Category: History and Historians

History and Historians, Ivory Towers

Shake and Bake History

daelnorwood

Drive Chain...ge

Or, Driving Changes

Not so long ago*, Kieran Healy over at OrgTheory did some interesting riffing on an idea in Jon Elster’s new book about Alexis de Tocqueville. He put together a list of different innovations in social theory, grouping them by how they characterize the relationships between different basic elements. His recipe is as follows:

Take a few basic kinds of institutions, structures or practices that can be identified across many different social contexts. There are markets, say, and there is politics. There is ritual. There are hierarchies. There are networks. There is culture. And so on. (Not all of these are the same sort of thing; that doesn’t matter at the moment.) Identify the basic features of each. Now, pick one of these and show it underpinning a setting usually taken as governed by one the others.

For example, you can say Politics is really Markets. This is Public Choice Theory. Because the market form is such a dominant feature of contemporary societies and of talk about them, applying the “x is really a market” trick to any given x is by now ubiquitous not just in theory but also often as a matter of common interpretation and even public policy, facts on the ground notwithstanding.

Healy goes on to spin out a half dozen or so such formulations, with reference to the works of particular sociologists or schools of thought, e.g. Markets are really Politics; Markets are really Culture; Organizations are really Ritual; Markets are really Hierarchies; etc.

Now, I think Healy means this partly as a dig at the vagueness of most social theory, but also as a pragmatic method for developing research heuristics, insofar as you can generate new approaches by substituting terms. I think a similar kind of simplified grouping could be pretty easily done for historical works; and switching around the basic elements might prove similarly useful.

The middle sign in the equation, though, isn’t “is” — it’s “drives change.”** The first term is the agent, the second term (implicitly) what you consider to be the main object of historical work.

For example, one way to characterize the debate between the two recent synthetic works in my field (Howe and Wilentz) is to say that Howe thinks Culture drives change in Politics while Wilentz thinks Politics drives change in Culture. Likewise Mark Noll’s book on the Civil War would be Religion drives change in Politics.

This approach would work well for sub-literatures too — you could probably subdivide the vast literature on the history of capitalism into different categories of Capitalism drives change in x, y, z.

While this is all certainly reductive — and no doubt, unfair to all the nuance in the works I’ve just name-checked — I think it pays off especially well when you’re trying to decide what debates matter to you, and what camp(s) your own work falls into.*** For myself, I think I used to be in the Economics drives change in Politics, but now I’m the Ideas drive change in Politics camp, much to my chagrin.

What about you? Or does this scheme not work well for a quasi-untheoretical discipline like history?

 

*Er, I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while.

** Or, you know, some kind of less clunky formulation. Suggestions welcome.

*** Though, to be a bit defensive, I think historians’ oft-repeated claims of “nuance” are more performative than an actual barrier to useful reductions. Everyone has a favorite driver of change, even if you think other ones come to bear. If you don’t, you’re writing an list of facts, not a history.

 

Image cite: KitLKat, “Drive chain of steam lorry…” Flickr, CC License

Apologies for the poor visual pun.

History and Historians, Ten Things I Hate About You

Muddy Whigs, Stuck Wheels

daelnorwood

Muddy Wheel

Sorry for the long(ish) absence. I have been lost in the unruly reeds of the Serial Set, ladies and germs, a wanderin’ in the wilderness of Congress’s forgotten backlot. I have seen many things, horrible things, in that slushpile: innumerable, ungainly, uncollated reports sprouting anteDeweyvian reference numbers, all housed with an organization scheme only a Melville could love in its Eris-inspired and Demos-driven multiplicity. (His erstwhile namesake, Melvil, would’ve hated it).

It’s not pretty, folks. Not pretty ‘t’all.

But I come bearing new loads of data, new sand and clay to be mixed with the brackish water of intellect and baked into scholarly bricks, and then built into a sturdy House of Monograph, shelter for kith and kin, and possibly even a way to pay rent.

Stuff for my dissertation, I mean. Not just ridiculous extended metaphors.

But that’s not what I came to discuss today. No, what interests me today is this: Daniel Howe, “Goodbye to the ‘Age of Jackson’ ?” New York Review of Books, May 28, 2009.

Howe is an eminent historian — preeminent, even, as not only is his most recent book part of a field-defining (if staid) series, but it won the Pulitzer prize in History. Like all of the books in the Oxford series, the interpretation Howe puts forward in What Hath God Wrought is intended as a master synthesis of the existing literature, the new foundation for all work to come. The NYRB review is a restatement of that larger project in miniature.

My concern with this particular article is not his critique of the books under review, per se, but rather an argumentative tack he makes along the way – a restatement of that made in the larger work.(1).

Put simply: Howe replicates a general feature of the political historiography of the Jacksonian era that drives … me …nuts.(2).

Like many other would-be synthesizers of the period, Howe maps contemporary political labels onto the political parties and personalities of the second party system – the Democrats and the Whigs – while trying to claim he’s doing the opposite. This effectively trades any development in the historiography, by way of synthesis, for retrenchment. This leaves us on the other side of the ditch, but still stuck in the mud.

Continue reading “Muddy Whigs, Stuck Wheels” →

History and Historians

Structures, Agency, and a Bleg

daelnorwood

Narcis

Or, An Apprentice Scholar’s (narcissistic) Lament

Ran across this the other day, and thought it worth “commonplacing”:

Ultimately, I hoped to show that we should not think of “agency” and “structure” as rivals, or even as being mutually exclusive. As I state in the last paragraph of the book, “The constraints and structures of any particular period are, however, often the creation of a previous generation’s political agents. In the short term, politics is, in fact, a world of constraints, but to agents willing to wait for effects that may not emerge for decades, the world is full of opportunity.” Agents have to operate in a world of structures. But if they have a long time horizon, they can create new structures, which will then act to constrain the next generation of agents. And so on.

~Steven Teles, “Response,” Crooked Timber, 1 May 2009, describing one of the themes of his book The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (PUP, 2008).

Continue reading “Structures, Agency, and a Bleg” →

History and Historians

#AmazonFail and History

daelnorwood

World's Largest Axe

Two quotes, intentionally out of context*, from Clay Shirky:

Metadata is worldview; sorting is a political act.

and

We’re used to the future turning out differently than we expected; it happens all the time. When the past turns out differently, though, it can get really upsetting, and because people don’t like that kind of upset, we’re at risk of finding new reasons to believe false things, rather than revising our sense of what actually happened.

Worth thinking about; mainly caught my attention because I’ve been thinking a lot about history and tech for a while now. That, and the ax I’m grinding about the purpose of History (the discipline) being the eradication of nostalgia (in political spaces; keep the nice family memories).

h/t

*Context: ruminations on the moral failings of the #amazonfail furor

Image cite: Chris Campbell, “The World’s Largest Axe,” Flickr, CC License

History and Historians, Ivory Towers

Crafty Historians

daelnorwood
but more like basket weaving
but more like basket weaving

Q. Can you tell us about specific disciplines and how they fare in peer-reviewed competitions?

In history there is a high degree of consensus among scholars about what is good. But it is not based so much on a common theory, or method, or whether people think the discipline is part of the humanities or social sciences. It’s a shared sense of craftsmanship. People care about whether the work is careful. They believe they can identify careful work. And that they can convince others about it. The degree of consensus has varied over the years. In the 1960s, for example, the discipline was polarized politically. But it has found consensus in the practice of scholarship.

Historians believe that contrasts sharply with English literature. As one told me, “The disciplinary center holds.” That sense of consensus makes history proposals and applicants very successful in multidisciplinary competitions like the national fellowship and grant programs.

…

Panelists who are in English literature perceive that their discipline has a “legitimization crisis.” … Some are unsure whether “quality” exists.

…

Like history, economics is a highly consensual discipline. But the consensus isn’t grounded in craftsmanship; it’s in mathematical formalism. As a result, while the last few years have seen more openness to other approaches, like behavioral economics, most economists believe they have fairly straightforward measures for evaluation. They know what excellence is, and say they can identify it when they encounter it. But intersubjectivity is also at the center of their evaluation process. …”

~Karen J. Winkler, “Reviewing the Reviewers: A Q&A With Michèle Lamont,” CHE, 3 April 2009. (h/t to Ralph Luker at Cliopatria)

From my own, horribly limited and absolutely anecdotal experience, what Lamont says about how historians evaluate each others’ work rings true. An evaluation of craftsmanship — careful work, qualified claims, mounds and mounds of evidence — is thebasis for most, if not all, critiques in the discipline. This is why the third-worst thing you can say about any historian is that they got their footnotes wrong, the second-worst is a charge of “antiquarianism,” and that the high crime is plagiarism — they are all variations on a single charge of faulty craft-work.

I think this is also why there are few, if any, prodigies in history. Careful craftsmanship is not an inborn skill.

However, it also strikes me that Lamont leaves something out, at least in the interview (the book is not yet ready to hand). Craftsmanship is a framework and a rhetoric that hides a lot of conflict based on methodological and political orientations. The culture wars continue, both within the discipline, and at its margins — e.g. cultural history vs. social history; econ history as done by economists vs. history of econ culture, as done by historians; historians’ participation in, & evaluation of, works in “American Studies”; etc., etc. But like all frames, that of craftsmanship both constrains and conditions the utterances made within it; so in the end, I think that as good a controlling rhetoric as any, and (with my disciplinary chauvinism showing), perhaps better than most.

Image credit: Anyhoo, “DSC_0578 – Ivory Tower,” Flickr, CC License