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Una línea torcida: De la historia cultural a la historia de la sociedad
Las transformaciones más significativas en el panorama de la erudición histórica durante las últimas cuatro décadas se recogen de manera brillante en este volumen. En parte una historia personal y en parte un análisis perspicaz de las tendencias metodológicas, historiográficas y teóricas clave desde finales de la década de 1960, siempre reflexivas y provocadoras, el libro nos muestra por qué le importa al autor la historia y por qué debería importarle al lector. Las reflexiones de Geoff Eley sobre el panorama cambiante de la historia académica en los últimos cuarenta años interesará y beneficiará a todos los estudiantes de la disciplina. Eley, historiador de oficio y analista de este relato historiográfico, combina los dos roles a la perfección para producir una de las narraciones más interesantes y convincentes de la historia reciente de la historia.
320 pages, Paperback
First published October 25, 2005
9 people are currently reading
190 people want to read
About the author
Geoff Eley
29 books18 followersGeoffrey 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 26, 2014
With this text, one of the most renowned European historians gives a semi-autobiographical account of his own historiographical development while inquiring into the trajectories of the profession as a whole. Although Eley started out as a Social Historian at a time when such methodologies were just becoming popular, he easily accepted the “cultural turn” and moved into analyses of discourse and meaning, rather than base and superstructure. Unlike many of his generation, he neither sees this as a tragic abandonment of a science still under-development nor as an unequivocally “good” progression. In the end, Eley champions the use of any and all methods, or multiple methods, in the pursuit of progressive goals through historical research – he is not attached to methods for their own sake nor even to history for its.
The structure of his book is highly personal. The chapters are labeled “Optimism,” “Disappointment,” “Reflectiveness,” and “Defiance,” suggesting an emotional state best applied to each of the eras he is examining. This structure suggests the radical nature of his work and the fact that he sees himself as a critic of traditional authority, and that he ties his historical work directly to his political position. In the early chapters, he tells us of his largely Marxist-influenced approach to social history, influenced by E.P. Thompson and others trying to reframe history as a narrative of classes (especially the working class) rather than of individuals. He discovered this history, he tells us, not because of but rather despite his professors at Oxford, who seemed determined to preserve the most conservative forms of history only. His “disappointment” comes when he perceives the rise of the German “Sonderweg” theory alongside the limitations of social and labor history through the 1970s. The third chapter tells of the rise of the new history and its profound influence by feminism, and suggests a more cautious and conscious adopting of new methods while dispensing with the less useful detritus of the past.
The chapter on “Defiance” then serves as a critique of the limitations of cultural history and a call for a re-valuation of values. He is concerned at the tendency of current historians to avoid analyzing questions of the meta-level, instead focusing on specificities to the detriment of the general. He suggests that “unless critical historians can find ways of joining this fray – by offering persuasive frameworks for understanding the contemporary dynamics of international conflict and societal change – the latest pack of recklessly and hubristically aggrandizing master narratives will continue enlisting popular imaginations, and generally sweeping the globe” (198). He believes that “the differences between social history and cultural history imply less an opposition than an opportunity,” a chance to finally write the totalizing “history of society” in its most complete form.
I generally recommend this book to people entering graduate study in history, or perhaps to other grad students in the social sciences and humanities. I especially recommend it to those who (like Eley) are starting out from a place of disadvantage, who are the first in their families to obtain advanced degrees or who are a bit intimidated by theory. Eley embraces theory, but not for purposes of intellectual self-aggrandizement. He is interested in theory as a practical means for accomplishing solid work, and he is especially good at taking very complex ideas and making them clear and readable, as he explains how they influenced his own work and thinking over time. In that sense, this book probably makes a great introduction to his work, which may appear rather more esoteric without the context we get here.
The structure of his book is highly personal. The chapters are labeled “Optimism,” “Disappointment,” “Reflectiveness,” and “Defiance,” suggesting an emotional state best applied to each of the eras he is examining. This structure suggests the radical nature of his work and the fact that he sees himself as a critic of traditional authority, and that he ties his historical work directly to his political position. In the early chapters, he tells us of his largely Marxist-influenced approach to social history, influenced by E.P. Thompson and others trying to reframe history as a narrative of classes (especially the working class) rather than of individuals. He discovered this history, he tells us, not because of but rather despite his professors at Oxford, who seemed determined to preserve the most conservative forms of history only. His “disappointment” comes when he perceives the rise of the German “Sonderweg” theory alongside the limitations of social and labor history through the 1970s. The third chapter tells of the rise of the new history and its profound influence by feminism, and suggests a more cautious and conscious adopting of new methods while dispensing with the less useful detritus of the past.
The chapter on “Defiance” then serves as a critique of the limitations of cultural history and a call for a re-valuation of values. He is concerned at the tendency of current historians to avoid analyzing questions of the meta-level, instead focusing on specificities to the detriment of the general. He suggests that “unless critical historians can find ways of joining this fray – by offering persuasive frameworks for understanding the contemporary dynamics of international conflict and societal change – the latest pack of recklessly and hubristically aggrandizing master narratives will continue enlisting popular imaginations, and generally sweeping the globe” (198). He believes that “the differences between social history and cultural history imply less an opposition than an opportunity,” a chance to finally write the totalizing “history of society” in its most complete form.
I generally recommend this book to people entering graduate study in history, or perhaps to other grad students in the social sciences and humanities. I especially recommend it to those who (like Eley) are starting out from a place of disadvantage, who are the first in their families to obtain advanced degrees or who are a bit intimidated by theory. Eley embraces theory, but not for purposes of intellectual self-aggrandizement. He is interested in theory as a practical means for accomplishing solid work, and he is especially good at taking very complex ideas and making them clear and readable, as he explains how they influenced his own work and thinking over time. In that sense, this book probably makes a great introduction to his work, which may appear rather more esoteric without the context we get here.
July 8, 2014
What does it mean to be a professional historian today? What does the landscape of the profession look like? What are the big ideas or transformations over the past half-century or so that have shaped how historians work and think? In A Crooked Line, Geoff Eley, a European historian at the University of Michigan, provides a personal answer to these questions from the perspective of a historian who has lived and worked through the shaping of the profession during this period. A Crooked Line is not quite a memoir, not quite a historiography, and not quite a manifesto for political and social engagement among historians. It is a little bit of all of these things, blending and transcending them to become something quite unique: a historian’s reflective survey of what the field looked like from the vantage point of a young historian just beginning a career in the sixties to what the field looks like today.
As a historian of science—and one who came to the field from outside history—I sometimes feel cut off or at least rather uninformed about the broader debates and transformations that have shaped the historical profession as a whole. I felt a bit out of my depth—or at least out of my fit—at a recent workshop at Bielefeld University rubbing shoulders with historians pursuing a very theory-laden sociological approach to history while I presented a talk on John Herschel’s stellar spectroscopy (or lack thereof). I had only a dim inkling of the importance of the Bielefeld School in the history of history. (On the other hand, the history students I interacted with there only asked whether Herschel’s hesitation toward spectroscopy was evidence of his resistance to a Kuhnian paradigm shift.) Clearly, we did not share a great deal of historiographical ground. I asked my roommate, a Latin American historian, for a good book that would give me a broad overview of historical theory and provide some touch-points for connecting that theory with practice. He recommended Eley’s book.
I’m sure A Crooked Line didn’t go all the way toward addressing my ignorance, but it certainly helped. Eley tells the story from his own perspective as a historian coming of age at the eve of history’s first large shift from building traditional narratives to using the tools of sociology to address large-scale questions of the development of society and class relations. This is the portion of the book he titles “Optimism,” chronicling his own excitement as a historian realizing the possibilities of the social sciences to help answer big questions in history, primarily from a Marxist, materialist perspective. Here, the work that he cites as indicative and exemplary of this approach is Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). British Marxist historians led the way with utilizing the empirical tools of social science to provide an explanatory framework for the evolution and the conflicts in society at large. For a historian, this held the promise of understanding, engaging, and perhaps even shaping social change.
In the second portion of the book, Eley focuses on the particular challenges of German historiography and the ways in which it illustrated the limits of a materialist approach. In particular—and here the section of the book is called “Disappointment”—the historiographical puzzle of Nazi Germany, the failure to explain the atrocities of World War II using the materialist, structuralist tool bag of social history, tempered early optimism regarding this approach. Tim Mason’s studies of Nazism in the 1970s, according to Eley, illustrated the difficulty of building up a complete history of the Third Reich from the foundation of class relations.
In “Reflectiveness,” the third portion of the work, Eley discusses the “linguistic” or “cultural turn” in history that took place in the 1980s as the field of history became influenced (or infiltrated, depending on your point of view) by anthropology, literary and art studies, oral histories, and the prioritizing of the unique, local, or small-scale, resulting in a historical approach much more open to cultural studies. This was tied to the realization that categories such as gender, race, and colonialism could be used in new and important ways for understanding history. Eley touches on the culture wars that resulted, as traditional historians cleaved to more social historical approaches and resisted what they saw as a “dissent into discourse.” Here the keystone text is Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman (1987). Eley takes a bright view of the efflorescence of such cultural approaches, asking why such tools and methods should not be used to compliment the historian’s work. Cultural studies, he convincingly argues, bring new questions and methods to the table and moreover make heard historic voices that have been silenced in the past.
Throughout the book, in his survey of the two great turns in history of the course of the second half of the twentieth century—first the turn toward the social sciences and then toward cultural studies—Eley wants to map these changes to outside influences, particularly political. One of his primary claims is that history should be politically engaged. Perhaps though because of my own hazy grasp on the political history of the 1960s-80s it wasn’t always clear to me how this was the case, either proscriptively or descriptively. History as an explanatory tool for society, a critical self-remembrance, and as a counterpoint to flawed and potentially destructive global narratives, yes, but Eley seems to claim that the influence was often the other way—the political situation influenced the sorts of questions and methods the historical field itself pursued. I needed these dots connected more clearly for me.
The big omission (for me) in this historiography was the history of science. Where does Eley see the history of science as playing a role (if any) in the turns he’s outlined? Historians of science certainly played a role in the culture wars, and cultural studies of science abound today, as in an earlier generation did social studies of scientists and their research schools. I would love to find a similar survey of the field written from the perspective of a historian of science. The closest thing I know of is Helge Kragh’s An Introduction to the Historiography of Science, which, while helpful, lacks the personal flavor and the evident passion that made Eley’s book such a pleasure.
As a historian of science—and one who came to the field from outside history—I sometimes feel cut off or at least rather uninformed about the broader debates and transformations that have shaped the historical profession as a whole. I felt a bit out of my depth—or at least out of my fit—at a recent workshop at Bielefeld University rubbing shoulders with historians pursuing a very theory-laden sociological approach to history while I presented a talk on John Herschel’s stellar spectroscopy (or lack thereof). I had only a dim inkling of the importance of the Bielefeld School in the history of history. (On the other hand, the history students I interacted with there only asked whether Herschel’s hesitation toward spectroscopy was evidence of his resistance to a Kuhnian paradigm shift.) Clearly, we did not share a great deal of historiographical ground. I asked my roommate, a Latin American historian, for a good book that would give me a broad overview of historical theory and provide some touch-points for connecting that theory with practice. He recommended Eley’s book.
I’m sure A Crooked Line didn’t go all the way toward addressing my ignorance, but it certainly helped. Eley tells the story from his own perspective as a historian coming of age at the eve of history’s first large shift from building traditional narratives to using the tools of sociology to address large-scale questions of the development of society and class relations. This is the portion of the book he titles “Optimism,” chronicling his own excitement as a historian realizing the possibilities of the social sciences to help answer big questions in history, primarily from a Marxist, materialist perspective. Here, the work that he cites as indicative and exemplary of this approach is Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). British Marxist historians led the way with utilizing the empirical tools of social science to provide an explanatory framework for the evolution and the conflicts in society at large. For a historian, this held the promise of understanding, engaging, and perhaps even shaping social change.
In the second portion of the book, Eley focuses on the particular challenges of German historiography and the ways in which it illustrated the limits of a materialist approach. In particular—and here the section of the book is called “Disappointment”—the historiographical puzzle of Nazi Germany, the failure to explain the atrocities of World War II using the materialist, structuralist tool bag of social history, tempered early optimism regarding this approach. Tim Mason’s studies of Nazism in the 1970s, according to Eley, illustrated the difficulty of building up a complete history of the Third Reich from the foundation of class relations.
In “Reflectiveness,” the third portion of the work, Eley discusses the “linguistic” or “cultural turn” in history that took place in the 1980s as the field of history became influenced (or infiltrated, depending on your point of view) by anthropology, literary and art studies, oral histories, and the prioritizing of the unique, local, or small-scale, resulting in a historical approach much more open to cultural studies. This was tied to the realization that categories such as gender, race, and colonialism could be used in new and important ways for understanding history. Eley touches on the culture wars that resulted, as traditional historians cleaved to more social historical approaches and resisted what they saw as a “dissent into discourse.” Here the keystone text is Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman (1987). Eley takes a bright view of the efflorescence of such cultural approaches, asking why such tools and methods should not be used to compliment the historian’s work. Cultural studies, he convincingly argues, bring new questions and methods to the table and moreover make heard historic voices that have been silenced in the past.
Throughout the book, in his survey of the two great turns in history of the course of the second half of the twentieth century—first the turn toward the social sciences and then toward cultural studies—Eley wants to map these changes to outside influences, particularly political. One of his primary claims is that history should be politically engaged. Perhaps though because of my own hazy grasp on the political history of the 1960s-80s it wasn’t always clear to me how this was the case, either proscriptively or descriptively. History as an explanatory tool for society, a critical self-remembrance, and as a counterpoint to flawed and potentially destructive global narratives, yes, but Eley seems to claim that the influence was often the other way—the political situation influenced the sorts of questions and methods the historical field itself pursued. I needed these dots connected more clearly for me.
The big omission (for me) in this historiography was the history of science. Where does Eley see the history of science as playing a role (if any) in the turns he’s outlined? Historians of science certainly played a role in the culture wars, and cultural studies of science abound today, as in an earlier generation did social studies of scientists and their research schools. I would love to find a similar survey of the field written from the perspective of a historian of science. The closest thing I know of is Helge Kragh’s An Introduction to the Historiography of Science, which, while helpful, lacks the personal flavor and the evident passion that made Eley’s book such a pleasure.
April 7, 2025
You might not think that a combination of memoir, intellectual history and historiography would be a very cohesive or engaging book, but Eley pulls it off. 'A Crooked Line' does a great job of conveying the initial political and intellectual excitement of social history in the '60s and '70s and the way this turned into deepening disappointment and changing theoretical perspectives in the more difficult political conjuncture of the 1980s. His explanation of how and why historians 'took the cultural turn' provided me with a clearer understanding of the positive elements of that change than any account I'd read before. The book's conclusion, however, is a bit too ambivalent about whether and how it would be possible to reconstitute some conception of 'the social' in history and answer big-picture structural questions.
August 9, 2018
I really enjoyed the perspective / politics of this book (something I should interrogate more). I read it during a graduate level historiography course, and we read it alongside Allan Megill's Historical Knowledge, Historical Error. Another reviewer here commented that people coming from a different undergraduate background and professional career may find this a useful fast forward through some of the currents of contemporary historical thinking. I agree as someone who studied the philosophy of world religions in a school heavily influenced by Eliade's religionswissenschaft (the philosophy of religion), before turning to a more practical career in Archival and Records Management, and then returning back to the field of History.
October 25, 2018
I found this book conflicting. While Eley has many important things to say regarding the changes within history between the late 60's and mid 00's, it seems to be buried within much of his text. The autobiographical nature of his narration was surprisingly pleasant by the time I got to the end -- allowing me as a reader to experience the changes from social history hegemony to the cultural turn. I found his fourth and fifth chapters to be quite valuable, but the first half of the book was difficult to parse. Regardless, this book is useful alongside a more general historiography book for students wishing to enter into history, and thus, understand its dynamic past.
January 17, 2025
Interesting book that straddles the line between memoir and disciplinary history, covering the evolution of history as a field from the 60s to the 90s.
Found it helpful, though the author’s biggest strength (his reliance on personal experience of these changes in his own subfield of social history of Germany) also at times limited how directly useful some of the examples and digressions were for me personally, as a Latin Americanist. Not his fault, nor do I attempt to frame it as a mistake of any kind, just noting that if you’re well outside of European social history this may limited the utility of some sections.
Found it helpful, though the author’s biggest strength (his reliance on personal experience of these changes in his own subfield of social history of Germany) also at times limited how directly useful some of the examples and digressions were for me personally, as a Latin Americanist. Not his fault, nor do I attempt to frame it as a mistake of any kind, just noting that if you’re well outside of European social history this may limited the utility of some sections.
August 20, 2025
Really good. Tracks the huge shifts in the discipline without falling into "old man yells at cloud"-itis. Also just great way to build a historiography reading list. Wish there was one of these for every field. Who would even write the music equivalent? Tomlinson? Taruskin obviously would've been great
March 28, 2022
British Marxist historian gets caught up in the spirit of 1968, then gets mentally crushed by Thatcherism. Additionally, he has to go through "the lingustic turn" within his disipline, oh and he thinks we all should read "The Making of the British Working Class"
May 30, 2018
Eley artfully accomplishes a take down of the general scholarly faux pas of mixing the personal with the historical.
May 19, 2025
Un llibre magnífic que detalla els canvis que ha patit l'estudi de la història, des d'un punt de vista autobiogràfic, fins al nou mileni, tot i que a alguns se'ls hi podria ennuagar.
October 12, 2025
There’s always something to be learned from how we used to do something, to how it’s done now–and not all should be lost or distinctly divided.
October 11, 2010
I had a difficult time reading this one...it said it was a nontraditional book, but ended up being similar to others I have read. I thought I would like the narrative...and did not. Enjoyed the last couple chapters though, and in the end left me asking more questions than having any answered.
September 25, 2014
My detailed review of this book could be found at:
http://asiaphiliac.wordpress.com/2013...
http://asiaphiliac.wordpress.com/2013...
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews