10th anniversary issue: social history today and tomorrow? || social history and total history

Social History and Total HistoryAuthor(s): Theodore ZeldinSource: Journal of Social History, Vol. 10, No. 2, 10th Anniversary Issue: Social History Todayand Tomorrow? (Winter, 1976), pp. 237-245Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3786682 .

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SOCIAL HISTORY AND TOTAL HISTORY

It is dangerous to write about 'The Nature of Social History.' Virtually all previous discussion of this subject has involved exhortation or condemnation; but the assumption that agreement is possible has been constantly disproved, and the ideals or models that historians have set before their pupils have always been rapidly forgotten. Personally, I have no wish to urge anyone to write history in any particular way. I believe that the history you write is the expression of your individuality; I agree with Mommsen that one cannot teach people to write history; I believe that much more can be gained by encouraging young historians to develop their own personality, their own vision, their own eccentricities, than by setting them examples to follow. Original history is the reflection of an original mind, and there is no prescription which will produce that. However, it is useful to analyse the opportunities that social history offers the individual, and to look back on how these have been used. Reflection on their own activities is profitable for historians, even if it causes discomfort.

I have been invited not only to give my views on social history but also to explain what I have been trying to do in my own writing. This too is a dangerous assignment. It seems to me that the best way to discover what a book is about is to read it. Historians, besides, are probably no more reliable as guides to their own work, than politicians are to their policies. However, the increasing specialisation of history is such that it is becoming difficult to appreciate the significance of what is being done in fields with which one is not familiar. Perhaps one owes it to one's colleagues to give some brief general hints, at least, about what one is up to; perhaps one owes it also to them to write books which have a meaning beyond one's own narrow interests.

Social history is the most ambitious form of history. Ambition, being the product of frustration as well as of idealism, seldom sees its goals precisely; and social history is therefore the branch of history which has most difficulty in saying clearly what its subject is. Its practitioners, when justifying their activities, usually try to offer a definition by means of commentaries on the word social. I believe this is a mistake, which has led only to further confusion. The word social in this context has become more a slogan than a description.

The practitioners of social history like to think of themselves as pioneers, and pioneers not just pushing back the frontiers of knowledge, but transforming the very methods of history. Social history has become synonymous with new history. This is both true and false. It is true that social history has constantly widened the range of activities that have been considered suitable for study. But



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this passion of curiosity is itself a tradition which reflects an outlook and a temperament that are not peculiar to the present generation or the present century. Social history is very far from being a new invention. It is a manifestation of a permanent rebellion, or at least of one that has been going on for a long time. It represents dissatisfaction with existing explanations; and in this it is as traditional, and as endlessly repeated, as the conflict of generations. The essential feature of its rebellion is that it demands new clues to understanding the past, additional help to reveal the significance of events. There is always an element of disillusionment, and sometimes contempt, in its attitude to previous historians; if it raises up new idols in their place, these are regularly overthrown. Social history expresses each generation's demand for novelties that appeal to its sensibilities: it is always relevant, modern, topical.

In its earlier manifestations, social history involved above all the demo- cratisation of history. It turned attention away from kings, politicians and parliaments and argued that other people also had a history. Voltaire preached this two centuries ago. Macaulay, Michelet and Burckhardt, among others, showed how it could be done, in different ways, a century ago. As early as 1891 Frederick Jackson Turner declared that the scope of history should extend to all spheres of man's activity. But for Voltaire, to overthrow kings meant to show the importance of 'geniuses' like himself, and the extension of this trend to other social groups was only gradually worked out. For a time, social history was almost equated with trade union history.

The next rebellion was to reject the domination of political history. That rebellion was not altogether successful, either. G. M. Trevelyan gave social history one of its most influential definitions when he described it as history with the politics left out. This could be taken in a negative sense: it could imply that social history was a marginal or additional kind of history, a diverting form of entertainment, but essentially light entertainment. Among the general public, this is probably the interpretation that has prevailed and survived. However, even those who saw social history as much more important did not raise it to the status of a truly independent subject. This was because, in place of the domination of politics, they substituted the domination of economics. 'Economic and social history' became an accepted phrase that revealed a firm alliance. The basis of the alliance, and of the domination of economics, was the influence of Marxism, though one should not exaggerate this influence: the earliest economic historians were not Marxists, but men impressed by the growing importance of industrialisation. Nevertheless social historians came to see their task as the analysis of social groups, defined by the position these occupy in the productive process and in the division of labour: the crucial classification was economic. Paradoxically, however, Marxism saved politics from being forgotten. Marxists are interested above all in the relationship between economic organisation and political power. They have expelled politics from its primacy, but they have not lost interest in it. Political revolutions still have a major role in their theory. They have kept a modified chronological periodisation of history. Social history was thus relegated to a rather limited function.




The third impulse behind social history has been the rebellion against the specialisation of history into a distinct discipline. The development of the historical profession in the nineteenth century meant that students of what were once known as the humanities had to opt between the different subjects taught in schools and universities: they had to specialise in only one. This gave history a new esprit de corps but also encouraged the growth of conservative routines. Independent minds inevitably protested. Lucien Febvre, leader of the Annales school in France, explained the significance of their protest when he said that he felt more in common with other young men of his own generation interested in other subjects, than with his fellow historians. The social sciences in particular were attracting most of the cleverest students, and bright young historians wanted to share in new enthusiasms, rather than follow in the well worn ruts of traditional history. By the end of the First World War, history as a subject of university study was clearly under assault, losing popularity, and all the more strikingly because it had, round the turn of the century, enjoyed unprecedented prestige: at Oxford fully one third of undergraduates were then studying history. Henri Berr argued that the reason why history was ceasing to be attractive was that it had become too timid about making generalisations: the new academic journals were encouraging minute scholarship that appealed only to a few specialists. He urged historians to challenge the social sciences by using them, making history the subject that carried out the synthesis of the findings of other subjects. History should marry with psychology and sociology and provide explanations of the evolution of mankind, with a richer content than any single social science could offer.

The idea that history was capable of having this dominant role was not the sign of a new arrogance, but a bid to return to the pre-eminence that it had clearly enjoyed in the age of nationalism. Condorcet had claimed that history was 'the high mathematics of society' and 'the physiology of governments.' Mignet had defined histoire philosophique (the kind of history that makes broad generalisations) as the prolongation the natural sciences and as par excellence the key to the human sciences. In the early nineteenth century, these pretensions had been taken seriously. The national movements in Europe used historical mythmaking as one of their principal instruments and historians occupied leading positions in government. This was particularly true in France in the mid-nineteenth century, when two best selling historians, Thiers and Guizot, led the rival political parties, until they were overthrown by other historians - Lamartine, Louis Blanc, Tocqueville and Napoleon III were all, among other things, authors of substantial historical works. In the twentieth century, the claims of the historians had no such success: history retreated into Academe. Most historians concentrated on winning status as professionals. They sought acknowledged mastery only over a narrow field. They stopped having pretensions to being philosophers or guides to daily conduct. Paradoxically, just when history found more readers than it had ever had before, historians became more modest than they had ever been. The popularisers were disowned by the professionals. As the number of professionals grew, they were more easily able to live in their own closed community.

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journal of social history

The modesty of the majority of historians was perhaps justified because, despite all the brilliance and fertility of imagination that went into the renewal of historical writing, history did not in fact offer a way of looking at the world which was peculiar to itself. History in the twentieth century has lived off loans - borrowing in turn from economics, statistics, sociology, anthropology, geography and psychology. It did not succeed in its ambition of producing a synthesis; it remained an ancillary adjunct. It was humiliated further by the new social sciences reacting against its old power, and rejecting the historical approach which they had once thought fashionable.

Social history's bid to be the central pivot of research has failed. Febvre imagined it could be the negotiator of new alliances between subjects, partici- pating in interdisciplinary team-work. When he and Marc Bloch gave Annales the amended title of Annales d'histoire sociale they had it in mind that 'social' was 'one of those adjectives which has been made to mean so many things over the course of time that it has finally come to mean virtually nothing.' That was why they liked it. They wanted to show that the object of their study was the whole of life. It was in keeping with this that Febvre edited a many-volumed Encyclo- pedia to sum up the whole of knowledge. But the scope of social history seems to have contracted since those days. Febvre's followers, whose writings are now considered the classics of social history, have not been quite so ambitious, or at least they have persisted in seeing social history as only one branch of history. Thus Braudel divided his great work on the Mediterranean into three sections: the first was geographical 'quasi-immobile history,' on the relations of man and the environment, the second was social history, dealing with groups- eco- nomics, institutions and war - and the third was the history of events and of individuals. A major distinction between these three was that they each used a different time scale. Le Roy Ladurie, who succeeded Braudel at the College de France in 1973, in his inaugural lecture entitled L'Histoire Immobile, said that it was 'in economics, in social relations and more profoundly still in biological facts, much more than in the class struggle' that he saw the motive force behind long-term historical movements. He therefore considered history as only the 'rearguard of the avant garde,' that is to say: 'We leave to researchers in more sophisticated disciplines the task of carrying out the dangerous reconnaissances.' History 'pillages' other disciplines. The 'narcissism' of the old history is condemned. The only consolation for it is that the contempt which the social sciences show for history 'is nearing its end:' they are coming to realize that human science must have an historical element. This is not claiming much.

The problem that arises now is whether it is possible to talk of history as an independent discipline at all, and whether history is capable of existing as a distinctive and unique approach to knowledge. It could perhaps be advanced that what is distinctive about history is that its subject matter is human nature, the whole of human nature from every point of view; and that its all embracing character is more important than its concern with the past, once it is conceded that historians are engaged in resurrecting and interpreting the past for the present, and that their aim is to make the present aware of all the forces that make it what it is. Clearly, history is a much wider subject than economics or

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psychology which deal with only certain aspects of human activity. But anthropology is, by definition, also the science of man; and philosophy is also concerned with surveying the whole of knowledge. In practice, however, there are very few historians, just as there are very few anthropologists or philosophers, who do go beyond the study of detail. In the case of history, getting beyond the detail is becoming almost prohibitively difficult, because of the vast accumulation of information: no historian can in fact survey all that man does. It would be more proper therefore not to distinguish between history and other subjects on the criterion of any ideals they might have, but rather to consider what they really do achieve. On this basis, there are obviously at least some people in each of these disciplines whose work is quite similar.

One could try to argue that historians are distinguished by their love of detail for its own sake, by their respect for individuals, events, accidents, and that they differ from social scientists in that they show how complex life is, how impossible it is to account for every variation, whereas social scientists are always trying to explain their data in terms of a system. But here again, in reality, historians are too unregimented to allow such a generalisation: there are historians who do believe they can get their facts to fit a system, just as there are empirical anthropologists who revel in recording every detail of their tribes' peculiarities and are not too interested in what it is all supposed to prove. It has sometimes become difficult to distinguish between the practitioners of different disciplines, except by the jargon they use. The jargon guarantees their respectability among their colleagues. This parochialism is unlikely to lose its loyalties very fast, but it does obscure the fact that students of the human sciences would probably be divided more accurately on the basis of their temperament and horizons, than on the basis of the training they received in their youth. The language they speak may conceal some nationalism, but it is not the most important thing about them.

Within history itself, it used to be the case that social historians were more open to the ideas of the social sciences, but this can hardly be maintained any more. There is a 'new' political history which is as quantitative and as socially orientated as any other form of history. Diplomatic history has come to incorporate questions of public opinion and mentalities and the latest theories of international relations. The history of science surveys thought and action in an increasingly wide perspective. Demographic history is highly mathematical. There are of course historians in all branches of history, including social history, who work away without bothering too much about all these fancy new ideas. No branch can claim a monopoly of innovation.

It seems to me, therefore, that it is not fruitful to create barriers among historians, or to differentiate too censoriously between moderns and tradi- tionalists. Inevitably we get on more easily with some rather than with others, we understand them more easily, we have fewer gaps of ignorance separating us from people working in similar fields. In my case, at any rate, this only makes me all the more conscious of the parochialism that training and outlook imposes on me. To be able to overcome that must always be a personal matter. But the inescapable limitations imposed by the sheer mass of knowledge will always

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remain. The most important difference between historians is perhaps in the way they grapple with this problem. Their motives in doing history categorise them more than the particular aspect of the past that they study: one could thus suggest that there are three major types: systematic, personal and social historians (to make social mean something different again). The 'systematic' historian is the one whose main concern is to seek patterns in the past and to explain present developments. Some socialist historians would fit in here. It was a realisation of this that led to an attempt to start a Journal of Socialist History. The 'personal' historian is the one who writes about the past because he loves it, because he finds personal pleasure in living in it. Richard Cobb's Second Identity contains the clearest exposition of what this means. Very often, such a person also loves writing, and history is, for him, above all a creative and literary activity. The 'social' historian, by opposition to this - but one sees at once that the categories can easily and usually do overlap - finds in history a social activity, involving teaching, membership of a profession, team work, the creation of links with other historians and other disciplines. Most historians obviously have a little of all three types in them, but the emphasis varies. Awareness of this may be useful in that it could lead historians to realise that, for example, if historical research is above all team work, it is extraordinary that there is so little planning and so little co-ordination among them; and if historical research is a philosophical activity, in the eighteenth century sense, it is surprising that there are so few people willing to say so openly.

It seems to me, therefore, that social history, precisely because it has been so successful, has somewhat lost its direction amid the variety of its achievements. There are ways, also, in which it is still a prisoner of inherited traditions. My own work is, in certain respects, a reaction to this situation. I have not got the space here to give a full exposition of what I have tried to do in my latest book,1 which cannot be easily summarised in a few lines, so I shall refer, briefly, to just some of my aims, which have particular relevance to social history. First of all, I have tried to end the tyranny of the evolutionary idea and of the chronological approach on history. It has been said that time was the one factor left to historians to distinguish them from other scholars. I am too aware of the subjective nature of history, of the influence of present concerns on what historians see when they look into the past, to wish to distinguish too firmly between past and present. I am too conscious of the survival of historical influences to feel it possible to draw chronological dividing lines except with a very light touch. 'Periodisation' is constantly being revised, as the vision of historians alters, and the horizon they encompass shifts. Braudel tried to divide historical time into roughly three speeds. It is inevitable that these should be split up on closer examination and that every activity should be revealed as having its own rate of change. Time will continue to dominate historians so long as change is their central theme; but the influence of the evolutionary idea, borrowed from the biological sciences in the mid-nineteenth century, is less powerful today. I myself see change as only one aspect of life, to be studied like any other theme. One can resurrect the past, or one can show that the past is in fact alive.

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It is fashionable nowadays to seek 'conceptual frameworks' through which to view historical problems: this is fine for those who regard history as a hand-maid of other studies; but I believe it is possible to work out one's own framework for oneself. It is a problem of recognising precisely the individuality of one's own approach. Personally, my aim has been to present history not simply as a mass of events and of influences but also as the creation of memory. I have tried, in the case of every detail, to analyse, as far as possible, both what it was in itself and how it came to be given the attributes or significance it had. I have seen history as composed, as it were, of events and of glue holding these together. This glue is the interpretations that have been placed on the events. Intellectuals - and historians among them - have played a major role in enabling people to make sense of the past, and indeed in determining what it is that they notice, in the past as in the present. By separating events from the glue, one is free to think again about the patterns into which events might fall. One of the major problems for historians is how to liberate themselves from the frameworks they inherit from their predecessors.

Another tyranny is that of social class. Mankind - as research is increasingly showing - is divisible into many other kinds of groups - for example emotional, moral, physical. Now that history is going beyond politics and economics, these groups deserve to be studied independently, without it being a preconceived assumption that social class dominates them all. In order to avoid preconceived ideas about the kind of groupings into which one should place men and events in order to study them, I have sought to break down my material into its smallest elements. I start with a kind of pointillisme reducing complex phenomena into their most elementary forms. I have broken down classes into groups, groups into smaller groups and then shown the diversity that even the smallest groups contain. When one reaches the individual, one still finds him highly complex, presenting a different face to every pressure, behaving differently depending on the circumstances in which he finds himself, in ways which may appear contradictory, and hardly ever becoming quite predictable. So I have not sought a single key to explain him. Instead, I have gone on, from pointillisme, to study the individual simultaneously from several different sides, as though I were painting not just the obvious face but the back of the head also, and the features rearranged so that they can all be seen at once. I have tried to maintain the richness and contradictions of life in my presentation of it.

So I have been hesitant about claiming to see causal relationships, which historians imagine too freely. To talk of causes means to talk of proof and it is difficult to prove motives, character or interpretations. I prefer juxtaposition, so that the reader can make what links he thinks fit for himself. This has the advantage that I can show the whole complexity of each factor, without having to suppress all those that do not fit into a causal pattern. Causation has been almost as merciless a tyrant to historians as chronology.

To attempt to incorporate the whole of life into history is to attempt the impossible, but it is the ideal that social historians have repeatedly set themselves. I share this ideal. The difficulty about it is that the more aspects you study, the more specialisation there is, and the more life becomes a mass of

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'factors' and 'influences,' with no unifying theme. My solution has been to keep the individual as the central character in my book. I have looked at the world through his eyes, instead of working the other way and studying a multitude of disconnected forces. I have tried to make more use of psychology than historians have hitherto, not as a theory of explanation, but as an opening into the remoter aspects of human personality. The divorce between psychology and sociology is understandable, but history can remain friends with both. My history is, from one point of view, an emotional history of man. That is why my book is divided into six sections - ambition, love, politics, intellect, taste and anxiety - which are six ways of looking at the complexities of human nature, faced by social, economic and physical pressures. The more purist forms of social history have rather lost touch with the individual, beneath the abstract forces and the averages of which he forms part. To me, the culmination of social history must be total history and that must include individuality, mentality and society all at once.

The result cannot be a reduction of the facts into a simple formula, nor the division of humans into a few major categories. I have found that if you study the behaviour and attitudes of men in their religion, their games, their politics, their families, their anxieties, they do not divide up in the same way. So history, for me, is not dominated by any one force. I see it rather as a vast number of permutations, the divisions between men cutting across each other. This makes things more complicated. Indeed I believe that it is the function of the historian to show that life is more complicated the more you look at it; every explanation of some aspect that we can find, nearly always leads to yet more problems and uncertainties. In this sense, the historian is ultimately akin to the philosopher, who shows that the simple view is seldom tenable.

My interpretation of history, and my interpretation of the work of historians, coincide. I believe that few labels are ever quite accurate. The social historian in search of an identity is not going to end up completely satisfied. To wish both to differentiate oneself from, and to associate with, other historians is natural, but one should not fool oneself too much about what this means. To claim that one's own team is the best, or the most advanced, is a necessary boost to one's morale, but as an historian, one cannot believe it. So I do not think there is an answer to the question of what the nature of social history should be. It will be what the present and the next generation, reacting to the pressures of their time, and depending on the peculiarities of their character, produce. I do not think it is the duty of old men to tell the young men what to do: if the old men know, they should do it themselves; and the young men, in any case, will not listen. The function of this journal should be to let all of them have the opportunity to publish, to argue, and to try and understand what others are saying.

The more earnest you are about the precise direction you think history should take and the more you believe it should be specialised and pro- fessionalised, the more you are likely to conclude that history serves its own purposes and should be happy with attaining strictly limited objectives. This leaves history a poor relation of the social sciences. For my part, I believe

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history is a practical as well as an amusing subject. It does not offer a ready made theory about the world, but it provides its students with the materials out of which to construct one for themselves. It does not enable one to predict the future, but it does give one some feeling for what is not likely to happen; it holds out the hope, not so much of knowledge as, perhaps, of common sense. Historians will never be able to replace economists, who will always be valued as soothsayers. Economists deal with regularities, and they formulate their policies for the future on the basis of 'other things being equal.' Historians see that other things are never equal; they know how rare it is for laws to have their desired effects. They are therefore the counterpart to the social scientists; they say what cannot be done, rather than what should be done. Their function is less glamorous than that of the soothsayer. They are only court jesters. The court jester cultivates detachment and humour. These are not totally useless qualities. But they also prevent one from taking oneself too seriously.

So I see dangers in social historians trying too hard to show that they are different from other historians, or from other scholars.

St. Antony's College, Oxford University Theodore Zeldin

FOOTNOTES 1. Theodore Zeldin, France 1848-1945. Vol. 1 Ambition, Love and Politics (Oxford, 1973), Vol. 2 Intellect, Taste and Anxiety forthcoming.

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10th anniversary issue: social history today and tomorrow? || social history and total history

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