Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570-1920 and its Interpretation.

The final chapter, in which the editor offers us the "foundations of an integrated historiography", supplies an exciting climax to a book of uneven quality which almost always expands the horizons and sustains the interest. Wilson stakes out the ground in a long first chapter which he describes as a "critical portrait" of social history. The problems he poses at the beginning are eloquently resolved (though in no triumphalist spirit) at the end of the book, in a proposed synthesis whose working out carries the reader along like a good detective story. At the outset we are confronted with social history's current discontents and divisions. Wilson identifies tensions between social history as "the history of the people" (a populist tradition giving way to a Marxist-dominated one), and as conducted through a "social-history paradigm" which borrows theoretical orientations and aspirations to "scientific method" from the social sciences. These approaches have shared a vision of social history as a "totalising historiography", pulling together the diverse strands of the discipline as a whole; and they have sustained a relationship of mutual suspicion with what Wilson calls "State historiography", the professional mainstream with its agenda and practices dominated by high politics. Wilson also looks at the relationships between social history and cognate disciplines, lamenting a lack of engagement with literature and literary materials and castigating an enduring subservience towards the social sciences. He also urges closer attention to the social history of science, which is his own research area, although this renders his comments neither partisan nor irrelevant. The chapter closes with an assertive response to recent problematisations of "society", as Wilson points to ways in which new approaches can be turned to account and emphasizes the difficulties sociologists experience when they try to incorporate historians' findings into their work. Wilson urges that social history has distinctive virtues and insights of its own, and enjoins practitioners to look outwards more confidently and trade with social science disciplines on equal terms.

This summary does not do justice to this important chapter: for example, it leaves out what Wilson has to say about the impact of feminist history. But it should give an indication of the nature of Wilson's project. He returns to the fray at the end of the book, where he presents an ambitious analysis of the distinctive methodological virtues of social history while proposing a reflexive, conceptually self-critical set of practices which could form the basis for a revitalized version of the discipline, reaching out to bring high politics and the state back into the fold while pulling together the philosophical affinities of no less improbable a twosome than Geoffrey Elton and E. P. Thompson. The author's delight at this coup is palpable, but it would take a much longer essay to do justice even to his presentation of the argument. This review now has to cope with the problems raised by the introduction, and with what the rest of the book has to offer. Wilson's own research interests are firmly grounded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and this affects the balance of his presentation of the historiographical issues and protagonists. So does his interest in the history of science as social and cultural as well as intellectual history. We hear a great deal more from him about E. P. Thompson and Lawrence Stone than about (for example) Eric Hobsbawm and Harold Perkin (and, incidentally, whatever happened to Asa Briggs?). Attention is focused on those who have written overtly about their theories and philosophies, and about other people's, rather than on those whose assumptions and principles are embedded less accessibly in their practices. Little attention is paid to the writing of text-books and the setting of agenda in the presentation of social history to the world at large. Moreover, Wilson is much more concerned about the relationships among social history, sociology and linguistics than about the links with economics or geography, and even within this framework discussions of class (which has surely not been abolished as a key concept) are not developed. Wilson's relative neglect of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries helps to explain this near-lacuna, and it must also play a part in accounting for his perpetuation of the myth that social history ignores politics. A lot of work on these and related themes (where is labour history in all this?) has been done at regional and local level, and this dimension is also beyond Wilson's range of interests. An oddly myopic aspect of his introduction is his (entirely apposite) injunction to social historians to pay more heed to literature, which is taken implicitly as consisting solely of the novel. And (a particular gripe) it seems very odd indeed that someone so keen on flexibility and reflexivity should take at all seriously the crude reductionism of citation indices.

The rest of the book contributes to and enlarges Wilson's programme in various ways. Philippa Levine is the only contributor to go beyond the "long" eighteenth century, with a useful but hardly path-breaking review of the literature on (mainly) Victorian prostitution. Keith Wrightson takes aspects of Wilson's argument further with an analysis of the "enclosure" of an increasingly compartmentalized social history. This chapter had previously appeared as an article in Rural History, and the stimulating historiographical piece by Innes and Styles on "the crime wave", which is far more than a mere overview of the literature, is a very thoroughly updated reworking of an article which originally appeared in the Journal of British Studies. These contributions replace unidentified backsliders, and Linda Pollock's limp offering on concepts of privacy perhaps represents another kind of backsliding. On the other hand, Patrick Curry gives full measure in an extended and sometimes fierce search for a radical post-Marxist social history, which urges the claims of Laclau and Mouffe on the disoriented. Simon Schaffer is entertainingly instructive in a splendid analysis of changing attitudes to plausibility and calculation in Augustan England, and John Landers responds positively to Wilson's agenda in another way by forging new links between demography and politics by way of mortality rates, migration and housing conditions. There is plenty of excellent material here.

This is an ambitious and thought-provoking book, and the chapters by Wilson and Curry (especially) should command a very wide readership. It is easy to pick holes in Wilson's contributions, because the potential agenda is so enormous; but he deserves our serious attention and respect for pursuing ideas which are so new (in formal expression) that he has had to invent a lot of new terminology to present them. It will be interesting to see how many of the proposed words "take" in the discourse of the profession. It is tempting to assert that more of us than Wilson assumes have already shown sustained reflexivity, openness to ambiguity and nuance and readiness to engage in his proposed higher criticism of sources without feeling the need (or at least the urge) to dress our activities up in philosophical terminology; but such a conclusion would in this case be wrongheaded and ungenerous. At very least, everyone should read Wilson's exuberant final chapter, if only to enjoy the vivid and immediate sense of creative processes at work which his articulation of his argument conveys.

John K. Walton Lancaster University