Turns to the Present

Varieties of social History comprised the most successful initial challenge to political History, especially from the middle of the twentieth century. From the 1980s social History was gradually supplanted in prominence by a cluster of related historiographical developments concerned with language and culture. In the last fifteen years or so newer fashions have waxed, and to those too this chapter will attend, but, in terms of justifications for History, social History and the linguistic and cultural ‘turns’ remain especially important. Social-scientific social historians were more apt to assert History’s predictive value or at least its pragmatic contemporary importance at a time of industrialization beyond the north Atlantic—this was an update of History as Practical Lesson. Other social historians were to be found revising prevailing conceptions of the past with a view to altering politics in the present—disturbing ‘whiggish’ narratives, or inserting the marginalized into the historical record to fortify their voices now. This was History as Identity fused with History as Emancipation. ‘New cultural historians’ specialized in a version of History as Travel as they invoked exotic worlds past. They, like historians under the influence of Michel Foucault, who addressed culture through the prism of power, might adapt the Travel rationale, contrasting past ways of doing things with present ways in order to unmask the conventional, made and remade, character of social relations and of human-being, and thus the possibility of changing them. This was a Marxist agenda of History as Emancipation adapted for a post-Marxist philosophy.