Book review: History of the Present: The Contemporary and its Culture

for-itself of contemporary Togetherness: Human history is embedded in the immensely longer scientific history of the planet . .. The deep time of planetary consciousness places human history in a new frame of understanding and responsibility that is critical to the historical self-reflection of world society. Both kinds of history, however, the deep time of planetary history and the relativizing-universalizing hermeneutics of historicism belong together as the legacy of the Enlightenment. But it is only now under the pressure of the multiple threats to the planet posed by human development from climate change to pandemics that planetary consciousness has become the inescapable counter-balance to human evolution that makes conservation the key to both histories: the imperative to conserve our natural and cultural heritage .. . and to preserve the planet is the duty of our ‘doubly indebted present’ .. . This Togetherness is that of a global contemporary modernity.