Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics, and the Psyche.

Kent, Christopher

edited by Michael Roth. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1994. xvii, 535 pp. $65.00 U.S. (cloth) $24.95 U.S. (paper).

Has cultural history's moment finally arrived? It has never quite gained "official" subdisciplinary status in the English-speaking world: it significantly lacks an eponymous journal and is rarely specified in job ads. A vaguely Germanic orphan, it was overshadowed by its foster parents, both of whom were strong-minded and preoccupied with their own increasingly divergent careers. The peculiarly American marriage between aloof, austere, theory-oriented intellectual history, and passionate, gregarious, activist social history broke down in the 1960s as social history, long the junior partner, "found itself." Its popularity blossomed, while that of intellectual history dwindled. The suddenly diminished ex-partner took to agonized self-scrutiny in articles in which "crisis" and "Whither?" figured prominently. As for cultural history, it had long languished under the care of these awkward parents. Introspective, somewhat gloomy and with strong aesthetic tastes, it sought consolation and companionship outside the discipline, consorting extensively with art, literature, music, and Freudianism. No one exemplified this condition better than did Carl Schorske, author of Fin de Siecle Vienna (1980) and dean of American cultural historians. This volume of twenty-one essays is a Festschrift in his honour.

If cultural history's moment has arrived, there now seems to be a question of which "cultural history"? Another sibling has surfaced under the same name. It is interesting to compare this volume with The New Cultural History (1989) edited by Lynn Hunt, the manifesto-style title of which is indicative of its intentions. Roth's title is not quite so aggressively programmatic, but Rediscovering History does have a certain claim-staking ring to it. Forty years younger than his mentor, Roth sees fine prospects for cultural history in the Schorskean mould, freed from the oppressive guardianship of social and intellectual history. The Hunt variety of cultural history is closer to social history, with its demotic tastes. The Schorske-Roth variety, to judge by this volume at least, is closer to intellectual history.

In Rediscovering History, the culture is high, the flavour European, and there is a certain aura of masculinity about it. Freudianism (the Old Testament kind) remains a major preoccupation: three essays deal directly with it, including Roth's which provides a useful corrective to Schorske's view of psychoanalysis as part of the modernist "retreat from history" mood with which Schorske empathized and which underlay his openness to other disciplines. Four essays deal with high art: two on Jacques-Louis David (including an extremely self-conscious and self-indulgent one on -- appropriately, perhaps -- self-portraiture, by T.J. Clark), Debora Silverman on Van Gogh (on painting as labour -- as close as this volume comes to the working class), and James Sheehan's interesting piece on the rise of German art museums. The only appearance of popular art, though in a very high political context, is Peter Jelavich's analysis of the Weimar craze for chorus girl kicklines. Apart from this decidedly nonfeminist presence, the only other treatment of gender is Jan Goldberg's excellent piece on the masculinity of nineteenth century official French philosophy. As for race, it is entirely absent. So for those seeking a book that is (almost) entirely unconcerned with the "holy trinity of race, class and gender," here's a candidate.

Theory, however, is not absent. Where once the social sciences were the chief source of theory for historians, now literature is our major supplier. One might therefore expect Schorskean cultural history, with its pronounced aestheticism, to be highly receptive. Interestingly it seems not to be, not highly, that is. Foucault is mentioned twice (though Goldstein's piece demonstrates her considerable knowledge of, and debt to Foucault's work) and Derrida only once, in passing. Where it does appear, theory takes its traditional intellectual history position as a subject rather than a means of historical analysis. Thus Martin Jay offers an ingenious and interesting discussion of Walter Benjamin and the novel, Michael Steinberg speculates very deeply indeed on Benjamin and Henry James, and Jerrold Seigel provides a good piece on structuralism and individuality in Levi-Strauss. In a more traditional literary-cultural vein there's William McGrath on Goethe, Byron, and the Greek War of Independence. In keeping with Schorske's often acknowledged debt to extra-disciplinary influences, six contributors come from outside history departments: three art historians, Clark, Anthony Vidler (on urban agoraphobia and modernity), and Thomas Crow (J.-L. David and the patriarchal theme), the French philosopher-sociologist Pierre Bourdieu with an interesting short meditation on a Faulkner short story, and two historians of French literature. Interestingly these last provide two of the three essays that deal explicitly with historiography. Patrizia Lombardo is worthwhile on history and the film (Martin Guerre), and Lionel Gossman is excellent on Jakob Burckhardt, the historian with whom Schorske surely has the closest spiritual affinity. The third historiographical piece is by Carlo Ginzburg on seventeenth-century antiquarians and the problem of historical fiction.

Intellectual historians may find this volume reasonably congenial: indeed several of the contributors explicitly designate themselves intellectual historians. Significantly, none call themselves cultural historians on the contributors' page. They may feel some concern about cultural history's excessive receptivity to extradisciplinary influence, since some intellectual historians particularly in the United States have recently been putting their traditional marginality to use by adopting the role of disciplinary border patrol, interrogating suspicious aliens in the name of protecting the autonomy and integrity of history.

An interesting question raised by the advertised arrival of cultural history, though this is nowhere addressed in Roth's volume, is whether in the interests of greater disciplinary harmony and understanding it may play a role in overcoming the estrangement between social and intellectual history, like an adult child acting to reconcile separated parents (and that's the end of that metaphor!). Here the problem is the apparent division within resurgent cultural history itself, between the social history-oriented Hunt variety and the intellectual history-leaning Roth variety. Is there any particular coherence in cultural history? Well, there is the word culture, which now that to its traditional elite meaning has been added its more recent anthropological meaning, embraces the high, low, and broad. Terminology can paper over a lot of cracks, but it may well turn out that social and intellectual history will remain proudly and suspiciously apart, and that cultural history will remain an institutionally inert category.