In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain James Vernon (bio) In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain, by James Epstein; pp. xi + 206. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, $60.00, $23.95 paper. James Epstein was one of the first, and one of the best, practitioners of the new cultural history of British politics. His landmark and prize-winning articles in the late 1980s on the political culture of Chartism—several of which were subsequently reproduced in his Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England, 1790-1850 (1994)—did much to develop the early pioneering work of John Brewer, David Cannadine, and Thomas Laqueur; they were certainly inspirational for those like myself who followed into the field. I say this not just to honor his contribution, which he modestly downplays, but to draw attention to two important elements of this book. Although a careful reader and astute commentator on the field, Epstein has tended not to enter explicitly into theoretical debate. Rather than abstractly chastise the poverty of theory or the poverty of empiricism, as E. P. Thompson and Gareth Stedman Jones (and more recently, Patrick Joyce) have done with such passion, Epstein has always preferred to make his historical practice do theoretical work. In Practice, billed as a report from the front line of the field, presents the author as caught in the crossfire between Thompson's cultural materialism and those like Stedman Jones and Joyce who advocated a further linguistic or cultural turn. An irate letter from Thompson chastising Epstein for having naively picked up the "going cant" of the linguistic turn sets the tone on the opening page. The book becomes an extended meditation upon whether it is possible to tread a middle path between these two positions without falling flat on one's face and being dismissed by the warring protagonists as either a hopeless idealist or crude materialist. It is a big job for a relatively little book made up of six previously published (but now revised) essays with a new introduction. That introduction sticks so closely to its brief that it at times implies that the only genealogy for studying the language and culture of popular politics in modern Britain was through Thompson, Stedman Jones, and Joyce. The cultural turn that, in the hands of those like Brewer, Cannadine, and Laqueur, preceded the linguistic turn—and was generated from rather different traditions of social theory and history—does not get a mention. Feminist historians and gender history fare slightly better, primarily through Joan Scott, but, like postcolonial theory and the so- called new imperial history, they are seen as more exemplary of a trend than generative of it. Indeed, Epstein is less concerned with historicising or differentiating the various cultural, linguistic, or discursive turns than in tracking how, during the 1990s, they played out in the frequently furious debates about popular politics and class formation in Victorian Britain. For Epstein's beef is not just methodological; it is with those revisionist histories that emphasize the continuities of popular politics and the relative insignificance of class to them during the long nineteenth century that ended with Clement Atlee's welfare state. It is tempting to ask unkindly who cares anymore, now that we all seem to be cultural historians. But Epstein should be applauded for reminding us why we should [End Page 675] care: there are important methodological and historical questions raised here that are often rushed over in the embrace of culture and discourse. In a single page, Epstein outlines his theoretical position as viewing language, culture, and discourse (the terms are variously deployed throughout the book) as productive but nonetheless embedded in social practice and structure. (There is, he insists, a structurally determined unequal access to discursive resources.) The issue of where agency resides, so central to the debates he is concerned with, is not altogether clear in this compressed account. Yet his method is: it requires close attention to the situated nature of culture, to the social conditions of its production and reception—in a word, to context. In part 2 of the book...