The Lion and the Newt: A British View of American Conservatives' Fear of Social History

Abstract

Viewed from Lancaster, England the sustained virulence and intolerance of the American Right's attack on social history is difficult to comprehend, both in its scale and its nature. It is not that British social historians are unfamiliar with the prejudices and paranoias of right-wing governments we have, after all, had one of our own since 1979, and Major differs from Thatcher in style and selfS presentation rather than in substance. But during all this time no attack on this potentially subversive discipline has come near to the intensity of the American campaign, although, as we shall see, this is not to suggest that social history in Britain has gone unchallenged as regards its and core methodologies, or that it has had an easy ride. The contrast in experiences may be instructive in various ways, and I propose to discuss the fortunes of social history under the Conservative Party in Britain over the last fifteen years before enquiring into the possible reasons for the differences in the attitudes, policies and profiles of the Right in the two countries. This in turn may make contribution, however indirect, to the construction of survival strategies by American social historians in these difficult times. The Thatcher regime was no more hostile to social history than to the social sciences generally, and although damage was done, it was not the result of directly-targeted campaign. One of the first priorities of the 1979 government was to cut the funding of the national research councils, and the Social Science Research Council was so seriously affected that it had to reduce the number of postgraduate training awards by 25 percent in the first year. Within this framework Economic and Social History, under which motley label most social history research and teaching was then assumed to be done, was under particular pressure, but only because it was seen as traditional scholarly subject which was at risk in the heightened search for relevance to business and policy which was now in vogue.l But social history survived as recipient of research grants, despite perceptions in high places that there was (infamously) no such thing as society, only individuals and their families (a remark attributed to Margaret Thatcher), and that reading history at university was a luxury (a pearl of wisdom from the same chemistry graduate). The concept of social science was officially abolished, but the research council, re-named in newspeak the Economic and Social Research Council, survived and continued to fund projects in social history. Senior social historians felt, however, that the dice were loaded against the discipline and that it had to struggle to be heard; thus Eric Evans in 1987, when the (then) University Grants Commission was persuaded to institute an enquiry into the current state of economic and social history: