BOOKS
Historians have feelings
Eric Christiansen
The Past and the Present Lawrence Stone (Routledge & Kegan Paul pp. 288, f8.75).
This is not only a review of a history book, but a review of a book composed almost entirely of reviews of other history books. The trouble is that one of the salient characteristics of the here and now is the frightful number of history books that gets published. They come surging out in pulsating masses, like the Zulus in that exciting film. To ignore them would be like picnicking at Rorke's Drift on the day of the big event. It is a terrible bore, but something we have to live with, as the progressive bishop said about the creed.
Anyway, to get back to Zulu. While our troops and the natives were locked in racial disharmony, there was a group of stern old chiefs up on a hill, who were organising the party. They wore feathery hats, and now and then one of them would signal with his assegai and about 25,000 impis would immediately attempt to rush the red-coats. Then he would make another signal and the whole brigade would stop, turn round, and trot back to point A on the map, irrespective of personal inconvenience. This stirring scene came to mind as I was reading Lawrence Stone's collected essays and reviews which is not about the Zulu war but concerns historians and the history racket.
Stone has now been standing up on the hill in his feathery hat for about 18 years, but before he became a professor at Princeton he was a lively Oxonian impi making furious rushes at the effete and amateurish corps d'elite which in those days held the fort at various history faculties over here. He particularly enjoyed washing his spear in the purple but unscientific prose of his fellow Old Carthusian Hugh TrevorRoper, and he wrote a large book called The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 to demonstrate the unlikely thesis that at one period of our history the upper classes were not doing too well. (Do not be alarmed — they pulled through in the end). Demonstrate is putting it mildly; the book was full of statistics and case notes, and the message was 'Quantify or perish!'
Then he went up the hill, and directed the battle from above, waving on the swarthy masses of New Historians and occasionally letting fly with his own missile at the target of his choice. He is certainly a crack shot with a review; see his demolition of Kearney's Scholars and Gentlemen in chapter 12, which leaves behind just that little heap of feathers you find under a hedge the day after the fox has been at the poultry. But his signals are less effective than his stabs. The assegai is raised, but down on the plain the warriors hardly take a blind bit of notice. At present he seems to be telling them to disengage, pause, re-group and change tactics; and all that happens is more of the same, that incoherent flood of historical writing that drowns existing reviews, and on which new ones are launched almost every year.
A sceptic might argue that this is because academic history is an over-protected industry in which most workers produce regardless of the quality of the product. The wishes of the consumer are not consulted, because there is reason to believe that the public can manage very well without any academic history at all. It is the greasy machinery of jobbery, tenure and grants that keeps the factories throbbing. At the same time, historians have feelings, you know, and one of them is self-esteem. This can easily be satisfied by the illusion of intellectual progress. Take the enormous diversity of historical writing, divide it into trends, put them in some sort of order, and you will find yourself and your friends right out in front, before you can say Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.
This scepticism is not going to be dispelled by the first part of Professor Stone's new book, which is called 'Historiography'. It is a sort of chairman's report on the firm's overall performance since 1960. He is not satisfied with the way some things have been going, but on the whole he is able to reassure the shareholders that this has been the 'Golden Age of historiography', bubbling with 'new ideas, new approaches and new facts' and prolific of 'major classics of their generation.' Perhaps this is just an attack of blisswasitinthatdawnitis. Perhaps the chairman is only trying to enliven life's cocktail hour. Very human, very convivial. Nevertheless the devastating picture he presents of what historians are, and have been, up to seems to invest the term 'Golden Age' with quite a new meaning.
For example, there is the InterUniversity Consortium for Political Research at the University of Michigan. 'Here there is being collected and put into machine-readable form information about the voting behaviour . . . of every congressman since 1789.' When this psephological pyramid has finally been erected, it will be possible for programmers to extract from it a set of coded biographies which can then be fed into computers and emerge as a THIS WEEK'S CONTRIBUTORS Max Hastings's study of D-Day and the French Resistance, The March, is to be published in October. Caroline Moorehead is editing Freya Stark's Letters. book or thesis. 'It is painful to admit' admits Professor Stone, 'that the advent of a technical gadget should dictate the type of historical questions asked and the methods used for solving them, but it would be adopting the posture of the ostrich to pretend that this is not happening now.' In other words, while the art of producing books that nobody reads was the discovery of other, leaden ages, to this golden one belongs the distinction of producing books that nobody reads or writes.
Then there is psychohistory,the study 'of the influence of infantile and childish experience on the psychological make-up and actions of adult intellectual or political leaders in the past' or of groups and whole societies. This study is based on the pellucid and pandemic principles of Drs Freud and Jung, or on adaptations of those principles made necessary by the shortage of information about leaders under the age of three, and by the difficulty of getting corpses to pay for analysis. The less said about it, the better; for, as Stone puts it 'there are strong indications that psychohistory is developing along dogmatically ahistorical lines, based on unproven social science assumptions about human nature, which are wholly independent of the influence of historically based cultural conditioning.'
Then there are anthropology and sociology and economics-crazy fragments of intellectual wreckage to which drowning historians cling like lost souls, dogmatising as they sink. Then there are the Gallic systematisers, who solve every problem by an explanation on three separate levels: first, the infrastructure, then the structure, then the superstructure; then the lift stops and we all get out. There are the 'cliometricians, who continue to act like statistical junkies', establishing to two places of decimals the percentage of Whig MPs who had coffee for breakfast on the day the Reform Bill was when the tour is over, Professor Stone remains d. remains a believer. If scientific and 'new' history have failed, he insists it is because historians have been inexpert in the use of new methods, and inflexible in their outlook. If there is a retreat from structural and a return to narrative historiography, it is a trend towards the analytic narrative of plebeian events, rather than a revival of old-fashioned story-telling.
Maybe. The above mentioned sceptic might differ. He might single out two dominant war-cries of the Sixties: that history should be a value-free scientific discipline, and that history should be a tool of socialism. He might ascribe much (73.524 per cent, as we cliometricians say) of what was then written to an acceptance of one of those principles. He would then point out that they were neither new, nor true; neither compatible nor rational. He might then lift up his voice and sing the immortal lines of Dryden:
Thy chase had a beast in view, Thy wars brought nothing about, Thy lovers were all untrue; Tis well an old age is out And time to begin a new.
If Professor Stone has a fault, it is an addiction to the idea of crisis, and to the view that the prime task of historians is to explain change. He is apt to be captious with all those whom he finds napping on those particular jobs. Hence his absurd dismissal of Conrad Russell as a 'young antiquarian empiricist ...busy trying to remove any sense of ideology or idealism from the two English revolutions.' And it is predictable that the pandemonium of the last 20 years should appeal to him as a symptom of crisis and change, and that he should interpret it accordingly. This may be the fault of his mentors, Sir Robert Birley, John Prestwich, and R.H. Tawney, who, as he claims in his charming dedication 'first taught me what history is all about,' The implication that he now knows what history is all about is somewhat breathtaking, but the reader can judge for himself in the second part of the book, where Stone considers various themes which have interested him in the course of his reviewing career: notably the Reformation, Puritanism, Magic, Court and Country, the University, the Family, and Death. The common-sense, humour, erudition, and acrimony which pervade these essays are qualities we can all enjoy, and the trenchant criticisms of the great panjandrums of our time (e.g. Barrington . Moore, Elton, and E.P, Thompson) can only be described as a public service. It is regrettable that the publishers have not insisted on an index. There are times when a man wants to look up the pounding of Dr. Elton on pp 107-113 in a hurry.
Previous page
