Keith Thomas: TLS revisits history 40 years after ground-breaking series
In 1966, the TLS devoted three issues to “New Ways in History”. They were orchestrated by the restless medievalist Geoffrey Barraclough, who had turned from the Middle Ages to contemporary history in the belief that recent world events had made irrelevant the austerely remote tradition of scholarship in which he had been raised. Many of the contributors must have been chosen in the hope that they would adopt an aggressively forward-looking tone; and they did not disappoint. M. I. Finley, one of the few classical historians in those days whom modern historians would have recognized as deserving the name, deplored his colleagues’ intellectual isolation, their ignorance of sociology and their failure to confront “central human problems”. E. P. Thompson, whose book The Making of the English Working Class had appeared in 1963, attacked “the established constitutional and parliamentary-political Thing”, in the name of history from below. The anonymous author of the leading article (Barraclough himself) asserted that historians should align themselves with the social sciences by tackling the questions “which ordinary people wanted answering”. Sir Isaiah Berlin, he added unkindly, was wrong to dismiss “scientific” history as a “chimera”; a younger generation of historians had passed him by.
The opening article was even more confrontational. It asserted that the first half of the twentieth century was “a time when most historians temporarily lost their bearings”, and declared that “academic history, for all its scholarly rigour, had succeeded in explaining remarkably little about the workings of human society or the fluctuations in human affairs”. The remedy, it suggested, was not to “grub away in the old empirical tradition” but to forge a closer relationship with the social sciences, especially social anthropology, sociology and social psychology, to develop a more sophisticated conceptual vocabulary and to employ statistical techniques. The future lay with the computer, which would replace the “stout boots” worn by the advanced historians of the previous generation. In the United States the new econometric history was already “sweeping all before it”.
Forty years later, the author of these brash words still bears the scars inflicted in the resulting furore. Not only did Isaiah Berlin take some convincing that I was not the anonymous leader-writer, but, by an unfortunate piece of timing, I had invited that outstanding grubber in the empirical tradition, G. R. Elton, to an Oxford college dinner in the week after my article appeared. It was a chilly evening. My guest went back to Cambridge to write The Practice of History (1967), a robust rejection of all new ways in history in general and of my views in particular. It was a faint consolation to find, in the “index of historians” appended to that work, the name Thomas making an incongruous appearance between those of Tacitus and Thucydides.
How do the confident predictions and prescriptions of 1966 look now? Some were patently off target. Econometric history has not swept all before it; on the contrary, its intimidating formulae and rebarbative style have been partly responsible for the regrettable lack of interest shown by many of today’s historians in economic history of any kind. Social history has not become a central subject around which other branches of history are organized, but has in its turn been overtaken by the newer genre of cultural history. There is more cooperative scholarship and organized research than there used to be, but the “individualist, prima donna tradition”, against which the polemicists of 1966 inveighed, is, in the age of stars like Simon Schama and Niall Ferguson, more alive than ever.
On the other hand, the computer has out-performed all expectations. Who in 1966 would have guessed that today’s historians would order their library books online, take their laptops to the archives, scroll through searchable databases and become highly dependent upon on such electronic aids as Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century-Collections Online (ECCO)?
Quantitative history has some spectacular achievements to its credit, like the anthropo-metric studies of changes over time in human height and weight, or the reconstruction of British population history in the pre-census era by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. William St Clair’s work The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004) shows that counting can illuminate the history of culture no less than that of the economy. Nevertheless, it is obvious that only limited aspects of the past can be understood in this way, and the precision offered by figures is often spurious. The thrust of most modern historical writing is qualitative rather than quantitative. The dream of historians in white coats who would bring scientific certainty to the study of the past now seems just another delusion of the 1960s, that optimistic decade, when Harold Wilson invoked the “white heat” of technology.
Yet though history has not become a social science, it is much closer to adjacent disciplines than it used to be. Roderick Floud and Pat Thane recently lamented that “there is little sign of the partnership between history and sociology which seemed in prospect forty years ago”. But even if sociologists remain resolutely unhistorical, many historians are firmly sociological. In his Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (1998), for example, Ross McKibbin draws on the work of almost every prominent British sociologist from Ralf Dahrendorf and J. H. Goldthorpe to A. H. Halsey and W. G. Runciman.
Social and cultural anthropology are now accepted as part of the everyday equipment for investigating the history of such subjects as religion, kinship, ritual, or gift exchange. There is a greater sense of the otherness of the past; and many historians conceive of their subject as a kind of retrospective ethnography. Who would have guessed, in 1966, that the history of witchcraft would become a staple topic on the undergraduate curriculum? The influence of social anthropology is equally evident in the widespread preoccupation with “the native point of view”. Instead of trying to classify and order human experience from the outside, as if historical actors were butterflies, and historians entomologists, much imaginative effort has gone into the re-creation of the way things appeared to people at the time. This shift from the etic to the emic, as the linguists would call it, involves an enhanced concern with the meaning of events for those who participated in them, and a new respect for what people in the past thought and felt. Back in the 1950s, it was common to disparage ideas as mere rationalizations of self-interest. Today, even the hardest-nosed historians seek to recapture the vocabulary, categories and subjective experience of the historical actors, rather than anachronistically viewing their behaviour through modern spectacles.
This approach has been reinforced by the declining appeal of Marxism, with its tendency to dismiss conscious thought as mere “super-structure”, and by a revived interest in the philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, who saw history as the re-enactment of past experience. It is as evident in the enterprising attempts of social historians to reconstruct the values of the semi-literate as it is in the historical study of political thought by Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock and the high intellectual history of scholarship practised by polymaths like Anthony Grafton, Ian Maclean and Noel Malcolm.
During the past forty years, historians have learned from many other disciplines. Geographers have taught them to study the physical environment and to map patterns of human settlement. Archaeologists have stimulated students of all periods into looking beyond written sources to the physical remains of the past, whether artefacts, buildings, or landscape. Art historians who have moved from high art to the study of visual culture have fostered a much greater sensitivity to history’s visual dimension than was evident forty years ago, when it was highly unusual for a serious history book to carry any illustrations at all, leave alone the coloured ones we expect nowadays. Literary scholars have accustomed historians to the notion that plays, poems and novels, sensitively employed, can yield insights just as rewarding as those derived from state papers or pipe rolls....
Read entire article at Times Literary Supplement
The opening article was even more confrontational. It asserted that the first half of the twentieth century was “a time when most historians temporarily lost their bearings”, and declared that “academic history, for all its scholarly rigour, had succeeded in explaining remarkably little about the workings of human society or the fluctuations in human affairs”. The remedy, it suggested, was not to “grub away in the old empirical tradition” but to forge a closer relationship with the social sciences, especially social anthropology, sociology and social psychology, to develop a more sophisticated conceptual vocabulary and to employ statistical techniques. The future lay with the computer, which would replace the “stout boots” worn by the advanced historians of the previous generation. In the United States the new econometric history was already “sweeping all before it”.
Forty years later, the author of these brash words still bears the scars inflicted in the resulting furore. Not only did Isaiah Berlin take some convincing that I was not the anonymous leader-writer, but, by an unfortunate piece of timing, I had invited that outstanding grubber in the empirical tradition, G. R. Elton, to an Oxford college dinner in the week after my article appeared. It was a chilly evening. My guest went back to Cambridge to write The Practice of History (1967), a robust rejection of all new ways in history in general and of my views in particular. It was a faint consolation to find, in the “index of historians” appended to that work, the name Thomas making an incongruous appearance between those of Tacitus and Thucydides.
How do the confident predictions and prescriptions of 1966 look now? Some were patently off target. Econometric history has not swept all before it; on the contrary, its intimidating formulae and rebarbative style have been partly responsible for the regrettable lack of interest shown by many of today’s historians in economic history of any kind. Social history has not become a central subject around which other branches of history are organized, but has in its turn been overtaken by the newer genre of cultural history. There is more cooperative scholarship and organized research than there used to be, but the “individualist, prima donna tradition”, against which the polemicists of 1966 inveighed, is, in the age of stars like Simon Schama and Niall Ferguson, more alive than ever.
On the other hand, the computer has out-performed all expectations. Who in 1966 would have guessed that today’s historians would order their library books online, take their laptops to the archives, scroll through searchable databases and become highly dependent upon on such electronic aids as Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century-Collections Online (ECCO)?
Quantitative history has some spectacular achievements to its credit, like the anthropo-metric studies of changes over time in human height and weight, or the reconstruction of British population history in the pre-census era by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. William St Clair’s work The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004) shows that counting can illuminate the history of culture no less than that of the economy. Nevertheless, it is obvious that only limited aspects of the past can be understood in this way, and the precision offered by figures is often spurious. The thrust of most modern historical writing is qualitative rather than quantitative. The dream of historians in white coats who would bring scientific certainty to the study of the past now seems just another delusion of the 1960s, that optimistic decade, when Harold Wilson invoked the “white heat” of technology.
Yet though history has not become a social science, it is much closer to adjacent disciplines than it used to be. Roderick Floud and Pat Thane recently lamented that “there is little sign of the partnership between history and sociology which seemed in prospect forty years ago”. But even if sociologists remain resolutely unhistorical, many historians are firmly sociological. In his Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (1998), for example, Ross McKibbin draws on the work of almost every prominent British sociologist from Ralf Dahrendorf and J. H. Goldthorpe to A. H. Halsey and W. G. Runciman.
Social and cultural anthropology are now accepted as part of the everyday equipment for investigating the history of such subjects as religion, kinship, ritual, or gift exchange. There is a greater sense of the otherness of the past; and many historians conceive of their subject as a kind of retrospective ethnography. Who would have guessed, in 1966, that the history of witchcraft would become a staple topic on the undergraduate curriculum? The influence of social anthropology is equally evident in the widespread preoccupation with “the native point of view”. Instead of trying to classify and order human experience from the outside, as if historical actors were butterflies, and historians entomologists, much imaginative effort has gone into the re-creation of the way things appeared to people at the time. This shift from the etic to the emic, as the linguists would call it, involves an enhanced concern with the meaning of events for those who participated in them, and a new respect for what people in the past thought and felt. Back in the 1950s, it was common to disparage ideas as mere rationalizations of self-interest. Today, even the hardest-nosed historians seek to recapture the vocabulary, categories and subjective experience of the historical actors, rather than anachronistically viewing their behaviour through modern spectacles.
This approach has been reinforced by the declining appeal of Marxism, with its tendency to dismiss conscious thought as mere “super-structure”, and by a revived interest in the philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, who saw history as the re-enactment of past experience. It is as evident in the enterprising attempts of social historians to reconstruct the values of the semi-literate as it is in the historical study of political thought by Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock and the high intellectual history of scholarship practised by polymaths like Anthony Grafton, Ian Maclean and Noel Malcolm.
During the past forty years, historians have learned from many other disciplines. Geographers have taught them to study the physical environment and to map patterns of human settlement. Archaeologists have stimulated students of all periods into looking beyond written sources to the physical remains of the past, whether artefacts, buildings, or landscape. Art historians who have moved from high art to the study of visual culture have fostered a much greater sensitivity to history’s visual dimension than was evident forty years ago, when it was highly unusual for a serious history book to carry any illustrations at all, leave alone the coloured ones we expect nowadays. Literary scholars have accustomed historians to the notion that plays, poems and novels, sensitively employed, can yield insights just as rewarding as those derived from state papers or pipe rolls....