Professional Documents
Culture Documents
GEOFF ELEY
I WROTE A CROOKED LINE BETWEEN THE FALL OF 2003 AND THE SPRING OF 2004 in a rush
of urgency and optimism. The urgency came from the parlous political state of the
425
426 Geoff Eley
which involves everything from the structured institutional settings where history is
practiced (departments, institutes, universities, classrooms, conferences, journals,
networks, associations) to the rules and protocols that define its boundaries and the
widest forms of intellectual disputation over its methods, its archives, its schools and
traditions, its forms of theory, and its epistemologies. Finally, I wanted to say some-
thing about how ideas and assumptions about the past tend to circulate more widely
in popular terms across the public culture. All of these are aspects of history’s pol-
itics.
It was for these purposes that I decided to make modest use of my own story. I
thought that this might be helpful in two ways. First, I have been struck over the years
by the messy unevenness through which extremely important political changes have
registered their impact in my own thinking; and second, I am equally impressed by
the time-lagged and bumpy relationship of such political departures to the ways in
which I have approached my historical work. This creates a kind of complicated
bridge, Mass., 2004); Miguel A. Cabrera, Postsocial History: An Introduction (Lanham, Md., 2004); Gab-
rielle M. Spiegel, “Introduction,” in Spiegel, ed., Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing
after the Linguistic Turn (New York, 2005), 1–31; Ann Courthoys and John Docker, Is History Fiction?
(Ann Arbor, Mich., 2005), especially 137–237. For my own contributions in this mode, see “Is All the
World a Text? From Social History to the History of Society Two Decades Later,” in Terrence J. Mc-
Donald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996), 193–243; “Between
Social History and Cultural Studies: Interdisciplinarity and the Practice of the Historian at the End of
the Twentieth Century,” in Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney, eds., Historians and Social Values (Am-
quite properly centers around the principal theoretical and epistemological issues
involved, commonly emphasizing a series of major figures and their contributions,
the resulting debates and controversies, and the varying forms of their resolution.
The tumults in the discipline and the cognate developments across the wider trans-
disciplinary map have now been captured in a profusion of guides, commentaries,
anthologies, forums, new journals, and a great deal of continuing discussion. Instead
of retelling that story one more time, I thought it would be more illuminating to find
other ways of writing the intellectual histories involved.
To that end, in the long chapter 4 on the 1980s (“Reflectiveness”), for example,
I looked for a series of emblematic books whose impact extended across fields and
disciplines, around which widespread and variegated interest converged, whose im-
pact had a symptomatic relationship to the emergent ideas, and which did something
to help assemble the cumulative readiness for change during the middle years of the
decade. Often preceding the most commonly cited texts, such works possessed their
sterdam, 2000), 93–109; “Problems with Culture: German History after the Linguistic Turn,” Central
European History 31 (1998), 197–227. See also the earlier, especially thoughtful commentary by David
D. Roberts, Nothing but History: Reconstruction and Extremity after Metaphysics (Berkeley, Calif., 1995).
the range of political dynamics that may have impinged. Both of these purposes are
vital to the fullest historiographical understanding, I want to argue—that is, both the
careful and critical exegesis of the major texts themselves and the exploring of the
dense thickets of discussion and practice through which those texts had eventually
been produced. That second context of analysis might be called the profane and
imperfect world of historiography.2
While confined to certain nuts and bolts of narrative reconstruction—the story
of who said what to whom and when—the kind of analysis I am suggesting might
easily seem slightly banal. Yet by providing a much fuller account of the sites and
settings of intellectual debates, especially within their appropriate institutional and
eventful contexts, we can get a much clearer idea of the stakes involved. Such an
account would allow us to explore the local and mundane microdynamics of the
processes through which ideas become formed together with their wider cultural
politics. That in turn can deliver a more complicated and unexpected set of gene-
2 Here my thinking has something in common with Gabrielle M. Spiegel’s concept of the “social logic
of the text.” See her essay “France for Belgium,” in Laura Lee Downs and Stéphane Gerson, eds., Why
France? American Historians Reflect on an Enduring Fascination (Ithaca, N.Y., 2007), 97: “This concept
seeks to combine in a single but complex framework an analysis of a text’s social site—both as a product
of a particular social world and as an agent at work in that world—and its discursive character as ‘logos,’
that is, as a literary artifact composed of language and thus demanding literary (formal) analysis.” See
also Spiegel, “Revising the Past/Revisiting the Present: How Change Happens in Historiography,” His-
tory and Theory 46 (2007): 1–19.
3 See Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Min-
neapolis, 1988). For Scott’s three works, see Joan W. Scott, The Glassworkers of Carmaux: French Crafts-
men and Political Action in a Nineteenth-Century City (Cambridge, Mass., 1974); Louise Tilly and Scott,
Women, Work, and Family (New York, 1978); Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988).
Elaine Abelson, David Abraham, and Marjorie Murphy, “Interview with Joan Scott,” Radical History
Review 45 (1989): 40–59, is fascinating on the early years but silent on the 1980s.
cultural history with the linguistic turn” (Spiegel); rather, I took some pains in making exactly that same
point. This is what I actually say on the page Spiegel cites: “Writing the . . . history of that extraordinarily
complex intellectual upheaval—in a manner commensurate with all its unevenness and diversity and with
all the broader cultural, social, and political forces partially explaining it—has so far eluded most com-
mentators. It becomes ever clearer that the favored shorthand descriptions—’cultural turn,’ ’linguistic
turn,’ and ‘postmodernism’—were coined in the heat of relatively short-lived, but extremely polarizing,
initial battles, disguise as much as they clarify, and conflate manifold variations . . . Turning to ‘culture’
was the rather vague common denominator for heterogeneous discontents.” See Geoff Eley, A Crooked
Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2005), 156. For an attempt to
construct a careful genealogy for the various uses of “postmodernism” by historians during the 1980s
and 1990s, see Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, The Future of Class in History: What’s Left of the Social? (Ann
Arbor, Mich., 2007), 57–80.
7 On another specific note, while I accept the spirit of William Sewell’s particular observation, I am
not sure that it is fair to call my approach “Anglo-centric” in general. After all, the discussion of social
history’s genealogies in chapter 2 (“Three Sources of Social History,” 25– 47) is evenly distributed be-
tween British Marxist historiography, French Annales, and U.S. social science history; chapter 3 is de-
voted to German historiography; and the long chapter 4 is located principally in the United States, while
On a broader front, William Sewell takes me to task for ignoring “the macrosocial
environment in which the historiographical changes took place.” While this seems
overdrawn—the destructive social and political fallout from capitalist restructuring
is actually an essential referent for how the book tries to deal with the complicated
back-and-forth between politics and historiography8—it is certainly true that I ab-
stain from any extensive discussion of either of the two big conjunctures in question,
the postwar capitalist boom or the post-Fordist transition that followed. But that was
deliberate. My Crooked Line was a very particular project: it tried to model a dif-
ferent way of writing about the intellectual history of the present by examining the
three-way reciprocities among the historiographical (or more broadly intellectual),
the political, and the personal. If the contemporary transformations of capitalism
were explicitly coded into my basic understanding of what the category of the po-
litical entailed, then for reasons of writing strategy and space, I consciously stayed
away from the detailed sociology of knowledge that Sewell wished I had supplied.
ranging widely across national and regional historiographies, including substantively crucial treatments
of the historiography of race in the U.S. and the subaltern studies school of South Asia. If the three
emblematic historians chosen to close each of the main chapters were British (Edward Thompson, Tim
Mason, Carolyn Steedman), they have each been hugely influential internationally in their respective
ways. It was precisely that duality—their place for my own intellectual formation, combined with their
patently non-parochial and transnational resonance—that led me to choose them. So my account seeks
to build from its British starting points without being confined by them.
8 E.g., A Crooked Line, 187: “the dispiriting political experiences associated with the crisis of a
class-centered socialist tradition from the late 1970s, under the combined effects of capitalist restruc-
turing, deindustrialization, class recomposition, and right-wing political assaults, have profoundly
shaped how I’m able to think about the kinds of history I do. For me, the cultural turn was appealing
because its implications translated across these different sites—not only my teaching and writing, but
also my political knowledge and social understanding, including the everyday settings of personal life.”
9 Again, I do explicitly acknowledge the desirability of such analysis. E.g., A Crooked Line, 277, note
6: “In my own view, that crisis of ‘class-political understanding’ bespoke an actually occurring socio-
political transition of genuinely epochal dimensions. In other words, together with the larger political
and theoretical rethinking it connoted, the cultural turn represented a necessary struggling with con-
temporary problems, for which the loyal reaffirming of classical materialist positions afforded little
help.”
10 In other words, Sewell’s “macrosocial” analytic is essential for many kinds of problems, but not
for the kind of history I wanted to write in this book. To make connections between historiographical
change and capitalist restructuring convincingly would be an entire project in itself. It would certainly
require more than any brief and incidental treatment in a book essentially focused elsewhere. For ex-
amples of my own macrosocial engagement, see Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left
in Europe, 1850–2000 (New York, 2002), 337– 490; and Eley and Nield, The Future of Class in History,
preceded by Eley and Nield, “Farewell to the Working Class?” International Working-Class and Labor
History 57 (Spring 2000): 1–30.
11 E.g., 151–152, 188–189, 96–97. For Sewell’s more detailed explication, see William H. Sewell, Jr.,
“The Political Unconscious of Social and Cultural History, or, Confessions of a Former Quantitative
Historian,” in Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005), 53–63.
See also the essays of George Steinmetz: “Scientific Authority and the Transition to Post-Fordism: The
Plausibility of Positivism in U.S. Sociology since 1945,” in Steinmetz, ed., The Politics of Method in the
Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others (Durham, N.C., 2005), 275–323; “The Epis-
temological Unconscious of U.S. Sociology and the Transition to Post-Fordism: The Case of Historical
Sociology,” in Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens, and Ann Shola Orloff, eds., Remaking Modernity:
Politics, History, and Sociology (Durham, N.C., 2005), 109–157; “Regulation Theory, Post-Marxism, and
the New Social Movements,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 36 (1994): 176–212.
12 See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford, 1989); and Fredric Jameson, Post-
modernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C., 1991).
at universities or for other social categories of actors. In that regard, Sewell wishes
to link the rise of social history in the 1960s to the post-1945 prevalence in the West
of “so-called ‘Fordist’ or state-centered capitalism.” In his view, “the epistemological
optimism of social history—its faith in the possibility of reconstructing a history of
the social totality—was made plausible in large part by the specific form of capitalist
development that characterized the great worldwide postwar capitalist boom.”
Again, I broadly share this view that “the ‘structure of experience’ generated by
postwar capitalism underwrote the plausibility of social history, whether in its Marx-
ist, its Annaliste, or its social-scientific form.” Yet I would argue that the primary
context for understanding the social history wave in this way was provided less by
the distinctive patterns of Fordist accumulation per se, however convincingly their
effects can be shown in the expansion of higher education and other ways. Rather,
the intelligibility of social history as a knowledge formation, as well as its appeal as
a body of intellectual practice linked to wider sociopolitical aspirations, owed far
being remade will be vital to how effectively we will be able to live within capitalism’s
latest social imaginary.
There is a more basic issue here. My commentators rightly focus on my insistence
that “between social history and cultural history, there is really no need to choose”
(181). That insistence had two purposes: it was strategic, in that I argued for the
possibility of fruitful conversation across sometimes irreducible yet mutually respect-
ful differences; and it was more specifically historiographical, in that I marked the
growing success of historical work that transcends the previous demarcations and
sub-specialisms of the discipline. I used the term “new hybridities” to describe the
resulting forms.13 Neither Sewell nor Spiegel likes this stance. They see my unwill-
ingness to choose as a lack of clarity, a “weak” or poorly developed grasp of theory,
a lack of ambition, and a falling back into the practicing historian’s bad old habits
of trusting the virtues of imaginative empirical work and simply “muddling through.”
Sewell then casts his own proposals in a manner that makes the choice pretty clear
13 A Crooked Line, 201. Whereas my own statement took pleasure in the growing redundancy of the
discipline’s traditional divisions between discrete regions of study (such as social history and cultural
history), Sewell took me to mean that “hybridity” was the decisive and praiseworthy characteristic spe-
cifically of the “new cultural history.” But this is what I actually wrote: By the 1990s, many former social
historians “now moved increasingly freely across the old distinctions between the social, the cultural,
the political, the intellectual, and so forth, allowing new hybridities to form.” The difference between
our two renditions is quite significant. By hybridity in this context I meant studies that “specifically refuse
the polarized division between the ‘social’ and the ‘cultural,’ vesting recognizably social and political
topics with a cultural analytic, responding to the incitements of cultural theory, and grounding these in
as dense and imaginative a range of sources and interpretive contexts as possible.” In that sense I argued
that the categorical opposition between “social” and “cultural” should be seen as unnecessary and mis-
taken.
schooling, cultural formation, political conjuncture, and so forth. We each enter the
stream or get on the train at different points along the way, usually with differing
destinations in mind (or different imaginings of what the destination might look
like), having missed earlier stretches of the journey that for others turned out to be
the really formative part. Spiegel’s explication of the phenomenological backstory
to the structuralist Marxist departures of the 1960s and 1970s (which is where my
own biography jumped on the train) is extremely helpful. So too is her very acute
characterization of what many current commentators are seeking to come up with
in response to the consequences and insufficiencies of the cultural turn. Yet, un-
derstandably enough, her actor-centered perspective and neo-phenomenological ap-
proach seem best fitted for her own preferred kind of history—mainly intellectual
and cultural, less concerned with (for example) state formation, social movements,
the politics of collective action, and other areas where another set of approaches
might be deployed. Her proposal offers much less help for William Sewell’s mac-
14 Likewise, those preferences can make us less patient with the grounds from which others do their
different kinds of work. Thus it is simply not the case (as Spiegel claims) that either an “empirically
grounded social history” or an acknowledgment of the importance of structures “implicitly reverts to
that ‘noble dream’ of an objective basis for historical investigation.”
us from the need to be clear and consistent in the standpoints we prefer for our-
selves.15 Martin Jay expresses the principle involved with characteristic generosity:
any given analysis, if it is sincerely pursued, produces the necessity of its alternatives. Every
particular approach, whether it is hermeneutic or theoretical or narrative or experiential, will
be ultimately inadequate. You will reach a point where it will fail to do justice to the com-
plexity of the phenomena. What is really required is a nimble way to move from one mode
of analysis to another without expecting them to necessarily cohere in a definitive way. In this
sense, the image of a force-field or constellation, which I’ve always found so useful in my work,
captures the inexhaustible variety of our interface with the world better than any single unified
approach.16
FINALLY, IF I HAVE LESS TO SAY ABOUT MANU GOSWAMI’S COMMENT, it is because I share
of polemical exchange, or an unwillingness to confront genuine differences and disagreements when they
appear. They are limits to the possible collaborations, too.
16 Douglas J. Goodman, “Dream Kitsch and the Debris of History: An Interview with Martin Jay,”
Categories,“ in Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, Mass., 1985),
255–276; also David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham,
N.C., 2004), 23–57.
18 I should say that here I am speaking quite specifically about the Left experience in the Euro–North
American West, a delimitation that was also repeatedly and explicitly marked throughout the text of A
Crooked Line. Likewise, I see the turning away from “whole society” analysis during the 1980s as spe-
cifically characterizing historians who are working in and on the West, although it certainly has its
analogues elsewhere. I made a point of emphasizing these particularities in the book, deliberately ex-
forms of political subjectivity in that sense. I can see the force of her more specific
critique of the “post-Gramscian turn” in subaltern studies, too.
These aspects of Goswami’s extremely clear-sighted discussion bring me back to
the starting point of this response. For if I remain optimistic about the chances of
reactivating certain kinds of conversation beyond the divisiveness of earlier histo-
riographical differences, then my sense of present political endangerment also keeps
its urgency—the sense, that is, of no longer being sure where the grounds of any
future-oriented optimism about the directions of change in the actually existing
worlds of capitalism might still be found. Thus for me, part of the intellectual history
of the present has to involve not only a degree of political self-consciousness in all
the ways alluded to above, but also a willingness to explore the material or structural
conditions of possibility that help make sense of such a generalized turning to cul-
tural history across so many different fields during the past two decades in the first
place. In those terms I am definitely sympathetic to some version of the project that
empting works written from “an extra-European vantage-point” (197). But I very much welcome Gos-
wami’s further reminder.
19 For my own recent attempt to engage this project, see Geoff Eley, “Historicizing the Global,
Politicizing Capital: Giving the Present a Name,” History Workshop Journal 63 (Spring 2007): 154 –188.
20 Sewell’s remark does younger historians a serious injustice.
ysis.21 Divested of the earlier expectations, while taking on board all we can learn
via the cultural turn, new histories of the social will certainly be written. But likewise,
if I uphold the gains that cultural history enabled, in the ways I used Carolyn Steed-
man’s work to exemplify, that does not mean I believe that everything about it can
be “uncritically” accepted. Let us sit down together and think about the various ways,
some large and some small, in which these differing projects might fruitfully be
joined. In the interests of that conversation, it is precisely important that we not be
required to choose.
21 See A Crooked Line, 189. I then spell out the terms of that original project: “Its coherence derived
from the sovereignty of social determinations within a self-confident materialist paradigm of social to-
tality, grounded in the primacy of class.”