Gaining ground.

van der Linden, Marcel

 "L'histoire ne progresse pas, elle s'elargit; ce que signifie
 qu'elle ne perd pas en artiste le terrain qu'elle conquiert en
 avant."

 Paul Veyne, Comment on ecrit l'histoire

More than thirty years ago, Eric Hobsbawm remarked that it was "a good moment to be a social historian." (1) Few people would now say the same. Many social historians seem subject to fundamental doubts. How must the discipline be pursued? What determines the relevance of research questions? What to think of the plethora of often incompatible theoretical approaches? Is social history really an independent discipline? Can "the social" be discussed in a meaningful way at all? I am always surprised at so much uncertainty. Of course, the subsequent (linguistic, cultural, interpretative) "turns" have brought many presuppositions up for discussion and there is a great need for further theoretical clarification. However, this is surely not all there is to say. Is the development of our discipline not much more complex (and to some extent more positive)?

We need only contrast the present situation with the one forty years earlier to recognize this. What were the most important studies in social history in English in 1963? Of course, every shortlist is rather arbitrary, but the following three certainly fall into the category of that year's major publications: Philip Bagwell's monumental study of the British Union of Railwaymen, Samuel Baron's standard work on Piekhanov, and, of course, E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. (2) It is beyond doubt that Thompson's work broke new ground, because it transformed our way of thinking about processes of class formation. The other two studies have a more conventional set-up, but no one will question their substance. In spite of the important differences among these three works, they have much in common: they regard social history as the history of class conflict, workers' movements, leaders and ideologists, political debates and supporters. They put emphasis on qualitative analyses; they use a fairly limited range of source material; they focus on a small part of the world; and they do not take gender, race or ethnicity into account. Therefore no one can maintain that there have not been a good many changes in the past forty years--for the better! But those changes have created a major paradox.

I will try to explain this more systematically. There are at least four aspects to the work of social historians: they use certain theoretical frameworks in order to study certain aspects of the past on the basis of certain source material and with the aid of certain methods. None of these aspects has remained the same since the 1960s.

Aspects of the past. No one knows exactly what social history is. According to Peter Stearns, social historians have in common that they "pay great attention to groups of people, particularly those remote from the summits of power (though elites are examined also)." (3) This is an entirely reasonable description, which, however, also shows that the boundaries of the discipline are very vague. Forty years ago, the study of "groups of people" was mainly understood as the study of the lower classes, their living conditions, their organizations (such as trade unions, political parties, etc.), and their conflicts with those in a higher position. The range of subjects studied by social historians has increased considerably since the emergence of the "new" social history. If one leafs through the different volumes of the Journal of Social History, one comes across an astonishing variety of subjects, ranging from illegal abortion, domestic conflict and mental depression to masculinity, breast-feeding and industrial waste. At the same time, we have acquired a much deeper knowledge of these various subjects. We understand the mechanisms at work in racism, social and geographical mobility, social protest, and religious mentalities much better than we did some decades ago.

It is often said that the concept of "social history" can have two meanings: it can both refer to "a sub-field of historical studies which mainly deals with social structures, processes and experiences" (such as classes and strata, ethnic and religious groups, migrations, etc.), and it can refer to "an approach to general history from a socio-historical point of view," dealing with "all domains of historical reality, by relating them to social structures, processes and experiences in different ways." (4) Recent developments have increasingly blurred the distinction between these two views. In principle, social historians are interested in all aspects of past society, and studying all these different aspects, they pay special attention to social structures, processes, experiences, emotions, and ideas.

Methods and sources. For a long time, social historians more or less used the same methods as their colleagues who were concerned with military or political history. They wrote narratives showing how certain organizations had developed or how certain events had taken place. Now and then, a chart should illustrate certain backgrounds or trends. The research was mostly based on archives of organizations and of the authorities, of memoirs, newspapers, brochures and other printed matter. The repertory of sources was fairly limited, and the questions brought to bear on this source material were defined rather narrowly.

Since the 1960s, a revolution has taken place in this field. The expanding interest of social historians made them both look for new sources and put new questions to old and new sources. Oral history made its appearance, a great number of birth registers was consulted, ego documents received more attention, and so-called meta-sources (large databases) were created. "Old" sources were interpreted in a different way: What stereotypes do they reveal? What are meaningful silences? What kind of unintentional information do they contain?

Parallel to these shifts, the interaction with the social sciences increased. The co-operation with sociologists, geographers, political scientists, and anthropologists became more intensive. Different fashions became more influential for a short or sometimes longer period, for instance cliometrics and anthropological history. All this shows that theoretical and methodological reflection have become enriched in the past few decades.

Theoretical frameworks. However, the development of theoretical frameworks is probably most important. In the 1960s, (marxist or other) modernization theories shaped the thought of most social historians. By now, these Grand Narratives have fallen out of favor, especially under the influence of post-structuralism and gender studies. At present, there is a great distrust of binary oppositions (subject/object, male/female, abstract/concrete, etc.). Comprehensive theories appeal to few people. This fact and the abundance of subjects in which social historians are interested make this field look incoherent. Our discipline seems to consist of many concrete "fragments" which only with many reservations can be said to reside in the same theoretical space. The field is indeed primarily "a collection of topics and analytical styles." (5)

The paradox within the discipline is that accumulation and fragmentation seem to go hand in hand. In key areas, in methods and in sources, a cumulative process of knowledge acquisition has taken place. We understand social structures and processes in the past much better than we did forty years ago. Our understanding of this subject has not only become more complex and subtle, but our insight in causal mechanisms has also increased (and, according to Paul Veyne and others, progress in historical studies consists of these extensions). At the same time, much that once appeared to be solid has melted into thin air. This process has yielded important new insights, but has also led to the fragmentation of our images of the past. There is a risk that connections between different historic processes will be obscured.

This paradox has made social history into an exciting but also complex project. The crucial question is whether we will resign ourselves to the current contradictory development. Those who do, fall into two categories. On the one hand, there are scholars who withdraw into their own subdiscipline. They pay no attention to the great epistemological debates and do their own thing. On the other hand, there is a group of people who welcome the current situation and try to justify it theoretically. I suspect that the first group is fairly large, but as they do not express their views in the debate, they are rarely recognized as a party. The second group, however, is vociferous, especially in the United States, but also elsewhere. They defend an epistemological relativism and maintain that there are as many ways in which phenomena can be "constructed" as there are theories, paradigms or conceptual schemes. It would, therefore, no longer be useful to speak of "accumulation of knowledge" within the discipline. At best, they are willing to view "the nostalgic experience of the past" as "the matrix for a satisfactory analysis of historical experience." (6) I find this view unsatisfactory, an expression of the "Rabelaisian carnival attitude, playful before the intellectual abyss," which Craig Calhoun commented on. (7) In my view, one important objection is that, from the point of view of the history of science, "knowledge accrues around certain topics across and despite the widest differences of theoretical framework, ontological scheme, investigative paradigm or whatever." (8)

Personally, I would defend the view that we should not accept this paradox as permanent. We have gained a lot of ground, but that has become divided to such an extent that the infrastructure hardly functions any more. In relation to an analogous problem in feminist studies, Karen Offen once cited the short English poem about the centipede and the toad.

 The Centipede was happy quite,
 Until the Toad in fun
 Said, "Pray which leg goes after which?"
 And worked her mind to such a pitch,
 She lay distracted in the ditch
 Considering how to run. (9)

What can we do to promote a new general perspective? In my view, we can only solve the current paradox with a new paradox: integration despite further extension. Let me first say a word on the second half of the paradox. Large parts of the world, especially Africa and Asia, have up till now been neglected by social historians. In other words, more than half of the world's population was usually left out completely. This is gradually beginning to change. Historians from "the North" have not just become interested in "the South's" past, but, more importantly, social history has developed in the South itself. The Subaltern Studies from India, by Ranajit Guha and his colleagues, have become famous, but they are by no means the only fascinating and brilliant attempt to develop an independent perspective. (10) The History Workshop movement in South Africa provides an example of another interesting perspective. (11) These developments are of course very welcome. Nevertheless, there is still a curious imbalance: historians from the South carefully follow the scientific developments in the North and are inspired by them, but Northern historians usually have little knowledge of the history of the South and the work done by their Southern colleagues. (12) A mental change seems called for.

Yet another extension in combination with a revaluation is in order. Social historians almost always study the origin and development of modernity in all its manifestations (and, following Lyotard, 1 regard postmodernity as part of the modern). There are two objections to this self-imposed limitation in time. In the first place, a large part of the human past remains unexplored. And secondly, it creates a skewed perspective reminiscent of the old modernization theories, as that which precedes modernity is not considered sui generis, but is conceived as "pre-modern" or "non-modern," that is as precursor or opposite of the "real" subject of inquiry.

These two extensions of the social historical field are absolutely necessary, if we want to discover the connectedness of processes in time and space. But they will only enhance the absence of a coherent general picture even further if we do not take on a very different challenge: the struggle against fragmentation. A disoriented discipline cannot be put easily on a firm conceptual and theoretical footing. In a conservative reflex, we could pursue a new Grand Synthesis that should enable us to survey the whole field in one glance. However, if anything, the "linguistic," the "cultural," and the "interpretative" turn made clear that such a Synthesis cannot be more than an illusion. These new developments emphasized the fundamental methodological difficulties that were insufficiently recognized or not respected at all in the classic syntheses. We could refer to these difficulties as indeterminacy problems, to some extent analogous to the indeterminacy problems in physics, according to which some properties of elementary particles are more difficult to measure as other properties are defined more accurately.

There are at least two such indeterminacies. The first involves the relation between structure and agency. The more historians focus on real individuals, the more social processes and structures on a larger scale move to the background. And the more intensely they focus on structures and large scale processes, the more individual actors with their personal histories are erased. There seems to be no solution for this dilemma: each approach has its price. The second indeterminacy problem involves the relation among class, gender, ethnicity, religion and other aspects of historical analysis. The Australian feminist historian Ann Curthoys has pointed out how difficult it is to work simultaneously with concepts such as sex (or gender), ethnicity (or race), and class: "Trying to keep just two of these concepts in play has proved extremely difficult. [...] But if keeping two such concepts in play is hard enough, look what happens when the third concept, be it ethnicity or class or sex, is brought seriously into play. The system, the analysis, becomes too complex to handle." (13)

Both indeterminacy problems make a skewed perspective inevitable. Yet they do not mean that there would be no intelligible reality outside our scholarly discourses. Grand Narratives remain possible and necessary, but a single narrative can never tell the whole story. Like spotlights, they generate a great deal of light, but they also leave something in the shade and may even blind the observer. Apart from that, it is by no means certain from the outset that these different narratives will coexist peacefully. Their relations need not be characterized by multiplicity, as there can also be accommodation or conflict. (14)

But there is yet another problem, a difficulty which Hayden White has, at one time, defined as follows: "It is possible to tell several different stories about the past and there is no way, finally, to check them against the fact of the matter. The criterion for evaluating them is moral or poetic." (15) It is beyond question that there are many such indecisive situations in historic research. But such "overdetermination" may be found in any other branch of knowledge--as far as I know, this phenomenon was first noted explicitly in econometrics. (16) There may be two reasons for this. Either there are (as yet) too few facts, so that several interpretations fit the empirical data, or one set of facts can be interpreted in different ways, as for instance a conflict between those in power and their subjects can always be considered from at least two different viewpoints. In the first case, further research can bring to light new facts that can falsify some of the earlier interpretations. But if those new facts do not turn up, the door will be opened to paradigmatic controversies that cannot be decided by research. This creates a situation which, in practice, is similar to the second one.

We therefore need a new notion of narrative and narrativity. The "classic" notion of narrative, which, with the swing of the pendulum of opinion, has rallied both supporters and opponents in the course of the twentieth century, involves a discursive and descriptive mode of representation. However, another notion of narrativity is also possible. According to that notion, the reconstruction of the social past involves the connection (in space, time, sequence) of aspects of a historic process on the basis of causal emplotment. This approach includes the "spotlight" concept as every plot is thematic and forces the narrator to make a selective appropriation of the past. (17)

Both the analytic and synthetic levels must be accounted for in order to create such emplotted narratives. They can therefore involve the use of various formalized social science methods and yet allow for the complex interweaving of ideas, emotions, power relations and all the other influences that make sense of historical outcomes. At the same time, we should heed Pierre Watter's warning: "Looking backwards, what we produce as perceptible and intelligible is inevitably a simplification that gives a false appearance of more or less straight forward progress. And it is this false appearance that incites to the belief in an encompassing single necessity determining a process from start to end and so producing it as a development." (18)

IISH

Cruquiusweg 31

1019 AT Amsterdam

The Netherlands

(translated by Stijn van der Putte)

ENDNOTES

(1.) Eric J. Hobsbawm, "From Social History to the History of Society," Daedalus, No. 100 (1971): 20-45, 45.

(2.) Philip S. Bagwell, The Railwaymen (London, 1963); Samuel H. Baron, Plekhanov. The Father of Russian Marxism (Stanford, CA, 1963); E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963).

(3.) Peter N. Stearns, ed., "Introduction," Encyclopedia of Social History (New York and London, 1994).

(4.) Jurgen Kocka, "What is Leftist about Social History Today?," Journal of Social History, 29 (1995-96), Supplement: 67.

(5.) Peter N. Stearns, ed., "Social History," in Peter N. Stearns, ed., Encyclopedia of Social History (New York and London, 1994), 683.

(6.) F.R. Ankersmit, History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor (Berkeley, 1994), 30-31.

(7.) Craig Calhoun, Critical Social Theory. Culture, History, and the Challenge of Difference (Oxford and Cambridge, MA, 1995), 97.

(8.) Christopher Norris, Reclaiming Truth. Contribution to a Critique of Cultural Relativism (London, 1996), 164.

(9.) Karen Often, "Feminism and Sexual Difference in Historical Perspective," in: Deborah L. Rhode (ed.), Theoretical Perspectives on Sexual Difference (New Haven and London, 1990), 15.

(10.) Subaltern Studies. Eleven volumes (New Delhi: Oxford University Press and Permanent Black, 1981-2000). The following articles provide an introduction: Partha Chatterjee, Subaltern History," International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (London, 2001), vol. 22, 15237-15241; Dilip Simeon, "Subaltern Studies: Cultural Concerns," ibid., 15241-15245.

(11.) Belinda Bozzoli, "Intellectuals, Audiences and Histories: South African Experiences, 1978-88," Radical History Review, No. 46-47 (1990): 237-263; Alan Cobley, "Does Social History Have a Future? The Ending of Apartheid and Recent Trends in South African Historiography," Journal of South African Studies, 27 (2001): 613-625.

(12.) See for instance Dipesh Chakrabarty, aPostcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' "Pasts?," Representations, No. 37 (Winter 1992): 1-26.

(13.) Ann Curthoys, "The Three Body Problem: Feminism and Chaos Theory," Hecate [Brisbane], 17, 1 (1991), 15.

(14.) Carlo Ginzburg, "Distance and Perspective: Reflections on Two Metaphors," in Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney (eds), Historians and Social Values (Amsterdam, 2000), 19-31.

(15.) Hayden White (1984), cited in Fred Weinstein, History and Theory after the Fall. An Essay on Interpretation (Chicago and London, 1990), 1.

(16.) Herbert A. Simon, "Causal Ordering and Identifiability," in William C. Hood and Tjalling C. Koopmans (eds), Studies in Econometric Method (New York, 1953), 49-74.

(17.) Margaret R. Somers, "Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English Working-Class Formation," Social Science History, 16 (1992): 602.

(18.) Pierre Watter, A Critique of Production (Pittsburgh, PA, 1996), 22.

By Marcel van der Linden

International Institute of Social History