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DISCUSSION

What is History?

A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society. By Geoff

Eley. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2005. 320 pp. $60 (hard-
back), $21.95 (paperback)

‘Before you study history, study the historian.’ This was the advice E.H. Carr gave in his
brilliant but flawed What is History? It could as well serve as the guiding admonition for
Geoff Eley’s A Crooked Line. Carr then added, ‘before you study the historian, study his
historical and social environment.’ The addendum fits Eley’s book as well, as A Crooked
Line is in still greater measure about the author’s environment, first at Oxford, later at
Michigan, and the importance, real and perceived, of these places for the fundamental
transformations of historiography in the last four decades. Written with esprit, the book is
compelling, rich and engaging, not only in the intellectual sense, but also—remarkably for
a book about historiography—in the dramatic sense. But as is the case with epic theatre,
one is in the end torn between nostalgia for the heroic age of history-writing Eley por-
trays, and a question about the state of historiography that needs, to cite Brecht giving
lines to Galileo, its heroes.
From the start, Eley sets himself against authority, and this will be a conspicuous theme
throughout the book. Authority is first represented by the curriculum of history at Oxford,
which included Gibbon, Macaulay, Tocqueville, Burckhardt and Bede, ‘antiquated knowl-
edge’ (p. 1). For Eley, it was the politics of the street, the exciting ‘demandingness of the
time’ (p. 4) that fired the imagination. Here, already, is the second theme: the ‘intrusion’
into history of ‘ethical and political urgencies’ (p. 4). History, for Eley, is about research and
mastery, but these are merely tools to understand the world; the point, if not to change it,
is at least to ‘show how the changeability of the world might be thought or imagined’, and
this demands a way of writing history that renders it ‘pragmatically prefigurative’ (p. 10).
The Crooked Line follows the immensely productive career of its main protagonist, but it
is also a generational book, ‘centered on the political and ethical meanings of 1968’
(p. xiii). With respect to that era, it is brilliantly evocative, reproducing the period’s heroic
longings and shadowing its familiar oppositions. The great movements of historiography fol-
low these oppositions. First there is social history, and its struggles at Balliol College, whose
Master from 1965 until 1978 was Christopher Hill. Eley immerses us in the Marxism of
the time: irreverent, youthful, attentive to agency, and more interested in the volatility of

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630 Discussion

(popular) culture than in the inexorable laws of the dismal science. Eley’s narrative then
broadens from Balliol to encompass wider intellectual currents, first Gramsci, whose Prison

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Notebooks were translated in 1971, then the Annales School, and US social history. He offers
fine (if in the French case not especially trenchant) sketches of these other historiographies,
showing, as it were, how they became part of a more general assault on the ramparts of tra-
ditional history. Eley’s account of the project of Charles Tilly, for example, is especially
instructive, for Tilly attempted in a grand, and grandly funded, way to establish the rational-
ity of popular protest and to integrate broad-based political action with the great questions of
the day. The sketches set the stage for E.P. Thompson, an oppositional scholar who worked
outside the university but whose The Making of the Working Class (1963) became the most
influential work of history in the 1960s and well into the 1970s. Eley deftly places
Thompson’s oeuvre in its charged intellectual and political context, showing how it chal-
lenged not only the academic establishment but also Marxist orthodoxies, and how it opened
new possibilities for historical inquiry. Thompson’s Making was a liberating moment, and it
came—significantly for Eley—from outside the university, from the world of engaged poli-
tics. This, then, will emerge as a further theme of A Crooked Line: the influence of real-world
politics, not mere schools of thought, on the writing of history. ‘Good history meant good
politics,’ Eley sums up, ‘just as bad politics produced bad history’ (p. 59).
A fair-minded, protagonist-centred account of the Sonderweg debate follows. Eley por-
trays the position of Hans-Ulrich Wehler and the Bielefeld school with due judiciousness,
and he delineates his own position in terms of its larger political imperatives. We learn of
Eley’s unease with explanations of Nazism that appeal to historical depth. The Sonderweg,
Eley argues, began ‘the explanation for Nazism at the wrong time, shifting focus away
from the immediate fascism-producing crises of 1929–1933 and 1918–23’ (p. 80). Here
too good politics mattered. The problem of the Sonderweg, according to Eley, rested in its
‘anti-Marxist thrust’ (p. 81), especially evident in its emphasis on the persistence of feu-
dal and pre-industrial structures in explanations of Nazism. ‘By these means,’ Eley
writes, ‘capitalism was being let off the hook’ (p. 81). This was one side of the problem—
the political. The other was the historiographical. The structuralist explanations offered
by the proponents of Gesellschaftsgeschichte seemed to deny agency, and therefore
‘offered the opposite of a Thompsonian account’ (p. 90). A great deal of new work took
this second critique as its starting point, and Eley communicates the excitement of
German historical writing in the early eighties, especially as it centred around the
Research Seminar Group on German Social History at the University of East Anglia. This
makes wonderful reading, but the real heart of the book, its best moment, is Eley’s beau-
tifully wrought evocation of the intellectual and political projects of the late Tim Mason.
Mason elicited an immense amount of admiration and even affection from a broad
range of scholars, Marxist and non-Marxist, and Eley shows why. Inspired by E.P.
Thompson, Mason attempted to understand the Third Reich from the ground up, empha-
sizing changing constellations of class and class conflict as its driving force. But Mason
was also an unimpeachable researcher, and Eley is at his best showing Mason’s profound
disappointment at his inability, partly for empirical, partly for theoretical reasons, to ren-
der the Third Reich in terms that made class its defining characteristic. This failure proved
especially poignant when it came to genocidal politics, which drew its murderous
dynamic from a racial logic that was ideological and political at its core.
In the early eighties, Eley, like many historians, turned away from self-confident class
analyses to embrace the ‘cultural turn’—but Eley proved more hesitant than others in part
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Discussion 631

because he insisted on relating the cultural to the social. The third section of the book sees
the cultural turn as largely, though not completely, driven by feminist historiography, as

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this historiography levelled the most profound critiques of materialist historiographies.
Here too politics mattered, and it was, according to Eley, his ‘political knowledge and
social understandings, including the everyday settings of personal life’ (p. 187) that made
the cultural turn appealing. He ranges across a wide panoply of authors, including Joan
Scott, Michel Foucault and Stuart Hall, and shows how, typically, it was people working
between disciplines who made a profound mark, with the margins, not the centre, gener-
ating new directions in research. He turns to Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good
Woman to illustrate the point. Her book was a challenge to master narratives of British
history, a story of working class lives that did not fit; but as a meditation on the possibil-
ities of writing history, Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman also stood for a larger
and genuinely productive disorientation, not the hubris of the early years but a way for-
ward nevertheless.
Eley’s account of the cultural turn will strike some as astute, especially as concerns the
hesitancy of a generation of scholars who, at an earlier time, possessed a surer sense of
how history worked. I never had that sure sense, so the transition described in A Crooked
Line was instructive. On the other hand, my own understanding of the wellsprings of that
turn is very different, and in this sense, I found it confusing that Clifford Geertz plays
hardly a role, or that Natalie Zemon Davis makes only a cameo appearance, or that
Derrida, the guiding spirit of the linguistic turn, remains on the periphery. This list could
go on, but common to the above figures is that they wrote within the academy, and it
seems to me that Eley deliberately slights their influence in order to highlight the general
importance of intellectuals on the margins and outside the academy. The thesis holds in a
qualified way for E.P. Thompson; it seems less compelling with respect to the politics of
history at Oxford (hardly the margin!), and it takes a still greater deal of bending to make
it fit the cultural turn, the centre stages of which, in addition to Ann Arbor of course,
included Berkeley, Princeton, New Haven and Paris. More to the point, the cultural turn,
while not without extra-academic influence, also signalled a certain distance between
ordinary politics and academic politics, and nothing so well expressed this distance as the
language barrier of theoretical debates. Not that this should have been otherwise (that is
another matter): only that the cultural turn cannot easily be explained, as Eley does, from
the outside in.
Finally, there is the question of politics, narrated from the start as full-throttled engage-
ment and concluding with nostalgia. Eley’s final chapter is entitled ‘Defiance’, yet he
knows he cannot replay the heroic story—battle lines are less clear, and what counts as
good politics is no longer as self-evident. Yet I wondered why he chose to ignore the
Revolutions of 1989.
A Crooked Line is a What is History? for our time, and like Carr’s book it advances
positions that are challenging and that one might query. The first concerns the relationship
of politics to history—that good politics is a precondition for good history, bad politics
for bad. Woe to the historiography that starts this way, I would say with Brecht’s Galileo.
History is not merely politics by other means, it is also about entering foreign worlds, the
pasts (in our case) of other countries, and while engaged scholars, not the least Geoff
Eley, have generated important insights into these pasts, and these insights have derived
from politics as such, politics cannot be our measure. 1989 was about many things, but it
was also a revolt against the notion that truth must have a political attribute. The second
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632 Discussion

point concerns interdisciplinarity. Eley correctly underscores the importance of interdis-

ciplinary thinking to the 1970s and 1980s. To get a history book published by Princeton

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University Press in the eighties, Robert Darnton advised in The Kiss of Lamourette, ‘say
it’s anthropology’ and if it’s anthropology, ‘say it’s history.’ But ‘interdisciplinarity’, once
thought of as ‘an intrinsically critical movement in and of itself’, has become a battle-
worn cliché. Who does not read outside of history? And when was the period when histo-
rians only read their own work? Was it the age of Burckhardt? Meinecke? Hintze?
Huizinga? Braudel? This is one point, the other is that historiographical innovation has
also come from reconsidering scale, and this reconsideration has a disciplinary history:
when the Italian microhistorians took on the rigid causalities implied in histoire totale, for
example, or more recently when transnational historians reconsidered the frame of the
nation-state. ‘To draw a boundary around anything is to define, analyse, and reconstruct
it, in this case select, indeed adopt, a philosophy of history,’ Braudel famously wrote, and
he might have added a philosophy shaped by the historian’s encounter with his or her
object. True, 1989 and its aftermath encouraged reconsiderations of territoriality, provid-
ing the current conjuncture with a political context, but the politics of transnational his-
tory, in the sense of its Left-Right coordinates, remains open—thankfully.
And because it remains open, it does not so easily admit of a heroic narrative. A
Crooked Line is a moving book, but part of its capacity to move depends on a modernist
narrative that places the protagonist and his environment on the side of a history that has
the weight of inevitability behind it. Even in Eley’s thoughtful last chapter, where his
sense of confidence flags, high modernist locutions abound, with ‘the cutting edge of
innovation’ (p. 185) shifting according to the dictates of inexorable transformations.
When Eley places his self, and the historians with whom he engages, at the centre of these
transformations, the uneasy feel of a heroic narrative follows, with the protagonist an
embodiment of the progressive elements of the age. Perhaps this is an unintentional struc-
tural problem. Yet I cannot help sensing that less Hegel, and more Brecht (as the title, A
Crooked Line, promises) would have made for a better, because less confident, book.
Finally, Eley closes his last chapter with an admonition that historians reconsider his-
tories of society. As hegemonic narratives cannot be contested by wishing them away, this
will entail putting forth alternate narratives of the kind that in earlier times served as
‘insurgent forms of knowledge’ (p. 203). This is the moment of ‘defiance’, the book’s last
heroic gesture. ‘Historical studies for the future,’ Eley concludes, ‘will certainly require
renewing an insurgent spirit again’ (p. 203). Perhaps Eley proves the veracity of E.H.
Carr’s other dictum, that ‘good historians … have the future in their bones.’ But one won-
ders if the future is not like happiness in Brecht’s ‘Song of the Insufficiency of Human
Endeavour’, always running a clever end around. And where does this leave the past,
imperfect wie es eigentlich gewesen?

Vanderbilt University HELMUT WALSER SMITH