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REVIEW ESSAY
PERFECTING INSTITUTIONALIZATION: THE FOUNDATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL HISTORY ASSOCIATION
| By Béla Tomka |
University of Szeged |
| In any discipline the existence of learned societies, the publishing of specialized journals and the organization of thematic conferences are among the major indicators of institutionalization and emancipation with other academic fields. As for the social history these attributes have already existed on national levels for a longer period of time. Internationally speaking, however, the institutionalization of social history was not complete until recently. There has not been a lack of journals since many prestigious periodicals, although primarily embedded into the academic life of those countries where they were edited and published, provided for a wide range of opportunities for international scholarly discourse—in some cases this aim even surfaced in the title of the journal (International Review of Social History). International social history conferences have rather been the events of certain branches of the discipline for a long time, such as in urban history. However, in the past decade, advancement can be seen in that respect as well. Since 1998, the European Social Science History Conference held in every second year has begun to play the role of a truly comprehensive and representative international conference of social history, at least at the European level, in spite of some deficits not detailed here. |
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As far as learned societies are concerned associations covering special fields of social history have already existed and they exist; we can refer again to the example of urban history (European Association for Urban History). An international organization embracing the whole field of social history, however, has not existed until very recent times. |
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This gap is more astonishing since several other areas of history have this kind of organization. For example the society of economic historians has been successfully operating for several decades (International Economic History Association) and other sub-disciplines that are even smaller than social history have their own professional bodies, such as the International Society for the Didactics of History or the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East. The existence of learned societies of a specific discipline is, of course, not mainly a matter of prestige, they rather have an important practical value for the researchers of the discipline, which we will come back to later. |
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The reasons for this long-lasting gap—even at the time of the biggest expansion of social history in the 1960s and 1970s—can be a subject of debate: the myriads of research themes in social history, as well as the methodological heterogeneity of the discipline are definitely points we have to take into account here. Subjective factors must have had an effect as well: for a long time, there has not been any social historian with the invention and the broad network of international contacts also undertaking the strenuous and time consuming work of organization. |
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To create a fuller picture, we should add that between 1951–2002 the Commission internationale d'histoire des mouvements sociaux et des structures sociales tried to encourage and coordinate the researches in social history at an international level but this mission could not be completely accomplished. Above all, the commission, as its name suggests, was originally created with a much narrower scope focusing on specific areas of social history. Besides, this professional body was somewhat isolated and locked into the French academic life, and could not fully open up to broader themes, approaches and other academic cultures. Furthermore, the death of the French chair of the commission made the further operation impossible and lead to the complete ceasing of it. |
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