In Search of People’s History

Eric Hobsbawm

• People’s History and Socialist Theory edited by Raphael Samuel
  Routledge, 417 pp, £10.95, January 1981, ISBN 0 7100 0765 5
• British Labour History by E.H. Hunt
  Weidenfeld, 428 pp, £18.50, January 1981, ISBN 0 297 77785 8

When the Roman emperor Vitellius was deserted in his last moments by everyone except his cook, the aristocratic historian Tacitus could not bring himself to mention the actual occupation of so undignified a member of society. As Peter Burke points out in a friendly but sceptical contribution to People’s History and Socialist Theory, under such circumstances ‘people’s history’ was a contradiction in terms.

We are a long way from Tacitus, upon whom time has taken its revenge by making his work accessible chiefly to a mass public of what he would certainly have regarded as the lower orders by means of television serials about early Roman emperors. As the great Fernand Braudel observes, ‘the obscure history of everyman’ (l’histoire obscure de tout le monde) is ‘the history toward which, in different ways, all historiography tends at present’. Histories claiming to take ‘peoples’ (as distinct from top people) as their subject began to be written under appropriate titles in the early 19th century, era of revolutions and national revivals. The label has been particularly popular at times of romanticism and the militancy of intellectuals, such as before 1848 and today. But what exactly do those who write ‘people’s history’ think they are doing? What does the term mean?

In the case of the splendid package inspired and edited by Raphael Samuel, it clearly means, among other things, history written by a lot of people: about fifty named authors and a ‘collective’. It also means a history arousing the active enthusiasm of a great many more. About a thousand attended the History Workshop at which the papers were first presented. These occasions, which emerged from Ruskin College, Oxford in the later 1960s, are the nearest thing there is to a Durham Miners’ Gala for militant historians, both professional and, in unusually substantial numbers, non-professional: unique mixtures of learned conferences, political rallies, revival meetings and weekend holidays. They await their own historiographers, who will no doubt emerge from the Workshop itself, which has already generated an impassioned, learned and miscellaneous ‘journal of socialist history’ and a notable series of books, of which the present volume is the fifth. In the meanwhile, History Workshop, inspired and dynamised by Raphael Samuel in the intervals of teaching, politics and titanic erudition, has already helped to create the nearest thing on record to a voluntary levée en masse of historians.

To summarise the contents of People’s History and Socialist Theory is therefore rather like summarising a department store during the winter sales. It contains British, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian and American writers. It parades other ranks, NCOs and officers of various grades in the army of history (some of the latter claiming honorary guerrilla status). There are papers, ranging from the fairly concise to the summary, and reports of discussions ranging from the critical digest to skeletal minutes. There are useful bibliographies. Apart from the editor’s excellent prefaces and ‘Afterword’ summarising History Workshop’s intentions, the book contains a dizzying variety of surveys of trends and fields, reflections, musings, programmatic demands, questions and arguments.

Vol. 3 No. 5 · 19 March 1981 » Eric Hobsbawm » In Search of People’s History (print version)
pages 9-10 | 2584 words