Making sense of social history - New Topics And Historians

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2003 by Mark M. Smith

II

Hobsbawm's optimism in 1970 about the future of social history was rooted in a judicious and penetrating survey of the field. Then, as now, defining social history was problematic. The phrase and, by extension, the field, meant several things. On one level, social history referred "to works in a variety of human activities difficult to classify except in such terms as 'manners, customs, everyday life'." Another meaning--one with which Hobsbawm had some sympathy--was the bracketing of social with economic history, not an unhealthy relationship in his estimation because "it threw light on the structure and changes in society, and more especially on the relationships between classes and social groups." Social history also "referred to the history of the poor or lower classes," so-called history from the bottom up, a definition that has proven remarkably tenacious even though, from Hobsbawm's perspective, it was deceptive because an exclusive emphasis on the bottom entailed a deliberate and unhelpful isolation of classes and the social production of power relations contingent on the interplay of those classes. In Hobsbawm's view, social history's examination of "class must therefore involve the rest of society of which it is a part. Slave-owners cannot be understood without slaves, and without the non-slave sectors of society." (11)

Hobsbawm was most impressed with the idea that "[s]ocial history can never be another specialization like economic or other hyphenated histories because its subject-matter cannot be isolated." "The intellectual historian may (at his risk) pay no attention to economics, the economic historian to Shakespeare," argued Hobsbawm, "but the social historian who neglects either will not get far." Here, Hobsbawm expressed his admiration to "the great Frenchmen" who "preferred to describe themselves simply as historians and their aim as 'total' or 'global' history, or as men who sought to integrate the contributions of all relevant social sciences in history, rather than exemplify any one of them." While "Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, Georges Lefebvre are not names which can be pigeonholed as social historians," that, it seems, is precisely what Hobsbawm thought social history should be: expansive, elastic, eclectic, reluctant to privilege one field of inquiry over another, willing to examine mentalities as well as concrete economic processes and structures. (12)

Several scholars have endorsed Hobsbawm's view. A decade after Hobsbawm wrote his essay, Peter N. Stearns also suggested that one of the strengths of social history was to "deepen understanding" of a variety of topics and he argued convincingly that it was "impossible to define social history adequately by discussing it in terms of period or area." Stearns also contended that social history was not simply "a catch-all category for those subjects that other kinds of history left out;" rather the field was driven not just by the desire to recover the history of daily life but also by an effort to connect "findings with more conventional historical topics," a striving to offer a more complete "portrait of a period, beyond the findings of strictly political or intellectual history." "Social history," maintained Steams, "is separated from intellectual history not only by its explicit concern for the popular resonance of ideas but also by its focus on popular belief systems, by its attention to the variety of sources and artifacts that evidence those belief systems, and by its interest in the interaction of mental attitudes and behavior." The concern for outlook or mental attitude, he ventured, "relates social historians not only to cultural but also to psychological history, in intent if not usually in conceptual arsenal," and such borrowing from other fields necessarily led social history to deal with questions of "emotional as well as cultural causation." (13) So, by 1980, the kind of trajectory anticipated by Hobsbawm in 1970 was, according to Stearns at least, in the process of being realized. (14)