be the first to say this, and I do think it’s important now that there are studies of the environment. And, as you know, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie [1929-2023, a French historian of early modern France] was talking about climate change decades ago.
Moshe: 60 years ago, yes.
Lynn Hunt: Decades ago. So, historians have a role to play in this. There’s no question about it. I mean, one of the ways that we know about climate change is through the study of tree rings, which historians have been talking about for a long time, and historians of the 17th century have been talking about the little ice age, and then what comes after it and what happens when the temperatures go up. We know that industrialization was in fact made possible by the agricultural increases that were made possible by the increase in temperatures and now the question is what’s going to happen next. So, for me, the role of history remains absolutely crucial in all of these areas. I’m usually incredibly receptive to new developments like the globalization of historical thinking, the kinds of questions that have been raised about it. But in the end, I stick with my belief that history remains important, even as it changes. And if anything, it’s going to be more important, (whether there’ll be universities to teach it is another question…)
Moshe: I assume that’s an extremely scary and pessimistic question and not sure it is the right moment to stop.
Avner: There’s so much talk about the crisis of the humanities, in the United States and in Israel and Europe. It’s everywhere, and we have to fight back somehow.
Lynn Hunt: Exactly. I mean we may lose all kinds of funding for all kinds of things, and we may not have as many positions but there still will be historians. I mean this is a topic for a longer conversation, but it may be that we reached some kind of high point in the recognition of the importance of the Humanities 15 years ago, 20 years ago and we may be entering a different kind of era, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not going to continue to be important. It may mean that we have to adjust the way we do things, but we’re adjusting the way we do things anyway because of the internet so we will work it out together.
Avner and Moshe: Before we end this fascinating exchange, let us add two questions relating to the series of lectures you just delivered for the Historical Society of Israel. Why did you choose Napoleon Bonaparte as the topic of these lectures? You are not known to be a biographer. In fact, social and cultural processes, rather than personalities, seem to be the agents of historical change in your analyses. And two: can you elaborate a bit about what comes across vividly in your lectures: a connection among Napoleon, authoritarianism, and modernity?
Lynn Hunt: The rise of Napoleon Bonaparte to power and his invention of the playbook of modern authoritarianism is a perfect example, for me, of how individual agency and the role of social forces come together. He did not have a well-articulated plan for how to take power, much less exercise it. The structural weaknesses of the Directory government created an opening, and though other candidates were available, Bonaparte seized the moment, despite nearly botching the coup itself. So social forces prepared the way, but someone had to grasp that opportunity and make the most of it. This back and forth between social forces and individual agency continued throughout Napoleon’s reign.
I was interested in the very first years because no one saw that authoritarianism would be the outcome. The coup plotters wanted to rewrite the constitution and install a property-oriented republic that would guarantee social order and push aside popular pressures, expressed, in particular, through elections. They thought the general would get the Directorial councils to abdicate and then allow them to produce a constitution and hold key posts. Instead, Bonaparte maneuvered adroitly to gain preeminent authority for himself which he then expanded step by step, getting his collaborators to accede each time in exchange for positions and money. He could have been stopped at any point but only by concerted action from those who brought him to power in the first place. They had installed a regime with no real elections and ineffective parliamentary bodies. Bonaparte was accountable to no one, except to a vague sense of public opinion. Over time Bonaparte made resistance unlikely by muzzling the press, expanding the surveillance powers of the police, and removing even mild critics from their positions. He carefully weighed what was possible and what was not, trying out his ideas with his entourage, and moving only when the time seemed right. Thus, social forces made authoritarianism possible but not inevitable.
6Avner and Moshe: It sounds, unfortunately, as if you are talking of the very present time in your country and ours. Thank you so much.
Pour citer cet article
Référence électronique
Lynn Hunt, Avner Ben-Amos et Moshe Sluhovsky, « The Itinerary of an American Cultural Historian/Interview with Lynn Hunt by Avner Ben-Amos and Moshe Sluhovsky », Revue d’histoire culturelle [En ligne], 11 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2025, consulté le 10 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rhc/17224 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15fde
Haut de pageDroits d’auteur
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.
Haut de page


