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The Past and Present Society The Revival of Narrative: Some Comments Author(s): E. J. Hobsbawm Source: Past & Present, No. 86 (Feb., 1980), pp. 3-8 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/650738 Accessed: 18/10/2010 05:11 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Oxford University Press and The Past and Present Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Past & Present. http://www.jstor.org THE REVIVAL OF NARRATIVE: SOME COMMENTS LAWRENCE STONE BELIEVES THAT THERE IS A REVIVALOF "NARRATIVE history" because there has been a decline in the history devoted to asking "the big why questions", the generalizing "scientific history". This in turn he thinks is due to disillusionment with the essentially economic determinist models of historical explanation, Marxist or otherwise, which have tended to dominate in the post-war years; to the declining ideological commitment of western intellectuals; con- temporary experience which has reminded us that political action and decision can shape history; and the failure of "quantitative history" (another claimant to "scientific" status) to deliver the goods.' Two questions are involved in this argument, which I have brutally over- simplified: what has been happening in historiography, and how are these developments to be explained?Since it is common ground that in history "the facts" are always selected, shaped and perhaps distorted by the historian who observes them, there is an element ofpartipris, not to say intellectual autobiography, in Stone's treatment of both questions, as in my comments on it. I think we may accept that the twenty years following the Second World War saw a sharp decline in political and religious history, in the use of "ideas" as an explanation of history, and a remarkable turn to socio-economic history and to historical explanation in terms of "social forces", as Momigliano noted as early as i954.2 Whether or not we call them "economic-determinist", these currents of hist- oriography became influential, in some cases dominant, in the main western centres of historiography, not to mention, for other reasons, the eastern ones. We may also accept that in recent years there has been considerable diversification, and a marked revival of interest in themes which were rather more marginal to the main concerns of the historical outsiders who in those years became historical insiders, though such themes were never neglected. After all, Braudel wrote about Philip II as well as the Mediterranean, and Le Roy Ladurie's monograph on Le carnaval de Romans of 1580 is anticipated by a much briefer, but most perceptive, account of the same episode in his Les paysans du Languedoc.3 If Marxist historians of the 1970S write 1 Lawrence Stone, "The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History", Past and Present, no. 85 (Nov. 1979), pp. 3-24. 2 Arnaldo Momigliano, "A Hundred Years after Ranke", in his Studies in Historiography (London, 1966), pp. 108-9. 3 Fernand Braudel, La Mediterranee et le monde mediterraneen d l'epoque de Philippe II (Paris, 1960); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Le carnaval de Romans (Paris, 1979); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Les paysans du Languedoc, 2 vols. (Paris, 1966), i, pp. 394-9, 505-6. 4 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 86 entire books on the role of radical-national myths, such as the Welsh Madoc legend, Christopher Hill at least wrote a seminal article on the myth of the Norman Yoke in the early 1950S.4 Still, there probably has been a change. Whether this amounts to a revival of"narrative history" as defined by Stone (basically chronological ordering of the material in "a single coherent story, albeit with sub-plots" and a concentration "on man not circumstances") is difficult to determine, since Stone deliberately eschews a quantitative survey and concentrates on "a very tiny, but disproportionatelyprominent, section of the historical profession as a whole".5 Nevertheless there is evidence that the old historical avant- garde no longer rejects, despises and combats the old-fashioned "history of events" or even biographical history, as some of it used to. Fernand Braudel himself has given unstinted praise to a notably traditional exercise in popular narrative history, Claude Manceron's attempt to present the origins of the French Revolution through a series of overlapping biographies of contemporaries,great and small.6 On the other hand the historical minority whose supposedly changed interests Stone surveys, has not in fact changed over to practising narrative history. If we leave aside deliberate historiographical con- servatives or neo-conservatives such as the British "antiquarian empiricists", there is very little simple narrative history among the works Stone cites or refers to. For almost all of them the event, the in- dividual, even the recapture of some mood or way of thinking of the past, are not ends in themselves, but the means of illuminating some wider question, which goes far beyond the particular story and its characters. In short those historians who continue to believe in the possibility of generalizing about human societies and their development, continue to be interested in "the big why questions", though they may some- times focus on different ones from those on which they concentrated twenty or thirty years ago. There is really no evidence that such historians - the ones Stone is mainly concerned with - have abandoned "the attempt to produce a coherent... explanation of change in the past".7 Whether they (or we) also regard their attempt as "scientific" will no doubt depend on our definition of "science", but we need not enter this dispute about labels. Moreover I very much doubt whether such historians feel that they are "forced back upon the 4 Christopher Hill, "The Norman Yoke", in John Saville (ed.), Democracy and the Labour Movement: Essays in Honour of Dona Torr (London, 1954), repr. in Chris- topher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the i7th Century (London, 1958), pp. 50- 22. 5 Stone, op. cit., pp. 3, 4. 6 Fernand Braudel, "Une parfaite reussite" [review of Claude Manceron, La Revolution qui leve, I785-I787 (Paris, 1979)], L'histoire, no. 21 (1980), pp. o18-9. 7 Stone, op. cit., p. 19. THE REVIVAL OF NARRATIVE 5 principle of indeterminacy",8 any more than Marx felt his writings about Louis Napoleon to be incompatible with the materialist concep- tion of history. No doubt there are historians who have abandoned such attempts, and certainly there are some who combat them, perhaps with a zeal increased by ideological commitment. (Whether or not Marxism has declined intellectually, it is hard to detect much muting of ideological controversy among western historians, though the participants and the specific issues may not be the same as twenty years ago.) Probably neo-conservative history has gained ground, at any rate in Britain, both in the form of the "young antiquarian empiricists" who "write detailed political narratives which implicitly deny that there is any deep-seated meaning to history except the accidental whims of fortune and personality",9 and in the form of works like Theodore Zeldin's (and Richard Cobb's) remarkableplunges into those strata of the past, to which "almost every aspect of traditionalist history" is irrelevant, including the answering of questions.10So, probably, has what might be called anti-intellectual leftist history. But this, except very tan- gentially, is not what Stone is concerned with. How then are we to account for the shifts in historical subject- matter and interests, in so far as they have occurred or are occurring? One element in them, it may be suggested, reflects the remarkable widening of the field of history in the past twenty years, typified by the rise of "social history", that shapeless container for everything from changes in human physique to symbol and ritual, and above all for the lives of all people from beggars to emperors. As Braudel has observed, this "histoire obscure de tout le monde" is "the history towards which, in different ways, all historiography tends at present"." This is not the place to speculate on the reasons for this vast extension of the field, which certainly does not necessarily conflict with the attempt to produce a coherent explanation of the past. It does, however, increase the technical difficulty of writing history. How are these complexities to be presented? It is not surprising that historians experiment with different forms of such presentation, including notably those that borrow from the ancient techniques of literature (which has made its own stabs at displaying la comedie humaine), and also from the modern audio-visual media, in which all but the oldest of us are saturated.
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