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Review
| A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society, by Geoff Eley. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. 301 pages. $21.95, paper.
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| The "crooked line" in Geoff Eley's intriguing new book refers to the controversial progression of social history from the 1960s, through the cultural turn of the 1980s, to the new cultural history that ensued. This change entailed loss as well as gain, but Eley considers the cultural turn empowering and "tectonic." As such, it is the main focal point of this history of social history. The book operates simultaneously in several dimensions, and on another level, it is a personal journey. Told through the perspective of Eley's own intellectual biography as a leading Marxist historian educated in Britain, specializing on Germany, this history presents issues that engaged Eley throughout his career. History's relationship to politics, the historian's role in the public sphere, the relevance of history, and the politics of knowledge, all are underlying questions or contentions. At its core, this is a valuable work about the nature of history and the ways in which it can make a difference. On yet another level, it provides a study of socially engaged historians and their contributions to the discipline. The author focuses on three particularly noteworthy historians (Edward Thompson, Tim Mason, and Carolyn Steedman) as exemplars who achieved the integration of their specific historical subjects into the larger picture of society as a whole, and who helped create important innovations in the discipline. |
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Eley's narrative is an admiring journey along the intellectual landscape that both molded his own professional life and that ultimately led to the cultural turn at the center of the story. First and foremost, was the social history of the 1960s, inspired by the Annales school in France, British Marxist historians, and American social science. Eley is particularly helpful in explaining historians' initial turn toward social history. He conveys the excitement with which his Oxford contemporaries embraced social history as a liberation (from a narrow, narrative history) that also uncovered hitherto suppressed histories, dealt with the big picture, and broadened the historian's agenda with new emphasis on material life, class and society. Similarly, he succeeds in explaining the appeal of Marxism to a generation of young scholars, frustrated by "fact-grubbing" and "theory-averseness," who embraced the interdisciplinarity and counter-narrative of Marxism as inspirational and empowering. Yet, while he explains the appeal of Marxist history, he avoids a sober assessment of it. His perspective is that of the uncritical adherent who unabashedly proclaims, "I've no doubts here: having access to Marxism...made me into a far better historian." (p. 191) |
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Nonetheless, influenced by Tim Mason's pioneering studies and his acknowledgment in the 1980s that class conflict as the main agent for change could not adequately explain Hitler's Third Reich, Eley too became open to an approach broader than Marx's materialist model allowed. Powerfully affected by Carolyn Steedman's path breaking work, Landscape For a Good Woman (1987) as well, Eley embraced the cultural turn toward new subjects previously left unexplored by social historians (particularly gender, race, and sexuality). He found other components of "the turn" compelling as well: the new interdisciplinary emphasis on anthropology, literary theory and linguistics, the new fascination with popular culture and daily life, the renewed interest in personal life (biography), the broadening of historians' definition of archival sources (to include museums, exhibitions, film and photography, magazines and popular fiction), and the return to local settings while moving away from structural histories of whole societies. Deliberately avoiding a discussion of the heated, at times acrimonious, debates that accompanied the cultural shift, Eley enthusiastically embraces it as the logical next step in broadening the discipline and in addressing the limitations of a purely class-centered approach to social history. His conclusion is that the ostensible division between social and cultural history is not a real distinction. "Between social history and cultural history, there is really no need to choose. " (p. 181) |
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There are many strengths to this book, not least of which is an engaging, readable style that makes it an accessible historiography for students. Both students and scholars will also appreciate Eley's excellent discussion of history's "renovative energy" in showing how people thought about change in the past, thereby showing how it might be imagined in the present. Finally, although this book has its own clear perspective, it seeks to challenge its readers into thinking about why history matters. Students and teachers will find that discussion powerful and illuminating. |
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| California College of the Arts |
Amy R. Sims |
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