The New History and the Old
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The
New History and
the
Old
The New History
and the Old Gertrude Himmelfarb
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts
and London, England
©
Copyright
1987 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
9876543
Printed in the United States of America
10
This book
is
printed
on
acid-free paper,
and
its
binding materials
have been chosen for strength and durability. Library of Congress Cataloging -in-Publication
Data
Himmelfarb, Gertrude.
The new
history
Bibliography:
and the
old.
p.
Includes index. 1.
Historiographv.
D13.H445 1987 ISBN 0-674-61580-8 ISBN 0-674-61581-6 '
I.
Title
907'.2 (cloth)
(paper)
87-327
For Celia and Harold Kaplan
Contents
Introduction
1
1.
"History with the Politics Left Out"
2.
Clio and the
3.
Two
4.
The "Group":
5.
Social History in Retrospect
94
Reflections of a Chastened
95
New
13
33
History
Nations or Five Classes: The Historian
as Sociologist
British Marxist Historians
Father
Recovering a Lost World 6.
107 Conservative
James and John Stuart Mill: Ambivalent Rebels 7.
Is
70
101
Case Studies in Psychohistory
Edmund Burke: An Ambivalent
47
108 1 13
National History Obsolete?
121
The Frenchness of France The Englishness of England
122 132
8.
Who Now
9.
History and the Idea of Progress
155
Does History Talk Sense?
171
Notes
185
Acknowledgments
205
10.
Index of
Reads Macaulay?
Names
143
206
The
New History and
the
Old
The
past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten. us,
—Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Introduction
"Old New The thus one eminent
social historian (Charles Tilly) distinguishes his
mode of history from
that of another eminent social historian (Law-
Social History"
rence Stone).
1
and the
"New Old Social
History":
Recalling the history of this genre, one might be
tempted to add some additional "old's" and "newY' to accommodate the several varieties that have emerged since James Harvey Robinson
proclaimed the advent of the
"New
History."
Even in 1912, when Robinson issued that manifesto, the "new history" was not all that new. In 1898 the American Historical Review, bastion of the old history, published an essay, "Features of the
History,"
commending the "new" Kulturgeschichte as
—
New
practiced by Karl
Lamprecht which itself was not so new, Jakob Burckhardt's classic work on the Renaissance having appeared almost half a century earlier. Lamprecht's new history was not quite Burckhardt's; nor was Robinson's Lamprecht's. But they had another and with
later versions
much
in
common
of the new history, for they
with one
all
rejected
the basic premises of the old history: that the proper subject of history is
essentially political
essentially narrative.
and that the natural mode of historical writing is Lamprecht's "genetic" method, emphasizing cau-
sation rather than narration, presaged the "analytic"
today.
And
Robinson's plea for a history of the
would dispense with the utilize
"trifling details"
method favored
"common man," which
of dynasties and wars and
the findings of "anthropologists, economists, psychologists, and
sociologists,"
is still
the agenda of the
new
history.
2
2
The
•
New History and
England had
the
Old
own founding father in J.
its
R. Green, whose History of
(1877-80) professed to take as its subject the "EnPeople" rather than "English Kings or English Conquests," and
the English People
glish
to be concerned more with the Elizabethan Poor Laws than with the Armada and more with Methodism than with Jacobitism. 3 Less than half a century later H. G. Wells published an un- Victorian and irreverent version of the new history in the form of an Outline of History in y
which
upon
Napoleon was seen strutting 4 "cockerel on a dunghill." Determined
a "world-historical" figure like
the crest of history like a
to democratize history as well as
would all
say),
Wells described his history
mankind," of
report that his the
debunk
all
and
classes
all
the sale of over
the
two
common
reader
—
million copies in
his
5
the
in evidence
little
though most professional historians were was of them, they could not ignore
"common adventure of And he was pleased to common man, it was for
as the
nations.
book was not only about
common man,
("demystify," the Marxist
it
of which he cited
more than
a decade. Al-
of Wells
as disdainful
work or
its thesis.
as
he
Reviewing
the Outline in the American Historical Review, Carl Becker (himself
new historian) confessed that Wells's "new hisnew for his tastes, too insistent'upon judging the past by
often identified as a
tory" was too
the standards of the present
when
— or rather by Wells's vision of the
the "Great Society," the "Federal
World
ushered in a truly democratic and universal
era.
6
State,"
If that
future,
would have
prophecy
seems quaint, some of Wells's other fancies have come to
pass. In
now 1900
he offered a "prospectus" for a history of mankind that would take into account
all
the forces of social change: biologic, demographic, geo-
graphic, economic. Later, in his autobiography, Wells remarked that
if
he were a multimillionaire, he would establish "Professorships of Analytic
History" to
gists."
As
it
breed.
endow
new breed of
a
historians
— "human ecolo-
7
happened, the French had already started to produce that new
The Annates dyhistoire economique
in opposition to the political
the academic establishment
and
Paris,
was founded
diplomatic historians
— the Sorbonnistes,
tuously called. That epithet lost
moved from Strasbourg to
et sociale
some of
its
as
1929
they were contemp-
sting
where one of its
in
who dominated
when
editors
the Annates
(Marc Bloch)
joined the faculty of the Sorbonne and the other (Lucien Febvre) the
College de France. With the establishment after the war of the Sixieme
Introduction
•
3
Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, the Annalistes ac-
quired a powerful institutional base, and under the editorship of Fer-
nand Braudel
became the most
their journal
in France, possibly in the world.
innovative.
and
Going well beyond
social history,
now
it
8
more
the
organ
influential historical
has also proved to be remarkably
It
traditional forms
derives both
its
subjects
and
of economic its
methods
from anthropology, sociology, demography, geography, psychology, even semiotics and
linguistics.
While Americans have been developing history
— econometric and
sexual, psychoanalytic
cliometric, black
and populist
A
may be found making annual or
also
been much
in-
large contingent of historians
sabbatical pilgrimages to Paris to take
from the masters. Others look to
especially to the Marxists,
own modes of new
and ethnic, feminist and
— they have
fluenced by their colleagues abroad. instruction
their
Britain for inspiration,
whose work has been used
to fortify the
indigenous tradition of radical history (typified by Robinson's student
and collaborator, Charles A. Beard). Thus E. the English
Working
American working els"
is
Eric
taken as the prototype of inner-city gangs; and Perry Anderson's
version of "Althusserian" sions of the theory
If the
Thompson's Making of
become the model for the making of the Hobsbawm's concept of "primitive reb-
Class has
class;
P.
new
Marxism
is
the point of departure for discus-
and methodology of Marxism.
we know
today,
is
younger enthusiasts might think, neither
is
not
the stereotype has
for a Burckhardt as well as a
it
was never
German
it.
as
novel as some of its
the old history as archaic as
assume.
before the advent of the new, plistic as
it
The old history, traditional assimilate and accommodate itself to
its critics
time to
history, as
history, has
had
a long
the new. Indeed, even
homogeneous or simmanaged to make room
as
history
Ranke, for cultural history
as well as
po-
The English Whig historians, descending from Burke and Macauley, came in many sizes and shapes, including some notably un-Whiggish types. And their contemporaries litical
in
and
"scientific" history.
France had a breadth and
liberality
admire; one of the complaints of the nistes
Nor
abandoned the grand
are the great
croft's history
of spirit that even the Annalistes
new historians
is
that the Sorbon-
tradition of Guizot, Thierry,
American
was not only
classics
a
merely
and Michelet.
political chronicles.
paean to Jacksonian democracy;
it
Banalso
— 4
The
•
New History and
Old
the
German
reflected his predilection for
the Great West,
ogy
as the
hero
as
9
was
as
he called his work on
rooted in anthropology, geography, and ecol-
as
work of any new
historian; the wilderness
was
as surely his
the Mediterranean was BraudePs.
The new history, then, new. In the
is
older than one might think, and the old not
what
quite so antiquated. But
is
new is the triumph of the whole the new history is now the
undeniably
historical profession as a
new orthodoxy. This being written.
not to say that the old history
is
no longer
is
and
Political, constitutional, diplomatic, military,
intel-
be written by some eminent senior histo-
lectual histories continue to
rians
And
idealism and romanticism.
Parkman's "history of the American forest,"
and even some enterprising young ones. (Although more often
the old history history
is
is
rewritten in the light of the new.
Thus
political
— the — the study of pop-
quantified and sociologized, and intellectual history
study of ideas ular beliefs
—
and
is
converted into mentalite history
attitudes.)
Yet the old history,
if
not entirely super-
What was once at the center of the periphery. What once defined history is now a
seded, has been largely displaced.
profession
is
now at the
footnote to history. In the spirit of collegiality,
argued that
all
of
this is
some
little
historians (old
and new
consequence so long
tolerance prevails, so long as each historian can "do his or, as has
more
been
said,
cynical view
"go to heaven
of the matter,
his
belittle
academic fashion that will disappear or as soon as some
as
own the
way."
10
as a
mood
own
thing"
as yet
as the novelty
more venturesome novices
have
another
wears
assert themselves
rebelling against their elders. (In the profession this
of
Others, taking a
new history
soon
alike)
is
known
off,
by
as re-
visionism.) In fact, this particular fashion has survived several generations
now
and has become more entrenched with the passing of time. By there are historians
—
serious, reputable, senior historians
— who
know no other kind of history and can do no other kind. For them the new history has lost its distinctive character. They recognize no legitimate
To
criticism
of the genre
as such,
any more than of history
as such.
the argument that quantitative history, for example, has a tendency
to elevate
method over
substance, permitting statistics to define the
subject, they reply that this
which takes
its
is
no
different
from constitutional
themes from whatever documents are
history,
available.
To
the
charge that social history tends to be unduly concerned with the
minutiae of everyday
life,
they respond by pointing to the no
less
Introduction
tedious machinations that issue,
we
are told,
is
•
5
make up a good deal of political history. The new history or the old, but good history or
not the
bad.
This
is
appeal to
old and
Who
a tempting resolution of the matter.
good
history?
much good
Who
in the
can deny that there
new?
disputes and resist the call to
who
finds that ideas are
reconciled, that important questions are at stake
been resolved, that the two modes of history
and method which
history,
are
much bad
in the
Who can be so churlish as to revive old rapprochement? Who indeed, except
perhaps an intellectual historian
subject
is
can refuse the
not so
easily
which have not yet
reflect differences in
tantamount to different conceptions of
and that the new history has
significant implications
not
only for the history of historiography but for the history of ideas as well.
The
volume deal with one or another mode, method, history and the old. They testify to a variety that appears to contradict the singularity of "new history" and "old history," that may even seem to defy the labels "new" and "old." Yet for chapters of this
or aspect of the
all
new
the variations and qualifications contained within them, the catego-
ries
have a
common
reality that
"New
usage.
cannot be denied. That history" has
term for modes of history that
reality is reflected in
become the accepted shorthand
may not be consistent with one
another
but that do represent, singly and collectively, a challenge to traditional history.
The
challenge
is
serious only because of the
mony," the new historian would sion today.
11
Indeed,
it is
the fact of dominance that
argument of this book. Again and again is
not the
sumed and not
I
new
dominance ("hege-
say) of the new history in the profes-
I
make
is
crucial to the
the point that the issue
history as such but rather the decisive role
the superior claims
made on
its
behalf.
it
has as-
No one — certainly
— can reasonably object to a study of popular unrest
in Paris
from
1557 to 1572; or of vagrants, beggars, and bandits in Cuba from 1878 women's work in manufacturing in Central Europe from 1648 to 1870; or of stature and nutrition in the Hapsburg monarchy in the eighteenth century. But when, as recently happened, these constitute the entire contents (apart from book reviews), not of 12 the Journal of Social History but of the American Historical Review,
to 1895; or of
and when the editors and
editorial
board of the Review see nothing
6
•
New History and
The
noteworthy
them
in this
the
Old
grouping of
articles
— indeed do — one may
belonging to a distinctive genre
as
reflection
not recognize find cause for
and concern.
It is this species
of the new history,
social history, that
is
of the opening chapter of this volume. "History with the out"
politics left
way G. M. Trevelyan described social history almost half a ago. The phrase is now used facetiously, but it does characmode of history that either ignores politics, or relegates it to
the
is
century terize a
the realm of "epiphenomena," or recognizes
of study only when science.
it
as a subject deserving
has been transmuted into social or political
it
When such a history professes to be "total" history, or even the
dominant and superior form of history, the implications tous
the subject
— not only
are
momen-
for the writing of history but for the historian's con-
ception of the polity and of the
human
beings
who are the subject both
of the polity and of history.
The chapter on
the
"New
History" focuses on quantohistory and
own kind of determinism and "Two Nations or Five Classes" de-
psychohistory, each of which exhibits its
own
scribes
methodological problems.
its
an exercise in sociological history and contrasts the abstractions
and models of this type of history with the ''moral imagination" of the Victorians.
'The 'Group' "
Marxist history:
its
deals with the influential school of British
origins in the
commitments and revisionist tory and to the new history.
The
Communist
Party,
strategies, its relation to
its
ideological
non-Marxist
his-
paired essays in the following chapters analyze specific works
and themes of the new
history. The first, on social history, considers two founding fathers of that genre and reflects on its present status. The second presents psychohistorical interpretations of two major English thinkers, which serve as case studies of the method itself. The third, comparing recent historical works on France and
the views of
England, concludes that one of the supposed casualties of the history, national history,
may not
yet be as defunct as
is
new
sometimes
claimed.
The counterpoint history,"
form. rians
which
is
"Who Now of all
to the
new
history
preeminendy
is
generally taken to be
political in subject
"Whig
and narrative
in
Reads Macaulay?" points out that Victorian histoand Radicals as well as Whigs,
political persuasions, Tories
shared the view that the history of a people
is
primarily the story of its
Introduction
•
7
political heritage
and that English history
"liberal descent."
"History and the Idea of Progress" traces an idea that
is
peculiarly the story
is
of a
Whig history but is in fact characteristic of a who differed about what constituted progress but
often associated with
long line of thinkers
agreed that some concept of progress was necessary to give meaning to
continuum with the present and the "Does History Talk Sense?" suggests that the challenge to tra-
history by bringing the past into a future.
ditional history does not
come only from
vative philosopher Michael Oakeshott
the
new
history: the conser-
in this respect
is
more
radical
than Nietzsche, and Nietzsche more Whiggish than Oakeshott; for Nietzsche's historical
muse makes
sense of the past by speaking to our
present concerns, whereas Oakeshott's
not "talk sense" because the past
Most of
is
itself is
a beloved mistress
who
can-
dead.
book were published in the 1980s, the The "Frenchness of France" has not previously been published, and a somewhat different version of the essay on Macaulay appeared in my volume of essays, Marriage and Morals among the Victorians. All the essays but one have been edited, expanded, and in some cases extensively rewritten. The one exception is "History With the Politics Left Out," which is inearliest,
the chapters of this
New
"Clio and the
cluded here in essentially in 1984,
it
provoked
a
good
the issues by revision, Postscript
The
its
I
History," in 1975.
original form.
When it was
deal of controversy,
first
published
and rather than blunt
chose to keep the original intact and add a
by way of commentary.
passionate response to that essay, favorable as well as
me
critical,
had come to a few years earlier. In 1980, in a review of The Past before Us (a volume of historiographic essays commissioned by the American Historical Association), I wrote caused
to reconsider an opinion
of "intimations" in
this
I
book and elsewhere
that
some new
were becoming sensitive to the concerns of traditional
historians
historians. I
predicted that "the 'humanization' of social history will eventually lead,
not to a restoration of the old history, but to an accommodation in
which old and new can
live
together."
13
I
came to
this
conclusion
from seeking an
same work accommodation with the old history, some new historians were embarking on a still more radical mission. In his contribution to that volume Carl Degler observed that while a great deal of attention was
despite other intimations in the
that so far
8
•
The
New History and
the
Old
being directed to the history of women and the family, these subjects
had
still
not been properly integrated into the "mainstream" of history,
and that
this
could be achieved only by altering our conception of
and our sense of the
sum, what
meant by history or the past will have to be changed before these two subdisciplines become an integral part of it." 14 history
past: "In
is
Since the publication of The Past before Us the
demand
for "main-
streaming" has been echoed by other subdisciplines dealing with workers, blacks,
well
ethnic groups, and social and sexual "deviants."
wonder whether anything would remain of the
One might
discipline
of his-
tory if these subdisciplines were brought into the mainstream, and
whether such an
of integration would not
effort
The "total" history on might turn out to be
result in the disinte-
some new
gration of the whole.
that
pride themselves
a total dissolution
tory
— history
in any
historian. This
is,
form recognizable to
either the
in effect, the prescription offered
new
historians
of
his-
or the old
by Theodore Zel-
din (discussed in Chapter 7); pursuing the historical revolution to end, Zeldin seeks the liberation of history from
concepts (cause, time,
class,
nation) that
Even some of the Annalistes
still
all
its
the categories and
enslave
it.
are beginning to suspect that they have
unleashed a force they cannot control. The very disciplines they have
used to subvert the conventions of the old history threaten to subvert history
itself. It is
curious to find the editors of a collection of essays by
prominent Annalistes complaining of the "aggression of ences," history:
and
still
'The
social sci-
more curious to hear of the effect of that aggression on which it [history] used to occupy alone as the
field
systematic explanation of society in
vaded by other sciences with absorb and dissolve
it."
15
its
ill-defined
time dimension has been
in-
boundaries which threaten to
The same volume
contains an essay by one of
'The Return of the Event." But the "return" heralded there is not of the kind of "event" familiar in traditional history. On the contrary, Pierre Nora confirms "the effacement of the event, the negation of its importance and its dissolution," as the great triumph of the new history. It is quite another event that he sees as returning: one that has been produced by the mass media of modern industrial society and that is often indistinguishable from a
the editors with the provocative
title
"nonevent" or "illusion," a "sign" or a "function." 16
A similar
retreat,
more semantic than
substantive,
may be noted
in
,
Introduction
the United States, where one of the founders of the
"new old history" to some of the virtues of the
new
new and But the "mentalite history" that
correct the excesses of the
restore
old.
tory"
is
And the
nothing "revival
Cipolla's Faithy
of narrative" he points to
Emmanuel Le Roy
ers
—
of a
old his-
or even cultural history.
— the "narration of
a single
Ladurie's Montaillouy Carlo
Reason and the Plague in Seventeenth Century Tuscany
Hobsbawm's Primitive Rebels,
Eric
mode of this "new
as the distinctive
like traditional intellectual
event" exemplified by
9
history has
called for a
Lawrence Stone invokes
•
Thompson's Whigs and Huntis far from the old narrative history, where the narration was not single event but precisely of a series of events chronologically
connected so as to
One
is
tell
E. P.
a story over a significant span
of time.
not surprised to find other signs of misgiving and dissidence.
Orthodoxies breed heresies; dominance generates discontent. As the
new history loses the glamour of novelty, the old acquires a new allure. More and more often one hears confessions of nostalgia for an oldfashioned history that has dramatic movement and literary grace; for a and laws
political history that regards constitutions
as
something more
than ploys in the manipulation of power; for an intellectual history that takes serious ideas seriously, as ideas, rather than as instruments
of
production and consumption; even for a social history that does not
presume to be dominant or superior,
we
are witnessing the beginning
revisionism skeptical It is
a real is
— not
let
alone "total."
It
may be
of yet another wave of
that
historical
the restoration of an old regime (historians are
of such restorations) but the inauguration of a new regime.
tempting to say
(as I
once did) that
accommodation of new and
old, a
we can now look forward to
merging of the best of both.
but not a very hopeful one. At a time
a pleasing prospect
when
It
the
new" historian adamandy rejects the small, tentative overtures of the "new old" historian, one can hardly be sanguine about the prospects of reconciliation with the "old old" historian. There is a good
"old
deal at stake, not only in terms of professional interests (careers depen-
dent upon particular subjects, methods, and institutional but of philosophical convictions
even
human
nature.
The new
—
historian cannot concede the preemi-
nence of politics in the Aristotelian sense, which supposes "political let
affiliations),
ideas about history, politics, society,
man
to be a
animal"; and the old historian cannot admit the superiority,
alone totality, of a
mode of history
that takes
man
to be a "social
'
10
•
New History and
The
animal."
Nor
can the
the
new
Old
contempt for
historian conceal his
a history
that persists in studying "important people, significant events, successful historical
movements"; 17 nor the old historian
find
it
and any-
thing but bizarre that such subjects should be derided and that Vhistoire historisante
should be used
as
an invidious term.
announce that "Mickey Mouse may
historians
in fact
So long as new be more impor-
of the 1930s than Franklin Roosevelt," 19 or
tant to an understanding that "the history
18
of menarche" should be recognized
portance to the history of monarchy,"
20
as
"equal in im-
traditional historians will feel
confirmed in their sense of the enormous gap separating the two
modes of history.
One would
like to
more
produce a
be sanguine.
It
modern times
think that reality will inevitably assert
and
sensitive
was, after
that
realistic history.
all,
two of the
of history. In
Marc Bloch alluded
and located
were
all
of us either
us,
by
fall
seem
specialists in the social sciences or
and maybe the very
a sort
disciplines
sailors?
of what
avail
may have
—
at
work
were the petty struggles of
To think otherwise would
have been to
action.
in society
occurred to him
when he
ment and gave his life to it. It was the same tragic event, the
a
few ship-
falsify history.
it
was not only
politically
One wonders whether
later
fall
21
possibility that this "cosmic"
falsified history itself, that
enervating but historically stultifying. sibility
workers in
of those employ-
of fatalism, from embarking on individual
Even then Bloch did not consider the theory
1940,
In the vast drag of these submarine swells, so cosmic as to
irresistible,
wrecked
in
lethargy."
We had grown used to seeing great impersonal forces as in nature.
"impersonal
of France
to the theory of history that contributed to the
scientific laboratories,
ments kept
reality in the
moving account of the
mood of "intellectual
prevailing
We
his
during the most catastrophic event in
greatest Annalistes affirmed their faith in
a doctrine that belittled events
forces"
that pos-
joined the Resistance move-
of France, that
ironically pro-
vided another historian with the opportunity to launch an attack Phistoire evenementielle.
Braudel,
to
itself
But here too one cannot
22
on
Historians have paid homage to Fernand
who managed to write the first draft of his monumental work,
The Mediterranean and
the Mediterranean
World
in the Age ofPhilip II,
Introduction
while confined in a prisoner-of-war
War
That work extolled
II.
camp
•
Germany during World
in
la longue duree: the "inanimate" forces
geography, demography, and economy that were the "deeper
of history, compared with which the passions of Philip
II
23
The book was indeed an
and the ideas
it
was written
Europe was being convulsed by the passions of ideas that very nearly destroyed a people
and
Braudel himself has said that he wrote
which poured
in
upon
time
when
man and by
of considerable
in prison, partly as a
it I
at a
a single
a religion
"direct existential response to the tragic times All those occurrences
his-
impressive achievement, but also a
profoundly ironic, even perverse one. For
duree.
of
realities"
of the Renaissance were "cockleshells" tossed on the waters of tory.
11
was passing through."
us from the radio and the
newspapers of our enemies, or even the news from London which our clandestine receivers gave us
Down
had to outdistance,
I
with occurrences, especially vexing ones!
history, destiny, It is
—
was written
at a
I
reject,
deny them.
had to believe that
much more profound
level.
24
curious that historians, admiring the intrepid spirit that could
bring forth so bold a theory in the midst of such tragic "occurrences,"
have failed to note the gross disparity between that theory and those occurrences reject,
— the extent to which the theory did indeed "outdistance,
deny them."
It is still
more curious
that in the years following
the war, as historians tried to assimilate the enormity of the individuals
and ideas responsible for those "short-term events" (known
War
II
and the Holocaust), the theory of history that
as
World
belittled individ-
became increasingly influential. The irony is compounded by the fact that what Braudel took to be an "existential response" to reality distancing himself from it and seeking a "much more profound level" of meaning was exacdy the oppouals, ideas,
and above
all
events
—
site
from the response of the
cisely in the actuality
—
Existentialists,
who found meaning
pre-
of events, however contingent and ephemeral.
Because the Existentialists respected the meaning of events, they also respected the integrity of the individuals involved in scious, responsible,
autonomous
individuals
willed, even "gratuitous." Braudel,
of events, denied both the
efficacy
whose
them
— the con-
actions were freely
by denying the "underlying reality" of individuals and the possibility of
freedom. The Mediterranean concludes by asserting the triumph of the long term over the individuals
doomed
to live in the short term.
12
The
•
New History and
So when
I
the
Old
think of the individual,
am
I
always inclined to see him
imprisoned within a destiny in which he himself has
little
hand, fixed in a
landscape in which the infinite perspectives of the long term stretch into the distance both behind
him and
before. In historical analysis, as
I
see
it,
righdy or wrongly, the long term always wins in the end. Annihilating
innumerable events
—
all
those which cannot be accommodated in the
main ongoing current and which side
—
it
are therefore ruthlessly
swept to one
indubitably limits both the freedom of the individual and even
the role of chance.
25
If historians have
shown
themselves,
resistant to historical reality, they
on
occasion, to be strangely
have also proved to be peculiarly
vulnerable to boredom. In his Philosophical Dictionary Robert Nisbet has an entry
on "boredom"
— nothing
so pretentious as "ennui,"
"anomie," or "apathy," but the simple "insistent and universal" trait
of boredom. Toward the close of the
article
human
he quotes Bertrand
Russell: "If life is to be saved from boredom, relieved only by disaster, means must be found of restoring individual initiative not only in
things that are trivial but in the things that really matter."
26
Some new
historians have confessed that their initial disaffection with traditional
came from boredom with the old subjects: dynasties and governments, wars and laws, treaties and documents. So it may be that a history
new generation of historians, bored with
the "everyday
life
of common
people" and the "long-term structures" of geography and demography,
may
in the
drama of events, the power of
ideas,
and the dignity of individuals
in things that are
trivial
but in the things that
find a
renewed excitement
— "not only
really matter."
"History with the Politics
Left
J.
Out"
You, the philologist, boast of knowing everything about the furniture and clothing of the Romans and of being more intimate with the
and streets of Rome than with those ofyour own city. You know no more than did the potter, the cook, the
quarters, tribes
Why
this
pride?
cobbler, the
When
summoner, the auctioneer of Rome.
— Giambattista
the history
ofmenarche
widely recognized as equal in impor-
is
we
tance to the history of monarchy,
A ing
few years ago, history,
in a discussion
have arrived.
will
—Peter
of recent trends
Stearns,
on the "cutting edge of the life
of
its
work
and
social institutions.
confine himself to that one town, but
of
as be-
He was writing a study of a
and sexual
familial
He
"in-
and
inhabitants: their occupations
and working conditions,
habits, attitudes,
his
toward the end of the eighteenth century, an
depth" analysis of the earnings, living
discipline."
1976
in the writing
one young historian proudly described
New England town
1702
Vico,
relations,
regretted that he had to
some of
his colleagues
doing comparable studies of other towns and their
were
collective efforts
and place. I asked him had any bearing on what I, admittedly not a specialist in American history, took to be the most momentous event of that time and place, indeed one of the most
would
constitute a "total history" of that time
whether
his study, or their collective studies,
momentous
events in
all
of modern
United States of America, the conceded that from
his
first
history: the
founding of the
major republic of modern times.
themes and sources
census reports, legal records, polling
—
land
lists,
He
parish registers, tax rolls, titles
— he could not
"get to," as he said, the founding of the United States. But he denied that this lives
was the
crucial event
I
took
it
to be.
What was crucial were
the
and experiences of the mass of the people. That was the subject of
his history;
it
was the "new
history," social history.
even ordinary people (perhaps most of
all
My rebuttal — that
ordinary people) had been
profoundly affected in the most ordinary aspects of their
lives
by the 13
14
New History and
The
•
the
Old
founding of the republic, by that
had created a new
him
naive and old-fashioned.
There was, in
political events, institutions,
and with
polity
it
a
new
society
something anachronistic about
fact,
—
and ideas
— seemed to exchange.
this
The "new history" or rather the new "new history," as distinct from the old "new history" sired by James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard early in the century is itself no longer new. If it is dated from the founding of the Annates more than half a century ago, it is by now
—
well into middle age. Indeed,
young
sion that while
so firmly entrenched in the profes-
it is
novitiates flaunt their boldness
and
originality,
they are comfortably enjoying the perquisites of a well-endowed estab-
And some
lishment.
of its leading proponents and practitioners (Fran-
and Lawrence Stone) find reason to complain of the excesses
cois Furet
and defects of what has become the new orthodoxy. 1
Nor is
new history
the
exclusive.
monolithic as the label suggests.
as
passes a variety of subjects
and methods, some of which
Yet there are characteristics that unite
differentiate
it
from the old
history.
it,
Thus the new
encom-
It
are mutually
and even more that history tends to be
analytic rather than narrative, thematic rather than chronological. It relies
more upon
statistical tables, oral interviews, sociological
and psychoanalytic theories than upon constitutions, mentary debates,
political writings,
or party manifestos.
history typically concerns itself with regimes legislation
and
tions, the
new
politics,
models,
treaties, parlia-
Where
the old
and administrations,
diplomacy and foreign policy, wars and revolu-
history focuses
problems and institutions,
on
cities
classes
and ethnic groups,
and communities, work and
social
play,
family and sex, birth and death, childhood and old age, crime and insanity.
Where
the old features kings, presidents, politicians, leaders,
political theorists, the
new takes as
its
subject the
"anonymous masses."
The old is "history from above," "elitist history," as is now said; the new is "history from below," "populist history." The new history is by now old enough to have provoked a fair amount of criticism. The analytic approach, it has been said, fails to capture the dynamic movement of history; the quantitative method narrows and
trivializes history
by confining inquiry to subjects and
sources capable of being quantified; psychoanalytic interpretations derive
more from
sociological
a priori theories than
from empirical evidence;
models are too abstract to elucidate
specific historical situ-
"History with the Politics Left
Out"
•
15
ations; the prevalent ideological bias disposes the historian to identify
endow them with his own attitudes and values; mode cannot accommodate those notable individuals
with his subjects and the populist
whose as a
actions
and ideas did,
whole, in
its
variety
after
all,
help shape history; and the genre
of techniques and approaches, suggests a
methodological permissiveness that seems to bear out Carl Becker's
famous dictum, "Everyman
his
own
historian."
2
All these criticisms
and more have been discussed and debated. But there that has received less attention
the
new
history
and that may be more
preeminently social history, and
is
is
another issue
significant.
as
such
it
For
makes
problematic the kind of history that has been the traditional concern of the historian
What does
— it
political history.
mean to write
history that cannot "get to" the founding
of the American republic (or the development of the English constitution, or the course
when
this
mode of
of the French Revolution) ? What does history
becomes the
mean dominant mode, when it is it
on the periphery of the profession but at the very center, an ancillary field but as the main field indeed, as some social
practiced not
not as
—
historians insist, as "total" history?
sense of the past
3
What does
it
imply about one's
and of the present, about an American past and
present devoid of the principles of liberty and right, checks and bal-
and good government, which were
ances, self-government
ciated
It
by the founding fathers and incorporated
was almost
first
fifty
in
first
enun-
our Constitution?
years ago, in his English Social History
— one of the
English works to deal exclusively with social history, and under
— that
that label
G.
M. Trevelyan
social history as "the history
hastened to add that
it
of a people with the
was
history, especially in the case
offered the famous definition of
difficult to leave
politics left out."
out the
politics
He
from
of the English people. All he hoped to do
was to "redress the balance," to recover that part of history, the history 4 of daily life, which had been sorely neglected. And he proposed to do so
knowing
that others
of his professional
He would reverse
to have
it
life)
in the writing
have thought
entirely, to
it
were engaged it
make
(as
he himself had been for most
of conventional,
political history.
a travesty to redress the balance so far as to social history the
dominant form of history,
supplant rather than supplement conventional history.
Trevelyan, after
all, like
his great-uncle
Macaulay, was preeminently
16 a
The
•
Whig
New History and
the
Old
historian, cherishing the political institutions
and traditions
had made England the liberal, progressive, enlightened country that he, like Macaulay, thought it to be. His Whig interpretation of the "Whig English history, like the Whig mode of writing history that
fallacy," as
it
has been called
—
— has
fallen into disrepute.
bert Butterfield exposed that fallacy
more than
5
When
Her-
half a century ago, he
meant to caution the historian against the insidious habit of reading history backward, of seeking in the past the sources of those ideas and institutions
we
value in the present, thus ignoring the complexities,
contingencies, and particularities that cably past. But he did not
mean
make
the past peculiarly, irrevo-
to counter a too intrusive present-
mindedness with a too austere past-mindedness, to deny the continuity of past and present. If it
mine the
past,
it
is
and
unhistorical to permit the present to deter-
surely as unhistorical to prevent the past
informing the present. political ideas
is
And it is surely unhistorical to belittle or
institutions that
from
ignore
were agitated and agonized over
sometimes to the point of bloodshed
— and have
since
become our
heritage.
Unlike a Trevelyan or his modern counterpart for
whom
social his-
tory complements and supplements conventional history, the cial historian
history,
who
is
even
new
so-
regards social history as the only meaningful kind of as "total" history.
truly guilty
of the
Whig
In this sense, fallacy.
For
it is
it is
the
new
he, even
historian
more than
Whig, who permits the present to shape the past, who projects own idea of what is real and important. It was once only the Marxist who regarded politics as the "epiphenomenon" of the
into the past his
history, the "superstructure" or "reflection"
nomic and
social "infrastructure."
Today
penetrated our culture that in this respect are
all
Marxists now." Having failed in so
example of a communist society that
is
of the underlying eco-
that view of politics has so it
might well be
much
else
—
said,
"We
in providing an
not tyrannical or authoritarian,
in fulfilling Marx's predictions
of the pauperization of the proletariat and proletarianization of the petty bourgeoisie, of the collapse of capi-
talism
and triumph of worldwide revolution
demeaning and denigrating and ideas.
in this: in activities,
In a sense the ist.
Where
new
social historian goes
the Marxist feels
it
— Marxism has succeeded
political events, institutions,
even further than the Marx-
necessary to prove, or at least assert, a
— Out"
"History with the Politics Left
between economics and
causal relationship
may simply
new
politics, the
17
•
historian
ignore the political dimension, making the social realitv so
comprehensive and ubiquitous that any form of government, anv law or political institution,
is
automatically perceived as a form of "social
control." Instead of the classic Marxist infrastructure
production and the social relations deriving from that infrastructure
the daily
is
however,
social historian,
what the
is
relations
historian thinks
not what contemporaries mav
Like the Marxist, the social historian finds
of
ity.
"false consciousness,"
If he thinks at
past
all
it all
that the advantages
about the discrepancy between
of hindsight and the
that he
their
his is
more
own
real-
account of the
wiser than they,
techniques
latest analytic
econometrics, prosopography, psychology, or whatever objective,
and times.
lives
too easv to convict his
of not understanding
and that of contemporaries, he assumes
more
as
as for the Marxist, the infrastruc-
it is,
have judged to be the most significant aspects of their subjects
of the
and peasants.
well as of workers
For the
of ordinary people: the
of classes, the condition of criminals and the insane
sexes as well as
ture
life
— the mode of — the new
mode
— give him
accurate view of the social reality. His
is
a
the
"true" consciousness, theirs the "false."
The
social historian
does
he attributes to the past
is
this in
play, sex
and childhood,
preoccupy him in
are the things that
more important
the reality
the reality he recognizes in the present. If he
makes so much of work and to be a
good conscience because
own
his
it is
because these
culture, that he believes
part of the existential reality than the "merely
formal" processes of government and
politics. If
he interprets the
reli-
gion of the Victorians as a form of psychic compensation, a sublimation of social distress, an expression of alienation,
it
is
because he
cannot credit, for himself or his peers, convictions and experiences that are essentially religious rather than social or psychological. If he puts
more credence
in local history than in national history, in folk tradi-
tions than in political traditions, in oral
and informal evidence than
in
written documents, in popular myths about witchcraft than in theories
of
statecraft,
he
unwittingly telling us
is
intellectual culture
more about
the political and
he himself inhabits than about the culture he
is
ostensibly describing.
In imposing his exhibits
all
own
sense of reality
the faults of the
Whig
on
the past, the social historian
interpretation without
its
redeeming
18
features.
of
New History and
The
•
However
Old
fallacious the
Whig
assumptions about the origins
constitutional government, and representative institu-
civil liberty,
tions, there
the
nothing
is
fallacious,
nothing anachronistic, about
at-
tributing to the past a deep concern with political, parliamentary, and constitutional affairs. Social history, in devaluing the political realm,
devalues history
itself. It
which serious and ful. It
makes meaningless those
influential
aspects of the past
contemporaries thought most meaning-
makes meaningless not only the struggle over
political authority
but the very idea of legitimate political authority, of political rule that is
not merely a euphemism for "social control," of rights and
that are not (as principles
and
would have
who
it)
Jeremy Bentham thought them)
liberties
"fictitious entities,"
of
do not merely reflect (as Antonio Gramsci the "hegemony" of the ruling class. The social historian
practices that
professes to write a comprehensive, "total" history of England or
America while leaving the
politics
out (again,
I
am not speaking of the
whom social history is a supplement to political history)
historian for
engaged in a
far
more
radical reinterpretation
may
suspect.
The
truly radical effect
political history
of the new enterprise
but reason
itself,
is
of history than even he
is
to devalue not only
reason in history and politics
— the
idea that political institutions are, at least in part, the product of a rational, conscious, deliberate
attempt to organize public
promote the public weal and the good historian scientist,
is
life.
life
so as to
In this respect the social
only following the example of his colleague the political
who
sees politics as essentially a
game, with
politicians jock-
eying for position, power, and the perquisites of office, playing upon the interests, passions, and prejudices of their constituents. This political
process
is
presumed to be
rational
on
the part of politicians only
with respect to the means of attaining and retaining power, not the ends of power; and rational on the part of electors only with respect to the satisfaction of their particular interests, not the public interest.
(The language of
political science
itself suggestive:
"politicians"
rather than "statesmen," "constituencies" or "voters"
rather than
is
"citizens.")
On those occasions when the social historian applies himself to politics, it is this
quantifies the
conception of politics that shapes his research. 6 Thus he
economic
interests
and
class status
of members of Parlia-
Ouf
y
"History with the Politics Left
ment and ior
who
power and those who
seek
install
them
in
describes the relationship of rulers and ruled in terms of
and "deference"; or sees
momentum" filled
the
in
the
He
judicial
were not
self-serving, that
means of power,
that
if
decisions,
as
(a casual
and deliberation
if
remark or
national
social historian finds precisely these
forethought
trustworthy than
less
and deliberation if
a hasty note) are
considered reflection and judgment, as ideas
commen-
debates,
embodied some conception of the
Machiavellian attempts to conceal the truth, as
moment
kind of
a rationality
formal documents are
communications,
political
were directed to the ends rather than
and public welfare. The
sources suspect, as vate
of
utilize the
for the secrets
does everything, in short, except
— constitutions, laws, — which might suggest
interest
"hegemony"
the explanation of laws and policies; or looks in smoke-
taries, treatises
that
power; or
bureaucracy and "administrative
rooms and the corridors of power
decisions.
sources
and behav-
their constituents; or psychoanalyzes the motives
of those
19
•
pri-
implv
the ephemera of the
more
if interests are
revealing than
more
than
real
and passion more compelling than reason.
In his inaugural lecture at Cambridge University in 1968, the eminent historian Geoffrey Elton
The
chair
is
commented on
the tide of his
the chair of English Constitutional History.
that tide myself,
and
I
don't think
I
new
Now
chair. I
chose
could have chosen worse, could
I? I
damned myself twice over. English Constitutional History, in the present climate of opinion. One adjective might have been forgiven. Perhaps Chinese Constitutional History would have been all right. Perhaps English Social History would have been wonderful. But no, I will pick them both: English Constitutional History.
Elton,
whose Tudor Revolution
itself something
7
in Government, published in 1953,
was
of a revolution in Tudor history and whom no one can
accuse of being a stodgy old historian,
went on to explain why he chose
that outlandish tide.
The purpose of constitutional history in
is
to study government, the
which men, having formed themselves into
societies,
manner
then arrange for
the orderly existence, through time, and in space, of those societies. therefore, like every other
form of history,
of the history of society. But
it
a
form of social
history, a
It is
form
takes particular note of the question of
— 20
The
•
New History and
government.
It is
Old
the
concerned with what
done to make
is
that society into a
wrong
properly structured, continuously living body, so that what goes
can be put right, so that the political action of which that society
is
capable can be efficiently and effectively conducted. Machinery, yes. But
What
also thought, the doctrine, the teaching, the conventional notions.
does the society think
its
government
is,
do to amend it? What forms of change on and so forth. 8
how does
are possible,
Constitutional history, Elton argued,
of the past because
govern
it
it
is
treat
it,
what does
it
what reforms, and so
central to the understanding
represents the efforts of a people to organize and
itself as rationally
and
effectively as
to the historical enterprise, because
it
it
can.
But
it is
also central
represents the efforts of the
historian to discover as best he can the objective truth about the past
to discover
it,
moreover, in those written documents that are the ob-
jective evidence
of the past and thus the principal resource of the
historian trying to reconstruct the past as objectively as he can.
documents have to be interpreted and
Those
reinterpreted, amplified
and
supplemented by other kinds of evidence; but they cannot be denied, falsified,
or ignored.
And
as
those documents are the bequest of the
past to the historian, so they are also the* bequest of the past to the present. Therefore, from the point of view both of the continuous ical
and from the point of view of teaching
research
work of histor-
history,
and from the
point of view of conveying to the world and to the future a sense of the past
and an understanding of the
tains, to
my
mind,
its
primacy.
most thoroughly described,
it
"It
No
else.
of government main-
fully explicated,
can be most clearly understood,
fewer absolutely open questions,
than anything
past, the study
can be most
It
it
can be leaves
it
can instruct in the use of reason better
9
can instruct in the use of reason"
— that
is
the heart of the matter.
one knows better than Elton the degree to which
past as in the present, consists in the struggle for privilege, position.
it
But he
also understands that part
politics, in the
money, power, of the
political
process consists in the attempt to restrain these self-serving motives, to create out
of them, or to impose upon them, a structure of government
that will serve society as a whole.
main
task
is
The
historian has
many
tasks,
but his
"the creation of a right mind, and a right reason."
'To
"History with the Politics Left
Out"
•
21
discover the truth as best he can, to convey that truth as truthfully as he
make the truth known and to enable man, b\ knowing the truth, to distinguish the right from the and
can, in order both to
learning
wrong reason" historian.
A
10
—
great deal
is
Elton assures us,
this,
at stake in this
is
the "simple" task of the
simple task, nothing
restoration of reason to history. This
is
scendental spirit or idea infusing history, but a
matic reason.
It is
less
than the
not Hegel's Reason, a tran-
more mundane, prag-
the reason reflected in the rational ordering and
organization of society by means of laws, constitutions, and political institutions;
and the reason implied
rian seeking to discover
that later generations
own
their
deliberately is
may be
instructed about the past that
The
tide
part of
it is
is
the future of history, as well as of the past,
at issue.
When foresee
it is
is
of Elton's address, "The Future of the Past,"
ambiguous:
Elton delivered that lecture in the
late sixties,
have foreseen the present state of the discipline. past.
of the histo-
that society, so
present and that they, in turn, will bequeath to future
generations.
that
in the rational activity
and transmit the truth about
it
and was being
as
canny about the future
Or as
he could not
perhaps he did
he was about the
In any event, his remarks are today more pertinent than ever. For
not only
tles. It is
political history that the social historian denies or belit-
reason
itself:
the reason
embodied
stitutions
and laws that permit men to order
manner
or,
—
in the polity, in the con-
their affairs in a rational
occasion, in an irrational manner, which other
men
perceive as such and rationally, often heroically, struggle against.
It is
on
the reason transmitted to the present by
which themselves specify the means
And
it is
way of constitutions and laws, amendment and reform.
for their
the reason inherent in the historical enterprise
itself,
in the
search for an objective truth that always eludes the individual historian
but that always (or so
it
was once thought) informs and
inspires his
work. This rationality
is
now
consciously denied or unconsciously under-
mined by every form of the new
history:
by
social history positing
infrastructure that supposedly goes deeper than
ments and
is
not amenable to reason or
will;
mere
an
political arrange-
by anthropological
his-
tory exploring such nonrational aspects of society as mating customs
and eating habits; by psychoanalytic history dwelling upon the
irra-
22
•
The
New History and
the
Old
unconscious aspects of individual and collective behavior; by
tional,
structuralist history
emphasizing the long-term ecological "structures"
and medium-term economic and
social "conjunctures" at the
expense of
short-term politics and individuals; by mentalite history giving greater
credence to popular beliefs than to the
"elitist" ideas
of philosophers;
by oral history relying on verbal reminiscences rather than written itself on advocacy rather than
documents; by engage history priding
mere
analysis;
by populist history seeking to recover not only the
lives
of ordinary people but intimate feelings that tend to be inaccessible
and unknowable; by the new history of every description asking questions of the past which the past did not ask of itself, for which the evidence ily
is
sparse
and unreliable and to which the answers
speculative, subjective,
are necessar-
and dubious.
—
—
must say I cannot repeat it too often that it is neither the subjects nor the methods of social history that are at issue but their dominance, which itself reflects the assumption, increasingly common in the profession, that these subjects and methods represent a higher
Again
I
form of history, more tial,
real
and
significant,
more elemental and essenis no question: one
than the old history. About this tendency there
need only look
at the
programs of the annual meetings of the American
Historical Association, or at the
newer
historical journals,
or
at appli-
cations for grants, or at the tides of recent and prospective dissertations. If the process
is
not even more advanced,
it is
because the old
many have become converts to the new history) and because some among the younger generation have resisted the allure of the new even at risk to generation of historians has not yet died out (although
their careers. It is
tempting to think of this
ysms of enthusiasm to which
as a passing fad,
way of institutionalizing such fads: it By now a generation of new historians
universities have a
tenure system.
generations as these are calculated in academia busily producing students in their image.
is
the only kind of history they
they respect. Rather than being a fad,
—
is
called the
— or
several
are tenured professors
For many young (and no
more graduate students, social know, certainly the only kind it more nearly resembles a revo-
longer so young) professors, and even history
one of those parox-
universities are so prone. Unfortunately
"History with the Politics Left
lution in the discipline. in
One
recalls the
Out"
revolution in education ushered
by the progressive school three quarters of
a century ago,
and
philosophy by the analytic school half a century ago, both of which
dominate
their disciplines (although they are
under attack) This only
mode of history.
in
still
beginning to come
is
or will become the
Political, constitutional, diplomatic,
tual history will survive, ies;
now
not to say that social history
is
.
23
•
and
intellec-
but not in the mainstream of historical stud-
they will be on the periphery, as social history once was.
In America this revolution has already
filtered
down from
programs to undergraduate schools and even high schools.
graduate
A
recent
documentary-essay question on the College Board Advanced Place-
"How and why did the women lives and status of Northern middle-class change between 1 776
ment examination and 1876?"
in
American history was
— a question
described in the bulletin of the American
Historical Association as a "mainline topic."
the in
European history examination
dealt with
11
A
similar question
methods of child rearing
England from the sixteenth through the eighteenth
Again, the point
is
on
centuries.
12
not the propriety of such questions but their promi-
nence. These examinations send out signals to high schools through-
out the country telling them what kind of history should be taught their students are to effect,
compete
if
successfully for admission to college; in
they establish something very
like a national
curriculum.
And
given the limited time available for the study of history in our high schools, the
new
subjects
do not merely supplement
the old; they
inevitably supplant them.
The
practitioners
should not
of social history
women and
will say,
And about time too. Why
children supplant kings and politicians?
Why
way ordinary people lived, loved, worked, and died take way they were governed? Such a reordering of would be eminently reasonable and humane were it not for
should not the
precedence over the priorities
—
the cost of that enterprise, a cost borne precisely by those ordinary
people about
whom
these historians are
most
solicitous. If ordinary
people are being "rescued from oblivion," as has been said, by the
new
from below," they are also being demeaned, deprived of that aspect of their lives which elevated them above the ordinary, which
"history
brought them into relationship with something larger than their daily lives,
which made them
feel part
of the polity even when they were not
24
The
•
New History and
represented in
it,
the
Old
and which made them
hard for representa-
fight so
much importance
tion precisely because they themselves attached so
to
their political status.
When
Macaulay prepared
his readers for the
famous third chapter of
of the peo— the chapter describing "the and the history of the government," the conditions of — he he would of manners, morals, and
his History ofEngland
ple as well as
work, the
history
life
culture
state
said that
"cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended history."
13
of history
But
it
as to
never occurred to
him
to
go so
below the dignity of
far
below the dignity
dwell on the history of the people to the exclusion
or even at the expense of, the history of the government.
occur to
him
to
impugn
Still less
the dignity of the people by dwelling
of,
did
it
on the
book entitled A Mad People's History ofMadness, consisting in extracts from writings by the mad, was hailed by one reviewer as "a welcome contribution to history from below." 14 It is only a matter of time before other critics will fault least dignified aspects
it
of their history.
for being insufficiently
recent
"from below," for including such eminences
medieval mystic Margery
as the
A
Kempe
instead of the truly lowly,
anonymous madmen (and mad women, one must now hasten to add) Bedlam and Bellevue. For Macaulay the "dignity of history" what an archaic ring that now has was tantamount to the meaning of history. If political events, institutions, and ideas loom so large in his history, it is because he saw them as shaping and defining the past, giving form and meanin
—
—
ing to the past as contemporaries experienced past as the historian tries to reconstruct
it,
and to the story of the
From a different perspective mode of history that deprives
it.
some Marxists have taken exception to a the past of the meaning they find in it. Thus Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese have charged that social history, by romanticizing the ordinary life
upon that
daily
is,
of ordinary people, denies the theory of im-
is
the Marxist impulse for revolution and, by focusing
life at
the expense of politics, obfuscates the class struggle
miseration that
finally, a political struggle, a
struggle for power. Against this
and depoliticization of history, they cite Engels' Origins of Family, Private Property, and the State, whose very tide calls atten-
privatization the
tion to the "decisive political terrain of historical process." Like Lenin
attacking the "Left deviationists" for objectively playing into the
"History with the Politics Left
Out"
•
25
hands of the counterrevolutionaries, the Genoveses rebuke those "ex"bourgeois swindle" by dwelling upon the daily
of the
class struggle.
One
ally,
lives
perpetrate a
of people instead
15
who
can sympathize with the Marxist
once his
who
and ex-Communists"
Marxists, ex-new Leftists,
finds that social historv,
has turned against him, not deliberately but unwittingly,
by distracting attention from the revolutionary struggle. sympathize with the social historian who, for
Marxism inadequate or
finds
all
rian if
and the insane.
And one may
he takes Schadenfreude
lives
much
as
a distortion
of deviants,
forgive the conventional histo-
each of them exposing the
in finding
weaknesses of the other, thus confirming what he has long is
can also
irrelevant in explaining the ordinary lives
of ordinary people, to say nothing of the abnormal criminals,
One
his radical sympathies,
of history to ignore
politics as to
said: that
make
it
the class
struggle the determining fact of history.
new history, we can better appreciate what we are in danger of losing if we abandon the old. We will lose not After several decades of the
only the unifying theme that has given coherence to history, not only the notable events, individuals, and institutions that have constituted
our historical
made
history readable
ful past
And
memory and our heritage,
— but
that loss
redefinition
and memorable
is
even more
— not only,
of man
also a conception
not only the narrative that has in short, a
meaning-
as a rational, political animal.
difficult to sustain, for
it
involves a radical
of human nature.
An eminent social historian has appealed to Aristode for the ultimate vindication of his enterprise: "There
is
no
better definition of
nature than Aristotie's, translated as he understood animal'." ical
16
What Aristotle
animal."
17
It is
said,
of course,
is
"Man
is
'Man
human
is
a social
by nature
a polit-
it:
not in the "household" or in the "village," Aristode
man
human, decisively different from "bees or any other gregarious animals." The latter, after all, also inhabit households and villages (societies, as we would now say); said,
but only in the "polis" that
is
truly
they also eat, play, copulate, rear their young, provide sustenance for
themselves (and, often, for their families), have social relations, and
develop social structures.
ment of laws and
What
institutions
of which, Aristode believed tablish a just
do not have by means of which they
— man consciously,
regime and pursue the good
life.
is
a polity, a govern-
— and only by means rationally tries to es-
The
social historian,
26
•
The
New History and
the
Old
rejecting any such "elitist" idea as the
stand any
life,
indeed regarding
it
good
as a
seeking only to under-
triumph of the
nation to explore the lowest depths of unreflective, irrational aspects
life,
of life, denies that
man
indeed unique, animal Aristode thought him to be
which
is
historical imagi-
to probe the unconscious,
life,
—
is
the distinctive,
a rational animal,
to say, a political animal.
Postscript
When
this essay
was
published in Harper's in April 1984,
first
pro-
it
I had expected. The editors solicited comments from some historians, and others volunteered their opinions, which ranged from effusive praise to unprintable vituperation.
voked even more controversy than
But
it
was not
until I received the first batch
some commending thought but had not dared privately,
arrogance, and bigotry, that
I
in saying publicly
say, others
denouncing
realized just
me
of letters addressed to
my courage
how
my
what they ignorance,
sensitive a nerve
I
had
struck.
In reprinting the essay,
I
planned to revise and expand
it
(as I
the other chapters of this volume). But since this might give unfair advantage over
my
critics, I
have
let
have
me
an
the original version stand
(except for small stylistic changes, elimination of duplication, and restoration of the footnotes
opportunity to
and the
comment on
original tide). Instead,
the
more important
I
shall take this
points raised in re-
sponse to the essay. (Only those correspondents whose
letters
were
published in Harper's will be mentioned by name.)
Because most of my interdiction
on
all
of
critics
seem to think
social history, I
that
I
am pronouncing
techniques and performed a simple arithmetic calculation. the course of the paper
I said,
no fewer than
— not
I
find that in
seven times, that
objections are not to social history as such but to
nance, superiority, even "totality"
an
have borrowed one of their
its
my
claims of domi-
to social history as
it
may
complement or supplement traditional history but to that which would supplant it. Anticipating this misinterpretation, I opened one paragraph: "Again I must say I cannot repeat it too often that it is
—
but their
—
methods of social history that are at issue dominance." But no amount of repetition seems to avail.
neither the subjects nor the
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a
•
.1
—
class
—
Two Nations "petit bourgeois, aspiring professional
artisans"
— or the
or Five Classes
men, other
literates,
motley assortment comprising working
53
•
and
B
class
"agricultural laborers, other low-paid nonfactory urban laborers, do-
women
mestic servants, urban poor, most working-class
Working
Class
A or B households"?
7
Surely these groups did not share
the same attitudes and social relations. precision, assign each
of these groups
streams, sluices, barriers, and
Neale
all
middle
class has
"done more to else.")
suggestive and valuable. hurts his case
and
crudities
— whether
8
And
it
all,
alternative
own
its
with the conventional
George
class.
thought about Victorian En-
there
much
is is
in
in
Neale\
article that
is
whether the model helps or all
curves rather than
its
both directions, make for new question of whether a mis-
better than an
unabashed and avowed
(or seven- or eight- or w-class) pool-model
is
the only alternative to a three-class box-model. Another a well-reasoned, well-documented
is
own, with
its
said that the concept of the
does not, for
is
of greater
stultify
rigidities. It also raises the
A five-class
imprecision.
dissatisfied
The question
placed or spurious precision
not, after
pool of
a
when he
and arrows pointing
straight lines
for the sake
with the category of the middle
Kitson Clark put the matter well gland than anything
Why not,
the rest?
undoubtedly right to be
is
class trinity, especially
whether from
argument
in
which the
nuances of language, rather than the direction and thickness of
lines,
bear the burden of conveying the complexities and subdeties of the social reality.
To the sociological historian,
however, language
is
a
"burden"
worst sense. Having made a great virtue of precise and definitions,
in the
explicit
he often proceeds to formulate definitions that are either so
obtuse as to be incomprehensible or so tautological as to be useless.
For the sociologist, there may be some meaning or definition
of social
ity structure
may be non of
classes as "conflict
appropriate to his purpose, which
most
distracts
historical situation
its
abstractness
to describe the
of a
phenome-
by promoting the
For the
historical situation,
At best it plays no him from attending to the
definition can hardly be helpful. it
is
general, universal, abstract sense.
historian, interested in the particularity
At worst
the
groups arising out of the author-
of imperatively coordinated associations"; 9
class in its
utility in
such a
part in his research. "actualities"
illusion that
of the
by virtue of some
such definition, he has "objectively identified" the concept of class. 10
It
54 is
New History and
The
•
this illusion, this
the
Old
claim of objectivity, that
is
the driving force behind
the enterprise of sociological history.
The
historian
— any historian — may properly be accused of hubris, of
professing to
more
better or
through rian's
know more about
it.
It is
objectively,
a historical event, to understand
an inescapable occupational hazard. For
wariness of the fallacy of hindsight, for
that fallacy
is
rian flaunts
and besetting
poraries.
his attempts to avoid
But where the
sin.
it
remains
traditional
disturbed by his presumptuousness, the sociological histoit; it is
and
his pride
he claims conveys the social poraries.
all
it
lived
the histo-
all
by immersing himself in contemporary sources,
his eternal temptation
historian
who
than those contemporaries
distinction.
reality better
He invents a language that
than the language of contem-
He freely reorders and remodels the experiences of contemHe abstracts, generalizes, theorizes for whatever purposes he
deems proper, to
elicit
whatever categories or postulates he deems
important. At every point he
is
asserting his independence of
superiority over those contemporaries
who
and
his
provide his material. In the
currendy fashionable phrase, they are his "objects"; he alone can see
them them
"objectively," scientifically; he can "construct" or "deconstruct" at will.
Yet even
contemporaries have a limited interest for the
as objects,
sociological historian,
whole dimensions of their experience being de-
nied or belittled by him.
The only
parts
of their experience he can
recognize, because they are the only parts he can use, are those that
manifest themselves externally, that are visible, measurable, quantifiable.
Their ideas, attitudes,
beliefs,
perceptions enter into his tables and
models only when they express themselves behaviorally elections, or
—
often said that this kind of sociological history
It is
democratic form of history; instead of "great
another
in riots, or
church attendance, or production and consumption.
— the
men"
who emerged
it is
the history of
is
the only
"anonymous" masses of one sort or
politicians, writers, leaders
in their
Sociological history has indeed
own
time as identifiable individuals.
had the
effect
of suppressing these
The question is whether it has succeeded in bringanonymous masses, whether it has not "upstaged" the
notable individuals. ing to
life
the
masses just as
it
has the leaders, whether
it
does not display toward the
masses the same condescension, the same sense of superiority,
toward
all
contemporaries.
it
does
Two Nations It is true,
who
or Five Classes
•
55
of course, that individual contemporaries, contemporaries
distinguished themselves in one fashion or another, cannot be
presumed to speak
anonymous
for the
masses. But
contemporaries are thus disqualified, surely
if
distinguished
a historian, generations
removed from those masses, familiar with them only through certain kinds of records that happen to have been preserved, must be immodest
indeed to think that he can understand them better than the wisest
men of
their time. Surely he
cannot afford to ignore the considered
judgments of these contemporaries. Nor can he afford to confine him-
and memoirs
self to their private letters
in preference to their essays
and books, on the assumption that truth "given away"
—
at the level
sciousness brings with
There
ness."
is
of
more of
it
best revealed
is
— exposed,
least consciousness, that greater
con-
the delusions of "false conscious-
something slanderous about
this
when he
that a great contemporary, precisely
ing himself most carefully and deliberately,
is
assumption.
least to
is
It
implies
at his greatest, express-
be trusted to
tell
And if the great men of the time are thus defamed, so also are anonymous people who bought their books, listened to their
the truth. all
the
them the
speeches, and otherwise accorded
may
purports to be democratic history insidious kind
When
of elitist
the discussion of class
and models of sociological
from those found
historians.
models. Contemporaries,
One
it
affair.
Over and above
all
and
proper, just and unjust, right and
most ingenious sociologist cannot tions
And
that language
moral nuances.
a highly charged
moral
is
an order of facts that
of what was proper and im-
wrong about
those relations.
translate these perceptions
— the models,
abstractions, at the time,
and
The
and con-
quantifica-
and are
still
only
language, the discourse of ordinary people as
well as the learned, of the uals.
was
men's perceptions of themselves in
— of sociology. They were rendered
intelligible, in literary
these
the economic, legal, and social distinctions
their conceptions
ceptions into the language
why
contemporary concepts into
and diagrammed, there
defies the sociological imagination:
relation to others,
in the tables
also discovers
appears, were not only acutely
class-conscious; their class consciousness
that can be quantified
most
well prove to be the
returned to contemporaries, one
is
historians cannot readily incorporate the
own
of greatness. What
history.
discovers quite different conceptions
their
title
anonymous masses is
as well as notable individ-
thoroughly, ineradicably penetrated by
l
56
The
•
If
we
New History and
the
Old
refuse to indulge the current prejudice against greatness,
may choose
on the
we
one of the great commentators on Victorian England, Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle was great not to consult,
subject of class,
only in himself but in his influence, and in his influence not only upon readers of
of
influential
classes
all
own
his
Disraeli, Kingsley,
particularly)
but also upon some of the greatest and most contemporaries
—
Mill, Arnold, Dickens, Eliot,
Ruskin, Swinburne, Thackeray.
Some of these
(Mill
were eventually put off by the blatandy undemocratic
tone of Carlyle's later writings. But the younger Carlyle helped shape the moral, intellectual, and social consciousness of early Victorian En-
gland as perhaps no other single figure did. Even criticism,
he confronted his
critics
when he provoked
with an alternative vision of society
they could not ignore. George Eliot, herself a formidable moralist, explained that even those
who
shared few of Carlyle's opinions found
the reading offSartor Resartus)an "epoch in the history of their minds." It is
an
hence:
idle
question to ask whether his books will be read a century
were
if they
would only be forest.
burnt
as the
like cutting
down
For there
is
all
grandest suttees on his funeral pyre,
an oak
after its acorns
hardly a superior or active
it
have sown a
mind of this generation
that
has not been modified by Carlyle's writings; there has hardly been an
English book written for the
been different
What
if
Carlyle
remarkable
is
is
last
had not
ten or twelve years that lived.
that Carlyle
had the
rhetoric so extraordinary that today
staunchest devotee.
We
We
also think
which the
realities
of
of
it
effect
he did in spite of a
tends to repel
all
but the
think of the nineteenth century as an age of
intolerable conformity, repressive sion.
would not have
1
it
life
as
of all individuality, enthusiasm, pas-
an age of complacency and hypocrisy, in
were obscured by
polite
euphemisms and
a
mindless adherence to convention. If anything could put such myths to rest, a
reading of Carlyle would do
He was
the
most
individualistic,
so.
indeed eccentric, of writers
— and
most outspoken. He denounced the false "gospels" of the age, the "foul and vile and soul-murdering Mud-gods," with all the fervor of a 12 Jeremiah. His invectives are famous: utilitarianism was "pig philosothe
phy"; laissez-faireism was the freedom of apes; parliamentary' reform
was "constitution-mongering"; material progress was "mammonism"; rationalism was "dilettantism." The more he denounced these false
Two Nations idols,
and the more intemperately and
or Five Classes
•
57
idiosyncratically he did so, using
elaborate metaphors and obscure references, presenting his ideas in the
work of German philosophy or the monk, the more attentively he was read.
guise of a newly published chronicle of a twelfth-century It is all
perhaps just as well that
much of his
audience did not understand
his allusions; Professor Teufelsdrockh, the
hero (or antihero) of
its most refined version as Professor Dung. But those who did know German, including Mill and
Sartor Resartus, translates in Devil's
Arnold, were not disconcerted by his pungent language, perhaps because they respected the moral passion inspiring
— — that Carlyle should have coined the phrase "condition-of-England It is ironic
it
it.
but only because of what historians have since made of
question."
Today this
question," which
is
is
generally interpreted as the
u
standard-of-li\ ing
taken as an invitation to quantification, the amass-
ing of statistics relating to wages and prices, production and consumption. Carlyle
understood
it
quite otherwise.
Having opened
his essay
"Chartism" with the "condition-of-England question," he followed with an extremely skeptical chapter on Tables are
like
cobwebs,
ticulated, orderly to
like
the sieve of the Danaides; beautifully
cumstance science
left
of.
out
it is
difficult to
There are innumerable circumstances; and one
may be
the vital one
on which
which ought to be honourable, the
sciences; but
basis
than others are; a wise head
is
all
turned. Statistics
ciris
a
of many most important
not to be carried on by steam,
facts are inseparable
re-
look upon, but which will hold no conclusion.
Tables are abstractions, and the object a most concrete one, so read the essence
it
"Statistics."
this science,
requisite for carrying
from inconclusive except by
a
it
any more
on. Conclusive
head that already
understands and knows. 13
To
was to ask the right questions, questions that could not be answered with the most comprehensive figures and charts. The first sentence of his essay defined the condition-of-England question as the "condition and disposition" of the working classes. If we are inclined to forget the second of these "understand" and to "know," Carlyle
said,
What gave Chartism its enduring strength, fact that it was only a new name for an age-old
terms, Carlyle never was.
he explained, was the
phenomenon: it meant "the bitter discontent grown fierce and mad, the wrong condition therefore, or the wrong disposition, of the Work-
— 58
The
•
New History and
ing Classes of England." :
working
had
classes?"
Old
the
The question "What
as its corollary, "Is the
working people wrong; so wrong that
rational
and even should not
under
will not,
rest quiet
the condition of the
is
condition of the English
working men cannot,
And
it?"
this raised the
further questions: "Is the discontent itself mad, like the shape
Not
-.^
the condition of the working people that
disposition, their
The answers
own
is
it
took?
wrong; but
their
thoughts, beliefs and feelings that are wrong?"
to these questions were not quantifiable because the con-
depended not on their material goods but on their "It is not what a man outwardly has or wants that
dition of people
moral disposition.
constitutes the happiness or misery of him. Nakedness, hunger, dis-
of
tress
heart
men ~~
all
was
kinds, death itself have been cheerfully suffered,
right. It
is
the feeling of injustice that
insupportable to
famous invention, the phrase "cash payment the
Carlyle's other
economists the deplorable idea that
of supply and demand relations
were best
left
men were
as surely as material
15
He
all
sole
attributed to the
subject to the principle
goods were, that human
to the impersonal forces of the marketplace, that
cash payment was the sole nexus between* man and man.
raged him was not only that tion
the
5)14
nexus," derived from the same moral impulse.
>
is
when
men were
reduced to
this
— although that would be outrage enough — but
What
out-
inhuman condithat this condi-
tion should be represented as perfectiy natural, a God-given law of nature. This
mockery of God
was blasphemous
as well as
inhuman,
of individual
men were
tainted by this
a
and of man. If the relations esy, so
were the
Carlyle
had
an upper
relations
a simple
class
and
a
of classes. Like most of
view of the lower
class structure
class, a class
of the
modern
her-
his contemporaries,
of England: there was rich
and
a class
of the
poor. Generally, again like most of his contemporaries, he pluralized
both of these, making them the "upper
classes"
sometimes he gave them a special Carlylean
and "lower
twist, as
classes";
when he spoke of
the "under class." But his special contribution to the nomenclature
— of
his distinction between the was here that the two classes, so far from being simple descriptive terms, became morally charged. And it was here that Carlyle parted company with Marx and Engels, who borrowed his aphorism about the cash nexus and quoted him on
and to the conception
"toiling classes"
classes
was
and the "untoiling." 16
It
Two Nations the condition of the working classes.
and the un toiling
classes
classes
What Carlyle meant by
was not
their Marxist equivalents: labor
or Five Classes
and
at all
capital.
•
59
the toiling
what might seem to be
The
toiling classes in-
the untoiling classes those of the lower
who did in fact work, and classes who did not work. So
too there were rich "master- workers"
as well as "master- idlers" (or
cluded those members of the upper classes
"master-unworkers"), and poor "un workers"
poorhouses euphemistically known
as
who
spent their da\s
"workhouses."
in
17
The implications of Carlyle's distinctions are momentous, for they mean that he was not at all the cryptosocialist that some present-day socialists would make of him. Socialists can share Carlyle's outrage at the condition of the poor, his condemnation of the idle rich, his detestation
of laissez-faire economics. They can
find in
him premonitions of
the dehumanization, desocialization, and alienation they attribute to
They can even share his respect for work, under certain The young Marx might have said, as Carlyle did,
capitalism.
ideal conditions.
"Labour
is
not a
devil,
even while encased
in
Mammonism; Labour
is
ever an imprisoned god, writhing unconsciously or consciously to
escape out of Mammonism!"
What
the Marxist cannot do, however, and
upon doing, was
to give
well as the laborer
worker rather than
work an ennobling
— provided only
20
And
this
19
"All
work ...
dictum redeemed the
Just as in the Marxist
is
noble;
capitalist, the
it),
insisted
quality for the capitalist as
that the capitalist
(the "Mill-ocracy," as Carlyle put
talist
what Carlyle was
a master-idler. Laborare est orare: this
pel according to Carlyle.
noble."
18
as
a master-
was the gos-
work
alone
is
working
capi-
much as the workingman.
schema the concept of surplus
value, or exploita-
making him the villain of morality play, so the concept of work legitimized him for Carmade of him a "captain of industry," a natural leader and a true
tion, illegitimized, so to speak, the capitalist,
that lyle
—
hero.
This
is
why
the struggle between rich and poor, between the upper
and lower
classes,
the-death
it
was
was not
for Carlyle the
same inexorable,
for Marx. Indeed, for Carlyle a
fatal
war-to-
symptom and
also a
cause of the prevailing misery and discontent was the fact that there
was such role,
a struggle.
made
The
idle aristocracy, abdicating its natural political
the process of government seem
artificial,
the fortuitous
product of competition and struggle. This was the true perversion of
60
The
•
New History and
the
Old
economy. Denying the proper function of government, the laissez-faireists subverted the proper relationship of the governed and the governors. And in the absence of such a relationship, cash payment political
became the
sole nexus connecting the rich
and the poor.
After reading the reviews of "Chartism," Carlyle remarked: "The
people are beginning to discover that
of the deepest, though perhaps the extant in the world."
21
I
am not a Tory. Ah,
Carlyle's radicalism
no! but one
now may not be ours. Nor was it
quietest,
of
all
the Radicals
own time.* But it was a form of radicalism that most of his contemporaries recognized as such. One reader of Past and that of all radicals in his
Present quipped that the
book would be very dangerous
"turned into the vernacular."
if it
not in the answers he gave to the
Carlyle's radicalism consisted
condition-of-England question but in putting the question in putting
it
in such a
form that
it
raised the
is
more banal than
into an upper
was to
and
a
raise the idea
class relations.
the idea that England, or any country,
lower
class, into rich
of class to a new
level
associating — lematic "dangerous,"
with the idea of
it
as
one reader
said
is
Noth-
divided
and poor. What Carlyle did
moral concept, a cogent instrument of legitimization and
By
and
of consciousness by giving
^moral urgency)ln Victorian England the idea of work was tion.
itself,
most fundamental doubts
about the legitimacy of prevailing doctrines and ing
were ever
22
class,
Carlyle
it
a powerful
illegitimiza-
made prob-
— what had previously been
the most natural and innocent of propositions, that England was di-
vided into two
classes.
In Sartor Resartus Carlyle described the extremes to which those two classes tise,
were being pushed. The book
Die
is
an elaborate play upon a
trea-
Werden und Wirken, by the ubiquitous Herr
Kleider, ihr
Teufelsdrockh, Professor of Allerlei Wissenschaft at the University of
Weissnichtwo. The clothes metaphor inspired Carlyle to invent two *Nor of
radicals abroad,
although they too
testified to its radicalism.
Marx and Engels
paid Carlyle the high tribute of borrowing and publicizing his phrase about "cash payment" constituting the "sole nexus of man to man."
was the only book published
in
And
Engels, reviewing Past and Present, said
it
England that year "worth reading." Although he rebuked
Carlyle for not realizing that the cause of the social evil
was
private property, his
much
"pantheism," which he took to be as outmoded
lengthier criticism
was directed
and pernicious
conventional religion. Echoing Feuerbach, Engels insisted that the old
"What is God?" had finally been answered by German philosophy: "God is Man." Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works [New York, 1975- ], III, 463-466.)
question (Karl
as
at Carlyle's
Two Nations Dandies and Drudges, the
sects,
or Five Classes
61
•
worshipping money and the
first
trappings of gentiemanliness, the second slaving to keep barelv clothed
and
fed.
Such
are the
two
Sects which, at this
moment,
divide the
more
unsettled
portion of the British People, and agitate that ever- vexed countrv ... In
and subterranean ramifications, they extend through the
their roots
structure of Society, and
work unweariedly
glish national Existence, striving to separate
uncommunicating masses
tradictory,
the
two
Sects will
itself from
side.
.
.
.
depths of En-
and
into
To me
isolate it
it
till
there be
none
two con-
seems probable that
one day part England between them, each
the intermediate ranks,
entire
in the secret
left
recruiting
to enlist
on
either
23
If Carlyle's final
words remind us of Marx, with
the polarization of classes
his predictions
of
— the increasing concentration of wealth on
the one hand, the increasing proletarianization and pauperization
—
on the other the rest of the passage recalls "the two nations." One need not go so far
Disraeli's
famous phrase
as some historians who made of that expression a "household word." 24 Nor 25 need one make too much of the fact that others used it before him. It
claim that Disraeli
is
enough to say that was "in the air."
Disraeli dramatized
and popularized
a
concept
that
Disraeli also dramatized, perhaps romanticized as well, the condition-of- England question. In Coningsby, published in 1844, five years after Carlyle's
"Chartism," Disraeli referred to the "Condition-of-
England Question of which our generation hears so much." 26
months
later, in
ity for that
an address to
concept:
"Long
his constituents,
before what
people question' was discussed in the
ployed
my
pen on the subject." 27
and was evidentiy anticipating that book: that parts
reports
is
Bill
and having
already
of it sound
like a
had been introduced
begun writing
Sybil
listened to those debates (a
in that very session
of parliament)
actually inserted verbatim into his novel portions
mission, released in 1842), Disraeli 28
of the
had em-
was to be leveled against transcript of Royal Commission
of one of
Employment Comhad reason to be sensitive on this
those reports (the second report of the Children's account.
I
a criticism that
and parliamentary debates. Having
Factory
few
he claimed some prior-
called the 'condition
House of Commons,
He had
A
62
The
•
New History and
The message of Sybil
Old
the
and
perfectly clear
is
explicit.
Unlike Carlyle,
with his extended metaphors and heavy irony, Disraeli, even when writing fiction, was engaged in a not very subtle form of political indoctrination. If parts of Sybil read like transcripts of the blue books
(which they were), other parts sound
on
phlets
like extracts
from
a Short Course
a Young Englander, or from penny pam-
in the History of England, by
"the social problem." In the novel the crucial passages an-
nounce themselves, so to speak, by the device of capitals. Thus the mention of the two-nations theme appears Egremont, the good
aristocrat (one
identifications, as in a morality play), tified as
Stephen Morley, an Owenite
in a dialogue
tempted to
is
between
capitalize these
and "the stranger,"
who
first
later iden-
has joined forces with the
Chartists.
"Say what you
like,
our Queen reigns over the greatest nation that ever
existed."
"Which nation?" asked the younger stranger, "for she reigns over two." The stranger paused; Egremont was silent, but looked inquiringly. "Yes," resumed the stranger. "Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as
they were dwellers in different zones, or
if
inhabitants of different planets; ing, are fed
by a different food,
who
are as
formed by
a different breed-
by different manners, and
are ordered
are
not governed by the same laws."
"You speak of—" said Egremont, "THE RICH AND THE POOR." 29 This
final line
C
grade
of capitals
hesitatingly.
followed by a fade-out scene worthy of a
is
movie: the gray ruins are suffused by a "sudden flush of rosy
hymn
and the voice of Sybil heard singing the evening to — Virgin "a but tones of almost supernatural sweetness; light,"
is
the
single voice;
tender and solemn, yet flexible and thrilling."
This
is
Disraeli prose at
ishly romantic.
sure,
Most of
but cleverly so
its
it
— sharp,
is
worst, blatandy tendentious and
very
redeemed by a
latent irony that
effect. Sybil is, in fact,
literary strategy
is
much
acerbic, witty,
veying some provocative thought. are
30
And
better
mawk-
— tendentious,
to be
and surprisingly often con-
even the romantic interludes
makes for
a slightiy offbeat,
campy
an eminently readable book, and although the
obvious enough
— the contrast between high
society
Two Nations
or Five Classes
63
•
and the lowliest poor, between parliamentary intrigue and Chartist conspiracy
— there
are
memorable episodes
satirizing the
upper
classes
and dramatizing the lower. The opening scene in the fashionable club finds a group of rich, blase, and rather effete young men chatting idly about the forthcoming Derby rather likes
wine."
31
houses, are
man
with one
races,
confessing that he
bad wine because, you know, "one gets so bored with good
In the same
who
mood
are scenes featuring the ladies
of the great
think they are wielding political power (perhaps they
— the novel
ambiguous
is
at this point)
by extending or withhold-
ing invitations to their dinner parties; they vainly attempt to extract
who do
information from dim-witted lords
pumped,
On
good reason
for the very
that they
the other side of the social spectrum
fashionable
men and women
ably. Disraeli has
been
the condition of
England
— terms that
own
When
I
freest,
and the
youth
soured
spirits
so, for
overdramatizing
and overidealiz-
this
religious race
and
all
good old
days.
As
if
she were
re-
English people once was; the truest, the
upon
their crimes
and the
I
best- looking, the hap-
the surface of this globe; and think of
and
their slavish sufferings, their
all
their stunted forms; their lives
without hope;
their deaths
Disraeli uses interchange-
and properly
bravest, the best-natured
them now, with
all.
in pre- Reformation times, Sybil reflects:
remember what
and most
at
the reality that these
in the nineteenth century
criticized,
ing the condition of England in the calling her
is
are being
are so abysmally ignorant of: the reality
of THE PEOPLE, or THE POOR
piest
know they know nothing
not
may well
feel for
without enjoyment, and
them, even
if I
were not the
daughter of their blood. 32
Even
if
the extravagant rhetoric, with
truest, the freest, the bravest
all
those superlatives
— do not forewarn us
— the
that Disraeli intends
the passage to be read mythically and allegorically, the last sentence
should surely
we know
alert
us to that possibility; for at this point in the story
that Sybil
is
not, in fact, "the daughter of their blood," that
from being of "the people," she oldest and noblest families. far
is
the descendant of one of the
Apart from such mythicized representations of past and present tentionally mythicized, as
I
(in-
read Disraeli), there are scenes that, how-
ever exaggerated, reveal important and frequendy ignored aspects of social reality.
For
all
his fantasies
and extravagances,
Disraeli
had
a
64
New History and
The
•
clear perception
Old
the
of different conditions and kinds of poverty.
He
dis-
tinguished, for example, between rural and industrial poverty, between
manufacturing and mining towns, between the ordinary working poor
and an underclass that was almost a race apart, brutalized, uncivilized, living in a virtual state of nature. There is a precision in these distinctions that the historian
may
well respect.
The historian may also profitably read the exchange between the good aristocrat Egremont and the Chartist Gerard in which each cites statistics
much
about the condition of England, the one proving that
better, the other
concluding
(like Carlyle
much
it is
worse, than ever before, with Gerard
before him) that in any event
it is
material conditions that are at issue as the relations of
not so
men
much
with one
another. The Owenite Morley makes the same point: "There is no community in England; there is aggregation^ but aggregation under circumstances which make it rather a dissociating than a uniting principle."
33
when he goes
only
It is
"obsolete" that Gerard balks. "the
method of
What we want "but
plies,
When tion,"
I like
Community." stretching
my
under the
labels
feet
not to Sybil,
who
is
on
35
m^ own
34
hearth."
Gerard
re-
he
is
Gesellschaft, historians listen
dismissed as a medievalist and
community
do
as
much
for
mankind
as the
Neither Morley nor Gerard has any hankering
for a preindustrial age;
both want only to humanize and
socialize
under the conditions of industrialism. The one character
whose occupation
fraud, if a kindly one; this
fortune by tracing
would-be noble of the
are right,"
a medievalist and romantic, but to the Owenite,
monasteries ever did."
the novel
you
careful to assign this speech about
believes that "the railways will
relations
as
isolation; therefore antisocial.
of Gemeinschaft and is
home
between "community" and "aggrega-
When Disraeli does it,
romantic. Yet Disraeli
is
"I daresay
sociologists distinguish
respectfully.
who
home
a rude age;
is
so far as to denounce the
"Home is a barbarous idea," Morley says,
vilest
it is
is
the antiquarian Hatton,
— inventing,
families,
to exalt and perpetuate the past
if
need be
who made
in
is
a
his
— the lineage of noble and
and who himself turns out to be the brother
and lowest of me(rabWe7)
If Disraeli's cast
of characters Includes good
aristocrats as well as
factory owners as well as bad. To be sure, the owners happens to be the younger son of an old, impoverished landed family. And it is this heritage that makes him so
bad,
it
also includes
good
best of these factory
Two Nations
or Five Classes
65
•
exemplary a character: "With gentle blood in his veins, and old English feelings,
he imbibed,
at
an early period of his career,
concep-
a correct
tion of the relations which should subsist between the employer and
He
the employed.
between them there should be other
that
felt
than the payment and the receipt of wages."
36
not a conscious echo of Carlyle's "cash nexus,"
of that sentiment
lence
factory
town
is
more than
a
it
little idyllic; is
also
account of
everyone
(In the
same
happy, healthv,
is
a factory
is
is
Age of
reminds him. "Have you seen Manchester?")
past," Sidonia
two
Disraeli's
nations, like Carlyle's
plicated than they appear at
first
sight
two
classes, are
and an
are
moral
class contains a
idle class, so Disraeli's rich contains a responsible
and an
For the indolent club-lounger
by the
irresponsible element.
idea of drinking politics as a
upper
37
more com-
— again, because they
as well as descriptive categories. Just as Carlyle's
toiling
is
town.
novel Coningsby, he has Sidonia inter-
spirit, in his earlier
rupt Coningsbys reveries about the glories of Athens. "The
Ruins
model
this
noteworthy that what Disraeli
idealizing, contrary to the conventional impression,
is
to the preva-
testifies
it
at the time.) Disraeli's
moral, and content. But
ties
(If the last sentence
bad wine, or the
game devised
ladies
for the exercise
of their female
has nothing but contempt. Riches, position,
"only one duty Just as (work
— to secure the
social welfare
was the legitimizing
titillated
of the salons
power
who
look on
wiles, Disraeli
are said to have
of the people."
principle for Carlyle, so
38
duty was
Where Carlyle, puttingfa preheroes among the "Mill-ocracy," the
the legitimizing principle for Disraeli.
mium on work, found most of his
captains of industry, Disraeli looked primarily to the landed aristocracy
who
in his mythical rendition
of English history
traditionally func-
tioned in this responsible, moral fashion. Although Carlyle and Disraeli
chose to eulogize and mythicize different groups
classes,
rule
they agreed that
it
was the
responsibility
— humanely, jusdy, compassionately, but
of the lower
classes to
among the upper
of the upper
rule
classes to
— and the obligation
be ruled. The main plot of Sybil centers on the
attempt of the lower classes to find salvation in and by themselves, to
own resources, to develop leaders own and seek power on their own behalf. This was the aspira-
try to cure their condition
of their
with their
tion of the Chartists, represented by Gerard, the purest
men,
who
after his
and noblest of
dies in the course of a wild, bloody, poindess rampage. Only
death
is
Sybil disabused of her "phantoms," as
Egremont
66
•
The
New History and
delicately puts
it
— her
Old
the
do no wrong and the two "the gulf is impassable." 39 the poor can Sybil
is
rich
no
right,
and that between the
generally taken to be the heroine of the book.
a distinctly flawed character
The unequivocal hero wants to obtain, intervention of
as
is
he
—"the most
Egremont, the good and wise says, "the results
and
really
is
is
I
40
that the welfare of the people can best
declares that "the rights of labour
living wealth
who
difference
as the Chartists advise,
first
.
.
.
as sacred as those
of
of the
interests
that the social happiness of the
object of a statesman, and that, if this were
not achieved, thrones and dominions, the
and empires, were
were
less cryptically,
were to be established, the
ought to be preferred;
millions should be the
What
ever read."
but by exercising power on their behalf. Elsewhere, if a
aristocrat,
interpreted by others as "sheer Radi-
be ensured not by transferring power to them,
property; that
is
of the Charter without the
democratic speech that
Egremont means, of course,
Egremont
As such, she
— the heroine, perhaps, but not the hero.
machinery." That cryptic statement bewilders some
its
characters in the novel
calism"
and good, that
illusion that the people are wise
alike worthless."
pomp and power
of courts
41
know what to make of Disraeli, and The distinguished historian G. M. Young, who was old-fashioned enough (and old enough) to draw upon his Contemporaries did not always
historians
know
still less.
own memories and those of his acquaintances, asked one elderly Gladstonian why his generation was so profoundly distrustful of Disraeli. The answer surprised Young. It was, the old man said, because of "his 42 early Radicalism." Whatever one may think of the practicality of Disraeli's
kind of radicalism, or of
radical at
all,
pounding
it,
that
its
desirability,
or whether
it
was
or even whether Disraeli was entirely serious in pro-
one cannot deny that
it
did color his
own
thinking and
of contemporaries about him.
More important than
Disraeli's solution
of the
social
problem
— the
nation unified under the direction of a "natural" aristocracy dedicated to the "social welfare"
— was
which the two
his
conception of the problem
itself:
a
were diverging so rapidly that they were perilously close to becoming "two nations." Many contemsociety in
poraries
who
classes
did not subscribe to his ideology,
who found him
either
too radical or insufficiently radical, shared his view of the social condition.
And
it
was
this
view
—
this
model, so to speak
— that was enor-
Two Nations mously
influential, that
and
social reality
Disraeli
of the
made
the
"two nations"
or Five Classes
•
67
image of the
a graphic
powerful symbol of discontent.
a
and Carlyle
are only
two of the many
helped shape that
social reality
Victorians
whose
reality as well as reflect
vision
If one
it.
is
looking for class models, surely their two- nation and two-sect models
worthy of consideration
are as
might contemplate the James Mill
—
as
three-class
model
reluctantly
reluctantiy because utilitarianism
vidualistic theory loath to assign
or
any the historian may devise.
any
reality to
was
a
Or one
advanced bv
profoundly indi-
such "fictions"
as society
Yet even Mill could not entirely dispense with some idea of
class.
although he did shun the word. In his schema the people were
class,
divided into an "aristocratical body," a "democratical body," and a
"middle rank," the
latter
being the repository of virtue, intelligence,
and leadership. Matthew Arnold's three
same
as Mill's,
different conception
a middle class features
classes
were substantively the
but his characterizations of them made for a radically
of
of
society. Positing
"philistines,"
and
an aristocracy of "barbarians,"
populace combining the worst
a
of both, he obviously had to look elsewhere for
gence, and leadership
Without
— to a
image of the
this
either his idea
of the
state capable
classes
virtue, intelli-
of transcending these
classes.
one cannot begin to comprehend
state or his analysis
of the
social reality.
There are obviously other ways of drawing upon the contemporary consciousness of less
eminent
memoirs, to
class,
not only by inquiring into
men who had reflect
sulting a variety
upon
all
the eminent and
occasion, in books, articles, speeches, or
their times
and experiences, but
also
of other sources that dealt with the same
by con-
more
issue
obliquely, less self-consciously: novels, tracts, newspaper accounts,
parliamentary debates, Royal Commission reports, legislative administrative measures.
sources
— two or three
A
acts,
and
few obvious models emerge from these
classes, for the
most
part, often
with each
class
pluralized ("working classes," for example), suggesting an acute sense
of the it
fluidity
and complexity of social
relations.
Whatever the model,
almost invariably contained a strong moral component. The classes
themselves were described in moral terms, and the relations
them were presumed to have failing to exhibit the
judgment). Just as
among
a moral character (or were criticized for
proper moral character, which was
we would not today
(or
itself a
moral
most of us would not, even
68
The
•
New History and
the
Old
—
age, sex,
social relations that did
not take
today) define familial relations in purely behavioral terms habitat, financial ties
— so the Victorians would have found inadequate
any purely behavioral description of
and obligation, propriety and
into account such moral facts as duty responsibility.
where much of sociological history goes grievously astray. Even those works that avoid the more egregious fallacies of misplaced This
is
precision, excessive abstraction,
and obfuscatory language tend to be
insufficiently attentive to the quality
teenth-century England.
It
of mind that permeated nine-
may seem odd
that historians should
fail
to avail themselves of such obvious sources of evidence as the ideas and
of contemporaries
beliefs
ordinary
men
—
until
— of the great men of the time
one
as well as the
realizes that to take seriously that evidence
would be to jeopardize the enterprise of sociological history as it is generally conceived. Intent upon creating a scientific, objective history, these historians think
it
necessary to purge the social reality of the
values that interfere with this "value-free" history. It is
not only
this ideal
moral imagination.
of
positivist history that
It is also a distaste for
inimical to the
is
the particular kind of moral
imagination that prevailed in nineteenth-century England. Today
moral concepts are to some degree suspect; they as
condescending, subjective, arbitrary.
agreeable
when
applied to class
And
all
modern ear the more dis-
strike the
they are
all
— when the poor were described
(as
they habitually were in the nineteenth century) as "deserving" or "undeserving," or spectable"
their intention thrift,
To as
the working classes were divided into the "re-
of fostering among the lower
of
the latter-day historian this moral temper suggests a failure of as well as
of compassion. One author has characterized
an ideological "deformation" produced by the "distorting lens" of
the middle class, a deformation so pervasive sciousness of the
working
classes themselves.
the moral imagination of the Victorians
*
classes the virtues
temperance, cleanliness, and good character.
understanding it
when
and the "unrespectable," or when reformers announced
stood and described
as
is
it
43
even affected the con-
From
this perspective
not something to be under-
an essential part of the
social reality,
but some-
thing to be exposed and criticized from the vantage point of the historian's
superior understanding of that
assumed to be best understood
reality.
in "objective"
And
the reality itself
— which
is
is
to say, eco-
Two Nations nomic
or Five Classes
— terms, without reference to such "subjective"
69
•
ideas as moral
character.
To
history that
restoration of moral imagination in the writing of
call for a
—
it is
impose
in the writing
of
all
most sadly lacking
his
own
—
history, but is
it is
in sociological history
not to give license to the historian to
moral conceptions on history. This has been the im-
pulse behind yet another fashionable school of thought, that of the
"engaged" or "committed" historian. In
this view,
all
pretensions of
objectivity are suspect, the only honest history being that
which can-
didly expresses the political and moral beliefs of the historian.
At the
opposite pole, in one sense, from the sociological mode, this kind of
"engaged" history shares with sociological history
a
contempt for the
experiences and beliefs of contemporaries and an overweening regard
wisdom and judgment of the historian. What is wanted is not so much the exercise of the
for the
historian's
moral
imagination as a proper respect for the moral imagination of those
contemporaries he exercise
is
professing to describe. /This, to be sure, takes an
of imagination on the
tolerance for beliefs that
moral principles rationalizations
historian's part
may not be
as such, so that
It is a
modesty. seriously,
own, above
all
a respect for
social facts that are so
from contemporaries those eco-
obvious to the historian. is
called for, indeed an exercise in
— the perceptions, and opinions of contemporaries — be taken
It asks
as
of interest, or deformations of vision, or evidence of an
modest undertaking that
principles,
a sensitivity to ideas, a
he will not dismiss them too readily
intellectual obtuseness that conceals
nomic and
his
—
nothing more than that moral data
be assigned the same
reality, as facts
ideas, beliefs, as
about production and
consumption, income and education, status and mobility. The historian
is
in the fortunate position
of being able to do what the sociologist fact- value dichotomy that has plagued
cannot do; he can transcend the sociological thought.
The values of the
past are the historian's facts.
should make the most of them, as the great Victorians did.
,
He J
J
The "Group": British Marxist Historians
«A \ J V V
hy was there no Marxism
in Great Britain?"
all
revolution,
Why,
letariat" alien
1
Why,
A recent issue
in the first country to
and
no
in the first country to
worthy of the name, was the very word "proThese questions have been the staple of
exotic?
explain the "miracle of its
Why,
social revolution?
Halevy
early in the century tried to
modern England":
the ability of England, by
historical inquiry at least since Elie
of
unique institutions and
to
traditions,
change, conciliate interests, and mitigate conflict. is
•
in the country that gave birth to the industrial
was there no
create a proletariat
There
4
the conditions for a mass Marxist movement, was there
such movement?
virtue
•
of the English Historical Review poses yet again one of the
perennial problems in English history.
meet
.
accommodate
2
another question, however, that has not often been asked.
Why, in a country so resistant to Marxist socialism, have there been so many eminent Marxist historians? And not as mavericks but as members of a respectable and influential (although not, to be sure, domi-
nant) school.
And
influential precisely in the field
of English history,
offering Marxist interpretations of a history that has been notably
inhospitable to
Marxism
Part of the answer
lies
as a political ideology.
in a fascinating
English intellectual history. learn
70
and little-known episode
in
we have come
to
only recentiy that
something of the origins of English Marxist historiography and
to appreciate been.
It is
The
how
story
well organized and consciously ideological
it
of the "Communist Party Historians' Group" (or
has
"col-
The "Group" lective," as
it
has also been called)
comes from the
it
memoirs,
3
the
is all
interviews, essays, and,
more
and
principals themselves
interesting because
their disciples
most recendy,
71
•
— from
a full-length book.
In 1983 one of the most influential historical journals in England
opened
its
one-hundredth
history of Past
and
Communist
British
recalling
its
founding
1952: "The
in
war with a members of the
Present begins in the years of the cold
group of young Marxist of the
by
issue
historians, at that time
all
Party and enthusiastic participants in the activities
'C. P. Historians'
Group' which flourished notably
1946 to 1956." Those young historians were,
in the years
in fact, old "friends
and
comrades":
They thus had the quadruple bond of a common each other since the
common
1930s), a
late
had known
past (most
political
commitment,
a
passion for history, and regular, indeed intensive, contact at the meetings
of the Historians' Group
which they debated the Marxist
at
interpreta-
tion of historical problems and did their best, in the military jargon then
favoured in Bolshevik
most
circles,
suitable to historians.
to Svage the battle of ideas'
on the
'front'
4
This account comes to us with the authority of three distinguished historians rians'
who were
founders both of the
Group and of Past and Present
and E.
J.
journal.
Hobsbawm
(Today Hill
Hilton and board.
The
Historians'
— and who
Communist
— Christopher
are
still
Hill,
Party Histo-
R. H. Hilton,
active in the affairs
of the
president of the Past and Present Society, and
is
Hobsbawm are chairman and vice-chairman of the editorial fourth founder of the journal and the oldest
Group, Maurice Dobb, died
A memoir
member of the
in 1976.)
by Hobsbawm, "The Historians' Group of the
nist Party," describes the organization that
Commu-
played "a major part in the
development of Marxist historiography" and thus
in "British historiog-
raphy in general."* The Historians' Group, he reports, was one of
many *It
professional
is
and
fitting that this
cultural
groups operating under the aegis of the
memoir should have been published in a Festschrift for A. L. (in 1978 when the volume was published)
Morton, one of the founders of the Group and still
the chairman.
Morton had
a special role in the founding, since
of the Group was the revision of his
People's History ofEngland, a
unscholarly book. Published by the Left
dozen printings
in
England and
as
many
Book Club
one of the
just before the war,
translations
initial
purposes
popular but embarrassingly it
went through
a
and editions abroad. The Group was
soon diverted into other tasks and never completed the
revision.
72
•
The
New History and
the
Old
National Cultural Committee of the party
— "from the
Party's point
of
view, the most flourishing and satisfactory" of them, attracting not
only professional historians but also party leaders and union organizers.
5
The founding of Past and Present was only one episode
"battle of ideas" (the
"B of I,"
mission of the Group. anniversaries
It also
it
was
familiarly
known)
that
in the
was the
organized conferences and celebrated
(1848 was commemorated by
Communist Manifesto
Marx and
6
as
a
dramatized version of the
in Albert Hall) ; arranged for translations (of
Engels, Lenin and Stalin, and such latter-day Marxist
luminaries as Gramsci); assigned historical projects to be carried out by individual
volume
members; and published, among other works,
collection
Democracy and the
themes
now
a four-
volume of essays, Labour Movement, that foreshadowed many of the of
identified
historical
documents and
a
with Marxist history.
The Group included some of the best-known historians in Britain Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, George Rude, Dorothy Thompson, Royden Harrison, John Saville, Victor Kiernan, George Thomson, Raphael Samuel. (Among those no longer alive, and remembered fondly and respectfully by the others, are Maurice Dobb and Dona TofY, whose membership in the party went back almost to its origin.) Hobsbawm comments on the curious fact that so many talented Communist intellectuals chose to become historians.* Just as curious is the fact that so many talented historians chose to be Communists not only in the thirties, when the depression, the Spanish Civil War, and the rise of Nazism made Communism seem, to many intellectuals, the last hope of civilization, but after the war, when they found the Western democracies more menacing than the Soviet Union and Stalinism more congenial and sympatoday: E. P.
—
thetic
In
than capitalism. its
early years,
Hobsbawm
recalls,
the
members of
the
Group
from schismatics and heretics," even from Marxists and Marxist sympathizers who had no party creden7 tials. With the advent of the Popular Front in 1951, they became less
"segregated themselves
sectarian.
strictly
(The founding of Past and Present
reflected this turn in the
*In fact, in the 1930s there was an equally prominent group of Communist scientists. Cambridge alone boasted J. D. Bernal, J. B. S. Haldane, Lancelot Hogben, Hyman Levy, and Joseph Needham. When the Modern Quarterly, the organ of the Communist Party, was founded in 1938, more than half of the editorial board were scientists.
The "Group"
Con-
party line.) In 1956, after Khrushchev's speech to the Twentieth gress
denouncing
year,
many historians however,
ations,
and the Soviet invasion of Hungary
Stalin, left
the party.
as well as their
their confreres in France,
later that
They retained their personal commitment to Marxism
Hobsbawm
73
•
associ-
— unlike
observes, where the break from
the party generally resulted in a disaffection with Marxism.
himself has remained in the party, and the Historians
1
Hobsbawm
Group continues
to this day.
During the whole of
Hobsbawm Stalinism"),
as 8
the
members of the Group saw no
roles as historians
Our work
that time (including the period described by
the "Stalin- Zhdanov- Lysenko years" of "ultra- rigid
and
as historians
as
between
conflict
their
Communists.
was therefore embedded
in
our work
which we believed to imply membership of the Communist
as xMarxists.
Partv.
We
It
was
as commitment and loyal, active and committed a group of Communists as any, if only because we felt that Marxism implied membership of the Party. To criticize Marxism was to criticize the Party, and the other way round. 9
inseparable
from our
activity
political
.
.
.
were
Indeed, their loyalty to both Marxism and the party was such that even
Hobsbawm, in retrospect, finds them excessively zealous. "There is no doubt that we ourselves were apt to fall into the stern and wooden style of the disciplined Bolshevik cadres, since we regarded ourselves as such."
Thus
their
arguments on
specific historical subjects
such
as the
English Revolution were "sometimes designed a posteriori to confirm
what we already knew to be necessarily 'correct'." If their work did not suffer more from the "contemporary dogmatism," he explains, it was because the authorized Marxist versions of history dealt with real prob-
lems and could be discussed seriously ("except where the political authority of the Bolshevik Party and similar matters were involved");
because there was no party line on most of British history and the
of Soviet historians was largely alty
and militancy were not
officials
in
unknown
any doubt prior to 1956" so that party
were well disposed to them; and because
* Hobsbawm himself mentions Soviet historians
who were
it.
a "certain old-
translated
the Group. Both Hill and Hilton were familiar with Soviet scholarship
were much influenced by
work
to them;* because "our loy-
and were known to
on
their subjects
and
74
The
•
New History and
the
Old
made it possible to criticize and modify some of the orthodox doctrines. 10 It was in this milieu that some of the distinctive theories of British fashioned realism" in the party
Marxist history were
formulated: about the nature of feudalism
first
and absolutism, the development of capitalism, the character of the English Civil War, the relation of science and Puritanism to capitalism,
on
the effect of industrialism classes, the
nature and role of the "labor aristocracy."
contributed to the
of the
the standard of living of the working
common
new social
people
history
The Group
also
— history from below, the history
— which became,
as
it
were, a fellow traveler of
Marxist history.
To
a
young American
must seem a heroic
age,
radical historian looking
when
radical history
had
back on that time,
it
a coherent doctrine, a
cohesive community, and a political purposiveness he might well envy.
This
is
one gets from The British Marxist Harvey J. Kaye. 11 The five historians who are the subjects study, all members of the original Group, are meant to suggest certainly the impression
Historians by
of this
the range and diversity of Marxist scholarship, their shared concerns
and themes, and above of "scholarly and
Maurice
Dobb
political is
Group. "The major cially,"
all
their
commitment
consequence."
to a kind of history that
is
12
generally regarded as the founding father of the historical
Hobsbawm has
said,
work which was
to influence us cru-
"was Maurice Dobb's Studies
in the Devel-
opment of Capitalism which formulated our main and central prob13 lem." Published in 1946, the Studies coincided with the formation of the Group, but long before then
leading Marxist "theoretician."
He
Dobb had
established himself as a
had joined the
British
Communist
was founded, and made the first of many visits to the Soviet Union three years later. From 1924 until his retirement in 1967 he was a Lecturer and then a Reader in Economics at Party in 1922, shortly after
it
Cambridge, where he became the mentor of generations of nists
and Communist sympathizers.
(It is
curious
now
Commu-
to read of the
debate in 1932 in which he argued for the motion, "This house sees
Moscow than Detroit"; his opponent on that occasion Kitson Clark, who later became one of the most eminent of
more hope was G.
in
non-Marxist English historians.) 14
Dobb
described his Studies as a
work
in "historical economics,"
15
The "Group"
and
it is
this historical
in
75
dimension, the application of Marxist economic
theory to the development of capitalism, that
among
•
made
it
so influential
the Marxist historians. Describing the emergence of capitalism
England,
Dobb
identified the
two
"decisive
moments"
in
its
devel-
opment: the "bourgeois revolution" of the seventeenth century, and the "industrial revolution" of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
As
centuries. "crisis"
a prelude to these
of feudalism
the transition to capitalism.
something taking
like
moments, he posited another: the which set the stage for
in the fourteenth century, 16
In retrospect one can see in this schema
an agenda for the historians in the Group, with Hilton
up feudalism,
Hill the English Revolution,
Thompson industrialism. Dobb
and
Hobsbawm and
relieved the others of the
out details of the Marxist analysis, such
as the primitive
need to work accumulation
of capital and the concept of surplus value, and provided them with
more
From
the perspective of a non-Marxist, or even of a later generation
of neo-Marxists,
Dobb
represents a stringent
minism ("economism,"
way
it
seemed
at the
controversy between
was Sweezy view.
a
sophisticated and respectable version of Marxist economics.
He
who
as Marxists
now
mode of economic
call it).
Yet
this
deter-
was not the
time to members of the Group. In a famous
Dobb and
the American Marxist Paul Sweezy,
it
appeared to be taking the more narrowly economic
criticized
Dobb, among other
with serfdom rather than defining
it
things, for equating feudalism
as a particular
mode of produc-
and for failing to recognize that the expansion of trade had undermined the feudal system of production- for-use and prepared the way tion,
for the capitalist system
of production-for-exchange. In
his reply
Dobb
argued that the dissolution of feudalism resulted from the internal contradictions of the social relations of production rather than from
growth of commerce and towns, and that Sweezy's was a static 17 Kaye sees conception of feudalism which neglected the class struggle. in this debate a conscious attempt on the part of Dobb (and of Hilton, Hill, and Hobsbawm, all of whom came to his defense) to move away the
from "a narrow economism to a broader politico-economic perspective" and to redefine class as a "historical phenomenon, as opposed to merely an economic or sociological category."
18
younger than Dobb, joined the Communist Party while a student at Oxford before the war. He spent most
Rodney Hilton,
a generation
76
New History and
The
•
of his professional career
the
Old
at the University
of Birmingham and was an
member of the Group until he
left
the party in 1956, after which
he remained closely associated with
his
former comrades.
active
plained
As
a
how
he came to take feudalism
communist
I
was
medieval peasants and craftsmen
and
of the time.
social context
The
as his subject:
seemed
sensible to begin with
— of course within the general economic I
expected to
found myself too much involved
society as a whole.
has ex-
interested in the potentialities for resistance to
exploitation of the subordinated classes. It
times, but
He
move forward in the study
to
modern
of medieval
19
radical nature
of
his enterprise (radical in
both senses of that
word) can be appreciated only by comparison with the prevailing theories
of English feudalism. For
his thesis requires
not only the injection
period more often thought of as relatively
of the
class struggle into a
stable,
but a redefinition of the very concept of feudalism. The conven-
tional non-Marxist ject
—
view
— to oversimplify
a vastly complicated sub-
between the lord and
sees feudalism as essentially a relationship
his vassals,
were not
with a
social structure reflecting values
and functions that
not primarily; economic. By shifting the
necessarily, certainly
focus to the lord and his peasants, Hilton creates a feudal system that
was an "exploitative relationship between landowners and subordinated peasants, in which the surplus beyond subsistence of the
whether in direct labour or
money,
in rent in kind or in
under coercive sanction to the former." 20 The peasants, passive victims of this process,
and the
social order, far
were
active agents
from being
static
and
is
transferred
far
from being
of their
stable,
latter,
own
history;
was ridden by
was this struggle, punctuated by recurrent peasant that was the "motor," or "prime mover," of medieval society
class struggle. It
uprisings,
and the principal cause of the
"crisis"
of feudalism.
21
This would seem to be an obvious Marxist interpretation of feudal-
was not Marx's own interpretation; thus Hilton was, in in a doubly revisionist enterprise. The class struggle Marx focused on in feudalism was the struggle between the landowning aristocracy and the nascent bourgeoisie, not that between the aristocracy and peasantry. Indeed, Marx doubted whether the peasants ism. Yet
effect,
it
engaged
even in modern times (and a a class. In a
Middle Ages) constituted The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
fortiori in the
famous passage
in
The "Group"
who their mode
77
•
Bonaparte, he defined a class as formed by those
"live
economic conditions of existence that separate
of life, their
and
interests
their culture
from those of the other classes, and put them
in hostile opposition to the latter."
not form a
class," for
under
they
By
that definition the peasants
live in similar
"do
conditions "but without
entering into manifold relations with one another," acquire their subsistence
"through exchange with nature rather than
society,"
in intercourse
and beget "no community, no national bond and no
with
political
them the character of a class, Marx saw them as the "simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes." 22 Nor was Engels, contrary to common opinion, more appreciative of the class character of the peasantry. In his Condition of the Working agricultural Class in England he described the preindustrial workers laborers as well as handloom weavers as intellectually and socially
organization." Instead of attributing to
—
—
inert.
"Comfortable
in their silent vegetation," enjoying a "patriarchal
relation" with the squirearchy, aware only cerns, they
beings."
were not a
class.
of their
petty, private con-
Indeed, "in truth, they were not
human
They became truly human only when the industrial and agdrew them into the "whirl of history" and thus
ricultural revolutions
into the class of the "proletariat."
war
in
tion,
Germany." But
his
23
Engels did
book of that
later
speak of a "peasant
tide deals with the
Reforma-
not the medieval period; and the "peasant war," led by the
gious "chiliast" (as Engels describes him)
Thomas
Miinzer,
is
reli-
said to
foreshadow not a proletarian revolution but a bourgeois one: "The social
upheaval that so horrified
actually never
went beyond
its
Protestant burgher contemporaries
a feeble, unconscious
and premature
tempt to establish the bourgeois society of a later period."
at-
24
Hilton, by engaging the feudal peasants in a class struggle, endowed them with the essential historical attribute of a class, thus bringing them into the forefront of history and making them worthy of sym-
He also gave them a measure of "class consciouswas an imperfect class consciousness, to be sure, only intermittentiy achieved and all too often negative (expressing itself in hatred of the landlord) and conservative (reflecting the "dominant ideology" of pathy and respect. ness." It
it was also informed by a "memory" of ancient and customs, and this gave the struggle of the peasantry both dignity and historical meaning.
the ruling class). But rights
78
•
New History and
The
The next
historical
the
Old
"moment'' was appropriated by Christopher
Hill preceded Hilton at Balliol by several years
tion gained a coveted Fellowship at All Souls. in the Soviet
Union and joined
the British
and upon
Hill.
his gradua-
He spent a year studying
Communist
Party in 1936.
After a brief teaching stint at Cardiff, he returned to Balliol in 1938 as
Fellow and Tutor. During the war he was transferred from the army to the Foreign Office, presumably because of his knowledge of Russian
and of the Soviet Union. While
at the
Foreign Office he wrote Two
Commonwealths, a comparison of the United
Kingdom and
the Soviet
was published under the pseudonym K. E. Holme, the own name. 25 He resumed his lectureship at Oxford after the war and served as Master of Balliol from 1965 until
Union;
it
Russian equivalent of his
his retirement in
1978.
Hill's studies in the Soviet
tions lish
Union had focused on
Soviet interpreta-
of the English Civil War, and
his first important essay, The Engwas written under the influence of the Russian histo-
Revolution,
rian E. A.
Kosminsky
(to
whom
Hilton too was
tide suggests the theme: the English Civil
movement
great social
like the
much
War was
indebted).
The
a revolution, "a
26 The French Revolution of 1789."
revolutionary nature of this thesis can be s'een by comparison with the classic
Whig
interpretation, in
as a struggle for constitutional
"excesses" of the period
make
England. For Hill the Civil
which the Civil War appears primarily and religious liberty, and in which the it
an "interregnum" in the history of
War was
a "class
war" between
a despotic
king representing the "reactionary forces" of landlords and the Church,
and Parliament representing the commercial and the towns, the
yeomanry and "progressive gentry"
industrial classes in in the countryside,
and the enlightened elements among the masses. As class struggle,
by violence, and a new and place."
a result
of that
"an old order that was essentially feudal was destroyed capitalist social
order was created in
its
27
This thesis provoked controversy not only torians but also
among non-Marxist
among those Marxists who had located the
his-
beginnings
of capitalism in the sixteenth century. Debated for years within the
1948 when the Group endorsed Dobb's interpretation of the Civil War, which was a
Historians' officially
Group, the
issue
was resolved
in
modified version of Hill's. Hill then incorporated that version in a edition
of The English Revolution published the following
year.
new
A third,
The "Group" slightly
times,
amended makes
edition appeared in 1955; reprinted half a dozen
it
now given
may not have been
clear that while the revolution
consciously willed by the bourgeoisie,
promote the
79
in print. In the current version (and in essays written
it is still
since), Hill
•
interests
its
effect
of the bourgeoisie. 28
a religious as well as
was nonetheless to
Similarly, Puritanism
economic and
is
dimension; but in
social
the revised essay, as in the original one, the "religious squabbles" are set in the
context of the class struggle.
29
While Hill's later writings on cultural and intellectual subjects are far more erudite and subde than that early essay, they remain within the framework of Marxism as he understands it. The World Turned Upside
Down
views the English Revolution as not only a successful bourgeois
revolution but also a failed democratic revolution, an abortive revolu-
common
tion of the
Masked
political
of
religion, the Levellers
espoused
political
Diggers communism, and the Ranters, although lacking
equality, the
any
people to subvert the bourgeois supremacy.
in the language
or economic agenda, preached and practiced a doctrine of
free love that
was
truly revolutionary: "a negative reaction to nascent
capitalism, a cry for
human
brotherhood, freedom and unity against
the divisive forces of a harsh ethic."
So too the
30
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution exposes the
economic and
social functions
of the
scientific, legal,
ideas that constituted the "intellectual origins"
and
historical
of the revolution. Thus
Walter Raleigh prepared the way for the revolution in "the optimism
and forward look of Parliament";
of property
his belief in private enterprise, in empire, in
Edward Coke contributed
in themselves
and
to the "confidence of the
in private enterprise";
men
and Francis Bacon
caught "the optimism of the merchants and craftsmen, confident in
new-found ability to control their environment, including the and political environment." 31 This view of Bacon is a much muted version of Hill's earlier account of him, in which he appears as a
their
social
"progressive" thinker foreshadowing that other notable progressive,
Lysenko. In 1951 Hill wrote:
Bacon inaugurated the bourgeois epoch colleagues are inaugurating the
the obstructive
in science as
new epoch
dogmas of bourgeois
Lysenko and
today. In the Soviet
his
Union
science have to be brushed aside, to
the indignation of the logic-choppers,
if socialist
science
is
to devote itself
whole-heartedly to the relief of man's estate: so Bacon was fighting
80
The
•
New History and
against the prejudices a priesdy
Old
the
and dogmas of an
dogmas which
effete civilisation,
academic caste continued to preach although they manifestly
impeded the development of
industrial science. Bacon's conception
of the high
science, in striking contrast with that
science in
its
of
of bourgeois
priests
decadence, was materialistic, utilitarian and profoundly
humane. 32
Although Hill
on
left
the
Communist
Party in 1957, he
Group
the discussions in the Historians'
have ever known."
of them
Thompson describes him
England."
34
Group
new dimension
to the
Hobsbawm
England
him
in those early
historical consciousness in
And Hobsbawm credits him with turning the
the Historians'
36
as the greatest stimulus
"formidable theoretical prac-
[who] restructured whole areas of
titioner
Eric
as a
—
looks back
as "the greatest stimulus I
Others pay tribute to him
Recalling the influence Hill had on
all.
years, E. P.
33
still
to "the social history of ideas"**
attention of
— thus giving
a
B of I.
has been called the "premier" Marxist historian in
of
in part because
his
continuing relationship with the
Communist Party (he is still a member of the Historians' Group and on the editorial board of Marxism Today the official organ of the y
party), in part because activities.
He
of
his far-ranging scholarship
and far-flung
himself has attributed his political views and cosmopoli-
tan interests to his personal history, which makes
it all
the
more
regret-
table that he has given us so tantalizingly few details about that his37 tory. are told that his grandfather, a Russian Jew, emigrated to
We
England
in the 1870s,
but not
or why his father and Austrian Hobsbawm was born in 1917. in Vienna; in 1931 Hobsbawm
when
mother moved to Alexandria, where
Two
years later the family settled
moved
to Berlin and in
youth organization
1933 to London. Having joined
in Berlin,
a
Communist
he associated himself with the party
as a
schoolboy in London, selling Communist Party pamphlets and improving his English (and his Marxism) by reading a popular book by
Dobb,
On Marxism
Today.
At the
congenial political atmosphere.
Cambridge," he active
later recalled;
university he found himself in a
"We were
38
member of the Communist
and
like
all
Marxists as students at
many of them, he was an
Party. After serving in the education
corps during the war, he returned to Cambridge to complete his studies,
then took a position
mained
at the
University of
until his retirement in 1982.
London where he
re-
— The "Group"
Hobsbawm's main
area of research
is
81
•
nineteenth-centurv English
labor history. Impatient with institutional history, he has devoted him-
such subjects as the
self to
effect
of the Industrial Revolution on the
standard of living of workers, the relationship between the working
and Methodism, and the nature of the "labor
classes
new
aristocracv." In
on the conventional Marxist view, or has given orthodox Marxism a somewhat different reading. Thus where Marx, and Lenin even more, attributed each case he has brought
empirical evidence to bear
the "reformism" of the English labor labor aristocracy,
Hobsbawm
racy in the organization
His theses are
still
movement
emphasized the
to the strength of the
of the labor
role
aristoc-
39 and radicalization of the labor movement.
the subject of controversy
among
Marxist as well as
non-Marxist historians, but they have reinvigorated some well-worn
and have given Marxism
topics
Hobsbawm
also
itself a
opened up new
new
lease
on life. Marxism with
frontiers for
the
concept of "primitive rebels," a term that he takes to comprise "social bandits" of the
Robin Hood
type, "secret societies" like the Mafia,
peasant millenarian movements, urban mobs, and religious labor sects.
40
To
the orthodox Marxist, the continued existence of these
primitive or "archaic" groups
is
an anomaly.
Hobsbawm, by
giving
them the status of rebels and bringing them together as a "social movement," has legitimized them and made them part of the Marxist schema. Instead of being aberrations, even counterrevolutionary deviations, they are represented as the "adaptation
modern
capitalist
economy
3'
— "pre-
of popular agitations to a
political"
movements, which do
not themselves aspire to political power but do promote a "political
made this century "the most revolutionary in work that has endeared Hobsbawm to a generation
consciousness" that has 41
history."
It is this
of radical historians committed to "history from below," the history of the
"anonymous masses," who
are seen as leading lives
times not so quiet) desperation and rebellion
who
express their alienation and
by means of criminality and other forms of
Many of these
historians are attracted
of quiet (some-
"social deviancy."
by the nonpolitical
(at least
overtly political) nature of this rebellion. For a leading
Marxist historian, however, the great achievement of that he has kept faith with the political
American
Hobsbawm
is,
make
to
make
is
mission of Marxism. "To be
'Hobsbawmian' means to be Marxist," Eugene Genovese has that
not
said
the "politics of class struggle" central to history, and to
"historical materialism" central to
Marxism.
42
82
•
The
New History and
Hobsbawm himself, brought
first
describing Primitive Rebels as "a political as well
work, has explained the conjunction of circumstances
as a historical"
that
Old
the
this subject to his attention in the 1950s: his exten-
Mafia; his reading of Antonio Gramsci, a
munist Party,
movement";
Mau Mau
who were familiar with the founder of the Italian Com-
with Italian Communists
sive acquaintance
who made much
of
an invitation to speak
this
kind of "nonpolitical protest
on the European precedents
for the
uprisings in Kenya; and the Twentieth Congress of the
Communist
Party in 1956, which inspired a revaluation of the role of
the party and the "bases of revolutionary activity." All of these events,
Hobsbawm says,
are reflected in the implicit
a "strongly organized party"
is
message of the book, that
necessary, although there
is
no "one
43
railroad" leading to the desired goal.
1956 prompts Hobsbawm to observe that the chief effect of that momentous year was to "set us free to do more history, because before '56 we'd spent an enormous amount of our time on
The
reference to
political activity." tive,
as well as
that he has
The
Yet he himself has continued to be
politically ac-
both within the British Communist Party and abroad
America the
44
Europe)
— which makes
been so productive
known and,
in
the
America
at
a
any
commentator on rate, the
most
(in
Latin
more remarkable
as a historian, a journalist,
pseudonym of Francis Newton) best
it all
even (under
jazz.
45
influential
of this
Thompson. The youngest of them (he was born in 1924), he had joined the party and barely begun his studies at Cambridge when he was called into service. The war itself was more traumatic for him than for the others, his older brother (who had also been a Communist at Cambridge) having been executed by the Nazis group
is
E. P.
while fighting with the Bulgarian partisans. officer
Thompson
himself was an
during the war and afterward spent some months
as a railroad
construction worker in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. Returning to
Cam-
bridge to complete his degree, he met and married another historian
who was
—
Communist indeed, a more active member of the Group than he. As an extramural lecturer at the University
also a
Historians'
of Leeds, he devoted half activities; his
his time,
by
chief responsibility, as a
his
own
estimate, to political
member of the Yorkshire
district
committee of the Communist Party, was to organize opposition to the Korean War. In 1956 he emerged as one of the leading "dissident
The "Group"
New Reasoner and of its more influenthe New Left Review. He was forced off the board of the
Communists," tial
83
•
successor,
founder of the
a
when
Review in 1962
came under the control of the faction led by At Warwick University in the sixties,
it
Tom Nairn.
Perry Anderson and
he became involved in the radical causes that convulsed that highly politicized university; he later resigned to devote himself to scholarship
and
politics.
may appear member, Thompson displayed In retrospect
it
that even in his years as a loyal party
may
"deviationist" tendencies. Yet this
be more a matter of style than substance, the expression of a literary
and poetic
sensibility (he
him from
distinguished
no accident
more
who had
Thompson
46 visionism'."
the
originally intended to be a poet) that
book was
a
It is
biography
the double virtue of being a poet and a
When it was published, however, in As
to the Popular Front, the party
and
first
himself claims to see in this book a "muffled
consistent with the party line.
spiritual
prosaic historians in the Group.
Marxist might say) that his
(as a
of William Morris, Marxist.
had
political ancestor
back
far
had
as
1955,
it
was
're-
entirely
1934, even before the turn
tried to appropriate
Morris
as its
by redeeming him from the "myth" of
romantic medievalism and establishing him
as
an indigenous Marxist
Communist.* In 1976,
shortly before the appearance of the second
edition of his biography,
Thompson commented on
argument" that tradition Stalinism.
still
of Morris
But
(as I
do) entailed unqualified resistance to
still
did not entail opposition to Marxism; rather,
it
nothing in the
is
and
first
edition highlight
edition of that
the earlier edition:
en-
book to suggest any
made
in the
what Thompson himself calls the "Stalinist 48
it
the
a lost vocabulary in the Marxist
"resistance to Stalinism." Indeed, the deletions
Communism"; 49
"To defend
large in his thinking.
tailed rehabilitating lost categories 47 tradition."
In fact there
the "Morris/Marx
looms so
second
pieties"
of
the endorsement of the cliche "All roads lead to
posthumous induction of Morris into the Communist Party ("Were Morris alive today, he would not look far to find the
the party of his choice"); * After
World War
Commons
in a
the assurance that Morris' Utopian vision of
the struggle for Morris' soul was fought
on
the floor of the
House of
heated exchange between Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, and
Willie Gallacher,
party
II
50
Communist member of Parliament, each of whom claimed Morris
and ideology.
for his
The
New History and
84
•
"A
Factory as
the
Old
Might Be" had already been realized in the Soviet Union ("Today from the Soviet Union with stories of 51 the poet's dream already fulfilled"); the long quotation from Stalin It
visitors return
that supposedly confirmed Morris' views
the advance to
"the 'party of a
52
Communism"; the new type' of Lenin
—
in Socialist theory, the
Svhich
is
to pierce the
by providing
a "blue-print
of
suggestion that Morris envisaged a party
of militant cadres educated
vanguard of the working
class,
the spearhead
armour of Capitalism'." 53 Yet even the Morris of
the revised edition, shorn of these "Stalinist pieties,"
is still
a staunch
Marxist revolutionary, committed to "scientific Socialism" and repelled
by Fabianism, reformism, and "semi-demi-Socialism." 54 (The revised edition
was
also
shorn of some of the philistinism characteristic of
socialist period: "Poetry is tommy- rot," and "Modern tragedy, including Shakespeare, is not fit to be put upon the modern stage.") 55 In his account of Thompson, Kaye inexplicably omits any discussion of the book on Morris. Yet without it one cannot truly understand Thompson's most celebrated work, The Making of the English Working Class. Published in 1963, it is still the most influential book produced by any member of the Group. Kaye echoes the opinion of many radical historians when he says that it is probably "the most important work of 56 social history written since the Second World War." If its tone owes much to Morris, its thesis is more boldly Marxist than anything pro-
Morris in his militant
posed by previous generations of radical and maintains that by 1832, even before the
rise
socialist historians.
For
it
of Chartism, England had
witnessed the emergence of a single "working class" (in contrast to the
"working fully
classes"
of common usage)
—
a class that
was
fully
developed,
conscious of its class identity and class interests, consciously com-
mitted to the class struggle, politically organized to carry out that struggle,
and ideologically receptive to an
social system.
alternative
There was no actual revolution
in
economic and
England, the argu-
ment goes, only because the counterrevolutionary forces succeeded in repressing or suppressing it. But the revolution was a latent historical reality, even if it was only intermittendy manifest. Put so baldly, the does not put the
book so
it
thesis
is all
so baldly; indeed,
influential.
too it is
easily disputed.
not the thesis
What has caught
generation of radical historians
is
But Thompson
itself that
has
made
the imagination of a younger
the passionate tone of the book, the
The "Group* variety
of sources, and the latitude given to the
the "working class"
Thus
crucial concepts.
taken to include "the Sunderland
is
85
•
sailor, the Irish
navvy, the Jewish costermonger, the inmate of an East Anglian village
workhouse, the compositor on The Times'^
by
"working
— and manv others who,
would not normally be consigned
social status or occupation,
single
7
sciousness are found in William Blake's
the class struggle
poems
as well as in folk ballads;
deduced from abortive uprisings, sporadic
is
to a
of working-class con-
class." Similarly, expressions
rick-
burnings, Irish nationalist conspiracies, and clandestine plots; political
organization eties,
is
attributed to Luddite machine- breakers, secret soci-
and trade unions; and
a revolutionary alternative to capitalism
is
seen in any hostility to industrialism, any nostalgia for an old "moral
economy" or yearning for a new moral order. In this long, eloquent, richly documented work, these anomalies and contradictions have the perverse effect of appearing to validate a thesis that seems all the more persuasive precisely because
What
contradictions.
moral passion of the author,
working
class as
which he
quoted that
it
has
it.
A
those anomalies and
all
these disparate elements
it
is
commitment
his overt, personal
he conceives
identifies
can contain
it
finally unites
the
to the
and to the revolutionarv cause with
sentence from his preface has been so often
become
the rallying cry of the cause: "I
am
seeking
to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete'
hand-loomer, the 'utopian'
artisan,
and even the deluded follower of
Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity."
More than any
other part of his thesis,
it
is
58
the concept of class
consciousness that has attracted a host of disciples and emulators. All
of the historians in
this
group (with the exception of Dobb) have
departed, to one degree or another, from the
more rigorous
classic
Marxist model, which relegates consciousness to the superstructure
and which
from and determined by reflecting that mode. But
sees the superstructure as derived
mode of production and class relations none of the others has made consciousness so the
concept of
class
— while
at the
same time
integral a part
insisting
upon
of the
the material
base of consciousness itself and the materialistic nature of the historical process.
And none
Marxism
against both the conventional historian
sively materialistic
Marxist
has been so polemical in defending this version of
who
finds
who
finds
it
exces-
and deterministic, and the Athusserian or Leninist it excessively empirical and moralistic.
86
The
•
New History and
Old
the
Thompson's great appeal is to the currently fashionable "humanMarxism, the Marxism (or "neo-Marxism," as is sometimes said) supposedly deriving from the young, or early, Marx. Yet Thompson istic"
himself, while
sometimes referring to the
much of him,
perhaps suspecting that the
quite what he has been made out to
Marx, does not make
early
young Marx was not
real
Thompson
be. Instead,
claims to
be recovering a "lost vocabulary" in the Marxist tradition, a vocabulary that in
Marx himself "was
partly a silence
and unrealized mediations."
59
— unarticulated assumptions
One wonders what Marx would
made of Thompson's vocabulary or of
have
his intention to "rescue" the
"deluded follower" of Joanna Southcott, the religious mystic and mil-
who
lenarian
inveighed
the
against
"Whore of Babylon" and
prophesied an apocalypse of destruction and salvation. In one of the
most memorable
sections of the
book Thompson
describes the "psy-
of counter-revolution," the "chiliasm of despair" and
chic processes
"psychic blackmail" that characterized this period of "emotional disequilibrium."
60
Yet for
psychoanalytic overtones, his account
all its
is
only a more sophisticated version of the "opium of the masses" theme.
So too
his description
of Methodism
— the "psychic ordeal" by means
of which "the character- structure of the rebellious pre- industrial labourer or artisan was violently recast into that of the submissive industrial
worker"
—
61
is
modish rendition of the
a
familiar
view of
Puritanism as an instrument of capitalism. Since The
Making
(as
it is
tury,
where he
economy." ties,
62
known
familiarly
son's historical research has taken
him back
to admirers),
Thomp-
into the eighteenth cen-
finds the "plebians" trying to restore an older "moral
But more of
his energies
especially the nuclear
have gone into
political activi-
disarmament movement, and into lengthy
and heated polemics. In a hundred- page "Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski" (complete with seventy-five footnotes), he berated the distinguished Polish philosopher for abandoning
munism. And
in a series
of essays amounting to
Marxism and Com-
a good-sized volume,
he charged Perry Anderson and the other English "acolytes" of Louis Althusser with a moral obtuseness and "intellectual agoraphobia" reminiscent sity
and
of Stalinism. 63 turgidity,
"Holy Family"
(the
To some
may
recall
readers these polemics, in their inten-
Bauer brothers)
(The Poverty of Theory, the
Marx and Engels against the and the "Sainted Max" (Stirner).
those of
title
of Thompson's volume,
is
obviously
The "Group"
•
87
meant to evoke The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx's attack on Proudhon.) Thompson and Anderson have since been partially reconciled, brought together under the umbrella of nuclear disarmament. Anderson praises
Thompson as "our finest socialist writer today," while Thompson, who
now
contributes to the
New
Left Review, calls
him of the
and partially absolves
sin
Anderson
a
"comrade"
of Althusserianism. 64
The controversy between Thompson and Anderson, both claiming to be Marxists, raises once more the old questions about Marxist history. What does it mean to be a Marxist historian? How "revisionist" can Marxist historians be
example
— and
still
— about the
materialist conception
remain Marxist?
To what
extent
of history, for
must Marxism be
taken into account in understanding and evaluating their work? What, in short,
To ing
is
the relevance of their Marxism?
address
less
of these questions adequately would require noth-
all
than a treatise on Marxism and historiography. But some of
them have been
implicidy, sometimes explicidy, answered by the
historians themselves,
ist
relevant, that they are
who
insist that their
Marxism
is
Marxindeed
not merely historians but Marxist historians.
A
work of history must be evaluated on its own merits rather than by reference to some external theory or philosophy, may choose to disregard such assertions. Indeed, some of the most severe critiques of Marxist histories have been scrupulously
non-Marxist, believing that every
empirical,
analyzing specific
generalizations.
65
tion of Marxism, as if that like
an ad
facts
Some have gone
and sources, assumptions and
so far as to disallow any considera-
would be improper and
invidious, rather
hominem argument.
H. Hexter, reprinting a long and devastating critique of Hill's Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England, removed the single parenthetical reference to Marxism on the ground that it was "irrelevant" and "ungracious," and that the critique stood or fell quite independentiy of Hill's "substantive philosophy of history." The flaws J.
in the
book, he
says,
system," which has thesis
can be ascribed to something
files
for the categories
and
but none for those that might confute
it.
like a faulty "filing
facts that
support the
Yet a few pages
later
"We
have here not a casual error, misquotation, misunderstanding, the sort of thing that happens to all of us, but system-
Hexter explains, atic
error
and symptomatic
error, error that suggests a systematic flaw
88
The
•
in a
New History and
man's habit of looking
and habitual ideology
is
Old
the
at evidence."
Surely an error so systematic
of a system and habit of thought
a reflection
— rather than
66
a system
And
of files.
surely
it is
— an
neither irrele-
vant nor ungracious to invoke Marxism in a serious analysis of a book in
which the author himself says that he
of a bourgeois revolution
.
.
.
ing the English Revolution."
The
idea that
it is
67
invidious to consider the "substantive philosophy"
of a Marxist historian
what the Marxist
finds the "Marxist conception
the most helpful model for understand-
is
itself invidious, for
historian takes
most
Does
seriously.
justice to the historian to ignore the theories self
refuses to take seriously
it
it
really
do
and philosophy he him-
invokes in support of his thesis? (Each of these historians has
quoted, sometimes copiously, from Marx, Engels, Lenin, and, in their
One of the happy
works, Stalin.)
earlier
published memoirs
to release us from the convention that holds
is
improper to allude to these historians so central to their work,
if
selves as Marxists, surely
we
There
is
by-products of the recently
as Marxists. If they find
they think
can do no
it
important to identify them-
less.
one other subject that can be explored more candidly, now
that the Marxist historians have taken the lead in doing so.
intimate (dialectical, a Marxist
would
say) relationship
— between writing about the
and acting
and
politics
Whatever differences Thompson has with Anderson,
past
would dispute Anderson's comment
historical
works
is
That
is
the
between history
ent.
that he
it
Marxism
in the pres-
it is
that each of
not
likely
Thompson's
"a militant intervention in the present, as well as a
professional recovery of the past."
68
Nor would he
or any of the other
Marxist historians take issue with the editors of Visions of History (a
volume of interviews with Thompson, Hobsbawm, and other historians),
who commend
inform their practice
as historians"
dictum that the task
is
it."
69
Marxist history,
"not only to interpret the world but to change it
would appear,
is
a continuation
other means. It is this
idea of history
specific ideas
about
radical
way "their politics and for their commitment to Marx's
these historians for the
class
and
mode of production and nominator of Marxist
more than anything class struggle,
social relations
else
of politics by
— more than any
consciousness and culture,
—
that
is
the
common
de-
history. Marxist historians can be revisionist
The "Group"
about almost everything separate politics
from
Marxist canon, but thev cannot
else in the
history.
89
•
They cannot abandon, or even hold
in
abeyance, their political agenda of changing the world while engaged in the historical task
of interpreting
The Marxist would say, and quite work a political bias of some
their
it.
righdy, that
all
upon
experiences of the historian inevitably intrude history, that the very process
historians reflect in
sort, that the ideas, interests,
the writing of
of selecting sources, presenting
writing a coherent account necessarily presumes
and
facts,
and
some conception of
reality, some order of values, that precludes objectivity. He might also go on to say that the Marxist, in being candid about his bias (unlike the "bourgeois" historian who would conceal it, possibly even be ignorant of it), is giving the reader the opportunity to judge it and make allowance for it. But this is to shift the burden of responsibility from the writer to the reader. The issue is not whether the reader can make the proper discriminations and judgments (he is generally not in a position whether he has to do so), but whether the historian has done so made an effort to control and correct his bias, to look for the evidence that might confute his thesis, and, no less important, to construct a thesis capable of confutation. The Marxist, on the other hand, is so
—
assured of the truth of his thesis truth
— that the
temptation, as
—
its
political as well as historical
Hobsbawm
says,
is
to invoke argu-
posteriori to confirm what we already knew to be 70 necessarily 'correct'." By the same token (Hobsbawm elsewhere ad-
ments "designed a mits) the Marxist
is
inclined to avoid arguments and facts that he
knows to be true lest they undermine the orthodox doctrine or divert him from his polemical task.* The Marxist theory of history, moreover, is so comprehensive its great appeal is that it makes sense not of this or that part of history but of the whole of history that the historian committed to it has to find it confirmed at every decisive "moment" of history. Any significant exception would be a denial of the whole, since the theory itself is a
—
—
* In reconsidering his earlier essays on the labor aristocracy,
had deliberately obscured for reasons
among
Hobsbawm
explains that he
disagreements with the Leninist thesis "both because he was,
which seemed good
then heterodox those who,
his
at the times
of writing, reluctant to
stress
views which were
Marxists, and because he preferred to engage in polemics against
on anti-Marxist grounds, denied the
existence or analytical value of the concept of
a labour aristocracy in nineteenth-century Britain" {Workers, p.
249n).
90
The
•
New History and
Where
whole.
the
Old
the "eclectic" or "empirical" historian (pejorative words
in the Marxist vocabulary) tries to
terms seem appropriate to
it,
understand each subject in whatever
finding evidence of a class struggle in one
event but not in another, giving priority to economics in one period
and to religion
in another, the Marxist historian
termined schema that applies to
may be
if
Marxism
some
— and to be meaningful
basic sense
it
has to
to be a meaningful part of his enter-
itself is
politics as well as history. It
a prede-
periods and events. That schema
modified, qualified, "revised," but in
be retained prise
all
bound by
is
for the present as well as the past, for
burden that the Marxist
a formidable
is
historian carries.
In addition to the burden of ideology, the Marxist
burden
— the incubus, some would come to think of — of it
editors of the interviews explain that
one of
repression of the cold
war
era affect
Communist
"How
"How
Party affect you and your work?" Hobsfelt
"very con-
and shied away from writing
One reason he was a nineteenth-century historian, he conwas because one could not be an orthodox Communist and
write about the period after the founding of the
And he which
also explained that the
it
Group had
had given much thought
the British lems"; the
in
—
Communist
Party.
abandon one project to 1952 and 1953 a history of to
—
movement because the period since the founding of Communist Party "raised some notoriously tricky probbook that was eventually published, in 1956, terminated in
the British labor
1920, the year the party was founded. affected Past
and Present
as well.
72
(This inhibition seems to have
A reviewer of the hundredth anniver-
sary issue pointed out that in the thirty years since
had been no "overt discussion of communism," and Stalin appeared only in 1979.)
If admirers
what
did the intellectual
it.
fessed,
on
did the political
himself has said that for "obvious reasons" they
strained about twentieth-century history"
about
The
you and your work?" 71 But they
did not think to put the corollary question: repression of the
party.
their questions could be
put only to the older generation of historians:
bawm
saddled with the
is
its
founding there
that the
first article
73
of the Group are reluctant to confront the question of Communist Party entails by way of discipline and
loyalty to the
more loath to confront the question of what Union entails which is, after all, the sine qua
conformity, they are even loyalty to the Soviet
—
The "Group"
non of membership
in the party.
Kaye
each of the historians joined the party
carefully notes the dates
and when most of them
But apart from passing references to the events of 1956 that break, there
world or
is
litde
a party
twenties until his
it.
Union during the period of their membership. for more than half a centurv, from the early death in 1976; Hobsbawm's membership covers a
member
from the
early thirties to the present; Hill
and
Thompson
for
Hilton were members for about twenty years, and
A good deal of history is contained within those memoir Hobsbawm observes that "it was among the
fifteen.
rians that the dissatisfaction
chev speech 74
left
led to the
or no discussion of what was happening in the
different half-century,
In his
when
in the Soviet
Dobb was
about
91
•
at the
dates.
histo-
with the Party's reactions to the Khrush-
Twentieth Congress of the
CPSU first came into the
more remarkable that the historians had them what the informed public had long since known. Both as historians and as party members during the thirties and forties, they had more reason than most to be aware of the
open."
This makes
it all
the
to wait for Khrushchev to
tell
highly publicized purges and
the executions and mass imprison-
trials,
ments, the precipitous changes in the party line requiring comrades to
be Bolsheviks one week and Popular Fronters another, pro-war and anti-Fascist
two
one day and anti-war and pro-German the
years while their country
was
at
next.
war with Germany, they had to
defend the Hider- Stalin pact. Asked in a recent interview
about the pact,
Hobsbawm
replied,
lutely loyal to the Party line."
That absolute
For almost
"Oh,
like
most people
how
he
felt
was abso-
I
75
The heyperiod some of
loyalty persisted for a decade after the war.
day of the Historians' Group from 1946 to 1956, a
them still recall with much satisfaction, was also the era that Thompson calls "High Stalinism." It was a time when intellectuals, scientists, and artists, to say nothing of politicians and political dissidents, were the victims of systematic purges; when Lysenkoism was the official doctrine of state, and when not only Darwinism but other manifestations of "bourgeois science," such
as the theory
of
relativity,
were pro-
when the apotheosis of Stalin took bizarre forms long before Khrushchev exposed the "personality cult"; when the trials in Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia recalled the Moscow trials of the scribed;
thirties;
and when the "Doctor's Plot" of 1952-1953 was accom-
panied by an anti-Semitic campaign in the course of which a hundred
92
•
New History and
The
Old
the
or more Jewish intellectuals were shot. These were, after
not naive party
bawm
and
scientists
members they
artists,
tacitly
who
all,
historians,
through these events. As
lived
sanctioned them, and even now, Hobs-
they "look back without regret on their years in the
says, 76
Group."
In describing the meeting of the
Hobsbawm
qua
historians
Group
after
Khrushchev's speech,
remarks upon the special sense of responsibility historians:
"The
fact
is
that historians
felt
by the
were inevitably
forced to confront the situation not only as private persons and com-
munist militants but, crucial issue
and why
it
as
it
of Stalin was
were, in their professional capacity, since the literally
had been concealed."
tested that they
one of history: what had happened
He
quotes one
Soviet interpretation of current
affairs,
pro-
and that they "must become
dorses that judgment. "Historical analysis," he politics."
Hobsbawm
of present too." In retrospect
historians in respect
of Marxist
member who
had "stopped being historians" when they accepted the
reflects,
"was
en-
at the core
77
member of the Group has undertaken that historical analysis. One can understand why Hobsbawm, who has chosen to remain in the Yet no
party, has not
done
so. It is
more
difficult
to understand the reticence
of those historians who have left the party. "I commenced to reason," Thompson prefaces a volume of essays, "in my thirty-third year [1956, when he left the party], and despite my best efforts, I have never been able to shake the habit off." his reason free rein lest
it
78
But even
now he
seems reluctant to give
give comfort to the enemy. Although he has
been more vigorous than the others in denouncing Stalinism, he has
done so only
in a polemical context.
considerable historical talent to bear
What he
has not done
upon such momentous
is
bring his
subjects as
the relationship between Stalinism and Leninism, or Leninism and
Marxism, or Marxism and the "Libertarian Communism" he
now pro-
on not following the "well-worn paths of apostasy," on not becoming a 79 "Public Confessor and Renegade" as if it would be disreputable to write a scholarly work on twentieth-century Communism or even a candid memoir of his experiences in the party. Kaye concludes his account of the British Marxist historians by fesses.
In his
"Open
Letter" to Kolakowski he prides himself
—
reaffirming the intimate relationship between politics and history
which
is
their guiding principle. In this respect,
he
says,
they go be-
The "Group"
—
•
93
beyond the Marx who wrote that "the social draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future," that the revolution "must let the dead 80 More than Marx, they believe that the past is a bury their dead." "well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act," and that
yond Marx
at least
revolution of the nineteenth century cannot
"We must
action itself requires a "historical education." for
whom
struggle
is
a
experiences of those for yesterday." History,
81
who
The same tell
whom lesson
was a determined drawn by the editors of
struggle is
us that the radical historians "have
about the past and
its
of the members of the Group ally, actively
trines
—
or, indeed,
relationship
omission
the
necessity Visions of
to teach us
thirty years since
by the historians ideologies.
by them of the
Nor
is
no
82
most
scholarly
who were
person-
has there been any
by those doc-
histories inspired
of the philosophy of history that posits an intimate
between "praxis" and theory,
is all
is
the party. Yet there
left
Communism
committed to those
serious reevaluation
much
historical
bearing on the work of liberating the present."
We still await that "historical education." It study of Marxism or
educate those
determined necessity today with the
more conspicuous
politics
in the light
and
history. This
of developments
in
France, where eminent historians have confronted, seriously and candidly,
tions
both
their experiences in the
of Marxist history.
Marxism
is still
83
For
Communist
Party and the implica-
their English confreres,
a forbidden zone.
"Here
lie
dragons
.
it .
would seem, ."
.5.
Social History in Retrospect
Twenty-one T.
years after the publication of the Origin of Species,
H. Huxley
reflected
on the "coming of age" of that momen-
tous work. History warns us heresies
.
.
.
and to end
that
it is
the customary fate of new truths to begin as
as superstitions; and, a^ matters
now
hardly rash to anticipate that, in another twenty years, the tion,
stand,
new
it
is
genera-
educated under the influences of the present day, will be in danger
of accepting the main doctrines of the Origin of Species, with as little reflection, and it may be with as little justification, as so many of our contemporaries, twenty years ago, rejected them.
1
Because Huxley was one of Darwin's most ardent
warning about the titioners
fate
of the new
contemplate their
of "new truths" has a
social history
own coming
for social history;
it
may
well ponder his words as they
of age. The year 1965 was
was then that two
influential
books were published, Lawrence Stone's The
and Peter
Laslett's
The World
disciples, his
special poignancy. Prac-
We Have Lost.
Crisis
and
a
good one
controversial
of the Aristocracy
Both authors have
had occasion to reconsider the genre of history so eminently sented by these books and by their
94
own
careers.
since
repre-
Social History in Retrospect
Reflections of a
95
•
Chastened Father
In The Past and the Present Lawrence Stone, a founding father of the
new
history, takes stock
essays
of
his progeny.
and reviews, turns out to be
less a
The book,
celebration of a
than a memorial to a golden age, a "heroic phase," that past.
2
If the
eulogy,
memorial sometimes sounds more
because Stone,
it is
like
a collection
of
coming of age
is
already in the
like a
dirge than a
Huxley, seems to suspect that the brave
heresy of his youth has degenerated into a mindless orthodoxy, and that
some of
his precocious children
have grown into swaggering,
blustering adults. Yet Stone, again like Huxley, does not despair of his
wayward offspring. His mission
is
its
excesses
and excrescences, and to
vation" that was the pride of the creative periods in the history
For
his reaffirmations
all
them from
to separate
able comrades, to rescue the doctrine
from the
their undesir-
doctrinaires, to
remove
restore the "cutting edge of inno-
new
history in
one of the most
of the profession. 3
and protestations, Stone may well be
sus-
pected by his colleagues of giving comfort to the enemy. Certainly no traditional historian has so effectively sions,
exposed the
fallacies,
preten-
and assumptions of quantohistory, or been so curdy dismissive
of the "disaster area" of psychohistory. 4 This rejects quantification
or psychoanalysis
—
is
not to say that Stone
in the appropriate place
to the appropriate degree. But he does insist
and
upon their limitations and
Above all, he warns of the reductivism inherent in the attempt make of history a social science. Contemplating the sad state of
dangers. to
the social sciences these days, he suggests that "it might be time for the historical rats to leave rather than to scramble aboard the social scientific
repair."
ship which seems to be leaking and undergoing major
5
In counseling these rats to leave the sinking ship of social science,
Stone
is
not urging them to return to the old history, but rather to
board the newest ship in the armada of the new history, the flagship sailing
under the banner ofmentalite
popular
beliefs, attitudes,
collective?
Dedicated to the study of
customs, sentiments, and modes of behavior,
mentalite history models itself
on
a humanistic anthropology.
Stone
himself has enlisted in this enterprise. His book The Family Sex and ',
England has an epigraph from Clifford Geertz, the anthropologist who is the guru of this school: "The problems, being
Marriage
in
96
•
The
New History and
the
Old
existential, are universal; their solutions,
The road
being human, are diverse
.
.
.
to the grand abstractions of science winds through a thicket
of singular
facts."
7
The more famous phrase of Geertz (quoted so often
and so inappropriately that he must be
of
heartily sick
upon
description": the technique of bringing to bear
it)
is
"thick
a single episode
or situation a mass of facts of every kind and subjecting them to intensive analysis so as to elicit every possible cultural implication.
8
In espousing this kind of cultural -social- anthropological history,
Stone repudiates both the pseudoscientific methodology and the deterministic ideology of
economic and
social
much of
the
new
history.
He
critical
is
of the
determinism of the Marxists, the materialistic
determinism (economic, geographic, demographic) of some of the An-
and the econometric and sociological determinism of the
nalistes,
'The culture of the group," he
Cliometricians. will
of the individual, are potentially
of change
asserts,
"and even the
important causal agents
at least as
impersonal forces of material output and demographic
as the
9
growth." They might even, on occasion, be the primary and determinant causes of change. Contraception, for example, uct of a state of mind as
it is
So too the Puritan
cal inventions."
is
"as
much
a prod-
of economic circumstances or technologiethic
was
a
"by-product of an
unworldly religious movement" long before there was any economic
need for
a
new work ethic. 10 Moreover,
in this cultural realm, elites
and
even individuals are often more influential than the masses in shaping history,
and shaping
have risen and
fallen
in the fortunes
by those ical
who
in political
ways
due to fluctuations
of war"
— an obvious
as well as social. "Civilizations
in political authority
fact
and
shifts
overlooked, Stone observes,
preen themselves on being in the vanguard of the histor-
profession.
11
Stone goes so
new
it
far as to
suggest that there
historians, a "revival
of narrative,"
a
is
under way, among some
prime example being
manuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou, an account of life the Pyrenees in the early fourteenth century.
12
Em-
in a village in
(Among his other exam-
of the new narrative
mode are Eric Hobsbawm's Primitive Rebels Thompson's Whigs and Hunters.) But here Stone seems to be playing with words, the "narration of a single event" being more analytic or structural than narrative; at most it can be described as episodic 13 or microscopic. Certainly it is not what Gibbon, Macaulay, or Ranke
ples
and E.
P.
would have understood by narration
—
a story
developed chronologi-
— Social History in Retrospect
over the course of years, so that the end of the period
cally
sense, in
much
not so
If Stone,
still
who
is
"moment"
stopped
normally chooses his words
break, as he sees
in
meaning of
"Narrative," he explains,
"narrative,"
is
a
it
end
its
is
— the end of the
seems to be
to dramatize the
"scientific" history. 14
It signifies
scientific pretensions,
the economic and materialistic determinism of the
marks "the end of an era"
is
"shorthand code-word."
of the analytic methodology, the
revolution, the
order to capture
carefully,
between mentalite history and
it,
ex-
Hegelian
in the
photograph.
violating the obvious
rejection
a story as a
which the course of history
essence, as in a
sig-
is
from the beginning. In Montaillou we have
nificantly different actly the opposite,
97
•
new
revolution.
history.
13
As
in
a
and
And it many a
being heralded not by some malcontent of the
old regime but by one of the original revolutionaries. In Stone's other
works tion;
The
of the Aristocracy; The Causes of the English Revolu-
Crisis
Family and Fortune; The Family, Sex and Marriage
lished himself as a skillful practitioner of the
and
the Present
he emerges
as
one of
its
new
— he has
history. In
most severe
estab-
The Past
critics.
The long methodological essays in the first part of that book will attract the most attention, and deservedly so. Yet in some respects the shorter reviews that make up the second part are even more revealing. Dating from the 1960s and 1970s, they deal with books that Stone regarded at the time as exemplars of the reviews today, one
is
beginning. Even in the
by
first
a vigilant skepticism.
word
to describe
new
history.
Rereading these
impressed by the rigor of his criticism from the flush
of revolution,
('Tempered"
some of
his reviews,
is
his zeal
was tempered
perhaps not quite the right
not reprinted here, which are
notably intemperate in tone and almost vigilante in pursuit of error.) It is
curious to find the same pattern repeating
after another.
The book
is
first
placed in
its
itself in
largest
16
one review
framework and
pronounced a major contribution to a most important subject. The reviewer then professes to be overwhelmed by the imaginativeness and boldness of the thesis, the number of facts and variety of sources brought to bear upon it, and the ingenuity of the author in weaving
them
all
together. Before long that glowing tribute gives
detailed critique
which
little is left
way
to a
and reasoning, by the end of 17 or "seminal work." masterpiece" of the "flawed
of thesis,
facts, sources,
98
•
The
New History and
Old
the
Some of Stone's most devastating critiques, moreover, social-science type
are not
of the
of history but of the mentalite genre. In the case of
Philippe Aries' History of Childhood and David Fischer's Growing Old in
America,
it is
the
methodology and data
that Stone finds inadequate or
faulty.
In E. P. Thompson's Whigs and Hunters and Christopher Hill's
Society
and Puritanism
in Pre-Revolutionary England,
it is
the Marxist or
neo-Marxist ideology that selects and distorts the evidence to preconceived ship
thesis.
and Democracy,
is
it
the
wrong
Bossy's English Catholic Community,
questions that are asked. In
it is
J.
the absence of all the "external
events" of the old history, which can be ignored by the risk
the
fit
In Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictator-
new only
at the
of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
One
does not want to leave the impression that Stone
harsh. Indeed, he seems often to
go out of the way
is
unduly
to be generous, to
give each book, at least at the outset, the benefit of the doubt, to credit it
with serious intentions.
may be
It
that his
own
expectations are an
invitation to disillusionment. In any case, his criticisms are usually justified.
Again and again, toward the end of
the question his reader
must be
asking:
often he regretfully concludes that
along than
we were
before
Where
we
his reviews,
are
are 'not
Stone puts
we now? And all too that much farther
all
— except, and here Stone
nal faith, that an important subject has been raised,
reaffirms his origi-
one that would not
have been raised by the traditional historian and that some day dealt with
more
satisfactorily
Stone has raised so that
it
may be
many
than
issues
churlish to ask
it
particular.
still
more of him. He has made
This
is all
the
more noteworthy because
man of the
new
he makes
with his mentor, the
clear, is still
a large
new history of ideology in general
he himself is not only a it
far.
and has dealt with them so candidly
point, for example, of the role in the
and of Marxism in
has been so
may be
historian but a
left;
his heart,
socialist historian
R. H.
Tawney, even though he can no longer subscribe to most of Tawney's historical theses. It is also noteworthy that in spite of his socialist sympathies, Stone has not been history. Crisis of the Aristocracy
is
cowed by largely
the animus against
devoted to one such
elitist
elite,
382
noblemen by his count. Family, Sex and Marriage deals mainly with the gentry and upper-middle classes, on the assumption that modern feelings about the family ("affective individualism," as Stone calls
it)
Social History in Retrospect
them and
originated with
down
filtered
that has been predictably attacked as paternalistic,
And An Open Elite?
bound." 18
of a country house of a
of the aristocracy) that
elitist
a thesis
and "culture-
defines that elite so narrowly (in terms
most of the gentry and some
size that excludes it is
—
to the lower classes
99
•
questionable whether such a definition can
sustain any significant conclusions about social mobility.
Yet more should be said about the ideological impulse behind the
new
history.
constitutional,
similating
as
If,
it
tends to ignore or
belittle political,
and diplomatic history (or attend to them only by
them
into the categories and
and
also ignores
Stone admits,
methods of
belittles intellectual history.
Stone joins the pack, deriding "traditional
And
as-
social history),
it
here, unfortunately,
intellectual history
5
as a
'
"kind of paper-chase of ideas back through the ages (which usually
ends up with either Aristode or Plato)," and complaining that "great
books" This all
is
quotation marks) are studied in a "historical vacuum."
(in
a bit
of philistinism unworthy (and untypical) of Stone. But
too typical of the historian
may indeed
who
is
it is
suspicious of "elitist" ideas that
trace their lineage to Plato or Aristode,
presume to characterize some books
that does
19
and of a
as great
discipline
books (without
the invidious quotation marks).
In this respect mentalite history content to establish
itself as
study of "mental structures" values,
and
states
mental structures
of mind"
known
20
one of the worst offenders. Not
is
an independent discipline devoted to the
— —
"feelings, emotions, behavior patterns, it
feels
obliged to denigrate those other
as ideas, especially ideas that
emanated from
the best minds of the time. Stone complains of the "hubris" of the historian.
21
But surely
it is
to be dismissive of great books is
and great
better reflected in second-rate
rate ones.
And
it is
new
the grossest kind of hubris for the historian
and
thinkers, to think that reality
third-rate thinkers than in
first-
surely a peculiar sense of historical relevance to
think that everything about a
book
is
worth studying
— the technology
of printing, the economics of publishing, the means of distribution, the composition of the reading public
— everything,
that
is,
except the
book itself. This cavalier attitude toward ideas, which sometimes verges on a positive animus against them, derives from the same populist or Marxist ideology that elsewhere Stone deplores (and ideas in the
that others have used to discredit his
own
work).
Stone points out that the tendency of quantitative history to
let
the
— 100
•
The
New History and
data dictate the subject
The
trite.
the
Old
too often produces subjects that are
all
mentalite historian
falls
trivial
or
into the opposite trap of choosing a
subject regardless of the availability or reliability of the data. It takes
no wonhave answers. The
great imagination, even for the traditional historian, to formulate derful questions to
which he would dearly love to
historical record, unfortunately, like the geological record,
ously inadequate,
missing links
we
of gaps and
subjects
—
what was once
penchant for subjects
the "states of
problem
it
for
all
historians,
by deliberately focusing
political, institutional, diplomatic, intellectual less
adequate records, and which can be sub-
called (the very expression
"canons of evidence." The a
a
is
historian minimizes
which do have more or jected to
notori-
flaws, infuriatingly lacking in the
are always seeking. This
The old
old and new.
on those
full
is
new history,
that,
mind" of the
now
seems archaic)
especially mentalite history, has
by definition, produce few such records; "inarticulate masses" are too
subde and
private to lend themselves to the kind of evidence that survives the ages. It is a
challenging task that confronts the
understand
why the
an exciting game to ferret
is
new
history,
and one can
most ambitious are attracted to it. It out whatever facts one can, however and
brightest and
wherever one can, and to make of them whatever one can, by way of deduction, generalization, extrapolation, supposition, intuition, imagi-
Only a crotchety old historian would throw a damper on the by pointing out that the results, more often than not, are thoroughly speculative and problematic "impressionistic," as the quantitative historian would say. Yet even among the new historians nation.
—
festivities
there
is
game
evidence that the
is
turning sour.
Where
theses can be contrived out of the smallest facts (and the
of
facts), there is
wonder
that the
obviously
new
much room
the largest
most tenuous and it is no
for controversy,
historians are even
more contentious than
the
old.
As Stone would say this leave us?
He
at this point in
thinks
arrogant about what
it
it
one of his reviews, Where does
leaves us with a chastened
can accomplish,
tory,
more rigorous methodologically, and more
cally.
He
rest
history, less
of the old
his-
pluralistic ideologi-
also predicts that with the revolution over, the
will consolidate its gains
The
new
less intolerant
new
history
and make some overtures to the opposition.
of us, mindful of the course of other revolutions, may be
less
Social History in Retrospect
•
101
sanguine. Several generations of historians (as generations go in the university) have a stake in the it.
What
others
may
new
criticize as
history as they have
methodological
laxity,
come
to know-
they regard as
what others look upon as ideological indulgence, thev take as an act of moral commitment. Stone mav think that the new
creativity;
pride in
historians have captured the
and
commanding
heights of the profession
carried out the basic objectives of their revolution. Like
however, they
ful revolutionaries,
still
all
success-
see themselves as embattled
besieged, having to fend off the forces of darkness and reaction.
many more
take
voices like Stone's, voices
ranks, to convince
them
able simply because it is
it is
that the
new
history
from within
and
It will
their
own
not necessarily admir-
is
new, nor the old contemptible simplv because
old.
Recovering a Lost World
When
The World
We Have Lost was first published
in
1965,
the kind of review in the Times Literary Supplement that
driven a
less stalwart
it
received
would have
author to despair. The lead review (anonymous,
two pages of detailed, relentiess criticism. That review, and others no less severe, may have contributed, paradoxically, to the eclat enjoyed by the book in academic circles; surely only an important work could be worthy of such extensive criticism. In any event the book throve on controversy. as all
reviews in the journal then were),
it
consisted of
22
It
was reprinted and
translated, reissued in a
almost twenty years after
its
new edition
in
1971, and,
original publication, Peter Laslett has
prepared yet another edition.
The
latest edition,
with Further Explored added
revised but unrepentant version of the
first.
23
remove some of the mistakes pointed out by references to
new
It
as a subtitie,
has been
critics,
emended
a
to
and amplified by
evidence and documentation culled from the abun-
dant literature on the subject in the past two decades. In respects,
is
however, the original theses are reaffirmed. The
the author's) resilience
may be explained by the
fact that
it
all
essential
book's (and
(and he) are
Cambridge Group for the History of Structure, which prides itself on being on the
part of a collective enterprise, the
Population and Social
"cutting edge" of the discipline. This
may
also account for the severity
102
of the lar
The
•
New History and
initial
the
Old
response, which was directed not only against diis particu-
book but
against the
mode of history it represented
— demographic,
sociological, quantitative, "scientific."
By now the new history has become sion that
it is
in the
so well established in the profes-
mainstream rather than on the cutting edge. Yet
practitioners retain a defensive spirit, as if they
minority.
Have
Thus one passage
were
in the original edition
Lost appears in the present edition, but
now
its
a beleaguered
of The World in the
We
form of
a
quotation:
Why
is
it
that
we know
much about
so
Empire, the growth of Parliament, and
its
the building of the British practices, the public
and
pri-
vate lives of English kings, statesmen, generals, writers, thinkers and yet
Why has do not know whether all our ancestors had enough to eat? almost nothing been done to discover how long those earlier Englishmen lived and how confident most of them could be of having any posterity at all? Not only do we not know the answers to these questions, until now we never seem to have bothered to ask them? 24 .
"Not one of these plaintive queries," Laslett comments, priate now," and some of them (about the length of life, are "entirely inappropriate"
.
.
"is as
appro-
for example)
— presumably because they have been an-
swered. Lest this be taken as cause for complacency, he hastens to add that the situation
is
far
from
satisfactory.
We are still not always asking
the right questions and are only beginning to appreciate their implications for trial
"human
England.
association altogether" rather than just for preindus-
25
In this passage and the subsequent
comment may be found
the
strengths and weaknesses of the book: a boldness that makes excessive
claims to originality (some of these questions had in fact been asked before); a confidence that
is
not always warranted (some of the an-
swers are notably inadequate) an ambitiousness that gives ;
tions that are unanswerable (about is
also apparent that
much of the
"human
rise to
ques-
association altogether"). It
controversy generated by the book
—
comes not from these kinds of questions about longevity, fertility, or diet in preindustrial England but from another order of questions, the answers to which cannot be found in the extensive files of parish registers assembled by the Cambridge Group or in the sophisticated
—
statistical
techniques
it
has devised.
Social History in Retrospect
Of those
•
103
questions that are amenable to quantitative analysis, some
are so complicated that the answers
remain mired
in formulas
and
distinctions that defy easy generalization; for these Laslett refers us to
the
more
detailed studies
of
Wrigley and R.
his colleagues, E. A.
S.
Schofield. Others are more readily summarized, and here Laslett takes
the opportunity to correct
from trial
literary sources.
26
England married
Shakespeare, twelve.
The
The
prevalent "misbeliefs" that derive
an early age comes to us with the authority of
at
who had
some
idea, for example, that people in preindus-
Juliet
marry
fourteen and her mother at
at
statistical evidence, however, shows that the average age of
marriage for the gentry and nobility was close to twenty, and for the
population as a whole nearer the midtwenties. Similarly, the vision of the peasantry disporting themselves in the hay, as in
Nighfs Dream,
not borne out by
is
month following
these revelries. (But
as Laslett says, that
which suggests that the
statistics
was
it
in
A
of births
May
Midsummer in the ninth
rather than June,
Shakespeare had them disporting themselves,
Laslett
may have been
wrong month.) Nor was
looking
at birth statistics for
the illegitimacy rate higher in the late
seventeenth century, as Restoration dramatists would have us believe.
Nor was
starvation (actual starvation as distinct
common
from malnutrition)
was extremely rare. was Nor infant mortality, even among the poorest families, nearly so high. Nor was the "extended household" the norm in preindustrial
nearly so
times; except for
family
was
as has
been supposed; indeed,
some of the
as typical
then as
it
aristocracy, the one-generation nuclear
it is
today.
Nor was
the family so large as
has been thought; late marriage and prolonged breast-feeding effectively limited the
Tudor
poem
times, as a
number of
children.
much-quoted but
Nor were
there factories in
entirely fanciful
contemporary
suggests; nor, for that matter, were there any until the eigh-
teenth century.
These and other findings are of great importance, and are indebted to Laslett
labor that
went
historians
and the Cambridge Group for the enormous But they are not what made the book so
into them.
controversial initially or
Much more
all
what sustained
provocative have been
its
interest in
it
over the years.
theses about the "one-class soci-
and the "English Revolution." 27 When Laslett characterizes preindustrial England as a "one-class society," he does not mean, as some of ety"
his critics
have suggested, that
it
was an
egalitarian or classless society,
104
The
•
New History and
the
Old
but rather that there was only one class.
Within
the landowning
class,
effective
ranging from the upper aristocracy to the lower
this class,
gentry, were considerable differences of status, wealth, and power, but also considerable mobility; outside
who were
it
were the great bulk of the people
too heterogeneous and powerless to qualify
putting the nobility and the gentry in the same
lenged the prevailing views of this period
ory of an emergent capitalist racy,
as a class.
class, Laslett
has chal-
— not only the Marxist
class in conflict
with the feudal
but those non-Marxist theories that posit something
By
the-
aristoc-
like a class
struggle between the "rising" and "falling" gentry.
The concept of a
one-class society also rules out the familiar idea of
the "English Revolution," a term Laslett
would
like
erased from the
vocabulary of historians (together with that other misnomer, the "rise
of the middle
class"
)
Marxists understand
The English Revolution,
.
it,
as Marxists
applies primarily to the Civil
regarded as the beginning of the revolution of the middle the aristocracy, a revolution that culminated in the
of 1688. Laslett
was
is
and neo-
War, which
is
class against
Whig
Revolution
here denying two distinct propositions: that there
a social revolution
which pitted the
aristocracy against the gentry
and that
(or middle, or capitalist, or bourgeois class);
a political revolu-
tion necessarily involves a major change of economic and social power.
During the whole of this period of supposed revolution, with great
and the
plausibility, the social structure
solidarity
of "political society." If Laslett finds
remained
of nobility and gentry gave them a
Laslett argues
essentially intact
virtual
monopoly
28
no evidence of
a social revolution in the seventeenth
century, he finds ample evidence of one in the late eighteenth and the
nineteenth centuries.
was
far
more
And
this revolution, the Industrial
totally altering the scale
stroying the rural
it
to a huge, impersonal structure, by de-
community together with
by subverting religious
ratizing the polity
faith
and
brought
Laslett also proposes to dispense with
"Puritan Revolution," the "Scientific Revolution," the "Revolu-
as the
tion in Government,"
and the
it.
by democ-
society, industrialism
*In refuting the idea of an "English Revolution,"
happy with
the bonds that sustained
traditional authorities,
and transforming
such other revolutions entirely
By
of life, by removing work from the domain of
the family and transferring
it,
Revolution,
cataclysmic than any kind of "English Revolution."*
like.
He retains the "Industrial Revolution," although he is not
Social History in Retrospect
we have
about the demise of the old world, "the world
lost."
penultimate chapter, "After the Transformation," describes the
world
as
it
took shape in England
Recalling the most dismal pictures
more
a century or
The new
in the early twentieth century.
drawn by the most
pessimistic his-
of early- industrial England, Laslett has the English
torians
105
•
after the Industrial
proletariat,
Revolution, seeming to confirm
the Marxist law of "immiseration." Working-class children, for ex-
ample, are described as "scrawny, dirty, hungry, ragged, verminous,"
and
their parents as "perpetually liable to social and material degrada29 Laslett concedes that this picture may be overdrawn. If, as a
tion."
contemporary study showed, almost half the workers were below the poverty
line,
over half must have been above
study also suggested), a large item in
was the
six shillings a
week
Moreover (as bringing them below that it.
that line
(one-sixth of their income) spent by the
on beer (thirty-one pints). But Laslett does not permit these facts to detract from his portrait of a pauperized and degraded working class, whose condition, he claims, did not materially improve until the advent of the welfare state after World War II. average family
It is
curious that Laslett should accept so readily the kinds of stereo-
types about the
"new world" he
is
properly suspicious of in the case of
the "old world." Industrialism did, obviously, transform society in
myriad ways
— but not
totally
and not
twentieth century poverty was far ally,
than
it
had been
less
cataclysmically.
By
the early
degrading, materially and mor-
in the early industrial period;
and
social
economic mobility, the opportunity to escape from poverty, was greater than
it
had been
it)
was
a happier
world for the poor than
would
a "one-class" society, in
which the poor were too poor and too powerless to constitute all.
far
in the preindus trial period. In this sense a
two-class or three-class society (or five-class, as other historians
have
and
a class at
Moreover Laslett himself, correcting some misbeliefs about prein-
dustrial
England, suggests that in crucial respects
— the nuclear
family,
the size of the household, the age at marriage, the incidence of illegiti-
macy like
— the world we have
our
believe.
lost
was not
entirely lost, that
own world than many "literary" historians He reminds us, for instance, that aged parents
times did not normally die in the
bosom of their
view of that world might suggest, but alone
it
was more
have led us to in preindustrial
family, as a romantic
in their cottage
or in the
poorhouse.
These examples of continuity between the old and new worlds may
106
The
•
New History and
the
Old
be more persuasive than Laslett's examples of change. Thus he a crucial feature life-span" that
of the old world
once characterized
in contrast to the all
cites, as
new, the "human
"temporal" matters
— the death of
the master-baker, for example, resulting in the end of the bakery.
other temporal
affairs
a far longer span than
is
Yet
indeed
life-span,
customary today; land tenure and material
goods (even modest ones, such
on from generation
human
exhibited a longer than
30
as quilts
and furnishings) were passed
to generation, in contrast to the mobile, dispos-
own
So too Lasletf s description of the "minuscule" scale of life in the old world must be qualified by his claim that urbanization grew more rapidly in England in the "five generations of pre- industrial times" than in any European country able,
at
and consumable habits of our
any time.
31
London
itself
doubled
its
time.
population in the
the seventeenth century and almost tripled
Nor was
it
half of
first
by the end of the century.
the metropolis as alien from the rest of the country as
may be
supposed; by the early eighteenth century, Wrigley estimates, one adult in six
had had some
direct experience
there for at least a short time.
In spite of
much
of London
life
by
living
32
evidence to the contrary, the effect of The World
We Have Lost— indeed,
of
its
very title—L is to induce a nostalgia for
'Time was when the whole of life went forward in the family, in a circle of loved, familiar faces, known and fondled objects, all to human size. That time has gone for ever. It makes us very 33 different from our ancestors." Laslett insists that this is not the familiar paean to a Golden Age, that the loving family circle might well have that lost world.
comprised tyrannical dren.
But even here he
fathers, resentful mothers,
lapses into nostalgia.
"Who
and exploited
of a limited company or of a government department
as
an apprentice
could love his superbly satisfactory father-figure master, even a bully
and
a beater, a usurer
and
a hypocrite?"
chil-
name
could love the
were
if he
34
These are not the kinds of observations one expects from a quantitative historian.
the years.
Yet they
may
help explain the appeal of the book over
And not only of this book but of this genre of history, which
invokes the authority of science while indulging in the rhetoric of nostalgia. Social history,
become
when
a sentimental one.
it is
not a dismal science, can
easily
Case Studies in Psychohistory
of psychohistory The impugned, critic
his
•
is
criticisms
some
at
can be "psychoanalyzed away."
tuseness: denial, repression, resistance, evasion, anxiety, rage.
he
it is
A
ob-
illicit."
of disclaiming any such intention, Peter Gay
sinuates precisely this: tion,"
his
One em-
inent psychohistorian professes to find this tactic "tempting but in the course
•
His motives can be
peril.
panoply of psychoanalytic concepts can be invoked to explain
But
^
in-
the historians' "emotion-laden acts of rejec-
must
from interpreting In the preceding sentence he has the "overwhelming
says, that the psychohistorian
as "resistances."
refrain
majority of historians" confronting Freud with "reasoned skepticism, ill-concealed anxiety, or cold rage."
1
Earlier
still,
that skepticism
is
de-
picted as a series of "aggressive defenses" or "defensive maneuvers" set
up by the
fearful historian: "If he
wall to the enemy, he can
fall
offer further resistance; if the forth, right
down
military
obliged to surrender the outermost
back on the second
second
to the fortress in
awaits the invader."
The
is
falls,
set
of bulwarks to
the third remains, and so
which the
historian nervously
2
metaphor
recalls the
hoary image of the "warfare of
and religion" once used to describe the forces of light battling the forces of darkness. The psychohistorian may find, like the historian of science before him, that scholarship is not well served by such science
images.
He may
the historian
is
also find that
two can
play at that Freudian game: if
portrayed as nervously, defensively resisting the truths
of psychohistory, so the psychohistorian
may be
portrayed as ner-
107
108
New History and
The
•
the
Old
vously, aggressively psychoanalyzing history for private reasons of his
own.
It is
a "zero-sum
and profiting history
game," profiting neither party to
least
of
this dispute,
all.
The following case studies are offered in a spirit of "reasoned skepticism," on the assumption that psychohistory is prepared to be judged by the canons of historical evidence and proof.
Edmund Burke: An Ambivalent
Conservative
Edmund Burke is usually thought of as the archetypical conservative. And with some cause. An uncompromising enemy of the French Revolution in particular and of revolution in principle, an unregenerate
defender of the established order in England and of establishments in general, a brilliant rhetorician
who
deliberately clothed his ideas in
—
what were even then the most provocative of words prescription, presumption, prejudice, and superstition Burke would seem to have
—
impeccable conservative credentials. Yet some
liberals,
and
radicals as
They keep trying to rehabilitate him. And if they cannot quite claim him as one of their own, they impugn his conservatism, suggesting that he did not mean what he said or that he only said what he did in response to the exigencies of the moment. These attempts to revise and reclaim Burke (to ubersetzen und ver-
well,
cannot leave
besseren
is
at that.
German translators of Shakespeare are said to have no new thing. A century ago John Morley, himself an
him,
boasted)
it
as
unexceptionable
liberal,
wrote not one but two appreciative studies of
Burke, and such eminent rationalists and positivists
and William Lecky praised him
lavishly. In
as
Henry Buckle
our generation we have
been presented with several portraits of Burke that depart even more a new edition of the ReflecConor Cruise O'Brien gives us a Burke cryptorevolutionist, whose arguments in
from the conventional image. Introducing tions
who
on the Revolution in France, is
nothing
favor of the
less
Whig
than a
Revolution were an implicit argument for an
Irish
whose
pas-
revolution to overthrow the Protestant ascendancy, and
sionate opposition to the French Revolution liberated a "suppressed
revolutionary part of his tionist appears in
own
personality."
3
Another kind of revolu-
Ruth Bevan's Marx and Burke:
where the protagonists
A
Revisionist View,
are said to share a similarity in the structure of
Case Studies in Psychohistory their
thought that
typed" differences.
is
far
more
Burke.
,
It is
109
obvious "stereo-
significant than their
4
A still more revisionist work 5
•
doubly
is
Isaac Kramnick's
revisionist, for
as well as politically.
The
it
reinterprets
The Rage ofEdmund
Burke psychologically
subtitle informs us that this
is
the "Portrait of
an Ambivalent Conservative." But the text more often presents him
as 6
an "ambivalent radical," which has a somewhat different implication.
Kramnick argues, because he was ambivalent. There were, he says, "two Burkes," one identifying
Burke was sexually
with the
politically ambivalent,
aristocratic, privileged order, the other
radical class, the first deriving
nature, the other conflict
we
from the masculine, aggressive
between these two Burkes originated
situation
and resulted
in
an identity
made
to
fit
this
political party,
not the stake
is
all
and
paradigm. As the
first
he raised issues that are
of this
is
his
The
side.
sick of his
tension
.\n