Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies: From Documentation to Intervention by Jaume Aurell (review)

This book represents an ambitious and interesting project, seeking to interpret a wide range of historians’ autobiographies—European and American—from the 1920s to the present. The result is, as the author intends, a genuine, and distinctive, contribution to contemporary historiography, and—with slightly less certainty—a commentary on larger developments in modern intellectual history.

Aurell seeks to identify several generational clusters of autobiography, though this approach works better in some instances than in others. In the interwar decades, a number of European historians—including Benedetto Croce and Robin George Collingwood—employed a humanistic emphasis to highlight the role of their discipline in responding to the troubles of this time. In contrast, soon after World War II, several American practitioners, including Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., and William Langer, used autobiography to emphasize the growing professionalism of the field in the United States.

The 1980s saw the emergence of ego-histoire, primarily in France, highlighting the intellectual journeys of figures like Pierre Nora and Henri Braudel, in a deliberate departure from the scientific-objectivist paradigm that was gaining ground in the field. Aurell encounters more difficulty here in venturing a decisive generational definition for another autobiographical strategy that developed soon thereafter around figures like Eric Hobsbawm. A more literary, postmodernist approach, with representatives like Hayden White and Carolyn Steedman, followed. A final substantive chapter addresses what Aurell calls an “interventional” school, defined by such historians as Geoff Eley, who used autobiography to participate directly in key historiographical debates, particularly concerning the issues involved in the “cultural turn.”

No summary of the groupings in the various chapters should ignore the many intriguing individual characterizations that the book offers. Several historians, Philippe Ariès among them, examined their own relationship with the past and their engagement with history to discover their own personal values. Although Aurell is not the first scholar to probe historians’ autobiographies (he acknowledges the influence of Popkins’ earlier work), he unquestionably adds some appealing and informative portraits.¹

Aurell leaves a few questions unanswered: For instance, why did certain eminent, and a few not-so-eminent, historians write autobiographies whereas others did not?. Or how does the twentieth-century literature relate to any earlier patterns, or to efforts in other cultures? Nonetheless, many historians will find much of value in the book as an opportunity to gain further insights about many practitioners whose work remains significant and to ponder their own disciplinary values in relation to some of the broader currents of our time.

A final question emerges above the generational flux that Aurell discusses: Why did so many historians of the past century, as opposed to scholars in other disciplines, decide to explore aspects of their own lives? One answer might be that this profusion of historians’ autobiographies reflects an ongoing concern about justifying and explaining a discipline that, even before our current troubles, fits less readily in a science-dominated intellectual landscape than had once been the case.