Re: hmm. (#74332)
by Timothy James Burke on January 20, 2006 at 10:57 AM

I think what Simmons and Bollinger are doing is an important thing to look at and praise. This is, I suppose, my inclination to look more at models with a kind of generosity rather than hammer on people in negative terms.

But the other thing I would look for, KC, is whether political history as you imagine it is doing the job it needs to do in order to compel historians to respect its intellectual virtues. And here too my answer would be optimistic, in that I think you can see the ways in which social and cultural history in many fields are turning a lot of attention to topics like law, sovereignity, civil society and so on. In my own field, after a long relative lack of interest, the formal character of colonial states and 'indirect rule' are becoming central topics of concern again, in part spurred by work from political scientists and political historians.

There may be plenty of political history out there that you're overlooking because of a feeling that it has to be "pure". It seems to me that the field of colonial American history is particularly affected by this in a great deal of recent work, that the insights and methods of political and diplomatic history are shifting what social and cultural historians write about and teach. That's how social history's ascension occurred thirty years ago: it went from a practice of relative outsiders to being broadly incorporated into what any historian felt obligated to write about and think about.

If what you expect from political history is instead the antithesis of social history (as opposed to a new hybrid form) then I think you're actually retarding the improvement of knowledge over time. I'm actually somewhat whiggish in this respect, that we know more and know better over time, that if you want to work on American constitutional history, yes, you also have to think about the social history which interrelates to it. What you're right about is that the obligation has not been felt in the opposite direction by many of the orthodox figures of a certain generation of social and cultural historians--some of them felt safe writing out "dead white men", and so on. But I think that's changing, quite noticeably in many respects. The product of that change should not be a reversion to formal separations between rigidly maintained specializations, it should be a new hybrid practice which then generates new research projects and problems for discussion.

In that respect, if a given department (like UCLA) says, "We want to hire in cultural history", I can well imagine that the person they hire might actually also end up being in a meaningful sense a political historian. For example, a historian who works on memoralization and public memory might well become someone interested in the state, in governance, in laws. A social historian might become someone interested in political elites, and from that interest increasingly move into sounding more and more like a traditional "political historian". A cultural historian who researches the history of passports and cross-border travel in Europe might turn into a a scholar resembling diplomatic history, studying the formal relations between states and the inter-state institutions. And so on.

The pressure you need to bring to bear to allow those kinds of evolutions is not the kind you've conventionally hammered on, I think. It's not, "Hire more formal specialists in a certain field". It's more in the cut-and-thrust of substantive criticism of what people actually write and teach. I think you affect scholars far more when you ask, "When you wrote about yeoman farmers, why did you rigorously leave out any discussion of gentry?" or "When you write about customary law in colonial Africa, why don't you write about the political history of imperial governance?" When you complain about syllabi, I think the complaint is powerful only if you register it in tangibly canonical terms. Like, "How can you justify teaching a class on this subject without teaching X or Y book?"

Those are the complaints that sting scholars, and often spur them to change their pedagogy and their publication--or to feel a need to hire or solicit specialists who can address those oversights and absences. Or at the least, they spur the kinds of statements of refusal where you really can argue strongly against the close-mindedness and narrow ideological premises embodied in such refusals. That's where you sort out people of good faith and people who really are out to reproduce a narrow orthodoxy: when you go to a specific point of exclusion in their work or their teaching and ask, "Is that deliberate? Why are you doing that?"