AHR ForumGeoff Eley’s A Crooked Line

Introduction

The last forty years have witnessed an extraordinary series of transformations in howhistorians approach the past. First insurgent, then triumphant, social history in the1960s and ’70s unleashed a remarkable outpouring of interesting studies that didnothing less than refashion our sense of the past. By the late 1980s, however, many,if not most, of its practitioners had turned to cultural history, which soon achievedhegemonic status. This simple formulation, of course, disguises the multiple meth-odologies, schools, and influences, both intellectual and ideological, that were partof these transformations, not to mention the variety of practices that passed forcultural history. And it is clear that the relationship between social and culturalhistory was more dialectical than merely sequential—that the seeds for a culturalapproach were present in the critical work done by the founding figures in the socialhistory movement. Recently, a number of historians have voiced their frustrationwith current methodological trends; some bemoan what has been lost in the eclipseof social by cultural history. Many, to be sure, see a source of renewal in historicalthinking through approaches that are transnational or global in scope. For some, thetime has come to look back in order to move forward.

Geoff Eley’s book A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society(2005) is a notable contribution to our understanding of how history has changedduring this period. It also offers a set of arguments for how we might go beyondcultural history, without forsaking its insights, in order to recover some of the large-scale concerns that characterized social history. Finally, it is an unusual blend of thepersonal and historiographic: Eley uses his own biography as a means of illuminatingthe transformations in approaches to history, transformations that he, like many ofhis generation, experienced as political and moral as well as intellectual revelations.

In this AHR Forum, three historians with different perspectives and expertise com-ment on Eley’s book. William Sewell, whose work has focused on France but whohas also written on theory and historical methodology, criticizes Eley for underes-timating the external forces—especially those related to the emergence of new formsof postwar capitalism—that, he argues, have to be understood in order to grasp thechanges in our approach to history over the period. Sewell warns that an attempt torecapture the totalizing ambitions that characterized social history will require morethan the historiographical “defiance” that Eley advocates. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, a

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medievalist who has also written extensively on historical methodology, calls intoquestion Eley’s account of the emergence of cultural history, pointing out some im-portant theoretical influences coming from France that she claims he neglects. Shealso questions what she perceives to be Eley’s call for methodological pluralism,offering instead the possibility of an actor-centered “neo-phenomenology” as ameans of wedding the social to the symbolic. Manu Goswami, who has written onmodern South Asia and political economy, emphasizes the deleterious cost of cul-tural history’s triumph over social history. Most pointedly, she notes that in the con-text of South Asian history, it has meant both an abandonment of large-scale com-parative approaches and a turn away from the concerns of political economy, thusobscuring key elements of imperialism and capitalism. In his response, Eley restatessome of the key arguments in his book, explains the strategies he chose to acknowl-edge the contingencies, difficulties, and resistances that made up the intellectualhistory it covers, and responds to the criticisms of the commentators. Finally, hedefends and enlarges upon his call for “new hybridities” and a “basic pluralism” indoing history today, insisting that this is neither tantamount to an abandonment oftheory nor an endorsement of mere eclecticism; rather, it is an argument for “thepossibility of fruitful conversation across sometimes irreducible yet mutually respect-ful differences.”

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