From Hegemony to Governmentality: Changing Conceptions of Power in Social History‪.‬

What was new about social history in its pioneering phase in the 1960s and 1970s? Answers to this question tend to focus on its objects of enquiry: the attention given to neglected social groups and the opening up of fresh fields of study, such as crime and popular culture. These objects in turn are often related to the wider ambitions of the new social history, including the critique of both traditional political history and of econometrics, and the championing of a history of society as a totality. (1) All this is relevant to an understanding of the origins of social history, though as Miles Taylor has argued, those origins were as often intellectually and politically conservative as radical, in Britain at least. (2) What is often undervalued in these accounts, however, is the significant re-conceptualisation of power that followed from a generation of social historical studies, including Thompson, Genovese and other less canonical but collectively important works. Social history proposed a substantial extension to the understanding and expression of power; it was no longer seen as restricted to institutions of government and state, but operative in multiple sites: in the workplace, on the streets, in the home. Social history, it was emphasised, was not history with the politics left out; instead, political history was radically expanded by looking beyond parties and organised movements to the political cultures rooted in the labour process and structures of popular belief. Power was at issue outside the frame of what had conventionally been deemed 'political'. Women, workers, slaves were not to be viewed as victims or as passive objects of power--they too had agency, were engaged in struggle. At its roots, social history challenged a traditional version of power as a smooth, one-way process; it represented the past as replete with checks, resistances, dissonances. It would be wrong to imagine that social history was unique in expanding the notion of power in this way. Similar thinking was occurring in disciplines such as sociology and political theory, as I shall indicate, not to mention in the new social movements of the period. Nevertheless, social history had an exemplary role in disseminating new ideas and in providing specific case-studies of power relationships, the multifarious forms which dominance and resistance have taken. In emphasising the dispersal and contingencies of power as well as in its critique of historical orthodoxy, one could suggest that social history was postmodern before postmodernism. It was these factors--and, not least, the capacity of social history to illuminate the politics of the present--which attracted many people to it in the 1970s.