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THE STATE AND SOCIAL HISTORY
| By Prasannan Parthasarathi |
Boston College |
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Introduction
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As has been noted by many observers, social history emerged in the 1950s and 1960s out of two potentially contradictory impulses. On the one hand, social historians sought to recapture the lives and experiences of the working class and other dispossessed groups. Of course, this list was soon expanded to include women, with the rise of feminism, and later minority groups. This impulse has led to a vast and rich literature on many facets of life for laborers, women, minorities, and the poor, especially in modern Europe and North America. And from this understanding larger social processes were illuminated, including demographic change, social protest and social movements. A glance at the Journal of Social History gives some sense of the enormous territory that has been covered over the last several decades. Much of this makes for fascinating reading and is very often ingenious history as it is based upon painstaking reconstructions from the fragments that are often all that remain in the historical record about these groups. |
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At the same time, social history was connected by a number of its early practitioners with major political projects. It was very self-consciously part of a larger analysis of a capitalist system, but the final aim was not simply understanding but rather the transcendence of that set of economic, political and social relations and the establishment of socialism. As Jim Cronin has shown in a recent essay, the historical work of Eric Hobsbawm, for instance, was deeply informed by his political passions and his long connection to the Communist Party of Great Britain. For many early social historians, there was simply no disputing that politics, by which is meant the exercise of state power and the political organization of workers and others in order to capture the levers of the state, was crucial to their historical studies. |
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This political agenda is evident in The Making of the English Working Class, with its problematic of class consciousness as a prelude to political action. This theme was no less evident in the writings of Hobsbawm and other pioneers of social history, in whose work the state loomed large. In the case of Thompson, this became even more explicit from the late 1960s and his work at Warwick University, and the series of studies that analyzed the British state in the eighteenth century and used the vantage point of crime and law to rethink the contours of political authority. |
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The tension between a social history that sought to reconstruct the lives and experiences of the dispossessed and one that was politically engaged, and therefore undertook a serious analysis of the state, came to be resolved from the 1970s increasingly in favor of the former. This is clearly evident in historical scholarship on the Indian subcontinent, where from the early 1980s Subaltern Studies stormed the field with its version of Thompsonian and Hobsbawmian social history. The early volumes of the project (that is, before it took a more explicitly post-structuralist and post-colonial turn) contain brilliant and imaginative explorations of the lives of subaltern groups, ranging from peasant movements to the problem of working class identity. Despite the very high quality and intellectual caliber of these writings, as Rajnarayan Chandavarkar noted many years ago, Subaltern Studies largely left the state out of its analyses. According to Chandavarkar, "The Subaltern historians, concerned with the 'autonomous domain' of the people, often appeared to emancipate their own historical research from the intrusions of the colonial state."1 This neglect of the state is a symptom of political disengagement, at least from the contest for state power. |
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This kind of political disengagement is not unique to India or historians of India, but is part of a global shift in political sensibilities over the last thirty-odd years. Several developments have transformed the domain of the political in this period with the result that the state is no longer seen as central to the political agenda. |
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