The Sam Spade Memorial Good Post Gallery

[Tetro Kornbluth]

since you're more up on these things than I am: could you point me to some current historians/historiographers who are central to this 'crisis of the Historical profession', and how this connects with arguments that the impact of the French Revolution has been repeatedly overstated?

This is fairly complicated, so I'll try to summarise without losing too much along the way. You'll be familiar with some of this already, I suspect. During the Post War decades the historical profession in the West became increasingly influenced by Marxist tendencies as it appeared that a Marxist (or quasi-Marxist) approach to history could explain the past in a rational and scientific manner. Political life and historical events were seen as offshoots of social and economic factors and changes rather than as independent phenomenons. This tendency took different forms in different countries (i.e. the approach of British Marxists - Hobsbawm, Hill, Thompson and so on - was notably less dogmatic than that of the German Bielefeld School) but by the 1970s was close to universal: it even spread to French social history, which was previously the exclusive domain of the anti-Marxist (but still materialist) Annales School, for instance. Even historians with right-wing political views tended to subscribe to some form of Marxist analysis.

You know what happened next, of course: The Forward March of Labour Halted and so on. By the end of 1970s it was becoming clear that contemporary political events could not be explained in terms of orthodox academic Marxism. This led to a massive crisis of confidence in Marxist historiography, because if it could not explain the present, were historians really right to assume that it could explain the past as well? New research (often by historians on the fringes of the profession) was also beginning to undermine certain critical assumptions about the past (but we'll come to this later). Younger historians overwhelmingly deserted the Marxist camp and began to scrabble around for alternatives. Many found one in Postmodernism -and in particular in Poststructuralism - and in other forms of cultural theory.¹ This is often referred to as the linguistic turn. A great example of this is Gareth Stedman Jones who had written Outcast London (a classic of Marxist social history) in early 1970s, but who's 1983 work Languages of Class explicitly denied even the existence of class in a Marxist sense.² But again, and alas, another problem. The sort of reheated (and if I'm being honest barely comprehended) Poststructuralism that so many younger historians seized on in the 1980s was no substitute for the old certainties of academic Marxism; it did not (could not) provide a holistic explanation for all of human history or for current events. Material reality is not language, after all. If you read through academic journals from the 1990s (I've not done this since I left academia a few years ago, but whatever) you see furious arguments between the Poststructuralists and the Marxist rearguard for the first half of the decade, and then a gradual petering out of interest (on both sides) around about 1996 or so. Unfortunately this was actually a sign of the deepening of the crisis, because during the same period (i.e. 1980s onwards) higher education across the world was increasingly brought under the sway of market logic and managerialism. Instead of trying to find explanations for the past and to uncover great theories that might underpin them, most historians (and this is not their fault as individuals) generally write about whatever will get funding and whatever will get them published (because a publication record now matters more than the actual content of what is being published). This leads to an emphasis on the topical, on the local, and on (I'm sorry but this is absolutely true) what certain malicious types would label the politically correct.³ There's still some very good work done, of course, but it's generally the product of brilliant individuals doing their own thing or concerns pre-1789 history.

So that's what I mean by a crisis in the historical profession. It's a really sad state of affairs and makes me personally unhappy.

How does the French Revolution relate to this? Largely by plunging into a great historiographical crisis, one that shows no sign of ending, and by doing so at exactly the same time (as there was increased interest - including from the publishing industry - for new and bold research into the Revolution in time for the bicentenary in 1989) as the entire profession lurched into the previously mentioned existential permacrisis. A large number of stridently revisionist works on the Revolution were published during the 1980s (the most important are probably François Furet's Interpreting the French Revolution and Simon Schama's Citizens; the latter is in some respects more 'radical' in that it stresses continuities with the past, while the former still insists on the Revolution as the turning point) and together they successfully undermined the old idea that the Revolution had anything to do with class (which, as you know, is one of the central assumptions to Marxist history). Other research published during the decade (including posthumously published work by Fernand Braudel) more-or-less conclusively demonstrated the relative unimportance of the Revolution to social structures in rural France and even to the development of capitalism in the country (i.e. that the process was well underway by the 1760s even and that the Revolution, whatever impact it had, certainly did little speed it along). Consequently, the importance of the Revolution to the development of modernity is now disputed, even if British undergraduates are still routinely taught (as I was) that 'Modern History' starts in 1789 and that there was no such thing as nationalism before that date. Habit dies hard apparently.

<sub>1. There were a huge number of other trends as well, some of them rather more sensible than Poststructuralism. Peter Clarke and his 'primacy of politics' followers (although probably too obsessed with detail for details sake) are a case in point. There was also an increased interest - particularly at the wacky end of the profession - in historical narrative.

2. Others went further; ex-Marxist Patrick Joyce went so far as to deny the existence of class in any non-linguistic sense in favour of a rather nebulous conception called 'The People' that he has never managed to explain coherently.

3. During one of the few academic conferences I ever attended, a complaint of Hobsbawm's about this latter point was read out by a speaker for the sole purpose of laughing at a relic. It wasn't a terribly dignified moment.</sub>

Actually all that thread is worth reading except for Ingemann's awful, awful posts.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Man-made emotional climate change.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

As someone noted on AAD, the sentiment makes more sense if you replace "economics" (the subject) with "the economy" (the object of study). As written it makes economics sound a little bit too much like the Tao. "That which can be named is not the true economics."

But isn't the Economy as a notion essentially Taoist anyway?