The Death of History in British Sociology: Presentism, Intellectual Entrepreneurship, and the Conundra of Historical Consciousness

Abstract

The famous opening line of L.P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between — ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’ [1953] (1977) — might well serve as an epigraph for sociology in Britain today. Mainstream British sociology in recent times has a very patchy record of building an awareness of long-term historical processes into its analytic foci and procedures. Presentism — the unintended, tacit, and unnoticed privileging of contemporary concerns and dispositions within particular modes of analysis — rather than systematic consciousness of the (contested) contours of historical dynamics is the hegemonic scholarly modus operandi today. Although the current ubiquity in both theoretical and empirical writings of a whole series of periodising theoretical constructs — such as risk society, globalisation, late modernity, liquid modernity, network society, and so on — seem to indicate strong historical consciousness within the discipline, in fact such concepts both make possible and legitimate disengagement with historical processes. This is because they provide pre-packaged, sound-bite-friendly accounts of complex historical forces that save sociologists from engaging in some hard tasks, namely really getting to grips with historical details and complexities and with current developments in both historiography and historical sociology. In a quite acute sense, the historical imagination is dying or already dead in British sociology today. What I want to address in this chapter are both the reasons as to why this situation has come to pass and also how this state of affairs might be overcome through a resuscitation of sophisticated historical consciousness in sociological practice.

We know only a single science, the science of history.

The one thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been ‘great changes’.

Proust

Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times.

Flaubert