Obituary Arthur Marwick 1936—2006

Abstract

Arthur Marwick, the foundation Professor of History at the Open University and co-editor of this journal from 1995 to 1998, died on 27 September 2006 following a severe stroke. Marwick's academic career blossomed rapidly in the 1960s when he was a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Some of his more senior colleagues frowned upon the young man in a hurry who published his first two books, The Explosion of British Society (1963) and Clifford Allen: The Open Conspirator (1964), within five years of his appointment. Immediately afterwards, in 1965, came The Deluge: British Society and the First World War, the book that made his name and that remains a core text for courses on 'war and society'. It is a commonplace now but, as late as the mid-1960s, it was rare for historians to consider the social impact of a war during its duration. While not necessarily clearly articulated, war was commonly seen as an interruption of 'normal' social development, and the beginnings and ends of wars were commonly made the terminal dates of courses; the wars themselves were the province of military historians. Marwick subsequently developed a theoretical framework for analysing the interrelationship between total war and social change. The impact of war, he suggested, needed to be considered through four dimensions: its destructive aspects; its test of social institutions; the way in which the scale of participation tended to alter the social pyramid; and war's psychological effects on the arts and beliefs as well as the minds of individuals. The framework was presented fully in War and Social Change in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Study of Britain, France, Germany, Russia and the United States (1974); intellectually this was not his best book but, like all his work, it was lively, opinionated and readable. The Deluge itself ran through a succession of reprints; it was, perhaps, one of Marwick's main failings that, once something was in print, he was reluctant to consider revisions. The book was also the first of a series of books that he authored and edited on the social impact of the two world wars. In 1969 Marwick took the courageous step of moving from the established department at Edinburgh to the embryonic Open University as its first Professor of History. The Open University was an experiment that might very easily have failed. The aim was to provide the opportunity of getting a degree to mature adults, rather than school leavers, using a mixture of correspondence texts and BBC radio and television broadcasts. The youngest professor