Cover Page

History and Social Theory, second edition

Peter Burke

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Preface

At the beginning of my academic career, at the University of Sussex in the early 1960s, I volunteered to teach a course on ‘Social Structure and Social Change’ on the grounds that it was a good idea to know what ‘Society’ was before writing its history and that the best way to learn a subject is to teach it. Involvement with the course led to an invitation from Tom Bottomore to write a book on ‘Sociology and History’, published by Allen and Unwin in 1980, attempting to introduce students of each discipline to what they might find most valuable in the other. Over a decade later, Polity Press has given me the opportunity to revise, enlarge and rewrite that book.

This second version appears under a new title which represents more accurately what the book is about. The original preface explained that social anthropology ‘plays a more important role in this essay than the title suggests’, while there was also some discussion of economics and politics. In the 1990s, however, a discussion of social theory might reasonably be expected to include much more, including such disciplines or sub-disciplines as communications, geography, international relations, law, linguistics (especially sociolinguistics), psychology (especially social psychology) and religious studies. It is also virtually impossible to exclude interdisciplinary enterprises such as critical, cultural and feminist theory, or indeed philosophy (which might be defined as the theory of theory).

Broadening the scope of the essay in this way raises a number of problems. The field is too large for a single individual to master. Although I have been reading reasonably widely in social theory for the past thirty years, and thinking about its possible uses in the writing of history, my own historical experience is obviously limited. I have always worked on the cultural and social history of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and have at best a patchy knowledge of other continents, other periods and other disciplines. Hence I have tended to choose concrete examples which are familiar to me from research and teaching, even at the price of a certain lack of balance.

To view what is going on in all these areas, the writer cannot avoid a personal standpoint. The perspective from which this essay is written is that of what the late Fernand Braudel used to call ‘total history’ – not an account of the past including every detail, but one which emphasizes the connections between different fields of human endeavour.

There is also a linguistic problem. What term should replace ‘sociology’ now that the discussion has widened? To write ‘sociology, anthropology, etc.’ is cumbrous. To speak of the ‘social sciences’, as used to be customary, is also awkward for anyone who does not believe that the model of the physical sciences (if there is such a unified model) is one to be followed by students of society. ‘History and Theory’ is an appealing title, but is likely to arouse false expectations of a rather more philosophical book than this one happens to be.

I have therefore decided to use the term ‘social theory’ (which should be understood as including ‘cultural theory’). As the reader will soon discover, this choice does not imply the assumption that general theories are all that historians are likely to find interesting in sociology and other disciplines. Some of the concepts, models and methods employed in these disciplines have their uses in the study of the past, while case-studies of contemporary societies may suggest fruitful comparisons and contrasts with earlier centuries.

The decision to extend the book in this way was rather like the decision to enlarge a house. It has involved a great deal of reconstruction. Indeed, it might be more exact to say that a few fragments of the first edition have been incorporated into what is essentially a new structure. There are many references to studies published in the 1980s. All the same, I have done my best not to be too up-to-date. I continue to believe that Marx and Durkheim, Weber and Malinowski – to name no more – still have much to teach us.

The first version of the book was written in the interdisciplinary atmosphere of the University of Sussex. The new version is the fruit of more than a decade at Cambridge, and it too owes much to colleagues. Ernest Gellner, Alan Macfarlane, Gwyn Prins and the Historical Geography group which meets in Emmanuel College will all recognize what I have learned from their stimulus, their criticisms and their suggestions for further reading. So will a number of colleagues outside Britain, among them Antonio Augusto Arantes, Anton Blok, Ulf Hannerz, Tamás Hofer, Vittorio Lanternari, and Orvar Löfgren. The rewriting was begun at the Wissenschaftskolleg at Berlin, and the book owes much to the historians and anthropologists there, especially to André Béteille for his constructive comments on the draft. John Thompson, who has been responsible for my continuing education in sociology over the last few years, and my wife Maria Lúcia both read the penultimate version with care. Without their help I might still have meant what I said, but I would not always have been able to say what I meant.

Berlin – São Paulo – Cambridge, 1990–1

Preface to Second Edition

The first version of this essay, which appeared under the title Sociology and History, goes back a quarter of a century. Even the second version, History and Social Theory, is now thirteen years old. In that time, historians have gradually become more interested in social theory. It is no longer exceptional for them to cite sociologists, anthropologists or psychologists in their footnotes. As a result, an essay which was originally written as a manifesto for a certain approach to history is turning into something like a textbook.

Social theory has also changed in the last twenty-five years. Some sociologists and anthropologists, like a number of historians, have made a ‘cultural turn’. As a result, culture is more prominent than before in these pages. Bakhtin and Gombrich, for instance, are discussed at greater length than before, and Thomas Kuhn has joined them. On the other hand, the rise of ‘rational choice theory’ in recent years led me to add a new section to the ‘problems’ chapter on the conflict between theorists who stress rationality and those who emphasize cultural relativism.

The bibliography has been updated to include a number of books and articles published between 1992 and 2004. New sections have been added, dealing for instance with social capital and postcolo-nialism, topics on which there was an outpouring of books and articles in the 1990s. In other sections new examples have been included. To make space for these additions, a few cuts have been made. A number of older items have disappeared from the bibliography, and the occasional older example from the text.

Cambridge, 2004