Historical awareness 1 5

The invented traditions of nationalism

The consequences of respect for tradition are particularly disturbing

in the case of nationalism. Nations are of course the product of

history, and the same national designation has usually meant different things at different times. Unfortunately historians have not

always kept this truth at the forefront of their minds. For all their

scholarly principle, the nineteenth-century historicists found it hard

to resist the demand for one-dimensional, nation-building history,

and many did not even try. Europe was then the scene of bitterly

contested national identities, as existing national boundaries were

challenged by those many peoples whose sense of nationhood

was denied – from the Germans and Italians to the Poles and

Hungarians. Their claim to nationhood rested partly on language

and common culture. But it also required a historical rationale,

of past glories to be revived, or ancient wrongs to be avenged – in

short, a tradition that could sustain the morale of the nation in the

present and impress the other powers of Europe. Historians were

caught up in popular nationalism like everyone else, and many

saw no contradiction between the tenets of their profession and

the writing of self-serving national histories. František Palacký

was both a historian and a Czech nationalist. He combined his two

great passions in a sequence of books that portrayed the Czechs as a

freedom-loving and democratic people since the dawn of historical

time; when he died in 1876 he was mourned as the father of the

Czech nation.22 Celebratory histories of this kind lend themselves

to regular rituals of commemoration, when the national self-image

could be reinforced in the popular mind. Every year the Serbs mark

the anniversary of their epic defeat at the hands of the Turks on

the field of Kosovo Polje in 1389, and in so doing reaffirm their

identity as a brave but beleaguered people; they continued to do so

throughout the crisis in former Yugoslavia.23 In such instances the

untidy reality of history is beside the point. Nation, race and culture

are brought together as a unified constant. Other examples span the

modern world from the Nazis in Germany to the ideology of black

separatism in the United States. Essentialism or ‘immemorialism’

of this kind produces a powerful sense of exclusive identity, but it

makes bad history. Not only is everything in the past that contradicts the required self-image suppressed; the interval between ‘then’

and ‘now’ is telescoped by the assertion of an unchanging identity,

impervious to the play of historical circumstance.

essentialism

Relating to the basic

nature (the ‘essence’) of

people or nations.

1 6 THE P U R SUI T O F H I S TOR Y

The process of tradition-making is particularly clear in newly

autonomous nations, where the need for a legitimizing past is

strongly felt and the materials for a national past are often in

short supply. Within two generations of the War of Independence,

Americans had come to identify with a flattering self-image: in

taming the wilderness far away from the corruptions of the old

society in Europe, their colonial forebears had developed the

values of self-reliance, honesty and liberty that were now the heritage of all Americans: hence the enduring appeal of folk heroes

such as Daniel Boone. More recently many African countries have

faced the problem that their boundaries are the artificial outcome

of the European partition of the continent in the late nineteenth

century. In a few cases, such as Mali and Zimbabwe, descent can

be claimed from a much earlier state of the same name. Ghana

adopted the name of a medieval trading empire which did not

include its present territory at all. Elsewhere in the continent

political leaders have invoked timeless qualities from the precolonial past (like Julius Nyerere’s ujamaa, or brotherhood) as a

charter of identity. To forge a national identity without some such

legitimizing past is probably impossible.

But appeals to an unchanging past are not confined to new

or repressed nations. Nineteenth-century Britain had a relatively

secure sense of nationhood, yet in the work of historians at that

time is to be found an unchanging national essence as well as the

idea of change over time. William Stubbs, usually regarded as the

first professional historian in Britain, believed that the reasons

for the growth of the English constitution through the Middle

Ages lay ‘deep in the very nature of the people’; in this reading

parliamentary government became the expression of a national

genius for freedom.24 Essentialist categories come readily to the

lips of politicians, particularly at moments of crisis. During the

Second World War Winston Churchill invoked a tradition of

dogged resistance to foreign attack stretching back to Pitt the

Younger and Elizabeth I. Liberal commentators were uncomfortably reminded of this vein of rhetoric at the time of the Falklands

War in 1982. Pondering the lessons of the conflict, Margaret

Thatcher declared:

This generation can match their fathers and grandfathers in ability, in

courage, and in resolution. We have not changed. When the demands of

war and the dangers to our own people call us to arms – then we British

are as we have always been – competent, courageous and resolute.25

rhetoric

Originally the ancient

Greek art of public

speaking, but more usually

used nowadays to mean

points that rely on the

persuasive power of words

or voice rather than actual

argument.

Historical awareness 1 7

Nationalism of this kind rests on the assertion of tradition, rather

than an interpretation of history. It suppresses difference and

change in order to uphold identity.

IV

Nostalgia – history as loss

Traditionalism is the crudest distortion of historical awareness,

because it does away with the central notion of development over

time. Other distortions are more subtle. One that has huge influence is nostalgia. Like tradition, nostalgia is backward-looking,

but instead of denying the fact of historical change, it interprets it

in one direction only – as change for the worse. Nostalgia is most

familiar perhaps as generational regret: older people habitually

complain that nowadays the young are unruly, or that the country

is ‘going to the dogs’, and the same complaints have been documented over a very long period.26 But nostalgia works on a broader

canvas too. It works most strongly as a reaction to a sense of loss

in the recent past, and it is therefore particularly characteristic of

societies undergoing rapid change. Anticipation and optimism are

never the only – or even the main – social responses to progress.

There is nearly always regret or alarm at the passing of old ways

and familiar landmarks. A yearning backward glance offers consolation, an escape in the mind from a harsh reality. It is when the

past appears to be slipping away before our eyes that we seek to

re-create it in the imagination. This was one of the mainsprings of

the Romantic movement, and within historicism itself there was

a sometimes unduly nostalgic impulse, as scholars reacted against

the industrialization and urbanization around them. It is no

accident that the Middle Ages, with its close-knit communities and

its slow pace of change, came into fashion just as the gathering

pace of economic change was enlarging the scale of social life. Ever

since the Industrial Revolution, nostalgia has continued to be one

of the emotional reflexes of societies experiencing major change.

One of its commonest expressions in Britain today is ‘heritage’.

When the past is conserved or re-enacted for our entertainment, it

is usually (though not invariably) presented in its most attractive

light. Bygone splendours, such as the medieval tournament or the

Elizabethan banquet, naturally lend themselves to the pleasures of

spectacle; but everyday life – such as the back-breaking routines

1 8 THE P U R SUI T O F H I S TOR Y

of the early industrial craft shop or the Victorian kitchen – is also

dressed up in order to be visually appealing. A sense of loss is part

of the experience of visiting heritage sites.

The problem with nostalgia is that it is a very lopsided view

of history. If the past is redesigned as a comfortable refuge, all its

negative features must be removed. The past becomes better and

simpler than the present. Thus nineteenth-century medievalism

took little account of the brevity and squalor of life or the power

of a malign spirit-world. Present-day nostalgia shows a comparable myopia. Even a simulation of the London Blitz will prompt

regret at the loss of ‘wartime spirit’ as much as horror at the

effects of aerial bombardment. Champions of ‘family values’ who

posit a golden age in the past (before 1939 or 1914, according

to taste) overlook the large number of loveless marriages before

divorce was made easier, and the high incidence of family breakup through the loss of a spouse or parent from natural causes. In

such cases, as Raphael Samuel put it, the past functions less as

history than as allegory:

myopia

Short-sightedness.

The image of the dome

of St Paul’s Cathedral

standing intact through

the devastating London

Blitz of 1940 became a

powerful symbol both

of British defiance of

Nazi Germany and of a

particular approach to the

distinctiveness of British

history. More recent

scholarship questions the

extent to which the British

people were united in

the Blitz, but the popular

social ‘memory’ of the

‘Blitz spirit’ shows no sign

of diminishing.

(Getty Images/Hulton

Archive)

Historical awareness 1 9

It is a testimony to the decline in manners and morals, a mirror

to our failings, a measure of absence ... By a process of selective

amnesia the past becomes a historical equivalent of the dream of

primal bliss, or of the enchanted space which memory accords to

childhood.27

This kind of outlook is not only an unreliable guide to the

past but also a basis for pessimism and rigidity in the present.

Nostalgia presents the past as an alternative to the present instead

of as a prelude to it. It encourages us to hanker after an unattainable golden age instead of engaging creatively with the world as it

is. Whereas historical awareness should enhance our insight into

the present, nostalgia indulges a desire to escape from it.

V

Dismissing the past: history as progress

At the other end of the scale of historical distortion lies the

belief in progress. If nostalgia reflects a pessimistic view of the

world, progress is an optimistic creed, for it asserts not only that

change in the past has been for the better but that improvement

will continue into the future. Like process, progress is about

change over time, but with the crucial difference that a positive

value is placed on the change, endowing it with moral content.

The concept of progress is fundamental to modernity, because

for 200 years it was the defining myth of the West, a source of

cultural self-assurance and of outright superiority in the West’s

dealings with the rest of the world. In this sense progress was

essentially the invention of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth

century. Hitherto a limit on human development had always been

assumed, either on account of the mysterious workings of Divine

Providence or because the achievements of classical antiquity

were regarded as unsurpassable. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century placed its faith in the power of human reason to

transform the world. Writers such as Voltaire, Hume and Adam

Smith regarded history as an unfinished record of material and

moral improvement. They sought to reveal the shape of history

by tracing the growth of human society from primitive barbarism

to civilization and refinement. The confidence of these historians

may seem naïve and grandiose today, but for 200 years some such

structure has underpinned all varieties of progressive thought,

2 0 THE P U R SUI T O F H I S TOR Y

including both liberal democracy and Marxism. As recently as the

1960s representatives of these two traditions – J.H. Plumb and

E.H. Carr – wrote widely read manifestos for history informed

by a passionate belief in progress.28 That kind of faith is much

rarer today, in the light of dire predictions of environmental and

economic disaster. But few of us are happy to live in a world of

nostalgic regret all the time; the yearning for a lost golden age in

one sphere is often balanced by the confident disparagement of

‘the bad old days’ in another.

That dismissal of the past points to the limitations of progress

as a view of history. Whereas ‘process’ is a neutral term without

an implicit value judgment, ‘progress’ is by definition evaluative

and partial; since it is premised on the superiority of the present

over the past, it inevitably takes on whatever values happen to

be prevalent today, with the consequence that the past seems

less admirable and more ‘primitive’ the further back in time we

go. Condescension and incomprehension are the result. If the

past exists strictly to validate the achievements of the present,

there can be no room for an appreciation of its cultural riches.

Proponents of progress have never been good at understanding

periods remote from their own age. Voltaire, for example, was

notoriously unable to recognize any good in the Middle Ages;

his historical writings traced the growth of rationality and tolerance and condemned the rest. So if the desire to demonstrate

progress is pressed too far, it quickly comes into conflict with the

historian’s obligation to re-create the past on its own terms. In

fact historicism took shape very much as a reaction against the

present-minded devaluation of the past that characterized many

writers of the Enlightenment. Ranke regarded every age as being

‘next to God’, by which he meant that it should not be prejudged

by modern standards. Interpreting history as an overarching story

of progress involves doing just that.

Tradition, nostalgia and progress provide the basic constituents of social memory. Each answers a deep psychological need

for security – through seeming to promise no change, or change

for the better, or an escape into a more congenial past. The real

objection to them is that, as a governing stance, they require the

past to conform with a deeply felt and often unacknowledged

need. They are about belief, not enquiry. They look for a consistent window on the past, and they end up doing scant justice

to anything else.

J.H. Plumb (1911–2001)

Sir John H. Plumb,

a leading Cambridge

historian specializing in

the history of eighteenthcentury Britain. Plumb was

an influential figure, many

of whose students went

on to become high-profile

historians.

Historical awareness 2 1

VI

Challenging the conventional version

If social need so easily leads to distorted images of the past, it

is hardly surprising that historians have on the whole kept their

distance from it. At a practical level the stance of the professional

historian towards social memory is not always consistent. Thus

Herbert Butterfield, who made his name in the 1930s with an

attack on present-minded history, wrote an impassioned evocation of the English historical tradition in 1944 which was clearly

intended to contribute to wartime morale.29 Today the newspapers quite often publish articles by leading historians who are

tempted by the opportunity to influence popular attitudes towards

the past. But the profession as a whole prefers to emphasize how

different the purpose and approach of scholarly historical work

are. Whereas the starting point for most popular forms of knowledge about the past is the requirements of the present, the starting

point of historicism is the aspiration to re-enter or re-create the

past.

It follows that one important task of historians is to challenge

socially motivated misrepresentations of the past. This activity

has been likened to ‘the eye-surgeon, specializing in removing

cataracts’.30 But whereas patients are only too glad to have their

sight corrected, society may be deeply attached to its faulty vision

of the past, and historians do not make themselves popular in

pointing this out. Many of their findings incur the odium of

undermining hallowed pieties – as in the case of historians who

question the efficacy of Churchill’s wartime leadership, or who

attempt a nonsectarian approach to the history of Northern

Ireland. There is probably no official nationalist history in the

world that is proof against the deflating effect of academic

enquiry. The same is true of the kind of engaged history that

underwrites the conflict between Left and Right. Politically motivated labour history in Britain has tended to emphasize political

radicalism and the struggle against capital; yet if it is to provide

a realistic historical perspective in which political strategies can

be planned, labour history cannot afford to ignore the equally

long tradition of working-class Toryism, still very much alive

today. When Peter Burke told a conference of socialist historians,

‘although I consider myself a socialist and a historian, I’m not

a socialist historian’, he meant that he wanted to study the real

Herbert Butterfield

(1900–79)

Cambridge historian

specializing in the

eighteenth century.

His analysis of The

Whig Interpretation of

History (1931) attacked

the tendency of ‘Whig’

historians to see history

in terms of progress,

thereby unjustly (and

anachronistically)

criticizing earlier ages as

‘backward’.

nonsectarian

Avoiding allegiance to any

particular religious group.

2 2 THE P U R SUI T O F H I S TOR Y

complexity of the historical record, not reduce it to an overdramatized confrontation between Us and Them.31 The same argument

can be made with regard to distortion emanating from the Right.

During the mid-1980s Margaret Thatcher tried to make political

capital out of a somewhat self-serving image of nineteenthcentury England. When she applauded ‘Victorian values’, she

meant that untrammelled individualism and a rolling back of the

state might once again make Britain great. She omitted to say that

the essential precondition of the Victorian economic miracle had

been Britain’s global strategic dominance, and she did not dwell

on the appalling social costs in terms of destitution and environmental damage. Historians were quick to point out that her vision

was both unrealistic and undesirable.32

The overlap between history and social memory

If this debunking activity would seem to put historians in the

opposite camp from the keepers of social memory, it needs to be

stressed that the distinction is by no means as hard and fast as

I have depicted it up to this point. One strand of opinion (particularly associated with Postmodernism) holds that there is in

fact no difference between history and social memory. According

to this view, the aspiration to re-create the past is an illusion,

and all historical writing bears the indelible impression of the

present – indeed tells us more about the present than the past.

I will evaluate the merits of this radically subversive position in

Chapter 7. Here it is enough to point out that the collapsing of

history into social memory appeals to a particular kind of sceptical theorist but commands very little support from historians.

However, there are significant areas of overlap. It would be wrong

to suppose that accuracy of research is the exclusive property of

professional historians. As Raphael Samuel pointed out, there is

an army of enthusiastic amateurs in this country, investigating

everything from family genealogy to steam locomotives, whose

fetish for accuracy is unsurpassed.33 Academic historians may distance themselves from the distortions of social memory, but many

well-established historical specialisms today have their origin in

an explicit political need: one thinks of labour history, women’s

history and African history. It is not always possible to distinguish completely between history and social memory, because

historians perform some of the tasks of social memory. Perhaps

untrammelled

Unhindered.

rolling back of the state

The role of the state

grew enormously in

twentieth-century Britain,

especially after Clement

Attlee’s postwar Labour

government (1945–51)

nationalized heavy

industry and the health

service. The Conservative

governments of Margaret

Thatcher (1979–90)

reversed this policy by

returning nationalized

industry to private

ownership.

Historical awareness 2 3

most important of all, social memory itself is an important topic

of historical enquiry. It is central to popular consciousness in all

its forms, from democratic politics to social mores and cultural

taste, and no comprehensive social history can afford to ignore

it; oral history represents in part an attempt to take account of

this dimension (see below, Chapter 11). In all these ways history

and social memory feed on each other. As Geoffrey Cubitt puts

it, ‘History and memory are proximate concepts: they inhabit a

similar mental territory’.34

Yet for all these points of convergence, the distinction that

historians like to make between their work and social memory

remains important. Whether social memory services a totalitarian

regime or the needs of interest groups within a democratic society,

its value and its prospects of survival are entirely dependent on

its functional effectiveness: the content of the memory will change

according to context and priorities. Of course historical scholarship is not immune from calculations of practical utility. Partly

this is because we understand more clearly than Ranke did that

historians cannot detach themselves completely from their own

time. Partly also, as I will argue in the next chapter, the richness

of history is positively enhanced by responding to topical agendas.

Where most historians will usually part company from the

keepers of social memory is in insisting that their findings should

be guided by the historicist principles described in this chapter –

that historical awareness should prevail over social need. This is

a principle that can be defended on its own merits. But it must

also be sustained if we are to have any prospect of learning from

history, as distinct from finding there the mirror-image of our

own immediate concerns. To that possibility I now turn.

Myths of popular history

When the Germans invaded France in May 1940 the British

Expeditionary Force was forced to retreat to the port of

Dunkerque (Dunkirk), from where it had to be evacuated under

heavy fire. Many in Britain mistakenly perceived the operation

as a success, and the ‘Dunkirk spirit’ came to denote cheery

optimism and resolution in the face of overwhelming odds.

On Easter Tuesday 1282 the people of Palermo rose up

against the French, massacring as many as they could find while

they were at vespers (evening prayer). The ‘Sicilian Vespers’ s

2 4 THE P U R SUI T O F H I S TOR Y

became a symbol of the immense potential power of a popular

uprising to strike without warning and to oust a foreign

occupying force, and therefore had resonance far beyond its

immediate historical context. The Mafia also has its origins in

medieval Sicily, where it was one of a number of clandestine

brotherhoods operating a pseudo-feudal system outside the law.

Mafia ‘barons’ ruled their neighbourhoods, often combining

benevolence with ruthless enforcement of their authority.

Elements of the Mafia were caught up in large-scale Italian

emigration to the United States in the late nineteenth century,

where they moved into protection rackets and organized crime.

The Italian–American Mafia rose to public prominence through

its involvement in supplying illegal alcohol during the years of

Prohibition (1919–33), becoming part of American mythology in

the process.

In 1776 representatives of the thirteen British colonies in

North America, including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and

Benjamin Franklin, met in Philadelphia and signed the Declaration

of Independence, renouncing British rule and founding the United

States. Nowadays they are popularly revered and romanticized

in America as the ‘Founding Fathers’. It remains rare – indeed, it

is considered almost unpatriotic – for Americans to subject the

Founding Fathers to serious critical historical evaluation.

Malcolm X (1925–65), a leading figure in the radical black

civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960s, called for

a major reappraisal of the mythology of American history and of

the role Africans played in it.

Periods of history

It is easy to forget that historical periods are later constructs;

no one at the time knew they were living in ‘the ancient world’

or ‘the Middle Ages’. These terms also reflect the values and

judgements of those who coined them. The term ‘Middle Ages’

was coined by scholars of the fifteenth and sixteenth-century

Renaissance to refer to what they saw as a long period of

ignorance and superstition which interposed between the ‘golden

age’ of the ancients and their own day. Periods are often defined

in terms of centuries or decades – ‘the eighteenth century’, ‘the

Sixties’ – or else in terms of rulers, as in ‘Tudor England’ or

‘the Victorians’, though this can be unsatisfactory: ‘Victorian’

attitudes can be traced up to the First World War; the reign of the

first Tudor monarch, Henry VII, was not significantly different

from that of his Yorkist predecessors; and the features most

Historical awareness 2 5

Further reading

Michael Bentley, Modern Historiography, Routledge, 1999.

Beverley Southgate, History: What and Why?, 2nd edn, Routledge,

2004.

J.H. Plumb, The Death of the Past, Macmillan, 1969.

commonly associated with the youth culture of the Sixties can be

more accurately dated from c.1965 to c.1975. Historians often

deliberately ignore conventional periodization: Frank O’Gorman

has written of the ‘long eighteenth century’, from the ‘Glorious’

Revolution of 1688 to the Reform Act of 1832, while Eric

Hobsbawm has written of a ‘short twentieth century’, beginning

with the First World War and ending with the fall of European

communism in 1989–91.

Enlightenment and the Romantics

The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century grew out of the

scientific revolution of the previous century, which had stressed

the importance of learning through observation and deduction

rather than by the unquestioning acceptance of past authority.

Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu and Rousseau

applied these ideas to human society, teaching that humans’

‘natural’ condition is to be free, and that human behaviour should

be governed by reason rather than by irrational and ‘unnatural’

tradition or religious faith. Enlightenment philosophy was an

important influence on the leaders of the French Revolution.

Romanticism was a cultural and intellectual movement in the

early nineteenth century, heavily influenced by the ideas of the

French Revolution. It sought to give free range to the emotions,

and thereby to attain eternal truths. The Romantics found

inspiration in the romances and tales of the Middle Ages, for

example the tales of King Arthur.

Nationalism, also originating in the French Revolution,

emphasized the importance of a sense of collective national

identity. Much of nationalism is concerned with preserving and

cherishing ‘traditional’ national language and culture, but it is also

closely identified with the idea of the nation-state, in which states

are organized along national ethnic lines.

2 6 THE P U R SUI T O F H I S TOR Y

George G. Iggers & James Powell (eds), Leopold Ranke and the

Shaping of the Historical Discipline, Syracuse University Press,

1990.

Geoffey Cubitt, History and Memory, Manchester University Press,

2007.

Stefan Berger (ed.), Writing National Histories, Routledge, 1998.

David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge University

Press, 1985.

David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spirit of History,

Viking, 1997.

Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, vol. I: Past and Present in

Contemporary Culture, Verso, 1994.

Sam Wineberg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts:

Charting the Future of Teaching the Past, Temple University Press,

2001.

Notes

1 Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House: the Gay Subculture in

England, 1700–1830, Gay Men’s Press, 1992.

2 Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, James Currey, 1985.

3 James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory, Blackwell, 1992,

ch. 5.

4 Malcolm X, On Afro-American History, 3rd edn, Pathfinder, 1990,

p. 12.

5 History Workshop Journal, I, 1976, p. 2 (editorial).

6 Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History, Pluto Press, 1973.

7 Sheila R. Johansson, ‘“Herstory” as history: a new field or another

fad?’, in Berenice A. Carroll (ed.), Liberating Women’s History,

Illinois University Press, 1976, p. 427.

8 L. von Ranke, Histories of the Latin and German Nations from 1494

to 1514, extract translated in G.P. Gooch, History and Historians in

the Nineteenth Century, 2nd edn, Longman, 1952, p. 74.

9 Unfortunately this is the impression conveyed by the most frequently

cited translation, ‘what actually happened’: see Fritz Stern (ed.), The

Varieties of History, 2nd edn, Macmillan, 1970, p. 57.

10 Thomas Carlyle, quoted in J.R. Hale (ed.), The Evolution of British

Historiography, Macmillan, 1967, p. 42.

11 E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common, Penguin, 1993, ch. 7.

Historical awareness 2 7

12 V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People,

1770–1868, Oxford University Press, 1994.

13 Quoted in Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London, Penguin, 1976,

p. 258.

14 L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between, Penguin, 1958, p. 7.

15 Simon Schama, ‘Clio at the Multiplex’, The New Yorker, 19 January

1998, p. 40.

16 Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Marking time’, in Holger Hoock (ed.), History,

Commemoration and National Preoccupation, Oxford University

Press, 2007, p. 7.

17 Penelope J. Corfield, Time and the Shape of History, Yale University

Press, 2007, pp. 131–49.

18 See, for example, James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness:

Witchcraft in England, 1550–1750, Hamish Hamilton, 1996;

Jonathan Barry, Marianne Helster and Gareth Roberts (eds),

Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press,

1996.

19 See, for example, John Gillis, For Better, For Worse: British

Marriages, 1600 to the Present, Oxford University Press, 1985.

20 Fernand Braudel, ‘History and the social sciences: la longue durée’, in

his On History, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980, pp. 25–52.

21 E.J. Hobsbawm and T.O. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition,

Cambridge University Press, 1982.

22 Richard G. Plaschka, ‘The political significance of František Palacký’,

Journal of Contemporary History, VIII, 1973, pp. 35–55.

23 Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History, Macmillan, 1998.

24 William Stubbs, quoted in Christopher Parker, The English Historical

Tradition since 1850, Donald, 1990, pp. 42–3.

25 Margaret Thatcher, speech in Cheltenham, 3 July 1982, reprinted in

Anthony Barnett, Iron Britannia, Allison & Busby, 1982.

26 Geoffrey Pearson, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears,

Macmillan, 1983.

27 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, vol. II: Island Stories:

Unravelling Britain, Verso, 1998, pp. 337–8.

28 J.H. Plumb, The Death of the Past, Macmillan, 1969; E.H. Carr,

What Is History? Macmillan, 1961.

29 H. Butterfield, The Englishman and His History, Cambridge

University Press, 1944.

30 Theodore Zeldin, ‘After Braudel’, The Listener, 5 November 1981,

p. 542.

31 Peter Burke, ‘People’s history or total history’, in Raphael Samuel

2 8 THE P U R SUI T O F H I S TOR Y

(ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory, Routledge & Kegan

Paul, 1981, p. 8.

32 Eric M. Sigsworth (ed.), In Search of Victorian Values, Manchester

University Press, 1988; T.C. Smout (ed.), Victorian Values, British

Academy, 1992.

33 Raphael Samuel, ‘Unofficial knowledge’, in his Theatres of Memory,

vol. I: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture, Verso, 1994,

pp. 3–39.

34 Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory, Manchester University Press,

2007, p. 4.

Chapter two

The uses of history

This chapter looks at some of the different ways in which

historians have tried to explain the purpose of their work. Some

see history as a study in itself which needs no wider justification;

others see it in terms of the inexorable march across time of great

forces, human or even divine, which explain both how we got to

where we are and where we might be heading; others deny that

history has any lessons for us at all. Historians explain the past

in response to present-day concerns and questions. History can

certainly allow us to experience situations and face alternatives

that we would not otherwise encounter, and in that sense it serves

a useful purpose; it can also reveal that aspects of modern life are

not as old, or as new, as we have assumed. But how can we learn

any useful lessons from history – especially for the future – when

so much depends on the details of the historical context? And if

history does not repeat itself, what sort of a guide can it provide

for the present?

None of the issues discussed in this book has drawn a greater

variety of answers than the question ‘What can we learn

from history?’ The answers have ranged from Henry Ford’s celebrated aphorism ‘history is bunk’ to the belief that history holds

the clue to human destiny. The fact that historians themselves

give very different responses suggests that this is an open-ended

question which cannot be reduced to a tidy solution. But anyone

proposing to spend several years – and in some cases a lifetime –

studying the subject must reflect on what purpose it serves. And

one cannot get very far in understanding how historians set about

their work, or in evaluating its outcome, without first considering

the rationale of historical enquiry.

3 0 THE P U R SUI T O F H I S TOR Y

I

Metahistory – history as long-term development

At one extreme lies the proposition that history tells us most of

what we need to know about the future. Our destiny is disclosed

in the grand trajectory of human history, which reveals the world

today as it really is, and the future course of events. This belief

requires a highly schematic interpretation of the course of human

development, usually known as metahistory. A spiritual version

of it predominated in Western culture until the seventeenth

century. Medieval thinkers believed that history represented the

inexorable unfolding of Divine Providence, from the Creation

through the redeeming life of Christ to the Last Judgement; the

contemplation of the past revealed something of God’s purposes

and concentrated the mind on the reckoning to come. This view

became less tenable with the gradual secularization of European

culture from the eighteenth century onwards. New forms of

metahistory developed which attributed the forward dynamic of

history to human rather than divine action. The Enlightenment

belief in moral progress was of this kind. But the most influential

metahistory of modern times has been Marxism. The driving

force of history became the struggle by human societies to meet

their material needs (which is why the Marxist theory is known

as ‘historical materialism’). Marx interpreted human history as a

progression from lower to higher forms of production; the highest

form was currently industrial capitalism, but this was destined

to give way to socialism, at which point human needs would be

satisfied abundantly and equitably (see Chapter 8). Since the fall

of international communism, belief in historical materialism has

sharply declined, but metahistorical thinking continues to hold

an appeal: Marxism has been turned on its head by certain freemarket theorists, for whom the 1990s signal the global triumph

of liberal democracy, or ‘the end of history’.1

The rejection of history

At the other extreme is the view that nothing can be learned from

history: not that history is beyond our reach, but that it offers no

guidance. This rejection of history takes two forms. The first is

essentially a defence against totalitarianism. For many intellectuals during the Cold War, the practical consequences of invoking

trajectory

The line of an object in

flight. It can be applied, as

here, to a perceived ‘path’

of a theme traced over a

long period of time.

Divine Providence

The idea of a benevolent

God who watches over and

protects people on earth.

Last Judgement

In Christian, especially

Catholic, theology the Last

Judgement is the moment

at the end of time when

all humans come before

God for judgement on

their lives on earth, some

being allowed to enter

heaven, others being

condemned for eternity

to hell. It was a common

theme in medieval art and

is dramatically presented

in Michelangelo’s frescos

in the Sistine Chapel in the

Vatican.

Enlightenment belief in

moral progress

The eighteenth-century

Enlightenment believed

that the exercise of human

reason would liberate

people from the mental

and political oppression

of organized religion and

superstition. By aiming

for greater human liberty

and happiness, reason

was thereby equated with

moral progress.

totalitarianism

Dictatorship, associated

particularly with European

regimes of the 1920s and

1930s, which stressed the

all-encompassing role of

the state.

The uses o f his t ory 3 1

the past to legitimate communist ideology had been so appalling

that any idea that history might hold clues for the present became

completely discredited; some historians recoiled so far from any

idea of pattern or meaning that they refused to find in history

anything more than accident, blunder and contingency.2

The second basis for rejecting history is a commitment to

modernity: if one is committed to the new, why bother with the

past? This point of view has a much longer pedigree. The equation

of modernity with a rejection of the past was first put into effect

during the French Revolution of 1789–93. The revolutionaries

executed the king, abolished the aristocracy, attacked religion

and declared 22 September 1792 the beginning of Year 1. All this

was done in the name of reason, untrammelled by precedent or

tradition. The early twentieth century was another high point in

the modernist rejection of history. In avant-garde thinking human

creativity was seen as opposed to the achievements of the past,

rather than growing out of them; ignorance of history liberated

the imagination. During the inter-war period these ideas became

the dominant strand in the arts, under the banner of ‘modernism’.

Fascism and Nazism adapted this language to the political sphere.

They reacted to the catastrophe of the First World War and the

alarming instability of the world economy by claiming the virtue

of a complete break with the past. They lambasted the corruption

of the old society and demanded the conscious creation of a ‘new

man’ and a ‘new order’.3

 Today, root-and-branch totalitarianism

is completely discredited. But ‘modernism’ retains some of its

allure. It validates a technocratic approach to politics and society

and underwrites the fascination with the new in the arts.

Neither metahistory nor the total rejection of history commands much support among practitioners of history. Metahistory

may cast the historian in the gratifying role of prophet, but at

the cost of denying, or drastically curtailing, the play of human

agency in history. Marxism has had great influence on the writing

of history over the past fifty years, but as a theory of socio-economic change rather than as the key to human destiny. Ultimately

the choice between free will and determinism is a philosophical

one. There are many intermediate positions. If most historians

would tip the balance in favour of free will, this is because determinism sits uncomfortably with the contingencies and rough

edges that loom so large in the historical record. Metahistory

involves holding on to one big conviction at the expense of many

modernists

In this context, those

whose concerns are

concentrated on

the modern day to

the exclusion of any

consideration of the past.

avant-garde

(French) The troops at the

front who spearhead an

army’s advance into battle.

The term was applied to

radical and pioneering

artistic movements in the

early twentieth century

and has since come to

denote any new or radical

ideas.

alarming instability of

the world economy

The international

economic slump of the

1930s that followed on

from the New York Stock

Exchange crash of October

1929.

root-and-branch

Thorough-going. The

term derives from a

seventeenth-century

religious group who

wanted a comprehensive

reform of the Church of

England.

3 2 THE P U R SUI T O F H I S TOR Y

less ambitious insights. It is an outlook profoundly at odds with

the experience of historical research.

Historians are no happier to have their findings dismissed as

a complete irrelevance. The rejection of history would obviously

limit its study to a self-indulgent antiquarian pursuit. In fact the

claims for historical awareness have for 200 years been asserted

in a continuing dialectic with the modernist rejection of history.

Historicism itself was to a considerable extent a reaction against

the French Revolution. To conservatives such as Ranke, the political excesses in France were a terrifying instance of what happens

when radicals turn their backs on the past; to apply first principles without respect for inherited institutions was a threat to the

very fabric of the social order. As the Revolution went off course,

many of the radicals acquired a new respect for history too. Those

who still believed in freedom and democracy came to realize that

humans were not so free from the hand of the past as the revolutionaries had supposed, and that progressive change must be built

on the cumulative achievements of earlier generations.

Only a visionary would accept the full implications of metahistory; only an antiquarian would be content to surrender all

claim to practical utility. The most convincing claims of history to

offer relevant insights lie somewhere between these two extremes.

And they hinge on taking seriously the principles of historical

awareness established by the nineteenth-century founders of the

discipline. The historicists have become a by-word for disinterested historical enquiry without practical application, but this is

not an accurate picture of their position. They did not disclaim all

claims to practical relevance but merely insisted that the faithful

representation of the past must come first. In fact the three principles of difference, context and process (discussed in the previous

chapter) point to the specific ways in which the scholarly study

of history can yield useful knowledge. The end result is not a

master-key or an overall schema but rather an accumulation of

specific practical insights consistent with a sense of historical

awareness.

antiquarian

Interest in historical details

and artefacts without

reference to their wider

context or significance.

dialectic

The conflict of one idea

(the thesis) and another

diametrically opposed to

it (the antithesis). The

resulting amalgamation of

the two is known as the

synthesis.