Recent developments in social history.

Although this is the second time I have had the opportunity to assess the state of the discipline in the pages of the Journal of Social History, this role is not comfortable for me. Having been trained in sociology, I am, after all, still a guest in the house of history, even after decades as a member of history departments and research institutes, and participation in the conferences and publications of the profession. My excuse is that I only sound off when invited.

In my first effort, in the 10th anniversary issue, I concentrated upon the problematics of social history: what do historians regard as a problem worthy of attention? (1) I suggested that a "scientific" history could only have emerged when we see an "esoteric problematic": that is, problems defined independently of the issues current in the society (the historian's or his period's) stemming from the intellectual dynamic of the discipline. That situation has not changed much, although twenty-six years is hardly a long time.

This time I will concentrate on one of the less valuable exports of French historiography, the practice known as "faire ecole." In French Revolution studies, after generations of domination by a Marxist-Jacobin interpretation, under the leadership of the Professor of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne, (2) a school of "revisionism" has taken over. I have always had great difficulty in identifying "revisionism" as a school. After all, the reason any of us writes history is to revise established views of the subject; otherwise we could not claim to be making a contribution. Whatever one calls the event, under the influence, first of Alfred Cobban, later of Francois Furet, the view of the Revolution as an attack of the bourgeoisie against a retrograde feudal order was demolished. (3)

While I find the objections to the Marxist dogma essentially sound, I have felt that there was grave danger of throwing out the baby with the bath. (4) It is one thing to deny that the Revolution was made by a bourgeoisie to clear the way for the efflorescence of capitalism, but it is another to deny the very existence of a bourgeoisie, understood as a relatively comfortable urban group without privileges. Some go further, denouncing reference to any groups in conflict in the sources of the Revolution (or in the interpretation of any other historical event) as outmoded by the failure of Marxism.

It is tempting to see this determination to avoid all mention of groups in conflict as a self-destructive desire to avoid all taint of contact with an earlier faith. To find a substitute, Furet takes refuge in the details of the machinations of politicians in Paris, unrelated to political events in the street or the countryside. Perhaps because it failed to excite many researchers, this revival of "l'histoire evenementielle" was succeeded by a school with claims going far beyond the subject of the Revolution of 1789, the school of "cultural history."

If I find a school of "revisionism" hard to understand, I find a "cultural" history devoid of "social" history simply inconceivable. In anthropology and sociology (101), "culture" refers to the collection of ideas, norms, values and beliefs shared by a group, which are inseparable from the structures, institutions, practices, and social relations they govern, and which perpetuate them. A culture is received by each generation largely within the family, a social structure, which, in turn, is established, legitimized, and maintained by virtue of cultural norms.

Even so, despite their misleading label, the proponents of a cultural history have much of value to offer. For one thing, one can grant that the old style of describing objective events and social facts, assuming that the responses of historical actors to those events are unproblematic, or even "natural," is unacceptable. An adequate analysis of the effects of an event in the life of society, or some feature of its social structure, would require a study of the context of values and beliefs in which it is experienced. But the cultural historians seem to exclude all mention of objective events that might influence history. Thus it would seem that depressions and prosperity, war and peace, over-population and under-population, and epidemics, have no place in historical analysis.

At a recent meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies, a leading exponent of the cultural approach contended that the flight of Louis XVI to Varennes had no significance for the progress of the Revolution. If the Terror is implicit in the concept of national sovereignty, the flight of the King to join the counter-revolutionary armies at the border could not affect the course of events. And in a recent book designed to demonstrate the value of cultural history, Thomas W. Laqueur writes a detailed and brilliant chapter on the origins of the modern cemetery, which, for the first time, exiled the dead from the community. (5) We can admire this imaginative and scholarly contribution to our understanding of the culture of modernity, while still wondering: was it necessary to ignore the fact that the development of the cemetery coincided with the decline of the mortality rate to the point at which death was no longer a normal, routine experience of daily life?

Fifty years ago, both the incorporation of social science methods in historical inquiry and the study of the past in the social sciences were ideas subject to bitter controversy. I believe that the most important changes have not been the rise and fall of schools but the disappearance of controversy over this issue. The use of the quantitative and theoretical tools of social science in much of contemporary social history is taken for granted; it is incorporated in studies without fanfare, as ordinary routine. This is most sensationally obvious in the work of David Hackett Fischer, (6) but what is most important is that it can be found as well in the work of a large number of younger scholars.

Department of Sociology 

Pittsburgh, PA 15260

ENDNOTES

(1.) Gilbert Shapiro, "Prospects for a Scientific Social History," Journal of Social History, (Winter, 1976): 196-204. The title was intended to recall the title of Part III of Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, tr. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York, 1936), "Prospects of a Scientific Politics," but apparently nobody recognized it. It seems in the post-modern age nobody reads Mannheim, despite, or perhaps because, of the fact that he said much of what is said by the postmodernists.

(2.) This domination was not continuous: Marcel Reinhard hardly qualified as a Marxist-Jacobin.

(3.) Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1964). Francois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1981). The French edition, Penser la Revolution Francaise, was dated 1978.

(4.) Gilbert Shapiro, "The Many Lives of Georges Lefebvre," American Historical Review, 72:2 (1967): 502-514.

(5.) Thomas W. Laqueur, "The Places of the Dead in Modernity," in Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman, eds., The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 1750-1820 (Berkeley, 2002): 17-32.

(6.) E.g., David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (New York, 1977), and Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York, 1989).

By Gilbert Shapiro

University of Pittsburgh