The "New" Social History in the Context of American Historical Writing

Abstract

Historians are subdivided in more complex ways than members of most other academic disciplines-quadruply, by nation or region of globe, by time period, by thematic category (social, political, intellectual, and so on), and by cognitive predilection, sometimes but not always tied to a political outlook (e.g., Marxist, Freudian, or-perhaps still commonest of all-a naively antitheoretical empiricism). It is a mildly shocking thought that of these four kinds of division, time period-our supposed reason for being-may actually strike many of us as least important. For about a decade, from mid-1960s to mid-1970s, cleavage that seemed to matter most was between leftists and nonleftists. And this shock wave has not yet died out. The presence of colleagues who are vigorous Marxists may still set afire deepest passions in us, greater, for instance, than those triggered by ritualized snobberies of Europeanists toward Americanists. This is so because more orthodox historians suspect that Marxists, as also indeed some Freudians, are not cognitively open in same way as they are. Of course in making this assessment non-Marxists often exaggerate their own openness, confusing it with collective heterogeneity of choices they have made in terms of various kinds of intense specialization. And, on political plane, non-Marxists too easily forget that liberalism, defined as faith in beneficent power of federal government to bring about social justice, is itself now only predisposition of a shrinking minority of Americans, though they frequently seek to present it as the trend of to their students, just as Marxists do in regard to their own agenda. There are signs, however, that Marxist shock wave has been increasingly assimilated. It has lost some force by internal splintering. In last few years varying conceptions of it among its practitioners have made label seem almost meaningless. Eugene D. Genovese threw out economic determinism; Immanuel Wallerstein soft-pedals once fundamental distinction between industrial and preindustrial capitalism, so as to invoke a continuous history of exploitation by core nations of Third World.1 What is left, beyond a strong emotional identification with oppressed? In part, this decline of