Sociology and History (RLE Social Theory)

Peter Burke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000155761
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Sociologists and historians are not always the best of neighbours, each group tending to perceive the other in terms of the crudest of stereotypes. However, the two approaches are obviously complementary – change is structured, and structures change. Each discipline can free the other from its own kind of parochialism and the aim of this book is to bridge the gap between these tow subcultures, to give historians a more acute sense of structure and sociologists a more acute sense of change.

1 Sociologists and Historians

DOI: 10.4324/9781003074328-1

A DIALOGUE OF THE DEAF

Sociologists and historians are not always the best of neighbours. Intellectual neighbours they certainly are, in the sense that both disciplines, together with social anthropology, are concerned with whole societies and with the full range of human behaviour. Sociology may be defined as the study of human society, with the emphasis on generalising about its structure. History may be defined as the study of human societies, with the emphasis on the differences between them and on the changes which have taken place in each one over time. The two approaches are obviously complementary. Change is structured, and structures change. It is only by comparing it with others that we can discover in what respects a given society is unique.

Each discipline can help to free the other from a kind of parochialism. Historians run the risk of parochialism in the more literal sense. Specialising as they do in a particular region and period, they may come to regard their ‘parish’ as unique territory, rather than as a unique combination of elements each of which has parallels elsewhere. Sociologists suffer from parochialism in a more metaphorical sense, a parochialism of time rather than place, whenever they generalise about ‘society’ on the basis of contemporary experience alone, or discuss social change over thirty years or so without looking at long-term processes as well.

Sociologists and historians each see the mote in their neighbour’s eye. Unfortunately, each group tends to perceive the other in terms of a rather crude stereotype. In Britain at least, many historians still regard sociologists as people who state the obvious in a barbarous and abstract jargon, lack any sense of place or time, squeeze individuals into rigid categories and, to cap it all, believe that these activities are ‘scientific’. Sociologists, for their part, see historians as amateurish, myopic fact-collectors without a method, the vagueness of their data matched only by their incapacity to analyse them. In short, despite the existence of a few bilinguals whose work will often be mentioned in the pages which follow, sociologists and historians still do not speak the same language. Their dialogue, as the French historian Fernand Braudel has put it, is usually a ‘dialogue of the deaf’.

It may be helpful to look at historians and sociologists from a sociological point of view, to see them not only as different professions but also as distinct subcultures, with their own languages, values and styles of thought, reinforced by their respective processes of training or ‘socialisation’. Sociologists learn to turn to tables of figures, while many historians skip them and look for conclusions in words. Sociologists learn to notice rules and often screen out the exceptions, while historians are trained to attend to detail and often fail to see general patterns. A similar contrast has been drawn between the tribe of historians and the tribe of anthropologists (Cohn, 1962; Erikson, 1970; Dening, 1971–3).

From a historical point of view, it is clear that both parties are guilty of anachronism. Sociologists seem to think of history as if it were still in the Ranke phase of narrative without analysis; historians seem to think of sociology as if it were still in the Comte phase of grand generalisations without empirical research. Both subjects have changed a great deal since the middle of the nineteenth century. How and why did the two subcultures develop? The question is a historical one and in the next section I shall try to give it a historical answer. It will be a provisional answer, since a truly historical history of sociology has not yet been written (for the British part of the story, see Burrow, 1966; Collini, 1978).

THE DIFFERENTIATION OF HISTORY AND SOCIOLOGY

In the eighteenth century there were no disputes between sociologists and historians for a simple and obvious reason: sociology did not exist as a separate discipline. Montesquieu, Adam Ferguson and John Millar have since been claimed by sociologists; indeed, they are sometimes described as ‘founding fathers’ of sociology. This label is misleading (as it is when applied to Marx, Durkheim or Weber) because it gives the impression that these men set out to found a new subject. They never expressed any such intention.

It might be less misleading to describe Montesquieu, Ferguson and Millar as social theorists, because The Spirit of the Laws (1748), the Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) and the Observations on the Distinction of Ranks (1771) are all comparative, analytical, and concerned not so much with political as with social theory, ‘the philosophy of society’ as Millar called it. However, one might equally well consider the trio to be analytical or, to use the eighteenth-century term, ‘philosophical’ historians. They all drew heavily on history for their illustrations, and all three wrote historical monographs: Montesquieu on the greatness and decline of Rome, Ferguson on the ‘progress and termination of the Roman Republic’ and Millar on the relation between government and society from the time of the Anglo-Saxons to the reign of Elizabeth I. In their generation, a number of writers were turning their backs on politics and war, the traditional subject-matter of history, to concern themselves with laws and customs (’manners’ as they called them), commerce and the arts. For example, Voltaire’s Essay on Manners (1756) dealt with social life in Europe from the time of Charlemagne. Voltaire’s essay was not based directly on the sources, but it was a bold and original synthesis. By contrast, Justus Möser’s History of Osnabrück (1768) was nothing if not scholarly, a local history written from the original documents. However, Möser had also read his Montesquieu and was encouraged to relate the institutions of Westphalia to their environment in an early example of the contribution of social theory to historical research. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (1776 on) was a social as well as a political history of the Roman Empire which owes something to Adam Ferguson as well as to Adam Smith.

A hundred years later, social theorists still remained close to history. Marx discusses historical examples frequently and at length in Capital and elsewhere, while Engels wrote a monograph on the German Peasants’ War of 1525. His monograph was not based on original research, but the same criticism cannot be levelled at Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the French Revolution, which is a seminal history based on archives as well as an important contribution to social theory.

Although Auguste Comte was much less interested in the study of concrete historical situations than Tocqueville, Marx or Engels was, his life work might be described as philosophy of history in the sense that it attempted to identify the main trends in the past, which he divided into three ages: the age of religion, the age of metaphysics and the age of science. Comte believed that social history, or, as he put it, ‘history without the names of individuals or even the names of peoples’, was indispensable to the study of what he was the first to call ‘sociology’. Herbert Spencer illustrated the process of social evolution from the history of ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, Russia under Peter the Great, and so on. The ‘comparative method’ practised by Marx, Comte, Spencer and a number of their contemporaries was a historical method in the sense that it involved placing every society, and indeed every custom and artefact, in a time series leading from ‘savagery’ to ‘civilisation’ (Nisbet, 1969, ch. 6).

Historians, on the other hand, took social history rather less seriously in 1850 than they had done in 1750. The most revered historian of the period was Leopold von Ranke. Ranke was not hostile to social history, but the books he wrote, which were many, were focused on the state and had little place for society. In his time and under his influence political history returned to its old position of dominance.

There were various reasons for this retreat from the social. The historical revolution associated with Ranke was a revolution in method which involved the attempt to write a more objective or ‘scientific’ history on the basis of official documents. Historians elaborated a set of sophisticated techniques for assessing the reliability of these documents. They knew how to organise their material when they had found it. There was a place for every fact and every fact was in its place–in a chronological sequence.

In contrast, the work of social historians looked unprofessional. ‘Social history’ is really too precise a term for what was in practice a residual category which G. M. Trevelyan would one day define quite explicitly as ‘history with the politics left out’. The famous third chapter on society in the late seventeenth century in Macaulay’s History of England (1848) was described by a contemporary reviewer, cruelly but not altogether unjustly, as an ‘old curiosity shop’, because the different topics – roads, marriage, newspapers, and so on – followed one another in no apparent order. Burckhardt’s Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), later recognised as a classic, was not a success at the time of publication, probably because it was an impressionistic essay based on literary sources and making little use of official documents. When J. R. Green published his Short History of the English People (1874), which concentrated on daily life at the expense of battles and treaties, his former tutor E. A. Freeman is said to have remarked that if Green had left out all that ‘social stuff’ he might have written a good history of England. The French historian Fustel de Coulanges, whose book The Ancient City (1860) was largely concerned with the history of the family in Greece and Rome, was relatively exceptional in being taken seriously by his professional colleagues while believing that history was the science of social facts, the true sociology.

In short, Ranke’s historical revolution had one unintended but important consequence. Since the ‘documents’ approach worked best for traditional political history, its adoption made nineteenth-century historians narrower and even in a sense more old-fashioned in their choice of subject than their eighteenth-century predecessors. They rejected social history because it was not ‘scientific’ enough.

On the other hand, many historians rejected sociology because it was too scientific, in the sense that it was abstract and reductionist, that it did not allow for the uniqueness of individuals and events. This rejection was made articulate in the work of some late nineteenth-century German philosophers, such as Dilthey and Windelband. Dilthey, who was a practising cultural historian as well as a philosopher, considered the sociology of Comte and Spencer to be pseudo-scientific and drew the famous distinction between the sciences, which seek to explain from outside (erklären), and the humanities, including history, whose aim is to understand from within (verstehen) (Dilthey, 1883). Windelband drew the equally famous distinction between ‘idiographic’ history, concerned with the unique, and ‘nomothetic’ natural science, concerned with the establishing of general laws (Windelband, 1894). The leading English spokesman for this point of view, the philosopher-historian R. G. Collingwood, formulated the distinction between the historian and the scientist as follows (1935):

When a scientist asks, ‘Why did that piece of litmus paper turn pink?’, he means ‘On what kinds of occasions do pieces of litmus paper turn pink?’. When an historian asks, ‘Why did Brutus stab Caesar?’, he means, ‘What did Brutus think, which made him stab Caesar?’.

On this view sociology is necessarily a pseudo-science, studying man by methods appropriate only to the study of nature, and there is no place for social history on the map of learning.

However, the hostile reaction to social history cannot be explained in intellectual terms alone. The dominance of political history in the nineteenth century (more precisely, its return to dominance) cries out for analysis in sociological terms. There are two obvious points to make here. Although ‘historian’ is a social role with a long history, stretching back to Herodotus if not further, the discipline was professionalised only in the nineteenth century, when the first research institutes, specialist journals and university departments were founded. It was then that the historians’ guild rejected social history (as the sociologists’ guild was to reject it a generation later) as incompatible with the new professional standards. The second point is that governments saw history as a means of promoting national unity, as education for citizenship, or, as a less sympathetic observer might have put it, as propaganda. At a time when the new states of Germany and Italy (and even older states like France and Spain) were divided by local traditions, the teaching of national history in schools and universities fulfilled the function of social integration. The kind of history for which governments were prepared to pay was, naturally enough, the history of the state. The links between history and the government were particularly strong in Germany (Gilbert, 1965; Moses, 1975).

Social theorists, for their part, continued to study history, but they had little time for historians. Comte, for example, referred with contempt to the ‘insignificant details so childishly collected by the irrational curiosity of the blind compilers of sterile anecdotes’ (Comte, 1864, lecture 52). Herbert Spencer declared that sociology stood to history ‘much as a vast building stands related to the heaps of stones and bricks around it’. Again: ‘The highest office which the historian can discharge is that of so narrating the lives of nations, as to furnish materials for a Comparative Sociology.’ We have moved a long way from the eighteenth-century co-operation between philosophical historians and philosophers of society. At best the historians were seen as collectors of raw material for sociologists. At worst they were totally irrelevant because they did not even heap up the right kind of brick. To quote Spencer once more: ‘The biographies of monarchs (and our children learn little else) throw scarcely any light upon the science of society’ (Spencer, 1904, pp. 26–9),

In the early twentieth century the major social theorists still took history seriously, whatever they thought of historians. Like Comte and Spencer before him, Emile Durkheim seems to have thought that much historical work was really ‘vain erudition’. However, he also believed that the past could be of use to sociology, and he drew on the work of Fustel de Coulanges, under whom he had studied at the Ecole Normale, in his books The Division of Labour (1893) and The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912). Durkheim himself wrote a history of education in France. He made it the policy of his journal, the Année sociologique, to review books on history, provided they were not concerned with what he called the ‘superficial’ history of events. It is likely that he would have approved of the French historians such as Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch who themselves rejected the history of events a generation later (Bellah, 1959; Momigliano, 1970; Lukes, 1973, ch. 2).

As for Max Weber, the breadth and depth of his historical knowledge were truly phenomenal. He wrote books on the trading companies of the Middle Ages and the agrarian history of Rome before making his famous study of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. The great classical scholar Theodor Mommsen considered Weber a worthy successor. When he turned to the theory of economic and social organisation, Weber did not give up the study of the past. He drew on history for material and on historians for concepts., like ‘patrimonial state’ or ‘charisma’, a term which he took from a discussion of the early church by the ecclesiastical historian Rudolph Sohm and gave a more general application. It was appropriate that the most historically minded of the great sociologists should have come from the most historically minded nation in Europe. In fact, Weber scarcely thought of himself as a sociologist at all. At the end of his life, when he had accepted a chair in the subject at Munich, he made the dry comment, ‘I now happen to be a sociologist according to my appointment papers’ (Bendix, 1960; Mommsen, 1974; Roth, 1976).

Durkheim and Weber did not stand alone among the sociologists of their day in their interest in history. Tönnies, for example, was trained as a classicist and retained his interest in the past. Pareto’s treatise on sociology discussed classical Athens, Rome and Sparta at considerable length and also took examples from the history of Italy in the Middle Ages. Albion Small, who became chairman of the first sociology department in the United States (at Chicago, in 1892), had previously been a professor of history. Like Durkheim and Spencer, Small was critical of the historical profession but continued to study the past. The new discipline of anthropology was also close to history at this time. Sir James Frazer, who held the first chair in social anthropology in Britain (as visiting professor at Liverpool in 1907–8), was an ex-classicist turned comparative historian of primitive thought. In the United States, Franz Boas, who founded the first university departments of anthropology (at Clark in 1888 and at Columbia in 1899), thought of his subject as concerned with the ‘culture histories’ of different tribes as a basis for generalisations about the evolution of mankind.

Then, quite suddenly, about the year 1920, anthropologists and sociologists broke with the past. The British-trained anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski discovered and proclaimed the importance of ‘field work’ as he called it; in other words, participant observation. Such participant observation was not completely new; Boas had been making long visits to the Kwakiutl since 1886, and Radcliffe-Brown spent the years 1906–8 in the Andaman Islands. What was new was Malinowski’s insistence on fieldwork as the anthropological method par excellence. ‘The anthropologist’, he declared, ‘must relinquish his comfortable position in the long chair on the veranda.’ Fieldwork became a necessary stage in the training of every anthropologist. The new method, like Ranke’s history, was more scientific; a more reliable way of studying contemporary tribal societies than the largely conjectural evolutionary history which had preceded it. However, it could not be applied to the past.

Sociologists too began to take more and more of their data from contemporary society, whether they used official statistics or carried out their own surveys. Durkheim’s Suicide (1897) is an example of the first of these approaches; the work of the Chicago school in the 1920s illustrates the second. Members of the sociology department of the University of Chicago studied the city, especially its slums, in the ‘field’ as if they were social anthropologists. The leaders of this project, Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, were consciously emulating Franz Boas. Their method was soon imitated by sociologists elsewhere.

There were several reasons for this fundamental shift to the cultivation of the present at the expense of the past. One reason was practical. Since historians had not furnished sociologists with the raw material they needed, sociologists were obliged to make their bricks themselves. T...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• 1 Sociologists and Historians
• 2 Social Structures
• 3 Social Change
• Bibliography
• Index