Social Interpretations of Nazism
Renewing a Tradition
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10073151 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Peter Baldwin (0000-0003-1745-5119, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1990 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 5-37 |
| Publication date | 1990-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Contemporary History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-0094 • E-ISSN: 1461-7250 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/002200949002500101 |
| OpenAlex | W2022029199 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
| References cited | 1 |
Social explanations, once a standard methodology in history, have been increasingly called into question during the past two decades.' Such accounts rely on a pyramidal conception of causation, from economic to social through political and finally to cultural and ideological levels. Crudely put, they explain political and cultural matters by reference to developments in what are regarded as causally prior strata. Ultimately, these are economic, but as actually practised, some combination of socio-economic forces is commonly referred to: hence the term social interpretation, immortalized by Alfred Cobban in the process of dismantling one of its most popular versions, the bourgeois origin of the French Revolution.2 Cobban was only the flag-carrier for a wider phalanx of revision that has since swept the profession. Most moderately, updated redefinitions of class, stratification and exploitation have made social interpretations sensitive to new issues, have allowed them to identify legitimate historical actors where earlier they saw only false consciousness and irrelevance. The middle class that would not be proletarianized has been a nettlesome problem long wrestled with; new social movements, framed in terms of gender and ethnicity that are not readily reducible to the usual notions of class and therefore hard to reconcile with the classic Marxist version of the social explanation, are more recent trouble-spots.3 The social interpretation has been changed in such reformulations, but some form of social interpretation still holds the field here. In more far-reaching recastings, however, the chain of causality implied even by a modified social interpretation has been severed. Realms of historical events, political and cultural, that in the older conception were derived from underlying economic and social factors have been granted an autonomy, an ability reciprocally to influence more material layers. Ideology and intellectual forces have
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Environmental ethics · German · Nazism · Political science · Sociology · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Philosophy
| Unique citing works | 7 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,19 |
| Citation span | 1989 - 2019 (31) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 7 |