Civilizing Efforts

Back in 1963, Past & Present published an attack on the British historical establishment by a young Oxford don called Keith Thomas. British historians were victims, he said, of an educational system which rewarded them for dashing off ‘dogmatic and personal interpretations’, based on ‘rapid reading in secondary sources’. They had been left with a frivolous fixation on ‘the gymnastics of minor politicians’, a ‘distaste for theory and speculation’, and, worst of all, an incapacity for serious collaborative inquiry. Instead of trying to improve the public’s understanding of ‘society as a whole’, they preferred to peddle a ‘personal view of the world’, in a flurry of ‘rhetoric and impressionism’. (No examples were given, but Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Gentry was described as ‘a rhetorical tour de force’.) The condition of British history was, in short, ‘a tragedy’. Historians needed to get out of their smug little club and learn some tricks from the new kids on the block – the social scientists. Economists and sociologists could teach them about quantitative information and the use of computers, while the better sort of Marxists might help with the ‘interrelation and mutual explanation of social facts’. Above all, they should seek out the social anthropologists, who were clearly ‘engaged in a roughly similar activity to our own’. Thomas cited G. M. Young’s injunction to historians – ‘go on reading until you can hear people talking’ – and suggested that anthropologists do the same thing, only better. Instead of just gathering facts – that would be ‘mere ethnography ... a much lower-level activity’ – they immerse themselves in a community till they understand it like a native, and then they construct general theories to explain how it works. The idea of anthropology as a ‘science’, might be overblown, but at least it fostered ‘discipline and precision of thought’, and enabled anthropologists, unlike historians, to ‘explain things in terms of each other rather than treating them separately, like patients in a hospital’

Art · Club · Gentry · Literature · Media studies · Political science · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · History · Law · Philosophy