Gaining Ground (Central Issues‪)‬

More than thirty years ago, Eric Hobsbawm remarked that it was "a good moment to be a social historian." (1) Few people would now say the same. Many social historians seem subject to fundamental doubts. How must the discipline be pursued? What determines the relevance of research questions? What to think of the plethora of often incompatible theoretical approaches? Is social history really an independent discipline? Can "the social" be discussed in a meaningful way at all? I am always surprised at so much uncertainty. Of course, the subsequent (linguistic, cultural, interpretative) "turns" have brought many presuppositions up for discussion and there is a great need for further theoretical clarification. However, this is surely not all there is to say. Is the development of our discipline not much more complex (and to some extent more positive)? We need only contrast the present situation with the one forty years earlier to recognize this. What were the most important studies in social history in English in 1963? Of course, every shortlist is rather arbitrary, but the following three certainly fall into the category of that year's major publications: Philip Bagwell's monumental study of the British Union of Railwaymen, Samuel Baron's standard work on Piekhanov, and, of course, E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. (2) It is beyond doubt that Thompson's work broke new ground, because it transformed our way of thinking about processes of class formation. The other two studies have a more conventional set-up, but no one will question their substance. In spite of the important differences among these three works, they have much in common: they regard social history as the history of class conflict, workers' movements, leaders and ideologists, political debates and supporters. They put emphasis on qualitative analyses; they use a fairly limited range of source material; they focus on a small part of the world; and they do not take gender, race or ethnicity into account. Therefore no one can maintain that there have not been a good many changes in the past forty years--for the better! But those changes have created a major paradox.