Page 34 - DLIS407_INFORMATION AND LITERATURE SURVEY IN SOCIAL SCIENCES

Unit 4: Historical Development of Sociology and History Disciplines

and elucidate. What was envisioned was a massive inductive project incorporating myriad local Notes
histories that would yield at an endlessly forestalled future time, a “history of society.”
The first Annales School was enthusiastically received by what was known as the Communist Party
Historian’s Group in Britain (1946–1956). Though putatively an organ of the Communist Party, under
the de facto leadership of the British journalist Dona Torr (1883–1957), the group enjoyed a free and
open discussion. Its members included E. P. Thompson (1924–1993), Dorothy Thompson (1894–1961),
Christopher Hill (1912–2003), Rodney Hilton (1916–2002), Eric Hobsbawm (b. 1917), and George
Rudé (1910–1993), among other future notables of social history. The group’s concerns maintained a
tension between two poles that would inform the members’ later work: at one end an interest in social
transformation, specifically the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and at the other, an interest in
the “manners, morals and customs” of the poor in relation to those transformations. The first roughly
corresponded to discussion of Maurice Dobb’s (1900–1976) Studies in the Development of Capitalism
(1946) and the second to A. L. Morton’s (1903–1987) People’s History of England (1938).
In 1952, the group founded the journal Past and Present, which sought to give voice to these concerns
and to engage with non-Marxist historians interested in similar lines of inquiry. In the first issue,
Hobsbawm published his groundbreaking analysis of the machine breakers, which demonstrated that
Luddite riots were not resistance to the machine as such, as has long been argued, but to the “machine
in the hands of the capitalist” (Hobsbawm 1952). He argued that in the absence of organizational
and political avenues, such protests should be read as “collective bargaining by riot.” The theme
was later expanded in a series of similarly pathbreaking studies by Rudé on the crowd. Meanwhile,
Hill demonstrated that the “manners, morals and customs” of the poor were themselves a source of
political struggle in his important essay “Puritans and the Poor,” which examined the disciplinary
techniques of the nascent English bourgeoisie (Hill 1952).
The group’s twin concerns were on full display in E. P. Thompson’s magisterial work The Making
of the English Working Class ([1963] 1968), which brought to bear his understanding of culture as
a “whole way of conflict.” Thompson argued that class comes into being as a result of struggle;
through this struggle, persons become conscious of their interests and themselves as a class over
time. Thompson therefore rejected sociological definitions that sought to define class as distinct from
historical struggle and, by extension, context. What resulted was a notion of class that Mikhail Bakhtin
would call “novelistic,” in that class designated an open-ended, dialogic “unity” which, through the
ceaseless interpenetration of other voices and experiences, undoes and redoes its own provisional
unity. From a methodological standpoint, Thompson’s work was highly innovative, incorporating
literature (from high to very low), folklore, local archives, and spy reports in a way that elucidated
the complex moral and symbolic universe in which class struggle was imbricated. In the making of
the English Working Class and in later works dealing with grain riots, game laws, and time and its
relation to work discipline, Thompson demonstrated a subtle understanding of human agency that
did not recognize, for example, time or the law as necessarily instruments of ruling-class power (which
they were initially, he allowed). Instead, he suggested that these created circumstances through their
own claims to universality that permitted a defense (if only a weak one at first) on those very same
grounds against the arbitrary actions of elites. Thompson presented his objects of study as situated
in historical processes, the relative meanings of which were constituted through struggle and human
agency.
Thompson inaugurated a new version of social history in the late 1960s and into the 1970s with mixed
success. On the one hand, authors such as Eugene Genovese (b. 1930) and Herbert Gutman (1928–1985)
produced subtle and far-reaching studies in the American context that recovered local knowledges
and successfully mapped larger processes through them. On the other, there was a tendency to shrink
back from the theoretical engagements of these authors, producing something closer to Trevelyan’s
“history with the politics left out” even in studies of working-class culture. It was against this trend
that Hobsbawm wrote his important essay “From Social History to the History of Society,” which

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