Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [170]
There was a shift away from historical models or ‘the large why questions’, a shift from ‘the analytical to the descriptive mode’, 11 from economic and social structure to culture, from recovering fact to recovering feeling, from telescope to microscope – as in the enormously influential little monograph on the world-view of one sixteenth-century eccentric Friulian miller by the young Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg.12 Perhaps there was also an element of that curious intellectual distrust for the rationalism of the natural sciences which was to become much more fashionable as the century drew to its end. Not that one can see much of a return from structural to narrative history among academics, or to old-style political history. At any rate, as far as I know historians of younger generations in the past thirty years have so far produced no masterpiece of non-analytic narrative history to be compared to that acknowledged triumph of traditional scholarship in this genre, Steven Runciman’s The Crusades (1951–4). However, the sheer extent to which patently important matters had been concealed or passed in silence in the half-century since 1945 left a vast scope for straight, archive-based filling of gaps, or the ‘history of events’. One has only to think of the hidden continent of Soviet archives which came into public view in the 1990s, the history of the Cold War or the long official silences or public myths about France under German occupation, or about the foundation and early years of Israel.
Although the historiographical moderns who had battled so successfully against the ancients until the late 1960s were an alliance which contained the Marxists, the challenge to their supremacy did not come from the ideological right. If my generations of Marxist historians formed in the years from 1933 to 1956 had no real successors, it was not because the cold warriors gained ground in schools and history faculties – probably the opposite was the case – but because the generations of the post-1960s left mostly wanted something else. But once again, this was not a specific reaction against Marxism. In France the virtual hegemony of Braudelian history and the Annales came to an end after 1968, and the international influence of the journal dropped steeply.
At least some of the change in history echoed the extraordinary cultural revolution of the late 1960s, which had its epicentre in the universities, and more particularly in the arts and humanities. It was not so much an intellectual challenge as a change of mood. In Britain the ‘History Workshop’ movement was the most characteristic expression of the new post-1968 ‘historical left’. Its object was not so much historical discovery, explanation or even exposition, as inspiration, empathy and democratization. It also reflected the remarkable and unexpected growth of a mass public interest in the past which has given history a surprising prominence in print and on screen. History Workshop meetings, which brought together amateurs and professionals, intellectuals and workers, and vast numbers of the young in jeans, flanked by sleeping-bags and improvised creches, resembled gospel sessions, especially when addressed with the required hwyl by star performers such as the wonderful historian of Wales, Gwyn Alf Williams, a low-slung dark man whose superb management of his stammer served to underline his platform eloquence. It is typical that the first Women’s Liberation Conference in Britain (to which Marlene was taken by the females of our ‘New Left’ friends) grew out of a proposed History Workshop at the end of the 1960s. Sheila Rowbotham’s historical manifesto of feminism which followed was characteristically called Hidden from History. These were people for whom history was not so much a way of interpreting the world, but a