A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society

V. DEFIANCE: History in the Present Tense

V. DEFIANCE History in the PresentTense Where We Began Within the vast corpus of the social history accumulated since the 1960s, it’s possible to ‹nd two distinct impulses or directions (though this is not the only way of telling the story). One impulse has been the desire to grasp the development of whole societies —sometimes discretely, by analyzing the forces shaping a single country’s experience; sometimes internationally, by arguing about global or comparative change. The history of social structure— whether approached through class formation or through the study of social status, social inequality, social mobility, and social trends—is one context of such research, with its familiar emphases around employment, housing, leisure, crime, family and kinship, and so forth. Finding the long-run patterns and regularities of social organization and social behavior was an early passion of the social historian. The transmission from these to the great questions of early modern and modern political change provided the inspiration for many of social history’s founding debates. A second impulse has been toward studying particular locales. Village or county studies and studies of individual towns became the familiar building blocks of British historians for the big questions of Reformation and post-Reformation religious history, the origins and course of the seventeenth-century civil war, and histories of poverty and crime. Analogous tracks can be found in the historiographies of France, Germany, and other societies, too. For the modern era, the urban community study became the main practical medium for investigating class formation. The impact of Edward Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class certainly encouraged a strong “culturalist” 183 turn in such work, but the older materialist concerns—with wages, labor markets, apprenticeship systems, workshop regimes, mechanization and de-skilling—still remained, as did the quantitative study of strikes. Urban community studies also emphasized questions of social and geographical mobility. Such work converged on the stabilities and cohesion of working-class communities and their ability to sustain—or not sustain—particular kinds of politics. With time, the closeness and reciprocity of these two kinds of impulse—between the macrohistorical interest in capturing the directions of change within a whole society and the microhistories of particular places—pulled apart. The two ambitions became disarticulated . Social historians didn’t necessarily jettison an interest in the “big” questions, but they increasingly drew back to the intensive study of the bounded case, in which a particular community, category of workers, or event stood in for the “whole-society” argument. Such studies might deploy the full repertoire of the social historian’s methods and techniques but held off from the aggregative account of what might have been happening at the level of the society as a whole. Indeed, the very logic of the community study tended toward the speci‹city of the local account, generalizing its relationship to larger social processes via claims of exempli‹cation rather than aggregation. In my own immediate ‹eld of German history, for example, these contrary impulses—the macrosocietal and the microhistorical—produced an especially strong polemical standoff. This resulted from the enormous popularity of Alltagsgeschichte (history of everyday life) from the end of the 1970s, pioneered by a small number of innovative scholars within academic history, but with extensive resonance in a wider variety of popular and semiprofessional contexts, embracing oral histories, school projects, local compilations, memory work, museums, exhibitions, and so on. If social history in West Germany had taken off in the sixties by modeling itself as “historical social science ,” the new Alltagshistoriker now challenged this focus on impersonal forces and objective processes, calling instead for histories of popular experience that privileged the local, the ordinary, and the marginalized.1 In the face of this challenge, the older and only recently established generation reacted aggressively in defending their own project of a systematic and “critical” social science—or Gesellschaftsgeschichte (societal history), as they called it. They upheld the paramountcy of struc184 A CROOKED LINE tures and large-scale processes as the only level on which the trivial and isolated status of the local case could be overcome. They insisted on the use of quantitative and other social science methods. They reasserted the commitment to generalization and the production of social-scienti‹c knowledge that could be called objective. Against them, the Alltagshistoriker, broadly corresponding to the “new cultural historians” coalescing during the 1980s in the United States, argued the importance of “historical miniatures...