What Happened to History?

Willie Thompson

Description

This original study explores the development of the postmodern turn in history, brought on by the social, political and cultural changes of the 1970s and 1980s. Challenging notions of certainty and objectivity, postmodernism has questioned traditional models and methods in studying history. A timely intervention in an increasingly contentious area, this book evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of postmodern history.



Beginning with a brief account of historiography as an academic discipline, with its origins in the 'scientific historiography' of the nineteenth century, Willie Thompson charts the growth and development of the historical method in the twentieth century. He examines the impact of Marxist historiography, particularly in Britain and the United States, and the emergence of new approaches to history exemplified by the work of E.P. Thompson and others. In addition, Thompson assesses the impact of feminist, black and minority history.
1. Introduction

2. Twentieth-century Historiography: the Emergence of ' Histories'

3. The Development of Marxist Historiography

4. E P Thompson and the Emergence of Social History

5. Feminist, Black and Minority histories

6. Causes: The Postmodern Turn

7. Consequences: History in the Aftermath

8. Oppositional Historiography and the Marxist conflict with Postmodern History

9. Conclusion: Strengths, Weaknesses and Agendas for the Future

Notes and References

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Social History
• PHILOSOPHY
• Histoire
• History of ideas
• History of philosophy
• General officer
• General
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 novembre 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783719631
• Langue: English

Extrait

What Happened to History?
What Happened to History?
Willie Thompson
First published 2000 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166-2012, USA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Willie Thompson 2000
The right of Willie Thompson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thompson, Willie.
What happened to history? / Willie Thompson.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-7453-1268-3
1. Historiography. 2. Historiography—History—20th century. 3. History. I. Title.
D13 .T5123 2001
907’.2—dc21
00-009579
ISBN  07453 1268 3 hardback
ISBN  0 7453 1263 2 paperback
ISBN  978 1 7837 1963 1 epub
ISBN  978 1 7837 1964 8 kindle
10   09   08   07   06   05   04   03   02   01
10   9    8     7    6    5     4    3    2     1
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by
Chase Publishing Services
Typeset from disk by Gilbert Composing Services, Leighton Buzzard
Printed in the European Union by TJ International, Padstow, England
Contents
Preface : Where I’m Coming From
1
The Tradition Established
 
The US
 
Marxists and socialists
2
War, Cold War and the 1960s Revolution
 
Cold War
 
The 1960s revolution
 
Consequences
 
The cutting edge
3
Continuing Revolution or Counter-Revolution?
 
Adventures of the dialectic – social history in the backwash
 
The French connection
 
Anglo-American responses
 
Why postmodernism?
4
Institutions and Personnel
 
Teaching
 
Postgraduates
 
Employment
 
Archives
 
Journals and publishers
 
Other institutional frameworks
5
Reality, Representation, Truth and Narrative
 
Being and seeing
 
Historiographical implications
 
Hayden White and others
 
Other deconstructionists
 
Historical emplotment
6
Grand Narrative
 
Teleologies
 
Evolution and culture
 
Marxism
 
Nietzsche and Foucault
 
Grand narrative or long-term explanation?
7
Identity and Morality
 
Whose history?
 
Evaluation in history
Conclusion
Notes
Brief Bibliography
Index
Preface: Where I’m Coming From
In 1960–61, when I was an undergraduate student, the history degree at my university included a half-unit in historical method or historical theory – I fail to recall the exact title. Only one text was referred to, R.G. Collingwood’s The Idea of History , in which the tutor believed that all wisdom upon the subject was to be found. Since the tutor in question was, unfortunately, also a wretched teacher, it isn’t surprising that these sessions failed to make very much impact. Happily this did not destroy my interest in the subject – though it prejudiced me for a long time against Collingwood.
Such was our introduction to the problems associated with the study and writing of history and practically the only reference point our class group had at the time. However, although not utilised by our tutor, Marc Bloch’s The Historian’s Craft happened to be upon the shelves of the departmental library, so we did at least have access to another perspective and were aware, though only very vaguely, of the existence of the Annales school of historiography. Then in 1961 our situation was transformed with the appearance in the university bookshop of E.H. Carr’s What is History? , 1 the short text which has been the introduction to historiography for a couple of generations of subsequent English-language history students and in many cases continues to be so. For myself and my colleagues at the time it constituted a revelation, introducing us to the epistemological and ethical problems associated with the historiographical enterprise, the uncertainty and slipperiness surrounding the notion of ‘historical fact’, the problematic nature of causality and other associated concerns.
As matters transpired, Carr’s text proved to be the herald of a historiographical transformation which, within the Anglophone world at least, produced enormous upheaval in the nature of the discipline in the following decades – revolution both in subject-matter and methodological approach. Another two years saw the appearance of Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, which, I will go on to argue, formed the pivot of the developments about to take place. Three years after that the Times Literary Supplement published a famous special number under the title of ‘The New History, which was principally concerned with methodologies – the benefits to be gained from linking historiography with other social science disciplines and the virtues of quantification and statistical techniques. Simultaneously in the United States social and cultural developments of profound importance were occurring, soon with far-reaching impact upon historiography’s institutional, methodological and theoretical character.
The 1960s were of course also the decade of the left; a political and cultural climate more congenial to Marxism in the West than at any time since the 1930s or possibly throughout the twentieth century; and Marxist historiography shared in the trend in terms of attention and credibility. Marxist historians of repute there had been in the earlier years of the twentieth century, but these had been isolated and singular individuals. I can recall, as an undergraduate at the end of the 1950s, that our class on Tudor and Stuart Britain was recommended a text by Christopher Hill, but the recommendation was accompanied by our tutor’s warning that this was a Marxist author, to be handled with care. Not long afterwards, though, Hill’s The Century of Revolution was published, which we all read and which appeared to most of us as a new and refreshing approach to historical understanding.
I continued to follow with interest the methodological and substantial debates which began to emerge, and in particular the polemic around the Nairn-Anderson thesis regarding the evolution of British politics and society since the seventeenth century, in which I felt that Thompson, for all his erudition, got the worst of the argument. Naturally I was gratified to note, in the Anglo-American sphere, the increasing academic credibility of Marxist interpretations (though these of course were not uncontested) and the contribution which the British Marxist historians made to that process. I looked with interest too on the veritable revolution in historiography occurring during the late 1960s and the 1970s, exemplified in new approaches, new historiographical constituencies, new institutions and new journals, convinced that developments such as feminist historiography and the general widening of the field of accepted historiographical discourse could be incorporated without difficulty into an expanded Marxist framework.
That confidence was, admittedly, shaken by the appearance in English during the 1970s of the writings of the French structuralists, followed by those of their English disciples. Assuming that Althusser had novel and innovative things to say, I attempted to read his translated writings, only to find them impenetrably unintelligible, and those of his English-language epigones only marginally less so. Not surprisingly therefore I received with great enthusiasm what appeared to me then and still does, Thompson’s effective demolition of structuralist claims in The Poverty of Theory, published in 1978. The year after that text appeared Thompson participated in a famous debate with his structuralist opponents during a History Workshop conference in Oxford. The debate, which I attended, took place in the interior of a church, then under renovation and whose internal walls were still covered in scaffolding. The event was packed out, and many attending perched themselves on the scaffolding, no doubt in blatant contravention of health and safety regulations. The thought struck me that this was what it must have looked like in Byzantine churches when the citizens gathered to debate the nature of the trinity and the relationship of Christ’s humanity to his divinity – with equivalent outcomes, for the debate was a dialogue of the deaf: Thompson taking a wholly intransigent stand, citing Marx’s aphorism that to leave error unconfuted amounted to intellectual immorality, with his antagonists responding in similar style.
If the 1960s and 1970s were historiographically disputatious, that was minor stuff compared to what was to come. Structuralism transmogrified into poststructuralism (here the Anglo-Saxon world was catching up on processes that had already developed in its French homeland) with the concept of postmodernism making its way into intellectual discourse 2 – I’ll deal later on with their definitions. My own attitude towards the new tendencies was generally one of suspicion and hostility, though I was always willing to acknowledge that the approach contained useful historiographical insights. Although I couldn’t help on one occasion responding favourably to a speaker who described postmodernism as an academic virus which turned all intellectual products into an indistinguishable mush – this at a time when there was a medical panic in Britain around a flesh-eating bug; and also to Richard Evans’s remark that some of the barbarians are loitering around the gates with distinctly hostile intent – nevertheless the uncompromising reassertion of traditional historiographical conceptions by G.R. Elton, Arthur Marwick or Gertrude Himmelfarb, to cite its most high-profile defenders, living and dead, is unsustainable and proceed by simply ignoring or distorting the arguments of the new style.
To say that my own standpoint derives from the Marxian tradition would not be very enlightening as at least some of the advocates of the postmodern tendency would advance a similar claim, convincing