History is not something which merely happens to humankind. It is not merely history-already-made. Rather, history is the self-deployment or self-alteration of humankind in time. It is among other things history-in-the-making and history-to-be-made. It is then a process of social creation, and no less destruction that does not necessarily or even generally signify good creation or the creation of positive values. As a process history signifies something quite different from objective indeterminancy or the unforeseeability of events. It is the domain in which we create ontological forms. Society itself is perhaps the first such form. It is (or should be) a form that can put itself into question and through self-reflection alter itself. All of this implies that there is no extrahuman authority responsible for what occurs in history; that there is no author of history; that there "natural" or "historical laws"; and that history is neither a subjectless nor a purely random process. The "killing fields" of Cambodia are no less a creation than the Parthenon. Neither were fated, both were created.
If history is created we are confronted with issues of judgment and choice. This question does not arise if history were simply a causal concatenation or if it were guided by natural or historical laws! It is precisely because it is created that judging and choosing emerges as a question. However, the judgements and choices we make belong to the history of the society in which we live and depend. The shear fact of judging and choosing in a nontrivial sense presupposes not only that we belong to a particular history, to a particular tradition where judging and choosing become effectively possible.
Among the creations of the history of the Cultural West, there is one that we judge positively and take credit for: putting things into question, criticising them, requiring an accounting for something and giving reason for it--which is the presupposition of both philosophy and politics. Since history is the domain in which there unfolds the creativity of all people, it has meaning not only as the history that happened but also as the history that is happening and the history that is going to happen. Within this contextual appreciation, the critical approach to social and civilizational history enables us to appreciate not only the relativity of our own history, as the concretion of one possibility among many, but also to think other possibilities of future historical development. Without granting any philosophical privilege to historical reality past or present we situate ourselves as critical actors in relation to what is, what could, and should be, and even to what has been. We situate ourselves as critical actors in relation to the "what is," the "what could be," and the "what should be." We can contribute to the character of the "what is" so that it may be otherwise. While we cannot change the "what has been," we can change how we look upon it. It is this last point which is an conscious and unconscious ingredient of/to our present thought and thinking. The "what has been" acquires a sort of transcendental importance, for our knowledge and criticism of it constitutes a dimension of our self-reflective activity. The "what has been" shows the relativity of the present, through our knowledge of other epochs, but it moreover enables us to glimpse the relativity of concrete history through reflection upon other histories that were unrealized but nontheless possible. To a very great extent this means that the objective reality of the "what is" possesses no normative privilege.
Walter Benjamin insisted that the task of history is not only to give the oppressed access to tradition, but also to create it. The past stands in need of reawakening. A critical intervention is necessary to shake the humankind from its complacency. Benjamin felt it was necessary to turn history into "the object of a construction whose foundation is not that of homogeneous and empty time, but rather that of a time filled and informed by the present time (Jetztzeit). A reflexive and experiential leap into the past had become necessary to crack open what is usually considered dead within the continuum of time and reaffirm it for a contingent future--a future that does not simply an extension, but depends upon the manner in which the past is appropriated.