MICHAEL DAVID-FOX: The Crisis of the Human Sciences and Lessons of the Past

Summary

A New Crisis of the Human Sciences

Michael David-Fox argues that the human sciences face a crisis distinct from the long-running “crisis of the humanities.” This is not simply a loss of prestige, funding, or authority. It is a more far-reaching challenge shaped by a volatile international order, rising authoritarianism, war, economic austerity, climate change, digital culture, and AI.

He points to two recent ruptures: Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Donald Trump’s second inauguration in 2025. Together with other developments, these signal a breakdown of the postwar international order and worsening transatlantic relations. David-Fox says authoritarian governments often target scholars in the humanities and social sciences because their work can foster critical thought and dissent. However, the broader assault on higher education extends to all academic fields.

The crisis also has internal causes. David-Fox notes that some disciplines have become difficult for outsiders—even other academics—to engage with, while certain forms of scholarship can seem detached from wider public concerns. He cautions, however, that greater support for education alone cannot prevent authoritarianism: highly educated people have also served authoritarian regimes. Empathy and ethics matter alongside knowledge.

Digital Culture and Changing Forms of Politics

David-Fox draws on cognitive neuroscientist and former literature scholar Maryanne Wolf’s work on reading. Wolf argues that reading is relatively recent in human history, and that the brain’s reading circuits adapt to the media people use. A shift from sustained reading to rapid snippets on screens may weaken deep reading, including its capacity to support reflection, critical analysis, and empathy. Her proposed response is to cultivate a “biliterate” brain: retain deep, book-like reading while also learning to navigate digital media.

He connects this concern to Anton Jäger’s concept of hyperpolitics: politics shaped by online life, including volatile crowds, intense emotions, short-lived activism, and influencer-like figures. David-Fox suggests this differs from the organized mass politics of the twentieth century, even as it creates new political risks.

Using Russia as an example, he describes how political innovation can emerge from post-Soviet conditions. In his account, politics has shifted from coherent, text-based ideologies toward fragmented and contradictory combinations of ideas, and eventually toward an alternative reality. He also describes disinformation as having roots in Soviet-era “active measures” but adapting to digital methods. Contemporary authoritarian regimes, he argues, may be able to maintain power through pervasive control and limited repression, rather than the mass terror of earlier dictatorships.

How to Use History Without Reducing It to Slogans

The second half of the lecture focuses on history and the “lessons of the past.” David-Fox is interested in applied history, but warns against presentism: forcing past events into simplistic analogies with current events. History should be studied on its own terms, with attention to contingency, unfamiliarity, structure, and unintended consequences.

He illustrates the dangers of simplistic analogy with the so-called Munich syndrome: treating any compromise or restraint as equivalent to Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 agreement with Hitler. Such comparisons can flatten historical context and focus only on individual choices, ignoring political structures and circumstances. David-Fox argues that history “rhymes” with the present but does not repeat it.

He discusses historian Klas-Göran Karlsson’s three categories of historical lessons:

• Genetic lessons: Explain the historical roots of a present-day situation.
• Genealogical lessons: Explore particular past issues that remain relevant to present dilemmas, often with attention to the historian’s own perspective.
• Structural lessons: Draw broader moral or ethical principles from historical events.

David-Fox is cautious about turning history into a storehouse of ready-made lessons. He argues that historians should model careful reasoning, not just deliver conclusions. That means asking good questions, weighing causes, periodizing, comparing cases, and recognizing the limits of incomplete evidence—especially when the present is still unfolding.

A Case Study in Constrained Agency

David-Fox uses his book Crucibles of Power: Smolensk under Stalinist and Nazi Rule to show how historical research can illuminate difficult moral choices without producing easy lessons. The book examines people who experienced successive Stalinist and Nazi rule in Smolensk, focusing on how individuals acted under severe constraints. David-Fox calls this circumstantial agency: people made choices, but within circumstances that sharply limited their options.

One central figure is Boris Menshagin, a local official who served under both regimes. Under Stalin, he defended some defendants during the Great Terror; under German occupation, he became mayor and helped some Jewish people and Soviet prisoners, while also subordinating himself to the occupying regime and exercising power over others. In his memoir, Menshagin described approving false papers for an elderly Jewish couple because he “liked them.” David-Fox presents the episode as morally complicated: it shows an act of mercy, but also the arbitrary power and limited grounds on which survival could depend.

The case demonstrates why historical interpretation should make evidence available for readers to form their own judgments. David-Fox says that a complex past cannot usually be distilled into a single moral lesson.

The Public Role of Historians and the IWM

David-Fox identifies contemporary historians such as Heather Cox Richardson, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and Timothy Snyder as examples of a newer kind of applied history. Through public writing and online platforms, they place current events in historical context and demonstrate how to reason historically. Their importance, in his view, lies not only in the specific lessons they draw but in showing broad audiences how historical reasoning works.

He concludes with two responsibilities for the IWM:

• Study and explain the crisis as it unfolds. The institute can examine political and international upheavals, analyze the crisis of the human sciences, and identify and support emerging scholars and scholars at risk.
• Engage the public. It can demonstrate the relevance of rigorous scholarship by making its insights accessible and participating in public debate.

Discussion After the Lecture

In the discussion, the moderator notes that crisis language has appeared in earlier periods too, and raises concerns about replacing the study of history with moral “lessons.” He also emphasizes the loss of a shared historical reference point and asks how to distinguish the present from the 1920s and 1930s.

David-Fox agrees that understanding what is genuinely new is essential. He stresses that the present is not identical to the past, even when historical patterns seem to recur. Audience questions address the “two cultures” divide, the broad political assault on higher education, scholars’ moral responsibilities under authoritarian pressure, and the tension between teaching lessons and maintaining history’s critical self-questioning. David-Fox responds that crisis rhetoric itself can be studied historically; that attacks on universities reach beyond the humanities; and that scholars must preserve the integrity of research while also making its results meaningful to the public.

Speakers and Sources Featured

Speakers

• Michael David-Fox — Lecturer; discusses the crisis of the human sciences, historical reasoning, and his research on Smolensk.
• Heinz Fischer — Thanked by David-Fox for the introduction; the opening introduction itself is partly unintelligible in the subtitles.
• Discussion moderator — Not clearly named in the subtitles; event metadata identifies Ivan Krastev as a participant, so he may be the moderator.
• Mitchell Ash — Audience questioner; identified as a historian of science and higher education.
• Henrik — Audience questioner; the subtitles do not give a surname.
• Yan Shuk — Audience questioner; the name may be imperfectly transcribed.

People, Works, and Organizations Cited

• C. P. Snow — “The Two Cultures.”
• Mark Mazower — Dark Continent.
• Kwame Anthony Appiah — Cited in connection with a report on the state of humanities scholarship.
• Maryanne Wolf — Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World.
• Anton Jäger — Cited for the concept of hyperpolitics.
• Niall Ferguson — Cited for applied history and an applied history manifesto.
• Sam Wineburg — Cited on the tension between the familiar and the strange in historical thinking.
• Klas-Göran Karlsson — Cited for the categories of historical lessons.
• Timothy Snyder, Heather Cox Richardson, and Ruth Ben-Ghiat — Examples of historians writing for broad public audiences.
• Charles King — Cited on writing about the past without reducing it to eternal truths.
• Tony Judt — Invoked in the discussion about the shift from teaching history to teaching lessons.
• Alfred J. Rieber — Cited in relation to David-Fox’s term “biographical logics.”
• Christoph (Kristof) Michalski — Named in the discussion as the institute’s founder.
• The Scholars at Risk Network, the Vienna Manifesto, the IWM’s Digital Humanism project, and the magazine European Voices — Organizations or initiatives referenced in the lecture.