One of the metanarratives threading through most historical scholarship produced over the last century is the lively debate between interpretations of major events that stress the hidden continuities between before and after the event and interpretations that push us to see the event as a major rupture or break where before and after are notably different states.
There is no event or example where we can ever successfully resolve that debate once and for all. The consensus of historians may tip one way or the other, but it is always possible to come along and argue that we’ve been getting it wrong, that a seeming rupture is in fact continuous, and that a seeming continuity is seething with major transformations and turning points. You tell me the Industrial Revolution was a dramatic rupture in human history, and I will point out that it has deeper roots into guild-coordinated mass production systems or putting-out production in various sites, or that the Industrial Revolution unfolded more slowly and contradictorily than we suppose, or that the real rupture was somewhere else, and industrialization is just a distraction. You tell me that foraging societies are unchanged since five thousand years ago and I will show you how comprehensively wrong that characterization is.
You can’t argue “always continuity”, though people have tried. (The dependency theorist Andre Gunder Frank eventually took the position that capitalism didn’t emerge in the modern world, but was in fact the essential core of a five-thousand year old world-system, for example.) Plainly things do change in world history: new things and ideas come into the world that have no continuous analogy in the past. Human beings did not land on the Moon before the 20th Century; no slave system of production involved transporting 15-20 million people from one region of the world to another over four centuries and turning them into chattel property in the process until the Atlantic slave system took shape. You can’t argue “everything changes fundamentally always, nothing stays the same, the past is incomprehensibly foreign”, though people have tried. Even if you have a disciplined theory of “the event” as an analytic concept, like William Sewell does in Logics of History, you’re never going to get away from the question of whether those events are more about the power of structural continuities or about something fundamentally novel that they introduce into those structures.
It’s not just an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin argument, though there’s something to be said for playfully arguing both sides about a case or event that you’re interested in, just as an intellectual tune up. There’s quite a bit at stake in many of the most strongly argued “this was a dramatic change” v. “this was just a cosmetic top-level shift with all the deep essentials remaining fundamentally intact”: that argument is really about two fundamentally different explanatory and intersubjective interpretations far beyond change v. continuity. There’s a big substantive difference between “the Bolshevik Revolution was a sharp rupture in Russian history with ongoing consequences” and “Putin’s post-Soviet style of rule shows that the Bolsheviks were just a light retouching of czarism, and that a style of absolutism is deeply encoded into the Russian state and Russian society”.
So with that all in mind as prologue, I will say that one of the most interesting theaters for this kind of argument is microhistorical, individual or personal, where the discussion often converges on a broad skein of humanistic argument generally. Novels often have something to say in this arena (has a character really changed? or stayed the same despite it all), and so do biographical studies. Intellectual historians, art historians and philosophers get involved: is the “young Marx” different from the “mature Marx”, or were they on about the same thing? Is Picasso doing the same thing when he’s blue and when he’s cubing, more or less?
Today, the person I have in mind, courtesy of the New York Times, is Rudy Giuliani. Dan Berry’s profile of Giuliani’s career skews strongly towards a theory of rupture, that the young prosecutor of crooked politicians and the Mob, fresh off of toying with the idea of the priesthood, is a fundamentally different person than the fumbling and desperate man who sold his soul and his fading legal expertise to the Prince of Corruption.
Berry doesn’t have a theory of the rupture as such, a singular event where Giuliani crossed his personal Rubicon from crusading, moralistic prosecutor to desperate money-grubbing authoritarian-ass-kissing criminal. Berry gently introduces some toys to play with in that analytic sandbox, all of them standard grist for a biographical mill: Giuliani’s attempt to compensate for his father’s criminal career (which included being a mob enforcer), the long-standing gap between Giuliani’s public morality and his private moral misconduct in his marriages and personal relationships, and some of the highlights of his career as prosecutor and as mayor. The overall profile, though, sees old Giuliani as a dramatically different person from young Giuliani, and not just as in terms of a rupture but as a fall from considerable grace into failure and darkness.
The failure and darkness part seems an accurate enough assessment of Giuliani’s present circumstances. Even if Trump somehow wins out, whether in evading conviction or in being re-elected, he is not a man who repays devoted service with loyalty. If Giuliani is still around in 2025 and beyond, it’s hard to see him being treated well by anyone.
But if you’ve followed Giuliani for most of his public career, it’s pretty easy to make an argument that the major distinction between young Giuliani and his elder self is simply that: failure and success, not character or morality. As a prosecutor, he was a vindictive, calculating figure who mostly looked for cases that would increase his public profile. He pursued the strategic humiliation of arrested suspects via normalizing the “perp walk”, despite the credo that people are presumed innocent until proven guilty. (He had a significant number of high-profile prosecutions fail or be dropped, making it seems as if his moves to humiliate the accused were consciously intended to punish people whether or not he could prove them guilty of a crime.) He seems to have thought about political associations in the same way, changing party registrations not out of ideological commitment but in terms of a reading of which party was most professionally necessary for his future ambitions.
I have some personal recall of his years as mayor, which we mostly spent living in the mid-Atlantic region, where news of New York was easy to come by. (I really miss getting the old-style Village Voice delivered to us every week.) Adulation of Giuliani from his post 9/11 response more or less completely obliterated the general memory of his numerous flaws as mayor. This is the guy who was so thin-skinned that he spent time on his call-in show berating a man who called to complain about the city’s restrictions on ferret ownership. This is the guy who made the disastrous “broken windows” policing strategy into gospel, and ignored some of the worst incidents of police brutality in New York’s recent history. This is the guy who insisted on putting an expensive crisis management center into the building that was a known terrorist target, rendering it useless on 9/11, despite considerable expert advice that he do otherwise. This is the guy who actually made NYC’s firefighters less prepared for emergencies than they had been. This is the guy who held a press conference to announce he was separating from his wife before actually telling his wife in person that he was separating from her. This is also the moralizing Catholic who has had numerous extramarital affairs across the entirety of his adult life. This is the guy who pushed officials out of office if they became too popular and thus rivalrous with him.
This is also the guy who has mostly had terrible political instincts with the one exception of his time as mayor of New York City, and even there, he lost by a thin margin the first time he ran and won by a thin margin the second time. This is the guy who was frequently willing to insinuate there had been voting irregularities in districts where the majority of the population was non-white. This was the guy who started chasing money like it was going out of style the moment he left the mayor’s office—arguably before that, if you look closely enough, since he used city agencies to hide his extramarital activities and save himself money. This was the guy who was asked to play a role in evaluating the war in Iraq and abandoned his responsibility because he decided it would be a liability in an upcoming presidential run, which was a catastrophic failure anyway. This was the guy who was always in favor of expedient lies and exaggerations, and never a stranger to racist insinuation.
So this would be a case where I’d go with Team Continuity. I see more that’s the same in Giuliani’s public career than what is different in his recent behavior. The rupture, if there is one, is in the degree to which the press was mostly compliant with or accepting of his public work at an earlier date, and thus the extent to which a wider public believed in the mythology of “America’s mayor”, much as they might have believed in the mythology of “Donald Trump, successful businessman”, which was built at the same time, in the same place, that Giuliani burnished his credentials. To paraphrase Norma Desmond, he was unprincipled, it’s just the indictments are of him rather than by him.