THE OLD NEW SOCIAL HISTORY

AND THE NEW OLD SOCIAL HISTORY

Charl es Ti l l y
Uni ver s i t y of Michigan
October 1980
Revised ver s i on of a-. keynot e addr es s t o t he
Conference on New Di r ect i ons i n Hi s t or y, St a t e
Uni ver si t y of New York A t Buf f al o, 3-4 October 19.80
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Soci al Hi st or y Renewed?
I n t he s pr i ng of 1968, t h e l ear ned j our nal Daedalus convened a covey
of hi s t or i a ns . The group i ncl uded some es t abl f s hed sages, such as Fe l i x Gf l ber t .
It a l s o brought i'n peopl e -- f o r example, Frank Manuel, Eugene Genovese, Lee
Benson, and David Rothman -7 who had been expl or i ng new t echni ques and mat er i al s ,
o r at t empt i ng t o employ i n h i s t o r i c a l a na l ys i s i deas and procedures which had
grown up i n t he s o c i a l s ci ences , A number of them were coming t o be known a s
p r a c t i t i o n e r s of something c a l l e d t h e New S o d a 1 Hi st or y,
S e wr a l of t h e p a r t i c i p a n t s prepared memoranda i n advance, and some of t he
memoranda d e a l t wi t h such e s o t e r i c t opi c s a s ' ' cl i omet ri cs" and "prosopography."
The words t r i pped the t ongue, but s t kr r e d t he imagimation, For i n t he 19.60s,
many hr s t or i a ns f e l t t h a t h i s t o r i c a l t heor y and pr act kce al 2ke were undergoing
gr e a t changes. Some f e l t t h e changes t o t hr eat en t he proper performance of t he
h i s t o r i a n ' s f unct i on: Jacques Barzun, f o r one, ful mi nat ed agai ns t "psycho-history"
and "quanto-history1' as pseudo-hi st ory. Ot hers f e l t t h a t h i s t o r y f i n a l l y st ood on
t h e t hr es hol d of Sci ence; Lee Benson, f o r example, spoke of t he l i kel i hood t h a t
"t he condi t i ons w i l l e x i s t i n t he not d r s t a n t f u t u r e f o r American p o l i t i c a l
h i s t o r i a n s t o achi eve t h e s c i e n t i f i c e s t a t e pr edi ct ed by Buckle, o r , more
pr eci s el y, . , , t h a t such condi t i ons wi l l e x i s t f o r t hose i ndi vi dual s a b l e and
wi l l i n g t o pay t he psychol ogi cal c o s t s r equi r ed t o break f r e e from ol d r out i nes "
(Benson 1970 11966]: 292, Most a l e r t hi s t or r a ns , whether wi t h f e a r o r hope, sensed
t h a t t he pr of es s r on f aced imminent choi ces whose consequences coul d profoundl y
t r ansf or m t he hi s t or y, and t he hi s t or i ogr aphy, t hey had l ear ned.
Pa r t i c i pa nt s kn t h a t 1968 meet i ng di sagr eed about t he f u t u r e of t he pa s t .
Yet t hey agreed about t he d e s i r a b i l i t y of di s cus s i on. So Daedalus f l ew on t o
anot her concl ave, t h i s one i n Rome. Then came a p a i r of j our nal i s s ue s , and f i n a l l y
a whole book. The book, publ i shed i n 1972, appeared under t he t i t l e Hi s t or i c a l
St udi es Today, Its t opi c s covered a wide range: qua nt i t a t i ve hi s t or y, t he New
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Urban History, oral history, an epitaph for the old poli,ti.cal history, a
mixed assessment of recent applications of psychology to historical analysis, and
-- as promised -- a thoughtful treatment of prosopography,
Convened today, how would a similar set of historians pronounce on the
future of history? What has come of the 1960s' promises? What changes in
historical practice have occurred since then? Idhat lessons have we learned?
Concentrating on social history, broadly defined, let us wander among these
questions, without making too strenuous an effort to lock their answers in place,
Let us pay particular attention to the historical endeavors which in the 1960s
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began to display the stigmata of social science: self-conscious explicat2on of
concepts and models; deliberate comparison of individuals, groups, places or
events (often many of them) placed within a common framework; fixation oii
reliable forms of measurement, frequently involving numerical treatment of
evidence. Economic history, archeology, demographic history, urban history,
plus some kinds of political, labor, agricultural and family history qualify.
Diplomatic history, intellectual history, the history of science, art history,
and other branches of , agricultural, labor and political history, in
contrast, generally remained alo6f from the New Social History and its
entanglements in the social sciences, Important changes were and are occurring
in those fields as well, but I shall neglect them here, in favor of the fields
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I know best: the various enteiprises known loosely as, social history,
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Lawrence ~tone, ~Sopographerj and Prophet
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In those fields, prosopography became more than a catchword. It became
a crucial practice. Through all Daedalian discussions, -the chief
prosopographer present was Lawrence Stone, the distinguished historian of
England. Stone had published a massive collective biography of the English
aristocracy, and was then engaged in a vast analysis of the changing
character of England's landed classes. The centerpiece of. ghaf analysis
was, in Fact, an anbitious venture in prosopography: a large catalog of four
"samples" of country houses and their owners down thkough the centuries. Lat~rence
and Jeanne C. FaQtier Stone once described that study as
designed to apply statistical methods of analysis to data of varying
quality, in order to test some subjective impressions and traditional
assumptions about English social structure and social mobility in the
Early Modern and Modern periods. [A footnote at this point credits
grants from the Yathematical Social Science Board and the National
Science Foundation.] It is generally agreed that England was historically
the first of the modernizing societies of the world, and in particular
that she was the ficst to industrialize and the first to evolve a stable
and broad based constitutional structure. For over a century it has been
part of conventional wisdom that these phenomena can be partly explained
in terms firstly of the slow growth of the middle class of business and
professional men, and secondly of the ease with which this middle class
could move upward through the social and political systems. So far,
however, there is no reliable body of statistical information with which
to check and evaluate the truth of this bold and far-reaching hypothesis.
This particular study is narrowly focused on a single aspect, namely the
degree of interpenetration of the landed and n?erchant/professional classes
as tested by the changing compositidn of the local rural elites (Stone and
Stone 1972 : 56) .
In this study, then, prosopography would begin to verify previously hypothetical
arguments concerning social mobility in England from 1540 to 1879.
A "reliable
body of statistical evidence" would supplant the "subjective impressions and
traditional assumptions" which had so far prevailed.
Writing his more general statement for the 1972 Historical Studies Today,
Lawrence Stone displayed cautious optimism. If historians kept their heads and
hearts, he suggested, prosopography could sharpen their eyes. Prosopography,
collective biography, or "multiple-career-line analysis," he pbinted out, all
referred to a rather old procedure which had simply?acquired a new range of
applications. It was "the investigation of the common background characteristics
of a group of actors in history by means of a collective study of their lives:'
(Stone 1972: 107). That old procedure, properly followed, had healing
powers. It could, he declared,
combine the humane skill in historical reconstruction :rl--,--- -
through meticulous concentration on the significant
detail and the particular example, with the statistical
and theoretical preoccupations of the social scfentists;
it could form the missing connection between political history and social
history which at present are all too often treated in largely watertight
compartments, either in different monographs or in.different chapters of
. . a single volume. It could help reconcile history to sociology and
psychozogy.
And it could form one string among many to tie the exciting
developments in intellectual and cultural history down to the social,
economic, and political bedrock (Stone 1972: 134).
Thus the new ways in history could lead historians to basic social processes
without losing them their contact with day-to-day experience.
Lawrence Stone certainly had his finger on the right button. In one form or
another, collective bi0grap.h~ surely constituted the single.most influential
innovation in the historical practice of the postwar period. It was not, of course,
entirely new: Sir Lewis Namier had long since biographized eighteenth-century
Parliaments, Roman historians had been perpetrating prosopography for decades,
and collective biography'is one name -or Crane Brinton's old book on the
Jacobins. Nevertheless, at. least bur,: features distinguished the colldctive
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biography begun in the 1940s from its predecessors: 1) its extension from
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clearly-visible elite populations to run-of-the-mill militants, ordinary
workers, and even entire communities; 2) the corresponding increase in the
sheer numbers of persons described; 3) the wide use of statistical description,
sometimes including statistical models adopted from the social sciences; and,
finally, 4) the sheer range and frequency of its application. Urban history,
population history, labor history, and some branches of political, economic,
and intellectual history all created their own standard forms of collective
biography. Later, the histories of the family, of migration, and of racial
and ethnic minorities incorporated collective biography as a central procedure.
Historians acted as if they
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bel i eved St one' s 1972 credo: t h a t c o l l e c t i v e bi ography r eveal ed t he pa t t e r n
of event s and s o c i a l r e l a t i o n s whi l e mai nt ai ni ng cont i ct wi t h i ndi vi dual
exper i ence .
Second Thoughts
A decade a f t e r t he Pr i ncet on meet i ng, however, Lawrence St one had l o s t
h i s ol d z e s t f o r t h e new ways. I n 1979, he ha i l e d t he "r evi val of nar r at i ve. "
He concluded t h a t event s had come back i n t o s t y l e , as t h e t echni ques and
det ermi ni sm which had capt ured t he h i s t o r i a n s of t he 1960s began t o l os e t h e i r
appeal . "Many hi s t or i a ns , " wrot e St one,
now bel i eve t h a t t he c ul t ur e of t h e g ~ o u p , and even t he w i l l of t he
i ndi vi dual , a r e p o t e n t i a l l y a t l e a s t as i mport ant caus al agent s of change
as t he i mpersonal f or ces of mat er i al out put and demographic growth.
There i s no t h e o r e t i c a l reason why t h e 1 a t ~ e r shoul d always d i c t a t e
t he former, r a t h e r t han v i c e ver s a, and i ndeed evi dence 2s p i l i n g up of
examples t o t h e cont r ar y (Stone 1979: 9) .
The "bedrock" had crumbled t o sand. The new ways had become ol d ways, suspect
i n t h e i r t ur n,
Three d i f f e r e n t s o r t s of s oi - di s ant " s c i e nt i f i c " h i s t o r y were t her ef or e,
accor di ng t o St one, l os i ng t h e i r f ol l owi ngs; t h e Marxi st economic model, t he
French ecol ogi cal demographic model, and t h e American cl i omet r i c method. The
s uppor t er s of a l l t h r e e had onee, s a i d St one, claimed t o be on t h e i r way t o
cas t - i r on s ol ut i ons
f o r such h i t h e r t o ba f f l i ng ques t i ons as t h e causes of "great r evol ut i ons"
o r t he s h i f t s from feudal i sm t o capi t al i s m, and from t r a d i t i o n a l t o modern
s o c i e t i e s , Thi s heady optimism, which wa s s o appar ent from t he 1930s
t o t he 1 9 . 6 0 ~ ~ was but t r es s ed among t h e f i r s t two groups of " s c i e n t i f i c
hi s t or i a ns " by t he be l i e f t h a t ma t e r i a l condi t i ons such a s changes i n
t he r e l a t i ons hi p between popul at i on and food suppl y, changes i n t he means
of pr oduct i on and c l a s s c o n f l i c t , were t h e dr i vi ng f or ces i n hi s t or y.
Many, but n o t a l l , regarded i n t e l l e c t u a l , c u l t u r a l , r e l i gi ous , psychol ogi cal ,
l e g a l , even pol i t i c a l , ~de ve l opme nt s as mere epiphenomena. Si nce economic
and/ or demographic det ermi ni sm l a r g e l y d i c t a t e d t he cont ent of t he new
genre of h i s t o r i c a l r es ear ch, t he a n a l y t i c r a t h e r t han t he n a r r a t i v e
mode was b e s t s ui t e d t o or gani ze and pr es ent t he dat a, and t he d a t a
t hemsel ves had as f a r a s pos s i bl e t o be q u a n t i t a t i v e i n nat ur e (St one
The r e vi va l of na r r a t i ve , i t f ol l ows, r e g i s t e r s t he decl i ne of t h a t "economic
and/ or demographic determinism. " As t he aut hor of s t udi e s of c l a s s s t r u c t u r e ,
s o c i a l mobi l i t y, educat i onal enr ol l ment s, and t he pa t t e r n of r evol ut i on --
a l l s i &i f i c a n t l y informed by t he models and methods of contemporary s o c i a l
s ci ence -- St one should know whereof he speaks.
What caused t he r evdval of na r r a t i ve ? What caused t h e , d e c l i n e of
a na l yt i c c hi s t or y? St one cat al ogs t hes e causes:
1. widespread d i s i l l u s i o n wi t h economic det ermi ni sm i n hi s t or y, most
l i k e l y promoted by a decl i ne i n t he i deol ogi cal c o d t me n t of
west ern i n t e l l e c t u a l s -- e s pe c i a l l y when i t came t o Marxism;
2. r evi ved awareness of t he i mport ance of p o l i t i c a l and mi l i t a r y power;
3. t h e mixed r ecor d of qua nt i t a t i ve work, e s pe c i a l l y when c a r r i e d out
by l a r g e r es ear ch teams, based on comput ers, and embodied i n s ophi s t i cat ed
mat hemat i cal procedures.
These new condi t i ons , a s Lawrence St one sees t h e s i t u a t i o n , f r eed hi s t or 2ans
t o t r y once more "t o di s cover what wa s goi ng on Pnsi de peopl e' s heads i n t he
p a s t , and what i t wa s l i k e t o l i v e i n t h e pa s t , ques t i ons which i nevi t abl y
l ead back t o t he us e of nar r at i ve" (St one 1979: 13) .
St one saves h i s s t r onge s t di sappr oval f o r t h e work of "cl i omet r i ci ans. "
(He names onl y t he. i . nevi t abl e Robert Fogel and St anl ey Engerman, l eavi ng h i s
r eader s t o r e c a l l t h e bad examples "we a l l know.") The cl i omet r i ci ans
"s peci al i ze i n t he assembl i ng of v a s t q u a n t i t i e s of d a t a by teams of a s s i s t a n t s ,
t h e use of t he e l e c t r o n i c computer t o pr ocess it a l l , and t he appl i cat i on of
hi ghl y s ophi s t i cat ed mat hemat i cal procedures t o t h e r e s u l t s obt ai ned", (St one 1979:
11) . Agai nst t hes e procedures, St one l odges t he obj ect i ons t h a t h i s t o r i c a l dat a a r e
t oo unr el i abl e, t h a t r es ear ch a s s i s t a n t s cannot be t r us t e d wi t h t he appl i cat i on
of os t ens i bl y uni form pul es , t h a t codi ng l os e s c r u c i a l d e t a i l s , t h a t mat hemat i cal
r e s u l t s a r e i ncomprehensi bl e t o t h e h i s t o r i a n s t hey a r e meant t o persuade, t h a t
t h e s t or age of evi dence on computer t apes bl ocks t h e v e r i f i c a t i o n of concl usi ons
by ot her h i s t o r i a n s , t h a t t h e i nve s t i ga t or s t end t o l o s e t h e i r w i t , gr ace,
and sense of pr opor t i on i n t he pur s ui t of s t a t i s t i c a l r e s u l t s , t h a t none of
t he b i g ques t i ons has a c t u a l l y yi el ded t o t he bl udgeoni ng of t he bi g-dat a
peopl e, t h a t "i n gener al t he s ophi s t i c a t i on of t h e methodology has
tended t o
exceed t h e r e l i a b i l i t y of t he dat a, whi l e t he us ef ul nes s of t he r e s u l t s seems --
up t o a poi nt -- t o be i n i nver s e c or r e l a t i on t o t h e mat hemat i cal compl exi t y
of t he methodology and t h e grandi ose s c a l e of dat a- col l ect i on' ' (Stone 1979: 1 3 ) ,
For t h i s eminent European s o c i a l h i s t o r i a n , t he l a r g e e nt e r pr i s e s which t ook
shape i n t h e 1960s have obvi ousl y l o s t t h e i r a t t r a c t i o n s .
E.J. Hobsbawm, l i kewi s e an eminent European s o c i a l h i s t o r i a n , has
r ecent l y publ i shed a commentary on Lawrence St onet s l a t e r es s ay, Hobsbawm
doubt s t h a t t he r e vi va l of n a r r a t i v e i s s o ext ens i ve as St one suggest s, and
quest i ons i n any cas e whet her i t c o n s t i t u t e s a r e j e c t i o n of t he e a r l i e r hopes
f or s oc i a l . hi s t or y. The v i s i b l e changes i n h i s t o r i c a l wr i t i ng, according t o
Hobsbawm, more l i k e l y r epr esent :
1. experiments i n pr esent i ng t he r e s u l t s of complex hi s t or i c a l anal yses;
2. at t empt s at s ynt hes i s of t hose var i ed r e s ul t s ;
3. t he ext ensi on of t he i deas and procedures of s oc i a l hi s t or y t o ar eas
of i nqui r y -- not abl y p o l i t i c a l hi s t or y -- which had previ ousl y been
l e f t as i de; and
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4. t he de s i r e t o have a well-defined and sharpl y-port rayed s oc i a l
s i t ua t i on s e r ve - a s t he hi s t or i ogr aphi cal j unct i on between l ar ge s oc i a l
processes and i ndi vi dual h i s t o r i c a l experi ence.
These f act or s , r epl i ed Hobsbawm t o Stone,
demonstrate t ha t i t i s possi bl e t o expl ai n much of what he surveys
a s t he cont i nuat i on of pas t h i s t o r i c a l ent er pr i s es by ot her means,
i ns t ead of a s pr oof s of t he i r bankruptcy. One would not wish t o deny
t ha t some hi s t or i a ns regard them a s bankrupt o r undesi r abl e and wish
t o change t h e i r di scour se i n consequences, f or var i ous reasons, some
of them i nt e l l e c t ua l l y dubious, some t o be t aken s er i ous l y. Cl earl y
some hi s t or i a ns have s hi f t e d from "circumstances" t o "men" (i ncl udi ng
women), or have di scovered t ha t a si mpl e base/ super st r uct ur e model and
economic hi s t or y a r e not enough, or -- s i nce t he pay-off has been very
s ubs t a nt i a l -- a r e no l onger enough. Some may w e l l have convinced
themselves t h a t t her e i s an i ncompat i bi l i t y between t he i r " s ci ent i f i c"
and "l i t er ar y1' f unct i ons. But it i s not necessary t o anal yse t he pr esent
f ashi ons i n hi s t or y e nt i r e l y a s a r e j e c t i on of t he pas t , and i n so f a r a s
t hey cannot be e nt i r e l y analysed i n such t e r ms , i t w i l l not do (Hobsbawm
1980: 8).
The issue is squarely joined. On the one side, Stone interprets recent trends
in the writing of history as signs of disillusion with what we must now, alas,
'. call the old new social history, as augurs of the rise of the new old social
history. On the other side, Hobsbawm sees the same trends, somewhat minified
by comparison with Stone's estimates of them, as likely evidence that historians
are now building on the accomplishments of the sort of social history that
began to flourish in the 1960s.
Both our observers agree that historical practice has recently shifted,
even if they disagree on the extent of the shift. They differ in their views
of the attitude that shift reflects, and of the relation between the new practices
and the old. On the whole, my reading of recent trends resembles Hobsbawm's
more than Stone's. I think, however, that Hobsbawm misses the extent to which
historians of a decade ago oversold themselves on the explanatory powers of
the social sciences, not realizing that those disciplines were much more effective
in specifying what had to be explained and in ruling out superficial explanatiions
than in producing explanations that could satisfy the average historian. The
overselling made disappointment, and a new search for deep causes, inevitable.
Hobsbawm also fails to bring out the paradoxical link between the demographic
and economic determinisms which many of us began to favor in the 1960s, and a
sort.?of voluntaristic populism -- a belief, in its simplest form, that ordinary
people make their own history.
To a large extent, the dialectic of historical research, rather than
alterations in historians' consciousness, accounts for the shifts in
practice from the 1960s to the 1970s. We ought to take pleasure from the
fact that the competing.exp1anations of the shift themselves fall into a
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determinist" and a "mentalist" mode. The debate between Hobsbawm and Stone
recalls one of the old, fundamental disagreements about the natures of history,
historiography, and social reality.
How the Models Matter: New (and Newer) Urban History
Should we care about these historiographical currents? I think so.
They affect the definitions and justifications all of us offer for the historical
enterprise. They influence the system of priorities and rewards we impose on
each other. And, most important, they affect historical practice at its most
vulnerable point: the doctoral dissertation. The number of Ph.D.s in history
awarded each year in the United States is down from its early-70s peak of more
than a thousand to the vicinity of 900. Yet it is probably still true that
the majority of all person-hours devoted to professional historical research
goes into the preparation of doctoral dissertations. It could well be true that
the majority of all pages of professional history published report research
undertaken for doctoral dissertations. (We can measure the perverse
individualism and/or inefficiency of professional history by the fact that
most dissertation-writers only acquire the essential skills of their trade --
locating documents in archives, criticizing and synthesizing those documents,
linking their findings to the existing literature, and so on -- in the course
of doing their dissertation research, and largely on their own.) The subjects
and styles of those dissertations, so far as I can tell, respond much more
decisively to shifting assessments of the viability of one sort of research
or another than do the works-in-progress of the discipline's veterans. Students
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look to the future, and their teachers encourage them to take the risks.
When history's authorities credit one model or discredit another, their colleagues
often challenge them vigorously and sometimes modify their own practices in
small ways, But it is their students who really change direction. Those
students, even today, hold future practice in their hands.
My favorite example is quite germane to our general topc. It concerns
the so-called New Urban History, (During the meeting for which I prepared
the earlier version of this essay, Michael Frisch handed me an already-published
article of which I was unaware; it makes all the pajor~points which follow, and
more, wi'th far fuller documentation: Frisch 1979. I dontt know whether to be
pleased with the independent confirmation of my analysis, or dismayed at the
duplication of effort,) Early in the 1960s, Stephan Thernstrom demonstrated
that information from widely-available sources such as city directories and
manuscript censuses could be reshaped into origin-destinati6nz:tables similar
to those sociologists used to analyze occupational mobility from father to son
or within a workerts own career, (Therstrom himself has graciously reminded
us that Harrfet Owsley, Frank Owsley, Merle Curti, and Sidney Goldstein had done
some of the pathbreaking technical- work; nevertheless, it was Thernstrom's
Poverty and Progress that made young historians take notice,)
In the case of Newburyport, Massachusetts, Thernstrom produced evidence
indicating that ethnic groups had not simply differed int their rates of "success,"
but had adopted somewhat different strategies for securing their familiest
futures; that in the aggregate little occupational- mobility occurred, but the
net movementtwas~slightly upward; that occupational
mobility had not declined substantially over time; and that unskilled
workers were very likely to.move on -- to leave the city -- when they didntt
move up. The demonstration attracted attention because of its technical virtuosity.
It attracted attention because Thernstrom managed to expose the false historical
assumptions sociologist Lloyd Warner had made concerning Newburyport (his
famous YankeetCity). Most of all, it attracted attention because it bore,
at least indirectly, on great questions of American history: Was nineteenth-
century America the land of opportunity? Did that promise fade for America's
later immigrants? Did mobility and ethnic fragmentation reduce the chances
for working-class militancy in the United States?
Graduate students were especially quick to see the promise of this new
form of collective biography. Soon dozens of doctoral dissertations were in
progress,pursuing the historical analysis of social mobility community by
community, group by group, and source by source. At a famous meeting on the
nineteenth-century century held at Yale University in 1968, Thernstrom and
a crowd of collaborators -- mainly youngsters, by the standards of the
historical profession -- identified themselves as a new school of historical
practice. When Thernstrom and Richard Sennett edited the conference papers,
they published their book with the subtitle Essays in the New Urban History.
Then, with a lag for the agonies of writing and rewriting, came the
flood of theses; articles, and monographs: Philadelphia, Omaha, Chicago, Milwaukee,
Boston, Birmingham, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Hamilton, Poughkeepsie, Troy,
Kingston, and, yes, Buffalo arrived under the microscope in the company of many
other North American cities. Although the analysis of social mobility never
generated the excitement elsewhere that it did in North America, collective
biographers likewise began sorting out manuscript census records and similar
sources as the means of reconstructing city popu1ations:in Europe and other parts
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of t h e worl d, For t h e most p a r t , t h a t was what h i s t o r i a n s meant when t hey
spoke of t h e New Urban Hi st or y.
Looking back at t h i s t o r r e n t of a c t i v i t y i n 1975, Stephan Thernstrom
commented wryl y t h a t "I a m now i ncl i ned t o be l i e ve t h a t , j u s t as t he Holy Roman
Empire was n e i t h e r hol y, Roman, nor an empi re, t h e new urban h i s t o r y i s not s o
new, i t shoul d not be i d e n t i f i e d a s urban, and t h e r e i s some danger t h a t i t
wi l l ceas e t o be hi s t or y" (Thernstrom 1977: 44) . He poi nt ed out t h e dangers
of t hought l es s i mi t at i on, u n c r i t i c a l compi l at i on of def ect i ve sour ces,
bur eaucr at i zed team r es ear ch, and s l ovenl y s l i d i n g i n t o t he uncouth pr os e of
s o c i a l sci ence. He di d not , however, poi nt out t h a t t he wave he had s t a r t e d
was spendi ng i t s e l f .
Why and how? F i r s t , t he i nher ent l i m i t s of t h e one-ci t y occupat i onal
mobi l i t y st udy were becoming i ncr eas i ngl y v i s i b l e . There was t h e d i f f i c u l t y
of
t r a c i n g t h e l i v e s of peopl e who a r r i ve d o r l e f t out s i de t he c i t y i t s e l f --
and, f o r t h a t matter, o r di s t i ngui s hi ng a r r i v a l o r depar t ur e from erroneous
r ecor di ng and, more i mpor t ant , non-reco' rding. There was t h e uncer t ai nt y t h a t
aver ages o r v a r i a t i o n s over many c i t i e s , based on t h e occupat i onal t i t l e s
r epor t ed f o r a d u l t males, a c t ua l l y r epr es ent ed t h e s t r uc t ur e of American
oppor t uni t y. There were t h e debat abl e assumpt i ons about c l a s s and mobi l i t y
b u i l t i n t o t he ver y method: t h a t occupat i ons formed a wel l -defi ned, uni t a r y
rank or der ; t h a t t he c e n t r a l i s s ue s concerned t he r a t e s and pat hs of achievement
by i ndi vi dual s , f a mi l i e s , and groups; t h a t one coul d reasonabl y post pone t he
a na l ys i s of l abor market s and employers' h i r i n g s t r a t e g i e s u n t i l t he d i f f e r e n t i a l s
were t he r e t o be expl ai ned. There were ot he r t echni cal and concept ual problems
which c r i t i c s and p r a c t i t i o n e r s had uncovered,
Second, urban historians were finding the statistical answers yielded
by their historical sociology unnecessarily thin. As Peter Decker put it, at
the close of his own recent collective biography of San Francisco's white-collar
workers in the nineteenth century,
The internal differences, if recognized at all by historians, are too
often described only through statistical measures and techniques.
Rarely are they explained within the social context in which they occur.
This context includes the hopes, aspirations, and anxieties of those whose
lives are being measured, To exclude these considerations, through the
?A - ,, -
exclusive use of quantitative techniques, is to disregard how individuals
perceive their own reality and to preclude any normative judgments regarding
social mobility in a society (Decker 1978: 250),
We have in Decker's statement a summary of the thoughts which have been
occurring to a great many historians -- not just American urban historians -- working
in the shadow of social science, They have discovered facts we all should
have recognized long ago: that statistical analyses in themselves almost never
yield unambiguous conclusions; that the effective use of social-scientific
procedures generally requires more, not less, explicit statement of arguments
than the average historical account; that on the whole existing social-scientific
approaches work far better at discrediting superficial explanations and at
specifying what has to be explained than at generating explanations which
historians are likely to find adequate. To the extent that an adequate explanation
entails reconstructing historical actors' experiences of the situations in
which they found themselves, collective biography and similar techniques (for
all their power in other regards) hold little promise of yielding such explanations.
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. - - . -. - - . ~ .
Alternatives and Syntheses a - .
I
Not that all students of-American cities had bitten;.as far into the
statistical apple as the predecessors whom Decker castigates.
Urban labor
historians, in particular, had managed to construct a kind of populist history
which gave ample attention to the.organization of work, the quality of life,
the everyday struggles, the forms of militancy. Alan Dawley's treatment of
Lynn's leatherworkers combined the now-standard analyses ,of occupational mobility
with searching examinations of belief and action. David Montgomery recreated
the rhythms of work in-Pittsburgh, as he and Bruce Laurie both revealed the .
patterns of organization and competition underlying the brawls and protests
of nineteenth-century Philadelphia. A German, Dirk Hoerder, discerned the
doctrines of popular sovereignty embedded in the workers' riots of revolutionary
Massachusetts. Herbert Gutman mounted a great quest for working-class.culture
and the making or unmaking of that American working class. Gutman and others,
in fact, drew a good deal of their inspiration from European social and labor
historians such as E. J. ' Hobsbawm, George ~udg, Michelle Perrot and E. P . Thompson.
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2
American urban h i s t o r y i nvol ves much more a c t i v i t y I haven' t mentioned:
t he enormous concat enat i on 9f s t udi e s of ni net eent h- cent ur y Phi l adel phi a
coordi nat ed by Theodore Hershberg; Ol i vi e r Zunz' e xqui s i t e l y f i n e anal yses of
l and us e and popul at i on d i s t r i b u t i o n i n De t r oi t ; Al l an Pr ed' s t r eat ment s of
t he time-geography of American ur bani zat i on; exami nat i ons of American urban
mi gr at i on, of t h e development of r a c i a l s egr egat i on, of urban women's work
exper i ences, of j ob-fi ndi ng and t he c r e a t i on of occupat i onal communities, of
power and c l a s s i n our c i t i e s , and more, and more. "Urban hi st or y' ' overflows
i t s banks, and. s pr eads i n t o t h e whole p l a i n of American s o c i a l l i f e . Any one
gener al i zat i on about urban hi s t or y t her ef or e i n v i t e s a t l e a s t two except i ons.
Yet i n ver y gener al terms my des cr i pt i on hol ds: i n most pr eci nct s of
American urban h i s t o r y , t h e 1960s brought a qui ckeni ng of ent husi asm f o r s e l f -
consci ous concept ual i zat i on and modeling, f o r d e l i b e r a t e (and o f t e n quant i t at i ve)
comparison of mul t i pl e u n i t s , and f o r r i gor ous measurement; t h i s s o r t of
e nt e r pr i s e , wi t h i t s soci al - sci ence over t ones, t ended t o s epar at e from t he
f i n e q u a l i t a t i v e s t u d i e s of i ndi vi dual and group exper i ence which cont i nued;
a s t he 1970s moved on, more and more doubt s about t h e adequacy of t he s oci al -
s c i e n t i f i c model ar os e among i t s f ol l ower s and i t s c r i t i c s , and urban hi s t or i a ns
t r i e d i ncr eas i ngl y e i t h e r t o enr i ch t h e i r p a l l i d c o l l e c t i v e bi ogr aphi es wi t h
col or i ngs of i ndi vi dual experi ence o r t o di s cover t hi cker a l t e r n a t i v e s t o t h i n
concl usi ons about s o c i a l mobi l i t y and s t r a t i f i c a t i o n .
The model a ppl i e s l e a s t wel l t o t he f i e l d s of h i s t o r i c a l work which
-
developed i n c l o s e s t concer t wi t h s p e c i f i c s o c i a l s ci ences : archeol ogy,
economic h i s t o r y , demographic hi s t or y. Researchers i n t hes e f i e l d s tended --
and s t i l l t end -- t o ge t t h e bul k of t h e i r t r a i n i n g out s i de of h i s t o r y proper,
and t o f ol l ow t h e i n t e l l e c t u a l agendas of t h e s o c i a l s ci ences r a t h e r t han of
hi s t or y. For b e t t e r and f o r worse, t h a t o r i e n t a t i o n t o s o c i a l s ci ence i ns ul at ed
them from t he p r i o r i t i e s and pr es s ur es of ot he r h i s t o r i a n s . Even i n t hes e
f i e l d s , never t hel es s , some s h i f t s occurred -- away from t he dazzl i ng chrome-and-
g l a s s cons t r uct i ons of t he 1960s, l et us say, toward t he more el egant , subdued
wood and br a s s of t he l a t e 1970s. Economic h i s t o r i a n s who were t horoughl y
conver sant wi t h economic models and economet ri cs (such a s Jan de Vr i es, t he
aut hor of a'-superb-.:text on The Economy of Europe i n an Age of Cr i s i s ) showed
t h a t t hey car ed t o r oot t h e i r anal ys es i n t he t i me, pl ace, and hi st or i ogr aphy
of t h e changes t hey were st udyi ng,
On t h e demographic s i d e , Kei t h Wrightson and David Levine have gi ven us
t h e s pl endi d example of t h e i r book on an Engl i sh v i l l a g e , Ter l i ng (Essex), from
1525 t o 1700. A c ol l e c t i ve bi ography of t he e n t i r e recorded popul at i on over
t he two c e nt ur i e s forms t he book' s backbone, The f i n e demographic r econs t r uct i on
provi ded a s e n s i t i v e i ndex of changing fot t unes-among d i f f e r e n t c l a s s e s of t he
popul at i on, as wel l a s some s i gns - a s nt oc t he char act er of l o c a l s o c i a l s t r uc t ur e .
It showed,'for~exam@le,"that i n Ter l i ng t he age at marri age and f e r t i l i t y , and
not mor t al i t y, were t he prime agent s of demographic c ont r ol . While t he short -run
i mpl i cat i ons of epidemic mor t a l i t y were of r e a l consequence, t hey were of l i t t l e
i mport ance i n t he l ong run" (Wrightson and Levine 1979: 72). Thus t he s t r i c t
Mal t husi an pf c t ur e of old-regime popul at i ons pe r i odi c a l l y decimated by pl ague
m
and famine because t hey :outgrew t h e i r r es our ces : f ai l s t o. . f i t a 1t he f a c t s . .
- -
Yet a l l was not bucol i c harmony i n Ter l i ng: t h e demographic evi dence
L I
l i kewi s e r eveal s t h e growth of a l a r g e c l a s s of poor r u r a l l abor er s , t he
i ncr eas i ng di vi s i on of t he pa r i s h between l anded haves and l andl es s have-
not s . That i s where Wrightson and Levine pr ovi de us wi t h a model f o r t he
l o c a l s o c i a l h i s t o r y of t he f ut ur e . For i ns t e a d of r e s t i n g wi t h t h e i r i mpressi ve
demographic evi dence, t hey del ved i n t o cour t r ecor ds , church r ecor ds , manori al
r ecor ds , t a x r ecor ds , and every ot her s cr ap t hey coul d ge t t h e i r
_ -. _ --= --.-- ------- - -
-.
hands on i n or der t o t r a c e t h e -
material conditions of existence, the routines of everyday life, the
structures of power and punishment, the affirmations of faith and disbelief.
Never have we seen more clearly the emergence of a confident, comfortable
class of local notables in pious, sober, responsible but (above all) firm
control of the many hirelings who worked their land. Never have we had better
displayed the mechanisms and consequences of the processes of rural proletarianization
which took place so widely in Europe.
Wrightson and Levine did an extraordinary piece of work, but their general
style of analysis was not unique. Alan Macfarlane and his collaborators have
undertaken a similarly comprehensive -- and computer-coordinated -- analysis
of a single parish, Earls Colne, from 1400 to 1750. Jean-Claude Perrot has
made the demographic history of eighteenth-century Caen the . thread
for the stitching together of the city's whole round of life. As Hobsbawm
suggests, these new, thick, demographically-informed community studies do not
represent an abandonment of analytic history, They show us skilled analysts
broadening the range of their analyses, and seeking effective ways to comunicate
their results..
Is Cra.ssness American?
Wightson and Levine are not Americans or American-trained; the Briton and
the Canadian learned their demographic history in a Cambridge which has for years
been a fount of the art. E.A. Wrigley of Cambridge and Louis Henry of Paris,
very likely the two most influential figures in the creation of the demographic
history we know today, have wider followings in Britain, France, and the rest
of Europe than in North America. In this field, as in the labor history over
which. such figures as E.J. Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson and their allies have
exercised so great an influence, Europeans have commonly led the way. Although
critics, European and American, of quantificat2on and of social-scientific
models in history have sometimes portrayed them as quintessential expressions of
American vulgarity and imperialism, in fact the initial impulse to both has
- '
I .
often come from Europe, and their fullest versions have commonly appeared\
outside . - of the United 'States?
The situation resembles the paradoxical processes by which almost
every city of the Roman Empire, except Rome, received a "Roman" ground
plan, with its ordo and decumanus, or by which the purest specimen of French
feudalism, with grants actually extending through a chain of subordinates from
sovere$gn to peasant, appeared not in France but in Quebec. For the really
massive building of centralized, team-operated, computer-based files of
"process-produced" historical data, we go to Germany. For the creation
of national demographic series extending over centuries of experience, we
go to France and Brttai'n. For the coordinatfon, .standardi'zation and
... - - . .
..-
computer linking of large numbers of demographically-based community-studies,
- - - -
- - P - - -
we go to Sweden. Perhaps the most surprising case is this one: if current
signs are reliable, almost unimaginably large files of evidence on historical
population changes will soon start to become available in, of all places,
mainland China. By comparison with these efforts, American forays into
historical compilation and computation look modest indeed.
Let me not exaggerate. When one of these large enterprises has taken
shape, Americans have usually appeared somewhere on the scene, For example,
AmerikancRonald Lee has figured importantly in the Cambridge Group's work on
reconstructing English population trends, and AmerixancJames Lee (no relation)
is playing an important part in Chinese-surveys of their sources for demographic
history. Furthermore, some rather large American undertakings have strongly
influenced research through the rest of the world. Two examples are the country-
by-country analyses of fertility decline conducted by the Princeton group
'at
Ansley Coale created in the 1960s, and the huge collections of machine-readable
- - --
evidence created by the Michigan-based Inter-University Consortium for Political
and Social Research since the 1950s. Still, the American reputation for Big
Data and bigger research teams has been greatly exaggerated. In international
perspective, the American historical profession includes more than its share
of individual investigators, carrying their handwritten notes about with them,
and using no machines more exotic than a typewriter-,or- photocopier.
Will Anthropology Save Us?
That American individualism may help explain one of the major reactions to
the alleged excesses of social-scientific history: the self-conscious turn to
anthropology as a guide to historical reconstruction.
The "anthropology" in
question has an odd connection to:the discipline which goes by that name,
with its controversies over evolution -and materialism, its debates over the
origins of ideologies of honor,
its explorations of the intricacies of kinship
and language, its chronicles of the rise and fall of peasantries and rural
-- - - - - - - -
proletariats.
We might better call the anthropology to which a number of
historians have been turning their hopes "retrospective ethnography."
The.
idea is to recreate crucial situations of the. past as a thoughtful participant-
observer would have experienced them. Some advocates of retrospective ethnography
adopt the Gilbert Ryle/Clifford Geertz program of "fhfck description''; they
tend to hold up as exemplars Natalie Davis' dramatic reconstructions of
sixteenth-century festivals and follies, not to mention Geertz' own portrayal
of a Balinese cockfight. William Sewell has recently written a book about French
workers in the era of the Revolution which pivots an analysis of changing
conceptions of property and group identity on the Geertzian idea that alterations
in fundamental concepts are the bases of deep socfal change, and that those
alterations show-up in the language of claims and contention,
More such
efforts are to come.
Although. the phrase ''retrospective ethnography" has not gained any
currency in th.e historiographical literature, hsstortans followfng this
.
-~ -- . - ... ~ . -- - - - - -
path. often make a delrberate point of their turn to anthropology, afid: of:
-
ttiefr?.dissa~isfaction with the old new social history, Sewell himself
explicitly invokes cultural anthropology and Clifford Geertz, and self-
consciously describes his move away from the structures and determinisms
of standard social history. The preface to Bryan Palmer's study of skilled
workers in Hamilton, Ontario, from 1860 to 1914 includes an exceptionally
clear statement of the alternatives.. It deserves quotation at length:
Hamilton, as many social historians are well aware, has become one of the
-.
. , most intensely studied communities in North America. Michael B; Etz
\ >
and his ongoing Canadian Social History Project have utilizedr.,quantitative
. - --- - - - - - - -- L-
data to launch one of the more sophisticated community studies
in the
- -_
-.
-
-
-
-- -
history of social scientific inquiry. While Katzvs work demands respect,
particularly his structural analyses of inequality, transiency, and social
mobility, it remains an open question as to how much numerical data can
tell us about culture or conflict. It thus seemed fitting to probe-?
traditional sources (newspapers, manuscript and archival holdings, and local
records) to see what they could offer. While such material is truly
impressionistic, it has yielded an impressive collection of data that
tell us'much about obscure corners 6f the nineteenth- and ear3.y twentieth-
century world,
Beyond the data, however, looms the theoretical framework within which
this study evolves. While sections of thebook have been somewhat influenced
by my wrestling with a kind of structuralist theory , . . the attachment
is to a structuralisn: rooted in historical analysis, informed but not
dominated by the approach of the anthropologist, It is, in short, the
structuralism of Levi-Strauss, rather than the structuralism of Althusser.
Where one has, at least, a partial respect for history and empirical
findings, the other 3s unashamedly antihistorical, masking abstraction
.-.
with the reification of theory,
This study, then, is no marriage of the social sciences and history.
If i.t does not totally accept the judgement of Richard Cobb.that it is
unlikely that historians will ever get much profit from the company of
social scientfsts, it cannot argue with Elizabeth Fox-Genovesets and
Eugene I).;:..-.Genovesevs recent remarks on the dangers inherent in promiscuous
I'
borrowing" from other disciplines. Far too often, the historian's own
lack of rigour has moved him toward the sociologist; the psychologist, the
economist, or the anthropologist; and the theoretical gains have been
minimal. These advocates of the interdiscPplinary approach have often
succumbed to the worst kind of defeatism, for in looking for answers to
history's jmterpretive problems they have subordinated Clio to the
jargonistic antihumanism of the social sciences, replete with their
clinical sterility and elaborate control mechanisms. The past, however,
was never so tidy (Palmer 1979: xii-xiii).
Palmer calls, instead, onxthe tradition of "empirical Marxism'' exemplified by
E.P. Thompson. Culture and conflict are to be his themes, sympathetic reconstruction
his method. Although Palmer does not summon Clifford Geertz to testify against
the impoverished rigidity of social-scientific history, he does advocate a program
of thick description*
The 6est-known recent exa~ple of retrospective ethnography, however, has
less to do with.Clifford Geertz, and more to do with the old-fashioned village
study. Enmanuel Le Roy Ladurieps spectacular Montaillou~gives an account of
life and love in a fourteenth-century Pyrenean community. It follows an outline
that could easily have guided an ethnography done fifty years ago: sex, courtship,
marriage, lffe-cycles, gatherings, forms of solidarity, and on down the '
checklist. CIt would convey the texture of the book a bit more faithfu1.l.y --
and explain some of i.ts best55elling appeal -- to enumerate the subjects as
--
. ..- .
- -
.- - -
-- .-
sex, courtship, sex, marriage, sex, life-cycles, sex . , . and so on,) But Le
Roy Laduri.e does the standard ethnography with exceptional panache, and with an
extraordinary source: the transcript of the Inquisitionts searching interrogations
I
of local people.
Montaillou nurtured heresy, and the inquisitive bishop sent to
track down the heretics followed the trail of mistaken belief into the routines,
crises, and peccadillos of day-to-day-life.
Le Roy Ladurie had the cleverness
to handle the transcript like an oral-history tape, splicing its testimonies
together wtih his own commentaries, comparisons, and speculations.
Result:
-
a revelation. The reader finds himself in the very midst of a weird, earthy, and
-
yet somehow familiar round of life.
Le Roy Ladurie did not, to be sure, invent the method entirely on his
own. Ethnographers such as Oscar Lewis had long since substituted tape
recorders for notebooks, and inserted long strips of their taped interviews
into their books on rural and urban life. A::whole-rgild-.of !!6ral historians,"
with its publics running from general readers to antiquarians through the
students of recent history, has sprung into being. Within French history,
Le Roy Ladurie had the splendid example of Alain Lottin, who built a
broad reconstruction of Lille's seventeenth-century social life 6n the base
of a journal kept by a modest textile artisan. Instead of settling for an
edition of the text with a long introduction and learned footnotes, Lottin
chose to interweave the phrases of the journal with his own portrait,of the
man, his milieu, and the city as a whole. The portrait relies on the standard
sources of demographic, economic, and institutional history. Lottin's Chavatte,
ouvrier 1illois~thBrefore lies somewhere between the structural history of Levine and
L
Wrightson and the retrospective ethnography of Le Roy Ladurie.
-- -
Yet another variant of anthropological work has appeared in the history
of women and feminism. Ethnographers often put a great deal of their effort
into notkg the concrete connections within some important segment of the
population. Similarly, some of the most-read American research on women --
C -
for example the writings of Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and Nancy Cott,
,-- attempts to reconstruct the networks and solidarities linking women
to each other. The-traci,zg of interpersonal networks ranges from informal to
precise, just as it does in anthropology. In both its'.historical .and2kts - . - -'.:
anthropological version, the network analysis serves two purposes: first, to
clarify how members.of~the.group copeLwith:difficulties they face in other
arenas of their lives; second, to help explain the solidarities and conflicts
that show up in public affairs. This approach becomes controversial, obviously,
to the extent that it reduces women's public claims to expressions of their
private preoccupations. Competing historiographical traditions, after all,
base women's involvement in the struggles for abolition, suffrage, and women's
rights on the articulation of real interests, on the,development of a
s6lidary, self-conscious social movement, or both.
A similar division appears in the history of the family, On the
"anthropological" side (to stretch the term a bit), we:have writers such
as Philippe ~ribs, Randolph Trunbach, Edward Shorter, and our mentor Lawrence
Stone. Although they disagree among themselves in many regards, they converge
on the interpretation of changes in family life as expressions of changes in
/
attitudes, -mentalites, Weltanschauungen. Thus for ~ri6s the rise of overriding
individualism in our own era has broken the old solidarity of the family. On
the "materialist" and "political" sides (to use a pair of equally tendentious
t er ms) , we have such i n t e r p r e t a t i o n s a s t h a t of Loui se Ti l l y and Joan Scot t ,
who por t r ay a l t e r a t i o n s i n fami l y s t r u c t u r e under i n d u s t r i a l capi t al i s m a s
c o l l e c t i v e s h i f t s i n s t r a t e g y condi t i oned. . especi al l y by changes i n t he
or gani zat i on of product i on. Si nce contemporary ant hropol ogy a c t u a l l y cont ai ns
ener get i c spokesmen f o r "mat er i al i s t " and " pol i t i c a l " account s of s o c i a l l i f e ,
t h e d i s t i n c t i o n between ant hr opol ogi cal and ot he r approaches t o s o c i a l hi s t or y
begi ns a t t h i s poi nt t o l o s e a l l c l a r i t y . Never t hel ess, t he d i s t i n c t i o n remains.
It r epr es ent s an ol d di vi s i on wi t hi n ant hrophl ogy i t s e l f : between t hose who, on
t he wh6le, gi ve expl anat or y p r i o r i t y t o c u l t u r e , b e l i e f , o r w i l l , and t hose who
gi ve p r i o r i t y t o material condi t i ons and power.
Mat er i al i sm Li ves
Despi t e a l l I have s a i d , mat er i al i sm has by no means di sappeared from
s o c i a l hi s t or y, As Hobsbawm's r epl y t o St one i ndi c a t e s , s o c i a l and economic
h i s t o r i a n s have been t r yi ng t o s o r t out and s ynt hes i ze t he mass of new evi dence
t h a t has been accumul at i ng on t he wor l d' s l a r g e economic, p o l i t i c a l , and
s o c i a l t r ansf or mat i ons. For European h i s t o r y s i nc e 1400 o r s o, t he grand themes::
have been t h e concent r at i on of c a p i t s l , t h e growth of a pr ol e t a r i a n l abor f or ce,
t h e c r e a t i on of powerful na t i ona l s t a t e s and systems of s t a t e s , t he emergence
of mass p o l i t i c s a t a na t i ona l s c a l e , t he r i s e and f a l l of European hegemony,
t he de c l i ne of f e r t i l i t y and mor t al i t y. Hobsbawm hi msel f has made i mport ant
cont r i but i ons t o t h e s ynt hes i s . Far from wi t her i ng away, t he di s cus s i on of
t hes e themes i s gai ni ng i n coherence and energy.
By and l a r g e , t h i s work ( l i k e Hobsbawm's) i s br oadl y Marxi st i n concept i on:
a t a minimum, i t begi ns wi t h anal ys i s of t h e or gani zat i on of product i on and
its i mpl i cat i ons f o r c l a s s format i on. On t h e small s c a l e , t he work of Wrightson
and Levine exemplifies the sort of synthesis which has its counterparts
in other work on England, France, Germany, and Sweden. On the large, promising
recent syntheses take the form of Kriedte, Medick and Schlumbohm's essays
on procoindustrialization (for all their loose ends), of Lis and Soly's survey
of poverty and capitalism in Europe (for all its lack of attention to variation
from region to region), of Immanuel Wallersteinrs second, seventeenth-century
volume on the European world-system (for all its controversial treatment of the
"strength" of different seventeenth-century states).
The award for the most sumptuous (if not for the most conclusive) recent
synthesis goes hands down to Fernand Braudel's giant three-volume exploration
of capitalism and material life from the fourteenth century onward, Braudel's
scope extends beyond Europe to the world as a whole, He takes in almost all
the social history I have been reviewing, and more. Demography, technology,
communications, geography, politics and cultural production flow together,
and through each other, in his account, Braudel finds parallels, common threads,
and interdependencies where the rest of us barely dare to venture factual
summaries. Hard to classify as a Marxist -- or as anything else -- Braudel
nonetheless comes through as a thoroughgoing materialist, That materialism
appears at each of the three "levels" treated by the book's successive volumes:
the routines and constraints of everyday life; commercial structures and
capitalism; world economies and interdependence. By the start of the third
volume, indeed, Braudel is trying to use Immanuel Wallerstein's model of
the world-economy as the means of organizing the whole vast historical experience.
Braudel abandons that effort without quite saying so, but he never abandons
the linkage of the full range of social experience to the structures of
pr oduct i on, d i s t r i b u t i o n , and consumption. He bel i eves and demonst rat es
t h a t t he mat er i al condi t i ons of everyday l i f e var y i n consonance wi t h s h i f t s i n
t he i nt e r na t i ona l economy. He shows t h a t t hos e mat er i al condi t i ons shape
t he f u l l r ange of human or gani zat i on, from s e x t o be l i e f t o power s t r uc t ur e .
I n or der t o do s o, he draws r epeat edl y on demographic anal ys es , on l o c a l economic
s t udi e s , on t h e whole a r r a y of t opi c s which have made h i s j our nal Annales a
byword f o r h i s t o r i c a l i nnovat i on.
Not i ce, as you r ead Braudel and ot he r s ynt hes es , how l i t t l e t hey exemplify
t he r e vi va l of na r r a t i ve , how r a r e l y t hey r e l y on r e t r os pe c t i ve ethnography,
how much t hey bui l d t h e i r cas es on t he ver y qua nt i t a t i ve , demographic, and
s oc i a l - s c i e nt i f i c works:which Lawrence St one has condemned t o bankrupt cy,
Somehow t hey r e f us e t o go broke. Works of t h e ol d new s o c i a l h i s t o r y have not ,
i t is t r ue , l ocked t oget her i n t he Sc i e n t i f i c Hi st or y Lee Benson once ant i ci pat ed.
They have, on t h e cont r ar y, made t he h i s t o r i c a l s p e c i f i c i t y of s o c i a l
s t r u c t u r e s and pr ocesses a l l t h e more appar ent . But t he ol d new s o c i a l hi s t or y
has made i t pos s i bl e t o connect i ndi vi dual exper i ence wi t h l a r g e s o c i a l processes
more c l e a r l y , pr e c i s e l y and f u l l y t han ever bef or e. Research and wr i t i ng i n
t h a t ve2n cont i nue t o t h r i v e i n economic hi s t or y, i n t h e h i s t o r y of t he fami l y,
i n demographic h i s t o r y , i n t h e hi s t or y of popul ar r e b e l l i o n and c o l l e c t i v e
a c t i on, i n t h e h i s t o r y of school i ng and l i t e r a c y , i n h i s t o r i c a l s t udi e s of
pover t y, agi ng, genet i cs , mi gr at i on, cri me, s t r i k e s , e t h n i c i t y . . . even i n
urban hi s t or y. The p r a c t i t i o n e r s of t he ol d new s o c i a l h i s t o r y have found
i t pe r f e c t l y f e a s i b l e t o i ncor por at e i n t o t h e i r model-mongering, comparat i ve,
quantitative,~:collective-biographical endeavors t h e devi ces and. i ns i ght s of
r e t r os pe c t i ve ethnography. We must end up agr eei ng wi t h t h e Lawrence St one of
1972, i f not of 1979, and wi t h t h e E.' J. ..Hobsbawm of..1980: t he mi ssi on of
s o c i a l h i s t o r y i s s t i l l t o " t i e t he e xc i t i ng development i n i n t e l l e c t u a l and
c u l t u r a l h i s t o r y down t o t h e s o c i a l , economic, and p o l i t i c a l bedrock. "
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0
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I _ _ _ . _ ' .
.. I.
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1973 Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States
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R.N. Pullat
1977 ed., Problem'i istoricheskoi demografii SSSR. Tallinn: Institute
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Toni Richards
1980 "Two Essays in the Analysis of a Demographic System: France
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Daniel Roche
1978 Le siscle des 1umi;res en province. ~cadgmies et acadgmiciens
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H.K. Roessingh
1979 "Tobacco Growing in Holland in the Seventeenth and
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John Rogers
1980 ed., Family Building and Family Planning in Pre-Industrial
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David Rothman and Stanton Wheeler
1980 eds., Social History and Social Policy. New York: Academic
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George ~ude'
1978 Protest and Punishment. The Story of.:'the Social and Political
Protesters transported to Australia, 1788-1868. Oxford:
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Jane Schneider and Peter Schneider
1976 Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicil*. New York: Academic
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John C. Schneider
1980 Detroit and the Problem of Order, 1830-1880. A Geography of
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Leo F. Schnore
1975 ed., The New Urban History. Quantitative Explorations by American
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Lawrence Schof er
1975 The Formation of a Modem Labor Force. Upper Silesia 1865-1914.
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1976 Radical Protest and Social Structure. The Southern Farmers'
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1979 "A Study of Contentious Gatherings in Early Nineteenth-Century Great
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1980 Work and Revolution. The Language of Labor from the Old Regime=
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1978 "Natural Decrease in Early Modern Cities: A Reconsideration," Past
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Edward Shorter
1975 The Making of the Modern Family. New York: Basic Books.
Theda Skocpol
1979 States and Social Revolutions. A Comparative Analysis of France,
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Carroll Smith-Rosenberg
1975 "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in
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David L. Snyder
1975 "Industrial Setting and Industrial Conflict: Comparative Analyses
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Allan H. Spear
1967 Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920, Chicago:
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Arthur L. Stinchcornbe
1978 Theoretical Methods in Social History. New York: Academic Press.
Traian Stoianovitch
1976 French Historical Method. The Annales Paradigm. Ithaca: Cornell
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Lawrence Stone
1965 The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
1966 "Social Mobility in England, 1500-1700," Past and Present, 33: 16-55.
1969 "Literacy and Education in England, 1640-1900," Past and Present,
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1972b "Prosopography," in Felix Gilbert and Stephen R. Graubard, eds.,
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1973 Family and Fortune. Studies in Aristocratic Finance in the Sixteenth
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1977a The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800. New York:
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1977b ''History and the Social Sciences in the Twentieth Century," in
Charles F. Delzell, ed., The Future of History. Nashville: Vanderbilt
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1979 "The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History," Past
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Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone
1972 "Country Houses and their Owners in Hertfordshire, 1540-1879," in
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1975 "Structural Sources of Popular Revolts and the Tobaku Movement at the
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Jan Sundin and Erik Soderlund
1979 eds., Time, Space, and Man. Essays on Microdemography. Stockholm:
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1964 Poverty and Progress. Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City.
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6 1
1968 "Notes on the Historical Study of Social Mobility," Comparative
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1973 The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis,
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1977 "The New Urban History," in Charles F. Delzell, ed., The Future of
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1969 Nineteenth-Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History. New
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1975 Whigs and Hunters. The Origin of the Black Act. New York: Pantheon.
1978 "Eighteenth-Century English Society; Class Struggle without Class?"
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Paul Thompson
1978 The Voice of the Past. Oral History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Louise A. Tilly
1977 "Urban Growth, Industrialization, and Women's Employment in Milan,
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1980 "Social History and its Critics,'' Theory and Society, forthcoming.
Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott
1978 Women, Work, and Family. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston
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1980 Kapital, Staat,und sozialer Protest in der deutschen Industrialisierung.
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1976 ~ontrgal, La formation d'une societe, 1642-1663. Montreal: FIDES
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1978 The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic
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1978 eds., Productivity of Land and Agricultural Innovation in the Low
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1980 Sources and Methods of Historical Demography, New York: Academic
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1979 Poverty and Piety in an English Village. Terling, 1525-1700.
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1980 The Population History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction.
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1977 Family and Community. Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880-1930.
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The Center for Research on Social Organization is a facility of the Department of Sociology, University
of Michigan. . Its primary mission is to support the research of faculty and students in the department's
- Social Organization graduate program. CRSO Working Papers report current research and reflection by
affiliates of the Center; many of them are published later elsewhere after revision.
Working Papers which are
still in print are available from the Center for a fee of 5 0 ~ plus the number of pages in the paper ( 8 8 ~ for
a 38-page paper, etc.). The Center will photocopy out-of print Working Papers at cost (approximately 5~ per
page). Recent Working Papers include:
209 "A Study of Contentious Gatherings in Early Nineteenth-Century Great Britain," by R. A. Schweitzer,
January 1980, 4 pabes.
. .
210
" Enumerating and Coding contentious Gatherings in ~ineteenth-century Britain,"by Charles ill^
and R. A. Schweitzer, February 1980, 84 pages.
211 "The Texture of.Contention in Britain, 1828-1829," by R. A. Schweitzer, Charles Tilly, and John.Boyd,
February ,1980, 150 pages .'
212 "How (And to Some Extent, Why) to Study British Contention," by Charles Tilly, February 1980,
61 pages. '
213 "States, Taxes and ~roletarians," by Charles Tilly, March 1980, 27 pages.
2i.4 " Chariva.ris, Repertoires, and ~olitics, " by Charles Tilly, April 1980, 25 pages.
215 "Gehkral Strikes and Social Change ,in Belgium," by Carl Strikwerda, April 1980, 25 pages.
, .
216
"Two Xodels of the School Desegregation Cases," by Joseph Sanders, May 1980, 75 pages.
217
"Two Experiments on the Effects of Social Status on Responsibility Judgement,''
-
by Joseph Sanders, . -- Thomas Regulus, and V.- Lee Hamilton, May 1980, 34 pies,
--
Request copies of these papers, the completelists of Center Working Papers and other reprints, or further
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