Political History after the Cultural Turn.

Abstract

Traditional political history is dead and is still dying. Over two decades ago, Lynn Hunt observed, Social history has ovenaken political history as the most important area of research in history. The proponents of the new social history called for a broader, bottom-up, and more sociological account of the past. These scholars turned to historical sociology, social theory, as well as new empirical, socialscience methodologies in creating a fresh approach to history. More recently, of course, cultural history has ovenaken social history as the historical subdiscipline in which most doctoral research is conducted. While literary theory has played an important role in shaping the ways in which cultural historians think about language, the most influential discipline directly or indirectly for the innovations of these scholars has been cultural anthropology. Practitioners of both the new social h istory and the new cultural history have been at one in denouncing (and moving speedily past) the traditional techniques, narratives, and perspectives of the old political history. Tony Judt, certainly not an uncritical advocate of either the new social or the new cultural history, captured a widespreadcontempt for political history after the social-cultural turn. Traditional political history continues on its untroubled way, he observed, describing in detail the behaviour of ruling classes and the transformations which took place within them. Divorced from social history, this remains, as ever, a form of historical writing adapted to the preservation of the status quo; it concerns itself with activities peculiar to the ruling group, activities of an apparently rational and self-justifying nature. Whatever their internecine differences, practitioners of most new historical subdisciplines have come to view traditional political history as an essentially conservative and crabbed way of approaching an increasingly rich and diverse range of historical material