Kissing Cousins?: Social History/Political History before and after the Revisionist Moment

Exploring the relationship between political, and more particularly Revisionist, history and social history, this essay suggests that these can be understood in terms of separation, segregation, and convergence. These categories operate as markers not only of continuing alignments but also of a significant shift across time in the relationship between social and political historians. Examining the making of the “new social history” through interdisciplinary exchange, the essay shows how its concern with state and power, which initially drove a separation from the high politics of a Revisionist political history, has seen a convergence with political historians in the shared study of a social history of politics and early modern political culture.