Remembering the Future

Abstract

GEOFF ELEY IS A PROMINENT NEW-LEFT SCHOLAR Of modern German and European social history. A Crooked Line is his meditation on the relationship between his intellectual biography, political transformations, and the historiographical shift from the social history of the 1960s and 1970s to the cultural turn of the 1980s and 1990s. The book is self-consciously hybrid. Its bold braiding of personal memoir, historiographical analysis, and political critique places it on the terrain of the cultural turn, making it an artifact of the shift it charts from social to cultural history. Yet its emphasis on the political context of social and cultural history remains true to the basic tenets of social history. The hybrid character of the book encapsulates its concluding, and controversial, claim that contemporary historical practices have so combined social and cultural history that they obviate any need to choose between them (181). Eley's work joins a personal and intellectual memoir with an old-school Hobsbawmian mapping of historical debates across British, German, European, and South Asian fields. The heterodox nature of the work is signaled by the affective register of the titles of its chapters-Optimism, Disappointment, Reflectiveness, and Defiance. The temporal structure of the book's narrative is similarly heterodox. The work moves between the political and existential dimension of becoming a Marxist social historian in the 1960s and 1970s, to a more sweeping historical panorama of the interchange between politics and historiographical debates in postwar Britain, Germany, and the United States, to a concluding affirmative snapshot of contemporary historical practices. This remarkable compass affords a rare demonstration of the uneven and multiple times-political, generational, and existential-that underwrite critical historiographical stocktaking. The experimental form of the book suggests that the only way to render intelligible the shift from social to cultural history is to short-circuit linear narratives in favor of Bertolt Brecht's concluding injunction, voiced by Galileo, that If there are obstacles, the shortest line between two points may be the crooked line. It is tempting to read A Crooked Line as the reckoning of one historian-or the post-1968 generation of historians-with the shift from social to cultural history. But while that shift was made by a specific generation, its sources and consequences extend far beyond that generation. To me, a historian of modern India trained in the midand late 1990s, when cultural studies and postcolonial history were at their peak, the force of the book lay in its explicitly political rewriting of that momentous shift. Eley offers a generous and generative reading of social and cultural history as