Making Histories

Studies in history-writing and politics

CCCS, Richard Johnson, Gregor McLennan, Bill Schwartz, David Sutton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135032173
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 2006. History and politics are fundamentally connected – indeed historians themselves have often made links between the two explicit. Making Histories explores the relationship between history and politics as it has developed in histories which are critical of the dominant, academic traditions of history writing, and makes a substantial contribution to the debate about the most appropriate way to handle the relations between theory and history. Part One is concerned with the development of 'people's history' – a social history with popular sympathies and links with radical politics. Three phases are discussed: the work of the Hammonds, the Communist Party Historians' Group of the 1950s, and the historical-political projects of E. P. Thompson. Part Two focuses on the relation between history and theory within Marxism generally and argues that philosophical and methodological assumptions play a key role in more narrowly empirical and historical debates. Part Three presents discussions of three newer forms of political history writing which take a more 'popular' turn: oral history, the public construction of the national past in the form of National Heritage or community, and a feminist assessment of histories of the suffragette movement. In challenging received opinion about the scope of 'history', the authors stress that historiography is concerned not with the past, but with the relation between the past and the present and argue that popular conceptions of history have an importance usually denied or ignored by academic historians.

Part One

Historians and ‘the people’

1

Radical liberalism, Fabianism and social history*

David Sutton

As we noted in the Preface, marxism is not the only philosophy which unites politics and history-writing. In England, for example, one dominant historical strand has been conservative and nationalist. It is not the long march of labour which is celebrated, but moments of national unity under the leadership of heroes and (more rarely) heroines. It is a history of kings and queens, national saviours, great statesmen, leaders in peace or in war. Sometimes ordinary citizens are granted an appearance, duly heroic and unified. Variants on these themes, suited to the contemporary occasion, are a staple of many popular historiographical genres.

This dominant historical conservatism, whose contemporary versions are examined later in this book, have been challenged by alternative traditions. Though often influenced by marxism, these alternative traditions have not necessarily been marxist or socialist in character. They have often been connected with a radical liberal, social-democratic or ‘social-reforming’ politics. It is arguable that this has been the commonest political anchorage, in Britain, of a social historiography. Certainly, in an important recent essay, Raphael Samuel has demonstrated the force of these non-marxist traditions on marxist historiography. ‘People’s history’, he argues, had its precursors in ‘radical and democratic rather than socialist’ history-writing. Until the 1950s, ‘Marxist history in Britain may be said to have existed as a tributary of a very much broader stream.’^{1 †} Before looking, therefore, at a specifically marxist historiography in the work of the Communist Party Historians’ Group, it is important to grasp the character of this social-historical mainstream.

This poses major problems of selection. It is not possible to cover the whole field, past and present. There is a huge range of practitioners and texts even for the early period, that is from the 1880s to the inter-war period: the early economic historians from Rogers to Unwin, the cluster of distinctively ‘social’ histories (the Webbs, the Hammonds, Tawney and then Cole) and an extremely interesting group of feminist historians, pioneers, in retrospect, of modern feminist writing.² And there are liberal/social-democratic historiographies today as well, notably in one strand in labour history (constitutionalist and ‘Whiggish’) and, more immediately, in recent reassessments of the history of liberalism and the Liberal Party itself.

The solution adopted here is to focus on one period (mainly pre-First World War) and, within that, on one or two exemplary cases. The most creative historiographical connections of this time were undoubtedly with a radical liberal politics and, its close relation, a Fabianism. The work of John and Barbara Hammond exemplifies these connections perfectly, wedding a vital and innovative social history to radical liberal agitations. For the early twentieth-century politics of class their work is of great interest. An important sub-theme of this essay, however, is the relation between a gender-based politics and history-writing. Early feminist histories interest me for two main reasons: first, because they show the need for a different but related analysis of the position of women in an intellectual politics; second, because they provide a parallel but different case of the Liberal and Fabian connections, since, as I shall show, much early feminist history was written within a ‘Fabian’ framework.

My treatment of these themes is organized in the following way. I start with some points of theoretical clarification concerning the problem of ‘political intellectuals’. I then look at the Hammonds as part of a radical liberal cultural group, the main lines of whose political activity and thinking is sketched. I analyse their historical practice within this context, as an example of the history-politics link. The parallel case of ‘pioneer’ feminist history is then discussed, and its link to Fabianism. Finally, I look at some of the ways in which the Hammonds’ work was taken up, espoused or opposed, by later writers and social movements. I stress particularly those elements which now seem innovative in their work, especially their consistent empathy with the culture and aspirations of ‘the common people’.

Political intellectuals

Peter Clarke’s Liberals and Social Democrats (1978) is an exemplary placing of the liberal intellectuals of this phase – including the Hammonds – in their historical setting. Clarke is guarded, however, about the more particular determinations on liberal ideas. Assured of the force and significance of these, he focuses on their content in an approach characteristic of the history of ideas. To do more, he argues, risks reductions:

As to what is believed, there will doubtless be some link between a person’s social position and his [sic] intellectual bearings, but the problem is to specify what connections are helpful as explanations.

The connections which marxists stress, Clarke argues, are of an unhelpful kind. They present the liberal intellectuals who pressed for reform as organizers of a new ‘ideological manipulation’.

All that has happened, according to historians who take this view, is that an ideological necessity to reorganise the state has led to the manipulation of its potential for social control in a different way, through social reform. Such reform, then, has been essentially conservative even though radicals pressed for it at the time.

Against this view of the liberals’ creed as ‘a bourgeois socialism’, ‘ideologically constricted to reformist methods by their class interests’, Clarke asserts the authenticity of their radicalism. Was not their social reform a more effective ‘strategy of political change’ than ‘the revolutionist position’? ³

Despite the lack of clarity of its terms (‘ideological necessity’, ‘ideological manipulation’, etc.), the critique is effective enough if directed at the more mechanical versions of ‘social control’. With Freeden (The New Liberalism, 1978), he convincingly shows that philosophical liberalism had an internal logic that was not reducible to class interests. But his argument has the character of much anti-marxist polemic: it hits out robustly at a ‘marxism’ crudified for the purpose. He fails to pose the question in its most interesting modern forms, faces us with absurd choices (taking ideas seriously or reducing them to ‘interests’) and ends up giving little serious consideration to the problem of theorizing the relations between political ideologies, intellectual groups and social classes.

Actually, Clarke’s choices are quite artificial. It is possible to combine a concern with ideas and their authors with an interest in the social consequences that flow from their propagation and with their social roots. Nor do these questions have to be explored only with the abstractness of general formulae. One major theme in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, for instance, is the working through of precisely this set of problems on the grounds, mainly, of Italian history. The question of ‘intellectuals’ has loomed large in recent marxist writing too; indeed, it has been a rather obsessive concern. Two examples are especially interesting here.

Raymond Williams, referring to the Bloomsbury fraction, has usefully considered the relation between a group’s self-definition and its objective position in a given social formation. While political parties, trade unions, and other large organizations leave behind manifestos and statements of aim and intent, small informal groupings are more resistant to definition and characterization. To describe this less explicit form of unity, Williams employs the term ‘cultural group’.⁴ Class position and institutional setting will give to the group’s culture a distinctive character, but the method of examining ‘cultural groups’ requires a close re-creation of their ideas and the precise milieu from which they grew. Similarly, in examining the social groups who agitated for state education in the 1830s in Britain, Richard Johnson argues against simple models of ‘social control’. The aim of exercising ‘moral and intellectual leadership’ is a ‘product of the subjective awareness of the “lived culture” of the middle class’.⁵ Their will to intervene culturally is a product of their lived relation to the material circumstances of their own social position. Such groups articulate a middle-class ‘ideal’. Methodologically, an approach of this kind involves the detailed construction of a collective biography, focusing on ‘the way of life’ of sections of the professional middle class. This should include, we might add, the analysis of middle-class notions of personal relations, of the family and of other social relations, not reducible to class, including the particular social networks and nodes of organization through which influence is sought.

In what follows I treat the Hammonds according to the method of collective biography. Dwelling on the determinations of their middle-class culture, however, does not preclude asking questions about the ideological tendency and the political effects of their efforts at intellectual leadership. Political intellectuals like the Hammonds were, in the first decade of the twentieth century, instrumental in driving a social reformist wedge into a Liberal Party, which, in the nineteenth century, had been given more to ‘Retrenchment’ than ‘Reform’. They recognized that liberalism had to take on board social reforms for fear of being swamped by the emergent Labour Party and the threat of working-class legislation. In their role as journalists (and here we are referring mainly to John Hammond) they retained many of the attitudes characteristic of the nineteenth-century liberal press. They were fearful that the mechanisms of educating responsible public opinion were breaking down⁶ but their self-ascribed role as ‘educators’ and intellectual pacesetters remained unstinted. It is important that the culture and politics of intellectuals are not completely severed from their class position. So much has been written in recent years about the intellectual origins and philosophical convolutions of liberalism that the connections between class formations and ideologies tend to be forgotten. The historical period which stimulated the Hammonds’ history has been aptly characterized as one of The Challenge of Labour⁷ and demonstrates the centrality of class divisions. It is in the context of this cultural and political background that the Hammonds’ histories are examined.

The culture of the historians: a radical liberal cultural group

The intellectual culture in which both John and Barbara Hammond were formed was Oxford Liberalism. Before the Hammonds attended Oxford University, the Liberal Russell Club (1850) had provided a forum for discussion. From this Oxford base individuals took different routes. Some moved closer to the Fabians, others like Belloc, Simon, Hirst, and John Hammond, began to restate Liberal principles in a new collectivist manner. Cambridge produced few prominent Liberals, the major exception being Charles Masterman. It was through common writing projects, journalism and groups like the Rainbow Circle⁸ (founded in 1893) that a close-knit grouping of what became known as ‘new liberals’ within the Liberal Party was formed. It is this relatively small grouping who are commonly held responsible for the founding ideologies of the welfare state and of navigating a path through ‘authoritarian Fabian dogmas and emotional, irresponsible toryism’.⁹ Their organizing role as intellectuals is considered by Emy as ‘one of the best examples of the role of intellectuals in politics’.¹⁰

John Hammond, born in 1872, was the son of a thoroughgoing Gladstonian vicar. He was educated at Bradford Grammar School, studied at St John’s College, Oxford, and graduated with a second in Greats in 1895. At Oxford he worked closely with those who were to become prominent Liberal intellectuals – Phillimore, F. W. Hirst and J. A. Simon. Further influences on him were his teacher Gilbert Murray and the Fabian Sidney Ball. Although impressed with Ball, Hammond’s activities and thinking were contained within a liberalism revitalized by the participation of such figures as Hilaire Belloc. But both Clarke and Tawney agree that Ball’s Fabian influence transformed his liberalism by turning his interest to the ‘social question’ and collectivist solutions.¹¹ In 1894 Hammond was working closely with Hirst, was secretary of the Oxford Union and was assisting the running of the Palmerston Club. In 1896 Hirst joined with Hammond, Phillimore, Belloc and Simon to write Essays in Liberalism by Six Oxford Men (1897). Its dedication to John Morley placed the text within Gladstonian laissez-faire but it is noteworthy that Hammond’s article on education was regarded as the most collectivist, bearing the hallmarks of the influence of T. H. Green.¹² His university collaborations encouraged him to seek out opportunities in journalism. He worked briefly for the Liberal Mercury, was unsuccessful in his approaches to the Manchester Guardian, and accepted editorship of the refurbished journal, The Speaker.

Barbara Hammond, born in 1873, was daughter of the Rev. E. H. Bradby, onetime headmaster of Haileybury. She studied at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and was taught by the radical L. T. Hobhouse. At university and through her family’s activities Barbara was involved with the settlement movement. Beside other middle-class families, like the Nevinsons and Boyles, the Bradbys lived in London’s East End, seeking to foster ‘closer contact’ between social classes. Canon Barnett’s settlement, at Toynbee Hall, provided many middle-class intellectuals with a route into social work and often into government. George Lansbury, in his memoirs, was as cynical about these efforts as many subsequent historians:

The most important result of the mixing policy of the Barnetts, has been the filling up of the bureaucracy of government, and administration with men and women who went to the East End full of enthusiasm and zeal for the welfare of the masses, and discovered the advancement of their own interests and the interests of the poor were best served by leaving East London to stew in its own juice while they became members of parliament, cabinet ministers, civil servants. …¹³

When John and Barbara married in 1901 they were both enthused with the ‘social question’. Barbara might have settled for an academic career as Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall but was seemingly troubled by what Beatrice Webb called a middle-class ‘conscience of sin’. Moreover an interest in defending the interests of the Boers in South Africa gave the pair common motivations. John had been a prominent force in the League of Liberals Against Aggression and Militarism between 1899 and 1900 and shifted The Speaker towards an ardent pro-Boer position. In 19...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part One: Historians and ‘the people’
• Part Two: Marxist theory and historical analysis
• Part Three: Autobiography/memory/tradition
• Notes and references
• Index