The Future of Class in History: What's Left of the Social? by Geoff Eley

by Geoff Eley

Unifying concepts are essential when studying history. They provide students and scholars with ways to organize their thoughts, research, and writings. However, these concepts are also the focus of myriad conflicts within the field. Social history has experienced more than its share of such conflicts since its inception some forty years ago. In recent times the fields of “the social” and of “culture” have sometimes been presented as mutually exclusive and even hostile. Once again, conceptual innovation in history has been cast as a closure by which the new drives out the in this case, cultural history radically displacing social history. The Future of Class in History analyzes the effect of the conflict that followed the “turn to culture” in historical work by examining the use of class and demonstrates how practitioners in multiple fields can collaborate to produce the highest quality scholarship. “Offers new ways of thinking about ‘class’ and ‘society’ in a world in which such categories have been radically called into question.”—Sherry Ortner, University of California, Los Angeles “Brilliantly charts social history’s past achievement, present dilemma, and future promise in a work distinguished by intellectual openness and generosity.”—James A. Epstein, Vanderbilt University “Eley and Nield seek to rescue the deluded follower of social history from the enormous condescension of the cultural turn. They succeed admirably, making the case for a new hybrid socio-cultural history.”—Donald Reid, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill “This terrific double act has once again produced a text that demands to be read by all those tired of the juxtaposition of social and cultural histories and still interested in the problematic of class and the politics of its past and present.”—James Vernon, University of California, Berkeley “Eley and Nield tackle a contentious debate with a gracious plea for collaboration. Their strong desire to get past the ‘culture wars’ and to engage social and cultural historians in fruitful dialogue is a welcome move, stylishly executed.”—Philippa Levine, University of Southern California Geoff Eley is Professor of History at the University of Michigan.Keith Nield is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Hull.

Genres: History

Paperback

First published January 30, 2007

About the author

Geoffrey Howard Eley is a British-born historian of Germany. He studied History at the Balliol College of Oxford University and received his D.Phil from the University of Sussex in 1974. He has taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in the Department of History since 1979 and the Department of German Studies since 1997. He now serves as the Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at Michigan.

Eley's early work focused on the radical nationalism in Imperial Germany and fascism, but has since grown to include theoretical and methodological reflections on historiography and the history of the political left in Europe.

Reviews

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eley and Nield track the history of social history, its heyday in the revolutionary 60s and 70s, the challenge of the cultural in the 1980s and the 'crisis years' of the 1990s. The authors write that the field is still useful as long as their is a practical need to offer comment on the exploitation of capital, and that class is by no means a defunct category. Whilst the authors criticise stilted theory-based labor works they reject the atomization and particularisation of modern history.

What has been lost, in other words, is big-picture history, an expansiveness which helped history to matter. This Eley and Nield wished to restore.

[Geoffy Dee · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a History graduate student, I actually enjoy historiography, but this book is terrible.

Outdated almost immediately after it was published, it is a ridiculous attempt to respond to a changing world with an outlook reflective of the 1960's as two old fogeys are out of touch with reality.

AVOID