Jul 30, 2004
The Fortunes of Political History
Reading the laments of my fellow Cliopatria historian KC Johnson, and through him, of the historian Pauline Maier, I find myself a bit frustrated by the way that Maier both identifies and explains what she sees as patterns in her fields of specialization (colonial and revolutionary American history) and the way in turn that KC ties these observations to his established critique of the politics of his own institution. It seems to me that if historians in general are going to have a meaningful conversation about the subdivision of our discipline, we have to do several things from the outset:
1) Be rigorous in the way we identify and verify trends in our discipline, and diligently consider the widest variety of possible hypotheses for those trends.
Maier’s complaint does something I find troubling about the weakest kinds of cultural and intellectual history, which is to construct a claim about trends without either an evidentiarily supported comprehensive sense of a particular form of writing or a reasoned claim about why several particular examples are keystones or exemplars of larger patterns (or even the progenitors of such patterns).
Alan Taylor has written a book called American Colonies, and for Maier this is sufficient reason to claim that the entire field of colonial history now assiduously avoids the political, largely to avoid white men. This is odd just as a characterization of Alan Taylor, let alone the whole field. There’s a not-so-little book he wrote called William Cooper’s Town that has both white men and political history in plentitude.
I think to identify a trend, you need some bounds on your claims (what’s the time frame that counts as a trend? Last year’s books? Ten years of books?), and a persuasively magisterial sense of the field based on something more than being a senior scholar. I’m confident, for example, that social history could be said to dominate African historical scholarship, because I think I could document that persuasively with a twenty-year overview of my field and the publications within it. On the other hand, I suspect that some of the more casual critiques I’ve leveled in conversations and informal presentations—that, for example, the canonical claims of postcolonial theory have become central to the writing of modern African history and anthropology—would require much more serious and careful documenting if I were going to make them in a strong or strident way, which is surely a reasonable description of the tone of Maier’s remarks. Minus that documentation, I might think it wiser to criticize singular texts as singular texts.
More important by far is that Maier considers but lightly discards what strike me as the most persuasive explanations for the movements and trends she identifies. For one, history is a discipline that requires revisionism, not merely for intellectual or academic fashionability, but as a central tenet of its practice. Particularly in a field like American colonial or revolutionary history, which is data-rich and where much of the data available has been read or examined by many eyes (as opposed to African history, where many archival records, archaeological materials and other evidence have been examined by few scholars, or sometimes none at all), all we can do is revise and reconsider, to try and see what we already know in new ways. So I am hard-pressed in this sense alone to see what’s so wrong with the new synthesis that Taylor and Foner propose in American Colonies: they’re asking, well, how does American colonial history look if we look at it comparatively, and as part of the early modern history of colonialism? I’m hard-pressed in this sense equally to see what ‘s wrong with Atlantic history per se: it asks, well, how does American history look different if we think about it in the context of the whole Atlantic world? Doesn’t it expand our knowledge to think about known histories in new ways and new contexts? Does thinking in new ways obliterate the possibility of thinking in old ones? Can’t this just be value-added? Does every single year of scholarly publication need to come with a fixed quota of works which reflect categories set in iron in order to properly constitute a field of study?
Beyond this, as Maier notes, but seems to weigh only lightly, there are basic structural pressures upon graduate students and junior scholars to create the impression of novelty in what they do, and to conform to the norms of more specialized scholarly writing. If newly hired assistant professors do not write best-selling biographies of Thomas Jefferson or Alexander Hamilton, that may have a small amount to do with the fact that they are still learning their craft and a much larger amount to do with the fact that senior scholars in the field—including, I would suspect, Maier—do not tend to encourage, permit or endorse junior scholars undertaking broadly communicative work intended for the general public. That’s a privilege reserved to senior scholars. I can’t say I’m happy about that myself, but on the other hand, some of this is about the life cycle of intellectuals, and about when people hit their stride and achieve their greatest confidence. For many, that’s not while the ink is still drying on their doctorates.
More signally, it means that observing what newly minted junior scholars are writing is probably a lousy way to decipher what the truly dominant trends in a field are. If Ellis, McCullough and others are writing best-selling biographies of the Founding Fathers, why not use that as the benchmark that defines trends in the field? If so, political history in Maier's preferred sense isn't just doing fine, it's utterly dominating the field. If you look at the most influential scholars in any field of historical specialization, I would submit that you often will not learn what was most typical or influential in their work by looking at their first monographs.
This would be something of my complaint against KC’s claims, as well. His argument with Brooklyn College in specific has long seemed well founded to me, and it’s not unconnected with deeper problems in historical scholarship and academic politics that I am also very concerned with. But there is a slippage between those documented issues and an assertion that trends against political history—if they in fact exist—are explained entirely or largely by hostility to dead (or living) white males, by the crudest kind of identity politics. There are at least other explanations as well as more complex readings of the trends themselves to consider in the overall context of the discipline of history throughout the American academy, and consider fairly before we give that hypothesis pride of place.
2) Be generous about how we categorize the specializations of our colleagues and their work, in recognition of the fuzzy boundaries between different specializations and the ways in which scholarship and scholars evolve over time.
This is an issue that’s come up before in our Cliopatrian discussions of KC’s arguments. What is a political history, and how should we know what defines that field? Maier draws a very tight set of criteria implicitly in her critique, though she doesn’t define the field explicitly. Would Taylor’s William Cooper’s Town be political history? If not, why not? Simply because it also has social history in it? Is a work which focuses on the colonial or revolutionary public sphere and the “republic of letters” in North America political or cultural? Seems to me that it’s both, and there’s quite a lot in this vein in recent years.
In my own field, there’s been a resurgence—promptly partly by political scientists writing in a historical vein—in the nature of the colonial state and British policies of “indirect rule”. That work does not follow an old and largely moribund scholarly template in which the policy history of particular imperial administrators was studied narratively, instead combining social, intellectual and political history to try and characterize the nature of the colonial state and its relations to African social life—but I’d say that this work could fairly be classified as “political history”.
If KC and Maier insist that political history is narrowly only the history of events, of formal politics, of elected leaders, and they do not classify historians as within their specialization unless the entirety of their scholarly output and teaching interests falls within that narrow bound, then I would say that it’s no wonder they see it in decline. I suspect anyone who defined their specialization in those terms might perceive it to be much smaller and less vigorous than it in fact actually is.
3) Put our intellectual cards on the table and let honest disagreements be honest disagreements.
One of my major frustrations with KC’s recent piece is that it substitutes what I think is the real issue on the table, namely, the substance of the meaningful, useful and generative disagreements between political and social history, for mere complaint about numerical underrepresentation. This gambit to me feels like an uncanny mimicry of the weakest and most problematic strategies of institutionalized identity politics, to translate the substance of intellectual conflict into an attempt to permanently reserve a fixed number of chairs at the table in the name of a constituency whose importance is taken for granted. I quite agree with KC that his antagonists at his own institution (and some elsewhere) are doing just that, and I find it repellant. But we shouldn’t do as they do in response.
There is a real issue involved in the old conflict between political and social history that is badly served when either side reduces it to being about the status of white men living or dead. Considered more thoughtfully, questions like, “How do we best know the past, by studying the broad patterns and structures of everyday life that shape the lives of most human beings in a given era, or by studying the particular events and actions of powerful individuals?” are real questions and not easily resolved. (They may of course not be antagonistic questions, which was the second point of my essay, already discussed.) You can’t just suggest that there’s something obviously inappropriate about deciding that the more important fact of American history is the imperial expansion of the United States as opposed to the history of the Constitution. That’s a real argument, and it has to be made in real terms, with satisfying rigor, with mutual respect and appreciation on either side. There’s too much snide eye-rolling on either side of that fence. Very little of what Maier or KC seem to regard as the self-evident virtues of political history as they understand it are in fact self-evident—a point which goes equally well for social history. You have to make the case for the kind of work you prefer: not just assert that it is owed a place at the table merely because it exists.
4) Abandon once and for all the charge that some other specialization is “politicizing” history, with the implication that one’s own preferred camp is not doing so.
If there’s one thing we should know—not the least due to the work of Peter Novick—is that history has in some fashion or another always been politicized. The craft of history is not a science, whatever else it is. It involves deeply humanistic judgements about what matters and why it matters, and it is always deeply related to the needs and sensibility of the present. The intellectual foundations of the modern discipline were deeply, powerfully linked to the rise of the modern nation-state. You can’t read Ranke and say that he was apolitical. The same is true for the political history of the American Revolution in the era that Maier evidently regards as more ideal and preferable to the present—to ignore the ways in which that historiography was powerfully linked to pervasive conceptions of citizenship and civic duty and pushed race and gender to the side is to have a hopelessly politicized concept of what constitutes “politicization”. The question is not whether our history has a politics, but what kind of politics it has. The valid complaint that KC can make, I think, is not about whether history is being “politicized”, but whether practicing historians are being fair and open-minded in their own work and in their evaluation of others’ work, whether they seek pluralism and variety in the field because those things are an intellectual good in and of themselves, whether they are being crudely instrumental in the choices they make as scholars. But this is something that I wonder about in regard to Maier’s complaints: is she reading the work of her compatriots generously, appreciatively, and with a strong belief that the diversification and pluralization of the discipline is always a good thing? It’s right to call other historians on their intolerance, but not if that threatens to become a mirror-image intolerance or parochialism in reverse.
1) Be rigorous in the way we identify and verify trends in our discipline, and diligently consider the widest variety of possible hypotheses for those trends.
Maier’s complaint does something I find troubling about the weakest kinds of cultural and intellectual history, which is to construct a claim about trends without either an evidentiarily supported comprehensive sense of a particular form of writing or a reasoned claim about why several particular examples are keystones or exemplars of larger patterns (or even the progenitors of such patterns).
Alan Taylor has written a book called American Colonies, and for Maier this is sufficient reason to claim that the entire field of colonial history now assiduously avoids the political, largely to avoid white men. This is odd just as a characterization of Alan Taylor, let alone the whole field. There’s a not-so-little book he wrote called William Cooper’s Town that has both white men and political history in plentitude.
I think to identify a trend, you need some bounds on your claims (what’s the time frame that counts as a trend? Last year’s books? Ten years of books?), and a persuasively magisterial sense of the field based on something more than being a senior scholar. I’m confident, for example, that social history could be said to dominate African historical scholarship, because I think I could document that persuasively with a twenty-year overview of my field and the publications within it. On the other hand, I suspect that some of the more casual critiques I’ve leveled in conversations and informal presentations—that, for example, the canonical claims of postcolonial theory have become central to the writing of modern African history and anthropology—would require much more serious and careful documenting if I were going to make them in a strong or strident way, which is surely a reasonable description of the tone of Maier’s remarks. Minus that documentation, I might think it wiser to criticize singular texts as singular texts.
More important by far is that Maier considers but lightly discards what strike me as the most persuasive explanations for the movements and trends she identifies. For one, history is a discipline that requires revisionism, not merely for intellectual or academic fashionability, but as a central tenet of its practice. Particularly in a field like American colonial or revolutionary history, which is data-rich and where much of the data available has been read or examined by many eyes (as opposed to African history, where many archival records, archaeological materials and other evidence have been examined by few scholars, or sometimes none at all), all we can do is revise and reconsider, to try and see what we already know in new ways. So I am hard-pressed in this sense alone to see what’s so wrong with the new synthesis that Taylor and Foner propose in American Colonies: they’re asking, well, how does American colonial history look if we look at it comparatively, and as part of the early modern history of colonialism? I’m hard-pressed in this sense equally to see what ‘s wrong with Atlantic history per se: it asks, well, how does American history look different if we think about it in the context of the whole Atlantic world? Doesn’t it expand our knowledge to think about known histories in new ways and new contexts? Does thinking in new ways obliterate the possibility of thinking in old ones? Can’t this just be value-added? Does every single year of scholarly publication need to come with a fixed quota of works which reflect categories set in iron in order to properly constitute a field of study?
Beyond this, as Maier notes, but seems to weigh only lightly, there are basic structural pressures upon graduate students and junior scholars to create the impression of novelty in what they do, and to conform to the norms of more specialized scholarly writing. If newly hired assistant professors do not write best-selling biographies of Thomas Jefferson or Alexander Hamilton, that may have a small amount to do with the fact that they are still learning their craft and a much larger amount to do with the fact that senior scholars in the field—including, I would suspect, Maier—do not tend to encourage, permit or endorse junior scholars undertaking broadly communicative work intended for the general public. That’s a privilege reserved to senior scholars. I can’t say I’m happy about that myself, but on the other hand, some of this is about the life cycle of intellectuals, and about when people hit their stride and achieve their greatest confidence. For many, that’s not while the ink is still drying on their doctorates.
More signally, it means that observing what newly minted junior scholars are writing is probably a lousy way to decipher what the truly dominant trends in a field are. If Ellis, McCullough and others are writing best-selling biographies of the Founding Fathers, why not use that as the benchmark that defines trends in the field? If so, political history in Maier's preferred sense isn't just doing fine, it's utterly dominating the field. If you look at the most influential scholars in any field of historical specialization, I would submit that you often will not learn what was most typical or influential in their work by looking at their first monographs.
This would be something of my complaint against KC’s claims, as well. His argument with Brooklyn College in specific has long seemed well founded to me, and it’s not unconnected with deeper problems in historical scholarship and academic politics that I am also very concerned with. But there is a slippage between those documented issues and an assertion that trends against political history—if they in fact exist—are explained entirely or largely by hostility to dead (or living) white males, by the crudest kind of identity politics. There are at least other explanations as well as more complex readings of the trends themselves to consider in the overall context of the discipline of history throughout the American academy, and consider fairly before we give that hypothesis pride of place.
2) Be generous about how we categorize the specializations of our colleagues and their work, in recognition of the fuzzy boundaries between different specializations and the ways in which scholarship and scholars evolve over time.
This is an issue that’s come up before in our Cliopatrian discussions of KC’s arguments. What is a political history, and how should we know what defines that field? Maier draws a very tight set of criteria implicitly in her critique, though she doesn’t define the field explicitly. Would Taylor’s William Cooper’s Town be political history? If not, why not? Simply because it also has social history in it? Is a work which focuses on the colonial or revolutionary public sphere and the “republic of letters” in North America political or cultural? Seems to me that it’s both, and there’s quite a lot in this vein in recent years.
In my own field, there’s been a resurgence—promptly partly by political scientists writing in a historical vein—in the nature of the colonial state and British policies of “indirect rule”. That work does not follow an old and largely moribund scholarly template in which the policy history of particular imperial administrators was studied narratively, instead combining social, intellectual and political history to try and characterize the nature of the colonial state and its relations to African social life—but I’d say that this work could fairly be classified as “political history”.
If KC and Maier insist that political history is narrowly only the history of events, of formal politics, of elected leaders, and they do not classify historians as within their specialization unless the entirety of their scholarly output and teaching interests falls within that narrow bound, then I would say that it’s no wonder they see it in decline. I suspect anyone who defined their specialization in those terms might perceive it to be much smaller and less vigorous than it in fact actually is.
3) Put our intellectual cards on the table and let honest disagreements be honest disagreements.
One of my major frustrations with KC’s recent piece is that it substitutes what I think is the real issue on the table, namely, the substance of the meaningful, useful and generative disagreements between political and social history, for mere complaint about numerical underrepresentation. This gambit to me feels like an uncanny mimicry of the weakest and most problematic strategies of institutionalized identity politics, to translate the substance of intellectual conflict into an attempt to permanently reserve a fixed number of chairs at the table in the name of a constituency whose importance is taken for granted. I quite agree with KC that his antagonists at his own institution (and some elsewhere) are doing just that, and I find it repellant. But we shouldn’t do as they do in response.
There is a real issue involved in the old conflict between political and social history that is badly served when either side reduces it to being about the status of white men living or dead. Considered more thoughtfully, questions like, “How do we best know the past, by studying the broad patterns and structures of everyday life that shape the lives of most human beings in a given era, or by studying the particular events and actions of powerful individuals?” are real questions and not easily resolved. (They may of course not be antagonistic questions, which was the second point of my essay, already discussed.) You can’t just suggest that there’s something obviously inappropriate about deciding that the more important fact of American history is the imperial expansion of the United States as opposed to the history of the Constitution. That’s a real argument, and it has to be made in real terms, with satisfying rigor, with mutual respect and appreciation on either side. There’s too much snide eye-rolling on either side of that fence. Very little of what Maier or KC seem to regard as the self-evident virtues of political history as they understand it are in fact self-evident—a point which goes equally well for social history. You have to make the case for the kind of work you prefer: not just assert that it is owed a place at the table merely because it exists.
4) Abandon once and for all the charge that some other specialization is “politicizing” history, with the implication that one’s own preferred camp is not doing so.
If there’s one thing we should know—not the least due to the work of Peter Novick—is that history has in some fashion or another always been politicized. The craft of history is not a science, whatever else it is. It involves deeply humanistic judgements about what matters and why it matters, and it is always deeply related to the needs and sensibility of the present. The intellectual foundations of the modern discipline were deeply, powerfully linked to the rise of the modern nation-state. You can’t read Ranke and say that he was apolitical. The same is true for the political history of the American Revolution in the era that Maier evidently regards as more ideal and preferable to the present—to ignore the ways in which that historiography was powerfully linked to pervasive conceptions of citizenship and civic duty and pushed race and gender to the side is to have a hopelessly politicized concept of what constitutes “politicization”. The question is not whether our history has a politics, but what kind of politics it has. The valid complaint that KC can make, I think, is not about whether history is being “politicized”, but whether practicing historians are being fair and open-minded in their own work and in their evaluation of others’ work, whether they seek pluralism and variety in the field because those things are an intellectual good in and of themselves, whether they are being crudely instrumental in the choices they make as scholars. But this is something that I wonder about in regard to Maier’s complaints: is she reading the work of her compatriots generously, appreciatively, and with a strong belief that the diversification and pluralization of the discipline is always a good thing? It’s right to call other historians on their intolerance, but not if that threatens to become a mirror-image intolerance or parochialism in reverse.