Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge

Chapter 9. From Macro- to Microhistory: The History of Everyday Life

Chapter 9 From Macro- to Microhistory: The History of Everyday Life Increasingly in the 19705 and 19805 historians not only in the West, but in some cases also in the Eastern European countries, began to question the assumptions of social science history. The key to the worldview of social science history, as seen by its critics, was the belief in modernization as a positive force. In its most radical form this belief was voiced in Francis Fukuyama's 1989 essay "The End of History,"1 which proclaimed that a modern technological society based on capitalist free market principles accompanied by representative parliamentary institutions signified the achievement of a rational order of things as the outcome of historical development. A good deal less sanguine, other social science-oriented historians such as Jiirgen Kocka, aware of the destructive aspects of modern societies, nevertheless expressed their confidence in the overall positive character of modernization, whereby a market economy and a highly developed technology would be coupled with democratic political institutions guaranteeing civil liberties, social justice, and cultural pluralism.2 For Kocka the collapse both of Nazism and of the Marxist-Leninist systems in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union seemed to confirm this point. A key function of a critical historical social science was, in his view, to point at the atavistic aspects of social orders in the twentieth century that stood in the way of a truly modern society, as Wehler and he had done in their analysis of German society before 1945. 101 For Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni, two of the most important representatives of microhistory in Italy, the key reason for the decline of macrohistorical conceptions and with them of social science approaches to history was to be found in the loss of faith in just this optimistic view of the beneficial social and political fruits of technological progress.3 The arguments made against macrohistorical social science approaches, which included Marxism, were based on political and ethical grounds even more than on methodological ones, although, as we shall see, the Italian school in particular subjected the basic assumptions of social science history to a searching methodological critique. A key objection to the social science conception of a world historical process characterized by modernization was, in their view, the human cost. This process, they argued, has unleashed not only immense productive forces but also devastating destructive energies that are inseparably linked with them. Moreover, it has taken place, so to say, behind the backs of people, primarily "little people," who had been neglected as much in social science-oriented history as they had been in the conventional political history that focused on the high and mighty. History must turn to the conditions of everyday life as they are experienced by common people. But the kind of history of everyday life that Fernand Braudel had offered in the 19605 and 19705 in The Structures of Everyday Life4 for them missed the point by attending to material conditions without examining how these conditions were experienced. We have already pointed to the role that political beliefs played not only in the scholarship of the older school of political historiography but also in more recent forms of social history and, of course, in Marxism. They play the same role, and perhaps a more readily apparent one in the new microhistorical studies of everyday life. It is not coincidental that in Italy many historians , like many of their British colleagues, began as professed Marxists and then moved in directions that challenged the basic macrohistorical conceptions of Marxism. The subject matter of historical studies moved, for the historians of everyday life, from what they call the "center" of power to the "margins," to the many, and the many are for them overwhelminglythe disadvantaged and the exploited. This stress on disadvantage and exploi102 The Challenge of Postmodernism tation distinguishes this historiography from older romantic traditions of the history of popular life such as the nineteenthcentury ethnology of Wilhelm Riehl.5 While Riehl looked nostalgically back to an idyllic folk society free of inner conflicts, the historians of everyday life emphasize the lack of harmony. The many, however, are not viewed by these historians as part of a crowd but as individuals who must not be lost either within world historical processes or in anonymous crowds. Edward Thompson had already made clear the motivation of his history when he proclaimed the aim of The Making of...