The Historiography of Communism

2. History and History’s Problem

2 History and History’s Problem P erhaps no discipline has been more significant in cultural studies than British social history in its present, one might almost say Thompsonian, aspect as “people’s history.” It is, in fact, that aspect which makes original its critique of earlier research that attempted to evaluate the development of “societies.” Peter Burke, for example, has not only described the biases of this research, he has identified with greater precision than E. P. Thompson himself the site or domain of the correction of those biases and has attempted to provide concepts for the type of historiography appropriate to the insight. However, none of the “people’s historians” has been able to move beyond a research emphasis on “the people” to an adequate theoretical formulation and statement of methodology. If “the people” is more than a demographic category, what concept does it signify? Clearly, more is involved than adding one part of a population, that which has been neglected, to another, that which has provided the traditional information base. The post-Thompson cohort of “people’s historians” has forced us to reconsider issues in the philosophy of history that had been thought virtually solved—witness the debate between Thompson and Anderson, once so prominent—but has not yet reconsidered the implications of its own work for the theoretical status and significance of key descriptive categories—institution, experience, process, structure, group, society—which have done so much intellectual mischief in the past. The new emphasis on sociology is, to be sure, an advance for historiography, but only if the categories of sociology are subjected to the serious critique implicit in what Burke refers to as “the discovery of the people.” The problem is most easily explored by a close, methodological reading of specific studies because that is where we will find the new historiographical principles manifest, whether or not they are made explicit in new theoretical formulations. This chapter examines a discrepancy in the work of Thompson between stated program and empirical analysis, not in order to criticize the latter but to discover the covert program upon which his analysis in fact depends and which, for a variety of reasons, he has not been able to make explicit. I will discuss one article, his short study of anonymous letters of abuse (1975), and try to show that his analysis and interpretation of the letters attempts to resolve what otherwise appear to be methodological contradictions. My conclusion is that his method is different from what he says it is and has said it should be, and that Thompson is engaged in an inquiry of greater historiographical and philosophical significance than he and those he has influenced seem to have recognized. Thompson: Conclusions and Principles Thompson begins “The Crime of Anonymity” with what appears to be the statement of a fact—not a summary of what is to follow or an introduction to a problem but a conclusion for which the ensuing presentation of “evidence ” and “argument” seems little more than illustrative: The anonymous threatening letter is a characteristic form of social protest in any society which has crossed a certain threshold of literacy , in which forms of collective organized defense are weak, and in which individuals who can be identified as the organizers of protest are liable to immediate victimization. (p. 255) What is this statement, so definite and plausible, the conclusion of? The level of abstraction suggests that it follows a close study of an enormous secondary literature leading inexorably to just this theoretical conclusion. Its presence in a relatively short article suggests, on the other hand, that it is the statement of a law that is confirmed by a close analysis of precisely the sort of data whose analysis can and will confirm such a law. Its definiteness suggests yet a third possibility, a statement of something sufficiently well established to serve as the program for analyzing some particular state of affairs . Finally, the use of certain terms—“characteristic,” “any society,” “in which,” “can be”—indicates a statistical conclusion on the basis of which the data can be entered in the encyclopedia of such conclusions. Each possibility , however, raises problems: Thompson has not, so far as I know, prefaced this conclusion with any other work or body of works providing the requisite review of secondary analyses of appropriate factual material; his article is too short and entirely too concentrated to confirm a law...