Our Shadowed Present: modernism, postmodernism and history Jonathan Clark Atlantic Books, 352pp, £25 ISBN 184354122X

History, complained an anonymous Pentagon official back in 1990, "is happening in a way it's not supposed to". But what if history has no narrative line, no rationale and no apparent purpose? What if no single configuration of events can produce a discernible theme? What, asked the novelist John Barth, if "the sum of history is no more than the stuff of metaphors"?

According to Jonathan Clark, history, and particularly the history of a nation, most certainly tells a story. What is national identity if it has no narrative unity? His book is about the identity that comes from continuity - from national institutions and beliefs that extend across the centuries.

Our Shadowed Present is a series of discussions on Anglo-American themes - the area in which Clark has made a notable contribution over the past 20 years. These include the legends around which the US is built, the myth of the Anglo-American "special relationship", and Britain's often tortuous relationship with Europe - all of which are taken to show that we can make sense of the present only if we reconnect it with the past.

Clark argues that the narratives of both countries are threatened by modernist and postmodernist ideas which tell us that our identities are merely social constructs and that nations are no more than "imagined" communities. Clark will have none of this. For him, identities are deeply rooted, unlike modernism and postmodernism themselves, which are products of a very recent past.

Rarely has a historian so effectively challenged the concept of "presentism" - the idea that we live in a time when everything has been said and everything is complete. "Everything is post- these days," Margaret Atwood wrote in her novel Cat's Eye, "as if we're all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own." In essence, postmodernism reduces all of us to footnotes of a history that was once more real, if more dangerous. It tells us that there are no great historical projects or missions left to accomplish.

Clark is incisive in dismantling the new postmodernist critiques that collapse the grand narratives of the past into little narratives - what Barth called "vortices". Rejecting the narratives of the past as oppressive because they are unifying, postmodernism offers a pluralised version of history with its own vocabulary of "identity", "invention" and "performance". All that these alternative narratives give rise to, however, is widespread apathy. Our political parties are in decline, our churches empty, our institutions devalued. In debunking history, we take from under ourselves our own grounds for action. If everything is historical but nothing is historic, then we can no longer consciously initiate events that will be remembered by others. Unable to determine what the future will find important, we live with the prospect of being forgotten.

Despite his apparently traditional message, Clark is a daring historian. He is no determinist, no exponent of the old "Whig" view of English history as having a definite trajectory leading to the Great Reform Act of 1832. Indeed, one of the most absorbing parts of the book is his championing of counterfactual history. Discussing specific events, such as 1688 and 1776, and what might have happened differently, he reminds us that all historical episodes have prehistories that contain the many things that might have happened, as well as the few that did.

The book's main problem is its debunking of modernism, as well as the postmodernist sensibility that is the zeitgeist of our time. The modernist project, after all, has been central in creating a more humane version of history, consistent with its three central themes of irony, relativism and the post-heroic. Each theme, when treated seriously by historians, has helped humanise modernity as well as history itself. Irony, or what Monroe Engel called "the normative reality" of the modernist sensibility, enables us to stand aside from our own first principles and beliefs without disavowing them entirely; to see ourselves as others see us and thus to engage in a more inclusive history than was previously possible. Relativism, where not a crude undermining of universal values, invites us to see history for ourselves, to recognise that our biographies are self-created as well as socially produced. And the post-heroic helps us to distinguish between individual acts of heroism and the myths that call for acts of heroism in the name of abstract ideas, such as a nation. Dying for an idea is different from dying for other people. Heroism of the second kind is not abstract but concrete, and relates more to the private than the public realm.

If we see the postmodern as the humanising of modernity, then we can arrive at a rather different conclusion from Clark. We may even see that some of the national narratives he is trying to restore may themselves be "post-historical" - in the strictly limited sense that the nation state itself may no longer be at the centre of history.

Christopher Coker is a professor of international relations at the LSE

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