History,Sociology,HistoricalSociology PhilipAbrams PastandPresent,No.87.(May,1980),pp.3-16. StableURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-2746%28198005%290%3A87%3C3%3AHSHS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23 PastandPresentiscurrentlypublishedbyOxfordUniversityPress. YouruseoftheJSTORarchiveindicatesyouracceptanceofJSTOR'sTermsandConditionsofUse,availableat http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html.JSTOR'sTermsandConditionsofUseprovides,inpart,thatunlessyouhaveobtained priorpermission,youmaynotdownloadanentireissueofajournalormultiplecopiesofarticles,andyoumayusecontentin theJSTORarchiveonlyforyourpersonal,non-commercialuse. Pleasecontactthepublisherregardinganyfurtheruseofthiswork.Publishercontactinformationmaybeobtainedat http://www.jstor.org/journals/oup.html. EachcopyofanypartofaJSTORtransmissionmustcontainthesamecopyrightnoticethatappearsonthescreenorprinted pageofsuchtransmission. JSTORisanindependentnot-for-profitorganizationdedicatedtoandpreservingadigitalarchiveofscholarlyjournals.For moreinformationregardingJSTOR,[email protected]. http://www.jstor.org ThuApr1904:57:352007 HISTORY, SOCIOLOGY, HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY in historical writing in terms of a revival of narrative, Eric Hobsbawm recommends choosing a quite different point of departure.' An obvious possibility would be to start from the "convergence" of history and sociology which a number of writers claim to have noticed in the last few years.* Although it would not be absurd to argue that if there has been such a convergence an important condition for it must have been the discovery by sociologists of certain cogencies of the narrative mode -and I shall suggest that that is indeed one of the most important things that has happened to sociology lately -it is clear that from the historian's point of view any real movement towards sociology must, among other things, have meant a quite definite move away from narrative. The possibility of describing history as moving simul- taneously towards narrative and towards sociology is at least enig- matic enough to invite some discussion. The argument for convergence tends to cite a range of loosely re- lated developments and to envisage a marriage of convenience rather than one of positive choice. Thus the rise of quantitative history and the possibility of the statistical reconstruction of past societies which it has permitted has involved a pooling of techniques and forms of analy- sis, whatever reservations one might have about its substantive results. The emergence of a range of "subjectivist" sociologies concerned with personal interaction and everyday experience has been matched by a shift of interest among historians towards the Weberian problems of meaning and understanding entailed in efforts to grasp thementalities of the past and to explore such unconventional matters as the history of lunacy, crime, magic, domestic social relations and, generally, the ordinary cultural worlds of ordinary people. The publication of a series of very ambitious and overtly sociological works concerned with the historical processes of such major transitions as the formation of twentieth-century democracy and dictatorship, the great modern revolutions and even the construction of "the modern world sys- 1 L. Stone, "The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History", Past and Present, no. 85 (Nov. 1979), pp. 3-24; E. J. Hobsbawm, "The Revival of Narra- tive: Some Comments", Past and Present, no. 86 (Feb. 1980), pp. 3-8. 2 See A. Marwick, The Nucure of History (London, I g70), pp. 97-13 0; P. Burke, Sociolody and History (London, 1980); G. Stedman Jones, "Frorn Historical Socio- logy to Theoretic History", Brit. Jl. Sociology, xxvii (1976),p p. 295.305; K.T. Erik- son, "Sociology and the Historical Perspective", in M. Drake, Applied Historical Studies (London, I 973), pp. I 3-30, 4 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 87 tem", has renewed serious consideration of the possibility of integra- ting historical scholarship and highly generalized social analysis and synthesis. A comprehensive crisis in Marxist thought over the nature of historical materialism and the extent to which it is properly his- torical at all has had the usual effect of such crises: a spill of creative energy into neighbouring fields, specifically in this instance to cultivate a sociologically fertilized history or to protect good historical grain from encroaching sociological weeds. At the very least some historians and some sociologists, faced with challenges to their various knowledge claims from within their own disciplines, have turned respectively to sociology and history to reinforce cases which they have felt the re- sources of their own disciplines inadequate to defend. There has been mutual, general borrowing of categories and methods -to such an extent that even the unconvinced have had to familiarize themselves with the other side in order to withstand its advances. A few die-hards on either side have held out for the old separations. A few radical critics have deplored the indiscriminate and opportunistic way in which much of the convergence has occurred. But as Stedman Jones has noted, there is a plain and widespread consensus: sociology as a theoretical discipline and history as an empirical discipline have been happily drifting towards one another for several years; a fruitful and contented union may now be e~pectedP.~et er Burke is only one of a number of enthusiasts who have offered to officiate at the ~eremony.~ With Stedman Jones, I am not altogether happy about this image of convergence. It is not just Stedman Jones's own reservations about the poverty of the theory that sociology is likely to bring to history that worry me -as he sees it history needs theory but not sociological theory. Nor is it just the voices from the back pews pointing out that history is already married to narrative and not available for a second union. The whole conception of convergence, of the two disciplines usefully learning from one another and progressively dissolving into a blissful social history, is too simple and too bland to do justice to a tangled, difficult relationship which is actually productive just because it is tense, distanced and complicated, because it is built on antithesis as well as on community of interest. In one sense history and sociology invoke logics of explanation which simply cannot be integrated - although they can constructively be combined. In another sense they have been living together in sin for so long that to proclaim a marriage at this stage can only be faintly absurd. As I see it, there is an emerging common mode of practical explanation. But there are also problems, not just in the disciplines but in the nature of the life they both seek to explain, which separate them forcibly in principle. It is thus possible at 3 Stedman Jones, "From Historical Sociology to Theoretic History", pp. 299- 301. 4 Burke, Sociology and History,p. 30. HISTORY, SOCIOLOGY, HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY 5 the present time both to see history and sociology as exploring common ground and to see them as distinct ventures each possessed of its own peculiar "discourse of pr~of"I.f~ I emphasize the common ground it is not because it is the whole story but because it allows me to put "the re- vival of narrative" where I think it properly belongs. The common ground is not as yet very extensive but it is perhaps fundamental. It involves what an increasing number of scholars in both disciplines seem to have come to understand as the central prob- lematic of their work and which I shall call the problematic of structur- ing. Such a sense of what the study of the social world is about is thoroughly serious, penetrating and fully justified by the past practice of both historians and sociologists. And from such a point of view history and sociology are effectively the same enterprise. Both seek to understand the puzzle of human agency and both seek to do so in terms of processes of social structuring. Both are impelled to conceive of those processes both chronologically and logically, as both empirical sequence and abstract form; in this context neither the diachrony- synchrony distinction nor the ideographic-nomothetic distinction carry weight. Sociology must be concerned with eventuation because that is how structuring happens. History must be theoretical because that is how structuring is apprehended. History has no privileged access to the empirical evidence relevant to the common explanatory project. And sociology has no privileged theoretical access. It must be admitted nevertheless that even those who have been most active and influential in clearing this ground have not always seen this particular significance of their work. A backlog of inter- disciplinary scepticism has inhibited co-operation. Some familiar passages from Edward Thompson provide an apt illustration. On a number of occasions and in a number of widelyquoted statements Edward Thompson has sought to advance the claim that class is to be understood as a relationship, not as a thing; specifically as a historical relationship, an event not an object. Sociologists in general and some Marxists in particular are singled out by him as purveyors of the con- trary view. Mistaken Marxists, he has argued, try to discover class as a thing; sociologists, equally mistaken, claim that class does not exist because they cannot discover it as a thing. Against both versions of the heresv he maintains the thesis that "the notion of class entails the notion of historical relati~nship".A~n d so, like any relationship, "it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomise its structure".' Hence, "the finest- 5 Or perhaps, following Edward Thompson, its discourse of "disproof": E. P. Thompson, The Povercy of Theory (London, 1978), p. 232. 6 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1968), P. 9. 7 Ibid. 6 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 87 meshed sociological net cannot give us a pure specimen of class . . . the relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real con- text"." Many sociologists might have to be forgiven for being puzzled to know just what he expects them to find controversial in such a state- ment. Rut let us leave them puzzling for a moment and consider the fuller and more famous version of his argument. Here again the with- drawal from sociology is achieved in quite general terms: Sociologists who have stopped the time-machine and, with a good deal ofconceptual huffing and puffing, have gone down to the engine-room to look, tell us that no- where at all have they been able to locate and classify a class. They can find only a multitude of people with different occupations, incomes, status-hierarchies and the rest. Of course they are right, since class is not this or that part of the machine, but the way the nzachinc works once it is set in motion -not this interest and that interest, but the friction of interests -the movement itself, the heat, the thunder- ing noise. Class is a social and cultural formation (often finding institutional expres- sion) which cannot be defined abstractly or in isolation, but only in terms of rela- tionship with other classes; and ultimately the definition can only be made in the medium of time -that is, action and reaction, change and conflict . . . class itself is not a thing, it is a ha~pening.~ The main argument here is also "of course . . . right" and it should - be extended from class to most other supposed social "things".lo But it is not an argument which divides historians from sociologists in any generic way. Some sociologists, but also some historians, have indeed tried to treat class as a bit of the machine (and some of them have actually emerged from the engine-room waving what they claimed was the relevant piece of machinery). But some sociologists, as well as some historians, have insisted that, as a social relationship, class must be understood historically, in action. K'eber's analysis, elaborated by Parkin, of the transparency and closure of classes is just such a treat- ment. So surely is the work of Lockwood in The Black-Coated Wor- ker, of Willis in Learning to Labour, of Mallet in The New Wor- king Class, of Sennett and Cobb in The Hidden Injuries of Class, of Westergaard and Resler in Class in a Capitalist Society, of Barring- ton Moore in Injustice, of Wolf in Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century and, of course, of Marx in The 18th Bru~naireof Louis Bona- parte." Appreciation of the historicity of class, of class as a relation- 8 Ibid. 9 E. P. Thompson, "Peculiarities of the English", in R. Miliband and J. Saville (eds.), The Socialist Register (London, 1965), p. 357. 10 Which is not to deny that in another respect it is also seriously one-sided. Treated thus, "class" is the cultural category counterpointing the structural category "mode of production". The task of a synthetic analysis of structuring (as distinct from action and structure) is to accommodate both. 11 hi. Weber, Econo;ny and Society (New York, 1968), p. 348; F. Parkin, The Social Analysis of Class Structure (London, 1974), pp. 1-18; D. Lockwood, The Black-Coated Worker (London, 1958); P. Willis, Learning to Labour (Farnborough, 1977); S. Mallet, The New Working Class (London, 1975); R. Sennett and J. Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (Cambridge, 1977); J. Westergaard and H. Resler, Class in a Capitalist Society (London, I 975); B. Moore, Jr., Injustice (London, I 978); E. R. W'olf, Peasant Wars of the Twenrierh Century (London, I 97 I ); Karl Marx, The I8th (conr,onp. 7 HISTORY, SOCIOLOGY, HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY 7 ship enacted in time (with equal weight placed on all four of those words) is simply not a form of wisdom private to the historian. Nor are the larger insights that time exists in motion and that society is the time-machine working. Sociologists and historians are equally likely now to seek their solutions to the problem of human agency through an understanding of the workings of that maddeningly non-mechanical machine. The problem of human agency is not a new discovery, although from Hobbes onwards people have repeatedly unveiled it as solemnly as though it were. In effect it is the persistent focus of a great body of social analysis which has always obstinately refused to be relegated or confined to any single formal academic discipline. We find it at the very origins of historical materialism in the work of Vico, pervasively in the writings of Marx and Engels.12 It is Schiller's problem of alienation, Hegel's problem of estrangement, Lukacs's problem of reification.13 It is celebrated as the intellectual pivot of sociology by Herbert Spencer.14 It is a recurrent nightmare in the work of Weber.15 We find it tamed as the problem of unintended consequences and latent func- tions by R. K. Merton, reinvigorated as the "awesome" paradox of the social construction of reality by Berger and Luckmann, strenuously wrestled with by Alvin Gouldner and Alan Dawe, claimed as the defin- ing concern of historians by Edward Thompson.16 It is the problem of finding a way of accounting for human experience which recognizes simultaneously and in equal measure that history and society are made by constant, more or less purposeful, individual action and that in- dividual action, however purposeful, is made by history and society. How do we as active subjects make a world of social objects which then, as it were, become subjects making us their objects? It is the problem of rnore 11 conr,! Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1962 edn.), i, pp. 247-344, which for all its amazing substantive in- consistency remains a classic of the genre so far as the method of unmasking class historically is concerned. 12 For Vico the problem is admittedly only half-formulated -as the tension be- tween history and providence: G. Vico, The New Science (New York, 1948), esp. pp. 5 1-5. For Marx and Engels the obvious text must be Marx's "History does nothing . . .": The Holy Family (London, I 956), p. I 25; the general pervasiveness of the issue of agency in the formulation of historical materialism is a major theme of L. Kolakow- ski, Main Currents of Marxism, 3 vols. (Oxford, I 978), i. 13 A continuity mediated by Marx's treatment of fetishism and well brought to light by G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History (Oxford, 1978),p p. I I 5-33. 14 For example, H. Spencer, The Study of Sociology (London, 1873), pp. 16-18, 59-67. 1J As his widow was to testify: Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography (New York, 19751, P. 337. 16 R. K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, Ill., 1957), pp. 19-82; P. Berger and T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (London, 1967); A. W. Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociologv (London, 1970); A. Dawe, "The Two Sociologies", Brit. Jl. Sociology, xxi (I~o)p,p . 207-18; Thompson, Poelerty of Theory, pp. 229-42. 8 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 87 individual and society, of consciousness and being, action and struc- ture. It is easily and endlessly formulated but, it seems, stupifyingly difficult to resolve. People make their own history -but only under definite circumstances and conditions; we act through a world of rules which our action makes. breaks and renews we are creatures of the - rules, the rules are our creations; we make our own world the world - confronts us as an implacable order of social facts set over against us. The variations on the theme are innumerable; and the failures of the human sciences to work the theme to a satisfactory conclusion are inscribed on page after page of their literature. The estranged sym- biosis of action and structure is both a commonplace of everyday life and the persistent fulcrum of social analysis. In sociology one distinctive product of the problem of agency is the "two sociologies", the coexistence of a sociology of action and a socio- logy of system which never manage to master their respective residual problems of system and action. I-suspect that the two sociologies are matched in historical work by "two histories", reflected perhaps in the polarization of science and narrative as images of sound historical method." Be that as it may, the history of sociology is, as Dawe has stressed, a history of repeated attempts to give the concept of action central importance in interpretationiof the-relationship of individual and society which repeatedly end up negating themselves and produc- ing a sociology in which action is subordinated to system.18 By many devious routes sociology seems to have spent much time rediscovering the dismal paradox that Dawe ascribes to Weber: "human agency becomes human bondage because of the very nature of human agency".19 Works like Gardiner's Theories of History remind us that historians (or at least philosophers of history) have spent even more time ensnared in their own versions of the same diffic~ltyT.~he~ two sociologies and the two histories express a similar bafflement in the face of the same dilemma. What has happened recently, and forcefully, is that significant numbers of both historians and sociologists have begun to move beyond the traditional terms in which they encountered the dilemma of agency (Durkheim or Weber perhaps for sociologists, and perhaps Plekhanov or Collingwood for historians) and to reconstitute it in new and somewhat less polarized terms. It is perhaps this shift which both Lawrence Stone's "revival of narrative" (which as exem~lifiedb v him is certainly not a revival of narrative in any traditional sense of the 17 Evident enough in Stone, "Revival of Narrative", in Thompson, Poverty of Theory, and in the whole set of debates reviewed in P. Gardiner, The Nature of Historical Explanation (Oxford, I 952). 18 A. Dawe, "Theories of Social Action", in T. Bottomore and R. Nisbet (eds.), A History of Sociological Analysis (London, 1979), pp 362-417. 19Ibid., p.,398. 20 P. Gardlner, Theories of History (New York, 1959). HISTORY, SOCIOLOGY, HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY 9 term) and the supposed convergence of history and sociology really reflect. What seems to be going on is that some historians and some sociologists are now making fairly sustained and self-conscious efforts to hammer out ways of analysing process which transcend the ex- hausted modes of narrative history and scientific history just as they transcend the exhausted modes of the two sociologies. The crux of this disparate but common venture is a steadily more articulate elaboration of the problematic of structuring. I hope my use of the term "problematic" will not damn me as sec- tarian. Although the word has become a term of art in some quarters its reference is actually quite vulgar, alluding simply to that rudimen- tary organization of phenomena which yields problems for investiga- tion. And it seems to me that it is just at that level that such important changes as are occurring in history and sociology at present are to be found, the level at which assumptions and principles and a sense of significance are applied to phenomena in order to constitute inquiry. Johnson speaks of a problematic as a "definite theoretical structure", a "field of concepts, which organizes a particular science or individual text by making it possible to ask some kinds of questions and by sup- pressing others".*' But he allows too that the fact that one is moving within "a field of concepts" may or may not be overtly conceded and understood. Some disciplines are more forthcoming than others. Some seek to persuade through the rhetoric of a seemingly artless empiri- cism. Thus: "In works of history the organizing ideas and presupposi- tions may lie very deep. They none the less exist".22 For whatever reason -a prolonged experience of fairly unprofitable controversy would be my own explanation -the organizing ideas and presupposi- tions of works of history seem today to be much nearer the surface of many historians' minds than Johnson's remark would imply. And one concomitant of that is that narrative has lost its old innocence. It is less and less likely to be offered as merely the record of what happened. It is more and more likely to be understood as an attempt to recover the movement of human agency as structuring. Consciousness of the prob- lematic of structuring as a primary concern of the historian does not displace narrative as an appropriate mode of professional discourse. On the contrary it is likely to emphasize the special force of narrative as a rhetoric adapted to what one is trying to say -which is one reason why many sociologists have embraced narrative recently. But it does transform one's sense of the explanatory scope of narrative, urging one towards a way of writing in which narrative is deliberately engaged in 21 R. Johnson, "Three Problematics: Elements of a Theory of Working-Class Culture", in J. Clarke, C. Critcher and R. Johnson (eds.), Working-Class Culcure (London, I 979), p. 201. 22 Ibtd. 10 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 87 dialogue with other rhetorics and more overt forms of explanation. The new narrative is thus, in principle, quite unlike the old. Scriven has drawn a suggestive analogy between "explanatory nar- rative in history and the development of the dramatic plot in a play" which is perhaps relevant here.23 In each case the author adopts a rhetoric which is not that of formal roof but rather that of "ulausi- bility in depth". Explanation resides in an achieved sense of dramatic inevitability, an appreciation that, however surprising particular epi- sodes in the drama may have been as they were presented, the plot as a whole viewed in retrospect rings true as a structuring. Actually, however, very few historians are good enough story-tellers or drama- tists simply to leave matters there. To a greater or lesser degree they also feel impelled to formalize the processes that their narratives have captured more or less fully and with more or less explanatory force. Le Rov Ladurie sets Montaillou in the context of a urotracted anthro- pological commentary; Keith Thomas makes sure that his readers are directly seized of the "pregnant principle" informing Religion and the Decline of Magic; Lawrence Stone concludes his discussion of social mobility in early modern England by spelling out the social process carried and achieved in the biographies of individuals and groups.24 What is new in recent historical writing is not this sort of recognition of the limits of narrative as a mode of apprehending structuring but a great increase in the interpretative ambition, scope and self-conscious- ness with which narrative and formal modes of explanation are counterpointed. It is in that sense that works like BondMen Made Free or Injustice, Lineages of the Absolutist State or Roll Jordan, Roll, taken together represent a distinctive and increasingly dominant thrust in-historical writing, a move not so much beyond narrative as towards a much more theoretically deliberate use of narrative as part of a type of explanation which plainly seeks more than plausibility in depth. Douglas Hay's opening contribution to Albion's Fatal Tree exemplifies the type of work very well.25T he appalling chronicle of the brutalities of English justice in the eighteenth century is the essential matter for a complex argument about the structuring of a certain kind of class domination. The process resided in the chronicle, the structur- ing was in the action as it were, but the chronicle itself does not reveal 23 M. Scriven, "Truisms as the Grounds for Historical Explanations", in Gar- diner, Theories of History, pp. 443-75. 24 E. Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou (London, 1978), although the analytical com- mentary is significantly abbreviated in this edition; K. V. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971);L . Stone, "Social Mobility in England, 1500- I ~oo",Pasr and Presenr, no. 33 (Apr. 1966), pp. I 6-55. 25 R. H. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free (London, 1973); Moore, Injustice; P. Anderson, Lineages of rhe Absolutist Stare (London, 1974); E. Genovese, Roll Jordan, Roll (New York, 1974); D. Hay, "Property, Authority and the Criminal Law", in D. Hay, P. Linebaugh, J. Rule, E. P. Thompson and C. '&'inslow, Albion's Fatal Tree (London, I 975), pp. 17-64. HISTORY, SOCIOLOGY, HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY I I or demonstrate the process. To reveal it to us the author has to organize his argument in terms of a continuous confrontation and interweaving of narrative and theoretical matter. The Dower of the " essay springs from the systematic skill with which that dialectic is accomplished. What is involved in works like this, and they could be cited in- definitely, is a breaking of'the bounds of conventional distinctions be- tween types of explanation. It seems that the attempt to move beyond action and structure to process impels neglect of such restrictions. What, for example, are we to make of J. W. N. Watkins's celebrated distinction between colligation, explanation in detail and explanation in principle in the light of the contemporary practice of many his- torians whose work is manifestly a practical integration of all three?26 Elsewhere I have traced in some detail the way in which in the course of debate both historical argument (starting often from a preference for colligation) and sociological argument (setting out no less often from a preferred explanation in principle) tend to move towards a practical procedure in which all three of Watkins's types are obliged both to interrogate and to sustain one an~ther.~~'e viewsof work-on the French Revolution by Lucas and on popular uprisings during the ancien regime by Salmon nicely illustrate the retreat from colligation and explanation in principle towards the new mode in the experience of historian^.^^ Perhaps the most familiar matching instance on the side of sociology is the transformation of the sociologyof deviance achieved by Goffman and Matza -the transformation of a sociology of being into a sociology of becoming in which the narrative of becoming, the "moral career of the mental patient" as a story, is both the reality to be explained and the structuring in terms of which explanation can be achieved.19 Here I would onlv stress the extent to which there does seem to have been cumulative movement on both sides towards a sen- sible intellectual pluralism in which theory and narrative cease to stand over against one another as principled alternatives and are in- stead locked together in a unified project of explanation. And the extent to which much of the movement on both sides has turned on an increasing sense of the need to incorporate close accounts of the con- sciousness of individuals into the explanatory package. It is not just that the story-tellers have realized in the face of disbelief that their '6 J. W. N. Watkins, "Ideal Types and Historical Explanat~on", in H. Feigl and M. Brodbeck (eds.), Readings in the Philosophy of Science (New York, 1953), pp. 723-44. 27 P. Abrams, Historical Sociology (forthcoming London, 198I ). 28 C. Lucas, "Nobles, Bourgeois and the Origins of the French Revolution", Past and Present, no. 60 (Aug. I 973), pp. 84-1 26; J. H. M. Salmon, "Venality of Office and Popular Sedition in Seventeenth-Century France", Pasr and Present, no. 37 (July