Abstract
In the last hundred years or so, from the ‘New History’ of James Harvey Robinson (1863–1936) to the ‘New Cultural History’ of the last two or three decades, a number of social and cultural historians have been calling for a new approach to history that would find a space for ordinary people as well as ‘heroes’, for women and children as well as men, and for everyday activities as well as battles and political debates. However, all these demands had already been made in the eighteenth century and some scholars were responding to them in a constructive way, as this chapter will show. My aim in what follows is to discuss the rise of this old ‘new history’, emphasizing the international character of a movement associated in the English-speaking world with Hume, Robertson and Gibbon, but including distinguished French, Italian and German exponents. I shall first consider what the new historians of the eighteenth century believed themselves to be doing, drawing attention to their concern with ‘manners’ and the social ‘system’. An attempt will then be made to reposition the socio-cultural approach in its own socio-cultural contexts, ranging from the Enlightenment to the rise of the female reader.
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Notes
Quoted in Renée Simon, Boulainvillers (Paris, 1940), p. 48.
John Millar, Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771: second edn, 1779), Introduction; Blair, quoted in Mark Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, NJ: Priceton University Press, 2000f), p. 44.
Quoted in Peter H. Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 45, 53–4.
Pietro Giannone, Historia civile del regno di Napoli (1723); cf. Giovanni Ricuperati, L’esperienza civile e religiosa di Pietro Giannone (Milan and Naples 1970), pp. 143–249,
and John G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 2, pp. 29–41.
Vettore Sandi, Principi da storia civile della repubblica di Venezia (Venice, 1765), vol. 1, pp. xvi–xxix. Cf. Francesco Dalla Colletta, I Principi di storia civile di Vettor Sandi (Venice, 1995), pp. 99–109.
Montesquieu, Pensée 954, quoted in Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, ‘The Historical Philosophy of the Enlightenment’, Studies on Voltaire 24/27 (1963): 1667–87, at 1675n.
J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Gibbon and the Shepherds’, History of European Ideas 2 (1981): 193–202.
Jonathan B. Knudsen, Justus Möser and the German Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Sandi, Principi, vii; Karl J. Weintraub, ‘Toward the History of the Common Man: Voltaire and Condorcet’, in Ideas in History, ed. R. Herr and H. T. Parker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965), pp. 39–64.
On ‘stadial history’, see Ronald Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976);
and Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 132–6.
Quoted in Georg G. Iggers, ‘The University of Göttingen 1760–1800 and the Transformation of Historical Scholarship’, Storia della Storiografia 2 (1982): 11–37, at 28.
Eric Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries (Chicago: Chichago University Press, 1973), pp. 459–62.
Voltaire, Essai sur les Moeurs, ed. René Pomeau, 2 vols (Paris, 1963, first published 1756), chapter 81.
Peter Burke, ‘The Rhetoric and Anti-Rhetoric of History in the Early Seventeenth Century’, in Gerhard Schröder et al, eds., Anamorphosen der Rhetorik: Die Wahrheitspiel der Renaissance (Munich, 1997), pp. 71–9; Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 24, 139.
Peter Burke, ‘Reflections on the Origins of Cultural History’, in Interpretation and Cultural History, ed. Joan Pittock and Andrew Wear (Aberdeen, 1991), pp. 5–23.
William Robertson, The Progress of Society in Europe (introduction to Charles V, 1769: ed. Felix Gilbert, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1972), 67; David Hume, History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Accession of Henry VII, 2 vols (1762), appendix.
Adam Ferguson, Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767: ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
On the idea of system in the eighteenth century, see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1969: English translation, London, 1970).
Peter Burke, ‘Scottish Historians and the Feudal System’, Transactions of the 5th International Congress on the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 2, pp. 537–9.
Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia, 1964);
cf. Donald Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Thought (New York, 1970),
and George Huppert, The Idea of Perfect History (Urbana, IL: 1970).
Peter Burke, ‘Images as Evidence in Seventeenth-Century Europe’, Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003): 273–96.
Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières (Paris, 1971);
Sergio Landucci, I filosofi e i selvaggi, 1580–1780 (Bari, 1972).
Roy Porter, Gibbon (London, 1988), p. 17.
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957: rpr Harmondsworth, 1963), pp. 47–50;
cf. John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination (London, 1997), pp. 77–81, 170–2.
John Brewer, ‘Reconstructing the Reader’, in James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor, eds., The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 226–45;
Daniel Woolf, ‘A Feminine Past? Gender, Genre and Historical Knowledge in England, 1500–1800’, American Historical Review 102 (1997): 645–79; Phillips, Society and Sentiment, pp. 110–18.
Phyllis K. Leffler, ‘From Humanist to Enlightenment Historiography: A Case Study of F. E. de Mézeray’, French Historical Studies 10 (1978): 416–38;
Faith E. Beasley, Revising Memory: Women’s Fiction and Memoirs in Seventeenth-century France (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), p. 13.
Friedrich Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970).
Peter Burke, ‘Ranke the Reactionary’, in Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, ed. Georg G. Iggers and James M. Powell (Syracuse, NY: New York Univesity Press, 1990), pp. 36–44.
Cf. Gerhard Oestreich, ‘Die Fachhistorie und die Anfänge der sozialgeschichtlichen Forschung in Deutschland’, Historische Zeitschrift 208 (1969): 320–63.
Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: the Annales School 1929–89 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
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Burke, P. (2007). The ‘New History’ of the Enlightenment: An Essay in the Social History of Social History. In: Bivins, R., Pickstone, J.V. (eds) Medicine, Madness and Social History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230235359_4
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