History, Social

views updated

History, Social

Social history emerged as a discipline over the course of about twenty years at the conjunction of two seemingly contradictory schools of historical writing: English social history and the French Annales school.

Defined by George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876–1962) as “history with the politics left out,” English social history sought to examine the “manners, morals and customs” of the English people within a disciplinary rubric that placed social history alongside political, economic, and, in some quarters, labor history as discrete subfields (Trevelyan 1942).

The Annales school, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch (1886–1944) and Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) and named after the journal Annales d’histoire economique and social, sought quite the opposite. Bloch and Febvre intended a new “science of society” that would incorporate all domains of the human and social sciences. The two envisioned their project in diametric opposition both to Durkheimian sociology, which they felt merely rummaged history for support of its theories, as well as historical renderings that purported to render through a catalogue of facts an objective past. They and their colleagues sought at once to investigate the differentia of past presents and to come through these investigations to a fuller sense not only of how a given society came together in all its interrelated elements, but also human society as conceived as an entity in which all historical moments participate and elucidate. What was envisioned was a massive inductive project incorporating myriad local histories that would yield at an endlessly forestalled future time, a “history of society.”

The first Annales school was enthusiastically received by what was known as the Communist Party Historian’s Group in Britain (1946–1956). Though putatively an organ of the Communist Party, under the de facto leadership of the British journalist Dona Torr (1883–1957), the group enjoyed a free and open discussion. Its members included E. P. Thompson (1924–1993), Dorothy Thompson (1894–1961), Christopher Hill (1912–2003), Rodney Hilton (1916–2002), Eric Hobsbawm (b. 1917), and George Rudé (1910–1993), among other future notables of social history. The group’s concerns maintained a tension between two poles that would inform the members’ later work: at one end an interest in social transformation, specifically the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and at the other, an interest in the “manners, morals and customs” of the poor in relation to those transformations. The first roughly corresponded to discussion of Maurice Dobb’s (1900–1976) Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946) and the second to A. L. Morton’s (1903–1987) People’s History of England (1938).

In 1952, the group founded the journal Past and Present, which sought to give voice to these concerns and to engage with non-Marxist historians interested in similar lines of inquiry. In the first issue, Hobsbawm published his groundbreaking analysis of the machine breakers, which demonstrated that Luddite riots were not resistance to the machine as such, as has long been argued, but to the “machine in the hands of the capitalist” (Hobsbawm 1952). He argued that in the absence of organizational and political avenues, such protests should be read as “collective bargaining by riot.” The theme was later expanded in a series of similarly pathbreaking studies by Rudé on the crowd. Meanwhile, Hill demonstrated that the “manners, morals and customs” of the poor were themselves a source of political struggle in his important essay “Puritans and the Poor,” which examined the disciplinary techniques of the nascent English bourgeoisie (Hill 1952).

The group’s twin concerns were on full display in E. P. Thompson’s magisterial work The Making of the English Working Class ([1963] 1968), which brought to bear his understanding of culture as a “whole way of conflict.” Thompson argued that class comes into being as a result of struggle; through this struggle, persons become conscious of their interests and themselves as a class over time. Thompson therefore rejected sociological definitions that sought to define class as distinct from historical struggle and, by extension, context. What resulted was a notion of class that Mikhail Bakhtin would call “novelistic,” in that class designated an open-ended, dialogic “unity” which, through the ceaseless interpenetration of other voices and experiences, undoes and redoes its own provisional unity. From a methodological standpoint, Thompson’s work was highly innovative, incorporating literature (from high to very low), folklore, local archives, and spy reports in a way that elucidated the complex moral and symbolic universe in which class struggle was imbricated. In The Making of the English Working Class and in later works dealing with grain riots, game laws, and time and its relation to work discipline, Thompson demonstrated a subtle understanding of human agency that did not recognize, for example, time or the law as necessarily instruments of ruling-class power (which they were initially, he allowed). Instead, he suggested that these created circumstances through their own claims to universality that permitted a defense (if only a weak one at first) on those very same grounds against the arbitrary actions of elites. Thompson presented his objects of study as situated in historical processes, the relative meanings of which were constituted through struggle and human agency.

Thompson inaugurated a new version of social history in the late 1960s and into the 1970s with mixed success. On the one hand, authors such as Eugene Genovese (b. 1930) and Herbert Gutman (1928–1985) produced subtle and far-reaching studies in the American context that recovered local knowledges and successfully mapped larger processes through them. On the other, there was a tendency to shrink back from the theoretical engagements of these authors, producing something closer to Trevelyan’s “history with the politics left out” even in studies of working-class culture. It was against this trend that Hobsbawm wrote his important essay “From Social History to the History of Society,” which appears in his collection On History (1997), urging a reconnection of such studies to larger historical processes.

While culturalist “advocacy” readings of the working class turned away from larger issues, the rise of historical sociology—with its use of demography, cliometrics, and other statistical tools inspired by the second and third waves of the Annales school—tended to efface culture and, with it, class conflict entirely. The twin recoil from the interventions of the Communist Party Historian’s Group inspired important and often scathing critiques by Tony Judt, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, and Geoff Eley and Keith Nield.

CRISES

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the field of social history found itself in another sort of crisis entirely. Feminists began calling into question the primacy of class in historical analysis, arguing that gender complicated and problematized easy assumptions regarding the universality of the class experience, which they argued tended to be gendered male. While the worst of these arguments reproduced the atheoretical “advocacy” histories discussed above in the context of gender, the best of these critically engaged the concept of class and have significantly enriched contemporary understandings of past societies. The scholars Deborah Valenze and Barbara Taylor revisited Methodism (a religion founded by John Wesley in the eighteenth century) and Owenism (a theory developed by utopian socialist Robert Owen, often considered a precursor to Marxism) respectively, demonstrating the egalitarian promises and realities of each for women that E. P. Thompson had overlooked. Similarly, Christine Stansell examined gender and working-class formation in New York City in her delightful City of Women (1987). Judith Walkowitz produced an influential social history of Victorian prostitution on which Stansell drew, and she later expanded on these themes, drawing successfully on the work of Gareth Stedman Jones (b. 1942) and the literary scholar Coral Lansbury’s (1933–1991) work to elucidate the physical and cultural landscape around the Jack the Ripper murders. The historians Sonya Rose and Anna Clark have sought more frontally to rehabilitate the concept of class while addressing what the latter views as its misogynist articulations and realities. Catherine Hall, first with Lenore Davidoff in Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (1987), engaged the deep intersections of class and gender in the formation of the English middle class, and later alone demonstrated the ways these were both deeply implicated in colonialism. Most suggestively, the literary scholar Mary Poovey has, like Hall, opened exciting avenues for examining the manner in which class, gender, and race influenced each other, inflecting every aspect of social life in the nineteenth century.

Coeval with the rise of feminist studies in social history arose what has come to be called the linguistic turn, which can be traced to Stedman Jones’s 1982 essay “The Language of Chartism” (Chartism being a movement for the franchise on the part of the middle and working class, beginning formally in the late 1820s and continuing through the Reform Act of 1867). Stedman Jones argued that an examination of Chartist language revealed a fundamentally political movement that obscured rather than articulated working-class interests. The historians Patrick Joyce and James Vernon pushed Stedman Jones’s observations still further, the former arguing that class should be replaced by what he feels to be a more fluid and soft term, the people. Drawing on the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard’s (b. 1929) conception of the mass, Joyce has argued for a formless corpus whose solidarities are formed and mobilized through political speech, only to form anew in different configurations in different contexts.

Criticisms of Stedman Jones, Joyce, and Vernon have been many and often unhelpful, a situation exacerbated by the posturings of the latter two. Joan Scott has offered a successful critique of Stedman Jones, arguing that his somewhat literal reading of political discourse excises the gendered nature of that language (Scott 1988). Eley and Nield have argued that Joyce’s formulations rely upon a straw man of a crudely economic, reductionist Marxism jettisoned from social history nearly from its inception. Joyce and Vernon’s most sympathetic and formidable critic, James Epstein, has argued that their formulations fail to take into account the conditions of the production and dissemination of political speech, especially the crowds to whom that speech is addressed.

In some renderings, social history has been in crisis since it began. When it has been successful, it has embraced new ideas and domains of inquiry by holding these in creative tension with the analytical purchase of its past discoveries. It is only through these engagements variously with feminism, postcolonial studies, Marxism, anthropology, and, more recently, literary studies that it has achieved something like its foundational concern of a “history of society” articulated by Bloch and Febvre and reiterated variously by Hobsbawm and, later, Eley and Nield.

SEE ALSO Marxism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bloch, Marc. 1953. The Historian’s Craft. Trans. Peter Putnam. New York: Knopf.

Clark, Anna. 1995. The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the English Working Class. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Davidoff, Lenore, and Catherine Hall. 1987. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dobb, Maurice. 1946. Studies in the Development of Capitalism. London: Routledge.

Eley, Geoff. 2005. A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Eley, Geoff, and Keith Nield. 1980. Why Does Social History Ignore Politics? Social History 5 (2): 249–269.

Eley, Geoff, and Keith Nield. 1995. Starting Over: The Present, the Post-Modern and the Moment of Social History. Social History 20 (3): 355–364.

Eley, Geoff, and Keith Nield. 2000. Farewell to the Working Class? International Labor and Working Class History 57 (Spring): 1–30.

Epstein, James. 2003. In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, and Eugene Genovese. 1976. The Political Crisis of Social History: A Marxist Perspective. Journal of Social History 10 (2): 205–220.

Genovese, Eugene. 1974. Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon Books.

Hall, Catherine. 1992. White, Male, and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History. New York: Routledge.

Hall, Catherine. 2002. Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830–1867. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hill, Christopher. 1952. Puritans and the Poor. Past and Present 2 (1): 32–50.

Hill, Christopher. 1958. Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century. London: Secker & Warburg.

Hobsbawm, Eric. 1952. The Machine Breakers Past and Present 1: 57–70.

Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1997. On History. New York: New Press.

Joyce, Patrick. 1991. Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Joyce, Patrick. 1994. Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Joyce, Patrick. 1995. The End of Social History? Social History 20 (1): 73–91.

Judt, Tony. 1979. A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians. History Workshop Journal 7 (Spring): 66–94.

Lansbury, Coral. 1985. The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Morton, A. L. 1938. A People’s History of England. New York: Random House.

Poovey, Mary. 1988. Uneven Development: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Poovey, Mary. 1995. Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rose, Sonya O. 1992. Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Scott, Joan Wallach. 1988. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press.

Stansell, Christine. 1987. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Stedman Jones, Gareth. 1982. The Language of Chartism. In The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830–1860, eds. James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson. London: Macmillan Press.

Stedman Jones, Gareth. 1983. Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Thompson, E. P. 1961a. The Long Revolution (Part I). New Left Review 1 (9): 24–33.

Thompson, E. P. 1961b. The Long Revolution (Part II). New Left Review 1 (10): 34–39.

Thompson, E. P. [1963] 1968. The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin.

Thompson, E. P. 1975. Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act. New York: Pantheon Books.

Thompson, E. P. 1978. The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Thompson, E. P. 1991. Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. New York: New Press.

Trevelyan, G. M. 1942. English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries, Chaucer to Queen Victoria. London, New York: Longmans, Green.

Valenze, Deborah M. 1985. Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Vernon, James. 1994. Who’s Afraid of the “Linguistic Turn”? The Politics of Social History and Its Discontents. Social History 19 (1): 81–97.