What is leftist about social history today?

Journal of Social History, Mid-Winter, 1995 by Juergen Kocka

By social history I mean, on the one hand, a sub-field of historical studies which mainly deals with social structures, processes and experiences, for example, with classes and strata, ethnic and religious groups, migrations and families, business structures and entrepreneurship, mobility, gender relations, urbanization, or patterns of rural life. Usually the borderlines vis a vis cultural, economic and political history are not clearly drawn. On the other hand, social history means an approach to general history from a socio-historical point of view. Social history in this sense deals with all domains of historical reality, by relating them to social structures, processes and experiences in different ways. The following remarks are aimed at social history in general, but they come from a European perspective. I teach in a German university and have done most of my work in the field of modern European, particularly Central and West European history.

If there is an affinity between social history and the political Left, it is neither clear cut nor ubiquitous. Modern social history emerged from very different intellectual sources. Certainly, there were strong traditions of social criticism, marxist and otherwise, which influenced social historical thought, most important in the study of workers' and labor history. But social scientists like Durkheim and Max Weber influenced historical sociology and social history as well, in a strictly nonmarxist and nonsocialist way; due to them, theories of modernization and social differentiation became important in the field from the 1950s to the 1980s, and in spite of much criticism directed against them, they continue to play a role still today. In addition, social history had conservative sources. Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, a nineteenth-century German ethnologist with much sympathy for the time-honored customs of peasants, deep respect for the monarchy and distrust of urban liberalism informed an important tradition of Central European conservative social history. In the 1930s and 1940s it took a nationalist turn. Werner Conze, one of the great pioneers of modern German social history, was deeply influenced by this tradition. One of his programmatic articles served as the opening piece of The Journal of Social History in 1967. Probably the conservative critics of social history are not aware of the rather complicated history of the field which contradicts widely held cliches.

It can be argued that topics dear to the Left have been dominant in social history: poverty and discrimination, workers and labor, social protests and social movements, inequality along gender lines, ethnic minorities and their usually difficult relations to the majority. But social historians have dealt with other topics as well. Elite groups have been favorite objects of social historical research, the rich and the powerful, the nobility, business communities and entrepreneurs. In fact the history of entrepreneurship has been one of the testing fields in which the cooperation between social historians and social scientists was tried out, very early, for instance at the Harvard Center for Entrepreneurial History. During the last decade working-class history has lost much of its attraction to social historians. In Central Europe at least, the history of the middle classes or rather of the bourgeoisie has taken its place as a fashionable field of concentration, combining social and cultural approaches in innovative ways. Most social historical topics carry neither leftist or rightist connotations - the social history of the family or of work provides obvious examples. In fact, every topic can be seen and studied from different angles. There are highly critical studies of ruling elites, and there are paternalistic or indifferent treatments of the laboring poor. The researcher dealing with workers is not necessarily a revolutionary, nor do historians of the nobility necessarily share elitist preferences. It may just be the other way around. This is, of course, well known within the profession. It should be possible to convey it to a larger audience as well.

Traditionally, the history of the state and of politics has been seen to be the centerpiece of general history. This legacy of nineteenth-century historical thought informed the writing of history in most European countries still after World War II. It is against this background that the social history of the 1950s and 1960s became an oppositional minority movement which challenged the rigid dominance of political history, frequently "from the left," that is, by stressing the need to study the social conditions and results of political structures and choices as well as the social embeddedness of individual actions in general. The ensuing conflict between revisionist social historians and established practitioners of the history of politics (and ideas) was less heated in the United States, where a narrowly defined political history had never been so clearly in command, than the case in most of Europe. More recently the confrontation between social and political history has lost much of its vigor everywhere. Combination and cross fertilization have become the rule. New fronts have emerged. Revisionist social historians of the sixties are faced by new challenges today. A new generation has emerged which criticizes social historians from a post-structuralist point of view, by emphasizing culture and language, discourse and power, and by trying to deconstruct the analytical concepts of old fashioned social historians. At least some of these challengers perceive themselves to be "on the left" and see the social history they attack as a bit too conservative.